Fa la lala la, la la la la

The Christmas tree is now up, with the usual family bickering (so unlike the standard screen portrayal of this tradition) but without what's become the small annual ritual of hanging on it the latest addition to our motley collection of ornaments. I didn't buy one on my travels this year, since the nearest thing I came across were these slightly forbidding Santas in [cliche alert] an Aladdin's cave of a market in Dubai. They had everything in there, stacked up high on wooden shelves along narrow aisles in a hot, dusty, dim and airless warehouse, in no discernible order: for instance, an old brass ship telegraph next to a long-handled sheikh's dagger next to a half-scale painted wooden giraffe. There were life-sized carved wooden African women, framed scorpions and bats, plastic Burj Khalifas, a human skeleton, Nepalese pashminas made from the neck hair of goats, Indian hand-knotted silk carpets, giant clogs, all the perfumes of Araby - and Old Spice too.

I don't know where the ornaments in the photo were made, but I'm guessing they were local, simply because who other than a desert-dweller would think to paint a snowman red?

What I was tempted by, but resisted, were the lovely little glass lamps in a [c.a.] rainbow of colours hanging from the ceiling, some of them lit and glowing beautifully. That really is a local specialty, and we saw them all over the place, in the souks and in use. They had them strung along the balcony at the restaurant we ate at one night in Abu Dhabi, sitting above the water that was sparkling in the dark with reflections from the tall glass skyscrapers across the harbour. The air was warm, there was soft music, quiet chatter from the diners, the Thai food was fresh and tasty...

Yes, Thai food. Foreigners make up around 90% of the population of the United Arab Emirates, so  you could hardly get a more cosmopolitan society. At my Dubai hotel one night, I saw a TV interview with Agnes Obel, the questions in French, her answers in Danish, subtitled in French and translated into English by me. That was a typically multi-cultural UAE experience. (And yet another coincidence for me, as I hadn't realised she was Danish, and there I was, on my way to Copenhagen.)

Shutterbuggery

This isn't the photo I wanted to take: it was the tattoo on his buttock that would have made the really striking shot - but he expected payment for that and, well, I was in Scotland... I've been tidying up loose ends and this goes with a story that's been knocking about for ages that I've recently found a home for. It's a bit of an odd one, about stalking Bonnie Prince Charlie on our travels around Scotland a couple of years ago - quite inadvertently, but also inevitably, as it turned out. You can't go anywhere in Scotland without bumping into Mary and BPC, with people talking about them as though they've only just left the room.

It was complicated to write, because Charlie's Jacobite Rising followed a different route from ours; and choosing the accompanying photos was a little compromised because this was the trip when my Canon cartwheeled down a scree slope on the Isle of Skye just over halfway through, so I don't have photos for places like Culloden, Loch Ness and Glasgow. I've read some fairly impassioned arguments for not travelling with a camera at all, that you see more, connect better, have a more real experience of a place when you're not distracted by peering through the viewfinder looking for angles and subjects. I've certainly seen plenty of people who honestly couldn't have had much of an idea of where they've been until they get home and look at their images. Video-cameramen (and it's always men) are the worst for this. I really do wonder what they do with all those hours of video that they shoot.

But I couldn't imagine travelling without a camera, and not only because it's essential to my job, as editors expect the complete package these days, and simply supplying the words just won't work at all. I find that having to record wide shots and close-ups, of people, places, animals and food does make me look more closely at places, explore further, make contact with people, look up. And since I'm frequently having to take notes and publishable photos and conduct interviews all at the same time as absorbing a few personal impressions too, snapping quick shorthand shots is also useful for jogging my memory later. When I have time, though, it's very satisfying, as well as lots of fun, to concentrate on the camera and get something that I think is really worth having.

Sun, sand and sabres

Thirteen months ago, my anal soul would have been happy with this:

But I wanted more, this time, so I tried harder. And failed:

Reactions not as good as they used to be, or seconds have got shorter - or my laptop slower. I'm going with that. Never mind, it was a busy day with plenty of other stuff going on, like a lovely lunch at the Sofitel hosted by Macau Tourism, with a neat link between the two. It was in Macau that I saw sabrage for the first time, when chef Antonio, who was a bit of a showman and made us crepes Suzette with great flourish, took a lot of pleasure in showing the youngest, blondest member of our group how to remove the top from a champagne bottle with a sabre. (It's a French custom, initiated, legend has it, by Napoleon, so why a Portuguese man was doing it was never explained. Apart from the showmanship thing.) Of course, I learned earlier this year that it's a piece of weasel, and whipped one off myself with no trouble whatsoever, which hasn't stopped me from boasting about it ever since. With good reason, it turns out, judging by Trish's (three) efforts when the ritual was performed today, which left her with an eyeful - fortunately of champagne rather than bottle-top:

And then, after a lot of airline and travel chat, it was time to head out of the city on a sunny afternoon for a friend's Big Birthday picnic at a little beach on a gorgeous bit of coast with turquoise sea and islands and inlets. There was shared food and many popped corks - no sabres on hand, unfortunately - plus a dog with a stick, children, pohutukawa in bloom, sand between the toes and that glorious feeling that summer is finally here with lots more sun and sea and sociable times on the way. Yay.

Do you feel lucky, punk?

Here's the question: if two killer tornadoes strike within 18 months, one of them in the next suburb to the north and the other in the next suburb to the south, should you feel lucky? Or move?

In May last year everyone was very surprised, as well as shocked, when a classic tornado hit Albany, killing a worker on a roof. We hadn't thought we got tornadoes here - but it turned out we do, and yesterday we had another, that ripped through Hobsonville just 4 kilometres from where I sat unknowingly on the sofa, looking at the rain overflowing the guttering and thinking mildly, "No more painting for me just yet, then." While, this time, three men died at the site of a new school that's being built, when a concrete slab wall blew over and crushed their truck. Dreadful.

In this crappy iPhone 3 photo, you can just see the collapsed slabs shining in the sun; and perhaps some missing orange tiles on the houses beyond. Hundreds of homes lost their roofs and windows: trampolines flew through the air, a car was shunted across someone's garden, boats blew away, and there are snapped and uprooted trees everywhere, many of them huge old pines. Walking through there this morning, the air smelt good from all that broken pine, but it was all such a mess. There were reporters, police and military people everywhere (the Air Force base at Whenuapai was hit too) and many groups of men in hi-viz vests and helmets standing around pointing. I whisked past the ones putting up the Road Closed sign, businesslike, focused and not breaking stride, and they didn't say a word. It's a skill.

There was a small (though temporary) silver lining to it all: a bit of the nasty orange sound barrier along the motorway blew down and gave us back the harbour view. And today's vaguely travel-related connection? According to QI, the country with the highest annual tally of tornadoes is... no (klaxon), not the US, but Britain. There, that's news to you, isn't it?

Visiting Hobbiton

Now here's irony for you. Or me, really. I was looking forward to today as a day both out and off - a holiday from shoulder-wrenching labour on our front fence, which I water-blasted with especial attention to removing the tenacious lichen that was growing on it. So what do I see when I get to Matamata after a lovely ride in a comfortable new train, and am taken out to Hobbiton, which is the actual set of the Shire scenes from The Hobbit (and The Lord of the Rings before it)? Lots and lots of little fences artistically encrusted with authentic-looking lichen which, I discover, has been artfully and artificially recreated, and painstakingly applied by the set-makers.

The whole village is a triumph of tiny detail, a cosy green place of grass and flowers and hedges, with ponds and real frogs, trees and chimneys, a water mill and a pub serving very acceptable cider. We were shown around and told lots of stories about the filming and actors and Peter Jackson's insistence on having everything just so even if vast amounts of time and work and money were spent on making something look right that appeared in the background of one scene for 11 seconds only. It was really interesting: the hobbit holes are several different sizes, for instance, to make it easier to get the scale right when dealing with short hobbits and tall elves (or people).

Most of them are just facades, only a couple of metres deep behind the round front door, but Bag End, where Bilbo lived, has proper rooms and is a comparative mansion, it has so many rooms - not that we were allowed inside. We could have done with the shelter: it was pouring with rain and we ended up so drenched that when we got to the Green Dragon for our lunch, some people took off their sodden shoes to toast their feet in front of the roaring fire. Or maybe they were just channelling their inner hobbits (minus the hairy toes).

Brown Shavers are nowhere near as evocative...

Rained off Project T.Sawyer this morning, instead I took my usual airport route across the city and disconcertingly stopped short in a nearby suburb to get some more hens, since the incumbents are getting on a bit and a couple of times recently I've had to buy eggs. These are Light Sussex, one of the world's oldest breeds, in England since the Roman conquest in AD 43. So they should know a thing or two about laying eggs, I hope. Sussex is one of the two counties that featured in the books of my favourite children's book author, Monica Edwards, and her love of the countryside infected me so intensely that I was determined to go to England as soon as I could:

...Though I lived in suburban Christchurch, meadows, streams and woods were the landscape of my childhood. The kowhai and cabbage trees in my own garden were less substantial than the oaks and elms under which the characters in my favourite books played out their adventures. I yearned to see badgers and foxes as they did, to jump into the harbour from the deck of a fishing smack, to spend a summer in an old stone Martello Tower.

But I was stuck in New Zealand at the bottom of the world, where nothing interesting ever happened. I grew up thinking I was missing out and, as soon as I could, I left. I went to England, where I lived in the countryside and rode horses through the fields and along the narrow lanes between high hedgerows, listening to robins singing in the hawthorn bushes. Christmases were cold and sparkly, and at the cosy pub along the road nearly everyone knew my name. The year was divided up by seasons and festivals, and I was enchanted to be part of it all.

There was something, though, that was the opposite of missing. I didn’t realise it until I took my English husband to explore the country I had come from, and we arrived in Queenstown. Of course we were both dazzled by the glamour of the lake and mountains; but it wasn’t until we started walking the Greenstone Track and got hands-on with the bush that I understood the value of emptiness. In England, wherever I went there were people, busily making their mark on the landscape, as they have done since prehistoric times.

In the Fiordland bush there was no-one, and nothing to show of people at all apart from the path we were following. Everything else was pristine: the fresh green ferns, the black-trunked beech trees, the snow-capped peaks peeping through them. For three days we followed the trail, sleeping in huts that had been helicoptered in, little oases of civilised comfort surrounded by untouched wilderness. Each morning we shrugged on our packs and set out into a day that felt truly new, every brow crested bringing a view that was ours alone.

And even when, on the third day, we spotted horses being ridden across the river flats, catching up with us from behind, the spell wasn’t broken. They were stockmen on their way to the Glenorchy Races, making a week-long cross-country trek to an event they looked forward to all year. It seemed gloriously rugged to us, a direct link to the olden days, and we were captivated.

So beguiled, in fact, that we went to the Races too, steaming up to the top of the lake on the Earnslaw with a good chunk of the Queenstown population. It was down-home entertainment of the very best sort: grandstands set up on utes and flat-bed trucks with sofas and tarp sunshades, the PTA sizzling sausages, kids and dogs everywhere, and of course the horses, numbers spray-painted on their rumps running forwards, and backwards too, dumping their riders or racing and bending with fierce concentration. It was chaotic and casual, there was both fooling about and intense rivalry, and everyone there was having fun.

It was a wonderful day, and as we chugged back again afterwards it was like being part of a family. There was singing round the piano while the sky turned saffron behind the mountains, and as we neared Queenstown an old man stood at the bow and played the bagpipes. It was real, it was ours and I missed it.

So I came back home again...

A fence is very like a chair

The first sentence of what is, for very boring reasons, my most popular post, search-wise, reads: 'An A380 Airbus is nothing like a bumblebee'. This one should have begun with 'A fence is very like a chair' (so I'm making it the title). Have you ever painted a chair? I have, lots of times, and if you have too you'll know how large the titchiest kitchen chair is, area-wise. It's the small intestine of the furniture world. It has so many surfaces that when you're onto the second coat, it's almost impossible to keep track of which ones you've done, so that years later when upending a chair for a random bit of spring-cleaning, you'll find the bottom of a rung somewhere with the undercoat grinning through.

A fence, now, you tend to think of in just two dimensions, plus back and front. But there's so much more to it than that! And you never suspect it, until you're already embarked on what seemed at first the work of an afternoon, and then found yourself committed to a week's hard labour (which, for those of us who are differently-abled, counts double). It's also a sad fact of life that, having begun waterblasting the front fence and quite quickly tiring of it, despite the satisfaction quotient of returning black mouldy wood to freshly-sawn condition, you can't just stop and quietly drift away pretending nothing's happened. People will notice.

So, having been unwittingly sucked into what is now looming as a Major Fence-Painting Project, of course I was thinking about Tom Sawyer (whose name now irresistibly conjures up the image of Bart Simpson for me - anyone else?) and thence Mark Twain. And thence Angel's Camp in California, where we stopped en route to Lake Tahoe and had our car washed by some college students who were raising funds for new band uniforms. Twain spent a winter gold-mining nearby at Jackass Hill, and came across something in a saloon in Angel's Camp that did him much more good than finding yellow metal. He heard a yarn there that he developed into 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County', which became his first writing success, and we all know how that story ends.

In the town, they have an annual Jumping Frog Jubilee each May. "It's a serious business," one of the students' fathers told us as the kids cleaned our car. "The bullfrogs are bred and trained specially, and there's lots of rivalry. But anyone can enter: we have a Rent-a-Frog service," he added helpfully. Of course, we wouldn't need that.