Latest fromPeter Calder

Reality TV is cheap to make, because the talent works for nothing and the scripts are skeletal, and it follows a wearyingly predictable formula, writes Peter Calder.

You'd be surprised just how hard it is to find a family willing to let a Herald writer snoop around their home and ask all sorts of intrusive questions about their substandard living conditions, writes Peter Calder.

Not for the first time, I found myself wondering why Queen's Birthday is a public holiday here, writes Peter Calder. Much more sensible is to mark Matariki, which begins in late May or early June.

The only palangi in the room, I had been invited by Tongan community leader Melino Maka, who was keen to speak about the place of kava in the culture here, writes Peter Calder.

Regulars at Chamberlain Park Golf Course say there is no public mandate for council ‘carve-up’ of popular public course.

Snooker got a new world champion last week. Stuart Bingham, at 38 the oldest champion since 1978, became one of those overnight successes who are 20 years in the making.

It would take a hard heart not to feel some degree of sympathy for the restaurant owners who have come out swinging against anonymous reviews and the websites that carry them.

Glory and glamour are made in the drabbest of surroundings.

It bucketed down on Sunday morning, just as they were setting up for the Auckland International Cultural Festival at the sprawling War Memorial Park in Mt Roskill.

Peter Calder revisits the chunk of Auckland's west where immigrant families from Croatia settled to grow fruit - and make wine - for the expanding city.

My first experience of getting behind the wheel of a left-hand-drive car was a thrilling one, writes Peter Calder.

'Time to get a weedeater through here, I reckon," I said to Roscoe Webb, as I gazed across the expanse of waist-high weeds threatening to choke the old headstones at Waikumete Cemetery.

Check Ditch Keeling's voicemail announcement. "I'm in the middle of killing something right now," it says. "Leave a message and I'll get back to you just as soon as it's dead.

Had I ever played croquet, he asked. "Maaate!" I thought, though I didn't have the nerve to say it out loud because I knew what he'd say next.

Arthur Taylor, whose name never appears in the media without the words "career criminal" shackled to the front of it, has been banged up since 2005 in the maximum security wing of Auckland Prison at Paremoremo.

The country around Clevedon, southeast of Auckland, is parched and brown. Hawks circle slowly in the blue sky and even at 10am, the sun is like a hammer blow. The occasional "Road May Flood" sign seems like a grim joke.

She was just 17. School had just finished. Summer seemed to stretch on forever.

It took longer than it should have before I noticed the name on the letterbox in the middle of Woolleys Bay.

Every American knows about the Mayflower making landfall in 1620 in what is now called Provincetown, Massachusetts...

If you stand at the door of Videon, the DVD and video library in Dominion Rd, you can see the two buildings where their competitors lived and died.