Yes, I did. I imported a vintage car into the UK. Here he is outside Cowboy's brother's house.You see, we have no off-street parking at The Bolt-hole, and parking him at the kerbside in London would be foolhardy in the extreme. Thieves would be able to make off with him in their arms. Additionally, he's delicate and he really should be in a garage lest droplets of rain cause unsightly rust.

Ingredients:7 weeks backpacking around Asia1 shipping container, with all personal possessions, delayed for no good reason1 vintage car, ready for import, and assorted bureaucratic requirements4 weeks of staying in someone else's house1 9-day bad head-cold1 sporadic internet connection1 wedding in far-off Wales2 small children, aged three and four years1 flat, damaged in multiple small but

It's been 17 days since I returned to the UK, and in that time I've noted that some things have changed, and some have remained the same. After an absence of two and a half years, some adjustment is inevitably required, I suppose. The novelty will wear off, eventually. For the moment, I'm relaxing into the UK in the same way you might flop into a large beanbag and note that somewhere deep in the

Is anyone still out there reading this blog? Apologies for this stream of consciousness, but it's about all I can manage for the moment.I'm back in the UK, at last. There are, of course, ups and downs to any arrival back in one's home country after an absence of significant length. To compound these into enormous troughs and peaks, I've been on the road and are suffering some mild reverse

I had been back in New Zealand for less than 24 hours when I received the call every migrant dreads."Hello. How was your holiday?" said my mother, but her voice sounded like it was missing something. Hollow, and exhausted. I launched into stories about what a great time we'd had, but how it had been marred with having to deal with the problems of our tenants. "That's nice." she replied, and it

We left Tekapo the next morning, heading to that mecca of all things extremely dangerous: Queenstown. This was our third visit, and the first that would not involve a bungee jump, jet-boating, canyon-swinging, or other assorted sense-defying stunts of foolishness.In that time-honoured tradition of having to buy a gift for people who live on the other side of the globe, and not knowing what to

We left Pak n Save and drove to Ruby Bay, to find the place we were to stay in for the remaining two nights on the South Island. The power of google had brought us to possibly the best holiday home in the universe: it promised sea views, a beach frontage, interesting high-quality decor, organic chicken eggs laid fresh every morning by the local flock, and an olive grove.As the sun was beginning

This is the part of the trip where things really started to bite, for me. Bite hard. You'll have to excuse the rant and the lack of photographs. Consider it part of the authentic experience. Or artistic license because we're coming to the end of the trip and I've got to string the blog-fodder out until something interesting happens in my current life. You choose. Choose Life. Choose never

Did I ever tell you about the time my father (man of the cloth) offered to pay me £1 to chew and swallow a black peppercorn? No? Well, impoverished young kid that I was, I succumbed to temptation. I chewed, and swallowed, and then vomited quite spectacularly. All in all, entertainment worth £1, I feel. But my father refused to pay up, on the grounds that I hadn't kept it down*. It's really

Waking up in the morning and realising I had not flipped my mortal coil was, you'll appreciate, a relief. However, 10am check-out times are never a thing of beauty. Combined with an overwhelming desire to be on my own alone for just a little while, without having to organise, answer questions, or re-pack my bag in an emergencified state, a 10am check-out time, sans breakfast opportunity, put me

Newsflash! I'm not dead! I have merely been sucked into a work-shaped black hole. Those stories you've probably heard about public sector workers sitting around all day eating digestive biscuits? Total myth. Tell it to my 50-hour working week, for which I get paid 20% less than market rate. Sigh. I do it for the love. Anyway, on with the show. So, we left Queenstown and drove to the side

Good grief. I've had to edit 3 times owing to dumbery. Onward:Some ninety minutes later it was time to stop for lunch, and Twizel hoved into view. At this point I should probably say that my family left weeks ago: think of this as an edited hightlights blog retrospective. If they were still here, one of us would be dead by now. The truth is that there is no way I could summarise the visit

The next morning, we awoke and everyone but my brother focussed on cleaning the house. My brother focussed mainly on dropping a beer bottle on the kitchen floor and staring aghast at the broken fragments of glass and the waste of a good drink.But these details are familial small fry. Our next stop was to be Lake Wanaka. On the way, a little offshoot road takes you up to Aoraki Mount Cook.

Our friends own a holiday home in Lake Tekapo:Photo by Fraser Gunn.We couldn't pass up the opportunity of Mate's Rates for two nights, so we wound our way from Kaikoura to Tekapo via the scenic route through the mountains, rather than the boring route across the flat flat flat Canterbury Plains. Unfortunately, the scenic views consisted of driving rain, so the price of an extra hour and a half

I tried to write this post yesterday, but I forgot that my brother was turned loose on the computer in order to organise and conglomerate the several hundred photographs we ended up with after the trip. For reasons known only to himself, he set about deleting the photographs he didn't like. Presumably he concluded that some of them were pointless because he has not heard of autostitch, or of

...there were two hours of uninterrupted silence. The birds have flown. I have had insomnia for the last two nights. I physically could not cycle to work this morning, so I stood at the bus-stop. Alarmingly, I didn't even have the energy for anger. I passively stood at the bus-stop and didn't care one whit whether the bus would show up, and if so, when. I stared vacantly into space and when

Maybe 'eagles' isn't so accurate. 'Slightly ruffled exhausted-looking pigeons' is probably a truer description. My family has arrived in New Zealand for a visit, and as I stood at the gate waiting for them to disembark their final flight (London to Singapore -12 hours; Singapore to Auckland -12 hours; Auckland to Wellington -1 hour) I was struck by how utterly bizarre it is to welcome one's

I have calmed down since the weekend, ably assisted by all the support I received in the comments. Thank you, readers! Who knew that interrupted mooching could garner such sympathy? May we all unite forever in our sofa-love and bring about world peace and the ending of poverty through the extended doing of nothing. Anyway, It's Thursday. Thursday is only one day away from my favourite day of

Where-ever you are, and whatever you're doing, I hope you're enjoying the holiday season!We had a considerably better Christmas than last year. This year someone else did all the food-related work, for which we are eternally grateful. The day was a glorious fusion of Latin-American and British tradition: we kicked up our heels to the sounds of Shakira and Ricky Martin, drank Pina Coladas, and

I have alluded in the past to the fact that I spent a few childhood years living on a commune in the countryside. It comes time to provide details of this incredibly happy period of my life. A period marked by minimal parental supervision, and countless hours spent pratting about in the countryside. Unfortunately I don't have any original photos because this was before the digital age, I don't