Happy New Year to you all and I hope that your Christmas was as strange and wonderful as ours.
We had a selection of small relatives - three very small ones and three nearly teenagers - and their presence made all the rest of us remember how exciting Christmas used to be at that age.
My father was given a push lawnmower, which wouldn't thrill most people, but my 2-year-old nephew was dumbstruck with pleasure. He and my pyjama-clad father made a strange couple pushing it around and around inside the house.
I like to throw out tea towels and underpants at Christmas, so it was lucky I held fire this year as Santa didn't bring us any new ones. I'm going to have to do something about this - my darling's underpants are looking a bit like something from an adult lingerie shop - a lot of holes in unusual places. Actually, apart from the holes, they look nothing like sexy lingerie at all. In fact, Christmas was a bit of a letdown all around.
I woke at 5am to the merry sound of the cat vomiting up some not very digestible rabbit ears beside my bed. One of our sons emailed to say he had thought of buying me some hose connectors, but had forgotten. He did just want to let me know it was the thought that counted, though. AND no new tea towels or undies.
New Year was more fun, though. I usually dread New Year's Eve (it's so hard for it to live up to the teenage memories I still have), so I used caring for my baby niece as an excuse not to have to go out. Lots of friends called in for a quick drink and many didn't leave.
At 3am, my niece's crying woke me. When I went to soothe her, I heard a hideous roaring noise in her room. In my tipsy state, I had set up the baby monitor the wrong way round, so my darling's snoring had woken her.
After all the holiday fun with our families, we took a family holiday.
We went to a fantastic wedding on Waiheke Island, which has a similar feel to here. Everyone who lives there is told how lucky they are to live somewhere so lovely, and it must sink in.
Like Queenstowners, everyone seems pretty happy and relaxed. Living in what I think is the most beautiful part of this country, I'm always a bit mystified why people want to go anywhere else for their holidays, but the North Island really showed me why so many people love the other options. Waiheke was terrific, but then we went to Matarangi in the Coromandel.
What an eye-opener. Huge, gorgeous beach and every day our friends' four sons would take the boat out and come home laden with snapper, crayfish, scallops, flounder and pipis and cook up a storm.
We are considering sending our own four sons on a bit of a training programme with them.
The very excellent part of going away for a holiday is getting away from all the daily routines at home. If you aren't in your own house, the phone doesn't need answering, visitors aren't visiting you, animals don't need feeding and gardens don't need watering. The luxury of reading books for several hours a day with nobody needing you is never possible at home.
One of the standout reads was Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes.
Marlantes is a highly decorated Vietnam veteran and this huge book is about a young marine, Mellas, who enlists for the war in Vietnam for some vaguely patriotic reasons. Marlantes has done a great job of depicting the total tedium and pointlessness of war without writing a tedious and pointless book.
Mellas is a likeable guy and the idiotic decision-making from the top brass which endangers his and his fellow soldiers' lives is infuriating and horrifying all at the same time.
I'm not really into war novels, but this is terrific and has a handy table at the front showing the layers of command for dummies like me.
Louis de Bernieres has a mixed track record - Captain Corelli's Mandolin and A Partisan's Daughter were great, but he's written a lot of not so good stuff as well. I finally got round to Notwithstanding - the name and story of a fictional village in England.
The village is the main character and each chapter is a separate story which builds the whole. The stories are dangerously funny - they start off making you laugh until you realise the darker, sadder message inside, from the general who likes to wander round naked to the squirrel shooters and the rabbit with myxamatosis. It's Louis de Bernieres back to being brilliant.
I'm mad about books that turn a subject I know nothing about into a really fascinating and compelling story.
Rebecca Skloot is a science writer and her first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is the story of a young black woman who died of cancer in the 50s. Her cancerous tumour was put into a culture and has changed the whole history of medicine.
Skloot tells the history of Henrietta, her family, the science and the changes in medical ethics. It's the strangest idea for a story, but you'll love it, I promise.
The Lake Hayes A and P Show is on tomorrow, so if you haven't already started your baking or knitting or growing your biggest thistle, now is the time to get going.
We will all miss the truly good Ewan Maxwell who died this week - our community will be much the poorer for losing him.
