In the morning we got an uber, loaded it with our bags and went to the Gentleman Friend’s cousin’s house for Christmas. The driver was, unfortunately, rather inept and managed to dent the corner of my suitcase by trying to bang the dickie lid shut on it. After watching a couple of vigorous attempts in horror I rearranged the cases and it closed easily.
At the cousin’s house the children were playing Cards Against Humanity but, on seeing strangers, quickly put them away and turned instead to the party game in which you levitate a volunteer with a single finger and a bit of hocus pocus. Our host, the cousin, was a slightly odd pucklike woman and her husband was an intense artistic type who runs a vitamin C therapy centre which made my hackles rise instantly but he was himself very pleasant. Then there was the GF’s aunt, with whom we are to spend the next few weeks and is the only member of his New Zealand family whom I had previously met much.
The final couple was another cousin and his partner. This was a rather insalubrious pair. He is the cause of his mother losing her savings due to dodgy dealing, and is a bluff, loud, insistently unintellectual man with a vicious edge to his jokes. She is a large woman who likes to be in control behind a facade of jovialness, who laughs gently and confidingly with strangers about people she knows.
Fortunately it was a pleasant afternoon, a far simpler Christmas than the one I have experienced in London, and all the better for it.
Unfortunately it was a cold, rainy, windy day so the pool went mostly unused. Very unusual, we were told repeatedly.
At around 2 we left with the aunt and drove up to Russell.
The drive was rainy and cloudy but beautiful, with forest covered hills. I do love tree ferns. Along the way we stopped at what claimed to be a world famous toilet, so famous that public spaces of the small town, Kawakawa, had adopted and echoed its mosaics.
Russell itself is the prettiest town we have seen in New Zealand, set on the peninsula in the warm north with clean orca filled waters and little white houses set amongst greenery. We have a little ‘sleep out’, a hut in the back garden of a century old house, and are just around the corner from the nearest pier. It is the first place I have encountered in New Zealand where I thought I wouldn’t mind living, though the food is yet to be evaluated.