The bridal party went for an informal, sporting look.

New Zealanders like to paint it black; whether it’s the angry hairdos of the heavily-lesbianed Auckland media set, farmer’s woollen vests, over-barbequed sausages, or even entire fasion labels.

But nowhere is this more important than in the uniforms and names of our national sports teams. Adhering to this naming convention, with it’s limited vocabulary, has led to an inventive, if largely slapstick branch of New Zealand humour.

History

The origin of our national sporting colour, like so much of New Zealand popular culture (binge drinking, repressed homosexuality, domestic violence), can be traced back to rubgy.

The first sports team to represent New Zealand internationally was the 1st XV rugby squad that toured the United Kingdom in 1905. Their formidable talent, combined with a low maintenance, easy-wash uniform, led the British press to dub them the ‘All Blacks’. Following the success of the tour, the colour quickly became a badge of honour back home,  forever associated with international recognition – very important for a small, insecure country determined, at every opportunity, to ‘put itself on the map‘.

A menacing colour, black also fitted well with the ‘hard’ image colonial New Zealand men at the time had of themselves, and of many of their women.

And, like my wife said shortly before she left me, “Once you go black, you can’t go back” (she was talking about shoes, right?). So important, now, is black to the All Blacks, that it has taken on an almost superstitious ominence. Forced to wear marl grey against France, during the 2007 Rugby World Cup, the All Blacks choked. Well, it was either that, or they were just a bit soft in the head.

Adoption

In the years since 1905, other sporting codes have adopted the national colour that, technically, isn’t a colour. Only, with a limited number of permutations for which the word ‘black’ can be mangled into a pun, the names of some of New Zealand’s national sports teams have begun, at times, to sound more like a parody of themselves.

Some examples;

• The Black Caps – not so much ‘caps’ these days as ‘crash helmets’, but in fairness, they are sometimes black – even if they’re worn by sissies.
• The Black Sticks – field hockey, a sport that doesn’t even deserve the effort of coming up with a witty reference.
• The Black Sox – we’re not sure if the New Zealand softball team actually wear black socks, but if they did, with white trainers, it would be, like, a major fashion faux pas.
• The Ice Blacks – (see ‘field hockey’, above)
• The Tall Blacks – somebody please give the guy who came up with the name for the NZ basketball team a job writing for Radiradirah
• The Black Cocks – yes, the badminton team actually called themselves this.. for about a month.

Exceptions

There are two notable exceptions to this rule.

Women’s sport - which, as everybody knows, isn’t really sport – has tended to follow the convention of naming themselves after Ferns. We can only assume this is because women like to be difficult. It was begun by the most popular women’s sport in New Zealand, Netball – a sport best described as basketball for women who like to grunt. Over the years other sporting codes followed suit, except, interestingly enough, the butchest of all women’s sport, rubgy (I know, gross right?), who endeavoured to keep a hairy foot in both gender camps by calling themselves the ‘Black Ferns’.

The All Whites is the chosen name of the New Zealand soccer team, which has done little to help dispel the popular notion in New Zealand that soccer is still just a game ‘played by poofs’.

Irony

Although the ethnic mix of the All Whites is, fittingly, all white, the All Blacks are not, by the same logic, all black. Far from it, actually. For while some of the best talent in the team comes from New Zealand’s Maori and Pacific Island population, the majority are still honky Canterbury farmers.

In fact, during the 1960 tour of South Africa, Maori were deliberately excluded from the national side, in deference to the host nation’s enlightened and ‘not at all likely to fail’ policy of apartheid.

The irony of sending an all white rugby team to South Africa, and calling them the ‘All Blacks’, is not lost on New Zealand history. It is just one of the many classic bloopers of our distant, and usually unrelated ancestors, over which Maori & Pakeha banter good naturedly – like Irish men in a pub discussing the fastest snail – instead of getting bogged down in an endless cycle of apology and blame. It is New Zealand’s good humour on these topics that demonstrates such an impeccable record of race relations. No, really. Seriously.

Other such classics include;

• Whitey owns the beaches now, nyah nyah nyah! (Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004)
• What’s the (Bastion) Point?
• Can I have your autograph? Just kidding, it’s a legally binding treaty! (Treaty of Waitangi)
• Look, I’ve got your nose! (and by nose, I mean Auckland)
• Four seats on the council? I thought you wanted four sheeps! Sorry, Flossie’s already moved into her new office. Oh well. Lamb kebab anyone?

That, that, dude looks like a lady.

A rose by any other name; although the word bogan is uniquely Antipodean, the lifestyle it describes is a universal phenomenon. Formerly, and perhaps more affectionately, referred to as ’salt of the earth’ or ‘the working classes’, every country has bogans, they just have different names for them. Terms of endearment, including ‘White Trash’, ‘Chavs’, ‘Rednecks’, ‘Pikeys’ and my personal favorite, ‘The Great Unwashed’.

In New Zealand, the word bogan is, like Russell Crowe, a regional peculiarity which, although of nonspecific trans-tasman origins, we are happy to let Australia claim the dubious honor of inventing. But that doesn’t make them any less of a Kiwi cultural icon.

Indeed, New Zealand bogans share much in common with their Australian brothers: permy mullets, Winfield cigarettes, a love of V8 engines that borders on erotic, and jumbo-sized chilli bins full of pub rock. And while appearances can be intimidating, the New Zealand bogan is generally a friendly & hard working member of society. If a little smelly. But definitely much less likely to stab you for an iPod, or ‘just being Abbo’.

A bogan’s sound moral compass is guided by their strong, if sprawling, matriarchal family structure, as can be witnessed on New Zealand’s longest running television documentary, Outrageous Fortune. They have a civic sense of duty and work ethic, underpinned, out of neccessity, by a high rate of breeding, and an aspiration to someday own a wire-fenced, quarter-acre bungalow in Henderson of their very own.

Bogans are good with their hands, and like to spend quality family time on said front lawn, dismantling automobiles, or building half of a boat. The young members of a bogan clan are thus raised with a keen mechanical ability, which makes them highly employable (when they leave school at 15) at panel workshops, petrol stations, or any franchise of the Mag & Turbo Warehouse.

But if bogans work hard, they like to play even harder. Well paid trade jobs, and low rent in the western suburbs, leaves bogans plenty of disposable income to fund loud, boozy weekends at Piha, nights at the Speedway, and a wardrobe of finest suede and leopard print.

Recent years have in fact seen a trend that can best be described as bogan pride. The lifestyle has been glorified, nostalgified even, and the word bogan reclaimed as a badge of honor – a way of deflating it’s originally intended power to insult.  It is also a cynical way for ad-men to sell beer to rich university students with a fondness for ’slumming it’.

But even middle aged corporate types are not immune to the appeal of going bogan. With the introduction of elasticated waistbands to Armani black skinny jeans, and the Karen Walker organic-cotton Jacques Daniéls collection; bankers, teachers, even politicians can make the 10 yearly pilgrimage to an AC/DC in concert, without sacrificing their commitment to sustainability, comfort, or style.

A point worth noting, because, as a political force, Bogans should not be underestimated. Some even suggest that the anointed bogan Queen, Paula Bennet - currently a high ranking Cabinet member – may one day go all the way to becoming New Zealand’s first bogan Prime Minister*.

Should that day come,  resistance will be futile. Better to spit out that posh Riesling all over your copy of Mindfood, put on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, and embrace your inner bogan.

His name is Shane. And he wants to party.

* – although John Key sounds bogan, often acts bogan, and may even have bogan blood, his $10 million mansion in Parnell disqualifies him from actually being bogan.

Aren't I lucky, I got a chunky bit.

The phrase “clean, green New Zealand” does not, as is often mistakenly suggested, refer to our high standard of environmentalism. Far from it, in fact. Nor does it refer to the colour of our deepening national envy for Australia.

It refers, rather, to the state of our healthy, if oddly coloured, collective colon.

So why, then, are we blessed with such a loose and Kermit-coloured national stool? The answer lies in a powdery, mulched seaweed drink. A drink that is perhaps as much of an icon of the 1990s as Seinfeld, or the Pulp Fiction soundtrack… Spirulina.

On it’s own, Spirulina is, for want of more prosaic language, f**king gross. Think crushed aspirin and tugboat barnacles. But blended into a smoothie, with (that other popular local green) Kiwifruit, banana and juice, it is almost palatable, leaving a quirky tang in the mouth that leads you to believe it must have some non-specific healthy properties.

You’ll find Spirulina smoothies on the menu of any urban cafe that plays a lot of dub-reggae, and has dreadlock-haired waiters with armfuls of vaguely Polynesiany tattoos. When taken regularly, along with the caffeine of a flat white coffee, and a little light exercise (say, netball or social touch rugby), it stimulates the kind of almighty bowel-motions that are the stuff of legend in the Retirement Village wastelands of Pakuranga.

However, it should be noted that any actual health benefits Spirulina may possess - beyond contributing towards a good daily shit – are at best speculative, and, at worst, homeopathic. There’s probably some waffle on Wikipedia about antioxidants – beta carotene this or lycopene that. Frankly, this author is just too lazy to conduct even the most cursory soft of internet research that passes as balanced journalism these days.

Perhaps a cleansing Spirulina smoothie will provide the kind of load-lightening relief I need to get off my heavily impacted arse, and write some facts, instead of just making sh*t up all the time?

Don’t count on it.

Please hold, I have someone on the other line.

You thought the world had stopped using land-line telephones years ago, right? You were wrong.

Like retired English couples, and migratory Godwits – it turns out they all just came to New Zealand to die.

So why, in the 2nd decade of the new millennium, do New Zealanders still talk to each other on such a dated piece of technology? Are we especially susceptible to microwave radiation this close to the South Pole? Or is the New Zealand accent so bad we can’t even understand ourselves without a crystal clear line?

No. The truth is, we never had a choice. Although it’s not for want of trying.

In fact, since the 1980s -those heady days of Gloss and brick-handsets that look like field phones from M.A.S.H – New Zealand has been desperate to go mobile. Desperate to stay technologically apace with the rest of the world. And desperate to be able to reply, “no look, see, we have mobile phones too,” to the boast-deflating statement, “yes, you’ve already told me about Eftpos, like, a hundred times.”

But New Zealand is a victim of it’s own size. With a population that for most of the last 20 years could support 2 or less players in the mobile network market, competition to drive down call prices has been about as serious as a commitment from Millie Elder to stay off P.

And although the situation appears to be marginally improving (there are now 3 mobile networks, after comedian and robot impersonator Rhys Darby started one in 2009), call charges are still so ball-retractingly high, that the typical mobile phone conversation in New Zealand goes something like this;

(ring ring, click) ”G’day.. yep… yep… ok, shut up… Bye.” (click, dial tone)

Which means that the only way to have a meaningful conversation in New Zealand, still, is to use a landline. Or possibly a fax machine.

Fortunately, for those Kiwis who clung on for a reason to own a cellphone, text-messaging, introduced in the late 1990s,  presented an affordable option that, unlike a owning a pager, wouldn’t get you beaten up for being a tool. However this lead to an unusual sort of feedback loop in the marketing of mobile phone plans. Vodafone and Telecom, noticing the popularity of text messaging, took this to mean that Kiwis must be just ‘mad for texting’ (not that the outrageous call charges simply left them no other choice) and started building impossibly high text allowances into their monthly plans.

Even today, consumers are faced with a choice, for around $30 a month on the major networks, between either 20 minutes of inclusive call minutes, or something like 6000 free text messages. And while you could quite comfortably blow the call allowance everyday just waiting for the phone to pick up,  even a 13 yo girl with 3 thumbs and a new boyfriend couldn’t get through 6000 texts a month.

So until such time as New Zealanders get the sort of unlimited mobile call plans on offer to the rest of the world, don’t be alarmed if you hear an unusual sound coming from the hall of many New Zealand homes. A sound that may be eerily familiar to you, as that classic mobile ringtone ‘Old Telephone’.

Chances are it is, in fact, an actual old telephone.

"I told you it was undercooked.."

New Zealand is situated on the Asia-Pacific Rim and, by drawing on it’s geographical and historical culinary influences, has adopted a unique style of fusion dining, fashionably known as ‘Asian Rimming’.

And by far and away the most popular of all the Asian Rim foods, since it’s introduction in the 80s,  is Sushi.

History

Sushi arrived not long after a period of great upheaval and uncertainty over New Zealand’s place in the world. Trade regulations within the European Union tightened in the late 70s, such that our historical trading partner, Britain, decided she preferred the garlicky, arrogant taste of French butter to our humble, mild-mannered blend. Nervous, and facing a growing mountain of congealed, unsold dairy, New Zealand began establishing ties with new, geographically closer, trading partners.

The United States looked promising for a while, until, in 1985, David Lange told her she had uranium breath and to kindly f**k off. And while Australia remains a fair weather trading friend, the single largest commodity we export there (hard working, educated New Zealanders) is, like oil, a finite resource.

Which left us with Asia. And so, at some unspecified period during the 1980s (or specified, if you can be bothered doing the research.. which I can’t), in a bold attempt to appeal to a potentially massive new trading partner, New Zealand got a big-time case of yellow fever.

This manifested in a number of ways..

Japanese language studies quickly became more popular at secondary school than the traditional favorites of French or Spanish, as bookish middle-class kids were encouraged to learn a language that would further their business career, rather than just something to help them get laid while backpacking around Europe.

Government immigration policy shifted, from the historic approach of herding in an endless stream of land-grabbing, limey Anglo Saxons, to opening the gates, as it were, to families from Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan, on condition that they a) build large houses and prosperous businesses, and b) have no idea how to drive a car between them.

But by far the most successful Oriental introduction, was the food. And of the many wonderful dishes to reach our shores – Pork Balls, Chicken Feet, Mystery Meat Salad, to name but a few – it was Sushi that we really took to our hearts. Raw fish, seaweed and sticky rice. It’s popularity can be explained for the same reasons it became such a hit in that other well known Pacific Rim location, California; proximity to fresh seafood, a background of exercise and healthy eating, and a middle class population desperate to appear worldly and cultured in spite of their obvious pastoral, frontier roots.

And for New Zealand, particularly, it at last provided an viable, alternative lunchtime snack to the staple ‘meat pie and chips’.

Not-History (aka, The Present)

Sushi remains as popular today as ever. For Kiwis living abroad (except those in Australia, California or, clearly, Japan), a trip to the local Sushi Bar sits high on their mental list of “shit I’m going to do as soon as I get home” (alongside ‘have fish & chips at the beach‘, ‘eat some Vogels toast‘ and, of course, ‘chill out to some homegrown dub‘).

And while you can now get Sushi in places such as London, as any Kiwi will proudly, and usually uninvited, tell you.. “It’s not as good“.

Sushi vs BMI (click to enlarge)

However, there is an unusual irony to all this sushi consumed, both here and in The States.  For what is perceived as a ‘healthy option’, after 25 odd years of lunching on raw salmon every day, we have somehow eaten ourselves into the prized position of 3rd fattest nation in the OECD (as illustrated by this excellent graph).

That’s if you believe in the Body Mass Index, that is. Which is about as accurate as diagnosing cancer with an Amethyst Crystal.

Or, for that matter, a lump of raw fish.

Sorry mate, you can't park there.

New Zealand Crown Law¹ permits only one mode of fundraising for charity^b.  To collect money for, say, a new Surf Lifesaving clubhouse, or indoor toilets at a local primary school, organisations must set up a barbecue at a busy Saturday shopping location and sell fried meaty logs to an unsuspecting public.

Colloquially, this is known as a Sausage Sizzle.

Certain charities try to boycott, or mess with, the Sausage Sizzle law.  A tactic of SAFE - the animal rights group popular with man-hating vegans and Capoeira dancers – is to draw in a hungry crowd by displaying life-sized photos of tasty-looking pigs. But it is a trick. They do not have any delicious pork sausages to sell, just a bunch of whiny rhetoric about how food should be allowed to roam free in the forest or something. Which is kind of funny, when you think about it.  Not like their spokesperson, Mike King, who stopped being funny back in 1994.

That aside, Sausage Sizzles are an effective source of revenue, timed to coincide with the short, hungry space experienced by shoppers between morning tea and lunch. And, by combining the serious work of ‘doing something for the community’, with the fun of a barbecue, a Sausage Sizzle is the ultimate mix of business and pleasure, contributing towards the kind of Zen-like state that all Kiwis aspire to achieve in their work/lifestyle balance, a.k.a “Living The Dream”.  Other examples include “Jandals at the Office”, “No Tie at a Wedding” and “Checking Emails from the Beach”.

But putting on a Sausage Sizzle is actually quite a serious business. There are rules. It can take several years study at a tertiary institute like the University of Auckland University of University Technology (slogan.. “Did we mention that we really are a University?”) to become a qualified Sizzler. The Re: Sauce Management Act - a gargantuan set of policy that makes the Magna Carta look like a drycleaning flyer – lays out specific guidelines, including;

• A Sausage Sizzle must be positioned between 10 & 20 feet from, and upwind of, the store front door of either a Warehouse, a Bunnings or a Mitre10 Mega.
• Any tomato sauce provided must contain black bits, taste of candy & be served in unmarked, 4L plastic bottles.
• Napkins must be exactly 10% absorbent and  90% waterproof.
• Bread must be at least a day old, white, and cost less than 10c loaf. Each slice should also be manually stressed the night before, so that it breaks apart evenly as soon as it’s wrapped around it’s designated sausage.
• Entertainment may only be provided in the form of either a) an 80s ghetto blaster playing dub/reggae, or b) an old man blowing a harmonica.
• Child labour is compulsory.
• Signs and banners should be designed in Microsoft Word, with ample Clip Art, then printed at home and sellotaped together.
• Sausages must contain no more than 5% meat or (preferably) meat by-products, from inorganic, factory-farmed pigs only.

Interestingly, the shortest section of the Re:Sauce Management Act is the part covering Hygiene & Food Safety, which simply states..

“Cook everything till it’s black, and you should be sweet as.”

Sweet as indeed. But sweet as what? We’re not quite sure. Like the question “What really goes into a sausage?”.. sometimes it’s best not to ask.

1 – Section 22b, clause (a) of The Treaty of Waitangi (1840ish, I think. The whole thing was a bit vague, apparently).
b – Telethon, it should be noted, was not a charity. It was a joke.
* – Some experts go so far as to suggest that Mike King was never really funny at all.

Recent protests over poor quality sign writing.

So fond are the Kiwis of exercising their right to protest that, only yesterday, New Zealand became the first democracy in the world to stage a march for, well.. democracy itself.

But then it was always going to be a long, hard road, the struggle for freedom and democracy, in a country that is already quite free and democratic, thank you very much.

It’s a bit like selling ice to the Eskimos (for which, apparently, there’s also a protest).

Some date the seeds of this national struggle back to the point in history when the vote was granted to “chicks and brown people“, and long, nostalgically, for an era when a man’s democratic voice was directly proportional to the amount of land (or brown people) he owned. Such opinions, fortunately, tend to be held by the fringe elements of society, and are easily kept in check by granting them, say, a provincial Mayoralty and a talk-back radio show – cleverly lulling them into a mistaken sense of self importance, while allowing the rest of us to publicly ridicule them.

But the national sport of protesting is much likelier to be a by-product of New Zealand’s small, fiercely egalitarian (on the outside, at least) society. It goes hand in hand with our enjoyment of referenda, frequent elections, and generally exercising our democratic freedoms harder, sweatier and faster than any one else in the world. When it comes to pounding pavement, or ticking boxes, on any and every issue, New Zealand is the Edmund Hilary, or Bert Munroe, of Western democracy.

It is, in fact, one of the few talents to which we can rightfully claim to lead the world, even without relying on complicated per-capita statistics. But since it’s both illegal under New Zealand law, and downright unfair, to compare ourselves internationally without doing so, here are some spurious, hypothetical scenarios that we’d like to imagine might happen if, per-head-of-population, other countries exercised their democratic rights as much as us;

• The Lincoln Memorial in Washington would probably start to resemble a Soweto shanty, as Million Man Marches and Pro-Life Rallies rotated through in continuous, 4 hourly shifts.
• Tienanmen square would require  a permanent UN peacekeeping force.
• It would be impossible to order a pint in London without completing three referenda on the drinking, voting or shagging age, and..
• Tibet would be so free, they’d by now be protesting themselves back into oppression, just for something to do.

New Zealand even has it’s own word for protesting, Hikoi – a Maori word describing a slow, dignified protest walk that people of all ages and gang colours can enjoy.

But the best thing about the word Hikoi is the way it, like so many other sacred Maori words and place names, can be bastardised by journalists & smart-alec bloggers to suit a range of letters-to-the-editor, white middle-class grievances. Recent examples include the motorcycle protests against ACC levy hikes (known as a Bikoi, or “Hikoi, for bikes”), and the aforementioned “March for Democracy”, calling on the government to re-introduce 100 year jail sentences, legal whipping of children, workhouses, and a range of other Dickensian measures (known as a Dickoi, or “Hikoi.. for Dicks“).

In the face of such irksome, widely exercised democracy, successive New Zealand governments have developed a flair for ignore the nagging wants of it’s people, with an air of detached cool that would make Robert Mugabe swell with pride.

Which, we can only assume, it is equally their democratic right to do.

Doctor models new hat for short people. Still has to stand up to be noticed.

Few moments in New Zealand life are more uncomfortable, than the arrival of the bill at the end of a group meal.

Kiwis are inherently programmed to try to make everything in life as ‘fair’ as possible.  So the thought of simply dividing the tab, evenly, by the number of people present, fills the average Kiwi with the sort of confusion and terror normally reserved for an All Blacks v France Rugby World Cup match.

Which makes squaring up the tab in New Zealand, one of the most difficult, most convoluted group agreements to reach, since the David Bain jury. Both of them.

History

The common practise, in most western countries,  is to treat group dining out as a sort of competitive sport. The winner being the person, or couple, who achieves the highest return on investment. The best way to do this, is by greedily scoffing more food and drink than anyone else, then, when the bill arrives, suggest loudly, “Shall we just split this evenly between us then?”, knowing full well that anyone who so much as raises an eyebrow will appear, to everyone else, a tight fisted bastard.

Scientists believe that, possibly due to low selenium levels in the soil, Kiwis have by comparison evolved with an underdeveloped Non Stingyus gland, which is, in layman’s terms, the part of the brain responsible for ‘getting the rounds in‘.

Evidence of this medical condition can be seen in the great many New Zealanders, living in Britain, who choose to co-habit, 5 to a room, in squalid 2-up houses in the Zone 5 (and beyond) suburban wastelands of outer London.

The alternative (known among academics as ‘Mixing with the Locals‘)  can be simply too confusing, too upsetting, to bother with – never quite knowing whose turn it is to get the next expensive round of drinks. Especially when the whole point of living in conditions not seen since the  Irish slums of Victorian London, is to scrimp together enough pounds for a deposit on an overpriced house back home.

And it is this withered Non Stingyus gland which is the root cause of Kiwi behavior when dining in groups of more than 4, of dividing up, and paying for, a restaurant bill meticulously, based on ‘who ordered what’.

So precise, is this custom, that it often requires a calculator. It is also both physically, and mathematically, impossible to perform without a protracted length of passive-aggressive negotiation, along the lines of ‘well Sue is driving, so she shouldn’t really pay for drinks’ or ‘I’m a gluten intolerant vegan, and the meat dishes are always more expensive’.

Quite why anybody would go to dinner with a gluten intolerant vegan remains a global mystery. The New Zealand method of ’splitting the bill’, however, is a firmly local quirk.

Advice

Visiting foreigners, or recent immigrants, who find themselves in this awkward situation, are advised to simply relax, let someone else stress over the sums, and join the queue of 12 other people at the till, insisting on paying their share of the tab with that other very-Kiwi phenomenon, Eftpos.

And on the plus side, it’s also a clever way of glossing over the equally uncomfortable issue of whether to leave a tip or not. Which is no bad thing, as it is universally established that most waiters are c**ts.

If bread had a gender, Vogel's would be a real man.

Vogel’s Bread is a Kiwi enigma. Part bread, part muesli, and part vegetarian meatloaf.

Abandoned on a desert island with but one choice of food, most New Zealanders could survive for years, quite happily, on nothing more than Marmite on generously buttered Vogel’s toast.

Where, exactly, one might find a toaster, let alone somewhere to plug it in, on a desert island, is anyone’s guess.  Especially when, due to a number of closely guarded secret ingredients which have magical, almost NASA-grade, heat-resistant properties, it takes no less than 3 full, frustrating toast cycles before even the palest shade of tan appears on either side of a slice of Vogel’s bread.

In fact it takes so long to toast Vogel’s bread, that it is, in New Zealand, a perfectly legitimate (and commonly used) excuse, when arriving late for work, so simply state, “Yeahnah, sorry mate, I had Vogels for breakfast, you know?”. Universally accepted, it’s good for tardiness of up to 11am, and is much less likely to get you the sack than some of the better known classics, including; “Child with Meningitis”, and “Messy Divorce”.

Until relatively recently, Vogels was available only in New Zealand, and was, as such, the first food demanded by jet-lagged and hungry ex-pats returning home to crash at mum’s for a few weeks.

During this period, although undocumented, Vogel’s Bread was  New Zealands 5th most exported commodity (behind Dairy, Wool, Dairy, and more Dairy), with every Kiwi leaving the country, for periods of more than 3 months, packing in their suitcase a minimum of 2 loaves to tie them over till the next trip home.

Forced to freeze and ration out their daily fix,  it became yet another point of conversation amongst Kiwis living abroad.  One which usually went along the lines of, “..and another reason why this country is shitter than than NZ, is those pathetic bran slabs that pass for brown bread here!”

In most countries, the clear response was simply, “Well why don’t you f**k off back to your own country then?”. In Britain, however, they took a more canny, businesslike approach.  During the early 2000s, English bakers began making Vogels bread locally, under license, to supply, at a profit, the fast growing community of London-based Kiwis who loved absolutely everything to do with New Zealand – except actually living there.

Not that this quelled their instinctive desire for a good moan. Instead, rather like Guinness to the Irish, the complaint merely shifted to one of, “Sure, you can buy it here, but it’s not as good as the stuff back home.”

To which the British eventually replied, in line with the rest of the world, “Well why don’t you also f**k of back to your own country?”

Surprisingly, very few did.

France exacts it's revenge on doves and rainbows

Hating the French has become so easy, so popular worldwide, it’s almost an Olympic sport. After all, what have they really contributed to civilisation? The White Flag, and women with hairy armpits? Cheers, mate.

But New Zealand, rather unusually for an such an unassuming pair of islands on the opposite side of the planet, has had it’s own unique, and particularly troubled history with the land of stripey-shirted, garlic-around-the-neck, pontificating troubadours.

The dilemma of this longstanding diplomatic frisson, however, is that 90% of middle-class New Zealand is desperately in love with anything French, and harbour private dreams of one day retiring to the south of France to welcome death, slowly, on a diet of soft cheese and unpredictable red wine.

The relationship between the two countries had been souring slowly, like creme-fraiche, throughout the 1970s and 80s, due to France’s fondness for blowing up pacific islands with nuclear bombs. But events reached a head in 1985, when the French government sent two spies to New Zealand to sink Greenpeace’s flagship vessel, the Rainbow Warrior, while it was docked in Auckland harbour, killing (albeit, unintentionally) one of the boat’s crew.

Although the boat’s moniker could well describe an evil character in the ‘My Little Pony’ series, it was actually christened in honour of the first openly gay WWF Wrestler of the same name.

The bombing of the boat was ordered by the French president, Francois Mitterand, after years of Greenpeace sailing it around the French atolls of the South Pacific, bringing unwelcome attention to both their aforementioned nuclear testing programme, as well as their secret experiments to genetically engineer a frog with horse-sized hind legs.

The agents who sunk the boat would probably have gotten away with it too, had it not been for the curious interest New Zealanders took in them as they built a cover story pretending to holiday around the country.  “So, where are you from?”, “Are you having a great holiday,” and “Isn’t it beautiful here?”, they were questioned by every Kiwi they met (naturally seeking continued reassurance about New Zealand’s appeal & place in the world). When the police later put out an APB for eyewitnesses to a ’suspicious French couple’, they were flooded with calls.

An international scandal ensued; NZ prosecuted the two spies, and, after much diplomatic wrangling, tit-for-tat, sanctions and political head-rolling, they were eventually imprisoned on a lovely island resort in the Pacific.

Through the late 1980s and 1990s, however, New Zealand’s relationship with France warmed. This is largely attributed to the release of Peter Mayall’s book, “A Year in Provence”, which became required reading and dinner party conversation in the chattering-class suburbs of Parnell, Kandallah and Fendleton. Lacking confidence in New Zealand’s own sense of identity, Kiwis embraced the French ‘joie to vivre’, hoping that a little style from a country which is, let’s face it, so steeped in culture you can smell it from England, might rub off on us.

During this period, much of New Zealand progressed from a nation of beer-swilling bogans to wine-quaffing urbanites. Roast beef was superseded in popularity by boeuf bourguignon. And the most sure fire way to become the envy of friends and neighbours was spending thousands of dollars furnishing your living room with the kind of discarded french junk that can be picked up in any 2nd-hand-store on the outskirts of Paris for less than 10 euros.

However, in 1999, the dark garlic cloud returned, when the All Blacks were unceremoniously, and unexpectedly, knocked out of the Rugby World Cup semi-finals by France. 8 years later, at the 2007 World Cup – in an almost biblical repeat of history – the same thing happened again.

The nation thereafter entered a long and subdued period of shame and mourning. To this day, rugby fans are still unable to look at themselves in an ornate, gilded French mirror.

Even as recently as 2009, the delicate Franco-Aotearoa accord was again tested, when the (appropriately named) French rugby player, Matheiu Bastareaud, lied about being beaten up by a gang of Polynesians on the streets of Wellington. It was exposed as a cover-up engineered by the coach, and even going as high as the French Rugby Union itself, to mask a fight between two French players over a pain-au-chocolat.

Perhaps, in concocting the story, they simply hadn’t anticipated the level of guilt for the incident that the New Zealand public immediately assumed, and concern over any potential tarnishing of our reputation as a ‘nice, friendly sort of place’. They probably figured, quite correctly, that the rest of the world would neither a) notice, nor b) give a shit, about such a minor item of news in this far-flung corner of the world. They almost certainly wouldn’t have expected the prime minister to publicly apologise for what was a fabricated, but otherwise quite common, Saturday night street brawl.

By the time they eventually recanted their story, however, they we’re so deep in sheep dip that even a return apology from the French prime minister did little to appease the angry mobs in NZ baying for (oh-so magically low in cholesterol) French blood.

So while French markets are still wildly popular in many New Zealand suburbs, antique shops continue charging the cost of a black-market organ for 2nd hand French tat, and groups of retired baby-boomers make yearly pilgrimages to Provence to blow their children’s house deposit money on foie gras and Chateauneuf du Pape, underneath it all there exists in New Zealand a barely concealed Francophobia.

It is enough to make even the most toothless, Freedom-Fries-munching, Alabama redneck pick up his banjo in shame, and strum along to the chorus of ‘La Marseillaise’.