Slide your Hide at the Hydroslide

A return to Nelson where we found this beauty a couple of days ago. A couple of days ago it was closed. But not permanently. It just opens for the weekends now. Which I think means that we are technically no longer in the holiday season over here. Although it is still plenty hot enough for a go on one of these.

I wailed and moaned until Annie agreed that we could come back when it was open. Me and Jay spent an hour walking, not running, to the top of this one slide and then flying down it on the spongy mat provided. No time for a rest. No time for discussing the intricacies of the ride. Not much to discuss really, there's just this slide. You go down it. In fact there is nothing else here. You pay for half an hour or an hour and you get to go on the one slide. There's no pool other than the one you land in, which is immediately occupied by the next grinning bullet of flesh to appear from the tube. There's no seating area nor refreshment stand. You just go on the slide then return to the top like an inverted Sisyphus until your time runs out and you are abruptly told you can't do it any more.

But a thirst quenched for the moment. Further water slide reports will follow.

Top Ten hits on cassette

One of the particular joys of my new found enthusiasm for motor transport is the rediscovery of the Cassette as the rubbish medium for music that it is. A twelve year old car has various things that still seem the height of new fangled-ness to me. Auto gears with 'Overdrive'; a Moon roof; Soapy water that squirts out the actual windscreen wipers themselves; even the dual drink holders strike me as luxuriant beyond even the most needy necessity. But the TSN-5125 Full Logic Control original car audio Cassette Player has me realising that everything except the steering wheel, the stop and go buttons on the floor and perhaps the mirrors are purely icing. Icing that will one day be as old school as boasting Auto-Reverse is now.

Auto-Reverse is, of course, the tape player's ability to play the other side of the cassette without the need for me to get the cassette out and turn it over. Does it save me listening to five minutes of silence at the end of each side? No. Does it mean I have no idea which side of a cassette is going to be played when I insert a new one? Sure, but why let this get in the way of some further tiny print on the front of the machine. There's already so many buttons that the off-switch has been reduced to a button half the size of my finger tip. Marked 'pwr', positioned just between 'sel' and 'auto-p' it is the quickest option for those of us who didn't want to hear really loud, poorly tuned-in radio in between our cassettes.

Next problem is not the fault of the enthusiastic developers at Toyota Audio. The range of music in cassette format available to me in 2009. I won't bore you with playlists, suffice to say: big shout out to Glyn in Auckland for allowing us to raid his old cassette collection. Don't know if it's your cassettes or my player, but all traces of bass guitar seem to have dissolved with time. And a big 'get your act together! To Nelson Hospice second hand shop, whose catalogue of cassettes is second to none only in the sense that it has a catalogue of cassettes. I want my dollar back!

Perhaps I waited too long to own a copy of Dark Side of the Moon. But Jay summed it up well when he reviewed it as 'sad' music. The unhappy feel of one of the biggest selling records of the late 20th century was added to by the slight tugging of the magnetic strip holding the tunes. Flattening the already downbeat drones and weightening the plodding beats. Cassette quality aside, I still recommend that noone ever bothers listening to this record ever again. You must always choose Easy All Star's Dub side of the Moon instead. It's simply a better version.

Next week: My kingdom for a Blipper and why on earth does my door centrally lock every door, but none of the others do?.

Tommy Love and The Loungerines

There can be no better way to finish of Valentines day than to groove along to unique stylings of Wellington's finest purveyor of the Love Song, Mr Tommy Love. Ably assisted by the Loungerines, he performed a kind of retrospective cum autobiography to a very appreciative open air crowd near the harbour. I particularly enjoyed the Roller Skating numbers and the reworking of a jingle for the Discount Carpet Warehouse where he used to work. Young Theophilus is, of course, a fan of the smoochy ballad, but Jay found the whole thing a bit too loud and didn't really enjoy staying up so late.

But we can not spend all our time Disco Dancing. It is time for us to get our wheels on and head for the South Island. We have plans to hook up with more of Annie's friends in somewhere called Golden Bay, and I fully intend to live up to my promise to myself to find and fling myself down some hydroslides.

Wellington, yes it really is windy

Wellington

Wellington is a great city. Whenever I arrive here, I get excited. In a plane, you come in over the sea to land on the very short airstrip at Seatoun. You wonder if the pilot will make it or drop the plane in the sea. You gaze out at the wooden houses dotting the green hills and the harbour sparkling below. By car, you come round the corner on the motorway to see the harbour and the city laid out in front of you. On a good day it is fabulous. But of course, Wellington's weather is its downfall. Often cooler than the rest of the North Island and geographically placed to be pretty much the windiest place in the country, it may look great but when you get out of the plane or car you are bombarded by the elements.

Returning this time, the weather has been fairly kind to us. The wind has been a feature, as usual. We went to the Island Bay festival. This was a cute affair with a market, fishing boats being blessed by the local clergy and some very good local bands. Unfortunately, the wind threatened to blow the whole thing away! Not a lot has changed in Wellington in the last couple of years. The harbour area has been done up and new playgrounds and cafes abound. It's great to catch up with friends here. I do miss them. Everyone says New Zealanders are friendly. I think this is largely true but for me the thing that marks out New Zealanders in terms of attitude is their ability to see the positive side of everything. There is very much a 'can do' undertone to Kiwi life. When I first arrived here in 1993, I found this rather annoying and suspicious – 'They can't really be that nice. Are they taking the...' - but it is genuine.

What I think about when I'm running – The Blue Lake, Rotorua

8 in the morning. Theo still asleep, Jay and Fran reading comics. Head out of the campsite. The Lake is just across the road. Blue, beautiful, surrounded by bush. Down to the end of the beach and onto the track that goes all the way round the lake. The track is OK to run on, some stones and roots but not too bad, a few steps too. The lake is on my left, glittering through the trees and the track winds through the bush. There are loads of different kinds of trees and plants ranging from vibrant green to olive coloured leaves and black branches and it smells rich and earthy. The cicadas (not sure how to spell this – pronounced 'sick ada z') are deafening. These insects start making their buzzing, rasping noise at dawn and continue till dusk. One landed on the tent today. They look like large grasshoppers and are black with jewels of bright green. 20 minutes out. Am I halfway round? Maybe. The track opens onto a beach. A man is there playing with his granddaughter. The only people I've seen so far. I walk for a minute or two, it's hot and humid. The track is narrower now, twisting and turning through overhanging ferns. Fantails flutter in my path. Where is the end? It's an hour and a half to walk they said at the camp office. 40 minutes and ah, the road. I'd better go and give Fran a hand. Yesterday, Theo had his first go on a trampoline. He lay on it and Jay bounced around him. Gently at first and then not so - 'it's too boingy mum, I can't help it' – Theo's little body is thrown ever higher while he laughs with delight and hysteria. Jay is keen to relive the experience this morning – 'He needs practise mum'. It definitely needs supervision!

One for all the Theophilus lovers out there

One thing you may have been missing from the blog so far is any mention of young Theo. Well he is still here, we haven't left him anywhere along the way. He isn't doing much so hasn't really got any spectacular anecdotes to add to the diary, but he has been advancing in his own way, and is getting a lot of general adoration as he grins his way into friendship with various locals.

He is right there every time I turn round, so I can't really empathise with any of you out there who may have been missing him, but I'm trying to make amends by giving him his own chapter today. He certainly deserves it.

Here comes the Science bit: he's got the hang of crawling pretty good, can pull himself up to a standing position, is less snotty and his excema has cleared up. He still has only one tooth, not sure if he'll ever have another, although he can just about suck down a banana on his own. But other than that is the same smiley, randomly sleeping guy he was when we left. He has a bit more hair, but we still can not work out if it is to be straight or curly. You decide.

Here's the latest pics of him on Youtube for you to adore.

NEWSFLASH: The second tooth has arrived. A large flappy bit of his gum has appeared and there is most definitely another tooth below it. That is all.

A beginner's guide to Schweebing

I'm not sure that I've emphasised it entirely on here, but I do really like my new car. It has all sorts of things that I've always wanted from a car. It goes (for the moment). It has lots of space, which is good as there are lots of us and we have lots of stuff. It is sleek and it looks good, which is a necessary for any vehicle of quality. But there aren't any cars that are ever going to be as a good as a bicycle. Sure they have space and can look good, but with a bike you can barely carry anything and you're going to smell bad once you've got there, so all concerns of possessions and vanity become irrelevant. Like traffic lights.

So anything kind of bicycle shaped is bound to catch my attention and having me grinning at Annie for some pocket money to have a go on it. Enter the Schweeb. A combination of a recumbent bike and an upside-down monorail. You lay inside a bubble that is suspended from a glorified curtain rail. You head forward as fast as your legs and the seven gears will propel you, and then swing out wildly at the corners. All this happens a couple of feet off the ground. You take in a shortish oval track that also has a couple of vertical undulations just to give it an extra Return-of-the-Jedi, Speeder Bike feel. But this sensation will be improved once the track is made a touch smoother, longer, and the recently planted trees have become more of a forest.

All very interesting, I hear you say, but where do you rank amongst the world's Schweebologists? I am proud to reveal that I am the world's 4th fastest Schweebist in my Class. My Class being: piloting a Schweeb with a small boy stuffed inside the bubble too. My solo run made me the UK's 16th fastest Schweeb Driver in my age group, but the tabloids will have a field day when they find out I tried to claim Lebanese heritage in order to increase my ranking. New Zealand computers have not heard of Lebanon, so I was unable to pull that one.