An increasing understanding of manly pursuits

Yesterday morning I hopped out of my pit (rendered awake by 2 screamers) and set about packing to drive to the west coast of New Zealand for the weekend where my aunty moved to not 4 weeks ago with her Kiwi husband. To have a relative living a mere 2 hours drive away fills me with excitement. After scrabbling around stuffing nappies and several changes of clothes into bags we were ready for the off. It's just me and the littlies as the husband will be spending the weekend drilling 34 holes into our back garden, filling them with cement and wooden poles, building retaining walls and then sometime during the week pouring in tonnes and tonnes of sand followed by top soil and turf so we can have a level garden. Hurrah! Badminton tournaments beckon.

The first half an hour or so of the journey was spent with me navigating through traffic whilst trying to officiate arguments in the back. A friend who is one of four boys told me recently that they used to be crammed four abreast in the back of their car (well before road safety was invented) and would bicker over the very many things worth bickering about when you are six years old. Their mother would hang on to the steering wheel with one arm and use the other to swing wildly behind her aiming at as many bare legs as she could. How hilarious, imagining my friend and his brothers swinging their knees as far to the side as possible to miss the punishment whilst their mother bellowed in irritation at them.

My son asked to try what I was eating. I told him wasabi peas were quite spicy and that he probably wouldn't like them. He insisted they were exactly what he wanted so I handed him one. The relative calm exploded in an ear splitting scream emenating from twin2. A glimpse of her in the rear view mirror showed green, dusty crumbs round her mouth from the wasabi pea my son had so generously offered his 1 year old sister. My inability to use both arms to keep us going in the same direction at the same time as aiming a whack in his direction annoyed me. I'm sure it won't be the first time my dodgy arm situation plays neatly into his hands.

The west coast is so close to us on the east coast but couldn't look more different. Where our Bay of Plenty beaches are of the 'white, golden sands fringed with Norfolk pines and brilliant blue skies' variety, the west coast of the Waikato is a rugged, less populated stretch of land with black sand pressing into the ocean. The people here are different too. The Bay of Plenty has a good sprinkling of California style surfers - blond curls, cheeky grins and expensive board shorts. Towns like Raglan on the west coast house a more alternative dweller. Expensive highlights and truckloads of sweet smelling conditioner might get you far in Mount Maunganui but dreadlocks are what you need to sport in order to be taken seriously in the waves at Indicators - the awesome left hand surf break at Raglan. Although the break to come away for the weekend is wonderful not to mention the joy of chattering to my aunty and her husband, I know it will be lovely to arrive back home tomorrow to our version of the seaside. I'm definitely an east coaster.

Having read back through this post, 2 things come to light. First of all I'm sure many of my friends in the UK will be pissing themselves laughing at my (fairly competent thank you very much) descriptions of the mechanics of levelling a garden and knowledgable surfing lingo. The transformation from city girl to Kiwi wife is well underway.

The second thing is that as I write about being as east coaster, I realise that my feelings about where I live with my husband and three little half New Zealander, half British chiddlers are changing. When we moved here the heart wrenching sadness at leaving home, family and friends transferred itself to an unhealthy dislike of New Zealand (but not of the people I hasten to add). On reflection it was the deep resentment at leaving everything I love which morphed into other negative emotions. Two years down the line and I'm starting, just starting to feel the twinkly feeling of pride in our street, town and area we live in. And, dare i say it, even love.

Jamie Oliver would wet himself with excitement

There are very many differences between life at home in the UK and here in New Zealand. One of the first I noticed when we moved here was the availability in the supermarket or greengrocer's of various vegetables and fruit at any given time of the year. We arrived not quite fresh as daisies on 1st November 2007 in the beautiful Bay of Plenty. November in New Zealand is probably akin to May or June in the UK . It is wonderfully clement , a bit breezy and summer feels like it's about to leap out at you. A perfect time to arrive in a country when you are distraught about leaving your beloved United Kingdom.

Wandering round the supermarket I noticed that most of the vegetables and fruit are grown in New Zealand. I was impressed and was pleased to be able to 'buy local produce' as Jamie and his mates had been urging us to do for the last couple of years. Even more exciting were the swathes of strawberries, avocados and asparagus which all seemed pretty cheap. I smugly congratulated myself on living in a country where these special treats were so readily available.

For the first few months our food bill was pretty high until I realised that produce is priced according to its seasonal availability. I immediately stopped paying $3 for a single leek and waited til autumn to enjoy them. A bag of ten avocados can be bought for about $5 in December but come May, each one costs around $2.50. In the UK, a basket of goods in a supermarket would cost the same in May as it would in December. I have quite a bit of horticultural education to get under my belt.

For about 3 weeks a year in winter every feijoa tree in the land blankets the ground with masses and masses of small, oval, green nuggets. They suddenly appear in the supermarket and are pretty expensive (apparently their delicate skin is easy to bruise and therefore make it tricky to transport). I have never seen anyone buy any though as every third house has a feijoa tree in their garden and the owners happily give the fallen fruit away to absolutely anyone. Before living here I had neither tasted nor heard of the fruit. I'm not competely convinced - it's a bit like eating a rather filling bouquet of flowers. But I absolutely love the mania that goes with them. You can't leave someone's house without having a jar of feijoa pickle or muffins stuffed in your bag and suddenly 'Feijoa and parma ham' seems like an excellent idea for a starter.

It certainly seems natural to take fruit directly from a tree rather than wait for it to be waxed, scrubbed, packed in crates and shipped to a supermarket where you have to hand over cash for the stuff. Clearly that's what my sister in law thinks too as I have, with my own eyes, witnessed her helping herself to a few juicy lemons from the branches of a heavily laden tree a few doors down from her house. Luckily New Zealanders are a generous bunch so I doubt she'll be locked up for it.