We had a local celebrity visit us during voting today – Betty Watt, the lady our street is named after!

Betty represented New Zealand at both Cricket and Hockey, and her husband was an All Black.

https://www.cricketwellington.co.nz/newsarticle/129326?newsfeedId=1397919

She was lovely too, very interesting and full of life even in the few minutes she chatted with us.

We extended an offer to come in for a cuppa whenever she is in the area and hope she takes us up on that so we can find out more about her life.

It’s election time in Nu Zilland and I won’t have far to go to cast my vote this year – it’s in our garage!

The Duchess signed us up for renting the space out as the local estate’s voting site, one of a couple of dozen around the constituency. It’s taken a couple of weekends of getting rid of crap and sweeping away the cobwebs but we managed to get it into a reasonably clean state for them to set up.

They’ve put up some cardboard walls to (mostly) hide our rubbish, with cardboard desks and voting booths. Thankfully the voting signs are sturdy plastic as it’s blowing a gale and raining sideways today.

The Duchess is also working as meeter and greeter for people as they arrive, which is keeping her busy, though how she’s managing a full day’s work while suffering from vertigo is beyond me. I think FOMO is helping more than the tablets.

The first hour was manic, with a voter every minute and queuing out the door and the street turned into a car park, but it’s now calmed down so I think I’ll get out and do my democratic duty.

The brilliant company I work for gave a bunch of us VIP tickets for World of Wearable Arts (WoW) recently. We had a couple of tables right in front of the runway and treated to a three course meal before the show plus a ridiculous amount of alcohol (I stayed at a hotel round the corner to avoid driving).

I’ve never seen WoW before but had heard great things, but essentially it’s a fashion show for mad costumes people have made for it, a walking art show, so wasn’t sure whether I’d enjoy it that much.

It was fantastic!

The show was split into 7 themes, each with music, dancing and aerial acrobats going on while the models moved around the outskirts of the stage showing off the costumes. Very slick, high quality entertainment (it would be given the eye-watering prices of the tickets!) and the costumes were really impressively creative.

These pictures were just a few past entries they let us photograph before the show started and don’t show a fraction of how spectacular it was. The only downside was not having The Duchess with me to enjoy it, which hopefully next year she will.