rehydrating

is probably good idea right now. Though, never the poster boy for the late 2oth early 21st century, I am not one for toting round a waterbottle. So I guess my veins are shrinking or necrotising or something nasty as we speak, and it could according to the pump ads be (partially) responsible for my miserable attention span ... though I am still blame late onset attention deficit disorder ...

Anyway the long awaited tour of the 'Grad with Melf and Sean was well worth the angst of a four hour delay in arrival. Especially since they brought with them a bottle of seven tiki white rum and (left behind the last of the) manuka honey vodka. Either of these mixes with ginger beer and lime went perfectly with late after noon badminton on the lawn.

Games where it is reasonably possible to participate with a glass in hand are the best kind, clearly. Despite losing in the Manawatustan Wellington play-offs it was a good time all round(s after rounds). The proceedings were interrupted by the unusual Spanish women he keeps a lot of her furniture in my garage., but that was all by the by.

We went into town and showcased the local residents' talent at the local karaoke joint. Which is breath-taking, but not in the way you might think. Palmengrad appears to be bride capital of the universe. We spotted 7 different hen parties. Each with not-so-blushing-bride with veil and skimpy outfits, all matching a theme ... naughty catholic school girls seems popular this year, which gives a whole porn-as-as-street-theatre atmosphere to the strip.

Melanie succinctly summed up the problem of the 'Grad, from a Newtown/Wellie perspective ... there is only the equivalent to Courtney Place here.

Speaking of 'atmosphere' this time as a lexical item, I awoke the other day to ad on the local radio for a brand new restaurant "opposite the hospital" ... fire your copywriter ... which has rebranded itself and has a great new name .... ambiente', pronounced in the approximation of a French accent as only a resident of the 'Grad could produce AM-BE-ANT-TAY. If you have to French it up a little, what's so wrong with ambience?

The locals, conservative about all other facets of life, have a very gung ho attitude to language. I'm not one an apostrophe-obsessed person. It is perfectly reasonable for people to be confounded by the rules of the little bugger, as the standardisation of this aspect was produced by printers not linguists or authors as late as the nineteenth century. Besides, the morphology of English is so poor that in spoken language we do not distinguish the ending -s as attached to verbs to mark 3rd singular present habitual aspect, and both plurality and possession on nouns. Yet no-one is confused when listening because we recognise word class and function from context. I digress ... rant ... What locals here seem to enjoy is sprinkling diacritics from other languages over perfectly reasonable English words in a manner reminiscent of heavy metal bands. There is a hotel named after an English county which has a nice overlay of umlauts above each of the vowels, which must really confuse the German and Hungarian tourists. Another obsession is inappropriate z. Just down the road from the aforementioned hotel, is another imaginatively named shadzz. Most locals have no idea how this is meant to be pronounced, which surely would impact on room occupancy rates, no?

And before I go. If you hanker after white rum, take a look at seven tiki. The bottle and the website reproduce the legend of the seven canoes that brought the Maaori to this corner of Polynesia. Who says hard liquor can't be educational. Though, if you ever find yourself navigating an outrigger in the Pacific in hopes of finding us down here, don't rely on the map on the bottle. For some reason, Tonga is west of Tahiti and more northerly than Hawai'i ...