Forward Thinking: Start the party

It's time for Auckland to show itself off as a really cool place to do things, considering thousands of people are coming to party here in six months time. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Winter is all very exciting really, isn't it? Time to buy new boots, watch excessive amounts of TV and frequent cosy bars.

It's also time for Auckland to show itself off as a really cool place to do cool things, considering thousands of people are coming to party here in six months time. We are party central.

Pity that last Friday night, a particularly cold one you might recall, while waiting for a bus to take me home via Queen St and shrugging off boozy girls in short dresses with goose-pimpled thighs who asked me if they could please have one of my crisps, Auckland's nightlife seemed to be going horribly wrong.

"Excuse us," said a couple of polite, scenester-looking Pommy boys. "Do you know where we might find some cool bars, like? It's just that everything we have seen so far is rather tacky." They gestured towards a drunk girl draped between two guys. She looked about 16. It was about 9.30pm.

I sighed. "You're in the wrong spot. While Queen St may appear to be the centre of Auckland, it is not really the area we want to show off to tourists after 8pm on a so-called drinking night."

They had heard of the Viaduct being the glam area and knew that was not for them, and were not keen on mingling with all the suits in Britomart.

So I told them to go up to K Rd for something a little more mellow, with music they might be into (they wore cheesecloth scarves, I had pigeon-holed them). They waited for the bus to take them there, but when it failed to turn up when the digital sign indicated it would, sighed heavily and decided to leg it.

I'm not sure what happened to them but I know they are not alone in struggling to find their groove in Auckland. I just hope we can resolve this in the next few months.

Britomart is looking fantastic and was heaving on Friday night. It was almost like something you would see in Melbourne. Almost. Definitely lacking a certain ease in transporting oneself there and a well-worn charm, but a start nonetheless.

However, on Saturday I returned to the precinct (after mooching around after a rather drab Kingsland festival) to find it a sad shell of itself. No doubt everyone was glued to the game on the telly at home. Even though it was also on in all the bars. The more likely reason though was that they were suffering a case of Auckland apathy, a winter condition as destructive to the city's vibe as the common cold is to the city's workforce.

A word generally associated with negotiating the inner city during the weekend is a "mission". In my books, the proliferation of sad, drunk underagers getting into fisticuffs also makes it "unappealing". It shouldn't be, six months out from one of the most exciting events to hit the city.

The place should be buzzing with the anticipation of its party-centric guests, not waiting for them to make the fun. It's kind of like arriving fashionably late to a party: you hope people have stopped standing around posing and making awkward small talk so you can slip into the fun unnoticed.

The city undoubtedly lacks soul, and the reason is it is lacking souls during crucial times. There were obviously several reasons why people did not attend the Arts Festival in droves earlier this year; Christchurch was one of them, costs were another, and then the traffic and transport is an ongoing shambles.

But perhaps we can turn things around in the next couple of weeks as Music Month, the Comedy Festival and Readers and Writer's Festival hit central locations. (At the risk of sounding like a scratched record, if Len Brown is reading this it might be nice for him to look at how best to actually move people towards the CBD, but as the old adage goes, the will has to be there first.)

I'm just as guilty of Auckland Apathy, in fact I feel that in writing this I am being a traitor to my couch, but the truth is, we've only got a few months to go. It's time to show off what we do have - even if it's not a $9.8 million cloud quite yet - and prove that going out in "party central" is not just about stumbling around Queen St drunk and frequenting BK. Not always.

-TimeOut