Roger Moroney: Best spot to be...for Jimmy Carr and me

Roger Moroney

He is a very astute chap, Jimmy Carr.

I had a quick natter with him last week given he was heading for Napier and he is a very concise man of words.

He likes to talk, and he talks fast and there is never a pausing "um" or "ahh" in there.'

Mind you, I daresay he's carried out hundreds of chats with journos through the years so he may have a pretty good automatic pilot set-up when it comes to delivering lines of response.

But he likes to chat about things off the beaten track.

It's like having a natter over a few ales with someone you've known for years.

Good bloke.

Oh, and he genuinely likes New Zealand...because it is a genuine place.

People are polite, they say "gidday" and in the smaller locations there's a sort of welcoming sort of village feel about things.

Unrushed, which is how he likes it so I guess he was at ease getting away from the maelstrom of midday Queen St in Auckland.

The one point he made clear was the feeling of ease which emerges when he's down this part of the world.

A long way from Hawaii where nuclear alarms go off.

A long way from major continental areas where major continental powers strut and in a thinly veiled way, threaten.

If Donald Trump and North Korea get into combat the best place to be is somewhere a long way off that flightpath.

And we are a long way off that flightpath.

I guess that is why this land is a magnet for tourists who basically "want to get away from it all".

A place of splendid isolation, but a place pretty well equipped to deal with the valuable tourism trade.

Which is what Hawke's Bay does so very well.

We are now an integral part of the cruise ship map.

Always good to see colourfully dressed unfamiliar faces with security identification tags around their necks slowly wandering the CBD streets taking endless selfies with anything vaguely Art Deco as a background.

And carrying shopping bags of course.

This eastern seaboard is very much a prime contender as a prime example of what "location location location" is all about.

Of course we who have set up our abodes here effectively take it all for granted.

It's the Bay and that's that.

Being here, slightly off the main beaten tracks, is a blessing.

Because coupled with that soothing feeling of splendid isolation is the fact that if we wish to have a sip of big city life it's really only a four or five hour drive away...with some rather nice places to see along the way.

But above all, from what I've come to hear through the years, is the climate factor.

"You always seem to have pretty good weather here," is a most common phrase, to which I generally add "oh yeah it's always pretty much like this".

And I remember back in the late '90s when a couple of English journos were visiting out here, chasing some sort of Downunder story, and it was late July.

It was a sunny day with little wind, and hovering around the 15C mark.

They could not believe it.

"This is Edinburgh in early summer," I recall one saying.

So what did I reply?

"Oh yeah, it's always pretty much like this."

Three days after they returned to London a foul southerly rolled across the landscape and brought rain and a "high" of around 11C.

But hey, it was winter, and in this part of the land that inclement season never seems to get too severe nor does it tend to linger.

Winters, unless there are road closures, slip from the memory.

A few cold mornings but that's it.

Bless the great mountain ranges to the west for they are like sponges when the southwesterly-driven systems fire up.

Yep, for me, 'tis the best place in the land to be, and this was overwhelmingly agreed on during a chat with a couple of other lads recently.

"Wouldn't want to be anywhere else...got it pretty darn good here," one said, and we nodded accordingly.

To which one of the other chaps said "yeah...but we haven't had a decent earthquake for a while".

There's always something.