Waitakere Utd or Auckland City FC?

Both teams are amateur and play in the ASB Premiership - they don't get many supporters, but ACFC can count on having one more soon. I can get to them by bus; whereas the Maxx journey planner for Waitakere Utd says simply: 'bus for 57 minutes, then walk for 4 kilometres'.

No thanks!!

Come on you City.

Through de tunnel...

I remember when I first visited New Zealand, in 2006, my map filled up with pen marks showing where the best hikes, mountains, bars and pubs, glaciers, fjords, parks, boat trips and surfing beaches were.

Five years later my map is now simply marked with little crosses showing where all the playgrounds are.

We've been to a bloody heap of playgrounds since we got here:

• the little one behind Pat's (bark chippings, no swings, space to perform 'the underdad' on the slide)
• one in Castor Bay (sand, again no swings, but a double slide)
• a bigger one in Silverdale near Kris and Pete's place (bark chippings, swings and a big climbing-boat-thing)
• and a great one in Brown's Bay, next to a little skate ramp (rubbery floor, swings, a big wobbly wooden walkway and lots of tubes, slides and tunnels).

But yesterday we went to the best one yet, in Onepoto Domain - spread out over a large area in the basin of an old volcano, with a little toddler park right next to the car park and paths through the bush gradually revealing a wobbly walkway over swampy ground, a toddler flying fox, a high wooden tower with an enclosed slide on it - 'dark tunnel' - and a long track for the kids to ride their little bikes and scooters round, complete with road markings and a little chicane and stuff. Really safe and fun and big enough to absorb lots of energetic little people.

Me and Rach enjoyed a temporary rush of freedom and positivity that amazingly lasted almost until Leo was back in the car.

October showers

It's a little bit odd, but also a bit thrilling, to be in springtime again, only 6 months after the last one started. It'd be tempting to move hemispheres more regularly.

The trees in Auckland are in blossom, lawns and meadows are rich with healthy daisies and buttercups, and the garden shops are full of fruit and veg plants. The overnight temperatures are much higher on average than at home, and there's plenty of sunshine mixed in with the showers.

So it's all perfect conditions for starting anew in the garden, and fortunately Pat's given me a rich strip of bed to play with. She's already underway with lots of veggies - cucumbers, broccoli, garlic, tomatoes, peas, bok choi, spinach, iceberg lettuces and some very healthy herb clumps - so I've gone for a strip of leafy lettuce plants (little gem and royal oak - picture below, with Pat's existing crops in the other section) that we'll use as cut-and-come-again rather than wait to form heads, giving us a regular supply of salad leaves until the rocket and mixed leaf sowings are through. Leo helped me out and we'll make a gardener of him, no doubt.

The growing season here looks like it's going to be longer, which is terrific - plants can be sown earlier, so the more difficult chillies might do better here, and we can look forward to some early cropping tomatoes and beans in the years to come. I guess there's a chance that plants which might be annual at home might overwinter quite nicely here, too.

Next stop: success with basil and mint - both have defeated me many times so far.

You and me, me and you

Leo is wonderfully expressive and can generally get most of his thoughts and opinions across to us pretty easily. If we can't quite follow him he can explain himself using other words, associations or memories. But one thing he hasn't grasped, and which amuses me a lot, is his mixing-up of the meaning of 'me' and 'my' with 'you' and 'yours'. It's very endearing and leads to chuckles and twee knowing glances between us, his parents. So if he wants you to do something for him, he might ask: 'want me to do it?'; or if he's tired or thirsty, he might say that he 'wants you to go to bed' or 'wants your drink'. He'll grow out of it but for now it remains a gentle delight and a source of mild confusion for newbies.

We could of course avoid all the misunderstandings by always referring to him and his stuff in the third person - Leo's this, Leo's that - but this can sound a bit too babyish, and it means me and Rach have to constantly call each other, and ourselves, mum and dad, which means we fall into it by way of habit and keep it up even after he's not in the room. Frankly I don't want Rach to turn to me in the morning and call me 'daddy' - at least, not every day...so our twee little chuckles will pertain for a little bit longer.

Wit and fuzzy

So we've finally arrived at Pat's...and a new life lit with sundown skies and, after Leo's jetlagged body finally slept, a massively entertaining semi-final which saw the All Blacks dirty the bludgeons of the Aussie lot. This was extremely satisfying for me, being an England supporter with strong Kiwi tendencies, seeing as I was sat on a calm train out of Richmond, Melbourne only last Friday reading a hack job on the kiwis in the shittest commuter paper ever written (like The London Paper, but printed with trashy ink that sticks to your mind after you bin it).

It would be nice to think, having taken a couple of shaky first steps into a new mother country, that some sort of scales had fallen from my eyes and you'd find me writing to you, glowing agog in the heliosphere of a meditative, vegetative calm, sprawled on the velvet cushions of Middle Earth. Not quite - but it is lovely, with beautiful bushes and trees and strange birdsong and no threat of danger in the undergrowth, and reasonable beer prices and in a place where they churn out wine and apples and pumpkins for fun. And a place decorated by black flags! With intricate little spiral designs on the coins, little tiki faces, and even gladder faces behind the counters.

It's a bit odd arriving in Spring - with trees shooting and the ground yawning for seed, blossom on the trees - and to think that Christmas will be in high summer. Odder perhaps than I thought it would be. But that is a mere sideshow. It's been GREAT so far.