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If you want to see two people at their absolute best, says A'Court, ask them how they met.
A'Court, 56, is in the kitchen with the spotted ceramic chook on the windowsill and she's making coffee. She throws sugar in the plunger. "Do you take sugar?" No. "Oh," she pauses. She and Jeremy Elwood both take sugar.
Read MoreIn one lengthy email to CYF in September 2013, a notification from the relative compared the unsafe home environment to one of New Zealand's worst cases of child abuse.
"The ineffective parenting or caregiving, the immaturity of the caregivers, drugs, alcohol and violence, turning a blind eye and creating a culture of silence . . . I am afraid these children will become another victim of our inability to act," she wrote.
"If they are not the next Nia Glassie, then they will be."
"Our views aren't publicly acceptable quite yet," one anonymous alt-right member said. "The media often paints us as evil, or vile or sick. We [could] lose our jobs, our families. Corporations don't apologise for racists ... not that we are racist."
Read More"No." As death notices go, my sister's call on a winter's day two years ago was a bit on the succinct side but it conveyed the essential information. Well, I thought, that's how it goes. It hadn't exactly come as a big surprise. We'd been expecting it for a while. And so I got on with my day – work, feeding the cats, reading YOU WON'T BELIEVE lists online – in a glum mood, nothing more. The next day I fell to pieces.
Read MoreDown the bank. Past the cycle path and the boundary fence and on to the Mt Roskill extension of the Western Ring Route. According to Go Media Billboards, 60,000 eyes pass this spot every day. If they looked up, just before the $1.2m Ernie Pinches pedestrian bridge, they might see a palm tree. A thick trunk, a spiky head, that started its life in a tyre.
This is a story about a tree. A family tree.
Read MoreSeen through the lens of mathematical validity, it's not at all incredible that a professor of genetics from New Zealand's fourth largest university became the world's best-known monster hunter following an unlikely Twitter exchange that would have disappeared without incident were it not for the stumbling upon it of a Scottish journalist a year later.
But mathematical validity doesn't make for a great story.
It's hard to know where my interest in war begins. My family has no military history links, that I know of. We never rose in the dark on Anzac Day. Apolitical, atheistic (perhaps as a result?), there were no dusty shoeboxes of exotic letters or knee-bouncing accounts of ancestral heroics. Boys would bring grandfathers' medals to school for "news", and afterwards I'd jealously skulk home and demand, "Did my granddads fight in the war?"
Read MoreUselessness loves company and I took consolation that I knew other people who couldn't drive. There was my niece Katrina, but she decided to learn when she was 35. There was my colleague Philip, but he decided to learn at about the same age. Well, there was always Shayne, widely regarded as the last great rock star in New Zealand, daemonic onstage, seething and intense offstage – who I viewed as a friend just as lame as I was, a plodder, carless, going nowhere. Good old Shayne!
But then he moved from Auckland to Brighton in Dunedin, where there was one bus an hour, and he decided to learn to drive. "Good one," I said, feebly.
Read MoreMy sponges soon became a treat between the two of us. I would make the cake, load it up with cream, put it on a pretty plate and present it to her in that little room. She would sit up in bed and eat it like a judge on the panel of a baking show. On those visits, she became master of the kitchen again. She would tell me if the oven needed to be hotter, if I didn't line the edges of the tin properly, if there was too much flour or too little, "I'll show you one day I hope, love. Maybe soon," she said.
Read MoreOld age and treachery will beat youth and skill, he reckoned, though the skill, along with the cunning, were at his end of the table.
Read More"People in New Zealand believe - and want to believe - it's an open society. It's something New Zealanders hold close to them," says Alan France, a sociology professor at Auckland University and an expert on class and youth.
"It's a view and has always been a view that New Zealand rejected the traditional class systems of the UK and tried to set up alternative systems. But all they did was create a new system based on land and property rather than work."
Read MoreLook at those people inside prisons, he says. So many mental health issues, addiction problems, family violence and inmates who are themselves victims of crime.
"If I don't follow my conscience and my political obligations to say we can do different things and better things and achieve better results, I'd be failing.”
It's the next morning and Neill is dutifully doing his media one-on-ones at the Hilton. He was staring out to sea when Canvas arrived in the room with the Antipodes sparkling water and mini Whittaker's chocolate bars. Neill has claimed Cook was "a hard man to read". But what to make of this actor who, on the one hand travels with miniature plastic pink pigs he captions for laughs on social media — and on the other champions big and serious causes. Neill has spoken out against cubicle dairy farming in the Mackenzie Country. He recently suggested a boycott of Cadbury's should its Dunedin factory closure go ahead. He is appalled at the Australian Government's decision to detain 1600 asylum-seekers in Papua New Guinea.
Read MoreTalking about his apparent mastery of the guitar, he said, "Nothing ever pleased me. I had such high expectations it was ridiculous. I just couldn't reach them. It had a bad affect on my health. Physically, mentally, emotionally. I had stomach ulcers, hernias... A perfectionist who is also a soft, sensitive person, a person like that is looking for trouble."
Read MoreThis is a story about science experiments and a cast of colourful characters playing a risky game of cat-and-mouse with New Zealand's drug laws.
A story of "protection" money, clandestine meetings and bugged Skype conversations.
Of boxes of cash stacked in the lounge of a pensioner's home in the North Shore, later laundered through companies in Hong Kong and Thailand.
Money made from "designer drug" pills. Millions and millions of pills.
Charisma, spunk, being willing to say what you think: these are the qualities Barton identifies as the common traits of Auckland's leading party people and they are qualities he embodied that night. But then again, sometime either a bit before or a bit after the booth-dancing and the bottle-swigging, through sad eyes that were increasingly squinty, he looked at me seriously and said, "This is my job."
Read MoreSome years when he's working on a book, he says, his income is more or less zero.
Looked at throughnink the prism of the harsh and uncertain economic realities of a solo father, Hager's whole project could be viewed as an ongoing series of leaps of faith, in which every time he has started a book, he's been at risk of being ended, economically speaking.
"I see it differently," he says. "I think, 'I've only got one life.' I mean, you know: Who wants to be old and regret what they did with their life?"
Read MoreHer sister takes her shopping on Thursdays at Pak N Save on Lincoln Rd (she used to go to the one in Henderson, but the aisles were too narrow and she ended up having panic attacks), and on Sunday nights she sometimes plucks up courage to phone Lindsay Henare's popular Whanau Show on Turanga FM and request a song. She's addicted to Sudoku, and Facebook; it's not uncommon for her to be up till 3am, sometimes later.
The panic attacks, the anxiety and depression – was she coping?
Fai didn’t need to run those dunes that Sunday, he’d be doing them soon enough anyway, but for 60 minutes he did. It wasn’t to impress his coaches. He did it for no other reason than he thought it would make him a fitter player, a better player.
Leaving the dunes for the beach, Fai would have been exhausted. His legs would have felt like concrete columns and his heart rate and core temperature would have been greatly elevated. The shimmering water would have looked like salvation.
Read MoreMichael Fitzgerald, said to be a hospital obstetrician, and a stepdaughter, Sophie, never existed.
The nurse cousin visited Oates-Whitehead in London last year but realised something was up the day she tried to find Fitzgerald, without success. She told Richmal by phone, jokingly, that her fiance needed to introduce himself to colleagues so people would recognise him.
"She got all upset, and said 'I've got to go'.