Deborah Hill Cone: City snapshot in rearview mirror

The trees are very green in the Waipoua Forest. Photo / Dean Purcell

Why does everything in this sexy bubble we call home become debased with the competitive spirit?

It rained all the way on the drive from Auckland to Hokianga; drenching and relentless. I only cried a little bit. The usual surplus of fraying consciousness; the green of the Waipoua Forest being simply too green; old Spotty, in the front seat, going on this trip maybe for the last time.

I get those spooky driving thoughts about how life seems sort of plausible in many respects but not really real. Also, after I got out of range of Kim Hill, all I could think of were bits of a poem. "Here is the deepest secret nobody knows ... this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)."

You bastard, ee cummings, you make me howl. In Hokianga it was misty and a man in gumboots was feeding chickens on the road. They were collecting for the kapa haka at the Opononi Pub and I saw a guy I know on Trackside, but the bar had run out of brandy.

At our shack I had to get rid of a decomposing rat, whose strangely bloated bare corpse and tufts of hair and rat-like material seemed to have got spread over an unfeasibly large area due to the leak in the roof. I felt like Walter White in Breaking Bad: fleshlike goop.

Afterwards, I got in the bath, lit by Glade Vanilla Candles ($5 from New World, honestly, not too bad). There is a garlic clove serving as a plug in the overflow vent of the bath to stop it leaking. Redundant, given the percussive leak from the ceiling.

Hot water helps. My conclusion: it may be easier to be happier out of Auckland. I am starting to wonder if with all the property prices and WVS (White Villa Syndrome) and people who think they should be living a life like Mike Hosking, whether there may be something wrong with life in Auckland.

Are we drifting into the arena of the unwell? Making enemies of our own futures? Waking up to "Murder and All-Bran and Ebola," to paraphrase Withnail.

Last week I got my hair done. It took so long I started to fantasise Walter Mitty style that I had been kidnapped and was being held against my will in a concrete bunker and tortured. I pretended I was Carrie Matheson in my sinister black plastic cape and tipped my head as far back as it will go while I was being waterboarded (shampooed).

"I don't advise a haircut man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hairs are your aerials," Withnail's dealer, Danny, said.

Also, last week I had Botox injected in my forehead. I don't usually - I'm Botox-free above - but there is solid research that shows if you get rid of your frown lines you feel happier because you can't frown. See how far we have strayed from all that is good and true? Botox is part of a late-in-life attempt to recapture the thwarted hotness I missed out on as a youth. It was pleasurably painful - "No! I will not give up any secrets no matter how much you hurt me!". Now my forehead looks as bumpy as a cheap Klingon latex mask. This week, I also considered buying a pair of YSL cage boots - a bit pervy - but you know what, I am not sure that yet another pair of statement boots will help me with my inner feelings of wraithlike annihilation.

Being a person is "free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can't". I drift about Parnell like a ghost. Oh, I know you can live in Auckland and resist all the bourgeois carry-on. Not everyone wants to go to 46 and York every night and drink pink champagne and talk rubbish. But even the sort of soul-building things that might help one feel like a real person - walking or gardening or riding a bike, say - in Auckland's humid sexy bubble seem to become debased with a competitive spirit.

It seems hard to do normal things without feeling obliged to do them in special ways. Trying to do them better than other people rather undermines the whole point. Maybe away from Auckland it is easier to just exist.

I will put my red gumboots on and take Spotty for a walk before the tide comes in. The trees are very green. I may never come back.