Author Archives: thesentinel2012

This is the first post of the year, and probably the last year of the blog. Hard not to be totally disheartened, firstly by events in the Northern Hemisphere, but mostly by the complete and utter ecological disaster in Australia. … Continue reading →

Everybody is still writing about the UK election. Didn’t he do well, that Boris. When he wasn’t hiding in a fridge, running down the clock, like the ice sculpture at the TV debate that the Conservatives didn’t see as a … Continue reading →

I don’t bother with social media any more, unlike during the previous UK election in 2017. Prospective electoral candidates should avoid it too, since writing rubbish on Facebook is bound to catch up with you. But there was something awfully … Continue reading →

More on the British election from a New Zealand perspective. Boris Johnson continues an incredibly erratic performance, and the Conservative Party are full of tricky manoeuvres and funny games on social media. Johnson launched the Welsh Conservatives campaign and the … Continue reading →

I got an email yesterday from Amnesty International in Australia, entitled ‘Behrouz is finally free’, with a photo of the Amnesty man greeting Behrouz Boochani at Auckland airport. Behrouz Boochani is an Iranian Kurd, an asylum seeker who has been … Continue reading →

It’s Saturday the second of the November, and today was meant to be the day that New Zealand won its third rugby world cup in a row. Instead, it will probably be England. So conventional wisdom is that if the … Continue reading →

Some short confessions of an Anglophile, I hope. I’ve had the misfortune to be fascinated by the Brexit process, and its lack of progress through the House of Commons. And I’ve lost sleep over it, given the time difference with … Continue reading →

This is a photo by New Zealander photographer Peter Peryer, who died last year. It was one of his first, and is called Hunua, from the Mars Hotel collection. If you could enlarge the photo a bit you will see … Continue reading →

After a little break, filled with television watching of world tour cycling and the live feed of the Supreme Court in London, it’s back once again to 1976. This time we are with the listener in the first week of October of … Continue reading →

Well it’s the end of September in 1976, and the cover of the listener has a publicity shot for a new New Zealand TV drama, Hunter’s Gold. This is a young adult costume drama, set in the goldfields of Otago, in the … Continue reading →