Well, thank goodness we've got all that culture out of the way. Just in time, eh? Now it's time for the truly cultural aspect of New Zealand life to begin: the rugby.
I couldn't help but thinking it really was as well we'd got that other stuff out of the way before the rugby heads arrive. What would they have thought? They might have thought that we were a very strange sort of people indeed celebrating, as we did last week via our television screens, two of what are often called "icons".
No, we didn't have a dramatisation of Pinetree's early years; perhaps that's still to come. Instead we've had Billy T and Katherine M: a funny man with a high-pitched giggle and a sex-mad young woman who went on to become a famous writer and who, said, in 1908, "bugger", according to Fiona Samuels' reimagining of Katherine Mansfield's early years.
Some spat has arisen (or re-arisen, probably) about who knew the real Billy T and who has the right to say what he was like. Ho hum.
Bliss - which is a fictional account of the young KM (obviously, and hence that "bugger") - was fresh as a daisy to begin with and a bit wilted by the end, as was KM. It looked light and bright and utterly contemporary (how very strange it was to see Kate Elliott as KM in the very same striped cardy I bought on Ponsonby Rd last year ...)
