Auckland

The wind is squealing at the window-cracks as I sit typing this on the 16th floor of our apartment block in Upper Queen St. The last time I heard that noise was in Edinburgh, in the swaying monstrosity of the David Hume Tower (Scandinavian Studies: 13th floor). Now I'm in Auckland - and while Mr Q dozes beside me and little Pie just across the hall, it's time to write about my New Zealand holiday.

It's two in the afternoon here on a gloomy and rainswept day. We can't even see the North Shore for the drizzle. I said I wouldn't blog unless I got bored, but today is the exception: it's dreary and hard work out there. Not as bad as Kilburn High Road in the rain, but still, we're taking the afternoon off. We've been out already and encountered the wet and taken a few buses, had lunch at a fun Indian canteen on Karangahape Road and now we're back at the flat, a little tired and not too keen to get out in the grey day again just yet.

To tell you about the trip in its entirety, in time-honoured amateur journalistic fashion I should begin by saying that the journey to the airport was uneventful. Considering that I had opted to take public transport and the Heathrow Express with a baby, buggy, little backpack and massive rucksack, this was a blessing. Mr Pie was very happy with Heathrow - he loves a good crowd - and boarding a plane at 10pm didn't seem to faze him.

I wasn't such a happy bunny. Never again will I fly to the opposite pole, alone, with a baby on my lap (apart from for the return journey as I'm anxious to get back to Blighty whilst the last shudders of Election Fever can still be felt.) All the things aeroplanes do to make travel palatable, fun even - such as alcoholic drinks and up-to-the-minute cinema - are rendered completely useless. The baby wants to crawl around the aisle and explore neighbouring seats. The baby doesn't want to sleep in the bassinet when the lights are switched off. The baby wants to stick to UK time whilst everyone else bends to the will of the International Dateline. And so on for twenty-seven hours (or however long it was. I lost count and sanity).

After this test of my endurance, Auckland would have had to pull off something utterly spectacular (fireworks and dancing horses) to have convinced me that the journey had been worthwhile. It failed. Ratty and sleepless, I complained continually to Mr Q about how ghastly everything was. Our first walkabout, the day after my arrival, took us down to the Viaduct Basin, a piece of land 'reclaimed' from the harbour to make space for all those pretentious chrome'n'glass restaurants and faux-bonhomie pubs that need to be built. And then back up Queen Street, the main shopping and banking street, as featureless and American-branded as any rotten high street in the UK.

Luckily it was Pie's first birthday, and so his parents put aside their grievances against the modern world, and took the gentleman baby to the park for a go on the swings. This place, Myers Park, is directly below us when we look out of the apartment windows. There are palm trees and many other species of native arbor spread out below us. From our eyrie perspective we had believed the park to be flat, but down on the ground it has steep grassy slopes: it is in a sort of gully. The swings and slides are second to none. Pie was delighted, if a bit dazed. He woke me at two the next morning - attempting to make his bleary eyes bright and his crumpled tail look bushy - and lunged hungrily in the direction of the jalopy. I think he wanted to go out and have another go on those New Zealand swings.

Location Location

I've changed the location on my profile to Auckland, New Zealand. I can't find any other way to search for people who actually live there and write blogs from there. I wanted to find out a bit more about those people on the other side of the world because I'm meant to be going there in two weeks time (with Mr Pie on my knee for the 24hour flight). Although, with the volcanic ash situation showing no sign of blowing over, it could be that a cyber Kiwi experience is as close as I'll get...

Studio London

It was exactly a month ago that I was phoned by Studio London and told that I had won a "magazine-style photoshoot". You can read all about it all below, in my post 'May their ears fall off'.

For a week or so after wrangling with them on the phone to extricate myself from this daft/sinister arrangement, Mr Q and I were fascinated by the wickedness of these people. Mr Q went right to their door at 120 Great Portland Street to establish that they really did exist and to talk loudly on his mobile (to put the frighteners on them).

I, meanwhile, told many people about my folly. It amazed me how much everyone else knew about this kind of scam. "Haven't you ever heard of NLP?" asked my sister. 'Neuro-linguistic programming' - it frightens me more than any ouija board. And my friend Moonbeam rolled her eyes and told me fondly about rescuing her mother from an online scam for a holiday.

The marvellous news is that - after threatening Studio London with The Law - my deposit was returned! It was even returned within 10 days, true to their word. But there was still a bit of funny business: in reply to my email - with its attachment of a letter quoting the Distance Selling Regulations 2000 - I got this (by accident, I assume):

Hey ya,

Does this
stand? I spoke to Craig earlier & he seems to think that we can still use
the ‘leisure’ thing! ?????? Sorry really cannot remember the technical term!
xxx

Regards,

Bookings Team
Studio London

The 'leisure' thing, eh? ?????? indeed! I'll waste no more juice on them, dear reader.

And another thing...

Do you get a smile when you shop on Amazon? Or to look at it the other way up, does your local bookseller try to press on you the tempting news that 'people who bought that book also bought these other ten?' (Change bookseller if they do!) Or, as Robert Crampton - go Red Bob! - put it in his Beta Male column in the Times magazine recently, "customers who viewed this also viewed that, if you like Ecstasy you may well like crack cocaine... Some people might find these suggestions helpful. I don't."

No, the local bookseller never does the hard sell. He does smile, though, in a way that says, I'm glad you stopped by. And guess what? He can also give you directions to Roundwood Park on a hot April afternoon. So you don't need to look it up on your iPhone or nuffink.

Of paper and vinyl

Sorry to bang on about books, but what with the psycho-geography of the Kilburn High Road (a.k.a. the Main Artery of Kilburnia) getting utterly ripped up this week in the wake of the bookshop's closure, I find the topic is still foremost in my mind. Sorry, also, to be lazy and simply copy out someone else's words, but they are quite touching - and they purport to come from, of all people, Zadie Smith's mum, Yvonne.

"The closure of The Kilburn Bookshop is indeed the saddest of news. It is true that I used to take daughter Zadie and sons Ben and Luke there on an almost weekly basis. All three have a massive love of books and I sure that The Kilburn Book Shop was a massive inspiration. The shops owner positively encouraged small children to sit on the floor and leaf through the books rather like they were in a library. To me, there is nothing more beautiful than standing and looking and shelvings of books. Browsing in a bookshop and purchasing new books is just a great thrill. Bookshops do not have distractions. They have books, so no danger of me coming out with some horribly expensive item that I really don't need. Frankly I don't really care how cheap books are on the internet. I prefer to go into my local bookshop and look, leaf through and buy what I want. I and all my children, friends, neighbours are keeping everything cross that the sister shop, The Willesden books shop does not go the same way. I am positive that bookshops will return to our high streets once this recession is over."

God, I hope she's right about that prediction. Someone else in the Telegraph comments section compared paper books (i.e. not i-books or blogs or whatever hi-tech faffery is hip) to vinyl records. They meant this in a gloomy end-is-nigh way, but to me it's a heartening thought, in its way. Vinyl is, to my ears, the best sound bar none and I'm absolutely bloody jubilant that I can't take it for a jog or use it for a ringtone.

On that note, I've added a blog to my 'Go see!' list: 17 Seconds is my brother-in-law's blog. He likes vinyl so much, I'm always braced for the news that their flat has finally collapsed into the flat below, under the weight of all those records.

Books: delicious hot, disgusting cold

The Kilburn Bookshop closed forever on Sunday. I popped in and out almost every day last week, checking its pulse and scavenging for books. The atmosphere was funereal, the shelves got thinner and thinner, people dashed in saying 'Darling! Is this really the end?' and the guys at the till got weary of saying the same old things. Yes, we're closing. Yes, it's true. Yes, Amazon, the book trade, the rent hike...

To counter the despair, I thought I'd post a list of some of the books I came away with in the vulture-mobile/jalopy. These are books which will illuminate my life in years to come. There was a separate pile for Mr Q and for Pie, and some that I won't mention because they're presents; these are the ones I chose for me, myself and I.

• Burnt Diaries - Emma Tennant
• Selected Poems - Wallace Stevens
• The Complete Poems - Emily Jane Bronte
• Singing in the Dark - Alison Brackenbury
• Drives - Leontia Flynn
• The Broken Word - Adam Foulds
• The Forward Book of Poetry 2007
• Time Bites - Doris Lessing
• The Unknown Matisse; Matisse the Master - Hilary Spurling
• The Artist's Way - Julia Cameron
• Sign Language Companion - Cath Smith
• More About Boy - Roald Dahl
• The Jolly Postman - Janet & Allen Ahlberg
• Wizard of the Crow; A Grain of Wheat - Ngugi wa Thiong'o
• Catholicism - Gerald O'Collins
• The Child that Books Built - Frances Spufford
• Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell
• A Tale of a Tub - Jonathan Swift
• The Discovery of France - Graham Robb
• A Book of Silence - Sarah Maitland
• Speak, Memory; Glory - Vladimir Nabokov
• Revelations of Divine Love - Julian of Norwich
• The first person and other stories - Ali Smith
• On Beauty (audiobook) - Zadie Smith

The last is poignant. I'm listening to it at the moment and it mentions Kilburn, Zadie Smith's childhood stomping ground, giving me a warm glow on the inside when I hear mudane details of the houses round here and how far it is to the nearest tube stop. But it also reminds me of the article posted up in the window of the bookshop (from the Telegraph, Apoca-lit Now) in which I read that Zadie used to get books from the Kilburn Bookshop as a kid. Where would a young bookaholic go now?

Like when a pen is picked up and writes on its own

Oh yulp. I haven't written a post for almost a week so this is what you get, a piece of stream-of-conk drivel. Well, the sun is shining mutely but overpoweringly through grey cloud (single grey cloud over London, probably looks like a lumpy duvet when viewed from an aeroplane window) and as I write it is coming and going, glowing as strong as a lamp in a teenager's ganja farm - one minute - and fading in cold afterglow the next. Cars a-go-go mostly downhill towards town [as I call the City Centre] on Finchmore Road. Occasional pedestrians.

The yellow tulips on the table are in a parallel world, strange aliens. The Camden rubbish truck goes by. Two men: one in a baseball cap, one in a beanie - pause for a moment to imagine that for them they are the centre of their day, their path under my window is an ingrained track in their lives, for them all stories all songs centre on them. Not me, how strange!

A smart car has pulled up at the foot of the steps. The car has wing mirrors with their own indicator lights, wing mirrors that fold inwards under remote control. The Mercedes dreamcatcher on the front is snapped off, though; even smart cars must have faults.

A lady walks down the street in flip-flops (good luck to you madam, have you not seen the forecast in the Cloud over London?) and on the opposite pavement, in the opposite direction, a man pushes a buggy, causing me to wonder why why why, it always intrigues me - the story behind the man pushing the buggy.