A Postcard From Christchurch

Christchurch is supposed to be the most English city in New Zealand. Given that they have nice tidy parks, old buildings are sensitively restored and the streets are laid out in an orderly grid pattern, I'm left wondering if anybody's been in England lately, but it's been a rough weekend to be an Englishman here. I speak as somebody who went out on Saturday night to watch our rugby team trampled by the All Blacks (although the locals were very friendly about it, and a nice girl asked me if I was really gutted- like an idiot I didn't play the situation for all the consolation I could get) and then up at six this morning to see a false dawn turned into frustration in the space of three minutes flat. Seeing as the French are so keen on nuclear testing, perhaps we should encourage them to let the next one off underneath the German Referees' Association. What was weird was the number of Oriental types in the pub supporting France, knowing nothing about the language or culture as shown when I suggested that one of them should aller s'en foutre.

The last few days of my time in New Zealand have been turned into a ridiculous mess by the fact that my tour company have decided to dump the hotel where I'm staying and use the one on the other side of the park instead. So they've dragged their heels over paying the old hotel, which is now advising all the tour company's customers that the tour company don't have a credit facility with them any more and the customers will have to pay themselves and reclaim it from the tour company. I spoke to the tour company at about 9.30 here (therefore 10.30am in England) on Friday and they were going to make sure that the room was paid for by the time I checked out tomorrow morning. With it being the weekend, however, even if they did an urgent funds transfer, the hotel company's head office probably wouldn't pick it up until this morning.

So I have to wait until this evening to see what's happening- the real nuisance is that the tour company and the hotel company have mutually exclusive office hours and they need to speak to each other rather than through me, but we'll have to see what happens.