Coldplay? Not My Cup Of Tea.

There are some teams in your lifetime that you just love to hate. You hate them because they seem to win everything, which in itself sucks, but that kind of success brings with it a horde of fans and supporters that are commonly called 'fair-weather'. A fair-weather fan is someone who only supports a team because they're winning. Once the success goes, so too will the fan. Coldplay is one of those teams.

Of course Coldplay is a band, not a team. Well not a sports team anyway. And as the old saying goes ‘there is no 'I' in team’ just as there is no 'Chris Martin in Coldplay’, only in case there is, because he’s the lead singer, lead writer and lead attention getter.

They may well share everything equally, but it’s Martin who is Coldplay. He's the one who gets to do the duet with Kanye, not the other three jokers. He's the one snapped by the paps whilst out and about with his equally famous missus (and onetime ClubDes trampoline girl) Gwyneth Paltrow, not the other three fellas. Who knows if they even have girlfriends? Who cares - they're not Chris Martin.

Now I like Chris Martin. He's a talented man who uses his immense profile and position as lead singer of Coldplay to get in behind some extremely worthy causes, like Oxfam. He likes to wear lots of beads and wristbands and eclectic shirt and jacket combos. He sends encrypted messages to the legion of fans who would love to have a duvet made from his pubes by wearing strategically placed tape on his fingers. He has piercing blue eyes that you should never look straight into. Ever. And he loves the environment so much he called his daughter Apple for which she will be eternally resentful, especially when she hits college and all the 'I'd like a mouthful of Apple' jokes start. Yet, despite all this goodness I still think that I liked him a whole lot better when he was just the nerdy guy singing 'Yellow' whilst walking on the beach in the rain.

Friends of ours chose that track as their wedding song. I thought it odd at the time and I still can't get my head around. It reminds me of how in the seventies the Procol Harlem song 'Whiter Shade of Pale' was one of the most popular wedding songs of it's generation, despite being completely and utterly about snorting coke. Love might make you blind but it doesn't make you deaf for fucks sake. The same sort of social cock up was recounted by the very sexy Dido at the concert of hers that my wife and I attended a few years ago. Dido found it quite bemusing that her song about helping a needle popping mate go cold turkey was being used in weddings across the UK. I just found Dido incredibly hot. I had an erection the whole night.

But my point is that back when Martin was the silly looking guy in the soaked anorak, Coldplay were cool because they were different - well somewhat, they were admittedly ripping off Radiohead in their glory days - but their fans dug them because of their music, not their politics, not their bracelet wearing, not because of Gwyneth and not because of Chris Martin. Somewhere between the first and second albums they became the Manchester United of music and fittingly, the fair-weather community stopped buying U2 and moved on in.

Comparisons to U2, that other most influential band ever were always inevitable. How the planet copes with two sources of infinite musical inspiration is beyond me. Why when I picked up my guitar the other day I just couldn't decide what to play, so I had a big wank instead. Incidentally, did you know that wanking got it's name from the sound wooden beds made back in the day when boys first started treating their bodies like a fairground ride; 'wankwankwankwankwank'.

Martin is a huge U2 fan actually and when amongst friends sometimes compares himself to Bono, even going as far as calling himself 'Crono'. Why he doesn't compare himself to Bob Geldolf, the man behind both Live Aid concerts I don't know. It was Bob, not Bono who saved the world first. I suspect it’s because Geldolf is quite ugly where as Martin is a very pretty man. Bono is somewhere in between I suppose, depending on which side of poo bay you like to drop your anchor.

For the record I prefer U2. They don't have fair-weather radio stations like ZM peddling them and their upcoming concert as the second coming, or fair-weather friends gushing over just how liberating they are. I've listened to a lot of Coldplay in a desperate attempt to like them and thus feel fulfilled in my life and I do like one or two tracks, but it all sounds the fucken same to me and I have exquisite musical taste. Not that sounding the same is necessarily a bad thing, you could say that of any band of course, but this is supposedly the biggest band in the world we’re talking about, could they not mix it up a bit? Geez even U2 went a bit fruity with their Pop album.

Oh and most importantly, I know the names of all the geezers in U2. Even their real ones. Coldplay? Not my cup of tea.

Envy - It Makes A Man Do Strange Things

Isn't the innocence of children great? I can tell my ten year old son that I've left him a little something in the kitchen i.e a fart and he'll go in to check what it is each and every time. Someday that gullibility will be gone forever and I shall have to get my kicks from letting out a silent one whilst we all sit around watching TV. Ah, who am I kidding, I do that now anyway.

I was sitting at the lights today admiring a big shiny HSV across the intersection until I noticed the driver pick his nose and eat it. Which I thought probably says a lot about owners of big shiny, attention getting cars, but it didn't half leave me feeling quite good, sitting their in my modest passion wagon, made from the finest Korean steel and in which I have never picked my nose and eaten it.

I love cars as much as the next guy who hopes that driving a big flash car will somehow influence people’s perception of his penis size. Which not so long ago was probably the case, but in these tumultuous times where petrol prices are through the roof and with global warming upon us, those drivers of big flash gas guzzlers are alas more likely to be considered by all to have a small dick, not a big one. Why not try shaving it fellas, that always makes it look bigger.

I do like cars. Not in a 'rub my bits against it' Mecaphilliac kind of way, but I admire a good looking motor. If I was being completely honest I might admit to cracking the smallest of chubbies when around an Audi R8 with all the bells and whistles, or a BMW M3, but that’s about it. I'm not going to go out and buy the jacket and matching cap or nothing. I do find myself admiring classics more though these days, particularly muscle cars but then I've always had a thing for The General Lee (a Dodge Charger) and if I had more money than sense I'd be cruising around in one quicker than you can fantasise about Jessica Simpson playing Daisy Duke..

Which leads me to make this other stark confession; the other day my wife put Solid Gold on the radio and guess what? I didn't change it. Classic cars and classic music, I think I'm turning into my Dad. Which is bad news for my boy because my old man left the country when I was about ten and I've never seen, nor heard from him since. I do know where and how he is, courtesy of an uncle, but even he struggles to get any info out of a marriage so locked down to outside contact you'd think my father had married Tom Cruise. Maybe he has. Maybe whilst I was off becoming a man he became a woman, Katie Holmes to be precise. And to think I was turned on by seeing her milkers in 'The Gift'.

I admire dudes who paint their own cars. It must be incredibly liberating to give your motor a paint job that is distinctly un-factory, like the camo job on the old Escort down the main road. Or the classic Holden with the bench seats that does the local rounds, it has an Aboriginal paint job that I know full well could not have been completed in such fine detail without the aide of several large spliffs.

But that's car envy for you. The penultimate stage for a fella in a lifetime full of envy. The final stage is young girl envy, which kicks in about now I think. Maybe that’s why I’m thinking the good looking girl at work should be my PA for no other reason than looks. I don’t need a PA but having one – especially a looker – would make me the envy of all the other fellas in the office.

Envy starts when you're young with something innocuous, like cricket bats. My mate Willie G was always wielding the flashest, shiniest, newest Gray Nicholls bat and man did it give me the shits. Figuratively speaking of course, it's not like we were ever doing anything with cricket bats that would physically give me diarrhoea. How he ever afforded them I never did quite figure out because his family had less money than mine but his parents were always the kind to put their kids wants first. I admire that greatly now but oh how I hated them for it back then.

I must have penned several dastardly plots to pinch Willies bats but even the best sand and repaint job was never going to mask a stolen bit of willow, not when we played for hours on end every day at the local park. So I made do like everyone else and enjoyed my turn with it when it came and to Willie's credit, he always gave you a turn with it. The jammy bastard.

The closest I ever came to getting my hands on my own sparkling Grey Nicholls was when I arranged for my mate and then local gang banger Rob to grab one in a smash and grab on the front window of the local Sterling Sports. To his credit he did get it, but subsequently used it in helping break the glass in a few more smash and grabs that night so it wasn't so sparkling when eventually I received it.

Still, I looked the business standing at the crease with it and that was all I was really after. And not once, no matter how great I thought I was or how cool I looked, did I ever pick my nose and eat it.

Twisted Firestarters

A wee while ago, Australia was the dumping ground for Mother England's criminals. It's not something mainstream Oz likes to be reminded of and that's understandable, it was generations ago that all that happened, but recent events in Victoria have proven that turd hasn't fallen far from the arse where some individuals are concerned.

It has all infamously started with a few fire starters who might have been after some sort of fucked up sexual gratification by watching bush burn but who are now murderers and dead men walking. I don't know the last time the world witnessed a public lynching outside of some shitty third world country or place where it's legal for a husband to sodomise his 13 wives, but I reckon that when they catch these guys we might just have a little public stoning on our hands. And I do hope they catch them despite the difficulties I can only imagine investigators face when dealing with a case like this. Unfortunately there are too few closed circuit TV cameras in the bush.

They have caught someone though and are charging him with at least 21 deaths and that's a conservative estimate of just how many his arson has caused. He's also being charged with being in possession of a large number of kiddie porn images. What a fucken surprise. The turd really hasn't fallen far from the arse has it?

You would think life doesn't get much lower down the denominator table than someone who likes to have a wank over an arson, but amongst the unbelievable scenes we've seen of towns and life wiped out, comes the news that some pricks have taken to looting amongst the rubble. How there can be anything left is one thing, but how these low life’s can then have the audacity to snake their way through the ashes beggars belief. Y'know, persecuted races looting the bodies of the dead Nazi oppressors after they've been mowed down by the liberating Allied forces is one thing; bastards looting the smoking remains of neighbours who lived in the same street with them is just plain Lord of the Flies shit.

But wait. There's more. Amongst the arsonists and looters we now have fraudsters, posing as charity collectors and pocketing the cash they have fraudulently gathered, the fucks. Are we still talking about a civilised country here? Because it all reads like something you hear of happening in Africa somewhere, not one of the most developed countries in the world that's four hours away by plane.

Not that the majority of Australians represent the bottom of the gene pool like this arseholes do, but the fact that there are so many in the one area is some scary shit. The doomsayers are having a field day though because for them and ever other fool silly enough to pay for the book on Nostradamus, this is the sign that they might have been waiting on for years and years. It could be, but ol Nostrils is never terribly clear about the exact dates of these things so they go with it until something else pops up.

Everybody has a thing for a good burn up at some point in their lives. I certainly did as a boy, not that it gave me a hard on or anything, but I experimented with fire as much as the next kid and like the kid next door, I nearly burnt the freakin house down too. This was back in the days when all the grown men wore stubbies, a Brazilian was just somebody from Brazil and you took your groceries home in paper bags. We used to pile ours up in the corner of the kitchen where they sat, just gagging for some six year old with pyro tendencies to toss a match on the suckers. So I did one Saturday morning whilst my parents were in bed and man did it light up something pretty.

The flames got damn high on my impromptu bonfire, to the ceiling I recall and the heat coming off it was only fractionally hotter than my arse cheeks would be some twenty minutes later after getting the hiding of my life from my step father, after he had put the fire out. Now you would think that a scare like that would put me off matches for quite some time and it did, but years later I developed a small fascination over lighters and a similar incident to the paper bag thing happened whilst in my Grandmas caravan with a box of tissues.

I was lucky to escape that one by the quick thinking of my sister who had been asleep in the caravan but had been awoken by the cackle of flames and by my lady like squeals of fear, thankfully she immersed the box in a sink full of water. My Grandma was appalled at my actions but ultimately thankful we were both okay, my Grandfather - who was a little bit more old school when showing his emotions - demonstrated his relief that we weren't hurt by the way of a damn good thrashing.

And that was that, the end of my short foray into a career in arson. I learnt my lesson after a) nearly frying myself, twice and b) two well deserved hidings. I hope the murderers in Victoria are given the same treatment because it would be rude not too really.

Bringing Back The Biff

It wouldn't be Waitangi Day without a bit of biff would it? It might only have been a bit of shirt tugging but it seems some good 'ol boys up that neck of the woods are determined to prove each year that the savage native has not yet been tamed by the colonial invader. And what better way to tell it to the man by picking on a guy with a broken arm aye?

But things do seem to have turned a corner as far as race relations go in this country. We all seem to have grown up this past year and realised that a) we don't need to make sensationalistic comparisons of the Maori in this country to the slavery struggles of Afro Americans in the States and that b) flying the tino rangatiratanga flag atop a government building our bridge on our national day, like the Dunedin City Council did, is no big deal.

Not that the Maori flag that looks so good on tee shirts and plastered across the back window of dusty station wagons and vans is actually is the actual Maori flag of independence. It’s certainly not the one that represented the Maori when the treaty was signed. No this present day piece of astute marketing is just that, something thought up by somebody with an eye for colour back in 1990. Not that it really matters I suppose, its not so much the symbol but the movement it stands for, but it's just a little known fact that makes me want to start an argument with someone.

But you know and I know that that little exercise would be like trying to have a balanced discussion with somebody obsessively religious - they're never going to see your point but the reaction would be well worth the wind up. Funnily enough I find all this talk of Maori independence and sovereignty about the same as I do religion; I don't mind that people do so long as they don't attempt to ram it up my arse. A little known fact is that my bottom is an exit only area, nothing gets in that bad boy.

I haven't always been so flaccid when it comes to accepting Te Reo. It all harks back to my college days where we had a marae on site, which in itself doesn't knot my undies, but we also had a principal who obsessed with being as Maori as one can be when one is as white as my aforementioned skinny arse. That meant compulsory Te Reo lessons for everyone at Naenae College, once a week, every damn term. At least it would have been for me had it not been for my mother, who, in perhaps the only moment of genius I can ever fairly attribute to her, wrote me a note that excused me from Te Reo.

She wrote that she would prefer that I learnt how to fully master the English language before I started with something as fruity as Maori. Now a note like that could have been read as being sarcy for someone who didn’t know my mother, but the sad fact is that she was genuinely of the opinion that I had all the communication skills of a mute. This coming from a woman who would later come up with such insightful gems as the day she told me she knew what I spent all my money on; beer and condoms, (like all men do). My mother might have been nuttier than a Snickers bar but I forgave her for it that day.

I wasn't the only one to get out of that particular class though. One of the 'teachers' did too after her old school technique of discipline - by smacking kids over the legs with a vacuum cleaner tube - came to the attention of the school board. Still despite all this, the principal was recognised by the local Iwi as being a huge suck up and was presented with a magnificent feathered cloak at assembly one morning. He thought he looked like the shit and a complete Maori, we all thought he just looked like a tit.

Speaking of bringing back the biff, it seems even that prettiest of pretty boys, Chris Brown is not immune from smacking his bitch up. I knew that guy was too smooth to be true. Admittedly I figured he'd probably end up being exposed as a kiddie fiddler like R Kelly, but wife beater would have been my second guess. And even more proof then that no matter how hot or how desirable a woman is someone, somewhere, is sick of her shit.

Not that I find Rhianna remotely hot or desirable, I think she’s distinctly average, but she seems to have a considerable fan base which I’m guessing just got one name shorter.

Bad Acting and Flying Willies

I saw a lot of scary things whilst in Gisbos and I'm not just talking about skanky girls who think that wearing a singlet as a dress is the latest in high street fashion. Breezy on a hot fanny it might be but I think I speak for every heterosexual out there when I say baring ones undercarriage every time you breathe in, is definitely not cool.

One of the joys of sharing a house is that you inevitably have to share the TV rights and unfortunately that means having to watch bits of shows that you'd never, ever willingly subject yourself to, like Shortland Street. Now I accept Shorters for what it is; a soap that by nature appeals to a pretty low denominator, voyeurism. Which is what all soaps do, they allow the watcher to regular partake in a world that is fantastical and often not their own. We watched a bit of Coro too, as was the Aunties want. Great stuff. But where Shorters differs from the likes of Coro Street is in the standard of the acting.

I've seen better acting at my son’s school. And he's ten. The kids at his school aren't paid to act and they aren't directed by folk who've done course in directing people. So with that in mind you would be right in thinking that they should actually know what they're doing on the set of Shorters. But I don't think they do. You would think that with such a support network in place that 25 minutes of a passable production would be achievable, but it rarely is. I watched several bits of several episodes and I am genuinely convinced that someone somewhere is having a farken laugh, because if I was the person responsible for turning out such rubbish I'd seriously consider topping myself. I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable in calling myself a 'director' or an 'actor'.

Now admittedly Shorters has been a very successful springboard for a notable few, but for every one actor who has gone on to make something of themselves there are hundreds that have delivered their lines with all the intensity one would find in a glass of water. And people watch this stuff? Every night? Fuck me. What really puckers my anus is that people like to talk about Shorters as being 'part of our culture'. The fuck it is. Let's compare Billy T James and Shitland Street and see which one cuts the mustard as far as being part of our culture. The same people also fart about saying things like that a 'whole generation has been raised on Shortland Street'. That bit is probably true, which goes a long way towards explaining a few things about the youth of today, aye?

I'm no stranger to soaps. Back when we were kids we only had one TV - didn't everyone back then - and that meant you watched whatever Mum watched and my mother watched a lot. Coro, Emmerdale, Eastenders; every bloody soap on the box. Hardly the kind of thing a coming of age boy hopes for in order to get him in the mood for a quick one when Mum leaves the room during the ads to make a cuppa. But somehow I got by and my ever increasing, swelling, blue pubescent balls thanked me for it.

Speaking of your cock up, my arse - I couldn't help but notice the world’s biggest phallus rolled into town (well Auckland) this week with the arrival of the first Airbus A380 to our shores. What a monster it is. We boys love planes, quite possibly because most of them look a lot like our willies and if looking at lots of other willies makes me a poof than go ahead and call me Gaylord. But I had to laugh when I saw the A380 because in these hard economic times it kind of reminds me of that episode of The Office where instead of laying off staff, David Brent hires himself a PA.

Of course when they thought up, designed and built the A380 the world wasn't looking down the barrel of a recession. But now we are and it's supposedly darker than Barack’s starfish, only how they'd know that I don't know. Unless his wife came up with that and then I'm pretty sure we can take her word for it. What's she doing poking around there anyway? Kinky bitch.

But it's a bit like Hitler building the equally massive King Tiger tank, the biggest, heaviest tank of the war. It was that great and I get hard just writing about it. But it was ultimately useless because once it finally got to see action, in the defrosting fields of Europe, it was so heavy that it sank into the mud and was immovable. I can only imagine what dear old Adolf would've said when he heard of it, probably something along the lines of 'Shitto'.

Anyhoo. What I don't get about the airline bizzo is the contradictions that come out of the place. On one hand one airline clearly feels it can pack out the biggest cock with wings every flight, whilst on the other hand it's competition are saying that there are too many half empty flights as it is and the A380 is not sustainable. Sounds like someone has airplane envy to me. But if there are so many empty flights then why is it all the ones I've ever boarded were jammed pack with crying babies who haven't had their nappies changed for several hours?

The only thing that would make it worse is if they showed Shorters during the flight.

Things You Find Whilst On Holiday

Don’t you just love the little peculiarities of holidaying? Like as soon as you bomb into the outdoor pool someone is bound to ask "How's the water?”

In my considerable experience the water is always two things; wet and cold. Even on the hottest of days, the water is cold. Admittedly there might be subtle temperature changes if said pool has been bathed in sun so hot it leaves your pink bits moist, but even so, that initial plunge is still going to be farkin cold. Still, it doesn't stop folk who never actually get in the bloody thing anyway from asking does it?

The water in the shower will be cold too, if you're silly enough to be the last of seven adults to have one each morning. A mistake you only ever make once, partly because you'll freeze your nuts of trying to soap and rinse in two minutes flat but more likely because when you tell everyone they'll laugh at you. It's at that point you realise it would probably have been easier to bomb into the pool where of course you expect the water to be cold and wet.

Holiday homes always spring a few surprises that we pampered city folk have been accustomed to. Like wildlife. Or in our case, cockroaches the size of 50 cent pieces. The old style 50 cent pieces. It's not as if this house is dirty, it’s far from that, although the previous tenants took the 'clean before you leave' rule quite liberally, if at all. No it's a flash place with all the mod cons, but somewhere, somehow, there's a small army of roaches chowing down on something because they don't get that big by sitting on the couch eating Twisties like you and I do.

One appeared out of nowhere in our en suite sink last night. I had just finished brushing my teeth, had taken a whizz and gone back to wash my hands when literally out of thin air there it was. And this was no standard roach either; this was a black Waffen SS number and it looked quite capable of running a small insect concentration camp too. It gave me a little more of a fright than usual roaches, or any insect for that matter would, simply because I couldn't fathom where the fuck it came from. One minute it wasn't there, the next it was. Perhaps it was a ninja.

If hot, humid nights in a foreign land (Gisbos) weren't already enough for me to start dreaming of Nam again, now I have Vietcong like roaches to worry about. Charlie would appear out of nowhere too. Now if three tours of Nam taught me anything it's not to fear the bush, thankfully the wife is prone to waxing hers. But we also learnt to ignore things like roaches because the jungles were full of shit like that; snakes, ants, spiders and of course, Mormons. I lost count of how many carefully planned ambushes were ruined by dudes in black suits who had pedalled their ten speeds through the bush to ask if we'd found God? I hadn't but like I always said, if we did and he was wearing black pyjamas, then the man will have to look for himself because shit would really kick off.

Gisbos, well at least our eight acres, appears to be Cicada Central on account of the millions that seem to call this place home. At night they smack themselves silly against the windows trying to get into the light. I don't know what the birds do all day around these parts but it they ain't eating the fucken cicadas, that’s for sure.

Bookcases and their contents are always an interesting place to spend some time when holidaying in someone else’s house. The one in our room has all the mandatory’s; Robert Ludlam, Bryce Courtney, cooking books, fishing magazines and the old classics that are Readers Digest mags. It also had the bonus of a condom wrapper, empty, the contents of which were hopefully discarded somewhere else other then jammed between the pages of the cookbooks somewhere inappropriate, like the white sauce recipe or the bit on how to toss your own salad. I dare not look.

The local municipality is always a good visit, at least initially, then the shops that were such a novelty the first few times just piss you off after that. You know you're in a holiday town when you notice they have shops that Granddad would spend his days driving between; The Pool & Spa shop, The second hand traders (fittingly named Mr BoJumbles), the mower repair shop and old school menswear stores. The kind that sell hankies in a box.

We used to sell hankies in a box in my first ever job at Hallensteins, Our best sellers back than were short sleeve business shirts, walk shorts and walk socks. We sold boxed hanks to the like of DougalMacs mum, who bought him home a new box of eight each week. To this day he hasn't opened them all in the hope they will be a collectable one day. He keeps them all in his Collectatorium at home, which is right next to the masterbatorium, which is right next to the kitchen. Where he keeps the Twisties.

In Gisbos the council makes money from parking meters, but only the out of townies actually pay for parking. All the locals simply park up and walk away. We do see a parkie every now and then, but she is more inclined to give cars the chalk, the international symbol of 'half an hour more', not tickets. That would never happen in Welly. But that's a holiday town for you, sometimes you'd swear that there's some ongoing joke that the locals get and you don't. Like paying for parking.

Oh and we have a pig running wild out there somewhere. Not your cute, little pink number that you can never see yourself eating, but some humongus, fuck off black Hound of the Baskervilles beast that like the roaches is certainly attracted to this place by something.

Quite possibly the father-in-laws snoring at night...

Gisbos: It's A Lifestyle Choice

Gisbos, as you may or may not know, is a little known place on the Eastern most point of New Zealand.

Unlike its sister city Lesbos, there is no all night casino where it's liquor in the front and poker in the rear, but Gisbos more than makes up for its lack of nightlife by being somewhat off the beaten track and totally devoid of almost all of the types that find their way to that other over rated town, RotoAnus.

Gisbos, supposedly, is 90% Maori. I would estimate that two thirds of that number are heavily tattooed, which I admire as much as the next intimidated Caucasian. Normally when I go on holiday I feel six foot tall and bulletproof and often walk around like I own the place, which I think comes from the confidence you get when you're somewhere we no one else knows you or any better. Gisbos is not the kind of place to do that.

Funnily enough, seven days in and I'm yet to see an Asian. I did see a Middle Eastern man in a shop down the main street but he looked as bored as fuck and I'm not surprised; I can't imagine there would be much call for Persian rugs in Gisbos.

There is undoubtedly a large Maori contingent up here and a lot of them are heavily overweight which surprises me given the proximity Gisbos has to so many natural resources. It has a beautiful harbour with plenty of fresh fish on one side and fields of fresh produce on the others. Hardly the stuff of a poor diet. Perhaps money is a problem? Quite possibly, but I've seen a lot of said fatty fatty boom booms getting in and out of flasher motors than mine so I doubt it.

Speaking of motors, the passion wagon didn't make this trip. Despite being made from the finest Korean steel, hill climbing is not its forte, so unfortunately we've had to make do with the mother-in-laws big fuck off shiny Audi. So what with us car training everywhere with the father-in-law's aircraft carrier of a Mercedes we're not only the whitest family in town, we are almost the most eye catching.

Now I'm not one to extol the virtues of the fannying about in the ultimate examples of status anxiety, but you could - just a little mind you - get use to feeling like you're part of a presidential motorcade every time you go anywhere in cars like these.

Unfortunately the drive to Gisbos is quite possibly, one of the most boring around. Everything up to Napier is terribly interesting, but once you leave the 'Bay there ain't nothing to see but hills and the arse end of the trucks in front of you that struggle to make their way up each and every one of the rolling hills that make up most of the two hour trip.

Whereas New Plymouth has a mountain to look at and Taupo has a lake, Gisbos has nothing. Except public service announcement signs that read 'Keep Our Lakes & Rivers Clean', 'Keep Out Aquatic Pests', 'Save Our Forests' and 'Women, Trim Your Beavers'. That last one might have been a figment of my imagination; it was a long drive after all.

Gisbos is the kind of place where you can park up at Video Ezy, leave the window down and the keys in the ignition and expect to find your car still there when you return. Something I wasn't keen to try with the Audi mind you. Other innovations in personal safety include turning up the home stereo so loud that the townies from out of town staying across the road in the 8 hectare block could swear that it was right outside their window, then going out for a bit. Nothing puts off a burglar more than some slow summer jams pumping out of the Aiwa. Pisses the neighbours right off too but hey who cares when you're not home to answer the door when they come a knockin aye?!

Still, despite its flaws, Gisbos is quite the lovely place. I was suitably impressed to see a large contingent of locals down at the recycling plant emptying their overflowing recycling bins four days out before the actual roadside collection takes place. Which probably says a lot about just how much piss gets drunk round here but also speaks volumes of just how conscientious some are in maintaining the idyllic feel Gisbos has.

Incidentally, Gisbos is not actually the official name of this town but I think it has a catchy ring to it that in time, could catch on like Paki's (Pak'n'Save) and Maccas. It may be, as my wife was at pains to point out, actually devoid of a gay community (unlike Lesbos) and thus a misnomer, but I've seen a few fruity numbers around the place and I ain't talking about orchards. But that’s Gisbos for you; not just a destination but a lifestyle choice.

Unless you're a Captain Kirk selling Persian rugs.