This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including investigating the state of our mental health in the Great Minds series, how NZ can rebuild stronger post-Covid with The New New Zealand and how to minimise the impact of living in an Inflation Nation.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2022. Today we take a look at New Zealanders whose lives are a little less ordinary but largely unknown.
The secret life of: A Kiwi swinger
The woman said extra-marital encounters made her feel like the volume was turned up in all areas of her life. Photo / 123RF
It began with a book, Amy tells the Herald: “Sex at Dawn. It opened my eyes to a new understanding of sexuality and what society had portrayed,” she says of the Christopher Ryan text that details a history of sexual practices and, according to reviews, aims to challenge general opinion and expectations around sex and monogamy.
As Amy finished the final chapter, she couldn’t help but reflect on her own sex life, impacted in part by her husband being away a lot for work. She decided to broach the idea of sex outside of their marriage.
What followed was “the most alive and thrilling time” in her life.
Amy reveals to the Herald her foray into swinging – or Ethical Non-Monogamy (ENM), as is the preferred term these days. This is her recount of the “thrill”, the “female empowerment” and the jealousy sparked by months of “fantastic sex” with myriad partners outside of her marriage.
Gustavo Concha is known among fellow concierges as "Mr Hilton, New Zealand". Photo / Supplied
A wedding in a day, a private plane, a month-long stay to recover from surgery, a last-minute booking at a top international restaurant: for some, money is no issue. It’s about the “priceless” delight of having the impossible made possible.
In New Zealand, there is arguably no one who knows this to be truer than a man named Gustavo Concha, the Hilton Auckland’s chief concierge for 21 years.
Speaking to the Herald from the hotel’s serene setting, that ship-like structure moored at the tip of Auckland’s Princes Wharf, Chilean-born Concha recalls some of the more interesting stories of his career.
In the height of summer, bags of ripe berries were found in supermarket dumpsters. Photo / Supplied
As the light seeped out of another moody Dunedin day, Amanda pulled on an empty tramping pack and rode her bike to the back of her local Countdown.
A student with little money and no car, her grocery budget was tight. But she knew there was food still good enough to eat in the bins behind the supermarket. Parking her bike behind a nearby building, she scaled the supermarket fence, scurried over to a dumpster and clambered in.
For two years, this was how Amanda did her “weekly supermarket shop”.
As living costs soar to a 32-year high, hitting us hard at the supermarket checkout, Amanda woman reveals how she found a way to avoid paying for fruit and vegetables.
