The tents on a shadeless expanse of land, miles from any beach, are lined up like frets on a guitar neck.

An attentive passenger on the 2pm ferry leaving Devonport on Sunday afternoon would have been treated to an unusual sight.

Life changes and people move on but an idyllic spot overflows with memories of when we were young.

Is there a prettier place anywhere to watch the sunset than on the foreshore at Karaka Bay on Great Barrier Island?

The new house up the road was ready to move into and the beginnings of a front lawn were visible over a rickety picket fence less than waist-high.

It's just gone 9am and the business of courtroom 6 at the Manukau District Court won't be getting under way until 9:30.

Seafarers of the world have found a warm welcome at the waterfront centre for more than a century.

'Best you leave me out of it," says Morrie Kearney as I step into the shallows and back on to dry land. "Write about those other people."

Shopowner wants to provide a place to rest and hopefully lure customers, but council insists it has to charge.

As sheds go, it's a pretty flash one. A fully insulated 300sq m building on a concrete slab, with a lunchroom and a small electronics workshop partitioned off at one end, it could be a small factory.

It's a food hall on steroids. Dozens of national cuisines are represented by stalls that sell various nations' street-food staples.

With Ten Guitars ringing in her ears a veteran publican recalls the six o'clock swill and drinkers' cunning lurks.

Some people get bogged down in the trivial and others just get the mower out and cut the grass.

Peter Calder writes: I have a Licence to Drive a Motor Vehicle in the Cook Islands. It might not seem something to skite about, but it's testament to perseverance.

I see Glyn Evans before I meet him. His head is bobbing slightly in the single window of his Khyber Pass Rd workshop as he methodically hand-sands a thin piece of swamp kauri.

At the airport in Samoa, I once saw an arriving family laden down with jumbo boxes of a well-known brand of fried chicken.

On a recent sunlit morning, Watling Reserve in Mt Eden was a pleasant place to wander.

If you had been at the Bridgeway Cinema in Northcote Point on Monday morning, you would have seen a piece of the past waiting to be carted away.

Is there not at least a possibility the convention centre SkyCity is building in Auckland will turn out to be as future-proof as the windjammer and the rotary-dial telephone?

First, it was stud poker. Like Texas Hold 'em but with nine cards, more face-down, fewer face-up, so the chance of killer hands was pretty high.

July film festival has been capturing one film festival-goer's heart since the early days in the Regent theatre.

You must know how to skate. Not on that new-fangled 18th-century invention called roller skates, but on thin blades that carve the ice.

He says I can call him Smokey. He tells me it's his street name. He's only 38, but his grey beard and hollow, careworn expression seem to add a dozen years to that.

The morning was clear and a blue-sky day was in prospect.

The kids in Room 19 at Takapuna Normal Intermediate School seem riveted to their chairs as the woman at the front of the class belts out a song that makes the steel rafters ring.

Model mountain at exhibition gives a realistic view on 60th anniversary of Everest ascent.

It doesn't look much of a kitchen: the bench is barely a metre long and the chef has just enough space to swing a Sabatier.