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’.

A graph demonstrating actual house science

New Zealanders fall into one (occasionally two) of following three states of being; “Thinking about buying a house”, “Buying (then paying off) a house”, or “Trying the sell a house”.  Anybody who doesn’t identify with at least one of these categories is probably either an asylum seeker, or a tourist.

And while it is possible that they may just be on the dole, that category is not mutually exclusive as, with enough children, even beneficiaries can afford to get on the property ladder in New Zealand.

All of which means that the most popular Kiwi topic of conversation – at dinner parties, water coolers and primary school gates – by a long, and oh-so tedious mile, is the price of houses.

But why all this brouhaha over a bunch of bricks and mortar (or, as is often the case, rotting timber and PVC sheeting)?

To begin with, there is a limited range of investment opportunities in New Zealand. The NZX40 so named because there are, quite literally, 40 companies in the whole of New Zealand.  Besides which, Kiwis are generally uncomfortable about taking a punt on the stock market, being creatures who are naturally distrustful of large corporations, governments, foreigners, rodents and domestic pets.

So for many years now, New Zealanders have instead been betting their retirement savings on the perceived value of a ‘quarter acre piece of paradise’.  Even if the cost of owning said slice of Godzone is roughly 6 times the average salary, with an interest rate that would give Sir Rob Muldoon an erection.

Added to this is the very real fact that, in quiet, unassuming little ol’ NZ, not a lot of note actually happens. The network news channels struggle to pad out their nightly broadcasts with stories about cats playing the piano, school-boy rugby brawls, and long, painfully-detailed weather reports, such that when the rugby season is, at long last, over, there is really f**k all else to talk about.

Therefore, at your next social engagement (ie; BBQ, post-netball drinks, or friendly gathering of the neighbours around a taped-off crime scene),  follow these useful tips, which should help you avoid getting into any arguments, or making anyone cry, when the conversation inevitably turns to that most popular Kiwi topic of ‘The Price of Houses’;

• Blithely commenting how ‘10 years ago, Herne Bay was all we could afford on our meagre budget, and now it’s worth…” will probably earn you a smack in the mouth, before you even reach the actual figure.
• Reminding someone that ‘at least the capital gains on their leaky building has covered the cost of repairing it’ is not helpful. It is, in fact, the opposite of helpful.
• Nobody is interested in your predictions of when the market will ‘bottom out’. New Zealand already has a ratio of 1 property expert to every 5 people. It does not need any more.
• Remarking that you ‘don’t know what everyone is talking about, Auckland houses are cheap’ because you have recently sold up and moved here from London or New York is culturally insensitive, and slightly racist.
• Loudly stating that ‘If I sold my Grey Lynn apartment and moved to Invercargill, I could afford an 8 bedroom mansion” will make your friends wish you bloody well hurried up and did.
• If more than 50% of the men are wearing ties, for God’s sake don’t mention Capital Gains Tax. However, if more than 50% of the women are wearing comfortable shoes, just agree with a tax on everything.

Get up yer crack!

In New Zealand, getting around in bare feet is considered cool – in a sort of sexy-Jesus meets pro-surfer way. It demonstrates how laid back, Eco, and generally unconcerned by commercialism or fashion Kiwis like to think they are.

To the rest of the world, though, it’s just something homeless people do.

In spite of the weather, many Kiwis would happily wear this vagrant look all year round. Unfortunately, there’s just too many fucking prickles in the grass. So the next best thing, and something of a cultural icon in New Zealand, is the humble Jandal.

Although the word Jandal is an abbreviation of ‘Japanese Sandal’, it is actually a trademark of the Skellerup company – one of the earliest manufacturers of the modern design – and, as such, is rarely used outside New Zealand.

Most other countries refer to them as ‘Flip Flops’, except in Australia, where they are called ‘Thongs’. Initially it was assumed the use of the word ‘Thong’ was yet another way for chauvinist Australian men to keep down the women of their country. Later analysis, even by researchers with strong feminist leanings, eventually agreed that it is probably more to do with the fact that Jandals really do look like G-Strings for the feet.

It is not, however, known for certain if Sisqo’s timeless 2000 hit ‘The Thong Song’ was actually a reference to footwear, not underwear. As a carefully worded warning about the dangers of an unchecked Camel’s Toe, the lyrics could comfortably (or rather, uncomfortably) apply to either.

Should you meet a friendly Australian on the feet-burning black sands of Piha beach in summer, therefore, don’t be alarmed if he tells you something along the lines of… “Struth mate, it’s so f**king hot I had to wear me sheila’s Thongs.”

Unless, of course, he is actually wearing two pairs of his girlfriend’s underwear. In that case, smile politely, and try to move on, remembering that it isn’t his fault he’s not right in the head.  He is, after all, only Australian.

There have, since the introduction of the Jandal in the 1950’s, been a number of pretenders to the breezy-footwear throne. Multi-strapped action sandals (as favoured by German tourists, usually worn over knee length white socks). Lesbian, chunky Birkenstocks. And more recently, Crocs, which are wildly popular with the genetically retarded, or those who’ve simply lost the will to live.

The recent popularity of Havianas has, thankfully, seen a worldwide return to the effortless cool of the Jandal.

But in New Zealand, Jandals never really went out of style. Just try not to dwell too much on whether this means we were a) leading the pack, or b) so far behind that we were caught, unawares, wearing them when they came back in.

Focus instead on the important question, which is.. what next?

Stubbies?