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Published: June 22nd 2008
(N) In the supermarket, Paula had found a prospectus for a college that was running a one-day bread-making course one Saturday in the very near future. It was already booked up, with 2 on the reserve list, but suddenly there were enough cancellations to enable me to get a place, as a present from Paula. So I spent Saturday 24th May in the company of 10 women and 1 other bloke (whose wife, also in attendance, had bought him the course as a birthday gift), and we baked multi-seed loaves, cheese twists, herb rolls and pumpkin bread. Paula opted for a course on web-page design at the same location, so watch this space for her future creations. (If I was writing a post-modern piece, I might have commented further on this interesting reversal of gender-stereotyping. Instead I will just say that I
do like the smell of fresh bread).
That night, we went to
The Ponsonby, a Belgian beer café in a gorgeous building which used to be a post office. May is
NZ Music Month and top of the bill was Graham Brazier who apparently is quite famous in this country, followed by Hammond Gamble, also of some repute.
Fresh bread
Baked in Nick's bread classThe setting was intimate, the acoustics great and quality of the music - quite blues-like in nature - was superb. Afterwards we chatted briefly to Graham, whose family originally came over from Liverpool. Finishing the line-up was our new guitarist friend Chris, who I’d met recently while getting info for Paula in the central beauty salon that he jointly runs with his wife, and who also comes from Liverpool - small world, huh? We had a great night with those guys and their friends, and of course the Leffe beer.
However, that night I should have been in a Heineken commercial that was being filmed for New Zealand telly. “Vous quoi?”
* I hear you ask. Well, I saw an advert for an extras company in the local paper, and had some spare time. I went for a brief interview and basically fitted the bill as a regular beer drinker who would quite easily blend into the background. I was about to decline the opportunity to be in the ad because of my impression of the abuse of the
Reinheitsgebot** by this brewery giant when it occurred to me that there could be worse ways to spend a Saturday night
Cheers!
Paula at The Ponsonby than to be an extra in a beer commercial. But as it happened, filming was to begin around 10pm in a distant suburb and I didn’t have a car, so the opportunity slipped through my fingers.
That was not our only close brush with stardom. The following morning, the same agency phoned us to see if we both wanted to audition for a forthcoming supermarket commercial. Our afternoon was free, and we ended up travelling on 4 buses, which took a total of 3 hours, for a camera test that lasted 3 minutes (me) and 6 minutes (Paula). In the first part, Paula had to make a short impromptu speech as if she were at a wedding, which she got through admirably, albeit with the odd stutter and blushing. I forgot where I was and grinned like a lemon at the camera. That was my entire contribution. They wanted Paula to do one more screen test in another scenario, and then we came home. Never was the phrase “Don’t call us...” more appropriate.
Later that week, while Paula continued with her job applications, I went for a walk around Auckland, leading to the scaling of the city’s highest
View of Mount Eden's crater
In the distance, to the right, is the famous Sky Tower and the heart of the city. peak,
Mount Eden, at all of 196m above sea level. It used to be a Maori
*** pa (a fortified settlement), last inhabited by a tribe around 1680. Starting the day with a haircut by a friendly Fijian, I then walked to Mount Eden Village, a good collection of shops, cafes, bakeries and bars. The sunny autumnal weather could not have been better, making the summit clearly visible from the street, and in fact I was quite hot making my way up. Clear blue skies stretched in every direction and the views from the top were stunning. Auckland straddles an isthmus of land at the narrowest part of New Zealand, only 9km separates the Pacific Ocean on the east from the Tasman Sea on the west. The various harbours and seas that surround Auckland were all in view, along with every suburb from the city centre out to ours (Mount Roskill) and on to the mountains in the distance. Even better, the volcano’s crater yawns down in front of the visitor, a depth of 50m carpeted in lush green grass, like a giant furry dent made by a gargantuan ice cream scoop. For the record, it's a little-known fact that 48
View from the top of Mount Eden
Rangitoto volcano is in the distance. The strip of land in the water with hills (extinct volcanoes) at each end is the suburb of Devonport. volcanoes dominate the Auckland landscape, making it a very hilly city, and they have been active at various points over the last 150,000 years.
I met an old boy at the top of Mount Eden, 81 years of age, and we talked for a while, the passing of time that is generally only possible if you don’t have gainful employment to attend to. His mother was of English origins, exact place unknown, and he’d travelled the world in his youth, living between strip clubs in Hong Kong, eating monkey brains in Tsim Sha Tsui and fathering children around the world. He told me that, early one morning, student pranksters had once set fire to many car tyres at the base of the crater, black smoke billowed up and caused the local population to believe that the volcano was about to erupt again!
Later, I checked out
Galbraith’s Ale House in the company of musician Chris, who we’d seen play at The Ponsonby last weekend, while our other halves were involved in a beauty evening at a nearby salon,
D’Aguiars, Paula as a customer and Chris’ wife Rachel as joint-owner of the place. Leaving them to attend to the finer points
of face masks and nail varnish, we sunk a few pints in this superb pub, once quoted as
"perhaps the best English pub/brewery outside the mother country", where several of the beers are brewed onsite; this can be watched daily before 5pm. I tried
Bellringer’s Bitter (cask-conditioned & strong on the hops) first, as it reminded me of early days at Durham Uni and sharing a room with Josh, the only bellringer I know (apart from his wife Katie) and father of my godson. I won’t list the others brews we quaffed but suffice to say it’s more than worth a visit if you’re ever in the area.
The next day was also sunny and while Paula continued with her jobsearch I made myself scarce again with a visit to the suburb of
Devonport, a 12-minute ferry ride away on the other side of Auckland’s city centre. As the boat approached the dock, the two dormant volcanoes which characterise this part of the city rose up at each end of the Esplanade. It was a short, steep climb to the top of
Mount Victoria, the nearer and taller one (87m). As well as another far-reaching view over Auckland city
Devonport from the ferry
With its two extinct volcanoes at either end of the Esplanade on the other side of the water, there was a huge 13-tonne, 8-inch calibre gun installed at the top, which had been there since 1899, when there was a fear of attack by the expansionist Russian Pacific Fleet. The gun was fired only once, in practice, when the vibration cracked the glass in many nearby windows and the local residents complained, and never again was it used. In fact, Mt Victoria itself had been fortified long before European arrival but was given its name in honour of the incumbent British monarch, replacing the Maori name
Taka-A-Ranga. This juxtaposition of English and exotic words really reminded me of our time in Hong Kong six months ago, where quintessential British names were found alongside obviously oriental ones.
I walked along some of the back streets of Devonport, past the shop claiming to sell Auckland’s biggest ice creams, till I came to
Cheltenham Beach (which sounds
really odd when you know that back home Cheltenham is a
long way from the coast), a pleasant small sandy bay with another extinct volcano,
North Head, rising up at its far end. From the beach, you are immediately opposite
Rangitoto Volcano, the most recent extinct
volcano of the city, which last erupted only 600 years ago and which is separated from you by a relatively narrow stretch of water. Walking along the beach, I passed an knarled old tree and then climbed up North Head, which conversely is one of Auckland’s
oldest volcano cones, created about 50,000 years ago after a series of explosions. As elsewhere, it was originally settled by Maoris before becoming a harbour lookout for the Europeans, who thereupon constructed fortifications and installed guns & searchlights, and who dug a warren of tunnels into the rock. Then I went home.
2nd June is the (British)
Queen’s Birthday and ironically that weekend is a public holiday in NZ even though it isn’t in the UK. We decided to tackle the 16km Coast-to-Coast walk which links Auckland’s
Waitemata and
Onehunga Harbours, mostly through parkland and nature reserves. We actually began the walk from our house, instead of getting a bus the couple of kilometres to Onehunga, and picked up the trail near the base of
One Tree Hill, a volcanic cone resulting from activity around 20,000 years ago. Its peak is 183m above sea level. With its steep defendable slopes, it became the largest
Rangitoto volcano
As viewed from Cheltenham Beach in Devonport, Auckland. of the around 60 Maori paa in Auckland. A Scot by the name of John Logan Campbell was one of NZ’s first entrepreneurs, sometimes called Auckland’s “founding father”, and was responsible for erecting a 100ft obelisk at the top of the hill, in his own words, “to express his admiration for the Maori people” - although his own grave is also found at the summit. Until 2002, the hill was topped with a single pine tree but it was removed for safety reasons. A plaque on the obelisk recalls the Maoris signing the 1840 Waitangi treaty which accepted the sovereignty of the British crown, thereby granting them “their rights and privileges as British subjects” - the lucky things. The sunshine was intermittent, but a few black clouds signalled rain was to follow. Back at the base of the hill, large brown healthy-looking cows munched through the thick grass.
We were now in
Cornwall Park, named after the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall on their visit to NZ, the Duke later becoming George V. The modest, original 19th-century wooden house (“Acacia Cottage”) of JL Campbell is preserved in the park, moved there in the mid-20th century from central Auckland, built
by the man himself no less, and is distinguished as the city’s oldest wooden building.
A few more km brought us to
Mount Eden, which I walked up last week but which Paula was almost keen to climb too. At the summit, there were great views all around but the heavens did open, though thankfully it was only brief. This produced the first rainbow that we’d ever seen where both ends were clearly visible, so we sauntered off in opposite directions and each found a pot of gold.
The last big park we walked through, another few km away, was the
Auckland Domain but we didn’t loiter as dusk was falling. We made it to the end of the trail, at
Princes Wharf, with tired legs which were rejuvenated by some of Valentino’s batch-made ice-cream on the harbour, one flavour of which was
hokey pokey, the second most popular ice cream flavour in the country, made up of small lumps of toffee in vanilla.
Also in this fortnight I finished my great travel book,
The Pillars of Hercules by Paul Theroux, which got more interesting as he went to the purportedly dangerous places that I would be
wary of visiting, such as Jerusalem, Damascus and Benidorm.
On the work front, I had a written job offer for an export sales role and went to sign the contract, but when I got there they told me that an immediate freeze on recruitment had just been imposed! Doh. It is harder than I expected to find suitable work, but I’m keeping optimistic 😊
There is only one pub near enough to our house for it to be regarded as local,
The Thirsty Whale but it is in the same complex as the community centre and supermarket, so cannot be regarded as a great haunt. We went with our 2 housemates Pam and Ashleigh on Friday evening, and actually it wasn’t too bad although all the beer did taste like it had been watered down - but maybe I’d just been spoilt elsewhere in Auckland. Later in the evening, and after a few more beers, the music turned quite 80s and the place didn’t seem so bad after all, but that still doesn’t excuse the four of us joining the dance floor for a wee while before we left.
And this just in…Paula did end up getting
some TV work from the extras company, and had to leave the house at 6a.m. for her screen debut, in which her role was to wait in a queue for the bus. I will let her write more in her next entry. When she returned at lunchtime, she was thoughtful enough to have brought me back a large bacon and egg roll from the generous breakfast spread provided for the extras by the film company, which, after last night at The Thirsty Whale, was just what I needed. She loves me yeah yeah yeah.
****
* Lit. translates as “You what?”, an expression coined by a friend of my good mate Dan Clarke, to express a sincere amount of surprise. I believe the first recorded use of this phrase was by Dan’s mate in response to being charged €30 for 2 beers in Paris.
** An edited Wikipedia definition of the Reinheitsgebot: “sometimes called the "German Beer Purity Law", a regulation that originated in 1516 concerning standards composition of beer. Before its official repeal in 1987, it was the oldest food quality regulation in the world. The only ingredients that could be used in the production of beer
were water, barley, and hops. Note that no yeast was mentioned in the original text. It was not until the 1800s that Louis Pasteur discovered the role of microorganisms in the process of fermentation; therefore, yeast was not known to be an ingredient of beer. Brewers generally took some sediment from the previous fermentation and added it to the next, the sediment generally containing the necessary organisms to perform fermentation. Hops are added to beer to impart flavours but also act as a preservative, and their mention in the Reinheitsgebot meant to prevent inferior methods of preserving beer that had been used before the introduction of hops. Medieval brewers had used many problematic ingredients to preserve beers, including, for example, soot and fly agaric mushrooms. More commonly, other herbs had been used, such as stinging nettle. German breweries are very proud of the Reinheitsgebot, and many (even brewers of wheat beer) claim to still abide by it. This is purely for marketing purposes; all modern commercial brewers in Germany add cultured yeast to the brew, and some beers contain wheat. Neither yeast nor wheat are allowable ingredients under the 1516 law.
Also, for further reading on why the Reinheitsgebot
Queen Street
The heart of Auckland is perhaps not so important, see
here.
*** Maori is pronounced similar to “More-ree” not “Mao-ree”
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