The sound is like a piece of crystal just after it's been taken from the dishwasher and polished - clear, warm and rich. As you turn it, it glints. Dimensions and experiences you haven't seen are caught in its highlights.

Josie gave me a set of irhythm ipod speakers for my birthday. They're small and the unit is a bit smaller than your standard issue radio/cassette boombox. The way its little speakers can fill a room with sound though, that's a treasure. It reminds me of a crisp Sansui box I used to own, which had a hopeless burned out amp and cheap wiring, but it came with the most amazing set of crisp cherry wood woofers. I made a mistake when I got rid of the speakers, even though they were black.

It's hard to describe warm, vibrant sound. There is a resonant, warm and complete feeling that makes the experience different to regular sound - but you don't get it until you listen to one along side the other. Otherwise it's like trying to explain continental cold to someone from Brisbane.

Anyway, the irhythm rocks. It even plays Josie's ipod shuffle so it's hard to believe that little ciggie lighter-sized case can belt out so much depth of quality.

Beautiful as the rich sound of the irhythm is, it left with me a dilemma because i still don't have decent computer speakers. The speakers on the imac just don't cut it for movies and music. One possibility was to move my gorgeous Harmon Kardon sound sticks from the living area to my computer.

But they produce definitively the best sound I've ever made on an amateur system. That sub woofer is a breakthrough. It produces a bass wave like a jello that floats up and slides down into your ears - into your blood! - as the complete note that left the fingertips of the composer.

So they stay and the irhythm becomes my portable. That called for new computer speakers. I had my eye on some beautiful Bose speakers but they turned out to be not released here yet and they are hideously expensive.

Then I found some wild Klipsch speakers.



Check out those puppies.

I never heard of Klipsch speakers but I read reviews saying the Klipsch has sound in the ball park of Bose and Onkyo so there was my birthday present for myself right there.

They are not hugely powerful - something like 10 watts out of each -- but the subwoofer is big enough to shake the stone walls. There are some small cars in Paris and I reckon some of the tinier models could use the subwoofer for a parking garage.

The little speakers are built with retro forties styling like the engine of a spitfire. It's a contrast - a groovy one - to the clean minimalist seventies glistening white of my imac.

They pump out a signal that is so clear unfortunately it collects every flaw in the source material. I downloaded Carmina Burana from the iTunes store - a pre-1972 production and sadly there is tape hiss all over it that isn't there on the modern recordings. So I tried Carla Bruni, whose fabric voice slid down my neck like a tongue as sharp as a knife. It's a sound that makes you want to wake someone up in the middle of the night with a phone call. The sound of a cottage by the sea on a summers day. Ah well.

The subwoofer has so much boom that it munges the music unless it's turned way down. It's possible the Klipsch is in the top end of speakers - it's won enough awards it turns out -- but my source gear and listening environment are nowhere near the standard where I could find out.

So this was a birthday for my ears. This stuff is filling every room.

Is John Stewart the world's funniest guy right now?

Funny, funny guy.

Here he rips George Bush for claiming the Geneva Conventions are vague because they prohibit 'outrages against human dignity'.



Although...it was Jay Leno that had the best one-liner of the week:

"The Senate has voted to approve the building of a 700-mile fence along the 2,000-mile border of Mexico. This is what happens when you let President Bush do the math.

If you want something just about as funny, though, check our David Letterman's Great Moments In Presidential Speeches.

Of the world's ten most expensive cars, why is it that all but one - the Mercedes SLR McLaren - got smacked with the ugly stick?

They're each like a motorised Princess Anne. They're Hillary Clinton on wheels. They fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.

The Pagani Zonda maybe is not the worst, but it's no Boticelli is it? It's no Bentley GT convertible nor Italian at all.

Carlo celebrated his third birthday by giggling with delight and uncomplicated pleasure at having his own special day. When we sang 'happy birthday' he would stand there trembling and grinning - so we did it again and again.

"I'm a big boy! I'm not two!" he told his brother on the phone.

He mostly kept his big sister at bay while he tore the wrapping from his presents. He would select one from the obscenely large pile, play with it and only move to the next to ease Maria's impatience. We assembled the big bus together and later the enormous pirate ship. He proudly sported his new shirts and pored over the books sent from his admirers far away - from the UK, from the US, from New Zealand.

Three years ago on a Saturday afternoon we were packing away the detritus and presents from Maria's third birthday party when Josie announced she'd been feeling contractions since she put the cheerios on to boil. I expected we had hours and hours to go; we didn't. He arrived by 8 that night. We haven't had cheerios since.

He was a hideously malformed baby with his squashed head, hook nose and blotchy skin. Now he has spent over half his life in Paris. He gets blonder every day, his eyelashes get longer and he bats them over his mischievous brown eyes. He won't eat much but starch - bread, pasta, rice couscous - broccoli and (of course) sweets. He boyishly identifies aircraft, loves diggers and bikes and stuff with wheels. He plays for ages on his own and then happily lets Maria humiliate him with dress up games. And he looks like a little man.

I put a little flash slide show up in the left-hand menu.

On Monday night we reached a kind of solstice, a seasonal waypoint, a marker in the meandering turn of the Earth's humdrum progression round the sun.

Sometime after midnight - between about 2AM and 4AM Paris time, to be less vague, the temperature dropped below 14 degrees in the French capital; and 14 degrees celsius at the time was the exact temperature in Wellington. Albeit in the middle of the day.

This is the first time since Spring, according to my cunning and omniscient weather software, that the temperature in Wellington has been higher than in Paris. Even for a nano-second.

Sometime in the next month, maybe after we end daylight saving and return to daylight wasting, we will mark the day when freezing, bitterly cold and unwelcoming Wellington reaches a higher maximum daily temperature than Paris on the same calendar date.

And then it will be time to go home.

Murdering, lunatic thug Robert Mugabe has postponed next year's Zimbabwe presidential elections.

I don't know why, seeing as he already had the ballots printed 'n all.

Oh that's right, to avoid being dragged off to stand trial for crimes against humanity. That's why.

There are a few meals that stick forever in your memory, no? We've been lucky enough to enjoy two in the last ten days.

This is where we went for dinner on my birthday.


Possibly the most stunning atmosphere I've ever dined in. The restaurant is in a train station, Gare de Lyon. It truly drips baroque elegance from every inch. We had a drink in the old gentlemen's club-style bar, sitting in old red leather winged-back armchairs sipping kir royal then dined underneath the glittering chandeliers and old frescoes. I had a delicious fois gras 'pour commencer'. The main, foie de veau, was so-so. We asked the waiter for a wine recommendation. With a twinkle in his eye he recommended the '77 chateaux margeaux. "Yes, let's have that," Josie said but I had already seen it's €1200 price tag and demurred as the waiter knew I would. We settled on a 2002 Chateaux L'Hermitage, which he felt was a poor match and to tell the truth it was maybe worth a fraction of its €88 price. Doesn't pay to convert currencies.

Last week we went to Flora's. The atmosphere was nowhere near as unique, although the eight of us had a private room and very personal service (possibly because one of our number was related to Flora). But the food was unrivalled. The best we've had in France, easily. Nine courses. Tiny samples of delicacies. The partridge was memorable for being unique. The best dish, easily, was a fois gras borscht - a pate swimming in a soup, which sounded unpromising but was transportingly delicious.

This review says Flora is regarded as on of the most talented chefs in France. (The article, curiously, qualifies the description 'one of the most talented female chefs'.) I can see how she's earned the respect. Her creations were French provincial inspired, which we've come to expect to be staid and dated. But these dishes were innovative, tantalising and unforgettably, droolingly good.

I would just say anyone coming to Paris should reserve a dinner there. Prepare to be impressed.

Today, for Carlo's birthday, it's off to MacDonalds. Sigh. Variety, you see.

I remember being told somewhere in my youth that our body completely replenishes all its cells every seven years or so. I don't know about that. I'm pretty sure it's rubbish. But it is convenient, on this date, to divide life into seven-year cells.

1964. Upper Hutt. Hmmm.

1971. Northland. On the beach. Not much else to say.

1978. Auckland. Fourth form. A small dog called Pazzo. Moving a lot.

1985. The time since 1978 seemed like forever then. Doesn't seem so far now. 21st at my new girlfriend's house in Grey Lynn. Studying politics.

1992. Small flat in Herne Bay. Married. Working on radio. A cat called Ella.

1999. Wellington. Divorced. Hurtling towards government and a new family. Dog called Moe.

2006. Paris. Remarried, three kids.

What can I learn from this? Everything changes in seven years. Everything. Time is shorter in the rear view mirror than in the windscreen.

I stuck some Italy photos up over here.

No, I don't know why.

This vindicates some of us.

Told to admire every syllable Shakespeare produced, some of us in study have occasionally felt some of it was rubbish.

The Queen Mab speech, for example. What was that there for? Possibly he wasn't egg yolked when he penned that though. Quilled it.

Anyway, it just goes to show the long, honourable and intimate history of booze and brilliance.

Conventional wisdom is that the French loathe the US, and M. Bush in particular.

So evil weasily Nicolas Sarkozy headed over there and organised himself a photo op shaking the simian's hand at the Whitehouse.

Cue apoplexy in the French establishment.

"With Tony Blair, we have already had one European leader serving the interests of the Americans in Europe. We don't need a second one with Sarkozy."

So said President Chirac. One might riposte with George Bush we already have one dim-witted, arrogant President of a major state and with M. Chirac we don't need another one, but let's plunge on. Ségolène Royal, the socialist front runner to contest the election against Sarkozy was perhaps slyly introducing a bit of Clinton bashing:

"My diplomatic position will not consist of going and kneeling down in front of George Bush."

Dear oh dear.

Trouble is, Sarkozy's ratings went up. The establishment still feels - and fuels - resentment at the US pre-eminence in global affairs, a position that France's scholared elite think belongs to them. There is also standard lefty knee-jerk reaction to the US, probably more important here than in most cultured Western democracies because the knee-jerk left is bigger.

But Sarkozy has correctly guaged how far out of tune this is with the culture of the majority. Far from being anti-American, France has a streak of pro-Americanism dating back to their twin eighteenth century republican revolutions. France sent military help to the US to ensure its victory over the Brits (on exactly the same reasoning still resonating in its foreign affairs outlook - a rational mix of national self-interest and principled ideology.) But ideology is not the cultural changling. America is simply hip - the kids love Macdonalds and American clothing. And there is institutional flattery in French efforts to emulate US industrial hegemony - Airbus, attempts to create a new, French Google, even the entire European project pay a huge compliment to the US.

The Times says there is some murmured question whether France should have opposed the Iraq invasion as strongly.

Le Monde, voice of the leftish establishment, and a Radio France commentator, wondered whether France might be reaching the end of a 45-year cycle in which it has defined itself through its opposition to the United States. 

I think that's wishful thinking by the Times correspondent. You don't lose marks at the Times for bashing France and I haven't noticed a lot of French saying the decision to invade Iraq was right. Nor am I sure Le Monde speaks for that many these days. More likely, French establishment thinking, hammered by the EU constitution debacle, Le Pen, riots and more, is beginning to pay more attention to the values of the public.

Turns out, homework for little kids is completely useless. And every one knows it's useless.

Turns out the main reason kids get homework is that parents want it.

When I shopped around the arguments against homework, I discovered that how you feel about it depends a lot on what you think kids will do if they don't have any.

Maria loves her new school because she loves getting homework.

She bursts out of school holding her homework book up but won't let me look at it in case I wreck it. We can only look if she is holding the book and turning the pages. And we have to look. She bends over the table and carefully practices writing. She proudly shows it off and discusses the varying philosophies she considers in deciding how to tackle a challenge, like writing 'a' a hundred times or copying a sentence written in joined up script. They are teaching her to write in the scrawly writing of an old person. When she discusses her school work she casually drops French words every sentence or so because when she is at school she is entirely French and her mind switches to French mode when she thinks about it.

I asked her why she likes homework.

"It's nice to learn stuff....No it's GOOD to learn stuff. With the maitresse [teacher]. I like it because then it's all quiet. Also IU like it becasue I always make it good."

In other words, she gets a huge sense of achievement.

Hard to think we were in Bangkok only a couple of weeks ago. I've never been through a military coup so that would have been a new experience.

We were thinking next time we fly home we would book the same route - stay a night in a five star hotel in Bangkok because it is cheap, the hotels are fantastic and it's exactly half way so you arrive feeling a bit fresher. But maybe those plans will be on hold for a while. But if we were still there we would be confined to the hotel - which, when you look at the pics from rooftop pool, is not the worst drama ever.


Meantime, not to be glib about it, the junta has rounded up members of the previous government, dissolved the parliament and banned political parties. These are not precisely the actions most likely to convince anyone there will be a speedy return to democracy.

Entering Italy at Rimini. Where da family is from.

It will be a revolution in Paris - but there are plans to make all public places in Paris, including bars and cafes (gasp) smoke free.

At the same time, the number of dog dogs has dropped and renewed efforts are being made to clean up the pavements.

Paris won't be (or smell) the same.

(Ironically, one reason for Macdonald's popularity among young French is that it is one of the few firmly smoke-free venues where they can hang out. I can think of a few anti-Macdonalds bigots who might be shocked about that, with all its many challenges to middle class smugness).

The only reason I care about Ford, and I care very very little, is that Ford owns Jaguar, and I do give a hoot about Jaguar.

Brilliant comms guru Seth Guru annihilates everything about Ford as a business here: Ignored their workforce, got offside with their distributors, blamed customers and made very, very ordinary cars (even taking prestige beautiful marques and making them ordinary). And they failed to see coming that many drivers might want more eco-friendly cars. Gee, how hard was that to see?

You know I'm not one to worry overly about incursions on our civil liberties in the name of avoiding people being blown to bits by lunatic suicide bombers. There are, what four million CTV cameras in the UK now, and I think, 'so what?'.

But you know I can't help feeling it's all gone a bit far when it is apparently now an offence in the UK to be in possession of a garden gnome.

Brilliant.

Genius.

I found this cool quiz application called Blufr, from Answers.com. It's a trivia quiz, and I've stuck a page up which you can play with in the left hand menu. It's addictive for know-nothings like me who foolishly sometimes think we know stuff.

The idea of it is to drive visits to Answers.com, which is actually a damn good resource. This makes it as much fun as using my desktop widget to go to wikipedia, but since you haven't go a mac, you don't yet know about the pleasures of widgets.

I meant to mention this in the schools post below.

The French school system has re-named Maria.

Her full name is Eva Maria, though we have always called her Maria.

When we went to the town hall to enrol her they insisted she had to be Eva because that is what her documents say comes first.

We thought we would be able to correct this at school. Not so, although - in a special concession, demonstrating the humanity and flexibility of French bureaucracy - they usually call her EvaMaria.

She just thinks she has a home name and a school name.

This site continues to receive almost daily hits from people searching for pictures of Ségolène Royal. Err, nude.

She is almost unstoppable as the socialist candidate for President. According to Wikipedia (the nutshell summaries are mine):

A poll taken on August 29 and 30 shows that 47% of respondents prefer her as the Socialist Party candidate. Although this marks a slight decline from polls a week earlier she maintains a strong lead over all other candidates. Her closest competitor, Lionel Jospin (loser, incompetent, dreary) receives 21%, Dominique Straus-Kahn 16% (wide boy, economics professor, best of the rest), Jack Lang 12% (lunatic former culture minister, weirdo), Laurent Fabius 9% (Rainbow Warrior bomber, cynical untrustworthy looks like he has closet sexual confusion) and François Hollande 8% (dull, like hospital paint is dull. Politically flabby. Party leader).

Sarkozy has wrapped up the centre right. The Sego-Sarko scrap is underway.

And I hadn't expected to say this - but they are both looking talented and appealing about now.

Some facts I didn't know about Mme Royal:

She was born in Senegal.

Her first name is Marie (how did she get away with dropping that in the French school system?)

She was a judge before she entered politics.

Some I did know:

She went to the school you have to go to if you want to be anyone in the French bureaucracy.

Her partner is dreary fat boy Francois Hollande, who happens to be the leader of the socialist party. They are not married, though they have formalised a civil union.

Over summer she was photographed in a fetching bikini. Hollande is a rival for the Presidency nomination (bet those are interesting chit chats...'hey honey, what do you think about booking our holidays for November. You fly out first and I'll come down later with the kids). He was photographed reading 'French history for dummies'. This is when you fire your press secretary.

Carlo is still only two. Last week he started school. Ecole maternelle might have the classroom ambience of a kindergarten, but it is structured as a school. The kids go from 8.30 to 4.30 every day except Wednesday, the harried teacher has a curriculum and issues a detailed report (Maria's ran to eight pages of line by line pass/fail marking). They take lunch together - three courses, naturally - in the school canteen. The playground is filled with bigger kids. It is school - though the primmers.

On his first day he understood that the soft slow days of creche were over, baby. We trotted down to school bright and early, only to be told Dad had messed up and we needed to come back after lunch for the first day. When we finally got into the classroom, he was right at home moving from table to table playing with the equipment, checking out the other kids, batting his eyes at the teacher. All the kids had a parent present. I was the only Dad. We went home after a couple of hours and he was very happy. Some schools apparently let the parents stay for days. Not ours. On Day Two it's drop-off and leave. Parents do not enter the school grounds and long, overly-emphatic signs are posted at the front door to remind us. So on the second day there were floods of tears and pleas not to be abandoned. Carlo was even worse. A week later he is still desperate at the start of each day and exhausted at the end. The teacher says he stops crying as soon as we leave. Well he's not in actual danger, he is not hungry. What can you do.

Maria, on the other hand, has leapt into her new school. This morning I asked her if she likes it better than her old one.

"Yes, because they give us HOMEWORK!"

She can't wait to get more. Sitting down practising writing the letter 'r' in that silly old fashioned script is more fun than Game Boy. (Everyone in France has the same handwriting - attache style. There is one national standard for the way letters should be shaped. It is is a stupid way of writing. But 'everyone must write the same' is a crazy egalite thing). She is in love with her teacher. She is in love with her big school bag. She hectors Dad about the way her school books were neatly covered in plastic, though not quite neatly enough. She hands over her school cahier - with all the school's news and instructions - and informs me that if I can't read it I have to give it to mummy. The rules are clear and hard, and she likes the certainty of knowing what to do. No quarter is given for her language skill: everything is in French. So she speaks all day at home in English but she's learning to read and write in French and I find myself worrying she will only ever read and write in French and struggle in her mother's tongue.

At nearly six she is ready for big school.

Some of these are brilliant. Some aren't. A few are just ewww.

(Via we can't all be perfect).

Anawhata beach, Auckland, mid-winter, where we swam in the nick because there was no else on the beach. Cost to spend a day: $0.


Rimini, Italy, where my grandfather left nearly a hundred and twenty years ago. The view from our hotel room:

You can't quite make out the oil rigs just off the beach. Cost to spend a day: €15.

I wonder why the old fella left?

Actually it was the 12th of September, I remember that very clearly.

The phone rang and rang. Eventually Josie shoved me out of bed to get it. It was about 5.00AM and I thought it would be a producer on a breakfast news programme calling to set up a 7AM interview. I thought I even knew what the mini-scandal they were chasing would be. It was Sam Fisher, who worked with me. He told me some planes had been flown into the World Trade Centre and I had better come to work. I was bleary and thought he meant a cessna or something.

I told Josie what had happened. She said she'd heard my cellphone ringing all night. "Why didn't you tell me?" "I did. You just cursed the reporters and went back to sleep."

Our Jim was the acting PM. I cleared my phone messages on the way to work. The mailbox was already full. (In 2001 a cellphone held twenty messages. During big news events it could fill in half an hour). I wish I had kept those messages - there was the Acting PM on the phone at around 1.30AM saying I better give him a call because he just happened to be up watching CNN and planes were flying into buildings in New York and this is going to be global, and jeeesus another one just hit! And then a full description and the very first thoughts on what would have to happen. Would have made great oral history.

At the office the big government agencies were gathered around the table. I remember being aware I was the only one with coffee. Treasury, Reserve Bank, PM's Department, security services and two or three of the minister's staff. Foreign Affairs didn't make it. Hmmm. Jim chaired and started by asking, first of all, 'is NZ in any danger'. And for a split second it dawned on me the answer could be yes. On our watch. That's when I understood.

It turns out there is a man who works in the Beehive basement whose job it is to be ready for stuff like that. He had a large book full of scenarios and turned to the 'overseas terrorist attack' chapter then began to list the things we needed to do and stuff we needed to know. The gravest immediate risks were copycats and financial threats in the chaos. Immediate decisions would have to be made - to close financial markets and airports. Or not. To introduce special security measures and ground planes. To pledge support for retaliation.

And at that time we didn't know if it was going to spread or if a state actor was involved. If a state was directly involved, the US would have to respond. The chances of an immediate retaliatory strike were receding as hours went by. But there is nothing like wondering if half the world will be at war before dinner. What would we do?

The PM was in the air. She was turning back. She was stuck in the global airjam. Decisions had to be taken. Twenty years of studying politics, philosophy and law, you come across a few ethical dilemmas: But when instant decisions have to be made suspending some basic rights - at the border, for example - the truth is, there is no debate. Decision-makers are totally reliant on the thinking and preparation that's gone on before.

We watched the TV in amazement. News reporters were far ahead of intel services, as they always are. In the UK a moronic press secretary got fired for sending around an email saying 'today would be a good day to release bad news.' She deserved to be fired. Why put that in an email? The rest of us just quietly did it without making the fuss. Josie, in another ministerial office, had a huge public announcement lined up, preparing reporters for months. It was buried.

But the main impression was the calm of our departments methodically working through decisions. Readiness. And, thankfully, immense distance from the flames. I remember Mark Prebble coming in and handling government business with calmness and assurance, counselling with professionalism and accuracy. I remember ringing foreign affairs and asking for info about what other countries were doing and saying so I could work on a statement to Parliament. Some idiot told me the request would have to go through the minister. Nothing like everyone pitching in. I found the info myself on the Internet. But other departments were ready and responded.

I wrote this:

New Zealanders share the despair and terrible loss that the whole of the civilised world feels at the loss of thousands of lives.
Our grief and our horror has been expressed in many ways:
In the flowers sent spontaneously to the US Embassy in Wellington this morning.
In the shocked conversations as New Zealanders woke up to the terrible news.
And as the nation gathered around radios and televisions and tried to make sense of this, a shared determination grew.
A determination felt by all decent people that the perpetrators of this violence must be brought swiftly to justice.
That the international community must work together to find everyone who has made this happen, and to punish them.
New Zealand will stand with all other democratic countries to do whatever is necessary to prevent and remove threats to peace and the devastating scourge of terrorism.

Within months we were in a political crisis over intervention in Afghanistan. For God's sake, how could anyone have opposed that? Looking back now, is there anyone who thinks the Taliban should still be there, left alone? Five years on it's hard to believe bin Laden is still alive, that he and his feral beheading partners were given a massive reprieve -strength even - by a lunatic decision to open a new front against an entirely different enemy in Iraq - who had nothing to do with the attack! We heard the sickening 'blame America first' commentary within hours - long before that simian George W Bush did anything. And right up with the poverty of that reprehensible world view - it's a disgrace bin Laden hasn't been roasted on an open fire in one of those caves he lives in and that most of the world is at even greater risk of suicidal, nihilistic attacks by theocratic fascists.

It's as if the early morning wake up call had never been answered.

Yeah we're back from our five week holiday. Did you miss us?

Tons to say, meaning most of it won't be said or I'll never get round to writing it. I know you can't bear the silence.

Randomly...

Maria's name for the familiar symbol of Pisa: 'The Bendy Tower'.

When the emergency medical team came to look at Carlo's cold the night we spent back in Paris before going to Italy, news we had visited a Bankok bird flu market the day before helped convince them to take him to hospital. (He and Josie were home in an couple of hours).

The day after a global terror emergency is declared, how could our bag possibly be put on a plane to Rome instead of Paris? How could it possibly take three days to find it again? How could the semi-sentient baggage handling call centre tell us that the bag might not be released for five days because more lost bags than ever before were being processed?

If you only do 120 on the autostrada and refuse to pull over when they sit on your bumper honking, Italian drivers don't think it's funny.

Italian drivers think the rule about the side of the road you drive on is optional.

What is the point of a high speed autostrada if you have to queue for half an hour to pay the toll at the end?

Tourists with the most boorish behaviour coincidentally seem to have the widest bottoms.

We didn't find a Pagani in Rimini. We didn't really look.

If you sit at a cafe in the Rimini piazza saying 'Pagani' loudly, you still don;t find a Pagani, other than those who arrived with you. However it's possible your bottom widens a little.

When you're moved by art, you only notice afterwards - you notice because it lingers in the emotional side of your brain.

The Medici Venus lingered in the emotional side of my brain. She is elegant and poised and impossibly delicate for a piece of old rock. She looks like a muse. In fact, I know just the one.

We tried to get a Spaghetti Bolognese in Bologne. There was none on the menu.


Here is a picture of small sheds near the water's edge in Venice, at a beach described in the guides as 'one of the most fashionable in Europe.' The millpond water makes Cheltenham look like Raglan, and it takes an hour on the boat to get there from the city. One of these sheds costs €200 to rent for a day - 400 kiwi. The cheapest spot on the beach, five rows back from the sea behind the sheds with no hope of a view was €35. On the other hand - at least someone kindly rakes the sand each morning so it's not too rough and messy looking. Seats on the beat at Rimini are a snip at only €12.

More later. And I'll try to post some pix, in case anyone's interested.