1. There’s no such thing as getting away from it all. 
”All” is what makes life easy and keeps you warm, dry and well-nourished. “All” is what makes a decent cup of coffee, retards the decay of foodstuffs and keeps your belongings stored in some kind of order. “All” is also what keeps you fresh-smelling, entertained and in communication with the folks back home. It’s not until you begin packing that you realise how much “all” there is to get away from, and how much “all” you must take with you to ensure your comfort in every eventuality: flood, drought, heat wave or cold snap.


2. Do Not Adjust Your Set
You should expect the disruption or suspension of all normal laws of physics on the day of your departure. Time stands still and the force of gravity increases. These changes are so powerful that you despair of ever achieving escape velocity. Objective indicators of an altered time/space continuum include endless rewriting of packing lists and five trips to the supermarket for last-minute essentials. 

When insomnia strikes, I listen to audio-books, avoiding thrillers which, if they do induce sleep, also tend to induce nightmares.

If you are looking for audiobooks to fall asleep to, you can’t do better than listen to stories written and read by Garrison Keillor about his (fictional) hometown of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota where nothing overtly dramatic ever happens.

Keillor, who has an unhurried delivery, begins and ends his stories with phrases which I’m now so familiar with I could … well … recite them in my sleep. “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown” he says as begins another story about decent and hard-working folk and of small-town happenings which are both funny and full of pathos. “That’s all the news from my home town” he intones at the close of each tale, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." 

Actually, the citizens of Lake Wobegon are lugubrious folks of Norwegian extraction and Lutheran beliefs who are suspicious of happiness and overt expressions of emotion. Minnesota’s long, harsh winters only exacerbates this disinclination to light-heartedness: they gather for coffee and delicious homemade rhubarb pie in the town’s Chatterbox Cafe but they definitely don’t chatter.   

I thought of Lake Wobegon and the Chatterbox Cafe last week as I sat in a Westport cafe with a friend after a couple of days staying at a bach near Punakaiki, with a roaring fire and a view of the sea crashing spectacularly below. 

​In The Polysyllabic Spree, his account of a year-long reading binge, Nick Hornby declared that “books are simply better than anything else.” He gets no argument from me. The book, as companion, stimulant, and entertainment is without equal as far as I’m concerned: I belong to three libraries, I cache books around the house the way a dipsomaniac stashes alcohol and in emergencies I resort to reading the labels on jam jars and shampoo bottles.  

I and fellow book-mad locals borrow well over 2 million items from our libraries each year, fossick through 50 tonnes of books at the Founder’s Book Fair and buy enough books to keep local booksellers (somewhat) solvent. We also attend book festivals like the Volume Mapua Literary Festival last month, or the upcoming Page & Blackmore Pukapuka Talks (previously Readers and Writers) at the Nelson Arts Festival in October. 

Why? On the face of it the answer seems obvious: we like books. Don’t we simply go to book festivals the way rugby enthusiasts attend rugby matches, or music lovers attend concerts? 

​It's a Monday at the Classic Comedy Club in mid-town Auckland. It's the night when beginner comedians gather to test their comedic talents in front of a live audience.

Comedy Director, Geoffrey Scott Blanks, who was made an Officer of the NZ Order of Merit for his services to comedy in the last Queen’s Birthday Honours is busy selling tickets to the 2-hour “Raw” show in the club’s bustling foyer.

​At 8pm the doors to the high-ceilinged performance space swing open. A friendly usher directs us to seats clustered around tables, cabaret-style. Candles flicker on each table. The red brick walls are hung with posters advertising comedy shows past and present. There are a few grey heads in the audience, but it’s a youngish crowd and the atmosphere is warm and convivial. 

I'm on my own so I’m pleased to be seated at a table with four other women with whom it’s easy to strike up a conversation.  It turns out they aren’t just here for laughs - they have skin in the game. The young woman on my left, has Nihilist printed on her T-shirt and Hysterical Feminist on her tote bag. She's here to suss out the comedy scene before making a leap from sit-down wannabe, to stand-up comedian. ​

​The book lust was upon me and a book token was burning a hole in my pocket when I visited Page and Blackmore’s bookshop last Saturday. It turned out to be New Zealand Bookshop Day and all kinds of celebratory bookish entertainments were on offer including tea and toast and random giveaways.

I like random give-aways as much as the next woman, but I really had to do something about the smoke spiralling from the back pocket of my jeans so I ignored the beverages - and the possibility of a freebie  - to browse the tables of appetisingly displayed books right away.

There is a brass band though. They are playing something vaguely Pomp and Circumstance from within the barricades which stretch from the church steps, along Hardy street and then dogleg through Montgomery Arcade into the Saturday Market. 

The green-painted Spud Cart, a potential hotbed of IRA sympathisers, is not under any kind of surveillance. Beside the ANZ, there’s a small cluster of people including a child in a glittery wig and another dressed as a tiger. A woman in a peasant skirt sits smoking on a bench outside the museum. On the other side of the street, there’s another woman waiting for something to happen. She’s sitting in a striped folding chair, knees pressed against the barricade with a Fox Terrier on her lap. She’ll have a prime view of the royal entourage as it strolls by, but at the moment it’s a lonely vigil she’s keeping. A couple of women stand chatting outside Cruella’s Natural Fibre Boutique. One of them is clacking away at some knitting like an antipodean Madame Defarge. 

I’m feeling a lot better this week. Thanks for asking. The rain-induced bout of Seasonal Affective Disorder and Cabin Fever which I wrote so plaintively about last week has passed. 

Actually, the whole neighbourhood seems to have perked up: the small herd of supermarket trolleys grazing the curb outside my place suggests that local homesteading activities resumed as soon as the rain stopped falling.

This weekend's rainy threatened to cause another kind of upset by plunging the Light Nelson festival into darkness.