Speaker by Various Artists

Two days might not be long enough to form a thoughtful, considered opinion of a place but it is quite sufficient to make an irrational snap judgment. And it was plenty time to know I hate Tokyo. In the biggest city in the world Fame never went away - I've never seen so many women who aren't dancers wearing legwarmers.

Actually it's not just that - the whole style ethos is quite repugnant. I know the soothsayers employed by advertising agencies to pick what's the new black say Tokyo is the place where trends begin and the last place they end up is in New Zealand. In which case, girls listen up, you are soon to be wearing Barbara Bush suits, long socks - or legwarmers of course - kinder-whore pigtails and a Burberry mini-skirt especially if you have thighs like uncooked yams. Got that? Never mind if not, the fashion crimes spotted on one trip from Narita to Shibuya are plentiful, even more so considering they are probably considered the next hot thing by "so bad it's good" Wallpaper magazine.

It's not just the clothes. Or even the culture. I am sure I would love Japanese culture if I had managed to come across any. And I was looking out for sushi, Issey Miyake, the whole minimalistic aesthetic that has led to us all getting Christmas presents of desk-top tranquillity gardens full of tiny stones with their own miniature rakes.

But tranquility was not much in evidence on our two day visit - instead I saw sickly yellow custard pies, Starbucks, glitter balls and acres of shopping mall culture. Sorry Thomas Friedman, maybe I'm not so keen on globalisation after all - the glittery legwarmers are diminishing my powers of reason.

Although we weren't there for long we did get around Tokyo, since we masochistically had booked into a hotel in Tachikawa - West Tokyo, three hours by train from the airport. We also visited Shibuya and Shijuku and lots of other places whose names I can't remember. John Banks might be interested to know that although Tokyo has an admirable public transport system an hour and a half is considered a short commute.

On the other hand, there wasn't much to see that looked identifiably Japanese - so perhaps it wasn't Tokyo I minded after all. It was the debased European culture that I couldn't be doing with. Most people in Tokyo don't speak English, but they will be covered with English designer labels - they can say Gucci and Adidas, who knows if they are real renditions of the kneesocks or saddlebags anyway. And they can hum along with the piped music. Richard Clayderman doing his version of Celine Dion's Love Will Go On is surreal. Harry Secombe doing White Christmas in Sukugama is hallucinogenic.

I could turn into a champion hater in Tokyo. I hate the prefabricated bathrooms that are made all in one plastic unit. I hate the cellphones, lacquered in hologram pink with a small paler pink fluffy bunny hanging off the aerial. I hate the way I didn't see a single tree or old building. I hate the way being eccentric in Tokyo is redundant.

I hate the politeness - manners are good, but this is bogus. Service workers smile as they say you can't come into their airline lounge because you haven't remembered your guest pass. It's the rules, madam. The more cross you get the more they smile. Of course they say sorry but they're secretly enjoying it. They're loving it. They're so gleeful they're aroused.

They know when you do muscle your way in to the airline lounge all they have on offer are rice cracker snacks and green tea muffins, so what was the point? And there is no point arguing with minions.

I found out too late the best thing to do in that situation is to be authoritative and issue an order. Japanese service workers are likely to jump to it if you act like a VIP. "It's the hierarchical society," Desmond explained 33,000 ft in the air and thousands of feet away from Tokyo where it might have been useful. Desmond, who sat next to me on the plane, had worked as a financial journalist at Bloomberg in Tokyo for eight years and was intriguingly sanguine about the place.

I asked him about whether I was right in thinking Japan's economy is in the toilet because the place is spectacularly unproductive. I based this judgment on in-depth research - they have an extra person at Starbucks who takes your receipt after you've paid and tells you that your vomit-making frappucino will be along in a minute. Which you already knew. Desmond said I was quite wrong - he misses the incredible efficiency and professionalism of Japan workers whenever he travels anywhere else.

"Italy is a great place, but people there just couldn't give a toss," he said. And to be fair, when SOH (Stupid Old Husband) left his new coat on the Tokyo-Narita Express train they quickly and efficiently managed to return it to him before we had even checked-in (let along got to the God-awful airline lounge.)

After eight years Desmond was strangely used to the place - he spoke the language and liked it. He had put on the free in-flight socks. They bunched around his ankles, to keep them warm - like legwarmers.

Deborah Hill Cone has her own weblog at deborahhillcone.blogspot.com

Tom Cruise! In a dress! Ok, it's a man's kimono, strictly speaking, but Tom cast the aspersion first, and he's got a very big sword.

Captain Nathan Algren is a washed-up, pissed-up gun for hire ridiculing himself before 1870s circus crowds now that the Civil War is over. He's paid a pittance to drunkenly regale them with tales of bravery, and butchery, his spiel enlivened by little models of battlefields being hand-cranked by dirty-faced kids in the background.

When this debasement of a decorated soldier gets all a little much and Pissed-Old Pete starts popping off a few shots around the place, along comes the hand of kind(-ish) fate. Algren is offered a job in Japan teaching the natives how to use "modern weapons" -- viz guns. Too soon into the training he's told to prepare these green troops for an attack on a group of samurai renegades. They fail, do the Japanese version of turning tail, and Algren is captured.

Cue matte screens looming over a hill village set, in large part, in Taranaki. Cue Algren being initially sceptical of these primitives but quickly appreciating their skills. Cue the tough, stubborn Algren being tipped repeatedly on his arse by superior swordsmen. Cue him "feeling the Force", "being the blade" and "letting go".

He's here because he's been spared by the village's imperious leader, Katsumoto, flawlessly played by well-known Japanese actor Ken Watanabe. The actor is a tall man with a splendid gravitas and regal bearing (many boxes must have been in order), who lets Algren know exactly when their "conversations" are at an end - Katsumoto turns with a curt parting word, a blanking of the face and a swish of the robe.

A word about the clothes. As with the Lord of the Rings triple-bill, Aucklander Ngila Dickson designed the fabulous kit, all muted earthy tones, and if she has any material left over she has my email.

Last Samurai is most watchable during the fierce and spectacular fighting and training scenes, but it drags like a lame dog when there's no battle going on (that is, during what seem to be misty corporate videos in which Algren explains in another needless voiceover how weird and wonderful Samurai culture - and its bushido code of honour and justice - are, or when he's wooing the widow of a samurai he killed a little earlier).

Bushido is more fuel to Algren fascination for - and admiration of - so-called primitive cultures, dying cultures, such as those hundreds of American Indians he has been paid to kill, probably just a little earlier.

(Ah, and those Naki exteriors brought back pleasant memories of when I lived there for a year as a student. The undulating paddocks of the mountain, where the Japanese village sits and the big stand-up battle is waged. The dead flat playing field at Pukekura Park doubling for a marshalling ground; New Plymouth touched up in the background as Tokyo never looked so, er, provincial. But no sign of that cute marching girl.)

Director Edward Zwick (The Siege, Legends of the Fall) is by his own account a fan of Akira Kurosawa, who created several classics around the mid-century that eulogised the skill and virtue of the samurai, particularly those pivotal years when the popularisation of the gun destroyed their raison d'etre. Zwick has used modern film making methods and technology to great effect in The Last Samurai's battles, but he is pretty much at sea when trying to explain the mind of this warrior class. Though perhaps co-writer John Logan (Star Trek: Nemesis,Gladiator) is also to blame for making Algren's narration all zeal rather than zen.

Timothy Spall adopts a ridiculously pompous colonial whine as a local diplomat, and doesn't seem to be enjoying himself very much. Contrast him with Billy Connolly's Zebulon Gant, an old comrade of Algren. Connolly, chewing through some kind of Irish accent, has a lightness and energy that hugely enliven the few scenes he's in.

Cruise himself is, I have to say, actually kind of good. He handles the language about as well as you'd expect a 19th century Yankee to, and his encounters with the widow Taka (ex-model Koyuki) are at least subtle if not the required tender. His fighting is superb, and a few moments of fraternal grief are not completely bone-headed.

For my money, about the only moments he's been watchable in are the passable Jerry Maguire, "You had me at hello ..." and for an against-type treat in the sprawling masterpiece of Magnolia. Here's another. Perhaps our diminutive Scientologist leading man has rechecked the expiring date of the action hero, or perhaps simply age is improving Cruise. Cool.

Then there's always Cabin Fever, the latest knowing addition to the horror-splatter section of the DVD shop. Eli Roth, of Toxic Avenger IV, er, fame, wrote and directed this homage to the joys of contracting flesh-eating diseases. Paul and Karen are a college grad couple (though I wish they'd kept their real names, Rider Strong and Jordan Ladd), Marcy and Jeff are another pretty pair, and Bert's the morally unconflicted, beer-guzzling bogan. They're heading off to a remote cabin, naturally, to celebrate their apparent fooling of academic invigilators: there's some flesh (in both senses) but not a lot of intelligence on show. An encounter in the woods with a bloodied fellow -- who they are not very friendly towards, it has to be said -- can lead only one way.

At least with good-looking nobodies such as Rider and Jordan, you can't have any illusion about what you're getting yourself in to. Especially not after the film opens with Se7en-ish titles and touches of Blair Witch -- polarised skies, dark woods -- and other horror tropes, such as roads not on the map, random acts, improbable encounters and the like.

Clearly Roth is having fun with the genre, which has never shied away from mocking itself or offering blatant sign-posts and vigorous nods to the audience, even as it adheres to its broader rules. Killing off American college kids seems to be a national cinematic sport (Queer Eye snaps to horror directors everywhere), as is making fun of hillbillies, monosyllabic stoners and other simpletons. Some touches, like the party-boy cop, are a hoot, as much as the vain babe's shaving the sores on her legs is a stomach-turner. Cabin Fever's unashamedly a B-movie with a better budget, and any resemblance to 28 Days Later is just that: a resemblance. Horror fans should watch it with a slab or two of that fine American Bastard Ale.

Did you ever get that feeling that somewhere, somehow, the human race took some terrible wrong turn, and that we’re all living in some horrendous, erroneous cul de sac of evolutionary history from where there is no exit?

Firstly, has anyone ever conducted a successful search on nzoom without the “page cannot be displayed” page popping up? And I couldn’t believe the layout of www.govt.nz since I was last there. I was able to find government documents within it more efficiently from external engines Google, stuff.co.nz and even The Herald.

Anyway, back to unreality. Back in the 1970s, Italo Calvino proposed a literature machine that could automatically analyse texts by breaking them down into frequency lists of the different the parts of speech. It could tell a biography from a textbook – say – by the number of verbs in the former and nouns in the latter. Strange but true, at least in theory.

It would have been simpler to devise a machine that scanned TVNZ programmes for their degree of Charter compliance.

There’s not a lot TVNZ can do about it. The government owns it lock, stock and barrel and as such, can pretty much do what it wants (say what you like about the Charter: at least it shows the Government’s not hell bent on selling the whole operation, which is more than can be said for the right wing opposition).

Want more home-grown entertainment with a tick in the box of the Tangata Whenua? More current affairs debate with an eye for the yoof market? So be it. And TVNZ begat Mike King Tonight and Eating Media Lunch.

In years to come, both these shows will provide archive footage for retrospective shows of TV in the early years of the century, showcasing the truly weird, bizarre and inexplicably duplicitous world of post-everything New Zealand in the 00zies.

Obviously, this retrospective has yet to be conceived, produced and broadcast. But then, Mike King Tonight itself also has yet to be conceived. So far, it has simply been produced and broadcast. Did CBS endorse this? You can’t help but wonder. But then again, what if they didn’t?

King used to have a line that the thing he hated most was being damned with faint praise. His line was that guys would come up and say “Hey, at least you’re trying, mate.” Strange sort of joke, I reckon, but far it be from me to add to that.

For what it’s worth, Eating Media Lunch is probably the best-fit charter programme we’ve had yet. If that sounds like yet more faint praise, I guess you can blame the government for trying to spell out exactly what values TVNZ’s programmes are supposed to incorporate. They can expect the independent producers to go to extremes to find their own voice within narrowly prescribed limits.

It’s possible that Eating Media Lunch is just as derivative as the King show, although of a rather less familiar format, and vastly less specific source: the genre of the dedicated close-reader of newspapers ascertaining the pure (or more often, impure) essence of a given story - between the lines between the issues. (What was the name of that show, anyone? And who the presenter? I’ve been racking my brains). For Jeremy Wells and his producers to identify this for resurrection in the post-everything NZ of the 00zies, and to make it funny, provocative and – I’ll say it – informative, is deserving of great awards and the right to take the stage and give thanks to all the little people.

In other reality-twisting news, I see that Ronnie Van Hout’s installation I’ve Abandoned Me has just opened at the Auckland City Art Gallery. It’s smart, funny, and moody, and made me feel excited about art all over again.

If you want a more insightful account, check out Anthony Bert’s view in Art New Zealand.

Watching his work is like watching a bunch of alcoholics get drunk at a party. It starts out being kind of funny, then it turns sad, then it gets scary. But at a time when so much boring identity art is being produced in New Zealand he is one of the few artists who knows that to lurk in the boggy marsh of fixed identity is to commit artworld suicide.

Exactly. The best time I’ve had in an art gallery for ages.

And while we’re on the subject of mobile identities and truths stranger than fictions, big shouts to Margaret-Mary Hollins, Ian Hughes and Scott Wills of Pandemonium Theatre company for the return – in full – of Mike Hudson’s Beautiful Losers at Auckland’s Silo Theatre. I’m looking forward to catching this, having seen the abridged version in the Restless Ecstasy festival earlier this year.

Beautiful Losers is a biographical account of beat maestro Jack Kerouac and his mate/ muse Neal Cassidy in which writer, director and actors combine in a maelstrom of dramatic energy that captures the beat spirit in Kerouac’s writing perfectly.

The celebrity biopic is a genre I have a guilty passion for: there are some real doosies, usually made for TV, on such easy targets as The Jacksons, Di, Ferg … you know the drill. Basquiat managed to haul itself out of the typical quagmire of narrative clumsiness that mars the genre to actually say something about New York or the 80s or art or whatever, although Hilary and Jackie on the teev the other night fell right back into the usual traps: then I got famous, then I got married, then I got weird, then I had sex …

While the biopic has only been scantly served in the medium of live theatre, such treatment as it has received has been seriously good. Take Shakespeare for a ubiquitous example: he staked more-or-less his entire career on his biographical histories. Brecht’s Galileo, Weiss’s account of the Marquis de Sade and Schaffer’s Amadeus all transcend their biographical subjects to exercise heavyweight arguments about politics, ethics and aesthetics.

Maybe it’s that theatre – especially the impoverished New Zealand fringe – is a more blatantly artificial medium than its screen competitors. With limited staging funds available, actors and audiences all have to work that much harder to suspend the old disbelief. If that’s the case, then the “truth is stranger than fiction” role of biography may play out that much more effectively in theatre than elsewhere.

Or maybe it’s just that Kerouac and his peers spent years in a state of widely publicised, substance-enhanced, ecstatic abandon, and if this energy is successfully captured in the intimacy of a theatre, it will excite an audience as surely as the beats themselves got off on junk and booze.

With Hollins and Hughes both having worked extensively with the now sadly defunct Theatre at Large, Pandemonium have no difficulty in generating enough on-stage energy to cure your habit. Hughes and Wills totally rock the house, your head and whatever’s left of your youth.

And a last item for the consideration that we live in the midst of an evolutionary crisis: the rugby paddock over the back fence is full of people playing what I think is called lacrosse. How did this come to be? By what twisted sequence of events? Not that I care either way, but small wonder the ABs can’t keep up with the world’s best when the finest specimens of South central Auckland are running around waving stick-nets like a pack of jolly hockey sticks.

Over the years Christmas has been a time of rituals in our family. We begin December with the purchase of an advent calendar and recount the Christmas stories as each day on the calendar is marked off. We have a live Christmas tree, usually selected by my husband and traditionally at least two feet taller that can possibly fit into the lounge.

Decorating the tree involves a traditional family debate turning into a strong argument about whose turn it is to place the star on the top of the tree. This argument is always resolved by agreeing that we will write down who placed the star this year and whose turn it is next year. Each year we fail to do this which allows us to maintain our traditional debate the following year.

Each year we attend Carols by Candlelight and Christmas Eve Service and each year reminisce on the times children have fallen asleep at the communion rail or while they have been servers. We return home to open a single present to celebrate Christmas day.

Christmas Day includes extended family, traditional Christmas dinner, a long siesta before the evening meal.

Each year as we have celebrated the birth of Christ, our children have developed a strong sense of being involved in family and community. They experience the world with a sense of excitement and hope.

Many of the children we see at the Mission experience different rituals at Christmas. Their Christmas stories are of families where there is no money to purchase advent calendars, Christmas trees and decorations. Children do not experience the telling of the Christmas stories or the spiritual rituals or carol singing. Sadly many children in Auckland will have no expectation of Christmas dinner or family celebrations.

The stories of families coming to the Auckland City Mission at Christmas are stories of despair, of parents in tears telling us that they have no money for the day to day necessities, parents knowing that once again this Christmas their children will be disappointed. The children tell stories of violence and abuse, results of the frustration and hopelessness that that families experience at this time of year.

For these families, Christmas is not about celebrating the birth of Christ, for them it is a time of the year when their failure to provide for their children is highlighted by radio and television, in shopping malls and advertisements.

Statistics tell us that during the Christmas period there is an increase in crimes of violence, abuse and suicide. We see the results of this at the Mission. Many families in our communities do not celebrate the joy of Christmas but are overwhelmed by hopelessness and despair.

Each year the City Mission works with thousands of families throughout Auckland. In the two weeks before Christmas we will distribute more than 15,000 Christmas presents to families. Hundreds of Christmas hampers are prepared for families to enable them to have Christmas dinner.

On Christmas Day, 1,000 people will share the 'City Mission' Christmas dinner. Every guest will receive a present from Father Christmas but more importantly we will share a sense of community. Families, children, people who are elderly and people who are socially isolated will be part of our huge family celebration at the Auckland Town Hall.

The Mission works throughout the year to provide excellent service and powerful advocacy to marginalised people in Auckland, in many different ways.

In the past year, emergency food and clothing, bedding and furniture have been given to thousands of people in need, and work undertaken by our Crisis Care team to find long-term solutions to problems faced by families.

The Mission's Drop-In service provided over 35,000 cups of tea and coffee, free clothing and bedding, and assisted people with accommodation and mental health problems.

The Emergency Food programme distributed donated food and supplies to 70 Auckland foodbanks and community agencies.

Each year hundreds of people pass through our residential drug and alcohol Detoxification service.

Our mobile Community Support team works with three different client groups: isolated elderly, people with housing difficulties, and people recovering from alcohol and/or drug addictions.

In Herne Bay, the Mission operates a respite, convalescent and palliative care hospice for people living with HIV and AIDS. Herne Bay House is the only service of its kind in New Zealand.

People do not choose to be ill, they do not choose to be unemployed. Our clients do not choose to come from ethnic minority groups, nor do they choose to live in poverty. Children from these families do not choose to be marginalised, to miss out on educational and social opportunities that ensure they are unable to participate in a responsible way.

The children of beneficiaries and low income earners do not choose to be born into impoverished circumstances. They are born with the promise and potential any child has at birth.

The Government has acknowledged that 3 out of 10 New Zealand children live in poverty. For many Auckland children, this means sleeping in overcrowded, damp conditions, falling behind at school due to illness and poor nutrition, missing out on sports and other recreational activities because of a lack of money, and living with the threat of serious diseases such as meningococcal disease and whooping cough. In fact, the health of our children now ranks among the poorest in the developed world. Many New Zealanders perceive poverty in its absolute form as seen in third world nations but the concept of relative poverty is still not well accepted or understood here.

The families we see daily at the Mission really do live in poverty - they are poor - poor in monetary terms - asset poor in terms of belongings - educationally poor, socially poor and frequently spiritually poor.

It is easy to blame individuals, to say that we must all take responsibility for our actions, to insist that everyone gains full time employment. The reality is that for many in our community there are extremely limited opportunities for changing their lifestyles. The issues do not sit in isolation. Living in poverty leads to stress amongst family members, stress related symptoms, lack of self-esteem and a feeling of alienation from the rest of society. For people experiencing these feelings, breaking the cycle can often seem hopeless.

The City Mission believes that communities need to take responsibility for all the members of their community. The City Mission is evidence of a community response to the social needs of the Auckland community. A response made possible by the generosity of many members of the Auckland community through donations of goods and money, and by the committed and highly professional staff of the organisation.

As we begin our own preparations for Christmas this year, and reflect on the promise of the new born Christ, let us remember our responsibility to our extended family of the community and work to ensure that the promise and potential of each of our children has the opportunity to be fulfilled.

Note: You can donate online to the Auckland City Mission Appeal here.

This week, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (or LOTR:ROTK as fans refer to it) opens to the public worldwide, but here in Wellington we've been catching tantalising glimpses of it for quite a while. A few weekends ago, for example, I stepped out my front door and strolled the fifty metres to my local café, Deluxe, which is nestled in the armpit of the beautiful, newly-refurbished Embassy picture theatre. The tail of a giant Fell Beast blocked my path, so I moved gingerly around it, ordered a coffee, and sat in the sun with the newspaper, under the beady eye of the Nazgul.

Weta workshop head Richard Taylor was scuttling around with a clipboard, making sure the beast came together just right. They already had the main part of its body secured atop the Embassy, Nazgul on board. Just the tail to go, being hoisted up by crane. I telephoned New York and Auckland to alert Busytot’s parents and uncles about this exciting event, which they could see live. (And as a special treat for Busytot, I got someone to take my photo standing next to his favourite hulking creature of fantasy... that would be the giant yellow crane, of course).

Yep, just another Sunday in central Wellington.

Actually, we’re not that blasé about The Lord of the Rings here. It has been – and until the extended DVD version of Return of the King is complete, will continue to be – a constant fizzing energy in this town. And so accessible. Sure, the sets were closely guarded lest photographs get out of ooh, let’s see, perhaps a white wizard impaled on a giant, spiked wheel. But in the last country in the world to be discovered and settled by humankind, the impressive sight of Helm’s Deep and Minis Tirith set pieces tucked into the Hayman’s Hill quarry at the side of the Hutt Road was a thrill for Wellington’s commuting public for months. As were other sites and sights up and down the country.

When I arrived in Wellington from Auckland in November 1999 -- a month after principal filming began -- locals were still getting used to having stars in our midst. Compared to the wonderfully eccentric, over-the-top displays of fandom over the past few weeks, it was so quiet back then. So quiet, in fact, that in my second week in Wellington, I sat knee-to-knee with Sir Ian McKellen at a wee bar called Motel for a full hour before noticing it was his knee. Nowadays, Motel is three times its original size with a restaurant called Chow attached, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy is the largest thing made in one go in the movie world, ever.

Side-stepping the Fell Beast’s tail marked the third year in a row I had stumbled across the Weta crew erecting a beast atop the Embassy. The first year was the best. I was driving to pick up a friend from Roseneath, late at night. As I came around the corner onto Oriental Parade, a cavalcade of vehicles with lights flashing drove slowly past. In the middle of the convoy was a flat-bed truck, and strapped to that, on his back, a giant cave troll. Arm raised seemingly in defiance, ropes all over him, he looked like a beast that had finally been caught after years of terrorising a small village, and the triumphant villagers were parading him through the town.

And the villagers are triumphant. I’d say that over the last few years, almost every Wellingtonian has had a Lord of the Rings moment. If not several. Here's a sampling of mine:

• Visiting friends in deepest Seatoun – practically the staff quarters for LOTR – whilst they were elbow-deep in script detail, except that rather than coming away with juicy on-set gossip, it felt like I was delivering news of the outside world to the monastery.
• Watching a Bledisloe Cup final with Bruce “Gamling” Hopkins at the Southern Cross Tavern, after he’d spent the day on horseback with Sir Ian and Co. (Australia won.)
• Dining beneath a black and white Viggo Mortensen photograph, which my upstairs neighbour babysat for several months.
• Sitting at Wellington airport with Associate Arts, Culture and Heritage Minister Judith Tizard and Richard Taylor, listening to them discuss a germ of an idea, which later grew into a fully-realised outfit: the feather and paua-trimmed stole made of Weta's feather-light chainmail that the Prime Minister would wear to the premiere.

• Having a ticket to the Australasian premiere of The Fellowship of the Ring handed to me an hour before curtain-up.
• Taking my Mum to the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra performance of Howard Shore’s The Lord of the Rings Symphony: Six Movements for Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Howard Shore.

That last one was a corker. Outside, the Michael Fowler Centre was swamped with fans seeking glimpses of VIP guests. Inside, the Michael Fowler Centre was similarly swamped with fans, many in costume. An Elfin couple glided past, closely followed by a scarily realistic Ringwraith.

I’ve been to great NZSO gigs, I’ve seen standing ovations, but usually for conductor and orchestra, not for the front row of the Circle. Yet when Peter Jackson arrived, we stood as one. "This is Peter Jackson, the Noo Zealand director, that’s him in the suit jacket and t-shirt right there in the front row," is how one camcorder commentary next to me went. I thought they’d never settle, but when Howard’s hand went up a reverent hush ensued and we settled in to a fine distillation of the music across all three films.

A highlight of the evening was Janet Roddick -- known and loved for the quirky brilliance of the Six Volts -- singing a couple of songs, including the Annie Lennox credit-roller Into the West (which, incidentally, Janet recorded the original demo of). Rumour has it that Janet was phoned on the Thursday and brought into rehearsals only on the Friday beforehand, making her Saturday appearance in front of a home crowd all the sweeter.

Finally, the premiere. I stepped out early on Monday morning to find my neighbourhood transformed. Deluxe was doing a roaring trade in muffins for the 14 year olds hanging out in their sleeping bags on the footpath right next to where Dominic and Orlando and Billy and Elijah and Liv and Viggo would walk that afternoon. A random survey concluded that they weren’t all from overseas. In fact, most were down from Auckland. On Lambton Quay, more visitors from elsewhere: a couple of Ents (yes, giant walking trees, although suspiciously human-sized) engaged in some leisurely window-shopping. At Parliament, fans awaiting the parade basked in the sun on the freshly-clipped lawn beneath the statue of Richard Seddon.

Ah, the sun. Much has been said of Wellington's weather on Monday 1st December. The Friday beforehand was a stinker, and the day afterward a dull grey. On the day it was absolutely perfect. You really can't beat Wellington on a good day, in part because it's just so gorgeous here, and in part because it's a town occasionally vulnerable to being entirely cut off from the outside world. It's not unusual to have one's South Island holiday extended by a day or so waiting for Cook Strait to calm so that the ferries can cross. And taking two or three goes at landing at Wellington Airport in a decent storm or fog is customary -- but our pilots are very, very good at it. So you can see why we were delighted with our weather.

As for the premiere itself, you can read about it and see photographs here, here and here, among other places. Thanks to my most excellent boss, I dressed up, walked the red carpet, saw the film, drank the champagne. I shook an All Black's hand, while another one stepped on the back of my dress. I enjoyed international guests enjoying local sounds such as Fat Freddy's Drop, Anika Moa and The Black Seeds (featuring Bret MacKenzie of Figwit fame). I didn't sit knee-to-knee with Sir Ian, but then I'd done that already. And although I don't want to spill any details, I can tell you that the film is satisfyingly great.

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And, now that the glittering LOTR:ROTK premiere has come and gone, the city has that happy, buzzy, slightly dazed morning-after feeling. On that note, one last vignette...

The Sunday before the premiere, I popped into Fidel's Cafe, where I discovered that the fans had done their research. You need to know that normally, Fidel's is a quiet hangover-nursing lounge for long, leisurely weekend brunches. A live DJ lays down chilled-out funk, while you spend an hour over your "Fidel's Feast" - featuring the beloved homemade hash browns. On the walls are various Cuba-flavoured paintings, a photo of Fidel's soccer team, and one particularly brilliant piece of pop-culture art: a blown-up photo of Rachel Hunter and Robbie Williams relaxing on loungers by a hotel pool. (Williams is naked, Hunter wrapped in a towel, and a dog sleeps nearby. The caption reads: "The poor pooch was exhausted just watching the frisky pair.").

But this particular morning, Fidel's was packed to the rafters with fans, autograph-hunters and a gathering of The One Ring Net friends. Whether they’d just heard it through the grapevine, or found this article singling out Fidel’s as a favourite brunch spot for Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd, the place was overrun.

As I waited to place my order behind three teenagers, the coffee-boy noticed their t-shirts, emblazoned with images of Orlando Bloom.

"You should have been here an hour ago," he said.
"What? Why?!"
"Because that guy was here. And a couple of the other guys."
"What? Where???!!"
"Out the back."
"Where... exactly?"
"Uhm, the round, red table in the corner."
(Screams. Breathlessness. A mad scramble up the corridor to the back dining area...)
"Oh my gosh I hope they haven’t cleared the table yet!"

Ah, the poignant afterglow, the thrill of proximity, the scramble for souvenirs. It will last a while, I suspect: you could say that Wellington hasn't cleared its tables just yet. In fact, Fidel's might want to reserve that back table for the impending gorilla in our midst...

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Gemma Gracewood is Busytot’s Auntie, and when she's not "seeping onna sofa" in New York, London, and Singapore, she lives in Wellington. Gemma has worked in radio, TV, theatre, print journalism and PR. She currently works for the government.