When I started my uni degree, I made a pact with myself to avoid scenarios that resulted in brain-melting panic mode at all costs. This might seem violently paradoxical to some. University can easily be described as three years spent scaling a sweat-drenched wall of deadline stress. Continue reading →

Warning – this blog post contains really awesome language that might offend. 

I’ve always been a lover of swearwords. I remember standing in our garden when I was very young and hearing a car zoom past on the country road directly below our house. As it flew past skidding on the gravel a male voice drifted up the hill, “fuck mate, watch out for the corners.” Continue reading →

I decided last minute to go to the book launch of the 9th Floor, the RNZ podcast interview series that aired earlier this year. In the interviews, Guyon Espiner talked to five past prime ministers about their time in the leader’s seat. Palmer, Moore, Bolger, Shipley and Clark. Continue reading →

My friend and I were having coffee the other day, talking shit, shooting the breeze, and we got onto the topic of knowing when to shut your mouth.

I come from a family of talkers. We all love a good gas-bag in fact, growing up there was a period in our house when Mum and Dad instigated turn taking. Continue reading →

Statistics are no match for my cold, hard dread. Only one in eleven million they say. You’ve got more chance of dying in a shark’s belly, they say. Who are those ‘they’?

This is how it goes. Continue reading →

My niece Edie May is edible. When she was tiny I would lay her down and grasp curling, pink toes in my mouth, half expecting to taste marzipan. Now, when I visit her in Greytown she stands at the door announcing my arrival and my day is immediately perfect. Continue reading →

Taputeranga coast as the sun goes down

We live in a house across the road from the ocean, I can’t really say beach because that would be a lie. It’s a stretch of coast that sings a sirens song to Instagrammers, each hoping to capture that perfect image of massive moving water against a turbulent sky. I am not immune to this myself. I have a folder on my laptop full of sunset moments.

Sometimes I sit at my kitchen table and look at the Cook Strait and imagine what it would feel like to live in the sea. To exist in that liquid landscape between frothy white horse and ocean rock. How the water would feel like silk on my skin as I floated in the glimmery depths. Running my hands over pebbles, slipping through fronds of seaweed as I let my watery home move me where it wanted me to go. If I became a fish would I have any human concerns? Or would I just drift and float, letting the water be the totality of me.

Rob says it’s a wondrous thing, to look at the ocean and see it as something so separate from us yet to be so connected to it, mother nature and all that jazz.

I grew up in kiwi villas with gardens. Grass, plants, gravel paths, trampolines and concrete driveways for roller skating. This is what I knew. So sometimes I’d say to Rob that sure the ocean’s a crowd pleaser, but wouldn’t it be great to move to a leafy suburb so we could cultivate a garden for flowers and herbs?

I’ve spent a lot of time sitting at this kitchen table looking at the water, imagining it on my skin, letting my eyes drift back and forth with the ceaseless iteration of the waves. And it is starting to occur to me that I’m not really a flowers and herb garden kind of person. Not yet anyway.