Random Play by Graham Reid

We live in troubling times: war and rumours of war; China v Tibet; the embarrassing aberration that is Winston Peters; alarm at the Labour Party conference in the capital; John Key and Bill English; falling house prices; complaints that a billboard about sexual dysfunction is offensive to certain cultures; gaps that aren’t closing; boy racers and a girl missing . .

Important matters all, and this post will deal with none of them. They tax the brain and taken in total might make you think our world has gone to Hell and this small corner of the Pacific is not immune but actually leading the way down.

Nope, it is a Sunday morning as I write, the weather is pretty okay for this time of year and although the Blues lost at Eden Park across the road last night there doesn’t seem any collateral damage in our street. Life could be worse at my place -- but his week it has been a whole lot better.

Mid-week I received an advance copy of the new Flight of the Conchords album -- and it is much more funny than you might expect. Given that many of the songs will be familiar it is a pleasure to report that shorn of the television show and given studio tweaking and some other changes this album is a knee-slapper from start to finish.

It is also astutely observed in its parodies and cleverly layered in lyrics and production.

We’ve been singing Inner City Pressure, shouting lines from Robots and Hiphopopotamus at each and dissolving into laughter, and we carry our precious copy to the car to enjoy all over again.

Even the promo sheet which came with it is amusing. I quote in part: “Its release finally renders pointless all the inexpert fan-made audio transfers (the modern day equivalent of holding a microphone up to the television speaker and shouting at your mom to be quiet), which have bloated hard drives the world over . . .

“And the album sounds legitimate and musically, it’s incredible, but as Shakespeare said, “Does it funny?” Happily, yes. If amazing, delightful, hilarious is your idea of funny, then prepare for undisappointment!”

Indeed.

The Conchords hardly need me to help advance their career (not that I could, nor could I stop it should I so desire) but I have started posting tracks -- with permission -- at Elsewhere here. Every day until its release on the 21st I’ll be putting up a different track.

At that time Elsewhere will also be giving away some handsome Conchords prize packs to lucky subscribers -- and this coming week as a give away I have some copies of the new Rolling Stones double-live CD, some by the exceptional Auckland band An Emerald City who play In Pt Chev on Saturday (I will have tickets to giveaway for that also), and much more. The Stones and Emerald City are also posted at Elsewhere right now too, along with much, much more music -- and essays, interviews (from Yoko Ono to anti-globalisation activist Naomi Klein), images and so on.

There is also a link to vote for Elsewhere in the Net Guide Awards (closes tomorrow, Monday) and even though this one-man band is up against the teleco people, Air New Zealand, the “government” and people with swagger and clout I am firmly convinced that this could be the year of the little guy. Even if it is only in the "best homepage" category.

I like to think of Elsewhere as New Zealand’s fourth best digi-personal website, if you get my drift.

So check out the Conchords (the track currently posted has the best use of lyrical silence on a song ever!), the Stones and much more. Subscribe to Elsewhere if you want to (it’s free, just use the e-mail link at top right on the pages, you get weekly e-mail updates) so you can be in to win Major Weekly Prizes -- and just for a little while forget about the woes of this world.

They will still be there tomorrow -- but so will the Conchords at Elsewhere.

All in how you look at things really, innit?

My guess is that not many people these days read W Somerset Maugham. The English author, critic and playwright (1874-1965) seems to have fallen into that abyss reserved for dead white males of the “writers of Empire” period -- although he was enormously influential in his time (Orwell was a fan) and Of Human Bondage remains a remarkable novel.

Frankly, I don’t read much Maugham either, although the other day I picked up cheap copy The Summing Up in a secondhand bookshop. It has the tone of a conversational memoir by an old man looking back on his life, although he is quick to deny that in the opening line.

Of course it is very rooted in its period and he hails long forgotten writers of his day. But he does have a nice turn of phrase (“perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull”) and as only the gifted can be, he is absurdly self-deprecating: “At 18 I knew French, German and some Italian, but I was extremely uneducated and deeply conscious of my ignorance” he says, before noting that in order to improve himself in a two month period he read three Shakespeare plays, two volumes of Mommsen’s History of Rome, a large part of Lanson’s Litterature Francaise, two or three novels, some of the French classics, a couple of scientific works and a play by Ibsen.

This from a man who also says “there is no more merit in having read a thousand books than in having ploughed a thousand fields”. (Which sounds alarmingly Maoist, doesn’t it?)

This autobiographical reflection on the dramatic arts, philosophy and religion sometimes sings and/or stings off the pages (“to write good prose is an affair of good manners. It is, unlike poetry, a civil art.”) but he also takes a very interesting skew when he writes of the many politicians and public figures he met. And he met a lot.

This is a year in which many public figures will imply they know better than you, and that their opinion is of more weight and import. That may well be true.

But Maugham has some nice reminders of the kind where a little girl says the Emperor has no clothes.

“I met persons who by their rank, fame or position might well have thought themselves destined to become historical figures. I did not find them as brilliant as my fancy had painted them. The English are a political nation and I was often asked to houses where politics were the ruling interest. I could not discover in the eminent statesmen I met there any marked capacity. I concluded, perhaps rashly, that no great degree of intelligence was needed to rule a nation.

“Since then I have known in various countries a good many politicians who have attained high office. I have continued to be puzzled by what seemed to me the mediocrity of their minds. I have found them ill-informed upon the ordinary affairs of life and I have not discovered in them either subtlety of intellect or liveliness of imagination.

“At one time I was inclined to think that they owed their illustrious position only to their gift of speech, for it must be next door to impossible to rise to power in a democratic community unless you can catch the ears of the public; and the gift of speech, as we know, is not often accompanied by the power of thought.

“But since I have seen statesmen who did not seem to me very clever conduct public affairs with reasonable success I cannot but think I was wrong: it must be to govern a nation you need a specific talent and that this may very well exist without general ability.

“In the same way I have known men of affairs who have made great fortunes and brought vast enterprises to prosperity, but in everything unconcerned with their business appear to be devoid of even common sense.

“Nor was the conversation that I heard then as clever as I had expected. It seldom gave you much to think about . . .”

And all this comes before page five. There is much more like this: waspish, aloof, arrogant, condescending, very funny and perhaps with more than a modicum of truth. Maugham had nothing to gain or lose by being honest, so he was. And snarky.
I love it and commend the book (which is available in paperback for about 30 times what I picked up for -- but is still cheap.)

Finally: Sometimes you wake up in another country, huh?

I read with bewilderment and anger in today’s Herald that some Chinese students at Auckland University had swiped around 800 copies of Craccum because they objected to an advertisement in its pages for the Divine Performing Arts theatre production which opens at the Aotea Centre on April 17.

The students apparently “were upset the advert sold the [show] as entertainment when it was really more of a Falun Gong political rally”, according to the Herald -- attributing the remark to Jim Sun, a representative of the New Zealand Chinese Students’ Group.

Well Jim, I went to the Falun Gong show last year and I’m going again this time. It is a colourful entertainment -- but certainly has a strong and pretty unsubtle political aspect in places. But a Falun Gong rally it ain’t.

And frankly even if it was, by what right do you swipe copies of the magazine to “edit” out an advertisement you object to?

I would politely suggest you and your group might want to look a little more carefully at the cultural context in which you live -- a liberal democracy as it happens -- and consider that Falun Gong (whether you or I or anyone back home in China likes it or not) has a legitimate right to take out advertisements in Craccum. Just as you do.

That’s the kind of country this is, weird though it may seem.

It’s life Jim. But not as you know it, maybe?

For about 15 years I played two games of rugby every Saturday: one for school and one for Cornwall Park. Lotsa practices, lots of rucks and stiff-arm tackles.

I wasn’t a very good hooker (the puniest kid in the team) and wasn’t fast on the wing, but I was a pretty decent break-away and for quite a while was the surprisingly accurate goal-kicker. I could get them through the uprights from just about anywhere in their half.

The things was though, I never much liked playing the game. I had teeth broken in those days before mouthguards, hated being trapped at the bottom of a ruck -- my fear was that I could drown in those ill-drained fields we used to play on regardless of how torrential the rain -- and over the years getting punched in the face and on freezing cold ears wasn’t my idea of an interesting way of spending a Saturday.

Up until recently I thought my schoolboy and university days on the paddock were about the roughest thing (after a couple of street fights ) I could get involved in: then I started going to record fairs to find stupid old bits of vinyl.

Last weekend I went to one just around the corner and fortunately I got there early, because by around 10am there was elbow-jabbing from big sweaty fiftysomething men in acrid, sweat-drenched shirts. If it hadn’t been for the treasures I found, it wasn’t my idea of an interesting way of spending a Saturday.

But I did find what I call treasures: a few 7 inch EPs from the 50s and 60s of songs “for adults only” and which feature girls in tight sweaters (one by Noel “Diamond Lil” McKay), Hawaiian albums, How to Enjoy Your Bagpipe by Anna Russell, a 10 inch of pre-Beatles pop star Tommy Steele (I picked up his biography a year or so ago, hilarious tales of dodgy promo tricks from his manager, a former Kiwi called John Kennedy), and much more.

After Megan had laughed loudly at I Wanna Hold Your Handbeing barked by dogs she looked at me as the needle swung into Love Me Do and said, “You’re not going to play the whole album, are you?”

I skulked off to listen to Peter Harcourt’s In Search of the Land of the Long White Shroud (which features the song September in Ohakune) in my office.

I love these old records, I find them quite transporting -- but what I have been grooving to recently (if that is the right phrase) are two box sets of three albums apiece called Dialogues on Democracy which I picked up at Real Groovy for $4 each.

These are recordings of US election campaigns and convention speeches, discussions on presidential power and the role of Congress, and the speeches by the actual people from Grover Cleveland in 1892 to John F Kennedy with pitstops for FDR, Harry Truman, Eisenhower and so on. I find it compelling.

Okay I don’t listen to this for hours on end -- I sometimes take a break and put on Ruth Wallis’ saucy Red Hot Risque or John Raitt’s croon-fest Mediterranean Magic -- but it is quite revealing, and puts current events in the US into a larger context.

Mr Obama doesn’t have a monopoly on uplifting speeches. Here’s just the start of a William Jennings Bryan speech in 1896: “I come to speak to you in the defence of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty -- the cause of humanity.” It’s all up from there and he ends a few minutes later declaiming, “You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

Brilliantly poetic -- and he was speaking to the issue of using the gold standard. You just can’t imagine the governor of the Reserve Bank rising to those eloquent and moving heights when discussing interest rates, huh?

Roosevelt placed the name of a fellow Democrat before the convention as a nominee for their presidential candidate with this ringing endorsement: “We offer one who has the will to win, who not only deserves success but commands it. Victory is his habit.”

He was Alfred E. Smith -- a surname away from a Mad magazine cover actually -- and he was trounced by Herbert Hoover. Oh well, that’s politics.

What you also hear in these voices from the past is humour, humanity and vicious stabs of the kind that spin doctors and advisors have ironed out of the current era. This is Harry Truman on his rival Thomas E Dewey: “He opened his mouth and closed his eyes and he swallowed the terrible record of that good-for-nothing 80th Congress.”

Here’s Democrat Adlai Stevenson -- a very witty, erudite and amusing man -- on the standard of debate from his rivals: “I have tried to talk about public questions. This road had lead me through some twenty states. But strangely enough my friends, this road has been a lonely road, because I never met anyone coming the other way.”

Stevenson again: “Neither political party has a monopoly of virtue or of rascality.”

There are inspiring speeches, rasping voices like that of Al Smith who sounded as if he’d be more at home calling a title fight, ringing phrases which lodge in the memory (FDR’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) and pure humbug. There are winners and losers.

The one I like best is by Adlai Stevenson who was not only gracious but amusing in defeat. I wonder if we might hope for this much wry dignity in this coming year, at home or abroad.

“Someone asked me as I came down on the street how I felt and I was reminded of a story that a fellow townsman of ours used to tell -- Abraham Lincoln -- when they asked him how he felt after one unsuccessful election. He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. That he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh”.

Have a good Easter. Lots of great music here and a couple of dozen Beatle-related essays and much else besides
here.
Enjoy.

It was a little over a week ago that Dame Kiri Te Kanawa made her ungracious, arrogant and not entirely unexpected comments about Hayley Westenra and others she considered “fake singers”.

Rather than leap into blogworld with a quick comment I thought I’d wait to see how it played out -- and I wasn’t disappointed.

In our adversarial culture -- nurtured by the media where nuance is ironed out and everything is reduced to the simplistic codes and language of sporting encounter (Helen v John) -- it was little surprise that this potentially interesting discussion should become reduced to Kiri v Hayley.

Letters to the editor were very much “leave off our Hayley” although the odd dissenting voice -- in haughty tones beamed down from on high -- supported the Dame.

The great lady herself then resorted to the most wearying line of all, she said she her words had been taken out of context. That is usually the default setting resorted to by those unwilling to defend their comments because they are in a hole and know they should stop digging.

What no one discussed -- not that I read or heard anyway -- was just how much the Dame’s comments were grounded in that notion of some hierarchy of the arts: you know, popular music is at the bottom, jazz (because it’s more complex) a bit above that, classical music atop that and then somewhere in the rarefied air, almost too distant to see, is the wonderful world of opera.

From the lofty heights of the opera world -- where doors are opened for you and diva behaviour (rudeness, self-obsession, demanding self-entitlement) is not only tolerated and accepted but actually admired -- it must be easy to look down on everyone else. And one gets the impression Dame Kiri does.

Jobbing journalists who have had the misfortune of an encounter with her -- and I am pleased I never have, tetchy Neil Young was enough -- return to tell of being kept waiting for 90 minutes or more without explanation or apology, of dismissive answers and a generally superior air. That feedback is too common for it to be just rumour and innuendo.

I mention this because if you subscribe to that hierarchy of the musical arts and place opera in the realms of gold somewhere near the hand of God then you almost invariably consider it more morally superior or uplifting also.

I don’t. (See below)

Because if that were true then the world of opera would be populated by saints . . . And it clearly isn’t. You need only look at Dame Kiri’s comments -- and those opera-loving souls who attacked Hayley -- to confirm this.

Opera -- and classical music in general -- isn’t morally improving or empowering. A lifetime of listening to Wagner or Delius doesn’t of itself make you a better person. The education that comes with it might help, but music of itself confers no moral improvement. (The converse however, that a lifetime of listening to Scandinavian death metal, might not hold.)

But still people are persuaded that opera is somehow “better” than popera. I don’t know how people make a qualitative assessment of this: it is more complex, more demanding to perform and listen to, requires more attention and so on. But “better”?

More fool me but I thought such value judgements on art -- comparisons between genres and styles -- were rather outdated. You don’t start with pop, graduate to jazz then make your way to classical and beyond as my schoolteachers seemed to hope for when I was carrying a Rolling Stones album to school in the mid 60s.

I don’t mean to come over all post-modern about this, but isn’t it possible to enjoy and appreciate all kinds of art without making spurious and unnecessary comparisons?
Last week before the Kiri v Hayley bout (TKO Hayley actually) we were in Wellington to see Ornette Coleman, a musician whose work and philosophy I have admired for many decades.

Among the many things I enjoy about Coleman’s career is that it has never been exclusively rooted in genre: he has played in a jazz context, worked with string quartets, wrote a symphony, recorded with the Master Musicians of Jajouka in Morocco, had Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead on an album, improvised with Yoko Ono in a New York loft, has recorded with poets . . .
Coleman doesn’t see any musical hierarchy, and I like that.

After his show -- stunning incidentally -- we went to Happy for a drink and there was a blues duo playing, Storehouse. We thoroughly enjoyed their take on old John Lee Hooker and Howling Wolf material.

This past week we went to hear the APO play Rhapsody in Blue, three excellent pieces by Jonathan Besser, some Dvorak and so on. It was a wonderful evening (I thought Diedre Irons was terrific in the Gershwin although didn’t swing as much as I might have liked, but that’s being picky). Afterwards we went to the Dogs Bollix to see Infinite Flying Kick, a rock band of young Taiwanese-Kiwis whose brand of noise owes a bit to grunge, punk and Lynyrd Skynyrd guitars solos. Messy but thoroughly enjoyable.

I didn’t see too many others from the APO traipse up the pub to hear IFK -- or vice versa -- and that’s fine. I didn’t expect to.

But an enjoyment of Gershwin and IFK aren’t mutually exclusive. Are they?
I don’t listen to Hayley or Kiri that much, although I treasure a Kiri 45rpm of her singing Greensleeves and other English folk songs which I take to be from the late 60s (In her popera phase perhaps?)

But I wouldn’t deny anyone taking musical pleasure where they will.

Actually I suspect Kiri was misrepresented slightly: she wasn’t saying Hayley was rubbish when she said Hayley wasn’t in her world, she probably meant to say in her “class“.

I think it’s time to, if I might paraphrase Ornette Coleman, remove the class system from sound.

I STAND CORRECTED AND APOLOGISE. As you may see (below) I wrote that the Herald obit columns seemed to have disappeared. They haven't, they have been moved and are now on the inside pages at the back of the Sport section, beside the death notices. I had looked for them in the high-profile place they were previously but foolishly didn't consult the index -- and when I was out of Auckland looked on-line for the Barry Barclay obit and could find only the cursory PA story.
BUT, that doesn't change the fact that I was wrong and so I apologize. They do have obits still and they did run a small piece on Barclay. You might look at it and say "too small" which was also my point.

Curiously enough, when the Entertainment section was down-sized and sidelined many many years ago it went on the back of Sport -- and we called it "the dead zone". Now it is.
I stand corrected -- but leave my folly below to my shame and to remind me to check my facts, as any half-decent journalist should. I am clearly something less than half-decent!

And is it just me, or does anyone else miss the obituary columns which have disappeared from the Herald? It seems to me emblematic of something worrying that a column acknowledging the lives and careers of interesting and often important people has been replaced by photos of champagne-holding celebs and posing civilians at some heavily sponsored function.

Obituaries allow us the opportunity to reflect on those who have gone before and the contribution they made. As anyone will tell you, one of the delights of major newspapers around the world is reading the extensive, well written and scrupulously researched obits pages. They are biographies in miniature and many papers have staff dedicated to writing them.

It might be too much to think in this exciting modern age that a big newspaper like the Herald would have anyone specifically writing obits, but that the passing of film-maker Barry Barclay could go almost unacknowledged -- a few sentences and no reflective piece -- is not only sad but a dereliction of responsibility for a journal of record.

Barclay was an important figure in New Zealand film (the first Maori to direct a feature, the award-winning Ngati) but also in the vanguard of the discussion of intellectual property rights for Maori.

I only met him once for a lengthy profile piece in the Herald -- it was in the files should anyone care to have retrieved it, as would have been many thoughtful pieces on Barclay’s films by Peter Calder -- and he was witty, fiercely intelligent, thought-provoking and kind. We drank tea out of chipped mugs at his home on the Kaipara Harbour as he discussed and defined “Maori film” in a way that challenged me.

I don’t think he thought there was a hierarchy in the arts either.

Finally, for those who like me enjoy music from all points of the compass, try
here under Music From Elsewhere. You’ll also find interviews, essays, reviews and more under
Absolute Elsewhere
and at Essential Elsewhere you’ll find essays about albums which make for an interesting music collection: American alt.country, Indian classical, British pub rock, power pop, deep roots reggae, quirky and alternative Kiwi music . . .

Hmmm. What genre is missing from that list? Yep, must get onto that opera stuff. Wouldn’t want anyone saying I was being exclusive.

(PS. Sick of the blanket coverage of Trinny and Suzannah yet? That one needs some close self-scrutiny within media organisations, surely.)

One of the pleasurable things about being a travel writer is people invite you places. Not Italy, Laos or Thailand (although they would all be much apppreciated, should anyone care to) but places where “ordinary people” don’t usually go.

And so today -- in jacket and tie, making an effort -- I took up an invitation to go aboard the luxury liner Queen Victoria which was briefly in Auckland.

Important matters first: for lunch on board I had the delicious wild mushroom bisque (the tartare and rillettes of salmon, cucumber and sweet chilli relish was equally well received by other diners) and followed that with the medallion of beef tenderloin with roasted shallot marmalade, a burgundy and stilton glaze, and parisienne potatoes. This was accompanied by a delightful French Beaujolais.

(Around about now you realise you have entered my world, the world of envy journalism!)

The group of us -- travel industry professionals and writers much more gainfully employed than I am -- were in the ship's elegant Britannia Restaurant which is of gloriously sweeping but restful Art Nouveau lines. Not a straight line in the place and the vessel has spacious open two-storey stairways throughout. Think that Titanic movie, but in real life. (And with real Erte art in the corridor, I noted)

As we dined -- "ate" seems too common a word -- a Mozart minuet was playing. It could have come from a live band, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

I was seated at the same small table as Ann Sherry, formerly Ms Big of Westpac Banking but now the CEO of Carnival Australia which represents the historic Cunard line in New Zealand.

Sherry was candid, witty (“I got out [of banking] before it all turned to shit”) and highly informative. She not only knew her stuff (facts, figures, passenger projections and the like) but didn’t once fall for just spinning out the company line: she punctuated the conversation with jokes and aside, and noted of Auckland’s woeful passenger facilities out the window (again, "porthole" is not the word here) that, “if that was the airport we’d be shocked and horrified”.

She engaged people on a personal level. I’d been at a dinner with her once previously (in my Author Guise) and you could see why she is worth loads of money to her employers. I liked her very much, and she didn't resile from tough questions.

Somehow the conversation turned to coach tours around the South Island and how uncomfortable they were, but they did get you from scenic place to scenic place. One of our number observed the Queen Victoria was like a big coach trip because it did much the same.

This was the kind of stupid and embarrassing thing I usually say and Sherry was quick to sniff with amused derision and noted the Queen Victoria is actually more like a floating five-star hotel.

And it is.

After lunch we got an hour-long tour which was full of the wow-factor. The astonishing theatre for example -- with a nice looking bar at the back -- was modelled on a Drury Lane theatre with gracious amphitheatre-style seating. It seats about 850 (Auckland theatricals trying to get the Q theatre going would have swooned at this one) and has West-End styled private boxes. I felt under-dressed. I should have worn a frockcoat.

The ship also has a small museum, a two-storey library lifted from a stately English home (love that spiral staircase and wood-panelling), the Churchill cigar bar (yep, Cubans available) a bookshop, gymnasium and spa, and two swimming pools.

There are a few other restaurants (one with a long buffet which stretched to a vanishing point), an English pub, casino area and the Winter Garden with a retractable roof. It looked like something out a W Somerset Maugham story: all colonial ceiling fans, rattan furniture and greenery.

Oh, and for those of the internet persuasion know this: the whole ship is wireless. It is a floating hotspot.

Did I mention in one bar there was harp? I hadn’t seen one of those on a ship since . . .

I think you should pour yourself a long drink and take the virtual tour here.

Gobsmacking, huh? And I was there!

The QV, as some over-familiarly called it, is the newest liner to come to this country -- it was launched in December last year -- and signals the sharp and high end of a growing market.

Sherry said there will be 78 cruise ships coming to Auckland this year, more than 100 the following year. Cunard currently have 10 more vessels being built.

About 15 years ago I interviewed Sir Peter Blake for some reason (a yacht race?) and he spoke persuasively of Auckland being the cruise ship capital of the South Pacific.

That might be a slight exaggeration -- but this is becoming an increasingly important money-spinner and drives all kinds of other aspects of the local economy. About 2000 tourists got off the QV for a day -- some just went to town to shop, others went on sightseeing journeys, many out to Waiheke and so on -- and Sherry is right. The waterfront area is appalling to look at.

Opposite us was that disgraceful pier which looked all but abandoned and was tatty beyond comprehension. That is where there is talk of a proper cruise ship terminal. Let us hope so.

But let us not also simply kowtow to this lucrative market by building a reception area and lining it with tacky gift shops selling stuffed kiwis and baseball caps with kiwi or fern logos on them (as was happening today).

“There are only so many All Black jerseys you can buy,” laughed Sherry.

We certainly need to accommodate these many thousands of visitors, for many of whom Auckland’s piers will be their first impression of New Zealand.

But we, the people, need to consider it our space too. Another Hilton -- fine though it is -- would not be an option. One of the charms of Auckland’s Waitemata is that when you can access it -- and I say this as one who swims regularly at Mission Bay and Okahu -- is how beautiful and relatively unspoiled it is.

So whatever happens to welcome the money from the cruise ships we should also have in mind that if next year 100 ships arrive for a day in port disgorging passengers and their loot, the other 265 days of 2009 they won’t be around.

But we’ll still be here. And it is, after all, our waterfront.

So I had a wonderful day pretending to be more wealthy than I was -- although if you do the maths on 41 nights from Sydney to Southampton which sets you back $15,374 per person (and there will be other costs of course) I can see the appeal.

Think what you get (aside from meeting interesting people), do the division into a daily figure, and you can see how it is easily within some people‘s budget. The demographic is 55 and upwards.
Which is me, actually.

When I left the beautiful Queen Victoria and got my feet back on the ground I had one worrying question after an afternoon of elegance, silver service, luxury and fine art.

If we can’t get the clock outside Britomart on the old Post Office to tell the correct time, what chance have we of getting the harbour redevelopment right?