Peta Mathias hits the stage

Famous foodie Pete Mathias keeps on expanding her repertoire. Stepping aside from running her luxury foodie tours to all sorts of exotic places, she's now doing her own stage show, combining cooking with storytelling, playing Agony Aunt and belting out some French songs. Here she is on my TV show, Let's Talk, explaining her new career move...

What the world needs now - King Lear

Such a long, golden summer here in Auckland, New Zealand. It's grim for farmers trying to cope with drought, but city folks are loving it. They're mostly loving it because there's so much on in the way of festivals and great events and all of it's happening under endless sunshine and clear skies. One of those attractions is Auckland University's outdoors Summer Shakespeare season This year it's King Lear, running all this month and directed by Lisa Harrow. She's a seasoned Shakespeare actress but this year, for the first time, she's tried her hand at directing. On my TV show, Let's Talk, she explained why King Lear - that ancient tragedy - is actually perfectly in tune with the times we're living in now. How is that? Here's a brief clip...

Cruising with a purpose

So I've signed up for a cruise heading into balmy Pacific waters where the ship carves a course through blindingly blue sea and the sun beats down from dawn to dusk. The air is filled with laughter as cocktails are shaken, the salad bar is endlessly re-stocked and ice settles in glasses as the cruise director coos news of countless shipboard amusements over the PA. 

Massages, dance lessons, art auctions, cooking lessons, tai chi, wine tasting, yoga, shopping, facials... you can imagine the delights.  

Meanwhile, down in the bowels of the good ship Oosterdam, in a small windowless theatre, I'm settling in for another lecture with some fellow cruisers as we get stuck into a course called Fractal Evolution. 

The lecturers are Gregg Braden and Bruce Lipton, top authors in the stable of Hay House International, the giant American publishing company that specialises in what the book trade calls MBS - the mind, body spirit genre. 

Having published in that area myself, I was intrigued by the sound of what they were offering.  Here's the blurb that drew me in: "Faster than we can document it in the media or teach it in our textbooks, it’s clear that we’ve entered a new phase of life on planet Earth. From the unprecedented crises of broken economies and the realities of climate change, to the shrinking resources of food, fresh water and the renewed threat of World War, even the experts are reeling at the perfect storm that’s converging on our near-term horizon. With all of the uncertainties there’s one thing we can be sure of: the collapse of global systems leads to big changes in our personal lives. 

"In this compelling new program, visionary scientists and bestselling authors Gregg Braden and Bruce Lipton marry their expertise in science and technology with the intimate knowledge preserved by the world’s indigenous elders to answer the questions on everyone's mind: What does our changing world mean to us? And what can we do to ease the transition?"

How could I resist? Cruising's fine but mixing the indolence with some stimulating mind food sounded wonderful. Bring it on, I thought. 

I wish I could tell you I triumphed in the learning department. The boys were compelling, their messages profound, their stories pertinent, their passion undeniable.  We touched on a thousand Powerpointed matters:  the world's stark choice between destruction and transformation, the wonders of cell biology, Darwinism and how he got it wrong,  indigenous wisdom, global warming and the Antarctic ice core samples that prove it's not our fault, energy healing, epigenetics, the rise and fall of civilizations,  self-belief, ancient scrolls, the tree of life, the nature of physics, geomagnetic fields, reincarnation, Hopi prophecy and the power of community. And more. 

All of this poured out every day that we were at sea in between afternoon tea time and the cocktail hour. You know, that blob-out time of day. When you're on holiday, what really calls you at 3pm is napping.  

At the end of one afternoon I left with my head full to bursting, fled through the noisy dazzle of the casino and the happy-hour cheers from the bar and went outside to gulp in what I needed most – air...buckets of salty air, the setting sun's warmth and a view of limitless blue.

The disconnect between what we were learning and the happy, mindless, pleasure-seeking other life we were luxuriating in was too much. I went a bit nuts there for a while. 

My mood roller-coasted between high elation at being out on the ocean on a huge, gorgeous ship surrounded by huge minds, and deep gloom over my lack of scientific education and the scale of my own tiny life. Then, bless it, on some weird energetic level my body seemed to sympathise with my turmoil and went out in protest. Suddenly I had a sore throat, a snotty nose and could hardly breathe (what, in the tropics?!) and with huge relief was forced to lie down. 

I think next time I want my mind blown I'll do it on dry land in sensible clothes with a sharp pen and a posture of total attention and dedication. If I cruise again I'll absorb nothing more challenging than a cracking good novel and the menu of delicious spa treatments. Oh, and another of those Tequila Sunrises would hit the spot as well.  :)

PS I did actually learn a lot. And had a wonderfully good hot-stone massage. Thanks, Ann, star member of the Oosterdam's spa staff.

How deeply I heart you

It’s an organ of many parts, the heart. As the body’s workhorse it keeps on busily pumping away more than 100,000 times a day to push blood around our bodies, a job we’re only too happy to delegate and forget about it… until and unless something goes wrong. But over and above all the muscular action we still doggedly persist in thinking the heart is the thing we feel with. We talk about how our hearts get broken or how they swell with pride or how our hearts go out to others in distress. And lately, in the social media world, we’ve begun to use heart as a verb, using either the word or a logo to express how much we love things.  People are hearting everything online from boyfriends and kittens to big, smelly cities. I haven’t yet heard it actually spoken in romantic dialogue though. As far as I know, no movie actor has gazed deeply into someone’s eyes and sighed, "Darling, I heart you". But it can only be a matter of time...   

A Wallow in Yellow

Springtime in New Zealand drives me a bit nuts. So much wind, so much blustery smacking of breezes  and rain against your face. The sun is a bit of a stranger too, with so much cloud skudding from horizon to horizon that we long for weather that's settled and hot. We know it's coming, but just now midsummer seems a long way off.  

But I cheered myself up the other day by taking out my camera on a yellow binge. Nothing like yellow's sunniness to add a dose of cheer to your life. And there's miles of it out there. Marigold, lemon, buttercup, saffron, egg yolk, mustard, cream. So many happy colors. You just need to notice.

The Herald's look-back letter H

The grand old New Zealand Herald, which has been talking to Aucklanders daily since 1863, has been shrunk from broadsheet down to compact size and been given a big revamp. But in one way it’s not so new because while the old masthead has been sidelined, we are still left with one lonely letter, the capital H, printed in what’s known as blackletter font.  

And that’s not new at all. In the middle ages, monks used to fill their days by writing out religious texts by hand, using ink and quill pens to produce convoluted gothic lettering. 

So when Mr Gutenberg invented, in 1455, a way to print words over and over again, using movable type, it was natural for him to copy the monastery style you can see below. . 

He printed his famous bible and showed the world a way to make books available en masse for the first time. 
Blackletter is closely linked with German history and much used by Hitler's lot for nasty propaganda publishing, which is why it fell right out of favour after World War II. 

There are of course thousands of modern, more readable typefaces, but many newspapers, in love with the aura of history and authority conveyed by blackletter script, have clung on to it. 

So even now the Herald still carries a 15^th century echo of Gutenberg. Given how very hard it is to read, we can just be very thankful that graphic designers dropped blackletter font for any other purpose a very long time ago.  

Me and My Car

Depending on how your life works out, and if you’ve had kids, and if they’ve had kids, and assuming you’re all living in the same town, you might get caught up in granny duties at some stage of your mid- or late-life years.

At 60 I thought I’d never be a grandma. Blink. A few years on there’ve been three new arrivals, all accessorised with irresistible smiles. Being on granny duty (let me amend that to ‘calling’ rather than ‘duty’) can be complicated if there’s fair distance between your house and the dwelling of the little people.

So I find myself driving. A lot.

There are two ways to cope. You can mutter darkly to yourself on the motorway about how ridiculous this is and how you’ll have to move closer before you go mad or the rising price of petrol chews up your bank account forever.

Or you can sit back, play some nice music and ponder on the fact that actually you’re so lucky to have a car to get you to the big-hug zone. And how some of your friends have grandchildren growing up 12,000 miles away who they only get to see on Skype, while your trip is only 50ks long.

And that there are some nice cafes and excellent produce shops to drop into
along the way. And that when you get there it really is worth it. Every time.

I’ve made a small video about this modern driving dilemma. Hope you enjoy…