We arrived back from Northland last Friday evening, 22nd September, 2006. Since then we've been taking things easy at Mission Control and making trips out around the local area. The last few days have been warm, even approaching hot, at times. This has been bringing large numbers of kids out from Auckland to Mission Bay to swim, sunbathe, play games and to consume vast amounts of ice-cream at the Mövenpick down on the corner of Tamaki Drive. Anne and I are working on strategies to take pictures of the queues without making it too obvious what we're about.

Last Sunday, we were picked up by some friends of Cathy and Laurie's, Rhonda and Barry, and taken for a highly enjoyable trip up into the Waitakere Ranges, one of Auckland's regional parks, west of the city. We had lunch up there, a cheerful little group comprising Rhonda, Barry, a jovial Australian computer whizz called Phil, Helen, who's American but lives in NZ, Anne and me. As always here, the food was good and the crisp, white NZ wine even better. We've arranged to meet Barry and his mother in Auckland on Friday evening for a concert.

On Tuesday evening, we were invited to dinner with Graham and Sue, who are also friends of Cathy and Laurie. They live high-up on one complete floor of a circular tower at Ponsonby, with the most tremendous views of everything, the harbour, the bridge, downtown Auckland and the Sky Tower, Rangitoto, Devonport, the inner harbour, everything. Like everyone we've met here, they're lovely people. The picture shows a view of downtown Auckland, taken from Graham and Sue's balcony. The camera was hand-held by me, after a couple of drinks, hence the camera-shake.

These have been the highlights of the week so far, but we have also walked down the road to St Heliers a couple of times (they have a very good butcher's shop there and I went to the barber's for a scalping). I've also be re-reading parts of the Penguin History of New Zealand, mainly about politics and relations between Pakeha and Maori, and also reading the papers trying to make some sort of sense of NZ politics. These are pretty bloody at the moment, the ruling party have been accused of fiddling election expenses and the prime minister's husband is gay, it has been said. There's a curious sub-text to this story, I think they're trying to hint that she is too. The leader of the opposition, one Brash by name, has been outed as having an extra-marital relationship with a high-profile businesswoman and he's also in trouble for having dealings with a religious-right organisation that hired a private detective to spy on the PM and her husband. In fact, it's all more complicated than this, the unfortunate Brash's affair was outed by one of his own colleagues, for example. Anyway, the New Zealand Herald is full of letters saying it's time to take personalities out of politics, et cetera, et cetera. They don't have horrible, UK-style, red-top tabloids here, but seem to manage quite well without them.

Oh, before I finish, I've started to upload pictures of our NZ trip, here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/nhopton

just in case anyone requires a spot of therapy for insomnia.