Eyes on the Tiger

Burning bright

The end of Chinese New Year is party time in Auckland. A truly unbelievable number of people descend on Albert Park to admire the lanterns, eat the food and marvel at the sheer crush of the crowd.

So that we could capture the event properly this year, we invested in a new camera. It's described as a "beginner-friendly" SLR, which means that even though its functions are outrageously complicated, they're not compulsory. It takes a ridiculous number of pixels - the images shown here are scaled down to something reasonable for web viewing, otherwise they'd eat up my storage allowance and bloat your browser into a flubbery widescreen pancake, and nobody wants to see that.

We arrived at Albert Park about six-thirty on Sunday. The smell of deep-fried food was everywhere. Susan's nostrils flared, she vanished into the crowd like one possessed of an insatiable hunger for fish balls; I looked away for a moment, and condemned myself to spend the next 40 minutes combing through the crowd in search of her.

An unusually thin part of the crowd. You can see through it.

Apart from that, we had a great time. There was a Chinese prog-rock group (very 70s - they would have been right at home opening for Hawkwind or Pink Floyd). Unfortunately they only got to play a couple of numbers, before being followed on stage by a marginally rehearsed children's choir. The announcer for this latter act kept telling the audience "This next song is very pretty. You will enjoy it."

China's answer to Rush

Well, Chinese culture does tend towards the authoritarian. Eventually we gave up trying to believe her, and moved off in search of lower culture.

That's why they call it a lantern festival

Hundreds of (lucky) red lanterns hung from the trees, along with various ugly faces and improbably-floating luminous babies. The Tiger, of course, had pride of place among the lanterns; a handful of skittish-looking zebras were in front of him, presumably in case he got peckish. Other set-pieces included animals from previous years (the Ox, the Monkey and others), and the traditional turtle orchestra.

At least they sounded better than the kids

I recommend it, it's a fun evening for all the family. But keep an eye on them.

A bid for freedom

Back-of-the-envelope economics

It's almost like being back home. In the 80s. Auckland is in the eighth day of a paralysing bus strike.

Well, "paralysing" might be overstating things a tad. Most people drive themselves anyway. I, swelling with ecological smugness, walk to work. Only an unlucky minority, such as Susan, are really affected.

It's also not a strike. What happened was that 875 drivers and cleaners, wanting better pay, notified their employer that they would work to rule; and their employer, NZ Bus, responded by locking them out.

To me that makes the whole issue cut and dried. Working to rule is about the mildest form of industrial action it's possible to take; if I had my way, it should be the norm for everyone everywhere. Any company that feels threatened by a work-to-rule - is exploiting its employees. To retaliate with a full lockout, completely shutting down your services for over a week - that's a huge escalation.

And most people seem to agree. The (Auckland-based) New Zealand Herald has been squarely behind the drivers. Even Auckland's city government, such as it is, has mostly aligned itself the same way, threatening to cut off $58 million in subsidies to NZ Bus unless it gets back to delivering the services it's supposed to.

Now, we're told NZ Bus normally carries approximately 80,000 passengers per day. Since Susan is one of them, I happen to know that a standard, full-price season ticket costs around $110 a month. Allowing for concessions, let's say the average passenger pays about half that much. That's a monthly income of $4.4 million from fares. Add $58 million in subsidies from the city, and we're talking about an annual income (not counting advertising) in the ballpark of $110 million.

There are 875 drivers and cleaners - let's guess that there are 400 actual buses, each costing (let's say) $25,000 per year in tax, maintenance and depreciation - that's $10 million. Fuel - maybe as much again. That leaves $90 million to pay for advertising (minimal - mostly done by the city anyway), premises, wages, parking and other running costs and overheads. Let's say 40% of that should be going to the people who actually do the work - $36 million between 875 people comes to just over $40,000 per year, or (assuming a 40-hour week) about $20 per hour.

But NZ Bus pays its drivers $14-16 per hour. Susan tells me that other bus companies are significantly more generous. (Although how she knows this, I don't know. All I know is that they're not having these problems, at least not at the moment.) Which suggests my calculations aren't too far out.

It's enough to make me want to start my own bus company. If only I knew where I could lay my hands on 400 buses and a bunch of spare subsidies...

Moving, day one

Friday, 10 July dawns optimistically bright. Sunlight through the blinds swiftly warms our bedroom, and I haul myself out of bed for our last-ever lazy day in the apartment. Susan, sniffling, asks for honey and lemon instead of tea. On general principles, I add a couple of slices of ginger as well.

At 9:00 exactly, I phone the lawyer. The house was still standing yesterday, I tell him, so please go ahead and complete. He promises to call back when it's done. I switch my phone to "Loud", tell Susan to keep an ear open for it, and go for a shower.

About 9:40 we stroll out to Alleluya for a big café breakfast. One last taste of city living. Big Breakfast for me, K-Road Special for S. It's quite nippy in Kevin's Arcade, and the tables in the sun are very popular, but it's a weekday morning so we still collar one. Food is fine. A couple of sparrows flutter about the tables, scrounging for crumbs and perching on the backs of chairs. Target would mark the place down for that, but I still think they brighten up the place and represent a vote of confidence in the comfort. About 10:00, the estate agent calls - congratulations, we can pick up the key any time.

"By the way, the lawyer called while you were in the shower" says S. "Thank you for not worrying me", I reply.

S wants a haircut at the place in the arcade. I go home and pack, desultorily. As I walk past the kebab place near the junction of K Road and Liverpool Street, a customer is clearing his sinuses impressively. I feel strong relief that I've succeeded in industriously ignoring the place for four and a half years.

As I pack, there's a programme on Triangle about Eartha Kitt. Being Triangle, it's an extremely cheap programme - probably cobbled together by a fan, mostly out of other people's documentary footage - but surprisingly well finished for all that. The sound quality, particularly, is excellent.

Around 11:15, we arrive at the agents to collect the key. Our agent isn't there, but another one hands the envelope over with a smile. "Don't I have to sign anything? I could be anyone."

It doesn't seem to have occurred to them. I guess, if I were Anyone, I'd be discovered pretty soon - and in the meantime, all I'd have would be access to an empty house. Still, something feels slightly - amateurish, about the whole performance.

At 11:30 we reach our new home. As I park outside the driveway, another car pulls into it behind me. Then a postal van. I had no idea it was such a social nexus. We amble up the drive and meet our new neighbour. Blair is a policeman. Not one of those tough, businesslike rozzers you see on the tackier type of TV drama, but a rather vague, definitely people-oriented person, in no hurry to get indoors and on with his day. We discuss police shifts and lawnmowers, learn of his own moving experience and where he works, before we can tear ourselves away to get inside.

The key is tiny, sized more for a locker or padlock than a front door, but it works all right. The door is double-locked. We search the house for more keys. None. Bloody kitchen drawers don't open, until I notice the child locks. The lights and water work, but no hot water. I dust the place with flea powder (the previous owners had a dog), while Susan potters about complaining about window seals and loose joinery. I really don't care right now - time enough to worry about that once we've moved in. Measure spaces for fridge and washing machine.

Outside, gas cylinders have been delivered. I turn on the gas and go inside. Gas hob now works beautifully. Hot water works once I figure out which way to turn the tap. The gas heater in the living room also works, but then I get a text from S: "I smell gas". She's texting me for that? I go outside. She's standing by the heater vent.

12:30, back to agent to ask about missing keys. "Under the doormat." What is this, 1960?

12:50, back to house. Sure enough, keys under doormat. Don't fit garage or patio doors, though. Text agent, who claims there are no keys for those. Ho hum. We're going to need a locksmith.

1:30, done for now. Home for tea break. The sky is turning white - there's a thin, even layer of very high cloud, far above the occasional puffs of cumulus. Still to do today: packing, buy fridge, freezer, broom, washing machine.

2:30, back out to shop for whiteware. Petrol first. The car has done 478km for 39.5 litres. That's 28.5 mpg in American, 34 mpg in British. Not too bad, for city driving in midwinter.

Back on the road: whereever did this traffic come from? It's daytime on a weekday, dammit. Sit on the motorway quite long enough, before reaching the shop we scouted a month ago, whose selection seems to have evaporated. Back to the motorway, all the way to West City - traffic worthy of rush hour - while S starts to whimper. I know the symptoms: Valkyrie Needs Food Badly. Arrive at West City, where there are four whiteware shops side by side.

Explore fridges and freezers. Doing the sums, we realise a fridge/freezer is cheaper to run than separate fridge plus freezer, even though the separate versions are individually more efficient. It's a size thing.

For dinner: there's a surprisingly good Japanese restaurant at Westgate. As we sit and review our achievements, I think the Big Day is in danger of morphing into just another day, with nothing more than a dull ache in the calves to show for it. We haven't bought any of the big stuff we set out for, and tomorrow the work begins in earnest - collect the van and raid brother-in-law's house. It's all a bit worrying. At the last moment we remember to buy a hammer and broom, essential tools for any proud householder.

Moving by easy stages. Can't beat it.

Watching the watchers

There's a by-election going on here.

British readers will know what this means - fringe parties being treated by the media as if they mattered, mindless speculation about how badly the government will be thrashed, even more mindless projections about how, if these trends continue, by 2015 we'll be governed entirely by dolphins and probably a good thing too. While I'm on the subject, I'd like to be among the first to welcome our new cetacean overlords.

In New Zealand, things work a little differently. There are only 60-something MPs representing constituencies, so by-elections are a pretty rare event in themselves. And what we lack in experience, we also lack in intelligent investigative media with varied agendas. If I had to sum up our media in one word, that word would be "lazy".



I was planning to write about how the media's coverage of the by-election has now descended from trivial to virtual self-parody. But in the course of researching, I found something I wasn't expecting at all. The coverage on blogs is actually not bad.

Did (the frankly thuggish) Trevor Mallard sic Campbell Live onto Melissa Lee? Okay, so there's no actual "evidence"... but there is a plausible connection, as Mallard was formerly minister for broadcasting. Surely worth some reporter's time to at least ask the question?

Blogs range from the nakedly partisan to the tediously factual, but both these extremes are vastly better than anything I've seen in the commercial media. Better yet is the geekily specialist type that focuses on a single issue, and focuses well.

I've previously argued that blogs can never replace big media. And there are still serious issues with finding the material - if you search without knowing what to look for, you're immediately snowed by more-or-less official party hacks, apologists and thinly-veiled "professional journalists" trying to justify their own feebleness. But if you can dig through that snow, there's some decent analysis.

Hint to Google: if a search engine can find a way to distil that material, it'll wipe the floor with you guys.

Landscape and money

Auckland is a hilly place, and property values tend to go up and down with the terrain.

Take One Tree Hill, for instance. Its peak - the spiritual heart of the city - is surrounded by Cornwall Park, a ravishingly beautiful slice of tamed nature in the city, a favourite spot for family outings and picnics. The park itself is lined with picturesque cottages whose owners enjoy the doubtful privilege of paying ground rent, which (as far as I can make out) is spent on maintaining the park - which explains why these beautiful houses, which should be priced in the $1-2 million range, in fact tend to go for about one-fifth as much. The ground rent keeps the area pretty exclusive, despite the bargains.

Then comes the sharply sloping "suburb" of One Tree Hill itself. Within easy walking distance of the park, it's a well established, leafy residential area where new building is rare - the subdivision here was done decades ago. Which is good, because it makes for a quieter neighbourhood and puts off landlords on the make. But as you go further down the slope, the scene changes rapidly. By the time you reach Waitangi Road to the south, boy-racer cars, graffiti and quite un-neighbourly wire fences are increasingly in evidence. Head eastward, towards the gruesome commercial zoning around Great South Road, and the picture takes a turn for the grimy.

To the south, it's not far before you hit the huge, sprawling suburb of Onehunga. Overlooking Manukau Harbour to the south, this was once the domain of ships' officers; and again the best houses are on the tops of the hills.

Yesterday we'd picked out 3 Quadrant Road, Onehunga as a possible target. It might have stood a chance. Looks nice enough. Unfortunately it's at the foot of a hill, and the road there took us past this gratuitous palace, just as it was holding its open home. Having half an hour to kill, we thought we might as well stop by.

It was a bit like touring a stately home.

Then we went on down to the house we could afford. It was a steep hill, and it took its toll. By the time we got to the foot, it hardly needed the packing factory across the road to put us off the house - which was probably pleasant enough, in itself, before - the old story - someone built another house in its back garden.

The Maoris, it strikes me now, were right. It was a mistake to let these pakeha buggers buy land. Let them live on it by all means, but once they started buying and selling it they got ambitious, and that's been the ruin of it.

The privacy paradox

When I was a kid, I lived in a beautiful big house in a small-ish village in Sussex. Looking out of the windows at the front of the house, there was the front garden and driveway - then the road - and then open fields, with (as I recall) sheep grazing peacefully.

When I was about 12, the greedy farmer sold the land to an even greedier property developer. Over the course of a year or so, the tranquil field was transformed into a housing estate. Google Maps tells me that there are no fewer than three named roads, now, where those sheep should be, with the entrance virtually opposite our former house. I daresay it's a pleasant enough estate, but I never explored it much - I couldn't forgive it for destroying my view.

That's the way most building happens, in England. Some obscenely rich person or company buys a ridiculous amount of land, builds a huge swathe of houses, then sells them off individually, at - if they're even half-way competent - a profit that has to be seen to be believed. In pre-industrial times, it was the aristocracy (for whom, much of the time, "having too much money" was quite literally their biggest problem); in the 19th century, factory owners (who needed somewhere for their workers to live); in the 20th century, professional developers (or the government).

The effects are variable, but on the whole it works well. The population density of England is huge - if it were a US state, it would be second in overcrowding only to New Jersey - but most people live in reasonable housing, with reasonable privacy and good access to amenities. And that, I now realise, is because the houses were built en masse. It's quite possible to put 20 houses on an acre of land, each with its own tiny garden, such that each one is overlooked on only one side (if that) - if you're the only one doing the building.

But that's not the way it happens down here. When pakeha settlers came to New Zealand in earnest, the land was parcelled out in lots, with each landholder in charge of building on their own patch. At the time, that must have felt like a liberating idea. A century or so on, however, the drawbacks are showing.

Most of the early settlers in Auckland - the 'Fencibles of the 1840s - built their houses on quarter-acre "sections". Pretty soon it was clear that this was too generous, and section sizes came down steadily; in central Auckland today, it's very rare to see a section offered that's much more than 400 square metres (one-tenth of an acre). And each time the "standard" section size comes down, people on larger sections have subdivided their land and built new houses, according to their own whims and bank balance, wherever they could fit them in.

It is, in a word, a mess.

Take, for instance, this place in Ellerslie, which we looked over a few weeks ago. Nice garden, decent area - but the whole of Ellerslie has similar privacy issues, and they're getting worse by the week. If these houses had been built all together as a two-storey terrace, or as duplexed pairs, they would have ended up with larger gardens, larger floor space and better privacy. But because they're each built standalone, they all overlook one another.

And the worst of it is that expectations have migrated steadily downwards, so now, even when developers do have a lot of land, they simply don't seem to notice the idea of privacy. Consider this pleasant house in rich Remuera. "Perfectly private" says the estate agent - which is an outright lie, unless you're willing to keep every blind closed 24/7.

Auckland has less than half the population density of London; but it's vastly overcrowded - just because it's ludicrously inefficient.

That's freedom for you.

House hunting, week (enough)

We're getting better at house hunting. I mean, we haven't yet reached the point where we can go to the right place and sit in a hide and the perfect house just comes up and eats grains out of our hands, but we've definitely improved from our early lumbering attempts to chase them down across the open savannah. Of the seven places we saw this weekend, three are quite livable, and one of those is (probably) surprisingly cheap.

But we still make mistakes.

One place we almost missed, on Sunday, by not double-checking the address. Two open homes at the same time within ten houses of each other - what are the odds? Still, we wasted most of the timeslot looking round the wrong place - an architectural embarrassment crammed into not enough land behind some rustic takeaway shops. Emerging into the sunlight, Susan leafed again through the details we'd printed out. "Did you see a fireplace?", she asked innocently.

Our real objective was a short dash up the road, which we reached just in time to find the agent politely bidding her last visitors farewell. But we were in no mood to take hints. Charging in like a SWAT team, we breezed through the house in three minutes flat. It was worth seeing.

Other highlights:

Nestled on the southern slopes of One Tree Hill is the bustling suburb of Royal Oak. The house on Turama Road is astonishingly ugly, has very little land, and is in urgent need of a new kitchen and bathroom - but surprisingly roomy on the inside, and cheap. Worth considering.

1/87 Te Kawa Road is a pleasant enough house, but as usual some idiot has attached a massive deck covering more than half the garden. What's left is a vertiginous patch of ferocious vegetation that looks like it's stolen from the set of an Indiana Jones movie.

Our second visit to a house we saw last week in the rain. In sunlight, the problems became more obvious - most notably, the fact that the master bedroom faces onto a fairly noisy road. Still, there's such a thing as double glazing.

One place where road noise is not an issue is 305 West Tamaki Road. As we made our way down the rugged driveway, my strong impression was that the cicadas were starting something. Here, the soothing summer accompaniment to lazy days outside was transformed into something more like a civil defence siren. If a tsunami ever does strike this part of the coast, let's hope it happens at night.

The house itself was very pleasant - 1970s construction (I'm guessing), with a few issues around uneven floors, but good sized rooms and garden.

The cicadas followed us all day, right across to the tail end of Mt Eden Road, where the house we'd come to see had conveniently been sold to save us the trouble of looking around it. So thoughtful.

All in all, our hit rate has improved markedly. We chose to call it a successful weekend.

I'd rather be listening to Mahler

The worst thing about house hunting is how it takes away one's weekends. Not that we spend that much time actually out and about looking at the damn' things; but there's time researching online, drawing up a shortlist, scheduling, travelling and looking; then there's time discussing afterwards, trying to decide which ones deserve any sort of followup.

This (Monday) morning my phone has been ringing with agents wanting to know what I thought of their property, which to tell the truth I can barely remember. So here, for my own convenience, is my take on this weekend's crop of no-hopers:

• 3/57 Mariri Road - nice little place, good neighbourhood, but criminally overpriced. The agent was talking loudly (to a roomful of viewers) about a price possibly "in the high $500s".
  Yeah right.
  If she's been fool enough to talk like that to the vendors, they're not going to sell. Not this year, anyway.


• 11 Esperance Road: very nice - in summer. But I can't rid myself of the thought that, come winter, the huge, all-glass, single-glazed walls are going to be something of a liability.


• 31 Duke Street: ancient phone kiosk and collection of stolen roadsigns in the front garden. Two bathrooms, no bath. Ensuite with underfloor heating, but no heating in the rest of the house. In short: built by and for a man, with no noticeable input from his wife. Sorry, but sometimes stereotypes just work.


• 64 Parau St: this one I think the agent put us off by playing obnoxious music on the outside speakers. All Kiwi estate agents are obsessed with "outdoor living". Me, I like to spend time indoors. Guess I'm just a foreigner.


• 38a Symonds St: this is a lovely house. Good condition, great rooms, excellent storage, a downstairs. It suffers only from two things: too much sun in the kitchen, and greedy developer syndrome (some wanker built three houses on a lot that would've accommodated two just nicely). Taken together, these things are enough to spoil it.

Two other places we saw that we haven't completely ruled out yet - and that's even more of an intrusion on my time. But I'm not very hopeful for either of them.

Of night and light and the half light

The Lantern Festival is one of the highlights of our year.

It's an ancient Auckland tradition, passed down from generation to generation since 1999, marking the end of the two-week celebration of the Chinese New Year. A great gathering in Albert Park, full of lantern sculpture, more or less tacky Chinese culture, fireworks, and dodgy Asian foodstuffs. A photo-op for politicians - the prime minister gives a speech and shows off his Mandarin - and a chance for dragon-dancers, martial arts schools and Chinese opera wannabes from all over to grab some limelight for a few minutes. All on a sweltering late-summer night.

Lanterns, balloons, badges, brooches and hideous fridge ornaments take the form of great Chinese cultural icons, such as zodiac animals, dragons, Shou Xing and SpongeBob SquarePants. (Nice to see that the li'l yellow dude has decisively replaced all Disney characters at these events - there was not a duck or a Pooh character to be seen. Take that, Mickey: that's what you get for repressing your fans.)

We left it late, this year - it was dusk before we left home - which meant we missed the daylight events. But the main event - the lanterns - are, of course, seen at their best after dark. Since there is no charge for admission, the crowds are always spectacular, and quite often we found our direction dictated mostly by which way it was physically possible to go. We saw the prime minister, surrounded by dark-suited figures whose purpose seemed to be to shoulder his way through the riff-raff. Perk of the job, I guess.

I love the whole thing. My avatar picture was taken at a festival two or three years ago. Several displays this year would have made for worthy replacements - the ever-popular monkey god, kid riding backwards on a ram, a four-toed dragon pausing in mid-descent, as if to exchange gossip with some random old sage. Sadly, however, my trusty Canon doesn't seem to be entering the spirit of the occasion. Rather than the unimaginative yet honest verisimilitude of earlier times, it prefers to render images as opaque abstracts in dark colours, more like an elderly Whistler than a keen-eyed Rembrandt:


I call this one "Year of the Ox". And to think people say that machines can't do art.

House hunting, year 2

It's curious, how different people's perceptions can be.

Looking out of the upstairs window from 4/33 Rukutai Street, Susan -- already unsympathetic -- muttered to me: "There's a stagnant stream outside."

There was indeed one of those water features that estate agents persist in calling "a stream", but look to me more like a poorly-finished ditch. I pointed it out to the agent.

"What's the problem? We're well above sea level here," he shrugged.

"Sea level be damned," I retorted. "What about mosquito level?"

"Ah, that's only a problem with stagnant water. That out there, that's running water."

I looked again at the water. A lethargic 'skater twitched its way across the surface.

"That's running, is it?"

Babbling, burbling, gurgling, rushing -- all of these would be entirely false descriptions. Truer descriptions would feature terms such as "ochre", "fecund" and, I felt, quite possibly "leprous". This water wasn't running, it wasn't even sauntering, I seriously doubted if it so much as got out of bed.

Have I mentioned what lying bastards estate agents are?

House hunting, II

I'd never heard of the Mareth Line until today. But somehow I knew the name must have been associated with a battle of the Second World War.

Today's house-hunting began with 24 Mareth Street, Panmure. Panmure's streets read like the New Zealand Corps battle honours for the war -- Tripoli, Caen, Dunkirk, Alamein, Benghazi, Tobruk. Not entirely by coincidence, it was built mostly in the late 1940s, and it has both the pluses and the minuses of the period.

The Second World War, in British cultural history, was a great "levelling" event. It was a total war, war as waged by every man, woman and child in the country. When it was over, everyone had shared in the sacrifice, and it followed axiomatically that everyone should share in the rewards of peace. And so there followed a huge expansion in public housing. In Britain it gave rise to the New Towns; in New Zealand, it gave us Panmure.

The houses are well built, in the spirit of post-war egalitarianism. They have quite respectable patches of land. But they're built by people who never intended to live in them, for people who were expected -- for the most part, correctly -- to be grateful for whatever they got. There is no heart in them, no love. No-one ever sat down, before they started building, and thought properly about how they'd live in each house. The result is -- well, it's four good walls and a roof, but it's not a home. Nowadays, people seldom stay here more than a few years -- and you can see why.


(Image courtesy Google Streetview. I'm not sure if that's legal. But if I were them, I certainly wouldn't want to make a deal of it.)

The first thing you notice, as you drive into Panmure, is a Church of Scientology. That's not a good sign anywhere. Scientologists prey on the depressed, the desperate, the ill-educated and the terminally confused; the presence of a full-time, dedicated "church" of that denomination suggests a high prevalence of these attributes, which (to my way of thinking) does not make for desirable neighbours.

Enough with the half-assed social history. The house is -- simply, pointless. The present owners have done their best to make it a home, they've renovated everything and begun creating a new bedroom, but even so they can't make it worth living in. Call it -- bad feng shui.

Next stop was 18 Ruawai Road, Mount Wellington. Here I noticed that the agent had taken trouble to close the blinds on the right-hand side of the house; opening one of them revealed the neighbour's unenticing rubbish dump. Essentially, it's four breezeblock walls, no roof, containing -- rubbish. Not something I want to live next to.

Then back for another attempt at Panmure. 7 Te Koa Road looks pleasant enough from the outside -- but its neighbours don't. "If these kids go trick-or-treating, I'm barricading the door", said Susan, watching two of the local thugs barrelling past, unhelmeted, on a quad-bike. We didn't bother to go inside.

Finally, 17A Inkerman Street, Royal Oak. Royal Oak is a quiet, genteel area, less lively than nearby One Tree Hill. 17 Inkerman Street was once, no doubt, a lovely home; now, it's the site of eight brand-new units in a terraced arrangement. We knew it was in our price range, because it was advertised as "price slashed", although it didn't say from or to what. So we looked up the official government valuation of the site. $490k. We can afford that.

"How much?", I asked the agent.

"$595,000", he said.

I wish, now, I'd laughed in his face. He deserved it. Smug, lying bastard estate agent. But I repeat myself.

The idea of building my own house appeals more every day. All I need is a patch of land...

House hunting, week 15 (ish)

In the first blush of enthusiasm, we'd set out to hunt six, eight or even more houses each day at weekends. It was exhausting, particularly since neither one of us knew our Auckland geography from our elbows. We'd start off in Mt Wellington, trek across to Epsom, down to Mt Roskill or Hillsborough, back up again to Grey Lynn...

(You might want to glance at Google Maps if you want to follow along, but it doesn't really matter. All you need to know is that these places are all about 15 minutes apart, and we were viewing houses at half-hourly intervals. Those were full and rich days.)

Susan, who was navigating, would often close her eyes during the tedious bits (i.e. most of Auckland). But I was driving, and if I adopted the same policy I thought there might be side effects. So I took to unilaterally varying the routes, to see more neighbourhoods and give me a change of scenery. Of course that meant she had to stay awake too, but you can't make an omlette...

This precaution on my part helped us both to reach the same point of exhaustion at about the same time. Which was a relief. We took a couple of weekends off, we fled the country, and when we got back we settled into a steady rhythm. Now we try to schedule no more than four houses per day, and seldom more than two in any half-hour period.

Today's tour began in Meadowbank, a suburb so exclusive that until today I was only dimly aware of it. One finds it by starting from the upmarket shopping district of Newmarket, travelling through the genteel suburb of Remuera until it turns into leafy St Johns, then taking one of the unmarked and unprepossessing turns that leads into the forbidding turf of Meadowbank itself. F/120 Gowing Drive, when one gets there, is very finely calculated to uphold the tone of the neighbourhood by putting off nearly, but not quite, everyone. It's one of 20 or so houses on a single patch of land; it has a railway track running past the back garden, which itself is low enough to be prone to flooding when the Purewa Creek bursts its banks; and worst of all, it has a driving range under the house itself.

Susan was put off when we went upstairs to the kitchen (Kiwis often put their kitchens on the top floor, I don't think they know any better, poor things) and found she had to stand on tiptoes to peer over the counter. I refrained from telling her how cute she looked.

I was put off when I wandered around the upper landing, and found myself walking downhill. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer floors that are level.

In short, the house was perfect for a tall, sociable, amphibious, golf-loving train-spotter who's not too fussy about the finish of their building. Scratch one.

Next stop was the more down-to-earth, neighbourly suburb of One Tree Hill, which has become something of a favourite of ours. It seems to offer more promising combinations of house, land and neighbourhood than any other area we've tried. 8 Tuata Street was the best new offering we saw today, featuring a quiet, leafy street, a decent kitchen and small but welcoming entertaining space, and a tiled and modern bathroom. But no bath, and no room to add one.

Scratch two.

The third offering was in Ellerslie, our second visit to an address I'm not going to publish here because there's an outside chance we might buy it. It's a pleasant enough house, but suffers from a mild case of Auckland Developer Syndrome (not to be confused with Kiwi Builder Syndrome, on which I'll probably have occasion to rant at a later date).

Show an Aucklander a house with a backyard big enough to accommodate anything larger than, say, an agoraphobic goat, and what they see is at least four lots of prime building land. And if you make the mistake of only building two houses, each with a reasonable patch, the next owners will just subdivide it again. It's like a cancer, splitting and destroying the land. (I just wish they had the sense to build upwards more often. If land is so damn' precious, then why do less than half the homes in Auckland come with stairs?)

This particular house does feature stairs, and a garden about the size of a two-lane bowling alley. And a patio door that opens onto the neighbour's driveway. No, really.

Last on today's itinerary was 19/27 Birdwood Crescent, Parnell. Parnell is a dream of a place to live: central yet peaceful, a buzzing, Bohemian community, rich in academics, artists and modest inherited wealth. (We passed a house that actually did keep a goat in its backyard, possibly as some kind of test of land area.) 27 Birdwood Crescent was, at one time -- probably within living memory -- a stunning, although slightly vertiginous, patch of land, backing down towards the Domain, offering a placid and uplifting view of the Auckland Museum. Then someone decided to concrete the whole thing over, divide it into something more than 30 separate lots and build a shoebox on each.

Scratch three. When this place comes to its senses and appoints me dictator, the former owner of 27 Birdwood Crescent is going to have some very hard explaining to do to the Inland Revenue, the kind of explaining where he ends up considering himself lucky to be allowed to sleep on a park bench.

Another day, another washout.

On the plus side, I can now find my way from Ellerslie to Parnell without any navigational aids at all. If you want to learn your way around a city, buy a house.