Moonlighting as a plumber

Initial LVR restrictions in October 2013 restricted banks to no more than 10% of loans beyond 80% LVR. In 2015, the restrictions were revised to target price inflation in Auckland, easing the restrictions to 15% over 80% LVR for non-Auckland loans, and increasing to 5% over 70% LVR for investor purchases in Auckland. In 2016 the restrictions tightened further on Auckland investors, to 5% over 60% LVR.

Merriam-Webster defines "moonlight" (verb) as "to hold a second job in addition to a regular one." However, I've taken a more literal definition.

Our property has been subdivided and now has three homes on one water connection. Normally when they do this, they put individual shut-offs on each property. (In New Zealand a shut-off is called a "toby" for some reason.) Of course, for our house, they didn't do this. Since Wellington doesn't meter water use, sharing a connection isn't a problem, only an inconvenience if you need to shut off the water for any reason.

For the flat behind us, the shut-off is on our garden tap (faucet) hose. It's not labelled and doesn't look like a shut-off; the only reason I know is because one day I shut it off...

Anyway, the point is that we don't have a shut-off for our house, and the kitchen tap (faucet) doesn't have a shut-off either. I don't know if this is a British thing or a New Zealand thing, but the pipes come straight out of the wall into the tap (faucet). In order to change a washer, you need to shut off the water to the whole house. Or in my case, I need to shut off water to three houses!!

So when our kitchen tap (faucet) started dripping, I just tightened the handle. When it started streaming, I tightened it more. When it started pouring, I tightened it more. Everyone complained they couldn't open it, and I don't know why I bothered: Tightening wasn't really helping. One night I measured it and found it was draining a litre per minute. That's over half a million litres (130,000 gallons) of fresh water wasted per year! Even though I wasn't paying for it, a sense of environmental responsibility goaded me to action.

So one night I went to the street and examined the tobies. I say plural because there was on on either side of my driveway, and no indication of which one was mine. I pried open the metal covers, expecting to see a valve, and all I saw was dirt. So I gave up and called a plumber.

New Zealand is going through a bit of a housing crisis. (There's even a Wikipedia page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_property_bubble). For much of this crisis, the Conservative government was in power and their response was, "Great, our property values are increasing!". Even though New Zealand was hardly affected by the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, the Reserve Bank kept interest rates near zero for no economic reason. Loan-to-value restrictions were relaxed in 2015, so more people qualified for loans with less than a 20% deposit. And New Zealand is one of the few countries that doesn't have a capital gains tax, making property much more attractive than any other investment. (The government did introduce a capital gains tax for investors who flipped a property within five years, but all you had to do was register the property as your primary residence during that five years and you were automatically exempted!)

Of course, the Conservative government couldn't deny that housing was becoming unaffordable for most Kiwis so they did what any good government does: They blamed the Chinese. Seriously, even though less than 3% of home buyers were off-shore, the government pretended the issue was cash-rich Asians bidding up the market. Even though Labour won in 2018, sentiment was such that they passed a law forbidding foreign ownership. Two years on, it was shown to have had no impact in the housing market whatsoever.

The major problem, as the banks repeatedly pointed out, was immigration. New Zealand has always had a problem: A well-educated workforce with a small economy. There has always been a "brain drain" to other countries, particularly Australia, which could afford better salaries. In 2012, for example, 87,500 New Zealanders moved overseas, 60% to Australia, which was experiencing a mining boom. (Sir Robert Muldoon, Prime Minister of New Zealand, once famously said that New Zealanders moving to Australia "raised the IQ of both countries.")

However, in 2013 that mining boom collapsed, dragging down the entire Australian economy. By 2015, the Australian dollar had lost fully 25% of it's value against the New Zealand dollar, and Kiwis started returning en masse. They were educated, well paid, had cash reserves and needed housing. From 2015 to 2021, house prices doubled. In 2015, the median house price in New Zealand was $430,000. In 2021, it was $850,000.

And the underlying problem was that, because of the Conservative government's laissez faire attitude, new homes were not being built. In 2017, only 30,000 building consents were issued. In the same year, New Zealand had a net immigration of 70,000! Perhaps the government believed there were an extra 40,000 vacant homes around the country that could make up the difference?

When the Labour government came in to power, one of their first policies was "Kiwibuild" with the stated goal of 100,000 additional houses by 2028. Unfortunately they promised 1,000 of those houses would be available within a year -- when it turned out only 300 had been finished, the programme was largely ridiculed. However, it did have the effect of kick-starting the construction industry, and in 2021 48,000 building consents were issued, a 60% increase from 2017.

Which brings me back to my problem: I could not get a plumber for love or money. I tried several but they were clearly on bigger projects and coming out to change a washer wasn't on their radar. So the kitchen tap continued gushing. It was so loud, you could hear it over the television. It needed to get sorted.

So one night, as I was putting out the trash, I again opened the toby and started digging in the dirt. It wasn't long before I had exposed the valve, but I could not turn it. To be fair, it was inside a small pipe and I've been having issues with my shoulders, so I could not get a good purchase on it, but again I gave up.

One night I was in the garage, cleaning up. (I had recently installed a kayak hoist and gotten the kayaks off the garage floor, but that's another long, painful story.) I came across a very odd piece of metal that was bent and had a hook at the end; I have no idea where it came from or what it was for, but I realised I could insert it into the pipe and use it to leverage the toby closed. I waited until the wee hours, when the neighbours were asleep, and quietly snuck out to the street and managed to turn off the water.

I raced inside, disassembled the kitchen tap (faucet) and replaced the rubber washer. I went back to the street and turned the water back on. It occurred to me, since everyone in my house was also asleep, if something went awry the kitchen would be flooded by the time I got back to the house. I did it anyway.

Thankfully everything went fine. I went upstairs to find that not only was everyone awake, but my daughter had tried to take a shower at 1am and discovered the water was off.

(Who takes a shower at 1am?!)

Anyway, I was overjoyed but I didn't say anything; I wanted my wife to "discover" that the kitchen tap no longer dripped. Unfortunately, the next morning I discovered the kitchen tap was leaking almost as much as before! I googled it and noticed the tap was supposed to have a nut to keep the washer tight, which was missing on mine. That night, at 1am, I again sneaked out, turned off the water, disassembled the tap, found a nut that seemed to fit, and put it all back together. The tap leaked only a little bit.

While it was a marked improvement, I didn't understand why it was still leaking at all, so I googled it. It turns out, if you over-tighten the handle you can distort the brass "seat" the washer sits against, creating a leak. The solution is to get a "tap reseater" which is a little metal device that can gouge out the brass and create a flat seat. I bought one today, it's almost midnight and I'm just waiting for my dishwasher to finish so I can sneak out and turn the water off again....

P.S. It worked, sort of. As you can see from the photo, the seat was actually cracked and so water was leaking through the gap. The "right" solution would be to replace the seat, but that would mean drilling it out, tapping the pipe and then screwing in a new seat, which seemed like a lot of work. Instead I used the tap reseater to grind down the existing seat as far as I dare, hoping the washer could then cover the gap. I honestly didn't think it would make a huge difference but it reduced the stream to an occasional drip, which is good enough for me!

The $5000 vacation, part 2

This isn't really a part two, it's just another holiday that happens to cost about the same as The $5,000 vacation, part 1.

That holiday, three years ago, was the first "proper" family holiday we had taken.(At least, the first one that didn't involve tents.) And the reason we did it was because we were worried it would be the last opportunity for a family holiday -- our eldest was heading to Israel for a year, and then to Uni, plus the other two were now teenagers with their own interests. We just didn't know how much longer we had. 

A year later, our eldest was back from Israel and we were talking about another family holiday, this one to the UK as the kids hadn't been there in over ten years. I bought plane tickets in February 2020; a few weeks later, the world shut down.

(Thankfully they refunded our money, but not because of Covid: Our flights connected in Hong Kong and at the time there was a lot of unrest so the airline cancelled all flights.)

The New Zealand borders were effectively shut for two years. Kiwis could still fly but you had to spend two weeks in quarantine, so a two-week holiday meant four weeks off work plus an extra $2000 per person for the privilege of sitting in a hotel room 24x7. On top of that, people who were desperate to move back to New Zealand were fighting for those slots so it seemed highly inappropriate to take one for a quick holiday.

Although the border controls kept Covid out of New Zealand for almost two years, they finally failed and suddenly we were having 20,000 new cases per day. Stopping 50 cases at the border was recognised as inconsequential and they dropped the managed isolation process. (They're still only allowing kiwis until 2 May, at which point most anyone can visit.)

So quarantine was no longer an issue and Easter was coming. In New Zealand, like most Commonwealth countries, Good Friday and Easter Monday are public holidays so you get a four-day weekend. Unlike most Commonwealth countries, Australia and New Zealand don't observe Remembrance Day in November (Veteran's Day in the US) but instead observe ANZAC day to commemorate the Australian and New Zealand soldiers sent to Gallipoli in 1915. This year, ANZAC happens to be the Friday after Easter, so you can get ten days off but only take four days of holiday. I had requested that time off last December, long before I had any plans.

We had just done a road trip of the north island in December and a camper van tour of the south island in January, so we talked about an international holiday. We didn't want a long-haul flight or even a layover at another airport so there were only two options, Australia or Fiji. And Australia kind of sucks.

(Of course that's not true. I quite enjoyed my visits to Sydney and Melbourne, and I know there's a whole continent left to explore, but now that I am a New Zealand citizen I am contractually obligated to insult Australia at every opportunity.)

My wife and I had been in Fiji twice for layovers heading to the States. Fiji doesn't mind if you leave the airport and so that's what we planned to do. Unfortunately, the first time I went through the wrong door and we got stuck in the international terminal for six hours. The second time we went through the right door and spent the afternoon swimming and eating at a resort hotel across the road. It was lovely and we talked about going back, but there were always too many other places to go. Now it was perfect.

It didn't hurt that Fiji Airways was having a sale.

Like New Zealand, they also closed their borders for 18 months which, for an island nation dependent on tourism, was quite impressive. They re-opened their borders in December with a vaccination rate around 69% and, although they had a spike in January, right now their case rate is just 38 per million people. (New Zealand, by comparison, has a vaccination rate of 78% but the current case rate is 3,330 per million!!) So they are highly motivated to get international visitors, plus historically April is the shoulder season. We're staying on the main island because that's where the medical services are, which is just an unfortunate reality of our lives now. However, we're going to spend three days on the south coast (near Pacific Harbour), then a day in Denarau followed by two days on the north coast (Volivoli). We didn't opt for all-inclusive resorts (those are still insanely expensive) but we are staying at nice resort hotels on the beach.

Both girls decided to join us for part of the week but then they needed to fly to Auckland to attend a youth seminar. Our youngest wanted to go to a Scout camp over the weekend, and although he could have joined us after, I don't think he wanted to fly on his own. We booked the flights,  hotels, rental car, airport shuttle, travel insurance and budgeted NZ $50 per person per day for food and entertainment. The total came to $4,842 NZD for a week in Fiji, just $150 less than our 10-day trip to Christchurch three years ago. This time, though, I did budget to feed the kids!

All that's left now is to cross our fingers and hope our world doesn't change again in the next four weeks...

New Zealand heatmap

Google photos created a "heat map" of my last 7 years in New Zealand. Still a lot of places to visit...

Food processor

A few years ago, my wife's food processor died. I had brought my small one from the UK, but it just didn't cut it. We were pretty skint at the time but I looked up some recommendations and found a used one on Trademe (our equivalent of eBay) that looked good, so I bought it.

My wife hated it.

To be fair, it came with 32 pieces (I counted!) and none of them worked particularly well. When I had to shred 10kg of potatoes for hanukkah, I would put the end bits through the machine two or three times, and still had to pick out the chunks. Recently she tried to make falafel and it was struggling with soaked chickpeas. That was the last straw: She wanted a new food processor.

Not to make the same mistake, I looked up some recommendations, identified three models that looked good and then took my wife to three different shops to see them. She liked the mid-range model and I was about to shell out NZ $324 for it.

While I was looking for the box, she looked on Trademe and saw a listing for the same model, in Wellington, closing the next day. Current bid was $20.

The next day I put in a bid and we got it for $21.

We picked it up today and it's perfectly fine. My wife got one she's happy with and she saved us $300. She's pretty amazing that way.

My next step was selling our old one. Unfortunately while I was photographing it I discovered two cracks and two missing pieces, but as long as I can get more than $20 for it, we'll come out even.

Freedom camping

New Zealand shuts down for three weeks around Christmas and New Years. Everyone is forced to take the time off and, because it's the middle of summer, everyone goes camping. We were reluctant to do anything this year because, after two years, Covid had finally gotten into the community. However, at the last moment we decided to do a driving tour of the north island to visit friends and family. We spent a week driving from Wellington to Auckland and back around and, while it was great to see everyone, I really hate driving. We covered 1700 kilometers (just over 1000 miles) and I was very glad to get home.

Of course, because everyone goes camping over that three week period, there's a slump immediately afterward and I got an email from a campervan rental agency that a 2-bed self-contained van was on sale for NZ $95/day. It's normally around $250/day, which I think is ridiculous (I can get a flight, hotel and rental car for less!) so I was intrigued. Wellington celebrates its "anniversary day" in early January (to commemorate the arrival of the first settler ship on January 22nd 1840) so we had a holiday coming up, and we still had some credits from our aborted Queenstown holiday 14 months earlier.

The next thing I knew, we had a 6-day/5-night driving holiday of the south island planned!! This would "only" cover 1100km (about 700 miles) and would include Milford Sound, Doubtful Sound, Franz Josef glacier and Arthur's Pass. It also meant we could visit Gloria, a deconsecrated church that a friend's son had painted bright pink.

In my head, a self-contained campervan meant freedom camping. With one of the lowest population densities of any country (#211 of 250 countries according to Wikipedia) and one of the highest natural beauty densities (a standard I just made up), being able to camp on public land throughout New Zealand, for free, was considered a birthright. Unfortunately, a few people -- mostly young, overseas visitors -- took the opportunity to travel cheap and leave a mess, which the locals did not appreciate, so in 2011 New Zealand tried to reign this in. Unfortunately,  they left it to the local councils which created a hodge-podge of rules and restrictions with no transparency, so to find out if you could camp somewhere you practically had to go to the site and look at the signage!

New Zealand tried to make exceptions for "self-contained vehicles" (essentially motorhomes and campervans that had their own toilet) but the only requirement was the vehicle needed a blue sticker saying it was self-contained. A lot of people just printed their own sticker and it quickly became meaningless.

New Zealand also has a large number of "holiday parks" which are a mix of tents, vehicles and cabins with communal kitchens and toilets. We've camped at holiday parks several times and they're brilliant, but if I already had a kitchen and toilet, I was affronted at the idea of paying $50/night! In addition, I wanted to wake up someplace where I could see water or mountains, not a neighboring campervan. However, with no real guidance we left it to the fates, and here's what happened:

Day 1: Parked at a holiday park for $48. (I thought it was $24 but it turned out to be $24 per person.)

Day 2: Parked at a  holiday park  but only paid $15 by promising not to use the communal kitchen or toilets. Lovely view of the lake.

Day 3: Parked in the parking lot of the AJ Hackett bungy experience.

Day 4: Parked in a  holiday park for $40.

Day 5: Parked at Lake Brunner for free. Fantastic view.

So it took us five days but we finally figured it out, and it was lovely.

Actually, the whole visit was spectacular. I've got about 130 photos (and a few videos) of the trip here.

After we got home, we got an alert that there had been a covid "location of interest" at the Christchurch airport about two days before we were there. While we were not at risk, it was just a reminder that New Zealand travel was going to become much riskier. Unlike the rest of the world, we really haven't had to worry about covid for the past two years, so this is quite new for us. I expect we're not going to be travelling any more in 2022, but hopefully the numbers will have peaked and fallen and we can travel safely again by the end of the year, in time for the next three-week shutdown.

My new ebike

My old ebike, a Merida Power Cycle, was manufactured c. 2003. I bought it used in 2015 for US $350.  Thankfully someone had replaced the 17-pound lead acid battery with a lithium battery, but it didn't provide much power and was speed limited to 15mph (24km/h). I referred to it as "The Beast" not because it was tough or heavy, but merely getting it uphill was a beast. However, it did get me to and from work for three years so I can't complain.

When I changed jobs, though, I knew The Beast was not up to it. (The old job was a 90m/300 foot climb; the new job was a 200m/650 foot climb, with several sections over 7% grade.) A friend had been complaining for several years about buying a road ebike when he really wanted a mountain ebike, so I made him an offer on the road ebike and he took it.

The new bike was also speed limited to 25km/h, but my friend had installed a "badass box" which effectively disabled the speed limit. (This is actually legal in New Zealand as they restrict ebikes by power, not speed.)

On the first day cycling in to work, I was coming down a steep hill and discovered the rear brakes did not work! Thankfully I was able to bring it to a stop before rolling out into cross-traffic. The next day it went to the shop where they found a leak in the hydraulic brakes. 

I also fitted a rack and some mud guards, but the rear mud guard was rubbing against the tire so I wrapped a bungee cord around it. This turned out to be a huge mistake: The bungee cord was now rubbing against the tire and it snapped when I was coming down a large hill, wrapped itself around the hub and froze the wheel! I snaked and skidded halfway down the hill. It was a miracle I didn't come off the bike. 

And then a week ago, I was cycling into work and someone made a right turn, straight into me. They were looking for parking and just not paying attention. I was going downhill so even with my brakes, I couldn't avoid them. Thankfully they were turning slowly and, although I came off the bike, it was another miracle I walked away with just a few bruises. I just had to buy a new helmet (I got a bright orange one) and I ruined my shirt (somehow I got oil across it).

Hopefully I won't have any more adventures on this bike.

P.S. Unrelated, I was cleaning out the garage and had two bikes that hadn't been used in years: My wife's beloved Marin she'd brought from Scotland, and my beloved Brompton folding cycle I'd brought from London. I made a pact with her that I'd sell mine if she sold hers. However, hers had a lot of rust and she opted to donate it to a group that fixes old bikes and provides them to poor families. I put mine on Trademe (equivalent of eBay) and it sold for more than I paid for my ebike! I really hated parting with it, but hopefully the new owner will love it as much as I did. 

I ended a toxic relationship today

Imagine if we treated personal relationships the same way we treated professional ones: We'd interview five people for an hour, maybe two, and if one of them was interested we'd make an open-ended commitment. At some point we'd feel unappreciated and try to find a new relationship without telling the current one. If we were successful, we'd tell our current relationship we were leaving...in a month.

And we'd all be okay with this and think it was perfectly normal.

But let's face it, it's crazy. It's inefficient, there's no security, it's unrewarding. 

Now imagine if we treated professional relationships the same way we treated personal ones: We'd meet with lots of companies, we'd have a good idea of what we were looking for, we'd understand what they offered and when we found a good fit we'd make a long-term commitment. Both sides would work to support each other, to learn and grow from one another. Not every relationship would work out, of course, but you wouldn't start the relationship with the expectation that it would fail in a couple of years. 

Of course, given that work relationships start out in such a dysfunctional way, it's no wonder so many become toxic. I resigned today because my work relationship was taking a lot from me and not giving me anything in return. The company wasn't listening to me, it refused to change, it couldn't even acknowledge the issues that I've been complaining about for over a year. Maybe it was just so wrapped up in its own problems, it didn't have any time for me. Maybe it never really cared about me, and I've just been fooling myself from the start. 

Unfortunately, I don't know if the place I'm going is any better. I talked to them for two hours. They seemed OK, but they're just replacing someone who left, so who's fault was that? It doesn't matter; what's important is they're giving me more money. It's not like I'm making a commitment; if I don't like it, I will leave.

I used to think dating apps were superficial--a few photos, a couple lines of text, no real depth--but it turns out that's what people like; they'd rather meet up and see if there is chemistry before trying to figure out the rest. Google "Tinder for jobs" and you'll see lots of people have created similar apps, but where does it go from there? Do they invite you to come work for them for a day or two (with pay) to see if you're compatible? Do you slowly work your way up to being "exclusive"? Do you eventually become committed after showing mutual respect, shared values and the desire to build a future together?

I don't know if any of this would work, but it can't be worst than the current situation. As for me, check back in 18-24 months so see if I'm happy, or I'm actively looking. 

Jimmie Rodgers, R.I.P.

I just learned another musical icon passed away January 21 this year. Every year, the family would drive from Los Angeles to Tucson, Arizona, to celebrate Thanksgiving with my mother's aunt. It's an 8-hour drive under the best of circumstances, but of course the traffic leaving LA on a long weekend, and returning after, was always a nightmare. My father would get off from work Wednesday afternoon, pack the car (and three kids), drive all night and arrive Thursday morning. My father would then crash and wake up about 3pm, just in time for dinner.

I'm sure we were little shits during the drive, but oddly I just have fond memories of those trips. Things I loved:

• My great-aunt Irene, who was a real firecracker.
• The food was fantastic (especially the turkey sandwiches on white bread with cranberry sauce the next day)
• Driving past the Cabazon Dinosaurs, which were always closed.
• Driving through the desert. To this day, I love the desert.
• My father's DIY roof racks (before roof racks were popular).

Things I didn't like:

• My great-aunt's dogs. This was before asthma relievers, and I would lie awake all-night struggling to breathe. I often ended up at the hospital for a shot of adrenalin. Imagine drinking a dozen cups of coffee and you'll have a rough idea of how much fun that was.
  
• My great-aunt's clock, which chimed every 15 minutes. As my brother and I slept in the lounge, this was maddening. When I grew up I learned there was a simple lever that would silence the clock.
• My great-aunt's corset, which hung on the back of the bathroom door for as long as I knew her. I later learned she was a can-can dancer in her youth, and that was obviously a memento from that time.
  
• My great-uncle, my great-aunt's brother, who lived next door and was very unfriendly. After my great-aunt died, and he was on his own, I still visited him at Thanksgiving each year, but never liked him.
  
• Tucson. The entire town was a retirement community, and anything that might have been interesting was closed for Thanksgiving apart from the cinema. In November it was always cold and wet (although one year it snowed).
• Doctor Demento always played Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. You could only hear this in Los Angeles and I always wanted to leave early enough to catch this, but we never did. When I was 16 and had my license, I volunteered to drive the entire way, and refused to stop the entire way, but still missed it. (I was an adult before I finally heard it, and it was absolutely worth the wait. I even travelled to Carnegie Hall, in New York City, just to hear Arlo Guthrie play it live.)
  

But what I remember most about these trips was my father had a set of tape cassettes that he only played on these trips. Music from Roger Miller, Johnny Horton, Bing Crosby and Jimmie Rodgers, that clearly shaped my musical tastes. When I grew up, it was easy to find CDs with all the other music but Jimmie Rodgers had disappeared. (It did not help that he shared the same name as another singer from the 1920's/1930's.) I was able to record my father's albums, and eventually was able to find CDs, so I'm still able to enjoy such maudlin classics like "It's Over," "Their Hearts were full of Spring," and my favourite, "Waltzing Matilda" with the wonderful lyrics:

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,
Under the shade of a Coolibah tree,
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled,
"You'll come a Waltzing Matilda with me."
Down came a jumbuck to drink at that billabong
Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee,
And he sang as he stowed that jumbuck in his tucker bag
"You'll come a Waltzing Matilda with me."
Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda,
You'll come a Waltzing Matilda with me,
And he sang as he stowed that jumbuck in his tucker bag
"You'll come a Waltzing Matilda with me."
Down came the squatter mounted on his thorough-bred
Up came the troopers one, two, three
"Who's that jolly jumbuck you've got in your tucker bag?
You'll come a Waltzing Matilda with me."

From Wikipedia: "The title was Australian slang for travelling on foot (waltzing) with one's belongings in a "matilda" (swag) slung over one's back. The song narrates the story of an itinerant worker, or "swagman", making tea in a billy (metal bucket) at a bush camp and capturing a stray jumbuck (sheep) to eat. [Tucker means food.] When the jumbuck's owner, a squatter (landowner), and three troopers (mounted policemen) pursue the swagman for theft, he declares "You'll never catch me alive!" and commits suicide by drowning himself in a nearby billabong (watering hole), after which his ghost haunts the site."

My great-uncle passed away in 2000 and my last trip to Tucson was in 2001, which I wrote about here.

P.S. I hope I don't have to keep doing these, but Alex Hassilev, the last surviving member of the original Limeliters, is 89, so expect another tribute soon...

Chris Barber, R.I.P.

I've mentioned Chris Barber on the blog several times, but I don't think I ever discussed the significance. He formed the "Chris Barber Band" in 1954, at the age of 24. They played "New Orleans Jazz" and their first record had a hit with "Rock Island Line" (https://youtu.be/CublT5vFS2o) that made Lonnie Donnegan famous. (Lonnie went on to popularise "skiffle" music which inspired a generation of Brits to pick up guitars, including Paul Mccartney and John Lennon.)

In 1959, Chris Barber had another hit with "Petite Fleur"  (https://youtu.be/dRFjEko04U0) which went to #3 in the UK and #5 in the US. After that, the band started touring in the US. The musical circuit at the time included a stop in Hartford, Connecticut, where my Uncle George lived. He loved their sound (and was a bit infatuated with their lead singer - and Chris Barber's wife - Ottilie Patterson) and even had the band back to his house one night.

Jump ahead almost 50 years and I had just moved to the UK and my uncle was telling me about Chris Barber. I googled him and discovered that, not only was he still performing, but he was playing in London that week! I bought a ticket and fell in love with their sound just as much as my uncle had. Afterwards, I met Chris Barber and told him the story. I think he was happy to have someone under 70 in the audience.

After that, I saw him whenever he was in London. He was almost 80 when I met him and still maintained a grueling touring schedule, playing a lot in Germany and Asia, as well as the UK. I last saw him in 2013, before I moved to New Zealand.

I haven't thought about him in ages but I googled him this morning to discover he'd passed away four days ago, at the age of 90. Wikipedia said he retired in 2019 and that he was suffering from dementia. He'd been given an OBE in 1991 and published his autobiography ("Jazz Me Blues") in 2014.

As an aside, Pat Halcox played trumpet for the Chris Barber Band since it formed in 1954 until he retired in 2008, a partnership that lasted 54 years. The first time I saw Chris Barber I got to see Pat play, and the last time I saw Chris Barber he told the audience Pat had passed away.

Chris Barber was a legend, and a wonderful link to my uncle who passed away in 2012. I feel privileged I got to hear him play, and lucky to have a number of his CDs in my collection. (I think one of them might be signed.)

You can read more about Chris Barber here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-56270163

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/03/chris-barber-obituary

You can buy his CDs at https://www.chrisbarber.net and (should the pandemic ever end) the Chris Barber Band continues to play and tour. 

City slogans

Wellington's motto is "Absolutely Positively Wellington." While sitting behind a bus one day, I got to thinking: How stupid is that? When your town motto is really just the name of the town, you have a serious identity problem. (And a grammar problem, as well.) So I looked into it and discovered it's been the town motto for *30 years*!

I found a news article that explained that, following the stock market crash of 1987, newspapers were having trouble selling advertising because the news was so gloomy. They hired Saatchi & Saatchi, the marketing company, who published feel-good stories about locals doing well using the tagline "Absolutely Positively Wellington." It was very successful, and in 1991 Wellington adopted the tagline as their motto.

Then I looked around and realised that it could be a lot worse.

Auckland hired Saatchi & Saatchi to do something similar; they came up with "Auckland A." In 2008, Auckland spent $1.8 million rebranding to "Big Little City." (I suggest they just adopt their nickname, "City of Sails.")

In 2017, Invercargill adopted the city slogan: "Dream Big". This replaced the earlier slogan, "Friendly." Before that, it was "Where Dreams Come True" and "City Of Water And Light." (What does that even mean??)

In 1988, Dunedin's motto was  "It's All Right Here," which might look fine in print but was pronounced, "It's alright here." In 2008, before an international cricket test match, the city used the slogan, "It's All White Here." If you're a cricket fan, you'd know the New Zealand team is called the "All Whites" (after the all-white uniform) but if you're not a cricket fan, you'd think Dunedin is very racist.

In 2001 they changed their slogan to the enigmatic, "I Am Dunedin" and last year they changed it to, "A Pretty Good Plan D" which I'm not even going to comment on.

A sample of other meaningless town slogans in New Zealand:

• Ashburton - "Whatever it takes"
• Canterbury - "Of course you Canterbury"
• Christchurch - Was "Fresh Every Day" before becoming the "Garden City"
• Dannevirke - named after a Viking-age fortification line in Denmark, the slogan "Take A Liking To A Viking" was clever but sounds pretty needy.
• Featherston - After trying "Wake Up Featherston," they changed it in 1999 to "Try Featherston, it will blow you away." Now the "Welcome to Featherston" sign just says: "If you lived here, you'd be home by now."
• Foxton - "The Fox Town of New Zealand"
• Gore - "A little bit wild, a little bit out there"
• Hamilton - It started with the innocuous "Where It's Happening" but in the 1990s they changed it to "More Than You Expect" and then "City of the Future."
  
• Hawke's Bay - "Everything under the Sun"
• Hutt Valley - "Right Up My Hutt Valley" was adopted in 1995 to try and draw Lower Hutt and Upper Hutt closer. It did not go down well; Lower Hutt then adopted the slogan "We've Got the Lot" in 1999 while Upper Hutt became, "A great place to live."
• Manawatu - "Young heart, easy living"
• Matamata: 'You matter in Matamata'
• Naseby - "2000ft Above Worry Level" (This was adopted as a book title in 2020.)
  
• Tauranga - "Tempt me Tauranga"
• Te Puke - "Stop and taste Te Puke" (Te Puke is known for growing kiwifruit.)
  
• Timaru - Was "Touch, taste, feel" before being changed to "Feel the heartbeat"
• Tuatapere - "New Zealand's Sausage Capital"
• Wairoa - "The Way New Zealand Used to Be"

The funniest unofficial slogan must be Porirua. In 2012, then Mayor Nick Leggett started referring to Porirua as "P-town," seemingly unaware that meth was called "P" in New Zealand. (I don't know why.)

P.S. In 2014, Lonely Planet called Wellington, "The Coolest Little Capital in the World." That seems like a much better slogan to me.