Kai Whakapai (Yes really)

I'm Rip Van Kiwi Winkle. He woke up to find they'd abolished George III and proclaimed a republic. Not quite the same for this Rip Van now I'm beginning to winkle but they are having as referendum on whether to abolish the flag. They're doing it in a roundabout way by deciding which replacement they like best before deciding whether to get rid of the one they've got. Well the bathwater swirls down the plug hole the wrong way round here.That might explain it.

But more Winklish because every one I want to see is dead and I'm halfway there. The ideas men, John Roberts, Bob Chapman, Erich Geiringer, Bill Oliver, the colleagues like Keith Jackson,Angus Ross, Willy Morrell all shuffled off the coil without waiting for my return.Who'll tell me what to think now?

Fortunately there's no need to think any more. We've got the internet to do that for us. Except we haven't Diane's house isn't wired up and smoke signals from the garden are no use in this wind. So we go to the Lakeside hotel next door, order two cups of tea and use their's. Since we look old, rich (in Linda's case) and clean (in mine) they don't mind. And they don't charge either unlike the next place,the local bar hang  out called Kia Whakapae (translated as the food ship bearing pies) which charges $2 per half hour which is just about long enough to read the guardian Times,Observer and Sunday Timers to find out that nothing is happening in Pomerania but the streets everywhere else are filled with Robocops bearing guns. They'll only be necessary in Britain when George Osborne announces that he's cutting everything Except Robocops

Kai is the local hippy haunt (is that still the name) they look like Jihadi lumberjacks with their straggly beards and in France they'd be shot but here they sit around outside the bar rolling their ciggies and drinking free water. They look weedy.Not like the world's image of a Kiwi as tall,tough and built for the rugby pitch

Since it rains all day (worst spring we've ever had one woman tells us)I go to sleep in the afternoon then we venture out to the New World supermarket.  "Why is there so much gluten free stuff?"  Linda asks an old joker on the way out "cos they're all bloody mad"