Real estate in the uneventful Hutt Valley is in demand. Photo / Thinkstock
Driving through the Hutt Valley I often think of Noel Coward, who dropped the withering comment, "Very flat, Norfolk", into bitchy repartee between two characters in Private Lives.
The Hutt is flat, and New Zealand is a kind of Norfolk, surely, far away from places where they're hunting Pokemon or committing mass murder.
We are blessed with uneventfulness. Cats stuck up trees make it to the TV news, and in a telling comment on our general pulse rate, median property prices in the Hutt Valley jumped by 21 per cent in the year ending June.
That's a bit like saying beige is a fashion statement.
Nobody will ever believe it's true, just as nobody will ever again wear a Norfolk jacket, an over-complicated piece of male tailoring that once, long ago, cut a tepid, tweedy sort of dash.
When there's a rush on Wainuiomata and Stokes Valley houses, that will be proof that the housing crisis is as real as a knife at your throat.
Even John Key would get the picture after a flying visit to that foreign country - to a wealthy Aucklander - where people mysteriously live.
Understandably, Masterton lags behind in the latest real estate graphs.
It seemed idyllic when I was a child, all sunny days and beds of vivid phlox, but today it's noted for especially nasty criminals, and teenagers so bored that, A) if female and nubile, pregnancy counts as some kind of entertainment and B) if male and testosterone-fuelled, you get a dirt-bike, being banned from driving, and tear up local streets and parks in an attempt to nearly die, which, along with causing actual road death, counts as local male action.
Aged between 15 and 18 they've been flinging themselves into the game of, "I'm 16 and I don't mind dying," over the school holidays, to locals' despair.
"What they need is another war," old people used to say about such idiots. Thank god they don't get politicised.
There might be cause to, though, over housing greed among Auckland's rich and thoughtless.
While so many Auckland families sleep in cars, or are lucky enough to bed down at a marae, multimillion-dollar businessman and retailer Rod Duke is gaily building a new mansion in Herne Bay, having ripped the guts out of an old one, on a $12 million waterfront site. "It's just going to be a family residence," he says modestly.
There will be a suspended weir pool, and a boatshed with panoramic harbour views will become an "entertainment venue", whatever that is.
The basement floor of the new mansion will be a cosy gaming, sports and entertainment zone in which the family will no doubt play Monopoly, buying up large with real money as property investors are currently doing, snapping up cheaper properties in which to farm the less fortunate with ever-increasing rents. Think ants and aphids.
Duke's neighbour, developer Graeme Murphy, has Park Lane plans to match Duke's Mayfair. "It's going to be Cape Cod, really big. It's about 650sq m, four levels, 12-car garaging with lap pool and a spa pool off the end of it," he has briefly described his planned palace.
Let them eat cake. I won't say what kind of cake.
As evidence of our quaint local ways in the capital, Wellington Mayor Celia Wade-Brown once rode her bicycle to the airport to greet the woman who may be the most powerful woman in the world come November, Hillary Clinton.
You can either cringe at the goofiness of it, or celebrate the memory of how out of touch with the real world we're lucky enough to be. I mean, did she want to double Clinton on her handlebars?
Meanwhile, former Prime Minister Helen Clark, who climbs mountains, literally and metaphorically, is after the top job at the United Nations.
As the PM who put our army to work doing stuff other than killing people she has an impressive USP. She made us harmless, and there are worse things to be in a crazy world.
That has changed, even in the past week, becoming more threatening than familiar.
Planning a holiday overseas involves risk assessment, as if you must prove to yourself that you're brave enough to go, or be a coward if you're not prepared to be blown to bits for the sake of someone else's obsession.
I waited behind an Islamic woman in a supermarket queue the other day and marvelled at her complete black covering, from the tip of her head to her invisible feet.
She seemed as inaccessible and remote as a mountain you could never climb in a country so far away it might as well be Mars.
How lucky we both are to be shopping without fear, I thought, dreading another night's news bulletin, and more useless tears.
- Rosemary McLeod is a journalist and author