The good ship Miranda is bulging at the seams this week with a lot of faces very familiar to Queenstown - award-winning architect Andrew Patterson, geologist Andres Arcila, party people Marianne and Roger Dickie, from Panorama Tce, and our own (well, over the hill in Wanaka) Annabel Langbein and husband Ted.
We are also in convoy with a gulet containing Steve and Virginia Fisher and Ross and Josephine Green.
It's just like being at home.
Our lovely skipper kept begging us to get another crew member as our sailing skills (or lack thereof) meant that our boat was going to pick up a reputation for being a sort of floating dodgem car around the marinas and, fenders or not, that is not a popular way to behave. So now we have Alatin on board as well.
These Turkish names are very hard to remember, but our names are pretty tricky for the Turks to grab hold of, too. At least, mine is printed in huge letters on almost every part of the boat. The letters on the bow got a bit of battering (probably at sea, and I hope not from collisions in marinas!) so on one side I am called MI ANDA and the other IRA DA. Annabel got spotted by some fans of hers in Istanbul and was delighted to be introduced as something like Animal Landmine.
Ms Landmine has been launching The Free-Range Cook all around the world, and last week it was the United Kingdom's turn.
I couldn't resist another trip to London for the book launch because the venue was the penthouse on the 17th floor of New Zealand House. I hadn't been up there since I was working in London in the 1980s.
New Zealand wine was just being introduced to the UK market and, if you were a New Zealand business in London, you could often take clients to drinks on Friday night there and sample all this exciting New World wine.
Needless to say, there were some very good parties.
As ever, it was a fabulous place to show off Annabel and great New Zealand food and wine. On a perfect night like we had last Wednesday, with the view of Trafalgar Square, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, all the trees marching up the Mall in their bright spring-green finery and the London Eye, was quite breathtaking.
I love the feeling of anonymity you get in a big city but, as my sister keeps pointing out, I must stop being embarrassing in public as you aren't always as anonymous as you like to think.
We pulled up at the news agent's and she sent me in to check our Euromillions lottery tickets - one week it was 130 million ($NZ232 million) - but, funnily enough, we hadn't won anything, so I threw the tickets in the wheelie bin near the car.
Oops, my sister's ones were for four weeks, so I had to get them back out again.
Needless to say, the bin was empty and they were right at the bottom, so I had to crawl inside to retrieve them. She was laughing too hard to take a photo, which I am very pleased about.
I had the same problem at the book launch party - a waiter carrying an enormous platter of meringues tripped and threw the whole lot on the floor.
Whipped cream splattered people's legs and the excitingly patterned '80s carpet got a whole lot more exciting. I took six photos of the mayhem while sobbing with laughter (and possibly too much wine!) but they all turned out blurry.
And on the subject of food, I finally made it to my idea of foodie heaven last week. I'm crazy about a recipe book called Ottolenghi - lots of delicious Middle Eastern salads and sauces and vegetable dishes.
There's a tiny deli in Notting Hill with one 10-seater table out the back. When you walk in, there are literally mountains of cakes and meringues and glorious, sparkly green salads overflowing their bowls and huge, dangerous feelings of want stir in you. If you want a chance to see really exciting, tantalising food, head straight there.
And, on the subject of books, well, I don't know what I do all day, but things take a lot longer in Turkish for the non-Turkish speaker. Alatin got a major tune-up from the skipper the other day, and had obviously been told been we were very angry. We weren't as we didn't have any idea what the telling-off was about, but later a sad Alatin brought me a note saying: "You have problem my work?"
We assured him we didn't and asked if he had any problems with us or the work.
"No, no! I love you!"
That was pretty cheering, especially as my darling wasn't sure an employee had ever said that to him before.
Oh, yes, books. Mmm. I have been reading Secrets of the Grown-Up Brain, which is the most comforting thing I have read in a long time. Not sure that "grown-up" describes the contents of my skull particularly well, but this book assures me that, even though we all have TOTT (tip of the tongue) moments when we know a word or name but can't find it at our age, it's more than compensated for by having such a wealth of information and experience at our disposal and that we actually do get wiser and happier and better at managing things as we get older.
Author Barbara Strauch is the New York Times health and medical science editor and she has written a very easy-to-understand guide to the surprises happening in our heads.
Read it and be delightfully cheered up.
