Miranda Spary: Old pre-cappuccino times

Arrowtown book buyer Miranda Spary continues her regular column about her recommendations for a good read and life as she sees it. 

Some weeks are so quiet and peaceful and you can really get a lot done. Some weeks are not. This has been a "not" week.

In my highly organised columnist's notebook (I stole it from a highly organised columnist), I scribble down things that happen in order to remind my feeble brain cells when I come to write this column.

Well, sometimes I do that.

Other times - most times in fact - I write them on the back of my supermarket docket or my parking ticket and put them in my handbag. Or jeans pocket. Or nowhere.

So it's always a surprise when I collect my thoughts (and bits of paper) and see what they turn into.

There have been a lot of thoughts about old times, first bumping into fellow ex-Wakatipu High pupil Stephen Royds at Willie Robert's birthday party.

He's been away from Queenstown for more than 20 years, so he's had a bit of a Rip van Winkle experience - there really is more to the nightlife here after 10.30pm now than just the Dolphin Club and the Skyline, and you couldn't even buy a cappuccino in the Queenstown he knew.

Honestly, we are just so darned sophisticated now ...

Stephanie Short has been back as well.

She arrived with a huge packet of photos of us all with those "interesting" '70s clothes and hairdos, people like Christy Lewis, Vicki Graf, Robin Cooper and all the rest of us fagging and drinking well away from the eagle eye of Sergeant Maloney, who terrorised the underage drinkers of the district for years.

Steph was meant to be our killer weapon in the Arrowtown PTA trivia quiz - we were The Erasers determined to destroy those Sharp Pencils and their winning ways.

So we blamed her totally for our inability to score more than a measly six out of 10, which saw us roundly thrashed not just by those overall winners the Artefacts, led by David Clarke (he has a whole museum and its archives to help him swot up the answers), but by the not-so-gloating-now Sharp Pencils AND the nauseatingly smug Pussycats.

My deliciously English nephew is here from London and he very kindly let me take him to see Toy Story 3.

Even without the pleasure of eating icecream, popcorn and sweets in the dark, it is a very, very funny movie - one of those ones with jokes on all levels so you have the different age groups in the audience laughing at different times.

My advice: find a 9-year-old and drag them along - a perfect way to spend a few hours on a freezing day.

Considerably darker and heavier and utterly gripping was Verbatim at The Hills.

Local girl Sandi Murphy played six different characters in this one-woman (and one real live policeman - well done, Keith!) play.

The performances, which helped to raise money for the Wakatipu Abuse Prevention Network, were sold out, and everyone was staggered by Sandi's talent.

Miranda Harcourt and William Brandt wrote this play nearly 20 years ago. The young Miranda interviewed several murderers, their families and their victims' families. They then used the transcripts of those interviews to create the play.

It was creepy and troubling to listen to the murderer explain why he did it, and even more troubling and horrible listening to his poor mother giving her views.

Sandi has performed this work before to rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and this show, produced by Caroline Hutcheson, was superb; please Sandi and Caroline won't you do some more? Now, the booklist .

What a complete waste of time that has been - in the best possible way, though.

So many of you emailed your lists and others have thrust them in my hot little hand while others have just mentioned theirs to me in the street.

I have spent hours flitting through my favourite book sites looking up the ones I hadn't heard of.

I can see it is going to take me a while to get any sort of summary together, but I promise I am working on it.

Jenny Mehrtens went one step further and brought me Meltdown, by Ben Elton, and Committed, by Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame).

Ben Elton is a very funny writer and this novel is a bit of a Bonfire of the Vanities, with way more laughs.

Jimmy is a flash-cat city trader making a small fortune and spending an even bigger one until the recession that his Dad had predicted hits.

I didn't want to read Committed as I was already a bit sick of Elizabeth Gilbert by the end of her bestselling EPL and thought she might go on a bit long about her own relationships.

But this is great - there is a bit of her own history, but mostly it's the history and politics of marriage and lots of useful little tidbits.

It's taught me so much about marriage that I didn't know. Apparently, it's not all pure bliss and romance - amazing!