Our journey to where we are now (that is, quite in love with New Zealand) has involved a large number of conversations with fellow immigrants. After the usual "How long have you been in New Zealand? Are you enjoying it?" platitudes and a discussion about the wonderfully diffent nature of this land at the bottom of the world, the laws of immigrant conversational phsyics take a turn towards the

I have shaken off most of the jetlag and attended one session of yogic spine re-alignment, and a moment of free time squeals into view on two wheels. I'm grabbing it, lest it veer out of my reach imminently. So buckle up, because it's a long one! These astonishing conclusions hot off the press: first, no matter how many times trans-global trips are made, one never becomes accustomed to the

After years of fruitless searching, I have finally procured the perfect pair of boots:I have carried the mental image of the perfect pair of boots around in my head for so long that the boots became like the Holy Grail. No shop had something that fit the bill. Oh, bits would be satisfactory, like the colour. But there would always be a glaring departure from the image: a four-inch

A little piece of advice from a Kiwi friend came home to haunt me today. In NZ, it is nowhere near as easy to return an item of clothing as it is in the UK or USA. Generally speaking, if you do what I do when out clothes shopping, which is buy things without trying them on and then return them for a refund after trying them on at home, you're going to get stung. Often they won't take the item

I've got a serious shoe-related problem. In sum, I have a posh wedding to go to. I bought a dress in a post-exam panic-buy frenzy last week, because I have literally been too busy to do anything (for example, I bought Cowboy's wedding anniversary gift a whole two days in advance of the anniversary) except fret and worry about my exam. However, the perfect shoe was nowhere in sight, and I was