Here I am, all taut and terrific after a weekend of yoga with Lance Schuler, who can make even the blobbiest body do weird stuff.
It's a bit scary sometimes, and no-one was more scared than Poppy Llewellyn, who ended up as my partner. She had to be in downward dog (hands and feet on floor with bum way up in the air) and I had to stand either side of her hands and lean back on her. All well and good until she started yelling, "You're too heavy."
Oh, the shame. Every mouthful of Christmas cake and sip of beer flashed past my eyes. That poor squashed Poppy already knew how heavy I was, as she had just had to have me standing on her back while she knelt and pretended to be a surfboard. I loved surfing on her back! Oh yes, yoga is a very serious business.
Someone else was ashamed at the weekend. My darling and his friends (let's just call them Murray and Roger) popped in for a spot of blackjack after dinner. They bought a stack of chips and set off to enjoy themselves until SHOCK! HORROR! GASP! a small but expensively formed rip was noticed on Murray's designer jeans (he's a very dapper chap, our Murray) by a casino holes-in-jeans inspector.
The inspector quite rightly insisted that the hole would put other respectable clients' enjoyment of the evening in jeopardy and a tearful Murray was ordered out.
My darling, who is always immaculately groomed, especially after a big meal of sticky, saucy ribs and a lot of pinot, and his equally finickety mate Rog were aghast that people might think they were the sort of people who had friends with holes in their clothes. The other punters might not have noticed, but that rip certainly ruined the evening's fun for my darling and his chums.
It won't hurt him to have a little less fun, anyway - life with me is just constant pleasure, so it was very good of the casino to bring him down a bit.
There's a bit much fun removal going on around town at the moment and it's important to remember that while no-one wants yukky people out there ruining other people's night out, we can't legislate just against yukky people. We have to bear the brunt of any legislation as well.
On nights when I go into town, I want to find loads of people out and about, the streets full of happy holidaymakers and locals, the bars and restaurants buzzing and busy. I want to drink outside on a beautiful evening and listen to music.
The council has put out a discussion document on noise in Central Queenstown and if you want to give your two bobs' worth, it's got to be in by February 4.
We live in a place that attracts vibrant and energetic people who don't want to be tucked up in bed at 10 with a cup of tea and a vanilla wine. So let's not get a whole lot of rules made that will have our downtown streets silent and empty and not generating any business at all.
The yukky people will still manage to get drunk on supermarket plonk and create havoc somewhere. Better to have them downtown where the unfortunately invisible police we pay for are meant to be keeping an eye on them.
I'm not alone in thinking that a resurrection of the Sergeant Maloney days would be in order. Throwing the bad boys through the window at Eichardt's used to work wonders. That policeman knew every miscreant in town and exactly what they were all doing.
I'm all for more police on night duty, more security cameras and really mean and nasty days in court. Call me a crazy liberal if you want.
Some of you might remember Herbison's Shoe Shop in the Mall, which was around in the Sergeant Maloney days. If I remember rightly, they sold two styles of shoes for girls - T-bars or Roman sandals.
John Herbison has been living near Calcutta with his Indian wife and children for a long time and is now a Hare Krishna monk. He was back in Queenstown recently and collected lots of old bits of machinery that had washed up in the Shotover. He welded these bits into interesting decorative pieces and held an exhibition at Greg and Sara Ross' Lake Hayes house on Thursday.
The whole lot sold to the 70 people who attended and raised $9000 for his local community. Great effort.
I haven't been to the movies much lately, but I went for a preview of Black Swan. I was so glad to be coming out in broad daylight, as it is a very shivery, black movie. It's based on the Swan Lake ballet, but if you are going for the pretty, pretty ballet thing, you'll be disappointed.
These are very bad ballerinas. Very good at ballet but in other ways - not so good. Terrific and terrifying. Do not take your sweet ballet-mad daughter. But a lot of men who aren't really into ballet will find there's a lot about this ballet movie that's very interesting.
For a short while, I planned to have business cards printed saying that I was Superman's Mother's Friend when my friend Ali's son was invited to audition for the role of Superman. The disappointment when he didn't land this plum role was huge, but things have got even better now.
I'll be printing Prince William's Mother's Friend on my cards now. That's right - utterly gorgeous Nico Evers-Swindell is going to be PW in a new TV movie about William and Kate - almost royalty in the Wakatipu. Must polish my tiara. Congratulations, Nico!
Usually I fit in several books a week, but this week has been so hectic and stressful in a number of delightful and dreadful ways. It has been a relief to escape into the world of a collection of netsukes - small, carved Japanese objects.
Edmund de Waal inherited a large collection of these tiny treasures and his fascination with them led him to write The Hare with Amber Eyes, a beautiful, elegant memoir that traces the history of these netsukes as they were handed down through his family.
Obviously, tracking this sort of history is much easier if you come from fabulously wealthy stock with plenty of time to sit in one's fabulous library writing letters about your art collections, and Edmund de Waal definitely comes from that sort of gene pool.
His story of research for this book is equally fascinating. It led him all over the world - Japan, Vienna, Odessa, Paris - exploring hectic times in world history as well as his own family as they were affected by these events. This book is a treasure.
