A conversation with Bernard Beckett

If you went to a high school in Welly dur­ing the last couple’o dec­ades, you may have been taught by Bern­ard Beck­ett, and if you were a smart, artic­u­late stu­dent, you might have got to act­ively par­ti­cip­ate in his classes (too bad if you wer­en’t). Or per­haps you’re one of the many people who like […]

fabric-a-brac

It’s the third year for fab­ric-a-brac and demand is still as strong as when they began as a quirky little event for die hard fans of fab­ric. But now it’s a must attend day for any­one who loves mak­ing things. fab­ric-a-brac on Sat­urday fea­tures the usu­al fab­ric and sew­ing accessor­ies gems, but  expan­ded out into […]

Web devs welcome in Wellington at WDCNZ

WDCNZ is tech talks for web developers hap­pen­ing on July 14. You can tell it’s a prop­er tech talk, because there is only one female speak­er in the lineup, and so far there are no females attend­ing accord­ing to Lanyrd, except for the organ­iser. Sigh. Apart from the lack of female rep­res­ent­a­tion, it looks like […]

Food Show, Glorious Food Show

You don’t have to buy us break­fast to wax lyr­ic­al about the Food Show, but they did any­way. The Food Show launch break­fast at Hip­po­pot­amus was so deli­cious that it has made me determ­ined that the next time I get to stay overnight in the Museum Hotel, I must do whatever is neces­sary in order […]

Welcome to May-lasia

As well as car­ry­ing out all my usu­al duties as Empress of the Inter­net and Edit­or of the Wel­ling­tonista, I’ve also been doing reviews of loc­al Malay­si­an res­taur­ants for Malay­sia Kit­chen – a glob­al ini­ti­at­ive that aims to edu­cate and inform con­sumers about Malay­si­an cuisine and res­taur­ants. It’s a hard life, being forced to eat […]

Lamason

Lamason

There are many many ways to make a decent cup of cof­fee. We are see­ing some of these altern­ate meth­ods return­ing to com­mer­cial use around Wel­ling­ton’s more inter­est­ing cafés: the Swiss Gold; the Chemex; the V60; the cold drip… and the siphon. Dave Lama­son, formerly Peoples Cof­fee’s barista train­er, is pas­sion­ate about the siphon. So […]

Notional Significance: Reclamation

[See all Notion­al Sig­ni­fic­ance posts] Kaiwhar­awhara is a node, a knot, a tangle of paths and his­tor­ies. It’s where the eponym­ous stream meets the har­bour, though quakes and reclam­a­tions have long since nudged the mouth sea­wards from its ori­gin­al pos­i­tion at the fault line, engulf­ing fore­shore, ship­wrecks and shell­fish beds in the pro­cess. It’s where […]

The duchess’ nice frock

“Oh, look! It’s Kate Wins­let’s wed­ding dress!” On the night of the roy­al wed­ding, while most of us were drink­ing gins and mak­ing snarky tweets about Prin­cess Beatrice’s hat (or poin­tedly not), fash­ion design­er Jane Yeh was hard at work furi­ously sketch­ing and sew­ing a rep­lica of Kate Middleton’s wed­ding dress, ready to go on […]

Flash mob, flashed up

The park in Cour­tenay Place sees a lot of action dur­ing the day – ran­dom inter­pret­ive dances, fuck­ing annoy­ing people with mega­phones who are appar­ently try­ing to recruit people to their gym (but I’m sure they must have been hired by the com­pet­i­tion because there’s no way any­one who works on Cour­tenay Place would want […]

Notional Significance: Skyway

[See all Notion­al Sig­ni­fic­ance posts] The stretch of motor­way that leaps out from the bluff was known in the Six­ties as the “Kaiwarra-Thorndon Sky­way”, incon­gru­ously com­bin­ing the Jet­so­ni­an optim­ism of the term “sky­way” with a mangled con­trac­tion of “Kaiwhar­awhara” that today would only be used by Pakeha blokes of a cer­tain age. Both the sky­way […]