Goodbye Piccadilly!

It's a far cry from working as a counter-terrorist detective in London to working at an Esk Valley winery, but one of Napier's newest immigrants, Richard Barker, reckons he's made the right decision.
Three days in Napier a couple of years ago was all it took for Richard and his girlfriend Demelza Jeffery (pictured) to fall in love with our seaside town.
Having failed in the Win a Dream Job in Napier competition, the 30-year-olds had to make their own way to this side of the world.
Richard has a part-time job on the cellar door at Esk Valley wineries, but hopes to find full-time work, and Demelza, who is trained as a teacher, picked up work at Kiwi Outdoors.
"We have only been here two weeks but the weather has been pretty good ... and it should only get better," Richard said.
He writes: After 20-odd hours in a steel tube at 10,000 feet, several suspect airline meals, and a chap next to me whose snore made the haka sound like a polite enquiry, I turned to my half-comatose girlfriend and asked whether moving to New Zealand was really such a good idea?
She forced open an eye, and gave me a look that said she wasn't too sure - and that either way, it was all my fault.
We had sold our tiny flat in London (for the price of a small Pacific Island), sold our car (an Alfa Romeo GTV - gutted), said goodbye to friends and family, and given up decent jobs to travel halfway around the world to a country we had visited once, where we knew no-one, and where neither of us had employment or accommodation lined up.
There is probably a moral in there somewhere about never making life-changing decisions when on holiday - but that was of little consolation halfway over the Pacific.
Suddenly the Underground didn't seem all that overcrowded. London house prices weren't so outrageous. Persistent drizzle for half the year wasn't too depressing.
And maybe 45 minutes was a reasonable amount of time to travel half a mile by car?
Well no, actually, of course it's not reasonable - it's absolutely ridiculous - which is why we were coming here in the first place.
To have the time and space to do the things we wanted to do, in the company of people we had found to be the friendliest, and most easy-going in the world (unless you try and bring a tent and some tramping boots into the country, in which case you're looked at by Customs like you've been caught smuggling chemical weapons into a retirement home - but that's another story).
We first came to New Zealand for all too short a month back in August 2004.
You probably won't remember us: our body clocks were so out of sync we were desperately trying to stay awake until seven for the first week, and would then wake up, fresh as a daisy, at half past three the next morning.
We didn't see much of Napier's nightlife. But we decided we liked what we did see, and spent the two long intervening years putting "Operation Kiwi" into action.
After all that organisational grief (and selling property in London is certainly grief), we weren't going to be beaten by some last-minute butterflies. Besides which, we would be just as homeless back in Blighty!
So we crawled off the plane, tumbled straight into a rental car and managed to keep each other awake long enough to navigate our way to Napier.
Admittedly, this is no major achievement in a country with about six roads, but as we hadn't slept more than two hours in three days, it still seemed like a triumph.
And why Napier? Why, in the whole of New Zealand, did we decide to stick the pin in the map here? Was it the famed Art Deco ambience of the town? Or maybe the abundance of top notch wine and grub that's produced around here?
Or was it, rather, the welcoming Hawke's Bay community spirit that appealed to us city folks?
Well, I suppose all of that played a big part but, if I'm honest, the main reason we came here is this: Napier has by far the lowest rainfall in the country, which - after a typical English "summer" - was a rather appealing prospect! Now, let's have a look at that Situations Vacant column.