Roger Moroney: Mid winter escape a hot topic

At this time of the year, as the true chill of winter sweeps in from the south, a lot of people skip off to Queensland or the closest Pacific islands to the north in search of warmth.
Which is understandable, although not something which particularly interests me.
It is kind of like being at war ... in the mud and cold of the trenches with darkness all about ... then getting word that you have been given eight days leave in the warm and peaceful climes of a faraway place.
Leave you would so gladly take, although the passing of each and every day of that leave would weigh heavy in the knowledge that the escape is but a temporary one.
That in but a few more days the relaxed lounging upon a warm beach would once again be replaced by the dark, cold air of what is the reality of just how things are.
Although, one could argue one would return to the grim landscape in a better frame of mind.
That's the trouble with people like me.
I'd be basking in the glow of a Brisbane sun and at the end of every such day would return to the hotel and cross it off the calender.
"Another three days and it's back to the southerlies and 11 ratty degrees," I would mumble.
So for people like me, the concept of a mid-winter escape to tropical climes is an alien one.
Better to just tough it out and embrace the occasional break in the chill (there were two 17C days last July).
Now this is where Sir David Attenborough becomes involved (please bear with me).
Sir David is the font of all natural history knowledge, and he would draw a conclusion from this attitude.
That the emperor penguin of Antarctica is not related to the human being ... except maybe for one.
Yep, one juvenile emperor (oh those tearaway youngsters) decided to do a "head for Brissy" except that he didn't make Queensland ... he made the Kapiti Coast.
Not exactly tropical to us, but to a lad from a land where the temperature gauge is forever under the zero mark it would have been positively balmy.
In fact the "heat" got to the great penguin the DoC crews down that way have called "Happy Feet". The big birds eat ice to help them cool down when things get a little too warm, like 12C, so this big little bloke started gobbling up sand, as although it was wrong colour it was all over the place, like the ice way down south.
So now he's getting his stomach pumped (happens to the wayward young human from time to time also) and if he comes right there's talk of letting him loose in Foveaux Strait so he can make his way back to where the sand is cold and edible.
As Sir David would point out - here is a case of an animal which made its way to a warmer spot in the world but upon arriving there found it wasn't for him and now desperately wants to get back to a much colder place, which is the opposite to what the human creature wants to do.
Poor little bloke, I hope he catches a chill soon.
And I hope the DoC crew can catch that taniwha up in Queen St because it appears to be halting the creation of a multi-million dollar transport hub.
No one's ever seen it of course, but like the Loch Ness monster, the yeti, the bigfoot and the leprechaun it's there alright. I saw a strange monster in Queen St once, but that was the result of about eight shots of bourbon.
And now, to conclude these random thoughts, a plea to the manufacturers of canned foods to put correct labelling on their products.
Last Thursday I bought a small can of spaghetti which bore the name of a major food processing company not too far from here.
I figured it was sufficient to fill four toasted sandwiches ... until I opened it and drained the very runny sauce out. What was left did not quite fill half the tin.
They need to re-evaluate their listing of ingredients.
These 200gm items should come with the wording "may contain traces of pasta".
Oh, and as we got barely three dessert spoons of spag' out of it I reckon they owe me one-and-a-half toasted sandwiches.
Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.