Weekend update, with apologies to Saturday Night Live: Lawrence and Vanessa and Brent and I went to the Nikau Cafe on Saturday. It's in the Waitakeres and has amazing views across Auckland. Even the Sky Tower looks puny! I realised upon their arrival to pick us up that my entire house is actually a gigantic dusty cobweb engorged with pet hair and that our broken vacuum cleaner must be replaced immediately. (Americans, decent - by which I mean pet-hair-attacking - vacuum cleaners in NZ are incredibly expensive, like many hundreds of dollars. I don't know why. It's like shoes and mobile phones. For some reason these particular businesspeople want to charge you through the nose. 'It's rape!', as Granny used to say.) Ellie flailed in her usual ridiculous way and Lawrence was blinded enough by his own canine fetish to call her beautiful. He is mad. We zoomed off to Cathy's birthday party in the late afternoon and sat in the sun in the back garden, awash in the scent of orange-blossom, eating exciting nibbles (dolma! rice balls! that organic walnut dip you get at the supermarket!) and listening to the Polynesian church gathering singing over the fence next door. However we couldn't stay long as the Finn Brothers show was imminent. I realised that I hadn't actually seen a live Finn-related show since the mid-nineties! (These things were timed badly, obviously. I was in America for Seven Worlds Collide and Neil never made it anywhere near Houston while I was there, either. Meh.) We were quite close to the stage and due to the joy of the St James lower-floor ramp (a boon for the short peeps!) I was able to see quite well. (There was a very loud, drunken Irishman snogging his girlfriend in front of me for a lot of the show but luckily he left to go bond with the front row towards the end. Move it along, Blarneystone!) They came out to old fifties home movies which were adorable and looked suspiciously like those of my family: terrible haircuts and enormous groups of people in little shorts on wooden porches. Song choices were solid, although I would have liked an 'I See Red', but I did get to hear 'Poor Boy', which may be my favourite Tim-penned work. Eddie Rayner came out for 'Bold as Brass' (!!!), 'Message to My Girl' (less schmaltzy on a grand piano, thank god) and 'Six Months...' with the full 'Pioneery' coda. The audience sang along lustily to most things and was in fine voice during the usual 'Four Seasons in One Day' and 'Weather With You' acoustic sing-alongs. Yay us! 'Distant Sun' was particularly good, too, with a lot of the Finn-esque extended outro with add-on mumbling lyrics stuff. Brent, whose familiarity with the Finns is fairly basic, was most impressed. He said he was surprised by how much the band rocked and how good a guitarist Neil is. 'Elvis will have to be pretty good to top that!' (High praise indeed!)

Oh, and I love Tim's blue-rinse hair. Deeply. He looks like Hyacinth Bucket!