In Monday’s blog in need of an empty adjective and in deference to a Jarvis Cocker lyric referred to the ‘useless trees’. A flippant aside for which I apologise for.

I love a good tree. Let’s face it, who doesn’t?

My pal Martin, the Toto of Perth, known to these pages as China, is a big fan. Woody, taker of the greatest catch I’ve ever seen on a cricket field, saw fit to name one after him.

One of the highlights of my visit to Russell (Kororareka) on Monday was my chance encounter with this big fella.

This is a Morton Bay Fig Tree (ficus mactophillia) and he’s been keeping watch outside the local lawman’s quayside cottage since 1875. What a beauty, eh?

Enjoy!

Another day, another bay scene and another unexpectedly brilliantly random music-to-situation travelling experience. Sat behind the warming plastic windows of Cafe Alfrescoes’, erm, al fresco dining area on the corner of Marsden Street, Paihia, facing the opposite direction to yesterday’s Shaft influenced day-defining vista at the early conclusion of a beach splayed afternoon wrestling Dickens, didgeridoos and drums, it’s the start of Happy Hour. Early finishers and reclining retirees sup on their brews and drink in the scenery. Like an Ashley Giles delivery that actually turns, there’s not the pizzazz associated with a Warnie ripper, but the result, somehow, stays in the memory.

El Salvador by Athlete*.

Why? And why here? Why now?

As far removed from the last time I saw this middling but marvellous English Indie band in climate, situation and venue, but as evocatively enjoyable. An understated beer to go with an understated band. My appreciation for great things Blighty based goes up a notch with the cooing attention of the cafe’s charming waitress.
A figure to betray secrets for accompanied by a voice, in a land of hacked-to-bits vowels and imported Teutonic twangs to savour equally. Cut glass, gentle authoritative perfect articulation. Wow. You’ll always find time and money for another beer.
Then a shit Reality TV show winner’s version of a mediocre song spoils everything. I drink up and get the hell out of there. Perfection ruined by that arse Simon Cowell and his odious ilk.

Is this what hell will look like? Except there will be no escape.

Then, later on, and a shop-bought sun-downer in the less salubrious surrounds of the hostel. Buying supper earlier, I couldn’t not purchase this.

As a vaguely cricket leaning travel blog my readership asks, nay, demands I do these things.

Ok, it doesn’t but in Henry-World (dangerous place, that) it does.

So taster notes then. Well, firstly don’t get sucked in by the label as though you’re a once-a-year, habit breaking teetotaller buying table wine for the alkie next-door neighbours’ dinner party. The boldly lettered label denotes a bygone age of bill stickers and Bill O’Reilly. A cream-on-gold silhouette swatting spazilly across his stumps above a beloved, timeless cricket phrase. Sticky Wicket indeed. The moment it goes in your basket, you’re on exactly that.

“Manuka Honey Lager”. What on earth was I thinking of?

Advice. Chill the hell out of it like an Aussie Caaaaaallldd One. This is not a good beer, it is far too ambitious in its aims. The first sip is the meekest. Honey Sugar Puff flavours reach out to every un-conquered pore of your taste buds. Something mildly resembling hops follows up with apologies of dog-walker insincerity. “Sorry about the honey and all that, the brewery are really good normally, they don’t mean it.”

Unlike the owners whose canine charges have shredded your best Farahs, or submerged your new loafers in burnt toffee coloured faeces, I genuinely believe this. Like the current management structure of New Zealand cricket, they’ve tried something based on badly judged folly and have got it completely wrong.
They will get better though, both NZ beers and NZ cricket, and I look forward to sharing examples of that here over the next few weeks. Both in terms of beers and, for the sake of Kiwi sport, on the pitch too.

*Hello to the gentleman plumbers, Cousin Tom and good lad John.

Appendix. To strengthen my statement earlier, witness the Black Caps’ gubbing of England in the second T20. Friday’s deciding third fixture should be a cracker.

A lazy long-black coffee in the morning sun overseeing an archetypal small time harbour scene. Motorboats and small crafts loll listlessly in the surf from the overworking passenger ferries, the useless trees on the banks of Kororareka Bay nod in noncommittal unison. The New Zealand standard and the Fern-on-Black-less-Union Jack flag flutter their welcomes at the smiling visitors making their way excitedly down the gangplanks.

Stick on cymbals. Surely not? A familiar but welcome sound in unfamiliar territory.

The pockets of cumulostratus and the formation flying sea birds add to the tranquil vista. Across the water the ranges of hills try and out-green each other.

The wah-wah guitar kicks in… Hmmm. The keyboard follows soon after.

Dinghies bob determinedly along the soft mill pool turquoise as those gulls not scrapping for bread perch goofily one-legged on the jetty awaiting the nonexistent applause.

Horns. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-daaaaaaaaaa!

Lemming-like punters peruse the quayside boutiques oblivious to the scene stealing score emanating from the cafe’s kitchen. As profoundly surreal travel moments go, this will take some beating….

“Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?”

I splutter in delight of the beauty of it all….

SHAFT!!!!!

Brilliant.

Meanwhile, round the corner from the moment and from Isaac Hayes to Otis Redding. The view from the rocks of the bay

*Hello Rob! Hello Chris!

Paihia, Bay of Islands, North Island, New Zealand.

It’ll do….

Saturday afternoon at the rugby with a couple of beers. My home life writ large across my vacation, a busman’s holiday. Yet my attendance at the Toll Stadium earlier for the Auckland Blues vs Sydney Waratahs pre-season friendly marked a seminal moment in my travelling life.

I’ve always wanted to watch rugby in New Zealand, one of the heartlands of one of my favourite sports. This mission has now been accomplished.

So what if it was only a friendly (an oxymoron if ever there was one considering the nature of this great sport)? I’ve now seen live rugby in New Zealand. One of the highlights of my last world trip was the Super 15 Semi-Final at Newlands (Cape Town, not Luton, sorry Keith….) between Cape Stormers and the Waratahs, and although today’s match was nowhere near as dramatic or significant as the one I saw in South Africa, it was a great experience nonetheless.

Part of said experience was the company. I inadvertently ended up leading a field trip of rugby virgins from the hostel to their first experience of the proper oval ball game. Two Canadian brothers, an American, an Austrian and a German made up the party, so I was grateful to a Kiwi also lodging there for his assistance in explaining the permutations of the break down and other such complications.

The game itself fizzled into life in the second half after a staid opening period. Inevitably the liberal use of substitutes, as is the norm with friendlies, helped the flow as the Waratahs took the game to the home team in the second half. Trailing 12-7 at the break, three early second half tries all instigated by the arrival of Israel Folau gave the Australian side the advantage with twenty minutes remaining. Both sides scored six tries apiece with Tah’s Tom Kingston running in a hatrick, though following some sustained late pressure it was Peter Saili’s second try that proved to be the difference. The Blues No 8 crashed over in stoppage time to wrap up this confidence booster for his team, 40-36.

So another one ticked off the To-Do List. Still plenty more to achieve not least brewing my own beer, making my own cheese, sleeping with harems of French women, headlining Wembley and watching football in Brazil to name but a few. Today was enjoyable, there is only one rugby team in blue for me though….. Be sure to have one for me at Goldington Road* later, eh chaps?

Come On You Blues indeed.

*Hello Ben, Mark, Nash, Matt M, Dan, Steve, Chris, Matt S, Marcus to name but a few. Sing your hearts out later and here’s to another great weekend’s Six Nations.
Swing low.

Avid readers (Ha!) of DWC will remember my trip, along with Pete and Toni (Hello folks!) when back in Ahmedabad and the National Utensil Museum of India. I saw this beauty on arrival at Fun-Gary (Hello our kid’s childhood hero, Mr Lineker!) and have been counting the days until my visit.

Promising the largest collection of clocks in the Southern Hemisphere it certainly doesn’t disappoint on that level, although the keenness behind my visit seems ill-founded. Vishalla it ain’t.

There are hundreds of timepieces of all descriptions but mainly cuckoo clocks. The friendly fraus behind the welcome desk, whether through design are not, are German or Swiss in keeping with the kuckucksuhr theme and are very happy in their work. The museum is in tribute to a one of the city’s most famous residents, a Mr Archibald Clapham who, as a Mr Cholmondley-Warner film tells you was an avid clock collector. Though one with a mischievous sense of humour. The Jeremy Beadle of the horophile world, this joker had the post-war Kiwis in stitches with his quirky clocks and witty watches…. Oh, the fun they must have had.
Following the short film and an an insight into what the hell I’ve let myself in for, sorry, an appreciation of my immediate surroundings, I tentatively take a walk along the misty jade painted corridor, its walls chock full of timepieces of all descriptions.

I was expecting famous Kiwi moments from history via the medium of horology. You know the sort of thing; the actual pocket watch James Cook wore when he first landed here, Sir Edmund Hillary’s pocket sundial, Richard Hadlee’s Casio, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa’s diamond encrusted wristwatch.
Instead it’s the Coldplay song brought all to realistically to life as the ticking, tocking, whirring, bonging and clanging seem to close the room seems to narrow in the growing and bordering on incessant din.

Like some kind of Antiques Roadshow Torture Chamber, my chest tightens, my throat dries, my ears ring. Make it stop.

Please? No, really. I beg and plead.

Seeing a glimpse of light between the pasty, deadening Midlands couple here on holiday, the sinister looking Disney alarm clocks and beneath the sentry-like grandfather clocks I make a dash for it, avoiding the glare of the watchful (literally) receptionist, clearly bewildered by my blatant under enthusiasm for Fun-Gary’s second most visited attraction. The Northland fresh air tastes even better than usual.
Home, where I wanted to go.

*Hello Will! Hello Ed! Hello Eats!

That’s the great thing about these Kiwis. Give ’em the very staple of British life and they’ll improve it out of all proportion and give it back to you with interest. Take rugby for example. From being a stodgy, civil war re-enactment of a part-time past time for hungover, wheezy fat boys as it lovably was (and sometimes lovably still is) back home, over here they made it the very lifeblood of the country, enlisted the strongest, fittest and bloody biggest athletes, instructed new parents to have their toddlers spinning lofted passes out of their cots in order to keep the production line alive and made it into eighty minutes worth of power packed pyrotechnics.
The All Blacks are one of the most iconic names in sport. They still lead the way.

Take music, we gave them The Beatles. They gave us Crowde… Yeah, ok, bad example.

But meat pies? Man alive. Even in the most died in the wool, chain-me-to-my-oven-and-force-me-under-great-duress-to-bake-effete-prawn-vol-au-vents-naked-for-the-rest-of-my-worthless-life-before-I-submit-to-your-evil-regime great bakeries of the UK will they dejectedly yield to New Zealand supremacy. The hand that fed them has been bitten again.

So while we had Steve Ojomoh, they had Zinzan Brooke. While we had, and indeed have, Oliver Adams, they had, and most certainly have, from the Jaffle Pie Company; Jesters. They appear to be another take on the acceptable face of food franchises, I’d imagine they’ve got bakeries in every town. If this is the case, I’m in for a treat over the next seven weeks.

In desperate need of some light relief following my visit to the life-shorteningly dull National Clock Museum in the Town Basin, I search frantically for the comfort that only a good meat pie can bring a man. In what is (sadly) to be the only use of this phrase in a while, Cameron Delivers!
Well, Cameron Street anyway. Slap bang in Fun-Gary’s (Couldn’t think of any more, so in a shout out to one of my childhood heroes, Hello Mr Wilmot!) CBD, Jesters Pie Shop is a noxious melange of purple and yellow like an LA Lakers changing room in dire need of a re-fit. Thankfully the staff are more appropriately attired. Forget the name, the business of pies is no laughing matter here.
As is proved by Jesters’ extensive menu. Pies of all fillings and sexualities align their expansive counter.

The Maharajah, The Stockman (Hello Uncle Tom!), Miss Muffet, Dr Pepper, William Tell, they’re all here. I go for the Southern Man, and the quintessential Kiwi treat; Steak & Cheese.

At first glance, with its bulging circular crust it looks a bit like Saturn, then on closer inspection of the pie top and its distinctive pentagon resembles an Adidas Tango after a pack of Alsatians have finished with it. But what a colour? a perfect gold Louis XIV would be happy to come back from the dead for. The faultless pastry looks short crust, but, is actually a variation of puff, again I think the long deceased Sun King would approve of this nod to la cuisine Francais. My first bite takes me into a deliciously tangy cheesy ozone hovering ominously above the meat. Thick chunks of steak in a rich, thick gravy complete a superb first pie since my return to New Zealand.

Roll on next Friday. If you’ll forgive the tedious space metaphor one more time, today’s effort was out of this world.

The problem with spending so much time on your own and with an over-active imagination is that your brain processes all sorts of shit for too long a period of time. As I was hiking the hinterlands of Fun-Gary (Hello to my mate the mechanic!) earlier today taking in all the scenic splendour of New Zealand’s Northland I got thinking along the lines of what if….

Well, what if I meet this stunning Kiwi lass while I’m out here, fall head over heels in love, we end up marrying and decide to move to Blighty. How the hell would I tear her away from all this?

Fun-Gary probably doesn’t get into the top twenty of NZ attractions, because like the Greatest British Song Ever Written there’s far too many contenders vying for a place among the elite. Heading out from the Town Basin, along the Hatea River through the gently picturesque Mair Park and the rainforest of Kauri Park up to the dramatic Fun-Gary Falls before heading back down to the historic harbour via the Abbey Caves, the views are effortlessly stunning pretty much everywhere you look.

As much as I’m proud dear old Bedfordshire, the miles of ever-changing powerful panoramas of this part of the world knock my beloved home county into a cocked hat. Then I got thinking, you know what?, home’s home. Bedfordshire may not have the stand-out sensational selling points of this particular underrated part Northland in this wonderful country, but delve a little deeper and Bedfordshire is a real treasure trove, a celebration of life. So without further ado, here are, in no particular order, The Seven Wonders of Bedfordshire (according to Dances With Chazzwazzers, anyway….):

1. The Forest of Marston Vale. Running south from the county town of Bedford towards the M1 motorway, this regenerated woodland area, through many years hard work, has triumphantly morphed from a brick making backwater to an outstanding area of natural beauty. Surf Brogborough Lake, take a trip on the Vale’s train (The Fenny Flyer) or walk or bike among segments of the 61 square miles of countryside to get for a tangible understanding of the thinking man’s dales.

2. The Devonshire Arms, Bedford. So hang on, there’s no TV blaring out some inconsequential rubbish, no pool table, dart board or fruities? No over-bearing moronic Muzak? No food? So no drizzles of this? No reductions of that? Nothing involving a pretentious use of an everyday kitchen item for the benefit of a small quantity of grub and a large portion of chef’s ego? Nope.
Just good ale and lots of it. And genial hospitality (Hello Martin & Naomi!). And conversation. An oasis in the desert of mediocrity that passes for Bedford’s pub scene.

3. Woody’s Tree. This venerable Baum proudly acts as the unofficial gateway to the picture-postcard villages of Ickwell, Northill and Old Warden as well as one of the county’s main tourist attractions, The Shuttleworth Collection. Get past Woody’s Tree and you’ve safely made it away from the suffocating new towns, the insufferable retail parks and into an idyllic world of village greens and South Eastern Bedfordshire woodland. This iconic tree was so-named after one of my chums (Hello Wood-man!) once acclaimed, unannounced, on the way back from football, “Wow, that’s a great tree. I’m naming it after me”, and so an arboreal legend was born.

4. Hulcote. I have been lucky enough to live here for thirty-odd years and as hamlets go its probably the best in the world. No pubs, shops, or Drive Thrus. No matter. Steeped in history, Elizabeth I is said to have favoured one of the local properties as a summer retreat, while during the last war Winston Churchill stayed in another of the houses when overseeing operations at nearby Bletchley Park. in addition to this, the church, St. Nicholas, is one of few that escaped Henry VIII’s little strop around about the reformation. In addition to local lore, there’s plenty more countryside to lose yourself in and pleasant farmland. The garden cricket is pretty good too.

5. The Burger Van Outside The Kenilworth Road End, Luton. “Naaaaaaaxxxxtt Puh-leeeeeaaaasssse!” An ear-splitting, banshee-like announcement beckons you forward. Come rain, shine, snow, fog, light drizzle and through thin and thinner these girls are there, furnishing thousands of Hatters fans with their pre-match tucker. Work makes you fry. And they don’t half work hard those girls in the van. Demonstrating the principles that made our country great; industry, humour, pride, enterprise and over-reliance on greasy foodstuffs, no one walks away from this eatery underfed or disappointed. That comes ninety minutes later.

6. Battlesden Hill. (Hello Hill Farm folk! X) Simply stunning, sweeping views of Bedfordshire. Time always seems to stand still when I’m here. Overlooking the South West of the county, it is a sight that takes in busy green hills full of sheep and cattle, far away rustic villages and of a time when things were surely simpler. Evocative scenes that bring all those emotions of love of county and country that we English, frankly, are for the most part dissuaded from experiencing.

7.

Enough said….

Postscript. Oh yeah, that stunning Kiwi lass from my imagination earlier? Sadly she is just (as with a lot of other things in my head), how would Captain Mainwaring term it; in the realms of fantasy.

I have not got the hang of this. I set off to yesterday’s hastily rearranged match in Fun-Gary (Hello Mr Flower, well done on your new Elstow CC role.) determined not to be caught out by the weather.

A fresh wind had blown away the stickiness of the last few days, one or two drops of rain hung around like Jason Gallian, the skies looked like some kind of grey ripple ice cream. Contemplating another afternoon on the knoll, I packed my bag with two waterproofs and a book for the inevitable delays while I put in my walking shoes and fleece. I was prepared. Then this happened.

Bother! Sun cream, how on earth did I forget that?

England won by 46 runs and I witnessed something I hope I see a lot more of in the coming months. A hatrick wicket maiden over by an Englishman. Congratulations Stuart Broad.

Venturing down to the ground today along with some inquisitive Swedes, Swiss and Somersetians (along with ECC’s new recruit- though he doesn’t know it yet- Chelmsford Charlie) and a French girl from the hostel, that particular feat will take some explaining. Anyone got one of those tea towels handy?
As well as some sun cream…..

Appendix 1: It has happened before. Again, when setting off for cricket it was overcast with a chill breeze. Several hours later this happened.

Seriously. Slip, slop, slap.

(By the way, hello to The Goosh-Big Red- and Phil, thanks for the photo. Great days.)

Like the stretcher-bound Anthony Quayle in The Guns Of Navarone, there’s been several times I’ve wondered whether it would be best to go on without them. Sat like a dead weight at the bottom of the rucksack, taking up valuable book space, I’ve thought about leaving them behind in exchange for an interesting curio or a souvenir t-shirt. Now I’m in New Zealand their value has rocketed higher than the international career of James Tredwell.
New Zealand is not a place for espadrilles and not only because of the suspicious looks they attract from some of the lock forward shaped locals. New Zealand is a place for real shoes.

Behold! My ‘callipers’ as they have been Christened, rather harshly I think, by an old pal of mine (Hello Chubbs!). Either way, for five bucks with staff discount from the factory store (Thank you Laura, I’m still very grateful!) they are worth their weight in gold over here.

So with a few hours to go before the start of play, weather permitting naturally, at The Cobham Oval, I thought I’d have a bit of a stroll around Fun-Gary (If you’re reading, hello Wilstead FC legend Mr Ward!) and the surrounding area. Heading up from the Town Basin to Mair Park then up to Mount Parihaka (Pack it in smut fans, it’s a Look Out Post….) it was two hours rewardingly spent and a reminder, as if I needed one, as to why this country is so close to my heart.