Welcome to 2025, the year of celebrity at Lush Places. After careful thought, lasting as much as five minutes, Michele and I have decided that we are to be world-famous celebrities this year, at least within the confines of our 12-acre sheep-and-pear paradise.
And why shouldn’t we be? The word “celebrity” is so completely drained of meaning these days we can’t see why we shouldn’t be celebrities like so many others who most people have never heard of.
In the past, you had to do something like climb Mt Everest, spend 10 years as All Black captain or be Michael Hill jeweller, to be a celebrity in New Zealand. Or you had to appear on local television.
Actually, we both almost qualify for the old-style celebrity under that last criteria. Michele was once an extra in an episode of Shortland Street – she was a patient waiting in the hospital’s A&E – and I had a blink-and-you-missed-it appearance on City Life, a camp, late-1990s attempt by South Pacific Pictures to make a sort of New Zealand Melrose Place.
I believe I may also have very briefly appeared on the nation’s screens during an early-1980s telethon: I and my fellow scouts were among those helping to thank the country very, very much for their kind donations from a studio in Palmy.
But television fame is pretty much yesterday’s fame. Nobody really watches local telly the way they used to, which is to say when we would all watch the same things, like telethons, Mortimer’s Patch and Gliding On.
The key thing about the new fame appears to be that it relates to whatever boring, everyday job you happen to do. You may not even have to be very good at the job; the new fame doesn’t require high levels of competence, just that you do that job.
Being a complete nobody for large swathes of New Zealand is definitely no barrier to being described as a celebrity now, something I discovered while reading about an Auckland “celebrity chef” who was using a news website story to help flog something or other.
Being a nobody for large swathes of NZ is definitely no barrier to being described as a celebrity now.
I can’t remember the celebrity chef’s name, but then I hadn’t heard of him to begin with. And neither had Michele. However, because the news website was describing him as a “celebrity chef”, it must mean that someone, somewhere has heard of the guy.
This is what is at the core of the new Kiwi celebrity. In the past, you had to be Paul Holmes or Colin Meads or Jason Gunn – someone who everyone had actually heard of and was widely known to be pretty good at what they did – to be described as a celebrity.
Now, you can get yourself called a celebrity if enough social media influencers have been to your possibly quite awful and awfully overpriced restaurant and eaten your signature dish of grass-fed lamb porridge or Clevedon oysters moulded in aspic and served on a bed of micro greens.
Fame, like much else these days, ain’t what it used to be.
With the decision to make 2025 the year of celebrity at Lush Places, it was only a matter of determining what sort of celebrities we wanted to be.
Michele is very keen on being a celebrity sheep farmer, but not because she knows a great deal about how to raise sheep, owns many sheep or is ever likely to own a proper farm. None of that matters because as long as I describe her in the Listener as a “celebrity sheep farmer” and you read those words, a celebrity sheep farmer she becomes.
I, on the other hand, am a very accomplished mower of lawns, with many years of grass-clipping experience and a wealth of expertise in doing the edges. Thus, I will spend 2025 as something New Zealand has never had before, and may never have again, a “celebrity lawn mower”.
With that determined, all that is left to do is decide which of us Lush Places celebrities is the more famous. Over to you.
