An ultrafast recipe for frustration
It started with a scattering of day-glo hieroglyphics on our driveway and nine months later ultrafast broadband is up and running at our house.
Installation was anything but ultrafast. Here’s what happened.
Archive for: 2016
My books and other animals…
Old friends should never be treated like this: interned in sunless corners, jammed upright until their spines crumble; bandaged, but with half their pages inexplicably missing.My books were freed recently by the arrival of our exuberant Westie wallpaperer and so ended up in piles all over the house. But in them we found reunions everywhere.
The silent spectator at the awards….
We are in the great hall of Auckland Grammar, tip-toeing up the stairs to the balcony overlooking the stage and the ground floor. In the belly of the domed hall, some 2,000 students wriggle in tightly organised rows, their collective chatter sounding like some human beehive.
A world without meat?
Vegan and vegetarian options have become noticeable in shops and restaurants in the last few years. This is a trend in most western nations. (Vegans don’t eat any meat products. Vegetarians may eat dairy products). The Telegraph reports that in the last ten years the number of vegans in the UK rose by 360%.
Warts and all
Jaw-dropping winner of the Kiwi version of London’s Carbunkle Cup (for the ugliest building in the UK) is right here in… yes in one of our prettiest centres, just keep reading…
Teresa and Hilary
The other day some friends talked about Auckland’s homeless and how awful the conditions must be sleeping rough. Auckland’s Spring was having an identity crisis, reverting to the chills and rain of Winter, dallying briefly with its sunnier self – then plunging into yet another sodden bout of seasonal recidivism. So these comfortably housed friends were right – how ghastly it must be to live day after day on the streets or crammed in the hothouses of cars at night.
How did we get to this point at which homelessness is so overwhelming, but at the same time beginning to slip down the news agenda? How could it be fixed they asked? They shook their heads sadly, but history has some answers…
Neat and tidy
I tested the kitchen smoke alarm a couple of weekends ago. Baking an apple and boysenberry cake, the topping, dots of butter sprinkled with muscovado sugar, melted, oozed through the dodgy base of my aging spring form tin and began to burn.
Progress?
Woke up this morning not to our plaintive Tui, who seems to have lost his song, but to a whacking great WHUMP! It shook the house, made the windows chatter in their frames like teeth in a shiver.
Damn developers we thought, making six dwellings where two once stood. But no.
Fashion Olympics…
The show-prayer fashion was everywhere this year. Why appeal to your maker in the changing-room or tunnel when you can do it front of millions? This is a special God, after all, a biased God, your own personal God who’s here for you, not the other blokes lining up beside you.