Down the east coast, the landscape becomes flat and agricultural, the gaps between half-hearted towns ever longer. My playlists are sorted. There’s a lot of Marvin Gaye going on, Michael Kiwanuka’s new album, blasts of Kamasi Washington and Miles Davis. Sometimes I sing a top line for a new song into my phone. Ooh, I’m […]

Read more "Islay and the Underworld"

We meet for drinks at 5. I am the last one there. I’d been on a wine tour. Again. Well, somebody has to do it. Already the guide is explaining our route, the terrain, our strategy. Everyone is in couples, and I get that look – the one that says, ‘So why is he by […]

Read more "Sounds Like Marlborough (Revisited)"

The small town of Whakatane is nondescript: dreary. The two major supermarkets, Countdown and New World, vie for your weekly shop. Brash functional stores line the road in, selling farm machinery, cars, boat equipment. MacDonalds, Burger King and KFC all in a row, a furniture store, a stationery shop and lots of empty lots with […]

Read more "The White Island Rendezvous"

I love my food. Life is a tussle between my waistline and my vanity. I am a gourmet and a gourmand. Just call me: I’ll take you to Brixton Pop, for amazing food inside a world of shipping containers. Vietnamese noodle here, pizza with truffle there; soft plump gyoza here, perfect sushi there. Washed down […]

Read more "In front of restaurants and behind bars"

iPad – check. iPhone – check. Camera – check. Hearing aids – check. Headphones – check. Smart watch – check. Electric toothbrush – check. Beard trimmer – check. Chargers and adapters for all the above – check. Combine harvester – check. Why oh why do I pack more gadgets and leads each year? Why do […]

Read more "A device too far"

It’s Sunday midday in Sydney. I’m sitting on my sheltered balcony in uber hip Surry Hills and it’s absolutely throwing it down. It’s been like this since last night – I can’t leave the apartment. The heavens have opened and the angels are crying. Every time I start a paragraph about what’s happened in Christchurch, […]

Read more "Out of Focus"

Tootsie speaks halting English. There’s ambient music wafting around and I’m being offered calming or energising tea. There are veils of white cotton masking private spaces. I hear a man arriving at the front desk, sheepishly whispering he is 15 minutes early. My hands are being stroked. ‘Beautiful hands’ she says. ‘Music hands.’ Later she […]

Read more "Perpendicular Perils"

M is beautiful. He smells of the bush, and his dark curly hair partly obscures a weather beaten face. Beneath his clothes you sense quiet, efficient muscles which might once have been a surfer’s. He wears badly ripped jeans, that show a colour tattoo of a map of the world on his right thigh. You […]

Read more "Tales from Okarito"

Mount Holdsworth is a couple of hours north of Wellington. It is not named after the late British jazz guitarist, Alan Holdsworth, though it is every bit as impenetrable. As you go north over the flat alluvial valley, the ridge to your left rises, part of the great fault-line that drives relentlessly across New Zealand […]

Read more "Rock steady! Or not…"

How fast does sound travel? I’ve walked 9 miles around the Kaikoura Peninsula today, stopping off for lobster and salad at a roadside café. They’re playing Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young – and Cat Stevens. Everywhere, from the bars and cafes in downtown Wellington, to the little seaside towns, on the radio, you can get […]

Read more "Sounds"