It was a good one (for me)

Not much left of 2009, and yes, here I am at home blogging, and not out getting the worse for wear, struggling to hear what people are saying against the racket and wishing I could sit down. Dull? Maybe, but I don't care: I've had a brilliant year and that's good enough for me.

I won an award, I've been sent to some amazing places that would have cost me a Lotto first division if I'd had to pay for it all myself, I've seen Lonesome George, I've walked the Milford Track, I've emu-whispered, I've been back to Linton. And that's not even half of it.

There's no reason to think that next year won't be just as good, if not better: it's beginning by going to see pandas in Adelaide, so how bad can that be?

So long as there are new places to see and old ones to revisit, and some birds and animals (like the Milford kea above), that'll do me. I hope it's good for you too.

(Who knows, by this time next year, maybe there'll be twice as many of you! And the year after that, perhaps even double figures!!!)

Hurr, hurr, hurr, hurrrrr*

So last night, when I gave the cats their supper, there was this on the back door mat - glistening, slimy and fully seven centimetres long. I regularly scoop drowned slugs like this out of the pond, but finding one in the house is rather rarer, thank goodness.

And it made me think about creepy crawlies I've come across in my travels, and realise that I've been uncommonly blessed because, despite both venturing up the Amazon and spending a lot of time in that Harrods of deadly insects, Australia, I've had very few incidents of the multi- (or in this case, no- ) legged kind.

Apart from the horrendous night in New Caledonia after which I wearily greeted the dawn with 47 mosquito bites on my face alone, there's been pretty much nothing to report. From my travels.

Now, when I spent a summer living in Australia, that was different. I'll pass over the brown snake living under the haystack where it was my job to go twice a day to get feed for the horses, because today's focus is invertebrates. Specifically, spiders.

In the living room of the homestead, hooked onto the curtain was the shed skin of a tarantula, kept as a kind of souvenir, like the polo trophies on the mantlepiece. This was disturbing to me, because my room was built on to the house as an afterthought, and each morning when I pushed open the screen door to go outside and into the main building, it broke a web that had been spun across my doorway by what I can only describe as a particularly ambitious spider. I never - thank goodness - laid eyes on this nocturnal beast, but it tells you all you need to know about the scale of the thing that as the strands reached breaking point, I could hear them snap.

Then there was the day that a visitor who briefly shared my room entered it ahead of me, shrieked "Tarantula!" and lunged at her bed with her booted feet. By the time I got inside, there was only a brown smear on the bedspread to show for the encounter - but my imagination filled the gap, and I didn't have a solid night's sleep for the rest of the summer.

And finally, there was the gully. Towards the end of my stay, I realised that spending every day in jeans as I exercised the horses, I was going to get home dazzlingly white. So I started wearing shorts when I rode (yes, the stirrup leathers can give your calves a nasty pinch, but you learn how to avoid that) - but still, there would be tan lines when I went to the beach back home. So then I rode in a bikini, which was rather pleasant as long as I kept moving faster than the flies.

One day I took a different route and found a gully between me and the way back to the stables. Tall, dead thistles were scattered along the bottom, but otherwise it seemed hazard-free, so I set off down the bank. It was only when we were halfway down and the horse had a fair amount of momentum going that I suddenly saw that between the 2-metre high thistles were swathes of spider webs like nets. It was too late to stop or turn, and all I could do was shut my eyes and shriek as Gidgeon took me down and through the thistles, the webs wrapping themselves around me on my bare skin almost from head to toe.

It was a nightmare. I'm shuddering now. I didn't see a spider that time either, but I didn't need to. It's the single most vivid image I've retained from the whole 10 weeks I stayed at Narrioota - and, remember, there were snakes.

So this slug is nothing. Except... it's too fat to have squeezed under the door, and I can only assume it muscled its way in through the cat-flap. It's a superslug.

* This is how a slug (possibly snail) sounds when it laughs, according to the story on the Junior Request Session on the radio on Sunday mornings in my youth. I have no idea what happened in the story, all I remember is the sound effect. I'm blaming the Red Fort.

Grasshopper turned Ant

So I've had all the fun - in the last 6 months I've been to Australia, Thailand, China, Ecuador, the UK and Ireland, India and some of the nicer bits of New Zealand - and now that it's summer and everyone else is at the beach, it's time for me to do the work and plough through all my notebooks of densely-written abbreviations that at the time I was convinced were so obvious, and which are now so impossibly obscure, and trawl through hundreds of photos, and churn out a mass of 1000-word stories some of which are already spoken for but most of which will be poor orphaned mites to be sent out into the harsh world to make their own living.

The current story is about the Hillary Trail, a newly-linked series of tracks through the Waitakere Ranges, where I went last week to speak to one of the Park Rangers - an outing which itself linked several of my own recent experiences.

The view above is a disappointingly poor photo of Whatipu Beach, from a track I last walked years ago with WOPs, the women's outdoor pursuits group I was a member of that taught me many useful things about the bush, most memorably never to trust the weather and always to be prepared for cold and rain. So when, shortly after this photo was taken, it started to rain huge, fat, soaking drops and the ranger got wet, I was able to put on my coat and keep dry.

Also, the next beach along from this one is Karekare - moody, black sand, isolated - where The Piano was filmed, which helped pass some of the time on the Milford Track when the Australians and I vainly racked our brains to remember the name of the actor playing the woman [sorry, Holly Hunter]. Not that the scenery down there wasn't magnificent, but it did go on a bit, and it was helpful to distract ourselves from the toil of one foot after the other for hours and hours by some mental activity, like converting miles to kilometres and trying to work out speeds and ETAs. It was to my great advantage in this to be so hampered by the innumeracy that scraped me 61% in School Certificate maths, since when it's gone downhill.

My memory and computation skills also suffered something of a set-back when I fell down a flight of 8 stone steps at the Red Fort in New Delhi and whacked my head at the bottom. It was dark, we were running late because of the horrendous traffic, the lighting was inadequate and the top step was, inconceivably, raised above the level of the path. So I plunged down the steps, scoring huge bruises on my elbow and hip on the way to hitting my head, which I knew was going to happen as I fell, and which hurt when it did. And all to buy tickets for a stupid Son et Lumiere show that was hopelessly low-tech and dull: don't ever waste your time on it next time you're in Delhi.

Since when there's been dizziness, headaches, nausea and impaired metal acuity - but at least I can blame it on India, and not age.

Dah dah dah, dah dah dah-dah-dah-dah...

And it's been a beautiful, beautiful day: calm, cloudless, hot; excellent food, good company, successful presents; nothing worse on the news than a cardinal's broken leg, no advertisements on TV and no need to wish I had eaten or drunk less.

The only small black cloud has been the discovery that the boy next door was given an electric guitar for Christmas, so it was the opening bars of 'Smoke on the Water' over and over again even before breakfast. But let me not be glum on this lovely day: at least he won't be able to play it at the same time as his drums.

I've had Christmas in New Caledonia, where I sat on a beach and shared with fellow-student friends a deli-roast chicken with wine and a baguette; I've had one on a cattle station in South Australia where we dressed formally and then played parlour games; in Salzburg we ate Englischer Rostbif late on Christmas Eve after standing in the dark in a graveyard where people lit candles on the tombstones and a trumpet played 'Silent Night'; and I've had lots of Christmases in England, not one of them white, but all of them jolly because there was always a pub session before lunch.

The whole festival is without doubt made for cold weather, and is more special in England because it's undiluted by summer holidays; and this year in Herefordshire we would have got our white Christmas. But still, there's a lot to be said for being able to walk the dog after dinner through the Pony Club where the grass is full of clover, buttercups and vetch, down to the park where families are playing indulgent games of cricket with the small fry, through the playground where little girls are shrieking under the fountain, to the creek where Fudge can have a swim before panting back home to collapse in the shade.

Where I can listen again to dah dah dah, dah dah dah-dah-dah-dah...

One sleep to go

This is what Christmas Eve morning is looking like here in Auckland: warm sunshine, flowers, lazy cat hogging the best chair.

What's missing from this picture is the sound of lawnmowers, our frog croaking, baby birds setting up a hungry chorus in the tree by the pond, and the hollow clatter of skateboards in the carpark of the school opposite as kids try to fill this very long day.

We've been promised a beautiful day for tomorrow, up and down the country: actually, rather a rarity for Christmas Day, as the best weather doesn't usually start till New Year's Day, which is always a cracker.

That suits us very well, as the twelve of us at my sister's small house will be able to spill out into her garden without any sort of hardship. There may even be a walk on Takapuna Beach at some point, where without doubt there will be people swimming.

But you know what? I'm feeling really envious of all those people getting a white Christmas this year.

The movie's real stars

Last night I squandered a couple of hours of my life that I'll never get back watching the movie 'Stardust', a silly although honestly-intentioned fairy story about witches and princes, simply because I wanted to spot the locations it was filmed at. It did look pretty spectacular - or, pretty and spectacular - as scenery in England, Wales and Scotland panned past behind the actors.

My greatest triumph was spotting the Quiraing, on the Isle of Skye, above, where Michelle Pfeiffer as a wrinked crone frowned into the distance. Skye isn't a huge place, but it has some deeply impressive moors and mountains, down the side of one of which I watched my Canon DSLR cartwheel in slow-motion after someone sneakily dialled up the gravity and my bag suddenly slid away from where it had been lying for 10 minutes at my feet. It was only when it reached the scree slope that the camera flew out of the open top, sigh.

So this was one of the last photos I took with it: it was a sorry sight when we scrambled down the slope to retrieve it.

Another location was Pen y Fan, a steep, bare peak of over 800 metres in the Brecon Beacons, the highest in South Wales and the big expedition on the annual camp for third-years at Newent Community School where I taught for a while. I was astonished at how some of these country girls collapsed by the path in the early stages, crying and frightened by how their legs were hurting - apparently, they'd never tackled anything more challenging than a flight of stairs, and had never felt the burn before - and this back when Jane Fonda was aerobics queen! (But my scorn came back to bite me on the descent, when I copped wind-blown grit under both contact lenses and ended up frozen to the spot, both eyes clamped shut.)

And then there was this place, Arlington Row in Bibury, in the Cotswolds, where I last went just a few months ago: perfectly pretty and, so the sign claims, England's most-photographed view. No surprises there.

Interlopers

The lupins are in flower down south, sheets of them growing pink, blue and purple over the river flats and around the lake; and yellow up on the hills, primrose against the rich gold of the broom. The dogroses are out too, the foxgloves and the elder blossom. Weeds, all of them, the lupins particularly reviled because they change the environment on the stony banks of the rivers, and give cover for predators to creep up on the birds that nest there.

Stoats are the worst, and all along the Milford Track we saw wooden traps with a small hole in the wire mesh at one end and sometimes an egg stuck on a spike inside. It's a long, long war that will never end, the best that DoC can hope for being control.

It tells you all you need to know about New Zealand's environmental history that stoats, weasels and ferrets were introduced, with enormous effort, in the 1880s to try to control the exploding rabbit population after they had been introduced even earlier to provide sport and food for the settlers.

It's an extraordinary story that includes possums, goats and deer, all brought to this mammal-free land by well-intentioned Acclimatisation Societies who then watched with dismay as native and endemic species of flightless birds gradually disappeared. It would be hard to believe, if it weren't still going on elsewhere - cane toads in Australia being a relatively recent example.

And also very pertinent: at a pre-Track briefing at Ultimate Hikes just a week or so before I did the walk, an Australian guest was rather surprised when a cane toad hopped out of her bag right there in the shop.

Having once inadvertently imported a Cook Islands lizard in my suitcase, I can imagine her horror - but it doesn't say much for the Queenstown airport MAF inspectors' powers of observation, especially since they'd actually handled and disinfected the boots where it must have been hiding. Seems they never thought to peep inside, sigh.

Anyway, lupins - noxious, agreed. But aren't they pretty?