Four days of fishing and foolishness with four friends and one darling in Fiordland on the Pembroke last week was pure bliss, but what I noticed and loved the most was that totally-out-of-contact-with-the-world experience (apart from Greg Turner's Oscar winners update texts by satellite phone).
It's so rare to be that out of touch any more, that it's exciting coming back and hearing the news again. Except that it was all sad - shark attacks, balloons on fire and Ralph Hotere dying.
When I was a vile teenager in the fifth form, I was lucky enough to have a fabulous French teacher called Cilla McQueen.
At the end of the year, she invited the seven St Hilda's girls and five McGlashan boys in our class to a French dinner at her house. She was married to a very funny Maori guy called Ralph. We ignorant things didn't know who he was except that he was our teacher's husband and extremely entertaining.
He was a generous host and filled our 15-year-old selves with Chateau Cardboard, endless cigarettes and let us tell him what his funny sort of paintings were about.
They were groups of numbers from between 16 and about 35 in the shape of a cross, and we guessed wrongly for ages until he relented and told us that each cross represented a row of graves in Italy where his brother was buried, and each number was the age of the soldier buried in each grave.
It was a memorable evening, not just because we felt so grown up being allowed to get a little drunk and smoke and snog those boys (these three things were thrilling enough to a boarding school girl!), but to have our first encounter with contemporary NZ art from such a master was an extraordinary privilege.
All the girls who had dropped French were green as grenouilles with envy. I dropped in at the Red Bull Roast It in Gorge Rd on Saturday to join the thousands of beautiful young things watching the BMX champions of the world defying gravity in all manner of frightening ways.
If you shut your eyes for a minute, you could open them and see five or six bikes and riders all high off the ground, upside down, sideways, headfirst as if they had all fallen from the sky instead of having launched themselves from the ground.
Quite extraordinary feats of strength, co-ordination and sheer guts, and I loved the way these biking heroes high-fived and encouraged their slack-jawed and adoring young fans as they biked past them.
Ahem ... professional golfers, you could copy that attitude and drop a few more encouraging words and smiles to your audience, especially to the younger spectators.
Lydia Ko is a brilliant ambassador for the sport, and I can't see her losing her charm and manners if and when she turns professional. Watching the PGA golf was excellent fun, although not so terrifying as BMX (what's with all these acronyms?).
My only terrifying moment was seeing what my darling had chosen to wear for his day of caddying. He had been sound asleep when I left the house and I was accosted more than once by anxious friends asking why I had let him leave home in a bright floral Fijian shirt and red tartan shorts. Golfers are famous for their challenging sense of fashion, but my darling really showed them who was the bravest in that regard on Saturday.
Kate Johnstone lent me Reading Jackie, which is almost the memoir that Jackie Onassis never wrote herself. I hadn't known she was an editor at Viking and Doubleday after Onassis died, and William Kuhn has written a very readable book which shows the real and unpublic Jackie through the books she chose to edit.
Her life as the wife of those powerful men, and her status as the great fashion icon made her a fascinating woman anyway, but this literary side of her is even more so. And I'm so pleased so many of you have enjoyed The Yellow Birds and In the Garden of Beasts.
Debbie Lipner from The Branches is in a book club in America with some very good book-choosers, and these were her recommendations. Thanks, Debbie - do keep letting us know what's great in the United States.
