In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s protagonist—Elizabeth—is excited at the prospect of a trip to the Lake District. And when we do return, she declares…

…it shall not be like other travellers, without being able to give one accurate idea of any thing. We will know where we have gone—we will recollect what we have seen.

Interesting, isn’t it, how we prefer to see ourselves as not like other travellers: Goodness me no, if in Dublin we would never fondle Molly Malone’s breasts…

Or, in New York, the Charging Bull's balls…

And yet we willingly paid money—months in advance—to see David Tennant’s Macbeth murder sleep at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre. Is that, really, any different?

Here’s something I read…

Intrepid travellers [are] those who want to see the world in meaningful and memorable ways, rather than just push through a to-do list1.

I’m sure Elizabeth would agree with that.

But…what makes our version of ‘meaningful and memorable’ superior to anyone else’s? Betcha, somewhere, there’s a group of guys still recounting the story of their big night out in Dublin: that night Stevie could not keep his hands off Molly Malone’s jugs…

Do you remember the movie, The Castle?

Trace and Con had a great honeymoon in Thailand. We met them as they came off the plane, with a baggage cart, which was lucky ‘cause they had heaps of stuff. We couldn’t wait to hear all the stories about their trip. It was the first time anyone in our family had traveled outside the country.

And they had these masks which you put over your eyes when you’re sleeping so that you can’t see anything. And they were complimentary. Yeah, they were for free.

Can’t think of a more meaningful or memorable trip than that one. Just imagine not being able to see anything when you’re sleeping.

But—even so—who is to judge who’s an intrepid traveller and who is not? Maybe the question is not whose trip is in some way superior to others’, but why—Elizabeth—we’re so keen to travel at all?

International travel continues its strong recovery and growth in 2025, with tourism income reaching record highs2…

The answer, of course, is hardly original: nothing compares with being there3. It’s not, just, seeing the Eiffel Tower, the lions of Trafalgar Square, or the Statue of Liberty (because they all, pretty much, look as we expect): it’s more—as we learned from The Castle—the vibe of the thing; the full, three-dimensional, ‘In Real Life’ experience:

When I started this series—Four Cities in Forty Photos—I wasn’t sure how I’d make it to the end. But here we are. And so, I sincerely hope I’ve been able to provide you with one accurate idea of [some] thing.

Even if it is just another spectacular sunset at Raumati Beach.

Thank you—so much—for following the photographs with me. A preview of my new series will appear next week.

Merry Christmas!🎄…

…and let me leave you with this word: zugunruhe. German, it means ‘migratory restlessness’ and describes the increased activity and anxiety migratory animals, especially birds, experience as they prepare to migrate.

I’m thinking, perhaps, you know the feeling.

No doubt you’ve had occasion—some time or other—to be ‘back of house’ at a conference venue, theatre, or other such place. And so you’ve experienced the divide— the demarcation, the stark contrast—between front and back. On the public side everything’s for show: glitz, glamour and ostentation. Smiles and geniality. But—back of house—it’s all function: concrete, pipework, cabling, ladders, air-conditioning ducts and industrial-grade paraphernalia. Stress and urgency.

Fly into most cities and the back is what you get. You’re clearly not arriving at the Met Gala—up the front steps, with the red carpet and the shiny brass handrails—rather, you’re brought in down round the alley, through the roller door and the loading dock. (Singapore’s the exception, of course—they bring you in through the pot plants). We arrived at Newark, across the Hudson, and it was like rewinding the opening credits to The Sopranos: Tony, in the Suburban, driving us past all the shipping containers and panel beaters and crane hire outfits. And we left from JFK—across the East River, through Queens—seemed like fifty kilometres of beige. Definitely back of house.

The only thing they make on Manhattan these days is money: anything that would get your hands dirty is pushed out to the bleakness of the ‘burbs.

Manhattan—to use one metaphor—is New York’s movie star. To use another, it’s a galaxy, a supernova. It is the city’s front: its glitz, glamour and ostentation; it is, after all, the world headquarters of Vogue. Never mind that the streets are clogged with delivery trucks: bringing in everything from donuts to diapers; or that you can’t move in Times Square for people; or that there are as many levels of social strata as there are floors in the Empire State Building—from the homeless on the sidewalks, to the helicopters in the sky—or that—at any moment—somewhere, something bad is almost certainly going on—somebody’s going to Emergency, somebody’s going to jail1.

Because…Manhattan has the magic. The excitement. The architecture, the Park, the galleries, the shows, the music. The restaurants, the bars...

So, yes please, make mine a Manhattan.

One week is not nearly enough.

Next week: And When We Do Return

Too late for Halloween, too early for Christmas, we’d crashed right smack into Thanksgiving: America’s most popular holiday, when 80 million people travel1, 46 million turkeys2 get the chop… and 3.5 million3 people line the streets of Manhattan for the annual Macy’s (department store) parade.

The weather was dismal, the crowds were daunting, and so—declining to join them4—we went to Brooklyn instead.

The day before, we’d been to The National Museum of The American Indian. It was troubling, actually: a sanitised collection of looted objects, rather than—as we’d imagined—a celebration of America’s indigenous peoples and cultures.

How about—given the season (but just as an example)—a closer look at Thanksgiving? We know there’s more to that story than the Pilgrims triumphantly celebrating their first year in their new land…

To be fair, the museum’s website does much better:

The Wampanoag [the tribe who helped the Pilgrims survive] practiced daily and seasonal traditions of giving thanks long before the encounter with English settlers in 1620 and the formation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

And there’s a video, telling the story of Cranberry Day5—of keeping alive one of the tribe’s traditions—and addressing the Thanksgiving myth:

It is a source of stereotype, it's a source of marginalising Wampanoag history. It's a source of forgetting. Some acknowledge it as a national day of mourning even because of those sacrifices, and because we continue to strive for justice in so many ways, whether it be land and culture or language.

In spite of all that occurred over the many years since then, we are still here.

Thanksgiving, as celebrated, is a myth. Halloween is a myth (Halloween was originally called Samhain and marked the end of the harvest season for Celtic farmers). Christmas is a myth (By holding Christmas at the same time as traditional winter solstice festivals, church leaders increased the chances that Christmas would be popularly embraced6). And myths, I read on the PBS website, are sacred tales that explain the world and man's experience. Myths are as relevant to us today as they were to the ancients. Myths answer timeless questions and serve as a compass to each generation7.

Maybe, but here’s what John F. Kennedy thought:

Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought8.

As I say, we did our best to avoid Thanksgiving, by going to Brooklyn, where— according to Wikipedia—229 movies have been shot (230 when you add recently-released The Friend with Bill Murray and Naomi Watts9)

Which makes it one of those places you feel you know, even though you’ve never been there. And so, part of you wonders if it’s actually real. What if it only exist in our imagination? Maybe they made it up? CGI? Maybe it’s mythical?

It was comforting to discover that Brooklyn is not a myth. It is real…and looks just as it does in the movies.

Next week: Make mine a Manhattan

Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, we have something special down here at Birdland this evening…

That’s the intro on a track1 from a CD we had…and it explains—with its promise of something special down here this evening—how Birdland became one of those places—one of those shining stars in the night sky—to be visited some day. A wrapped and preserved possibility, in an entire (if imaginary) cabinet of curiosities: one of many in the drawer labelled ‘New York’.

The drawer as a whole—New York, I mean—is (as Amor Towles describes it) simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life.

And here we actually were: we had approached. And were at Birdland…for something special tonight…an evening with Elizabeth Bougerol2. Magic.

Another day, another treasure. At The Met: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Home to more than two million artworks: The America Today murals fill a whole painted room, four walls, ten panels, floor to ceiling3. Extraordinary. As is the preserved entire living room of the summer residence of Francis W. Little, designed by Frank Llloyd Wright4.

When writer Antonina Pattiz5 and her husband first arrived in New York, they purchased membership at the The Met and visited every Sunday, often devoting a visit to a single artwork. She says New York attracts storytellers, people who would rather have a great story than a quiet, uneventful life.

Of course, everyone in New York is a writer: Paul is a real estate novelist, who never had time for a wife (Billy Joel). Probably because—as Antonina writes—New York attracts people who are in love with the idea of New York.

I guess that is the allure of these curiosities within the drawer in the cabinet. Here’s Amor Towles again:

For what was civilisation but the intellect’s ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)?

Although, I think the best explanation of New York comes from (no surprise) Fran Lebowitz, who said:

When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.

Art, Music and Books. Isn’t that what cities do best?

Next week: ‘tis the season

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears1...

A new day on Raumati Beach and the birds congregate: the oyster-catchers here, the red-billed gulls there. Birds of a feather…

In cities, too. Between 1880 and 1920—in what’s been called The Great Arrival—four million Italians arrived in New York City. Mostly—like Tony Soprano’s grandfather2—from the depressed south: around Naples, and down Sicily way.

Many of them, as Emma Lazarus3 put it: Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But not all. Some, like Pietro Cinelli4, were wealthy; travelled first class to America. No Ellis Island for people like you, signore Cinelli: please, step ashore! The streets here, we think you’ll find, are paved with gold.

The streets he decided to buy, and to build on, were not on Manhattan…not on the Lower East Side, nor even up in East Harlem: both places where many Italians had already congregated: in overcrowded, poorly-constructed, tenements; often, people from the same village in the same street. Instead, he bought land over the Harlem River, in what then was still a rural village—Belmont—in a district called The Bronx5.

The Italians of East Harlem followed. Discriminated against by the Irish and German clergy there (who disapproved of the Italians’ version of catholicism), threatened by (what we now call) the mafia, and attracted to Cinelli’s newer, better-quality, apartment buildings, they moved west. The Puerto Ricans replaced them: East Harlem became Spanish Harlem…and Belmont—birds of a feather—became the new Little Italy.

A century or so later, that’s where we were headed…to visit Arthur Avenue: A well-kept secret: the best place for bread, pasta, meat, pastries, espresso machines, the only place to buy Italian sausage6.

We were not disappointed. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and here was everything foodies like us might desire.

But cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears…and we were innocents abroad. From just around the corner of our midtown hotel—our safe, by-now-familiar, home-away-from-home—the subway took us as far as Fordham Road, and from there it was a twenty-minute walk to Arthur Avenue.

But this—where we got off—this was not New York. At least, not the glossy, Lonely Planet, tourist version. Unknowingly, we seemed to have taken a ride into an alien, foreboding, third-world country. So this is The Bronx...Oh My God! Those children! They’re going to stab us—mercilessly—for our passports and passwords and steal our 2007 Rugby World Cup backpacks [mint condition] and our ancient iPhones and dump our punctured bodies into that dumpster and go and start new lives in New Zealand! And nobody will ever know what became of us!! Oh My God!!!

We were fine.

The children smiled and waved.

When we encounter something that is unfamiliar to us, our brains immediately go into overdrive, trying to make sense of the situation. We may experience anxiety, apprehension, or even panic, as we struggle to understand and adapt to something new or different7.

As John Mellencamp sang8—a song, the sarcasm of which is often missed9—Ain’t that America, home of the free, yeah? Nothing like being there to fully appreciate the economic disparities in the richest city of the richest country in the world.

Desires—and fears—are like dreams.

You can’t leave home without them.

Next week: Art, Music and Books

They called it—Ellis Island, where we’d just landed—the Island of Hope. The pearly gates through which immigrants were to pass on their way to a better life in America1.

In their millions. Between 1892 and 1954, when the facility closed, nearly 12 million: at the peak—1907—a million in one year. Every day, in other words, thousands more.

Hope seeped into the sacred spaces in her heart. She hoped, because there was no other choice2.

Ellis Island was the final hurdle. Filled with hope, they had reached America. But not yet arrived:

Men, women, and children segregated by sex, stood in lines on Ellis Island awaiting a barrage of questions on their potential destinations, intentions for going there, and job prospects upon arrival. The newcomers faced assembly-line medical exams and if doctors or nurses put certain chalk letters on an immigrant's outer-garment it meant detention and possible deportation3.

Family groups could be split; any one of them judged undesirable, refused entry and sent home. For many, it was L’Isola delle Lacrime: The Island of Tears.

And—if you think it’s tough today, getting through immigration—think again:

The conditions as I found them when I took office have been frequently described. Immigrants were abused and maltreated and the whole building was filthy. Many corrupt inspectors were in office. Boarding-house runners, posing as missionaries, were fleecing immigrants.4

Welcome to America.

Heather Webb’s historical novel, The Next Ship Home—captures the darkness and the light of Ellis Island. She describes it as a novel of the dark secrets of Ellis Island, when entry to “the land of the free” promised a better life but often delivered something drastically different.

America, did, to be fair, start off as the Land of The Free. Most of the Founding Fathers were strongly committed to a policy of free immigration in order to increase the population and well-being of the new nation5. In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote6:

The present desire of America is to produce rapid population by as great importations of foreigners as possible7.

America industrialised over the following century and the flood of immigrants was needed: for its factories, for building its railways, its skyscrapers. By 1910, over 40% of the population of New York were foreign-born8.

There was a backlash…

People began saying immigrants impeded the achievement of an ideal society, committed crimes, and abused welfare and that immigrants lowered native-born American wages…Scholars of the era contended that certain ethnicities possessed immutable intrinsic characteristics that would prevent assimilation into American society.9

America is known as a nation of immigrants, says Erika Lee, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. Xenophobia has been built into our laws, our politics and even our very definition of who counts as an American10.

A series of laws were passed, restricting who could enter the country, introducing quotas, literacy tests and discrimination on the basis of race. As a result, by 1919, the annual number of immigrants through Ellis Island had plummeted: to just 26,00011.

Hard to believe, isn’t it, that as many as 40% of Americans today may be descended from Ellis Island immigrants12. Reasonable to ask, therefore, as does Erika Lee, How can the United States be a nation of immigrants and a nation of xenophobia at the same time?

Next week: Desires and Fears

More interested in Ellis Island, we chose not to disembark at the statue—Liberty Island—despite both attractions being included in the one fare. Maybe this was our way of saying Good grief, can’t you see we’re not tourists? We’re visitors!

Understandable, though, that they only sell the boxed set: the two islands are next door, after all, and they’re both about immigrants, right? And the statue stands in welcome…and has that poem we’re dimly aware of:

Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…1

Puzzling, however, that the actual name of the statue is Liberty Enlightening The World…what does that have to do with immigration?

Liberty was a roman goddess: the personification of liberty and personal freedom2. And then, Enlightening…??

The Age of Enlightenment:

The central doctrines of the Enlightenment were individual liberty, representative government, the rule of law, and religious freedom3.

Hmmm. Turns out the statue wasn’t intended as a welcome to migrants. It was a celebration of the American Declaration of Independence; a gift from the people of France to the people of America…

Rewind. 250 years (1770s)

At that time: Well, there were three of us in this marriage… America, France and Great Britain. France and Great Britain hated each other and had been at war for years. America hated Britain because America wanted to be a grown-up now. And Britain hated America because America just wouldn’t do as it was told.

Upshot? America declared independence from Britain. Britain was furious and sent troops. France (encouraged by Benjamin Franklin4) saw an opportunity to get Britain, took sides with America, enabling it to win its Revolutionary War with Britain. America would not have won that war without France5.

The French people thought America was wonderful. So enlightened. Liberty! Progress! A Representative Government! Hang on a minute…But we don’t have representative government. Why not have our own revolution against the monarchy? And so they did.

Fast forward: one hundred years (1860s)

To commemorate the centennial of America’s Declaration of Independence, the French people6 decided to make a statue—the statue of Liberty Enlightening the World—to give to the American people.

The deal was that the French would fund the statue, but the Americans would pay for the plinth on which it would stand, and so they had a fundraiser. And Emma Lazarus7 contributed a poem, to be auctioned. With immigrant ships constantly arriving—and her being involved with helping immigrant Jews settle in their new country—she came up with her own interpretation of the statue…

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name, Mother of Exiles …[and] Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses…[etcetera].

Several years later, a plaque with her poem was added to the plinth and—over time—Emma’s version of the story has become the story. This, from Lonely Planet:

A one-woman welcoming committee for millions of immigrants8

Not that America is interested in immigrants any more9. But, as I say, we weren’t getting off the boat.

Which was unfortunate, really: because it means we have forever missed the opportunity to purchase an extremely stylish souvenir…

Next week: Islands In The Stream (2)

Once a fund manager, Amor is now a best-selling novelist. So New York…

Amor lives in Gramercy, which is where Carrie moved to (if you’ve been watching the Sex and The City spin-off. No comment). Inspired by your exclusive London squares, Gramercy1 is where we’ll all be living, when we too are best-selling novelists. You can have the one of the left…

In the morning, we’d gone to Union Square, which is nearby, to explore the market2.

…which was glorious.

And check out the four-storey Barnes and Noble bookstore3 across the street.

Buy some copies for Amor to sign…

Our lunch venue was Union Square Café, beloved for its quirky, comfortable charm and dishes featuring ingredients sourced from the nearby Union Square Greenmarket4. Walking distance for Amor from Gramercy.

Some ‘café’. We’re not in Dannevirke now, Dude.

You can’t (out of respect) quite see them in the photo, but Robert de Niro was there, with Daniel Radcliffe, Sarah Jessica Parker (of course) with Jerry Seinfeld, Martin Scorsese, with Fran Lebowitz (which is surprising, because the New Yorker calls her the patron saint of being at home5), Billy Joel, with Yoko, and Sean. Taylor Swift was in. Tom Hiddleston left. I mean, So New York.

Once Amor had worked the room, we ordered, and finally got him talking about his first novel, Rules of Civility6, which is set in New York in the 1930s and—it seems, anyway—has parallels with The Great Gatsby: Katey pursuing the American dream, Tinker not being who he said he was. A car crash.

But Amor didn’t want to go there. He wanted to talk about life for young women in New York in the 1930s, referencing Edward Hopper’s paintings…

…saying they were more liberated—had more fun—than the conservative post-war generation. His grandmother, for example, who did not think Amor’s sister should move in with her boyfriend, because that would make it too difficult to see other men.

And about New York versus London and Paris: all three cities on rivers, but only New York accessible by large ships, which (he believes) explains the greater diversity of this city, with the stevedores and immigrants…

A charming, interesting, articulate, intelligent man7. It was late afternoon before we noticed the time. He said you should let him know when you’ll next be in New York. He’d love to meet you.

So New York.

This bit is all true...

We were paying the bill and the waitress asked where we were from. Oh!…I know someone from New Zealand! I’m from Oklahoma and Steve Adams played on our basketball team! We told her that Steve’s sister, Valerie, is also a famous sports person: so now she knows two people from New Zealand.

No, she said, Now I know four people from New Zealand!

Next week: Islands in the Stream (1)

It’s 1858. Two young men are shown into (what I imagine was) a grand, gloomy, wood-panelled, room. (Easy to overlook how young they were: today, this could be any of my genius nieces or nephews1).

It’s their turn.

Seated, expecting them, are eleven important gentlemen—the commissioners—there to decide—of the thirty-three proposals they’d received—which to accept for the development of a park in New York City: Central Park. The first landscaped park in the USA.

Fred and Cal are our young men’s names. Cal (Mr Vaux) is thirty-four; an English architect, who’s never designed a park. Fred (Mr Olmsted) is thirty-three and (until recently) a journalist (and before that, various other things). Fred’s never designed anything.

And can you tell us, Mr Olmsted, what experience you have, developing parks?

Ah, well, yes. I have been to one. It was very good.

He had been to a park: Birkenhead Park, in England, near Liverpool; the U.K.’s first publicly-funded park. He liked it. Wrote about it.

Fred and Cal do, nevertheless, have a point of difference. Thanks to a family connection to one of the commissioners, Fred already works at what will become Central Park (a publishing venture failed; he needed a job): evicting the 1,600 people currently living where the park will be; supervising the preparation of the site.

Which is partly why Cal wanted Fred to partner on the bid: Fred knows the location. And, furthermore, people know him. Thanks to his writing, Fred has become reasonably well-known—and well-connected—in New York (it was a small pond at the time: population about that of current-day Christchurch. Think a young Miles Warren).

Well-known, in particular, because of a book2 he’d written, about slavery: a book that had deepened the divide between the North and South; a divide that was leading to civil war. Fred’s book was critical of the extreme economic disparity between landowners and slaves, and (because of the emphasis in the South on private ownership) the lack of public infrastructure: roads, schools, libraries.

But, when you think about it, what chance did they have, really? Just a couple of kids: a cheeky start-up, thinking they could go in at the deep end. Mike Mulligan, pitching for the new town hall.

They got the gig.

Who can say how influential Fred’s connection proved to be, but it must have helped: that old saying, who you know beats what you know. What the record shows is that Fred and Cal’s concept was the only one to reposition the four roads running across the site to below ground level: maintaining the unity of the park environment.

It is also clear that their plan—the ‘Greensward Plan’ as they called it, with its naturalistic plantings of grass and trees, rather than traditional, formal, parterres: an idealised version of the countryside—captured the zeitgeist. All over the world, cities were creating green spaces. Here, for example, Sir John Logan Campbell was creating what would become Auckland’s Cornwall Park (1853). Christchurch was creating Hagley Park (1855) and Wellington’s town belt (earlier: 1839) was similar.

Here’s Marie Walsh, Central Park Conservancy’s historian:

Central Park was built on the premise that living in cities was unhealthy and had dehumanising effects on people and that being together in a more beautiful and natural and healthy environment with opportunities to gather, to exercise, to be in nature, all of those things would help alleviate the dehumanising effects of cities.

There’d been a global cholera epidemic in 1832. It had killed 20,000 in Paris and 3,500 in (much smaller) New York. Mostly in the crowded slums. An aqueduct was built to bring in fresh water from upstate and a reservoir was created in what would be Central Park (it’s now a lake: the Melania Trump Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis reservoir).

Also of its time was Fred’s notion that parks should be for everyone, not just the wealthy. This came from his visit to Birkenhead Park…all this magnificent pleasure-ground is entirely, unreservedly, and for ever the people's own, he wrote. His travels in the South had strengthened his commitment to democracy: he wanted Central Park to be a place for people of every class.

Central Park is, today, surely one of the man-made wonders of the world3. It attracts over 42 million visitors—of every class—annually (70% of them New York residents). As visiting Kiwis, the throng of people is a shock, but Fred would say this is every individual adding by his mere presence to the pleasure of others, all helping create the greater happiness of each (a phenomenon, I guess, that applies equally to restaurants and bars).

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux—now Landscape Architects—went on to create parks throughout the United States.

Times change. The murmuration that is the zeitgeist whorls on. Today we’re no longer, necessarily, looking for respite from the city. Rock star landscape architect, Michael Van Valkenburg4, who’s spent twenty years developing Brooklyn Bridge Park5 says this:

As landscape architects, we aspire to create urban landscapes that become an integrated, enriching part of daily life. The goal of our work is to create parks that are intrinsically urban—not places to escape from the city, but places to escape within the city—the very idea is urban.

Seems wherever you turn in New York City these days, the greenery’s pushing back the rampant concrete and steel. They’re even putting the park back in Park Avenue6:

Good grief. Much more of this and New York might even start to feel like somewhere you’d want to live.

(Want to know more? Here’s an excellent video of the history of Central Park.)

Next week: So New York

It’s almost 25 years since 9/11. A generation ago. History…

History, as I experienced it at school, was stuff that happened. In the past. 1066 and all that. WTF are we learning this for?

Ripples. Throw a rock into water and it creates ripples. Those ripples travel across time and space. At school, history was all about rocks, not ripples. Never (that I can recall) about how what happened then created ripples that still ripple today.

Colonisation (for example) was a rock thrown into our moana…a couple of hundred years on, politicians are still ducking and diving its ripples.

The 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York—on the site of the twin towers—is another rock. Or rather, the story of a rock. A devastating rock. Here’s Alice M. Greenwald, the museum’s Director1…

On the walls, floor to ceiling all around the room, are portraits and names of the nearly 3,000 people killed during the 9/11 attacks. They are 2½ to 85 years old. They are from over 90 nations. They represent every ethnicity imaginable, every faith tradition, every sector of the economy. So, you’re looking at a microcosm literally of the world. And you walk in and you immediately look at these faces and names and you are struck by the fact that this could have been me. These people are people just like me.

The whole story so well told: grim, shocking, dreadful. I was affected by the fire truck, destroyed when the North Tower collapsed:

It’s the story of a rock.

So, what about the ripples? Here’s The Brookings Institution’s view:

In his long war against America, Osama Bin Laden has won a sweeping if posthumous victory. The United States is weaker, more divided and less respected than it was two decades ago2.

and the Institut Montaigne in France:

The two wars that followed the 9/11 attacks have had a significant impact on the US social climate, perceptions of national identity, and on America’s relationship with the world - especially immigration. The wars also led to the militarisation of the police in the early 2000s, with important consequences for police violence in a tense social climate… Finally, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have also fueled domestic political violence. New militias were born, and their increasing size and influence led to the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021.

Ultimately, the wars conducted by the United States these past two decades - the longest wars in American history - impacted the entire population. Millions of veterans returned to the United States either injured or traumatized.3 4

And The Nation:5

While the War on Terror has receded into the background of our lives, its premises and tactics remain all too readily available. Its expansion of presidential powers, coupled with the Supreme Court’s recent immunity decision when it comes to more or less anything a president does in office, leaves the country in a state of imminent peril.

Ripples. Waves, even. Across time and space, still rippling from 9/11; continuing to wash all around the world.

Best we can do, I reckon, is cling tight to that survivor tree: cheering it on to keep bursting into magnificent bloom each spring.

Next week: Fed & Cal’s

Back when I was working for the man, the man came to visit. All the way from Minnesota!

Well, to be honest, not THE man—not Curt—but a man. We’ll call him Chuck, or something. I asked him why he’d come: what would make it worth his while visiting this teeny-tiny business they happened to own on the other side of the Pacific? (It had come as one of those combos: ‘Buy Australia; get New Zealand Free’.) And Chuck replied, wisely: all businesses are the same, it’s just that some have a few extra noughts.

I mention this for two reasons. First of all because (at time of writing), the Chrysler Building in New York City is for sale. And secondly because—as you may recall—Jude and I happen to have experience reviving decrepit architectural icons1.

It’s just that some have a few extra noughts.

The Chrysler Building—to refresh your memory—is the one with the Art Deco stainless steel spire:

Completed in 1930, it was not—as you might assume—the head office of the Chrysler car company: that was (of course) in Detroit. Rather, it was built for—and named by—that company’s founder: Walter P. Chrysler. In his own words …as a monument to me.

Ninety-five years on, and it’s for sale.

Now, the first thing to note is we’ll only be buying the building, not the land. The land is owned by an outfit called The Cooper Union: a school of art, architecture and engineering founded in 1859 by Peter Cooper. He believed education should be free to all: in this case, paid for by the rent from the land the Chrysler Building stands on. In 2019, The Cooper Union was hoovering up $32 million dollars a year.

I mention 2019, because that was when the government of Abu Dhabi called it quits. In 2008 they’d paid $800 million for the building, but the income and expenditure hadn’t gone quite as they’d imagined, and they sold it: for just $150 million. To an Austrian company, who—the heavily discounted purchase price notwithstanding—had a similar experience, and filed for insolvency in 2023. Leaving their New York business partners with no choice but to default on the lease payments and so be booted out—by court order—earlier this year.

Hence the opportunity: we all know one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. (By the way—just for the spreadsheet—note that the annual payment to the Cooper Union for the ground lease will now be around $40 million a year).

I did mention, I think, that the building is ninety-five years old. And, sure, there’ve been renovations over the years, but—well—she’s not in good shape. Tenants complain about the lack of natural light, the unreliable elevators, the revolving doors that don’t revolve, the poor cell-phone reception, the brown water coming out of the drinking fountains. The infestations of mice. And rats. In the empty ground floor retail space. Reports of duct tape holding things together.

But, really, no surprises there. That’s tenants for you, right?

So, surely—wouldn’t you say—definitely worth a look? Because—come on—this is, after all, the jewel of the Manhattan skyline2. One of the world’s most famous buildings. Never mind the nickel and dime, just think of the prestige: ‘Kiwis Take On The Chrysler’! Issues? Nothing a bit of imagination can’t fix…

Because—speaking as someone with experience in such matters—it is fair to say that—rather like businesses—all renovations are the same:

Take the number you first thought of…and then add a few extra noughts.

Next week: Rocks and Ripples

Last time, we were discussing The Great Gatsby…

Right at the end of the book, when everything’s disintegrated, Nick stares out at the bay, thinking about the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes… its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house.

Maybe, the book suggests, the American Dream can’t be reached, because though it may have glimmered once, it then—as dreams generally do—quickly vanished.

I did take prettier pictures of The High Line than the one above. The High Line is a park created on an abandoned elevated railway, in what was once Manhattan’s industrial west side. You can watch a video here (narrated by Ethan Hawke) of the back story and here see some prettier pictures of The High Line as it is now.

When we arrived—first up on our To Do list for New York City—it was almost winter, so most of the trees were bare, but there were people about, the Piet Oudolf perennial plantings to admire, and the entire, audacious, project to appreciate. But that’s the photo I chose…

I chose it because it has something to say (I think) about the American Dream. About New York. Because—what’s exciting about The High Line—is how phenomenally successful it has been. When it opened, they thought maybe 300,000 people might visit in year one. Actually, a million more than that came. Now, it’s around 8 million visitors a year: the largest cohort being residents of New York City. As well, high value residential development all along The High Line, and businesses nearby, such as the Chelsea Market, have boomed.

The photo, I think, is emblematic of the battle between Nature and the American Dream: the trees cut down to build the city; the concrete under your feet. In Joni Mitchell’s 1970 song,1 Big Yellow Taxi, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

The photo, though, shows Nature fighting back, reclaiming the city from the steel. Today, on The High Line and—thanks in many ways to The High Line—throughout New York City, the trees are coming back. The plan—now a law—is to increase the city’s tree canopy2 from 23.4% to 30%.

Your song made a difference, Joni. Around the world—this old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—many cities are now pulling up the paving and putting in parks: bringing back the vanished trees.

How wonderful is that.

Here’s a little more about that ‘old island’…

And an unrelated photo from The High Line I thought it timely to share3…

Next week: A Few Extra Noughts

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it…

That’s Nick Carraway, newly arrived from (where else?) Minnesota. Nick’s the narrator in The Great Gatsby, the story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published exactly one hundred years ago (1925: back in the ‘Roaring Twenties’).

To refresh your memory (I’m assuming here you’ve seen the movie) Nick rents a small place out on Long Island, where the rich folk have their weekend houses. His cousin, Daisy, is there. Her husband, Tom, was at Yale with Nick. Tom’s old money. Daisy, too.

Nick’s immediate neighbour is an unusual character by the name of Jay Gatsby (who, you’d say, looks remarkably like Leonardo DiCaprio and clearly didn’t drown, despite what Kate Winslet claims). Gatsby is new money. Hosts outrageous parties to attract the ‘in’ crowd: Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Meyer… and also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers…

But it gets messy. Tom (Daisy’s husband) is having an affair with Myrtle—not someone Billy Joel would consider an Uptown Girl, but, hey, she likes a good time and everyone has their dreams—meanwhile Nick learns that Gatsby and Daisy had been an item back when Gatsby was a soldier in uniform about to go to war. Before she married Tom. The house, the parties: turns out it’s all a scheme on Gatsby’s part to impress Daisy and win her back. And it almost succeeds…

But then, more messy: a lunch, at the famous Plaza hotel, and a showdown: Tom and Gatsby fight over Daisy. The party disintegrates and—on the way home—Myrtle is run over and killed (I know. It’s a story). Thinking it was Gatsby driving (and believing it was Gatsby Myrtle was having the affair with, not Tom) her husband shoots Gatsby, and then himself (it’s America). Daisy and Tom patch things up and quickly move away. Disillusioned, Nick goes back to Minnesota. The End.

Except, what’s missing from the above, is this: Jay Gatsby was, in truth, James Gatz, from a farming family in North Dakota (I mean, in the story: it’s still a story). Obsessed with Daisy, but convinced a socialite like her would never marry a poor boy like him, he set about making his fortune—illegally, from selling liquor during the Prohibition—and creating himself a new backstory: his time at Oxford, and so on. So he invented, Nick tells us, just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent and to his conception he was faithful to the end.

But, okay—by now, surely, you’re asking—WHY am I telling you all this?

Well, you may recall that they say You cannot understand France today without understanding the French revolution. What they also say is that to understand America today, you have to understand The Great Gatsby.

Because The Great Gatsby is really about The American Dream: the belief that, in America, anyone—no matter their origins—can make it.

More specifically, though, The Great Gatsby is about the corruption of the American Dream. Jay Gatz was chasing the Dream all right: but by telling lies, breaking the law, pretending to be something he wasn’t. Besides, he never was going to make it, anyway: Old Money would never admit him. And—in the story—it’s clear that nobody really cares about anybody…

The Great Gatsby is a classic of illusions and delusions, writes Wesley Morris1.

Which is also true, I suggest, of New York City: birthplace of the 45th and 47th President. A city where nobody really cares about anybody:

Accepting that there is this underlying disturbance in the Force, we remained determined to make the most of the best of what New York has to offer…

For all its shortcomings, still one of the world’s great cities.

Next week: Big Yellow Taxi

La Monde: ‘Winter officially arrived in Paris on Thursday, November 21, as the first snowflakes of the season fell on the French capital in the late morning...’

Our plan had been to go to the Eiffel Tower and Champs de Mars, but somewhere inside made more sense, so we capitulated, and booked, online, tickets for a specific entry time: at the Louvre. Only to get there and wait in our designated queue—outside— for what seemed the remainder of our natural lives.

One would imagine, wouldn’t one, that snowfall in Paris would be romantic. But then, one would imagine anything in Paris would be romantic. It was grim, it was wet, and it was cold…

The Louvre was nice, but crowded…

And elsewhere was more interesting…

Including the Musée de l'Orangerie, where we didn’t have to queue…

The next day, we would be leaving...

Be Leaving. Believing that—in my secret life—I would be back in Paris again, soon.

You may recall, from my earlier post (So Long, London), that it is my wish to become a kuaka—a godwit—dividing my time between Aotearoa and London. And—whenever I am in London—I will, of course, flit, as godwits do, frequently to Paris.

Maybe for an exhibition, or to see Notre-Dame, now that it’s open, or the trees and gardens in the spring time, but mainly just to roam the rues, the marchés, the boulevards, the boulangeries…

...or, maybe, just so I could say that’s where I’d been.

Not to stay, of course. Just a petite Paris top-up. Un week-end romantique.

Soul food.

Just in my secret life, of course.

Next Week: New York

In 1997, a new art gallery opened in Bilbao, in northern Spain…a project to revitalise that city’s run-down port area. They’d chosen an American architect, Frank Gehry, who had recently won a major architectural award…

Gehry's work is a highly refined, sophisticated and adventurous aesthetic that emphasizes the art of architecture.1

Gerhy delivered Bilbao a landmark building that was to transform the city and take modern architecture to another level: the Guggenheim Museum.

In France, meanwhile, businessman and art-lover, Bernard Arnault, had just become a billionaire, having engineered the merger of Moët Hennessy and Louis Vuitton to create LVMH.

Arnault visited this phenomenon in Bilbao and decided he wanted one too, so he met up with Gehry. Who knew instantly what Paris needed:

Arnault loved it. Wanted it. Must have it. Got the government on board, figured out where it would be built, overcame the nay-sayers, and got it done. True, the total cost (€790 million) was more than seven times the original estimate but, you know, that’s architecture.

It opened in 2014…

..and is astonishing. You wander through thinking how did they even imagine this building, let alone create it? It’s as if he was raised on Red Bull: how else to explain these wiiings? A sheltering outer shell of thousands of individual sheets of glass, precisely curved and cut to shape; complex, intricate, levels and spaces. Computer-designed—impossible otherwise—using software Gehry adapted from the aerospace industry. Elegant and sophisticated and luxurious—even lunch—just as you’d expect from Louis Vuitton.

Once upon a time we built cathedrals, but now—thanks to Gehry, who regards his buildings as sculptures—we build sacred spaces for the arts. In such a bold and dramatic building, the art and its protective cocoon are intertwined, inseparable.

And the art was up to the task:

Giant—three dimensional—collages. Pop Art pieces from New York artist Tom Wesselmann.

We could, of course, have gone to that other gallery, the one offering kilometres of Christian propaganda paintings telling us how to behave and what to expect if we didn’t. It was wonderful, instead, to experience something so low-brow, so relatable, so joyful. In such a glorious building.

And so, if you’re making your way up the Rich List, and thinking of renovating, or maybe even a new build—and you’re not too bothered by budget—then you gotta get Gehry.

Because, as philosopher Alain de Botton puts it2…

Spending money well is no less a skill than making it.

Next week: In My Secret Life

I guess I always figured that La Défense was HQ for the French military…

Which makes the guy in my photo a secret agent, checking the phone for his next mission. Figuring out how to get that innocent-looking duffel bag through the X-ray at Charles de Gaulle, having just received by carrier pigeon (now just leaving) the co-ordinates...

Turns out I was mistaken. But, to be fair, there is a military connection: the place takes its name from a sculpture—La Défense de Paris—commemorating another bloody episode in Paris’s altogether bloody history…

Did strike me as strange, though, naming a place after a sculpture. Be like calling Wellington La Bucket-Fountain. Previously, when King Louis XIV went hunting here, it was named Chantecoq. Which is—you know—enchanté, is it not?

But no, Chantecoq became La Défense. And is now a business district: 200,000 people work here, in one or other of the 2,800 companies, in one or other of the 61 skyscrapers. 50,000 people also live here and 70,000 students study here. It is, they say in their brochure, unique in France for its ‘urban verticality’.

Which is why it’s here, really. As the economy recovered after World War Two, there was demand for high rise buildings, but a determination to maintain the character of central Paris. And so they extended Houssmann’s boulevard—the straight line from the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe—across the Seine, to this new site four kilometres further on.

Perhaps, though, the place only really took off in the 1980s, when Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen1 presented his plan for a Grande Arche: a one hundred metre by one hundred metre hollow cube, in glistening marble. The project appears remarkable by its purity, by the force with which it gives another offshoot to Paris’s historical axis, and by its openness2.

Spreckelsen himself described it as a modernised Arc de Triomphe, but as a monument to humanity rather than military victories. Like his compatriot, Jørn Oberg Utzon—designer of Sydney’s Opera House—Spreckelson didn’t survive the politics of the project, and neither of them saw their projects completed.

It’s a strange place. You’re no longer in Paris. You’re in Dallas, or Dubai, or somewhere, surrounded by glass and steel and concrete. The buildings are beautiful, the piazzas and plantings are perfect and the artworks are wonderful, and yet it seemed empty. Is empty…

Soulless, somehow… One-dimensional. Here’s one worker bee’s perspective:

I have never felt the slightest excitement when coming to work here, because we are cut off from the city. It is a place solely dedicated to work, an isolated space with no continuity to its environment3.

Made me wonder what it’s like to be an astronaut on the International Space Station…at the office 24/7: no scope for bird-watching, or a side-hustle making outdoor furniture.

The American writer Jane Jacobs4 said this about cities:

There is no new world that you make without the old world.

Cities can have their new and shiny, but they need their grunge too…

Grunge is always the best guide to a better coffee.

Next week: Gotta Get Gehry

Well, bash me with a baguette if it’s not Sebastian1. Again!

Last time we saw him, you might recall, he was awestruck by a department store window display. And now? Here he is at our favourite art gallery (Musée D’Orsay), working on a detail for his reproduction of a famous painting from 1847 by Thomas Couture: Romains de la Decadence (The Romans in their Decadence)…

Traditionally—like, back in The Renaissance—this was how you learned to paint: copying the Old Masters. Raphael, for example, was eleven years old when he was apprenticed to a great painter (Perugino) and was soon making copies of his master’s work that could not be told apart from the originals2.

Back then, apparently, copying artworks was legit: they weren’t fakes; they were how the wealthy covered their walls and showed their appreciation of great art.

Sebastian wasn’t the only apprentice at work in our gallery that day:

But the painting he was working on was surely the most ambitious:

It was Couture’s painting3 of an orgy, at a time when the Roman Empire was nearing its end; ‘the inevitable outcome of such moral decadence’. The gods—represented by the statues in the background—look on, with disapproval and dismay.

But really, it’s a political piece. It was painted at a time when France was having another go at royalty, and Couture (the artist; a supporter of the republican ideal) was disgusted by the scandalous behaviour of the aristocracy. There was to be another revolution the following year and the king would abdicate.4

But here’s the thing…

Sebastian is not Sebastian. Look again: he, himself, is a work of art. An installation, a ‘hyper-realistic’ figure, from the Scandinavian artistic duo, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset5 called, simply, The Drawing, Fig. 3.

The contrast between Couture’s large, detailed, and vibrant canvas and the child’s small, almost blank sheet of paper highlights the profound differences between adulthood and childhood, history and the present, the collective and the individual.6

Not sure if I get that last bit, but anyway…go ahead:

Bash me with a baguette.

Next week: Grunge

An uncomfortable truth for Baby Boomers is that we are no longer the trendsetters we once thought that we were. The world has hurtled on, leaving us confused and mystified by safety cones and “working from home” and being given prizes for trying. Droning on about the white album and walking to school…and Minis that were actually mini.

So, don’t get us started on Selfies…

The word wasn’t even invented until 2002, and it wasn’t until 2010–with the release of iPhone 4, with a front-facing camera—that selfies really became a thing. Serendipitously, Instagram launched then, too.

Some of us would say, of course, that there’s nothing new under the sun: after all, how many self-portraits did Rembrandt paint1? Don’t you know that one of the fundamental topics of human existence is the search for one’s own identity?2

Paris, it seemed to me, anyway, is the world-wide capital of the selfie. It’s a photogenic place, after all. At a basic level, of course, the response is merely This is us…

But then, there’s the ‘Yay, we’re in Paris!’…

And the, Hi honey, guess where I am right now (oh, and by the way, I bought a coat)…

The—already well-rehearsed—This is my style (note the feet)…

Before reaching the full-on, professional, Influencer…

A Baby Boomers myself, I was bewildered. What is this obsession; this narcissism? You should not be the subject of your photograph!!

And so, I went looking, and I found a TED Talk by journalist Mary McGill3. Who began by confirming that I’m not alone: Selfies are interpreted as an act of self-indulgence and a quest for attention.

But soon, I was in very deep water, as we delved into Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex…

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.

…and began talking about:

Striving for visibility in a world where female representation remains, unfortunately, very much a work in progress…

Concluding with this advice…

So, the next time you see someone rolling their eyes or complaining about young women’s use of the selfie, I sincerely hope that you think, and you realise: when it comes to young women’s engagement with the selfie, there is so much more going on than meets the eye.

A selfie, said one young woman Mary McGill interviewed, is a format and a platform to share who you are.

Seems to me we all need one of those.

Next week: The Drawing, Fig. 3.

There was a photo opportunity in Tokyo that I missed…a photo illustrating just how seriously the Japanese take their jobs. It wasn’t the corporate salarymen (sararīman) and women (kyariaūman) streaming up from the subway in the mornings, with their dark suits and blank faces. No, it was down on the platform: the guards on the trains, peering out from their special little windows, with their tiny flags, and their uniforms worn with such pride.

Which is not to say that we regard our jobs any less seriously, nor that—despite not having peaked caps or blowing whistles—we don’t have our own version of a uniform; our carefully curated ensembles: our statements to the world of who we’d like to be thought we are.

And so it follows that we have no reason to assume (as we might) that this French leaf sweeper—this Public Park Presentation Patroller—is any less invested in their role. According to one, seemingly reliable, source1, there are 110,000 trees in Paris. And—according to another such source2—your average mature tree produces around 22,000 leaves a year. Every autumn then, there are 2.5 billion Parisian leaves to be raked and removed. Give or take.

Now—in a purely amateur capacity—I can claim some experience with gathering autumn leaves. And I can tell you this: it is a Sisyphean task (that Greek guy being punished by the gods, pushing a rock up a hill every day). Made worse, I suggest, because as fast as you can gather the bastards up, just as many are falling, behind you.

It is soul-destroying. A task that puts you in mind of Woody Allen’s observation: Eternity is an awfully long time, especially towards the end.

However, philosopher Mark Rowlands offers an interesting perspective3. What if, he proposes, Sisyphus enjoyed his task? If he actually—much to the fury of the gods—took pride from achieving his goal every day? Much as we might take pride from knocking off another session at the gym?

Through that lens, our French leaf sweeper is no longer suffering the unrelenting, underpaid, misery—the apparent futility—of their task, working for the man; but, instead, making a real, and meaningful, contribution to society. Through that lens they don’t, after all, hate this time of year, hate their job, struggle to make it to work every day.

Rather, they love their city. And raking up leaves is how they show it; how they show the world:

How much do I love Paris? Let me count the leaves…

One more thought from an amateur leaf raker:

When confronting a drift, a pile, a multitude of leaves like this, you begin to appreciate how unlikely it is that you’ll ever win Lotto:

Your ticket is just one leaf. And yet Lotto NZ tell us that the Powerball winning leaf will be picked at random from a pile of over 38 million leaves.

Photo (below) from Rosemary of raked leaves on Nami Island, in South Korea (see her comment)

Next week: # Me

Three guys at the Czech Technical University in Prague have done the science1.

But we’ll come back to that…because our story really begins in 1987 with the very first Rugby World Cup. In the final, at Eden Park, New Zealand played France and (you’ll be pleased to know) New Zealand won, 29-9: tries by Jones, Kirk and Kirwan; goal-kicking by Fox.

What you may not know or remember is that in the number 10 jersey for France that afternoon was Franck Mesnel, who can fairly be described as a bit of a character. At the time, he was with Racing Club de France2, part of a gang—Le Show Bizz they were called— who became famous for their crazy stunts. Like, for example, having champagne brought on at half-time.

And…for wearing pink bow ties3.

Playing in that first RWC final, on one of Rugby’s most famous grounds, was a big deal for Franck. So much so that he went home and launched a clothing label that he named…Eden Park. Today, it’s a global brand. And the pink bow tie is in the logo.

So, now, have another look at the main photo. See the bow tie? The gang opened the Eden Park Pub—a sports bar, naturally—in 19924. In La Rue Princesse: walking distance from our hotel. And so—given that we were in Paris on a night that the All Blacks were there to play France; a game for which we did not have tickets—where better to watch it on TV than the Eden Park Pub?

Anticipating a crowd, we were there early: England were playing South Africa beforehand, so there was a rabble of rugger rogues in, destined to skulk away—defeated yet again—to be quickly replaced by Parisians.

By now, we understood that the French can sing. They sang the English anthem, they sang the South African anthem (all three parts), they sang the New Zealand anthem (both parts) and—of course—they SANG the French anthem. And then they sang—it seemed— every OTHER song that driver knew5. It was a total joy to be in that space with them.

Which remained true, even though they won: When the pressure went on in the final quarter…errors returned to deny the All Blacks the attacking opportunities they achieved during a dynamic first half6. All Blacks 29 (just as in 1987), but France 30.

To say the place ‘went off’ would be a bland understatement. It ERUPTED. More energy than a confined space like that could contain. An explosion of delight. Vive La France! They didn’t just sing, they bounced. Arm-in-arm, now carousing at the tops of their voices, leaping up and down like kids in a birthday blow-up castle, as if there were prizes for whoever could hit their head most often on the low ceiling.

I needed a pee, and the loos were downstairs. It took half a lifetime to squeeze through the euphoria, only to get there and be terrified that the ceiling—the floor above me—would collapse, such was the synchronised pummelling of ancient boards.

Our three engineers at the Czech Technical University (I mentioned them earlier) have been studying the impact of spectator behaviour on grandstands. They have found that the greatest vibration of the structure—the most stress—occurs when the spectators are bouncing…especially when all fans are actively involved and a high degree of synchronisation is achieved.

They should have been there, at Eden Park Pub that night…

The night the French—in a famous first for them—beat the All Blacks for the third time on the bounce7.