Reducing the amount of trash you toss is important, but you don’t have to go completely #zerowaste to make a difference. Fiona Ralph explores.
The growing zero-waste community is aiming to slash their environmental footprints by reducing what they consume, reusing what they have, recycling what they can and refusing wasteful items.
While the aim is stellar, the end goal can be unattainable for many, and even the name could be misleading – low-waste would be a more accessible term. Not all #zerowasters are actually producing zero waste; most are aiming towards less waste. The most dedicated contain a year’s worth of rubbish in a small jar – like Kate Nelson (@plasticfreemermaid) and Shia Su (@wastelandrebel) – but this impressive effort is unachievable for many, especially parents. In terms of zero-waste, I’m still far away.
I recycle and compost as much as I can, refuse extra packaging when possible and shop mostly second-hand, which cuts down on packaging, manufacturing and shipping waste. I also try to reuse, repurpose or donate something before throwing it away. Thanks to these efforts, I’ve noticed our council rubbish bags getting smaller over the last couple of years, and now we only need to put them out about once a month.
Wherever you are in your waste journey, even cutting down a little bit can help – that’s the aim of eco advocates Juliet Dale and Miriama Kamo. Read on to find out more about Miriama’s rubbish reduction methods.
PHOTO BY EMILY CHALK
Reduce, reuse, recycle
TVNZ journalist, and recent Woman cover star, Miriama Kamo, started her low-waste journey after setting a goal of going waste-free in January 2019, and has committed to the #zerowaste kaupapa ever since.
Do you send any rubbish to landfill? Āe (yes), but I’d say it’s reduced by up to 80% from what it used to be. The biggest key for the rubbish bin is “no food waste” and to make sure you don’t put recycling in the rubbish.
Do you have a goal you aim for? Kāo (no), I haven’t set a goal, but we only put our rubbish bin out every two to three weeks. You may have just inspired me to set a mindful goal…
What do you throw away? I had to go and look in the rubbish bin! I put very little in the bin, but my husband is at a different stage of the journey. I’ve gone gluten-free vegan, which has reduced packaging even more, but my husband still likes to buy meat and some packaged goods, so I just found some plastic in the rubbish bin!
Top tip for cutting down on waste? Mindfulness: think about what you’re buying before you buy it. Once you have, consider its life cycle – where will it end up? Can it be reused, repurposed, recycled? Or will it rot in a compost?
Love a bit of history? Find your perfect read in our tried and tested round up.
1 The Zookeeper of Belfast by S. Kirk Walsh
Genre:Historical, fiction
Animals, say people who know about these things, can be incredibly beneficial to humans, from decreasing our blood pressure, cholesterol and triglyceride levels to helping kick loneliness and depression into touch. That immutable human-animal bond is at the heart of this debut novel from Texan writer S.Kirk Walsh.
Yet the setting is a long way from the US: 1940s Belfast, when the clouds of war are roiling overhead. It’s based on the true story of Denise Weston Austin, a zookeeper nicknamed the “elephant angel” – Denise was charged with looking after a young elephant during the Luftwaffe’s aerial invasion of Belfast.
Weaving fact with fiction, here Denise becomes Hettie Quin, a 20-year old who’s landed a part-time gig at Belfast Zoo, only because the eligible men are at war. Hettie’s life is a bit of a mess: her father has left, her older sister has just died in childbirth and her mother refuses to visit her infant granddaughter because she lives in a Catholic neighbourhood (this is Belfast, after all, and the sectarian tensions that still exist in Northern Ireland today are ever present).
It’s probably no wonder Hettie prefers animals to people. She forms a strong bond with Violet, the zoo’s three-year-old elephant, and thanks to Violet, Hettie can escape the grim reality of her life.
But then bombs rain down on the city – including 674 in one night, resulting in the death of almost a thousand civilians – and the government orders all dangerous animals to be killed because they could escape during air raids. Hettie does the only thing she can: she goes on the run with Violet to ensure the elephant’s safety.
My late father-in-law was from Belfast and I’ve spent a lot of time there, so this book was always going to appeal. But even if the only thing you know about Belfast is from the 6pm news, you’ll love this clever tale of love, heartbreak and the kind of resilience most of us could never fathom. A debut novel doesn’t always contain such brilliance, but give this author all the literary awards. Iontach (fantastic), as they say in Belfast.
The best books make you care about something you’ve never really thought (or even heard) about. Did I, for example, know about the American Library in Paris (ALP), the largest English-language lending library on the European mainland?
I did not.
But thanks to writer Janet Skeslien Charles, who herself worked at the ALP in 2010, we’re able to enjoy this little-known story of how a group of brave women and girls kept the library open during the Nazi occupation of Paris.
Based on actual events, this hefty novel is set along dual timelines – one from 1939-1944, the other in the 1980s. The former kicks off with Odile Souchet, a young Parisian whose love of books leads to her dream job at the ALP. But bubbling under Odile’s joyful interactions at the library – of the right book finding the right reader at the right time – are the dark clouds of war. That segues into the second timeline. It’s 1983 and Odile is now widowed, living a quiet life in a nondescript suburb of Montana. Life still revolves around books, but now it’s largely within the four small walls of her house.
Until her neighbour Lily, a high school student, decides to interview Odile for a class project and manages to crack through her defences. It’s during this burgeoning friendship that we discover how the lives of the ALP staff and their families played out under the cruel Nazi regime.
I consumed this book in a greedy gulp, eager to find out what happened to Odile’s family, her policeman boyfriend and how she ended up in America. There’s much to admire. This is a story of love, betrayal, courage and coming-of-age during one of the worst chapters in human history.
Bonus points to Janet for showing us a side of the story we rarely get to see – the involvement of gutsy women during World War II. She’s clearly no slacker when it comes to research and she deserves kudos for seamlessly combining fact with fiction to create a balanced, nuanced tale. If you love books, you’ll have a soft spot for this beauty
Grace Kelly, Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion and Candice Bergen are just some of the women who lived at New York’s women-only Barbizon Hotel. Historian Paulina has captured some of the stories of this Manhattan hotel that provided safe harbour for young women from the 1920s until it was sadly turned into condos in 2007. But this is more than just a trot through history, it’s also about women’s ambition and liberation.
Mega-selling author Kristin Hannah’s latest novel is a moving tale of love, despair and the importance of labour laws, set during the Great Depression in the US. It starts in Texas in 1921, where Elsa Wolcott is ignored and bullied by her wealthy family for being too tall, old and ugly to ever land a husband.
At 25, Elsa decides enough is enough. She makes herself a red silk dress, cuts her hair and sneaks out to town, where she meets handsome teenager Rafe Martinelli. After a few hasty couplings, she’s pregnant and is unceremoniously dumped on Rafe’s family. The pair marry and have a second child, and Elsa falls deeply in love with Rafe, his parents and their land.
By 1934 things have gone downhill. Millions are out of work and drought has devastated the Great Plains. Everything on the Martinelli farm is dying, including Elsa’s marriage. One by one, their neighbours start abandoning Texas, seeking greener pastures, but Elsa can’t bear to leave the first place where she has finally felt at home. It’s only when her son struggles to breathe after contracting dust pneumonia that she has no choice but to try to start over in California.
But the so-called land of milk and honey is overwhelmed by desperate people looking for work. “Okies” like Elsa and her family are shooed away from schools and hospitals. Worse still, the giant-farm owners are free to treat their workers as brutally as they want, meaning Elsa has to work back-breaking hours for pitiful wages.
Most of the characters in The Four Winds tend to be relentlessly awful or impeccably saintly, so a little more light and shade wouldn’t have hurt, but Kristin does a magnificent job of bringing the soul-crushing poverty and hopelessness of the Great Depression to life, and I enjoyed Elsa’s development from self-loathing introvert to baseball bat-wielding warrior.
It’s the 1970s and Nev, a ginger-haired British muso, teams up with Opal, a black American singer who’s the sassy yin to his awkward yang. They’re an unlikely pair poised for great success, until a racially-charged incident ends their fame as quickly as it began. Fast forward to 2016 when a music journalist starts poking around in their story and uncovers a heap of secrets. An impressive debut.
A good book, say those who know about these things, takes you to new places, makes you think and wrings out your emotions.
Aussie author Kayte Nunn clearly got that memo, because her sixth novel whisks readers from the war-torn Burmese jungles of 1944 to 1970s Oxford and then to Ireland on the eve of the new millennium.
It’s a triple whammy that pivots around The Wasbies, a group of around 250 formidable women from England, Australia and Canada who ran mobile canteens in the Burmese jungles for front-line troops during WWII (there’s no mention of Kiwi participation and a quick tootle around Google seems to support that).
Unwilling to spend the war rolling bandages like all good women of a certain social standing, Brits Bea, Plum, Bubbles, Joy and Australian Lucy join The Wasbies, enduring monsoons, mozzies and enemy fire to feed, water and supply soldiers with razors and toothpaste.
Fast forward to Oxford in 1976, and a middle-aged woman visits a museum to steal five rare Japanese artefacts made of ivory, called netsuke (including the very rare fox-girl). Despite a substantial reward, the treasures are never recovered.
Until the rump end of the 20th century, that is. After an absence of 50 years, four of the surviving Wasbies reunite at Plum’s Irish mansion. Along for the ride is Olivia, a young Australian art expert who’s been sent by her London office to assess Bea’s late husband’s collection of Japanese art, in particular the valuable Japanese netsuke. Poor Olivia has no idea of the decades-old vortex of wartime secrets and complex friendships she’s about to be sucked into. She and the reader get to sit back and watch as skeleton after skeleton tumbles out of the closet.
This is a big, bold and brilliant shot of escapism, so astutely observed you can almost hear the gunshots and smell the jungle.
I’ve never had the pleasure of reading Kayte’s work before – more fool me. Is there anything more delicious that finding an author you love, then discovering she’s got a back catalogue? Not in my world, there isn’t.
Holy heck, this Australian writer is prolific! This is her 14th novel (and I lose track of how many non- fiction, children’s books and columns she’s written). Here, Nikki twirls us around the 1800s, where Thomasina Trelora is headed to the colonies – cue a storm, a shipwreck and a whole new life. But all is not as it seems in this bristling read from one of the sharpest writers around.
Even if you don’t know your Coco from your Chanel, you’ll enjoy this novel about the sisters who changed fashion forever. It tracks their early days at an orphanage to the glamour of Paris as they drag themselves out of poverty and class restrictions. I’m a sucker for stories about women beating the odds, so this beautiful piece of historical fiction was so far up my alley, it was blocking traffic
What would you do if the secret police demanded you spy on a friend to protect your family? This debut novel by an Australian journalist/documentary maker is based on her experience of living in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. As the sights and smells of 1990s Baghdad leap from the page, Gina teases out the themes of trust and motherhood in three friends whose lives have been fractured by the dictatorship.
Just when you thought the WWII story well had run dry, along comes this hefty novel about Georgie, a young female journalist who enters the eye of Hitler’s storm in 1938. It clearly isn’t a comfortable place to be, especially when Georgie gets involved with a Jewish family and puts her own life on the line to help. Yet another reminder, should we need it, of how monstrous war is.
It’s 1853 and life in Kaipara is pretty grim. Into this hardscrabble pioneer setting comes Lydia Boulcott, who’s hoping the kauri forests will be the perfect hiding place for her numerous demons. But then she discovers her new practi is someone from her past – someone who can reveal her dark secrets. This is Christchurch-based Joanna’s second historical adult novel and her astute dialogue and style bring the story to life.
Throw the espionage and intrigue of the Cold War into a pot and this what you get – a humdinger of a novel by the prolific writer Francine Prose (this is her 22nd book). Her protagonist, Simon, is asked to edit a top-secret novel about the true life execution of suspected US spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg but his life soon spins out of control. A lush, layered tale by one of literature’s masters.
I’ve just spent 344 pages in the company of three amazing Irish women: Rosaleen, a pregnant teenager in the 1960s; Kate, who’s unhappily married in ’90s London; and Aoife, who kick-starts the lineage.
Three different eras, three different situations, but each of them is damaged by the Catholic Church and its attitude to marriage and illegitimate children.
Aoife, who dreams of a better life than her mother’s, marries the unlikeable Cashel. After WWII, they give up their London pub and move back to Ireland with their three daughters. But their eldest – the fiercely independent Rosaleen – won’t settle for life on an Irish farm, so returns to London where she falls in love with Felix, a bohemian older artist.
Felix couldn’t love Rosaleen more but falls at the first hurdle. Thinking the nuns will help her, she heads back to Ireland. If you’ve ever ugly-cried watching Philomena or The Magdalene Sisters, you’ll know the Church took a dim view of unwed mothers. Poor Rosaleen is eventually tricked into adopting out her daughter Kate, while her family believe she’s brought shame on them and are forbidden to ever speak of her.
Later, Kate’s search for her birth mother brings her – and her own young daughter, Freya – to the Irish convent in which Kate was born and where they discover the horror of what went on there.
You may know Esther for her first novel Hideous Kinky, which was tuned into a film starting Kate Winslet. You may also know her for her surname – she’s the great-granddaughter of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and daughter of painter Lucian Freud, so she knows a thing or two about complex family dynamics.
This is her ninth novel and yowzah, it’s good! Esther has that magic ability to make the reader really care about her characters, who take up space in your head for a long time after you’ve finished. You’ll need to be on the ball though, because the story flashes from past to present and back so quickly it can give you whiplash.
Get the tissues ready and settle in for one of this year’s most beautiful reads.
This is very different to Colson’s The Underground Railroad – a harrowing tale of slavery that was turned into a mini-series – but it’s no less gripping. We’re now in 1960s Harlem with a small-time crook trying to go straight. As the book’s blurb puts it: “This is a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and a love letter to Harlem.”
Horowhenua writer Carole Brungar works as a school librarian, yet still has time to write compelling novels. This one is the fourth instalment in her Vietnam War- based series (but it also works as a stand-alone book). Summer is a hippy child of the 1970s who ends up writing to a Kiwi soldier in Vietnam – they couldn’t be more different and both have demons aplenty to overcome. Get the tissues ready.
Whitney Wolfe Herd co-founded Bumble in her twenties, then became the target of misogynistic trolling. Now her female-friendly dating app has made her one of the world’s wealthiest women at 31.
When I first met Whitney Wolfe Herd four years ago, Bumble HQ was a humble two-bedroom apartment in Austin, Texas. A fresh-faced team of just 10 – with a further 20 in London, New York and Los Angeles – plus Whitney’s elderly golden labrador, Jack, were crammed into the tiny space, and the entire second bedroom was a store cupboard of bright yellow Bumble-branded merch.
Whitney, then 27 and undeniably impressive – polished, passionate, articulate, driven – had founded the dating app that forces women to make the first move just two-and-a-half years earlier.
She had recently made the prestigious Forbes 30 Under 30 list, alongside actress Margot Robbie, bestselling author Emma Cline and Olympic gymnast Simone Biles. In the four years since, she’s been busy. She got married to 33-year-old Texan oil heir Michael Herd in a lavish three-day event at a castle on the Amalfi Coast, and the couple welcomed son Bobby in December 2019.
Whitney with husband Michael at Time 100 Gala celebrating their list of 100 most influential people in the world of 2018.
Bumble’s employees now number more than 700 across offices in Austin, Barcelona, London and Moscow, with 42 million active users in 150 countries. And in February, four hours after Bumble was floated on the New York Stock Exchange, 31-year-old Whitney became not only the youngest female CEO to take a company public, but also the youngest self-made female billionaire, with an estimated net worth of $3.1 billion.
Celebrating at the stock-market launch of Bumble in February. PHOTO VIA INSTAGRAM
I’m not quite sure what I’ve been doing with my past four years, but I now feel like a bit of a slouch. When Whitney logs on to Zoom from Austin – on-brand in a pink, blue and black Bumble jumper – she has apparently not aged a day either. The only slight difference is her diffidence in disclosing her whereabouts. I’ve visited her former home, a mansion in enormous grounds beside Austin’s Colorado River, but the family no longer live there, she tells me cautiously.
I imagine they’ve upgraded to somewhere even grander, given their combined worth these days. Since she’s using a yellow Bumble-branded background, however, I have no clues – save some loud birdsong and occasional shouts from her toddler son. I don’t blame Whitney for guarding her privacy: she’s a billionaire with a baby and a disturbing history of being targeted by trolls.
She is, in fact, one of only 100 self-made female billionaires in the world, with self-made women still accounting for just 5% of the world’s 500 richest people. Part of the problem is a lack of investment in female-founded companies. “It’s hard for women to get capital, because we are held to impossibly high standards,” says Whitney. “Men are applauded for being big, wild thinkers, while women are given very strict guidelines not to be too out there, to be measured and reserved. It’s hard for us even to be convicted in ourselves for fear of being labelled as self-obsessed or arrogant. I know,” she says, “because I have lived this.”
Even Whitney’s success is disparaged by some, and her achievements belittled because of her partnership with Badoo, the social network behemoth owned by Russian businessman Andrey Andreev, who invested heavily in Bumble during its start-up phase. “Badoo also made investments in a lot of other businesses that you’ve never heard of and which don’t exist anymore,” counters Whitney. “We were given very modest resources and it was not $100 million, as some people reported. The notion that I just had everything handed to me, that’s not the truth.”
I’ve hit a nerve, and understandably so. That it’s easier for some to believe Whitney – who has been dubbed, somewhat patronisingly, “the Elle Woods of the tech world”, a reference to Legally Blonde – is simply the front-of-house furnishings and not the true founder of a billion-dollar firm is evidence of exactly the misogyny she built her app to fight.
For anyone who hasn’t been on the front lines of dating for a decade, Bumble works in a similar way to Tinder or Hinge – based on location and proximity, users swipe right for yes, left for no – but, crucially, women call the shots. Men cannot initiate a conversation (even if they swipe “yes”) and the female party has 24 hours to strike up a chat before the “match” expires. (In same-sex matches, both parties can initiate.) Although basic membership is free, users can upgrade to a premium plan for a monthly fee and gain access to features like backtracking to undo left swipes and boosting your profile to be viewed by more people.
“It’s not biological imperative that says men have to ask us out, it’s social conditioning. And the internet has been engineered to reflect gender norms in relationships. But we can change it,” says Whitney.
“I cannot count how many times I’ve heard women say, ‘I would have never made the first move, but now I approach in real life too and make the first move,’” she beams. “And they tell me, ‘It’s because Bumble has normalised that for me’. Bumble has normalised making that first move, whether in person – seeing someone that you think is attractive or interesting – or elsewhere, like sending someone your CV.
“Do I think we’re solving the world’s problems? No. Do I think that, by making small tweaks through product and technology, we have the potential to shift behaviour in a more positive direction? Yes. And do I think there are long-term positive implications from that? I do believe that is true, yes.”
As Bumble’s queen bee, Whitney (centre) hopes to empower women to make the first move in all aspects of life, from relationships to career.
For the first time, really, since the second wave, feminism is big business. The current moment – of post-#MeToo empowerment and the first female US vice-president – has been commodified and sold back to consumers who, more than ever, align their identity with brands. And Whitney is, without a doubt, a marketing and branding genius. Bumble’s colourful billboards and ads feature slick quips – “Be the CEO your parents always wanted you to marry” – but Whitney also walks the walk. In 2019, Bumble lobbied the Texas legislature to pass a bill that fined anyone who sent obscene images without consent US$500, and unsolicited “dick pics” are now illegal in Texas. Next, she wants laws against online harassment, verbal abuse and the digital equivalent of catcalling.
“Female entrepreneurs typically build things to solve problems,” she says, while men, she believes, are far more likely to come up with ideas simply aimed at being successful. And, for Whitney, solving the problem of “online toxicity and abuse” has always been personal.
One of the founding team at Tinder – the original “swipe right” dating app – Whitney was its first vice-president of marketing at 23. She also dated a fellow founder, Justin Mateen, who, she has claimed, sent her abusive texts and called her a “whore” and a “gold digger” after she ended things. Another senior member of the team apparently said that having a female co-founder made the company “seem like a joke”. Whitney sued Tinder for sexual harassment – the company denied any wrongdoing itself – and she won an undisclosed sum, rumoured to be over $1 million.
The media reporting of the case was extensive and, in the summer of 2015, Whitney was viciously trolled for it. “Emails, texts, tweets, people showing up at my house – really weird and horrible stuff,” she recalls. Including rape and murder threats from strangers. “I was 24 years old and I had been given this scarlet letter. I decided to take back control over my life and my narrative, and to try to do something that would help solve the problem I was living through.”
I decided to take back control over my life and my narrative, and to try to do something that would help solve the problem I was living through
There’s another element to the story, though – one that Whitney rarely talks about publicly. She once dated someone in what a family friend has called “one of the most horrific relationships I’ve ever seen”. The man, who has never been identified, reportedly referred to Whitney, her sister and mother as “c***s”, threw a watch at her mother’s head at a party, and once threatened her with a gun. “I experienced severe emotional abuse during my really formative years, and it stripped me down to nothing,” she has said. “It showed me a very dark side of relationships, and it helped inform my understanding of what was wrong with gender dynamics.”
The daughter of Michael, a property developer, and Kelly, a housewife, who separated more than a decade ago, Whitney and her younger sister, Danielle, grew up in a small town outside Salt Lake City in Utah. Although her father is Jewish and her mother Catholic, the region is predominantly and fervently Mormon, which, says Whitney, meant an “incredibly patriarchal community and society”.
“I’ll never forget being 17 and saying, ‘Why are the men always in control in relationships? Why is every woman my mum knows spending her days crying about the way her divorce is going, or the way her husband is treating her?’ I recognised that it was a problem, but everyone was accepting it all as, ‘That’s just how things are’. And my inner voice was saying, ‘Just because that’s how things are, doesn’t mean it’s how they have to be.’”
Along with delivery services, gaming and garden centres, dating apps have boomed during the pandemic as sex-starved singles, sequestered in their homes, turned to the only truly safe way of meeting someone. Use of dating apps, including Bumble, Hinge, Tinder and Happn, increased 17%-23% last year, compared with the previous 12 months. Bumble also saw a 42% increase in video calls, with 33% of users saying they will consider still using the video-call function – which was part of Bumble before Covid, and which Whitney calls “a no-brainer, for safety and security” – when dating post-pandemic too.
I’m a very reluctant app dater myself. I find the strange Pavlovian response that the process inspires in me – disappointment when someone I wasn’t even really that interested in doesn’t respond – actively disempowering, so I tend to steer clear. However, I’m single and live alone, so the isolation and tedium of the pandemic set in fast.
I logged on, not so much looking for romance or even sex. I was just bored of not speaking to anyone new. I missed flirting, sure, but I also just missed every day, unexpected social interactions. On Bumble, I found some perfectly nice guys, but conversation soon lost momentum and I never met up with any of them – unlike on Hinge, which served up a string of great dates and one lovely, albeit short-lived, romance (he was far too young for me, but that’s a different piece entirely).
My friend Alison, who uses both Bumble and Tinder extensively, still prefers the latter, and has a theory that the nature of Bumble’s set-up relies on women doing all the work and rewards passivity in men, which, she finds, causes problems later, with men not taking the initiative in arranging dates, texting or calling. And while Bumble is committed to clamping down on abuse, harassment and lewd, threatening behaviour, it’s impossible to eradicate completely. In response to my quippy gambit about his beard, one guy replied, “You’re that perfect mix of sexy and cute that makes me want to pin you against the wall and f*** you. Hard.” I blocked him.
Bumble has also taken numerous steps to make female users feel safer, including banning guns from photos, as well as “unsolicited and derogatory comments… about someone’s appearance, body shape, size or health”. Like the guy who called me “thicc” (a sort-of compliment, meaning curvaceous) and then asked if that comment was too forward. It was. I deleted him.
Whitney has only ever used a dating app once herself. “I went on one Tinder date and it didn’t work out, obviously.” She met Michael in 2014 in Aspen. He reportedly strolled into the luxury Little Nell hotel in cowboy boots and ski gear and sat down next to his future wife by the fire. His opening line was, “I hear you got a dot-com?”
“My husband is a chilled, rodeo-riding cowboy rancher,” she says today with a laugh. “He still has a Yahoo email address, he looks at his phone once a day. We could not be on more different spectrums.
My husband is a chilled, rodeo-riding cowboy rancher. He looks at his phone once a day. We could not be on more different spectrums
After some bad experiences and a single failed Tinder date, Whitney met Michael the old-fashioned way in 2014.
“But if I was a single girl, I would be on Bumble,” she enthuses. “My mum has been on Bumble, my grandma has been on Bumble. I have friends’ parents that have met their new partners on Bumble, and my own friends that have been divorced are now remarried from Bumble.”
She doesn’t pretend Bumble is perfect. Numerous studies over the past five years have found serious inequities in the experiences of users of different ethnicities. A study by OkCupid found that black women consistently receive the fewest matches on dating apps, closely followed by black men, and that women of colour frequently report experiences of fetishisation, being dehumanised and hyper-sexualised on apps and dating sites.
In a new book published this month, The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance, its sociologist authors argue that online dating sites exacerbate racial divisions, particularly those that allow users to filter by race-related “preferences” (Bumble is not one of those).
“One of my biggest shortcomings is that when I started Bumble, I was trying to solve a problem for myself and women I knew,” says Whitney. “And the reality is that most of those women look the same. The problems I was trying to solve for them are very different from the problems that women of colour face. One of my biggest mistakes is not prioritising that sooner.” Bumble now has a diversity team aiming to solve the challenges faced in using the app by any minority or marginalised group, including those with disabilities and sight impairment.
As well as her female-friendly dating app, Whitney is working to make the internet a safer place for women.
One of the most endearing things about the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire is her willingness to air her own challenges and shortcomings. She came back to work 18 weeks after Bobby was born, “the CEO of 700 people, on lockdown, with very serious postnatal depression and anxiety,” she says. “I felt so lost, scared and confused. It was dark.”
Now she’s a mother, does she still check her emails every two hours through the night, as she famously used to, often getting up at 4.30am to work?
Whitney multi-tasking with baby Bobby. His birth led her to re-evaluate her overworking tendencies.
“I had a reckoning,” says Whitney, shaking her head. “That was toxic behaviour, both for me and for others, because me saying that showed young girls, entrepreneurs or team members that’s what they should do too. We probably perpetuated burnout culture,” she admits. “The reality is, I did work around the clock for too many years and it was very unhealthy. I’ve missed a lot of life. There were way too many weeks that went by without talking to loved ones or family members or checking on my grandma, and those are regrets I have.”
Hang on though. She’s a billionaire at 31. Surely that would never be possible without some level of burnout?
“I lost my twenties,” she says. “Since I was 22, I’ve felt like a machine. So OK, I’m on some list, but who cares about a list? What matters is the joy you get out of your life. This rat race is not mandatory. It’s optional. And we need to remind ourselves of that. Because at the end of the day, that’s not how you’re measured.” She’s right, of course, but that’s a lot easier to say when you’re the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.
And for all her talk of balance, I’m not completely convinced. Unlike other dating apps, Bumble is alone in having diversified – there’s Bumble Bizz for networking and career connections, and Bumble BFF for making new platonic friends.
From humble hive to buzzing business, Bumble’s popularity continues to grow thanks to the new networking and friendship modes.
“I always wanted to do something bigger than dating,” Whitney explains. “But I felt, let’s start with dating. Let’s fix dating and then we fix friendships, because when you change the way women feel in their romantic relationships, they no longer feel like they need to be competitive and cruel to each other. So I always saw dating as step one.”
Her plans for Bumble are characteristically ambitious. She suggests it could become a space to find “resources for anything you’re going through, any struggle or any joy – divorce, trauma, menopause, heartbreak – or someone to celebrate with”.
Right now, she says, “the friendship space is exploding.” The fastest-growing social media apps include numerous “friend discovery” apps, such as Itsme, Hoop and Wink.
“And we hope Bumble will be at the forefront of that too. We’re lonely. We are creatures of community and we were not built to be alone. Humans were never intended to self isolate,” she says. “If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s the importance of our relationships.”
PHOTOS BY DINA LITOVSKY/REDUZ/HEADPRESS, INSTAGRAM
If you’re looking for a fresh fashion fix, ask yourself, do you really need to own it? Niki Bezzant checks out the rising popularity of clothing rental, and its potential to cut the number of garments clogging landfills.
Quick quiz: how many new items of clothing did you buy last year? And how many times, on average, do you reckon you wore each of those items?
You would not be alone if you have garments hanging in your wardrobe that you’ve worn fewer than five times. You might even have some you’ve only worn once. Op shops are filled with these kinds of fashion mistakes; things we feel guilty about, keep in the closet for a while, and then eventually discard.
Accurate statistics around clothing and its impact on the environment are tricky to come by – and there are lots of unproven ones out there. But it’s estimated that close to 99 percent of used clothing is eventually burned or sent to landfill, with a huge impact on global waste volume.
A big part of cutting that waste is each of us buying less in the first place. And there are now alternatives to buying new or even second-hand clothes. Enter fashion rental.
Globally, people are warming up to the idea that we don’t have to own all of the things we wear. I was listening to a podcast about fashion history when I first heard about Nuuly, a fashion rental subscription service in the US. Founded by the fashion company URBN, which owns big brands Urban Outfitters, Free People and Anthropologie, among others, the service offers six garments a month to customers to rent for a fee of US$88 a month. Users return the garments at the end of the month and choose new ones, or there’s the option to buy. In the UK, clothing rental is also taking off. Options there include subscription services with garments distributed from a central supplier, and peer-to-peer services where users rent garments to each other, a bit like Trade Me, but for clothing rental.
The difference between these companies and what we might be more familiar with – say men’s suit hire – is that they’re not just for “occasion” dressing; they’re for everyday clothing. They offer “pieces that scratch that itch for something new without claiming precious space and hard-earned cash, or giving in to fast fashion,” as fashion writer Scarlett Conlon put it in TheGuardian. She reports these subscription services have taken off post lockdowns lifting in the UK, with people returning to more normal activities, but with a bit more pressure on budgets than they might have had before.
The benefits of renting rather than buying are obvious: users are wearing something new-to-them but not contributing to that giant clothing waste pile; renting means you don’t have time to get bored with something and you can try new looks often. Money saving is a big benefit, too, especially in uncertain pandemic times. Services usually have sustainable practices around cleaning and transport, which appeals to green-minded fashion lovers.
Locally, there are a number of fashion rental services (see below). Designer Wardrobe is possibly the most well-known; it offers fashion rentals as well as a platform for users – of whom there are 200,000 – to sell garments to each other. And it has a “rent your wardrobe” offering where you can consign designer garments to the company for renting out, with the proceeds split 50/50 between the owner of the garment and the company. Designer Wardrobe and others seem to offer mostly special-occasion wear at the moment (dresses are the most common garment listed) but there’s a huge selection of brands and styles.
Most fashion rental sites seem targeted at younger women, who perhaps are already more in sync with the sharing economy. The clothes on offer tend to reflect that. But Dunedin-based rental site Loveme Rentme was started by Karen McCormack, a 50-something mother of four, in 2017. She has over 750 dresses in her collection, and says it’s become clear that women of all ages are now ready for rentals.
“We’re starting to think more and more about older age groups and what we buy in; they are not keen on cut-outs or some of the new dresses that show too much skin,” she notes.
She started her business with sustainability firmly in mind.
“I suppose I look at my own life, and I am in no way living a sustainable life, but I’m trying to learn more about being greener and act on what I know,” she says.
“I kept hearing how many times women purchase a dress quickly when they have an event to go to, and don’t even love it. Now I know I have rented the same beautiful dress 20 times to 20 different people who have loved that same dress. I do believe renting is a positive step in the right direction for our environment.”
She and others have started to dip their toes into the subscription model for regular clothing rentals. It’s worth keeping an eye on this space, and asking yourself: do I really need to own when I could rent?
They’re one of the most intimate items we own, yet undergarments are an often overlooked element of an ethical and sustainable wardrobe. Jessica-Belle Greer gets down to the basics.
It’s a dirty secret in the underwear industry that our smallest of garments are creating a huge problem for the planet, and for people.
A 2012 Greenpeace report revealed lingerie companies, including Victoria’s Secret, produced garments with detectable levels of the toxic chemical nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPEs), which are known to harm the environment and disrupt human hormones. As a result of the study, all EU member states voted to ban NPEs from textile imports, and individual companies started detoxes. And yet, the global market still leaves a lot to be desired.
“A lot of women don’t realise that lace, mesh and tulle fabrics found in most bras are made from plastic-based fibres – polyester, polyamide and nylon,” says lingerie expert Chloé Julian of Videris. “Not only are plastic-based fibres stifling against the skin, but there’s also a hefty amount of toxic chemicals used in the production process. Some of these toxic chemicals, such as NPEs, remain in polyester-based lingerie and clothing, and are nearly impossible to wash out … Azo dyes – a cheap, versatile dye used by many clothing manufacturers – are known to contain heavy metals such as cadmium, lead, mercury and chromium.”
After a successful international career, Chloé has the chance to change the industry from the inside out with her Auckland-based label Videris. Designed using her technical skills, the bras offer a more natural shape, without underwires, but still with the necessary support, in natural and durable Tencel fabric. The garments have Oeko-Tex certification to ensure every inch is harmless to human health. “A lot of lingerie is about how you look in it, not really about how you feel in it,” says Chloé. “So it’s shifting that whole mindset.”
Local love
Local fashion labels are also turning their attention to what lies beneath. Rachel Mills’ French briefs, in organic and recycled cotton, are made in an old sportswear factory in Auckland, which came with specialist sewing machines. Undies are a seasonless, necessary product and manufacturing them offers a chance to revive this side of the industry. “We have the potential to relive how the industry used to be, but with a much more ethical approach,” says Rachel. “I have hope that our factory- direct model will enable the New Zealand manufacturing industry to grow in what is otherwise a very small (and diminishing) side of the local industry.”
Meanwhile, Loclaire’s scallop-style briefs make the most of small organic cotton offcuts (with a touch of spandex) from its sustainability-minded main line. Post-lockdowns, all styles are available via pre-order, removing the need to hold excess stock and allowing those who are not a standard size (basically everyone) to customise their garment. “I think the pandemic has been a huge wake-up call to the way we shop – and I feel like it is every New Zealander’s duty to do what they can, in their means, to keep our beautiful country above water,” says founder Frances Lowe.
Nisa employs women from migrant and refugee backgrounds to create underwear for all.
Pay it forward
Sustainability, in a business sense, is essential for brands that hope to continue improving garment-worker welfare. Wellington’s Nisa provides employment for women from refugee and migrant backgrounds, and their product happens to be organic cotton underwear. “We started with a very specific goal around employment, but since then our values and sense of purpose have evolved,” says founder Elisha Watson. “Every day we think about how we can create a brand, a workshop and a product that exemplify the values of inclusion and belonging.” The intimacy of undies creates a unique opportunity to connect with women. Actor Robyn Malcolm’s pop-up business Robyn’s Undies (created in association with Yellow NZ) is raising funds for The Aunties charity, helping women and children who have experienced domestic violence. Robyn has collaborated with artist Karl Maughan for confident prints with painterly water-based inks on eco-certified bamboo fabric. “Every pair is thoughtfully designed to make every woman feel like she’s got a friend,” she says. “The vibrancy and deliciousness of Maughan’s patterns will make you smile at your own bum every morning!”
Elisha says she is proud to be part of the move towards local and ethical production, but warns about big brands jumping on the bandwagon without significantly changing practices. “Customers do need to do their research and make sure that brands put their money where their mouth is.”
Cora Harrington of The Lingerie Addict blog says, as a shopper, the best you can do is buy something you love that will last. “Lingerie is about you first and foremost.” She suggests feeling the fabric as well as the quality of the stitching and finishes. Finding the right fit is also important, considering many brands do not accept undergarment returns.
Some local brands make it easier to get our hands on labels leading the sustainable underwear industry on an international scale. Penny Sage stocks the French- Danish label Baserange, which works with innovative fabrics suppliers. “The pieces are comfortable and unfussy … and complement our own range perfectly,” says Penny Sage founder Kate Megaw.
Online store Made Good brings us Organic Basics, a carbon-neutral Copenhagen-based brand also using organic and recycled materials. “We believe that finding a good sustainable underwear brand is particularly important, as underwear is one of the most thrown away pieces of clothing,” says director Natasha Moore.
Breaking it down
It’s understandable that undergarments are hard to on-sell. With even well-meaning makers feeling the need to use a mix of natural and synthetic fibres, it’s difficult to recycle them as well. Decomposing delicates are a promising development, especially given composting standards require no harmful chemicals to be released in the process. Options include the Very Good Bra from Australia and Daylight Lingerie’s beautiful biodegradable bra from London, but they are still the outliers.
On-gifting bras is good for now. Zonta collects bras for women inmates and The Uplift Project sends bras to women in need worldwide, from several drop-off points. Women supporting women – sounds like a sustainable option to me.
As the Sex and the City reboot hits our screens, Lily Richards revisits the original show and wonders whether something made today could ever be the same.
About six months ago, after a day of repetitive tasks (emailing, eating, eliminating, trying to remember something I’d forgotten, audibly sighing whenever one of my children came near me, eating), I flopped onto the couch, opened my laptop and considered my options.
I am both at an age and within an epoch that demands nostalgia. My hunch is that it’s more than the normal mid-30’s kind of nostalgia where you find yourself digging out old Liz Phair albums and wondering if you kept that Standard Issue cardigan somewhere… I suspect it’s an altogether more aggressive, desperate kind of nostalgia, based on the fact that the world is currently fucked.
Right now, people can’t smile at each other, children can’t hug friends, petting random cats is frowned upon, technology is now our shadow overlord dictating who can and cannot have an opinion. If I am anything to go by, we are stressed, sad, lonely and in need of something to binge-watch.
Specifically a show born into a different, more hopeful era when bisexual was as progressive as it got and a thirst for shoes, cocaine and cigarettes could propel a good half hour of dialogue. Which was why, after trawling through endless high-tech, high-concept new releases I settled on re-watching Sex and the City.
I was 13 years old when Sex and the City first hit our screens in 1998. A riot of sexual innuendo and outright exposition went almost entirely over my head. I caught some stray references; I clocked what a blow job was, I pegged Samantha for a slut, I recognised my older sister in Carrie’s devotion to her wardrobe and I was also largely bored by Charlotte and Miranda whose goals to marry, and to be a lawyer I found dull. So it was with a somewhat unsettling delight (did this prove I definitely wasn’t cool?) that I began a self-taught media studies class by rewatching it from the beginning.
Over the course of its six seasons, the show was nominated for 50 Emmys and won seven. It was the first TV show to include seriously good fashion, to blur the line between costuming and styling, the first to make fashion another character in the show.
Carrie in her emerald green silk bunny hop skirt with the huge white padded tail. Carrie wearing a cowboy hat and a bandeau at a twenty-somethings Hamptons’ hoedown. Carrie (it’s all Carrie) in a tight white crepe dress as she catches Big’s eye whilst he’s en route to his engagement party (to someone else). There are endless blogs categorising screenshots into top 10 outfits that, although you probably wouldn’t wear them today, you have to admit, still look great on SJP. And every single one of them had a mood, a movement and a moment. You could spot a heatwave from how Carrie’s shorts got shorter. A bad streak with men for Miranda would often culminate in a bizarre textural layered outfit in mismatched pastel and earth tones as if to scream “Mayaswell, I couldn’t make myself any less appealing.” Samantha’s penchant for baggy, bold and block coloured power suits forecast her bucking some kind of sacred taboo, be it in the boardroom or the bedroom, and in stark contrast you knew Charlotte would be getting some action if she looked like she’d been dressed by Martha Stewart holding the cover of a bodice-ripper for reference. In legendary costume designer Patricia Field’s own words “It’s a storytelling situation.”
Carrie’s outfits in the original Sex and the City will forever be iconic, defining the meaning of matching clothing to your mood.
And yet, what’s maybe more interesting than the fashion, is watching a show written and filmed pre-cancel-culture. A time when questionable opinions were opined and the sky didn’t fall down. Maybe that’s the real reason Samantha’s character wasn’t renewed for the upcoming season? The world can no longer cope with opinions it doesn’t agree with. Can you cancel a fictional character? Probably we’d just hunt down the writer and assassinate them instead. Facebook and Instagram’s censorship algorithm would have exploded if it had to deal with Samantha’s nipples and her comments about trans people: “I am paying a fortune to live in a neighbourhood that’s trendy by day and tranny by night.”
Would we have banned Carrie when she balked at the idea of her hot young boyfriend confiding his bisexuality to her? “I’m not even sure bisexuality exists. I think it’s just a layover on the way to Gaytown.”
Right or wrong aside, it’s bloody refreshing watching a show that explored different ideas without scrutinizing their impact.
The four women practically spew awful sentiments, at least to each other, and apparently aren’t afraid of being ‘unfriended’ because that charming prospect didn’t exist pre-Facebook. When cellphones and personal computers finally make an appearance, Carrie isn’t interested.
Yes, there was homo-obsession and fetishisation of Black men, there was slut shaming and materialism but there was also the right to be wrong and less of an appetite to take yourself so seriously. Its initial pre-internet optimism hinted at the opportunity to get better, the writers didn’t seem to be checking every sentence to ensure it wouldn’t offend anyone from now until the end of time.
With the current level of self-scrutiny and righteousness I cannot imagine what the reboot will be like or how it will manage to have a sense of humour. But if it fails, we can, at least, go back in time and binge watch the ballerina skirts, strappy sandals and golden namesake necklaces of an arguably less complicated era.
An upsetting number of women know next to nothing about money. Up until very recently, Angela Meyer was one of those women. Now she’s getting money savvy and making up for lost time.
I spent countless hours berating myself for being so useless. How could I know all the lyrics to Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell album and next to nothing about how to manage my money? Was it because I only got a C- in School C maths? Was it the patriarchy pigeonholing women to identify as spenders rather than savers? Could it be intergenerational trauma from my family’s difficulties with money? Was I just not cut out to understand the men in the grey suits and all their financial jargon? What the heck was the shortcut to wealth? And, why did I feel like vomiting every time I thought about money?
I was in the dark. Locked out of that “white man’s magic” – the boys’ club of investing, stocks, ETF, PIE, DCA etc.
“WTF” is what I thought.
We all have our own money story, and mine, while stacked with many of the tick boxes of privilege, was keeping me from entering the cashed-up club and feeling financially secure.
As a card-carrying feminist, I am ashamed to say that growing up, I thought that only men were good with money.
Only it wasn’t true. Not in our home.
My father went bankrupt, twice. The first time we lost our house. The gossip mill went double time.
“Did you hear? He’s bankrupt. Owing lots. Terrible for the girls . . . And his wife . . . Yes. Still, he should have known better . . . ”
I don’t recall Dad making excuses (the 1987 stock market crash), or talking about mitigating factors (he hadn’t been paid commissions on time) or the extraordinary run of bad luck he’d had. I remember him hustling (any number of get rich quick schemes – Amway, anyone?) and trying to hold his head high (driving a forklift for less than minimum wage), while I was filled with the conflicting emotions of humiliation and love. How could he let this happen? But he was not a bad man. A recent survey by The Treasury shows only 43 percent of New Zealanders self-identify as having a high financial literacy rate. In the mid-‘90s the bankruptcy rate was at an all time high. It wasn’t just Dad, it was life.
The only conversations I heard about money were either so fanciful – like the time Dad came home with a Mercedes Benz brochure and said “choose one” – or extremely stressful. We knew how to answer the phone in case it was a debt collector, final demand letters would pile up on the kitchen table and my mother would ask repeatedly about what was going on, only to be told a tale so completely convincing and logical that it seemed silly to have worried about it. She wasn’t alone. Dad was a very charismatic man and we all wanted to believe his schemes would work out.
And then, it happened again.
The last conversation I had with my father was about money. He was lying in his hospice bed, gasping for breath as he tried to share with me his plan that would help keep the wolf from the door. It was something about subdividing or maybe it was pooling money or . . . who knows. I didn’t want to know. I wanted my Dad. He died two days later. Owing money. It breaks my heart to think that these were the last words we had with each other. It makes me cry to think that the pressure he felt that quantifies success as the accumulation of money was so great, he had to work every hour God gave and that he couldn’t ask for help.
He was a bloody great Dad. He wasn’t good with money. Those two things are true.
Financial insecurity has had a profound effect on me, and my sisters and my mum.
There has been therapy. There have been tears. There has been a huge amount of fear and confusion and anger. For me, for a long time, debt equalled death. One of my sisters to this day cannot open officially addressed mail.
This shit runs deep.
After his death I put my head in the sand and became a workaholic, equating wealth-creation with hard work. If only I worked harder, maybe I would be worthy of financial security? Despite lots of professional and personal achievements, I felt like a total loser. I am a risk taker by nature, I have sailed across the world with a toddler. Left a well-paid job to start an agency. Walked solo from Wellington to Palmerston North – admittedly humming Meatloaf’s greatest hits along the way. But like many women, it’s complicated. My relationship with money was toxic.
My attitude to saving was a bit like being gluten- free and then having just a little bit of baklava for dessert. I know that delicious honey-soaked filo pastry is going to kick me in the guts and yet every time I think, maybe this time, it won’t. Every time I spent anything from my savings account I’d feel guilt and shame. It was all or it was nothing. It was living on a prayer. And not getting any closer to financial security.
Honestly, I didn’t know where to start.
Then came the rage. The rage of the perimenopausal woman who has a sudden and profound realisation that there is no shortcut to wealth, that I had been taught about recipes for meringues and not about compounding interest. I put my feminist lens across the finance sector, and let out a howl.
The gender pay gap, longer life expectancy, and breaks in workplace participation, coupled with women having lower financial knowledge than men and the fact that Kiwi women are more likely to be the victims of financial abuse in relationships, all contribute to women’s low KiwiSaver balances. We are retiring into poverty. Great, after a lifetime of hard work for low pay, we get the added bonus of a rough retirement!
I realised that wishing and hoping was not going to cut it. Anger restored the gift of clarity. The buck stopped with me. There was no family money. Winning lotto was not a viable strategy. I was privileged to have an education, a home to live in, a family that supported me. I needed to learn about money. The first step was changing my mindset. I had to believe I could get it sorted.
In a survey conducted by the Ace Lady Network in 2019, a lack of financial confidence was the top issue preventing women from achieving their financial goals. For the vast majority of women, their money stories are centered around feeling safe.
In other words, it’s not just about how much women make, it’s about the kind of life financial security can provide them, and the sense of safety it affords both women and their families.
I get it. Women get it. Gender inequality persists throughout New Zealand society – it permeates all aspects of our lives, from health, safety, and economic wellbeing, to education, to who has influence and who makes decisions. It negatively impacts businesses, government, families, and the community, as well as individuals.
Here’s a truly terrifying statistic – according to Double Denim’s Gender Intelligence Report (2017), 87 percent of New Zealand women don’t feel safe.
What kind of country are we living in when 87 percent of the women in it do not feel safe? When I dug into the stat more, feeling safe means feeling safe in public, in our homes, in our relationships, in our jobs, and in our financial lives. Another howl.
I began with The Barefoot Investor. His book was what I needed at the time – disclaimer, it’s written from a very cis white man point of view – but I found the advice solid. Instead of a spreadsheet, he talks about percentages. Whatever money I got as income, I put it into four different accounts. Ten percent into an account that I could spend on whatever I wanted, guilt free; 20 percent into my “F**k Off Fund” – a stash of cash that you put aside and tell no one about, and if you need to leave a toxic relationship or workplace you can do this without having to rely on anyone else’s money; 10 percent into expenses like rego and warrants. The rest in the everyday account. I started putting money into my KiwiSaver and I opened a sharesies account. Finally I could focus on bringing in the money and, by setting up a bunch of automatic payments, I stopped the spiral of doom and slowly I started to feel more secure.
Turns out, investing isn’t anywhere near as complicated as the dudes in the grey suits would have us believe. If you can op-shop, you can invest in the stock market. My mother’s favorite saying is “Never pay full price”. The same principle applies to the stock market.
Bargain-hunting is a national sport among women – the other day I found a Deadly Ponies handbag in an op shop for a fiver. Yes, really. And, in the same way as I check the racks for the best labels in an op shop, I check out great brands on the stock market, wait till they take a dip, buy them and wait for the market to recover and then sell them for a profit or hold them and watch my portfolio grow. Obviously there is a little more to it than that. But now I get the same thrill investing in the stock market as I do op shopping.
The Financial Markets Authority’s (FMA) Investor Confidence Survey indicated women were more likely to doubt themselves as investors and, perhaps as a result, were far less willing to take on investment risk.
In general, women have a lower financial knowledge than men. This isn’t due to a difference in the ability to understand the subject matter, but the way in which women talk about money.
I, like many women, needed metaphors and comparisons that made sense to me, that were already a part of my life.
Since I cracked that, I haven’t looked back.
Maybe if Meatloaf had written power ballads about compounding interest, retirement savings and the joys of investing, I would have more of a clue about money, how to get it, keep it and make more of it.
All I know is that I would do anything for love, but I won’t completely combine my finances with my partner, oh no, no, I won’t do that. Perhaps that was what Meatloaf was on about all along.
Women are often too cautious when it comes to investing, money expert Mary Holm tells Wendyl Nissen, so she hopes her new book will inspire them to be more daring and end up with a bigger bank balance to retire on.
When it comes to money, there are those of us who are great at handling it, others who are terrible and some of us who saved their 50c a week with the ASB when we were children and can manage a mortgage but that’s really about it.
The hard reality is that not many of us received any education about how to make money work for us other than the basic equation of – you earn it, you spend some and you save some.
When it comes to seeking out money advice we tend to think only rich people do that. Who would want to know about my measly salary and my mortgage?
And if you’re a woman, you are extremely unlikely to ask for advice. We tend to be very cautious about money and put all our money in a savings account rather than risk investment.
“It’s a self-preservation instinct,” says money expert Mary Holm.
“Yet there are ways you can invest which are really low risk and you can end up a whole lot better off.”
Readers of the New Zealand Herald will be very familiar with Mary’s personal finance Q&A column in the Weekend Herald, which is a hub of vital information combined with a nice dose of humour. She also appears on RNZ regularly, has written bestselling books on finance, and in the last Queen’s Birthday Honours was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to financial literacy education.
There’s no one more accessible or easy to understand than Mary when it comes to financial advice. She is keen to point out that she’s legally not allowed to give financial advice, because she’s not an authorised financial adviser, but she is a financial journalist from way back and can be described as New Zealand’s most trusted money expert.
Which is fine by her.
“I like to answer letters to my column and give broad advice because I would hate to advise someone specifically on what to do with their inheritance and have it all go horribly wrong,” she says.
Her latest book, A Richer You: How to make the most of your money, is one she would really like women to read.
“I think it might give women more confidence to be more daring with their money,” says Mary. “I also worry about a lot of women, quite a few who I know, who might be in a great marriage but if the husband dies first, which is very common, the wife is left floundering because she’s never been included in any of the financial decisions.”
Mary says many women, even successful career women, are told that they are “bad with money” by their partners and therefore the man in the relationship should take care of all the finances.
Women are also vulnerable in new relationships where men will insist that the money and real estate they have when they come into the relationship is tied up in a trust for their children, leaving the new partner without anything if he passes away.
“It’s not hard to understand money and investment and you really just need to read up about it, and that’s where my book is so handy. It’s letters I have selected from my column, which cover the basics of managing your money to investments, retirement and helping others with any spare money you might have – for instance, your children.”
There are many letters from women Mary has advised. Probably the loveliest is from a 54-year-old woman who put her money into rental properties and set off to live in a caravan, travelling around New Zealand, doing odd jobs like fruit picking and café work on her way.
“Working out what to do in retirement is a big issue for many of my letter writers,” says Mary.
“A lot of people do manage on just the NZ Super. Forty percent of singles over 65 have virtually no other income than NZ Super, and 60 percent get less than $100 a week from non-government sources.
“But if some planning happens before then, you can have a much nicer retirement that includes travel and lovely times at vineyards and concerts.”
The upside of risk
Mary says cautious women are lucky to have KiwiSaver because it doesn’t expose people to too much risk.
“By now everyone is pretty much in it and you can choose what risk level you want when it comes to investing. One of my driving forces is to help people understand that if they just take a bit of risk, in the long run they will end up with a lot more. Just relax with it, and if the balance goes down a bit when you are in a high-risk fund then just hang in there, it will come right. And in a high-risk fund, in the long run the returns are almost certainly going to be higher, and quite often a lot higher.”
She says last year offered us all a great lesson when, because of Covid-19, the sharemarket suffered, but then recovered remarkably fast.
“I just hate hearing about people who got out when it went down and didn’t stick with it.”
Mary says there is no need to go to a share broker if you want to invest some savings.
“If you’re starting out you’ve got to try and pick which companies are going to do well, and if you’re an amateur you’re not going to be good at that.
“But whoever is managing your KiwiSaver will have lots of different managed funds you can choose from and you automatically get diversification, so if several shares do badly they get balanced out by others.” (See facing page for some websites to visit.)
Mary says really well-off people always take high-risk funds and it works for them, but there is always an element of luck with that type of investment.
“They will tend to say that they were very clever with their investments, but you never hear from the ones who didn’t do well.”
Personally, Mary is not a high-risk investor, despite being a money expert. “I’m comfortably off, largely because I’ve invested in index funds, which are a low-fee fund, since the 1970s when I first started work. They’ve just sat there and grown very nicely, but I’m not that interested in taking high-risk investments.”
Mary’s newspaper column has been running for 23 years and she says it’s the interaction with real people and their different circumstances that keeps her interested.
“One letter can prompt responses and one story can keep going across the column for weeks because other people come in and put their two cents’ worth in. I think these stories are a great way for people to learn, rather than just reading the facts.
“And there are moments of humour, some battles, some of it shocking, and some of it quite useful information!”
It’s long been known that time outdoors makes you happier, but psychologist Jacqui Maguire says it’s really immersing yourself in nature that does the trick.
“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.” – David Attenborough
When a figure as respected as David Attenborough says that nature makes life worth living, you sit up and take notice. However, as many Kiwis live surrounded by water, bush and ample green space, this statement won’t seem revolutionary. And research showing the important role nature plays in maintaining and enhancing our mental health and wellbeing will come as no surprise.
What’s been long-established scientifically is how much benefit you get from exposure to the outdoors depends on factors that include:
The length of time spent in nature.
How regularly you engage in simple outdoor activities, such as sitting by the sea or gardening.
Your level of “nature connectedness”, which is a term used to describe how psychologically and emotionally connected you feel with nature.
People who have increased levels of nature connectedness experience more frequent positive mood, happiness, life satisfaction, meaningful relationships, purpose in life and an increased sense of competence.
Two hours a week in nature has been shown to lower blood pressure and the stress hormone cortisol, enhance immune system function, increase self-esteem, reduce anxiety and improve mood.
Attention difficulties and aggression are also known to reduce in natural environments. Even indirect contact that’s technology-generated (for example, watching nature documentaries) has been show to be good for our mental health.
However, what has not been crystallised previously is whether any of these factors are more influential than others. The answer to this very question can be found in new research published in the International Journal of Wellbeing.
Researchers from the University of Derby, in the UK, say that nature connectedness and engaging with nature through simple activities have the most significant influence on our mental health (and are linked with lower rates of anxiety and depression). This is a surprising finding given that the length of time we spend in the outdoors has received the most attention to date.
Getting the most out of nature is therefore not about time, nor can we rest on our laurels and assume that New Zealand’s astonishing beauty will benefit us passively. It is about mindful moments in nature, where we are actively present and engaged.
What does this new knowledge mean for us? Researchers from the University of Melbourne suggest:
Look Closely
Walk out your front door and really engage with the variety of natural surroundings Aotearoa provides. Literally smell the roses, pick up shells on the beach, watch the clouds blow in the breeze or study the tūī sitting in your tree.
Notice Your Reactions
Take note of the emotions you experience when being actively present with nature. Happiness, awe, amazement… when you savour those emotions the benefit to your wellbeing will increase.
Soak Up The Beauty
Pause and take a moment to appreciate nature’s beauty. I live by the coast, and do this regularly. It is amazing how calm I can feel when looking at the sun setting over Wellington’s harbour.
Pre-loved fashion finds can be the key to developing your signature look in midlife, stylist Stephanie King tells Thrive editor Niki Bezzant.
Stephanie King doesn’t like looking like anyone else. And she doesn’t subscribe to the idea of midlife women “hiding” in their clothes.
The stylist and owner of online vintage boutique Painted Bird rails against what she calls “the rectangle” – a style she sees women adopting more and more as they get older.
Stylist and online vintage store owner Stephanie King’s mantra is, “Buy once, buy right, and make it last.” See more tips on her website, paintedbird.nz or on Instagram @paintedbirdnz.
“Those loose dresses that are basically rectangles with armholes and a neck hole, and that’s pretty much it. And then you get told, ‘Oh, zhuzh it up with some jewellery.’ But you’re still making yourself look like a rectangle! When you look at yourself in the mirror, when you’re already not that confident about the way you look, jewellery’s not going to fix that.”
Instead, Stephanie is a fan of experimenting – especially as we get older – with different looks as a way to regain any lost body confidence. Vintage garments, she reckons, are a great way to do that. “Vintage was made to flatter women of all shapes, all sizes, all forms. It was made to flatter you.”
On the day we meet, she’s a living example, looking stunning in a vibrant, shapely 1960s knit dress with modern jewellery and shoes.
“I’m feeling pretty good about this dress,” she says. “And you can’t see that I have had two caesareans, or see my lumps and bumps, or any extra Covid kilos that I’ve put on. You can’t see that because this is not what everybody else is wearing. It’s a reflection of me.
“I think that’s one of the things people forget – when you are dressing in things you really like, you stand up better, you face people better, and they’re not looking at all the stuff that you are not confident about.”
For those of us just starting on a journey to being more creative with our clothes, and wanting to incorporate vintage into our wardrobes, she offers some advice.
“I would say, choose three colours and stick with those, and look for the basics of your wardrobe. I always wear dresses – so I would look for a dress and I would look for a skirt and I would look for a top, and then probably a sweater and a jacket. And if you’re a trousers person, look for vintage trousers – though they are really difficult to find, so you can just use jeans. That’s your basics, and once you’ve covered them off, then you can say, ‘Oh, that blouse has got a little bit of that colour in it, it’s my size – I can go with that.’ And then you can start to incorporate other little bits and pieces, but you’ve got a capsule wardrobe of the basics of vintage, and then you can mix and match from there.”
And how can we avoid feeling like we’re in costume when wearing vintage garments? “If you like to look like you’ve walked out of a magazine from another era, I’m totally good with that,” Stephanie says. “How cool, that you can emulate that. But that’s not my style. I use heaps of accessories to make vintage look modern. If I ever get a chance to go op shopping, that’s a thing I look for. I don’t think you need to spend a million dollars to make things look current.”
Stephanie says she enjoys finding one-off garments and putting unique things together. Her daily style is about experimentation. “I just look in the mirror and go, ‘Can I pull that off?’” She encourages other women to do the same.
“I say: put it on, see what it looks like. Maybe walk around the house and see if anyone in your house goes, ‘Holy Mike, what are you wearing?’ Or do they go, ‘Oh, you look interesting today.’ Wouldn’t it be better to look interesting than to look like you just came out of that fast-fashion shop in the mall?”
Steph’s tips for developing your own unique personal style
Use your intuition. Develop and tap into the creativity you probably used to use when trying out different styles outside your regular wheelhouse.
Don’t keep things you don’t love. A bit of bravado can help you “own it” when you walk out the door. Help yourself find that confidence by not having a wardrobe filled with things that make you sigh in dismay at the prospect of putting them on.
Try all styles. Something that may not have looked nice when you were younger might be perfect for you now. Don’t limit yourself – try it all.
Coordinate your accessories. Use the details so often found in a vintage or retro piece to help keep a focus when adding the rest of the elements, like accessories, shoes or jackets.
Dress to your mood. Sometimes simple is the best approach. Sometimes what you are wearing can give you an extra bit of daily armour, such as a bright colour or flamboyant print – it can really lift you.
Remember the stories of your clothes. Think about why your favourite piece is actually your favourite – it’s not just about the way it looks on you. It’s nice to have a story to go with what you are wearing. When you put it on, it can help your confidence knowing when or where you bought it, or who you were with. It can give you a quiet confidence.
This salad is a combination of two of my favourite salads: strawberry, balsamic and black pepper; and strawberry, mushroom and asparagus.
Serves 2-4
Ingredients
1 cup small white button mushrooms
¼ cup olive oil
3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
½ teaspoon brown sugar
Few sprigs of fresh thyme
¼ teaspoon black pepper + extra
2 cups sliced strawberries
1 bunch asparagus (or use a handful of green beans), blanched
½ cup crème fraiche to serve
Squeeze of lemon juice to serve
½ cup toasted hazelnuts, chopped roughly
Method
1. De-stalk mushrooms and quarter or halve them.
2. Shake olive oil, vinegars, sugar, thyme and pepper together in a jar. Pour this over the mushrooms in a large bowl and leave to marinate. After 30 minutes, add strawberries and asparagus and toss to coat.
3. Whisk the crème fraiche with the lemon juice.
4. Arrange the salad on a serving plate and spoon crème fraiche over top, followed by a sprinkling of hazelnuts and an extra grind of pepper.
Nici’s Note
The combination often surprises people, but once they’ve tasted it, they absolutely get it.
This is a delightful, sparky little dish that takes care of a surplus of cucumbers and refreshes the palate beautifully.
Serves 4
Ingredients
2 long cucumbers
500g sustainably farmed or caught cooked prawns
1⁄4 cup lime or lemon juice
2 teaspoons fish sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1-2 teaspoons brown sugar, or to taste
Pinch chilli flakes
1⁄4 cup raw roasted peanuts
1-2 red chillies, thinly sliced
Method
1. Use a peeler to remove cucumber skin. Halve lengthwise, then use a teaspoon to run down the middle to remove seeds (see note). Slice thinly.
2. Prepare prawns by running a sharp knife down the back of each prawn to remove the vein. This also opens them up a bit to absorb the dressing flavours.
3. Make dressing in a bowl by whisking together lime juice, fish sauce, sesame oil, sugar and chilli flakes. Taste – it should be sweet, sour, salty and hot – and adjust seasoning as needed. Add cucumber, prawns, roasted peanuts and chopped chilli and toss to coat.
4. Transfer to a serving dish or plate up as individual portions.
Nici’s note:
Use the discarded cucumber seeds for a refreshing drink with watermelon, lime juice and crushed ice.
This is a simple recipe to make when zucchini and basil are thriving in your garden.
Serves 4
Ingredients
4 large zucchinis
1 tablespoon olive oil
½cup spinach
1 cup fresh basil leaves
¼ cup pine nuts, toasted
¼ cup parmesan cheese, grated
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon lemon zest
Ground black pepper
1 teaspoon chilli flakes (optional)
Basil and pine nut pesto
⅓ cup pine nuts
1½cups basil leaves
½ cup spinach
Juice of ½ lemon
3 garlic cloves
½ cup parmesan cheese
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons nutritional yeast
Method
1. To make pesto, add all ingredients to a food processor and blend until you get a smooth, creamy consistency. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
2. To make your zucchini pasta, you will need to use a spiraliser. If you don’t have a spiraliser, you can use a similar technique with a mandolin. Place each zucchini in the spiraliser and spin to cut out the pasta strands. Once you’ve done this to each zucchini, add it all to a frying pan on medium heat, along with the olive oil and spinach. Sauté for 1 minute. Be careful not to overcook the zucchini as it will become too soft and break. (You can also eat the zucchini raw and add it straight to your plate.)
3. Transfer the zucchini and spinach to a large plate or platter. Toss the pesto through, and sprinkle the fresh basil, toasted pine nuts, grated parmesan, lemon juice, lemon zest and ground black pepper on top. If you like an extra kick, you can add some fresh chilli or chilli flakes to serve.
Note
The pesto is also great to make on its own. If you want a thicker consistency to use it as a spread, add less olive oil. If you like it juicy and easy to toss through pastas or salads, add a bit of extra olive oil and lemon juice. Store in an air-tight jar in the fridge. It should last for one week.
Could Claire Chitham’s turning point inspire your own health overhaul? Sophie Neville talks to the actor about overcoming an autoimmune disease and taking her wellness into her own hands.
As far as summer holidays go, Claire Chitham’s recent break on the Coromandel Peninsula was a pretty good one. There were long, lazy days on the beach, wonderful catch-ups with friends and family, and an incredible night spent at a festival dancing alongside hundreds of others to her favourite band, Shapeshifter.
In the midst of a global pandemic and with much of the world in some form of lockdown, the beauty of this incredible freedom wasn’t lost on Claire. And when we meet just a few days after her return home, it seems she’s still on a holiday high.
“Oh man, it really was magical,” she says. “You know, beaches with hardly anyone on them and great roaming pōhutukawa trees that you could rest under, barbecues, fish and chips, cocktails… it was heaven! I know this sounds cheesy, but everywhere I went it was like everyone you saw had gratitude shining out of their hearts. We’re just so f***ing lucky to be able to do all these things.”
Claire attempting her first-ever surf.
The Kiwi actor, who first shot to fame as Waverley Wilson on Shortland Street in 1994, is a big believer in gratitude. So when she found herself in the same company as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern during her glorious holiday, she just had to thank her.
“I had a couple of chances to chat to her and it felt amazing to be able to express my gratitude for her leadership and thank her for the work she did,” says Claire, who’s an old pal of the PM’s fiancé Clarke Gayford. “It was also really nice to see her getting her own time to relax and enjoy a holiday with her family. I can’t imagine the past year was easy on her.”
Scenes of summer: Claire’s all smiles with Jacinda Ardern at Whangamatā’s Festival of the Other Side.
While Claire could chat about her holiday for hours, the real reason for our catch up today is to talk about Good For You, the book she’s written about her journey to health after a debilitating battle with Crohn’s disease. Becoming an author was never on this thespian’s to-do list, but after devoting the past two decades to her own health and wellbeing, TV star Claire, 42, realised she had a story worth sharing.
IMAGE BY LUKE HARVEY
But she’s quick to point out she’s not here to lecture anyone – she simply hopes it might help others.
“I’m an actor, not a doctor!” tells Claire, who co-wrote the book with her writer friend Kylie Bailey. “I’m certainly not here to tell people what to do, but it’s about sharing the things that worked for me and explaining that everyone has the power to take responsibility for their own health.”
Claire’s story begins at age 13, when she was diagnosed with the crippling autoimmune disorder after experiencing increasingly painful stomach cramps whenever she ate. At the time, she was told the inflammatory bowel disorder would be with her forever and she’d likely be on immune-suppressant medication for the rest of her life. “That’s a pretty tough thing to hear when you’re a kid.”
At age 13, Claire was so sick her school uniform hung off her thin frame.
By the time she was 20, though, Claire – who in the book describes her then-self as a “Coca-Cola drinking, afternoon-sugar eating, takeaway queen, who smoked and didn’t really exercise” – was in a bad way. On the face of it, she was living the dream riding the Shortland Street wave of success, but in reality, her health was in grave danger.
When she was younger, Claire (with a friend at her 21st) didn’t want to deal with her health issues.
“People would say to me, ‘You’re so skinny, you look amazing!’ But that’s such a dangerous comment because it was the opposite. I was deeply unwell. Even my skin was weirdly translucent,” recalls Claire, who admits she’d given up taking her pills in her teens.
“I just didn’t want to have to deal with my health,” she says. “The idea of having something that inhibits your life when you’re young can feel cataclysmic.”
But things reached a frightening turning point for Claire in her early 20s, when she was hospitalised with severe symptoms and dangerously high levels of inflammation in her body. She came extremely close to having surgery to remove part of her bowel, which would have meant relying on a colostomy bag. It was a close call, and provided the turning point that changed the course of her life.
“After that, I became determined to get better,” she says, adding that the fear of being too sick to work also helped spur her into action. “Acting is what I loved most in the world, so the thought of having to give it up was awful.”
Over the next few years, Claire embarked on a journey of discovery, learning everything she could about her condition. As well as religiously taking her medication, she visited many different types of healers, tried a huge variety of both traditional and alternative therapies and changed her diet. Most importantly, she listened carefully to her body, taking notice of the things that did and didn’t work every step of the way. She tried everything – including taking imported bovine colostrum after reading about its ability to heal the gut. Slowly but surely, she started to get better, and after a few years she was confident enough to stop her pills.
Claire knows doctors might question her assertion she no longer has Crohn’s, but she firmly believes she’s free of it. In fact, she can pinpoint the moment it left her body, writing in her book about the “very strange, green, splodgey excretion” during a toilet visit. “Whatever it was, I had a moment where I declared to myself, ‘That’s it! It’s gone,’” wrote Claire.
“I’m not so arrogant to say that I’ll never be hospitalised for it again or that it will never return, but right now, I am 100% disease free and I have been for nearly 20 years now.”
Claire has finally found wellness. IMAGE BY LUKE HARVEY
This is why she’s so keen to share what she’s learnt. A wealth of information on every aspect of health and wellbeing, Claire hopes that people will see Good For You – which will be on shelves in early February – as a book they can refer to for many years. It’s as much for those who want to learn more about wellbeing as it is for people struggling with specific health problems, both emotional and physical. Much of what keeps people from tackling the subject, she says, is the overwhelming amount of information, which can feel like “too big a mountain to climb,” especially for anyone in the midst of an illness.
“I know that even the word ‘wellness’ can make people a bit eye-rolly, but it’s actually a really simple concept – wellness is literally just the opposite of illness. It’s so important to focus on your health and prioritise it, because without it, you have nothing.”
I know that even the word ‘wellness’ can make people a bit eye-rolly, but it’s actually a really simple concept.
One of the biggest things she’s learnt is that you don’t have to lead a restricted life forever. Gone is the Coke-swilling smoker, and in its place is a “kombucha-drinking, dark chocolate-eating Pilates queen” who still enjoys a few cocktails on a Friday night or fish and chips on the beach during the summer holidays.
Pilates instructor Claire hopes to help others on their wellness journeys with her book.
“Being healthy isn’t about never doing any of these nice things,” she says. “It’s about listening to your body and watching for signs that you need to make some small changes. I’m at the point now where if I start to feel like things are out of whack, I stop and use what I know to rebalance myself.”
Claire writes openly in the book, which is published by Di Angelo Publications, about her journey to strong mental health, too, and is a firm believer in reaching out for help when you need it. She credits her ability to cope with her 2009 divorce from broadcaster Mikey Havoc as testament to her years of therapy.
She also opens up about her relationship with her parents and the devastation over her 74-year-old dad Bryan’s dementia. The Covid-19 pandemic has been especially tough on families like hers, with rest homes closing to visitors for several months in 2020.
Claire with her beloved dad Bryan.
“It was extremely difficult for all the men in his unit, because they couldn’t understand why things had suddenly changed,” says Claire. “The carers were wearing masks, which was confusing, and there were no visitors coming and going anymore, which meant a lot less stimulation for the brain. The carers are incredible and did their best to combat the loneliness, but they reported a big jump in agitation and a definite cognitive decline.”
Being able to spend Christmas Day with her dear dad felt particularly special. Although he can no longer communicate, he’s able to recognise his family.
“We gave him a zero-alcohol beer, which he was very unimpressed with, but absolutely delighted when I shared my pinot gris with him,” she laughs. “And that’s the lovely thing – so much of who he is has gone, but there is still joy to be found.”
Claire, who shares a home with two flatmates, is happily single, filling her life with work, friends and family – not to mention health, wellness and her other great joy, Pilates, of which she’s a qualified teacher. As she looks to the year ahead, international travel and work abroad might be off the agenda, but she’s got some exciting acting and directing projects on the go here, and is even developing a TV show. She couldn’t be happier.
“I love my 40s because I genuinely feel like I give far fewer f***s about what anybody thinks of me,” she says.” Maybe that’s how I got brave enough to write a book! I’m in a great place.”
Good For You is available to pre-order at goodforyoutv.co.nz, and will be in stores from February.
Nici Wickes revels in the joy of cooking for one. Her new book is full of unique and versatile meals that can be whipped up in no time for solo diners and easily adapted if you have company.
Store-bought pita is fine but you won’t go back once you try homemade. It’s simply divine and well worth the effort.
Makes: 8-10 pitas
Ingredients
1 teaspoon honey
1 teaspoon active dried yeast granules
¾ cup warm water
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups plain or high-grade flour
Method
1. In a medium-sized bowl, combine the honey and yeast with the warm water. Leave until the mixture froths (approximately 5 minutes).
2. Pour in the olive oil and flour, mixing with a knife, then turning out to knead to a soft dough on a floured bench.
3. Lightly oil the bowl it came from and return dough to it, cover with a damp tea towel and put it somewhere warm to double in size (approximately 30-60 minutes).
4. Once risen, gently turn out and divide into 8-10 pieces. Roll into balls. Flatten each with your palm then dust with flour and roll each out to a 12-15cm disc. Leave to rest for 15 minutes.
5. Heat a heavy-based frying pan on a medium heat and dry-fry each pita, flipping over when dimples appear and the cooked side has freckles of colour (don’t let it brown too much). Flip and cook second side. Stack and keep warm, under a tea towel, until required.
Note: These freeze really well and make perfect quick pizza bases.
Extracted from A Quiet Kitchen by Nici Wickes. Photography by Todd Eyre (David Bateman, RRP $45).
Who doesn’t love a sausage roll? Just because you’re avoiding gluten, that shouldn’t mean you have to miss out!
MAKES 12 ROLLS
Ingredients
300g pork mince (or a mix of pork and chicken mince)
1/2 cup fresh gluten-free breadcrumbs soaked with 2-3 tablespoons milk
1 tablespoon each smoked paprika and wholegrain mustard
1 spring onion, finely diced
Salt and pepper
1 egg
4 x 14cm corn or gluten-free tortillas
Black sesame and/or cumin seeds to sprinkle
Tomato sauce to serve
Method
1 Preheat the oven to 180°C and line a baking tray with baking paper.
2 Place half the mince into a food processor. Pulse to a fine grind but not to a paste. Mix with remaining mince, breadcrumbs, paprika, mustard and spring onion in a bowl. Season with salt and pepper.
3 Whisk the egg in a small bowl and add to the mince mixture, reserving a small amount of egg to one side for glazing the top of the rolls. Mix with your hands until combined.
4 Warm the tortillas so that they don’t crack when rolled.
5 Divide mince mix into four and roll each into a sausage shape, about 3cm in diameter. Place one sausage on a warmed tortilla and roll tightly. Use a pastry brush to brush the edges with the reserved egg to help seal the rolls. Repeat with all the tortillas. Using a sharp knife, cut each roll into three and place on the lined baking tray, seam-side down.
6 Glaze the top of each roll with the remaining egg and sprinkle with the seeds of your choice.
7 Bake for 25–35 minutes until golden. MUST be served with tomato sauce!
This colourful salad is an absolute dream! It’s full of punchy, earthy flavours, juicy oranges and crunchy hazelnuts. I promise it’ll go with anything else you decide to cook and it’ll become your favourite salad all spring and summer long, I bet.
Serves 8
Ingredients
16-20 small cooked beets (I’m a fan of ready-to-eat LeaderBrand beetroot, available in supermarkets, but see my note below)
4 oranges, peel and pith removed
3 handfuls of rocket leaves
⅓ cup roasted hazelnuts, skins removed, chopped roughly
Dressing
¼ cup good-quality olive oil
5 tablespoons red or white wine vinegar
¼ teaspoon brown sugar
1 teaspoon wholegrain mustard
Juice from cutting the oranges
Method
1. Cut the beetroot and oranges into bite-sized chunks, reserving any juice from the oranges for the dressing.
2. When ready to serve, whisk together the dressing ingredients in a large bowl and toss the rocket through to get it well coated.
3. Top with beetroot and orange pieces and, lastly, the crushed hazelnuts. Don’t toss it again or it will lose its good looks – take it to the table as is!
Nici’s note
I’ve used store-bought, ready-to-eat beetroot for ease of food prep but if your garden is giving up beets galore or you prefer to prepare it from scratch, wrap some whole, peeled beetroot in foil, roast it for 45-60 minutes, and cut it into chunks.
Many of us are looking for alternatives to meat meals these days. Try this vegan Thai dish from Auckland’s East restaurant executive chef Harmeet Singh – it is sophisticated and full of flavour, yet relatively easy to recreate at home.
Serves 3-4 as a starter or part of a shared meal
Ingredients
Salad
1 garlic clove, peeled and crushed
1⁄2 red chilli, sliced (add more if you like it hotter)
3 cups raw green papaya, julienned or very finely sliced, see notes
1⁄4 cup green beans, cut in 5cm pieces and slit in half
4 cherry tomatoes, halved
1 tablespoon roast peanuts, crushed, plus extra for garnish
Microgreens, to garnish
1 lime, sliced in cheeks
Dressing
1 1⁄2 tablespoon tamarind, seedless, or use paste, see notes
1/3 cup palm sugar or brown sugar
1 tablespoon caster sugar
1⁄2 cup water
1⁄2 tsp salt
2 tablespoons vegan fish sauce or regular fish sauce, see notes
Method
Dressing
1. Soak tamarind in water overnight. Remove the pulp, push through a sieve and set aside (or use paste). Melt palm and caster sugars in a pot over a low heat. Add tamarind and cook for 10 minutes. Add the rest of the dressing ingredients and bring to the boil, then simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and let it cool.
Salad
1. In a mortar and pestle, pound crushed garlic and sliced red chillies until there are no large chunks (or crush with the back of a knife).
2. Combine pounded garlic and chilli with raw papaya, green beans, cherry tomatoes, crushed peanuts and half the cooled dressing. Mix well.
3. Plate and garnish with crushed peanuts and microgreens, and serve with a lime cheek.
Note:
Green papaya can be found at Asian grocers, either fresh, or grated and frozen. You could substitute other grated veges, like carrot or zucchini. Vegan fish sauce is readily available online.
A Cuban cocktail that has spread all over the world, this cousin of the mint julep first popped up on the bar at Sloppy Joe’s in Havana in 1928, when scores of Americans travelled to the island to escape prohibition.
Ingredients
8-10 mint leaves
30ml simple syrup
60ml white rum
22ml fresh lime juice
Soda water
2-3 mint sprigs, to garnish
Method
Gently muddle the mint and simple syrup in a collins glass.
Add the rum and lime juice, then fill halfway with crushed or pebble ice.
Stir with a bar spoon or swizzle stick.
Add soda water, then top with more pebble ice to fill the glass.
Striving for success led to overwhelming stress and a health crisis for business coach Natalie Tolhopf. She tells Sharon Stephenson how she learnt to let go of her doubts and embrace imperfection.
Over the couple of years, as the rest of us ticked off squares on our lockdown bingo card (baking sourdough and hoarding toilet rolls, anyone?), Natalie Tolhopf was holed up in a tiny bedroom.
From her Whangaparāoa home, overlooking the sparkling blue waters of the Hauraki Gulf, Natalie shut herself off from her family to write, rewrite and occasionally wonder why she was putting herself through such hell.
“I got up at 5am every day for five months to write,” says the mother of Ruby, 12, and eight-year-old Molly. “It wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever done,” she adds with delicious understatement.
The result is Allergic to Perfect, Natalie’s 167-page ode to Kiwi businesswomen. As the name suggests, it’s about battling burnout, social media pressure and an addiction to perfection.
“I wanted to share what I’ve been through in terms of dropping my perfectionist tendencies and letting go of self-sabotage,” says the business coach. “And to help women overcome the dreaded imposter syndrome, because how many of us still think we shouldn’t be where we are?”
These are just a few of the issues Natalie wanted to get off her chest in her book and during our two-hour chat, where she barely pauses for breath.
“I’ve seen so many incredible women compare themselves to others, who scroll through social media looking at the highlight reels of other people’s lives and find themselves wanting,” she reflects.
That, says the 43-year-old in her usual take-no-prisoners way, is “complete BS”.
“We have to let go of the fear that we and our businesses will never be good enough. It’s a fear that allows us to procrastinate and get in the way of growing the business. But my message is you can drop the perfectionism, take imperfect action and get on with it.”
Getting on with it is Natalie’s second language.
On a warm day in February 2016, shortly after launching her business-coaching business, she woke up to find the right side of her face paralysed.
“It was one of those horror moments where I couldn’t feel my face. I got up, rushed to the mirror and the whole right side of my face had collapsed,” she remembers.
It was one of those horror moments… The whole right side of my face had collapsed
She initially thought it was a stroke, but doctors diagnosed it as Bell’s palsy, a condition where the muscles on one side of the face become weak or paralysed. “They told me it was the worst case they’d ever seen.”
It was the result of Natalie’s workaholic tendencies – the stress led to shingles and eventually Bell’s palsy.
“I was working incredibly hard and wore my busyness like a badge of honour,” she recalls, raking her hands through her short blonde hair. “I was trying to fill a void in myself that told me I wasn’t good enough, that if I just worked a bit harder, I might be.”
I was trying to fill a void in myself that told me I wasn’t good enough, that if I just worked a bit harder, I might be
PHOTO BY NYKIE GROVE-EADES
The irony, though, is that Natalie is the face of the business she started in 2015, which specialises in coaching female entrepreneurs.
“I had a mortgage to pay and a family to feed, so even though I had a wonky face, I still had to fulfil the speaking engagements, workshops and clients I’d committed to. It wasn’t easy and people stared at me, but my business message has always been imperfect action, because nothing in life is ever perfect. So delivering that message of imperfection with an imperfect face was weirdly appropriate!”
It was a good 18 months before Natalie’s droopy eye and crooked smile came right. It was almost as long before she could sip liquids without slurping. But she never missed a beat with her business and today Natalie coaches mainly women clients across the country, as well as in the US and Canada, on how to build a successful business.
Self-employment runs through Natalie’s veins: her mother, father and stepfather all ran their own businesses and her husband Michael Tolhopf is a self-employed plasterer.
Although she flirted with the idea of journalism, a love of food eventually prevailed and Natalie was one of the last apprentice chefs accepted at Auckland’s Hyatt Regency. She was also one of three women in a kitchen of 30. But Natalie took to the classical French training like a duck to orange sauce and when she finished her apprenticeship, she headed to Europe for a six-year OE that saw her winter in London and summer at cooking schools all over Italy.
Back home, Natalie opened her own restaurant in Orewa, but after two years, shuttered it. “I lost money on it because I didn’t understand finance or how to get the best margins. It was a great lesson on what not to do in business.”
Natalie’s introduction to sales came at a mortgage company on the Gold Coast, which taught her another valuable lesson she lives by today: “You have to sell with integrity. Ask yourself how your offering is going to help this person and be right for them because otherwise you shouldn’t be selling to them.”
The business coach wants to help other women stamp out self-doubt and step up with confidence. PHOTO BY NYKIE GROVE-EADES
She and Michael returned to New Zealand after a couple of years and Natalie went into hospitality management and training. But, post children, the entrepreneurial spirit tugged at her once more and she started an online venture, Catapult Your Business, to help women get back into the workforce.
It wasn’t what you’d call a success. “I made $45 in six weeks selling one course, which I promptly refunded because I thought it wasn’t good enough and who the hell did I think I was telling someone how to run their business? It was the good old imposter syndrome and I eventually worked with a business coach who helped me see that I was good enough, that businesses take time and that the key is to keep showing up instead of giving up.”
Natalie had always wanted to write a book and started gathering ideas in 2017. “It’s the sort of book I wish was around when I was first in business. I want this to be dog-eared and well-used because there are useful strategies to help women build their business in a way that’s right for them.”
Allergic to Perfect: How to Ditch Your Doubt and Take Imperfect Action to Grow Your Biz by Natalie Tolhopf, $30, is available now from natalietolhopf.com.
Nici Wickes revels in the joy of cooking for one. Her new book is full of unique and versatile meals that can be whipped up in no time for solo diners and easily adapted if you have company.This is a simple meal in all its glory – roasted vegetables with a creamy dressing.
2. On a roasting tray, toss vegetables with oil and salt. Roast until cooked through, about 30-40 minutes.
3. Place all the dressing ingredients in a food processor and blend to a thick sauce consistency. Add a small amount of warm water to loosen, if necessary.
4. Serve the roasted vegetables drizzled in dressing.
Note: Leftover dressing can be stirred through pasta or draped over a lovely piece of smoked salmon.
Extracted from A Quiet Kitchen by Nici Wickes. Photography by Todd Eyre (David Bateman, RRP $45).
I’ve visited Bali many times and I adore it. This salad is based on a dish from my favourite plant-based café in Sanur, Genius. I love the magical rice crisps – I never tire of watching them fizz and puff up in the pan.
Makes: A big salad for one
Ingredients
Crispy rice crackers
3 tablespoons oil for frying
2 x 22cm rice papers
Salad
¼ medium cabbage, finely shredded
½ cup toasted cashew nuts
1 large iceberg lettuce, chopped
½ telegraph cucumber, thinly sliced
100g vermicelli rice noodles, soaked for 5 minutes in boiling water then drained
a handful of coriander leaves, roughly torn
a handful of mint leaves, roughly torn
4 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds
Zingy citrus dressing
juice of 2-3 limes, or 1 lemon
1 tablespoon brown or palm sugar
1 teaspoon sesame oil
2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger
½ red chilli, roughly chopped, or a sprinkle of chilli flakes
a decent pinch of salt
Method
1. Heat the oil in a frying pan on a medium heat. Place one rice paper into the oil and cook until it frizzles up to an opaque crispiness. Drain on paper towels and set aside. Repeat.
2. For the salad, place the cabbage into a large bowl. Scrunch/massage the cabbage to soften it slightly so that the dressing can really get into it later. Add the cashews, lettuce, cucumber, softened rice noodles, herbs and sesame seeds and toss gently to combine.
3. Make the dressing by whisking the ingredients together. Pour over the salad and toss well.
4. Serve salad alongside crispy rice crackers.
Extracted from A Quiet Kitchen by Nici Wickes. Photography by Todd Eyre (David Bateman, RRP $45).
Fish cakes are always a winner in my household. While they definitely satisfy most weeknight cravings, they’re also spectacular when served on a sunny day alongside a crisp glass of white wine. These are a great hosting hack if you’re entertaining and need to whip up some canapés – simply reduce the patty size by rolling the batter into smaller balls.
Serves: 4-5
Ingredients
450g medium potatoes 200g boneless, skinless smoked white fish 200g boneless, skinless white fish fillets ½ cup mayonnaise 2 tablespoons capers 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard Zest of 1 lemon 2 spring onions, thinly sliced ½ cup finely chopped Italian parsley ½ cup finely chopped fresh dill ½ cup panko crumbs 1 egg Salt and black pepper ¼ cup light cooking oil Lemon or lime wedges, for squeezing
Herby Mayonnaise
½ cup mayonnaise ¼ cup lemon juice A handful of fresh dill, finely chopped ½ teaspoon paprika Salt and black pepper
Method
Bring a large saucepan of water to the boil on a high heat. Peel and quarter the potatoes, add to the pot and simmer for 10 minutes or until soft.
While the potatoes are cooking, blitz the smoked fish, fresh fish, mayonnaise, capers, mustard and lemon zest in a food processor until smooth.
Drain the potatoes well. Place them in a large mixing bowl, then mash until smooth. Add the fish mixture, spring onions, herbs, panko crumbs and egg. Season with salt and cracked pepper. Mix well.
Using your hands, roll the mixture into 8 balls. Press down to create a flat patty.
Heat two large, non-stick pans on a medium/low heat. Add 2 tablespoons of oil to each pan. Fry the fish cakes for 5 minutes on each side.
While the fish cakes are cooking, mix the Herby Mayonnaise ingredients in a small serving bowl. Season with salt and cracked pepper. Set aside.
Serve the fish cakes on a large serving platter with the Herby Mayonnaise and lemon or lime wedges on the side.
Extracted from Miss Polly’s Kitchen, by Polly Markus. Photography by Melanie Jenkins (Allen & Unwin NZ, RRP $45, released August 30).
This goes beautifully with a fresh loaf of bread or a salad. I also love to serve it with artisan crackers and a ramekin of aioli, as something tasty to nibble on when friends come around. You can make it ahead of time and serve it cold.
Serves: 4-5 as a main
Ingredients
3 tablespoons dukkah 2 tablespoons lime juice 1 heaped tablespoon honey 1 teaspoon cumin seeds 2 garlic cloves, minced 1kg side boneless, skinless salmon Salt and black pepper
Herby Salsa
Juice of 1 juicy lime 1 teaspoon sugar 2 tablespoons pickled jalapeños, finely diced ½ cup finely chopped Italian parsley ½ cup finely chopped fresh dill ¼ cup finely chopped fresh chives Salt and black pepper
Method
Preheat the oven to 200°C fan bake.
Mix the dukkah, lime juice, honey, cumin seeds and garlic in a bowl.
Place the salmon skin-side down on a lined baking tray. Spoon the dukkah mixture over the salmon. Season with salt and cracked pepper.
Bake for roughly 16 minutes (the cook time will vary depending on the thickness of the salmon).
While the salmon is cooking, make the salsa. Whisk the lime juice and sugar in a bowl, then add the jalapeños ands herbs. Season with salt and cracked pepper. Set aside.
Once the salmon is cooked, gently lift it onto a serving platter and spoon the salsa over the top.
Extracted from Miss Polly’s Kitchen by Polly Markus. Photography by Melanie Jenkins (Allen & Unwin NZ, RRP $45, released August 30).
In my early 20s, I lived in Palma De Mallorca, Spain, where Tapas Tuesday was a big thing. We would go out at around nine o’clock and have a few at one restaurant before moving on to the next bar in a similar fashion until the wee hours. The streets were full every Tuesday without fail. This dish reminds me of those times. I don’t think I’ve ever consumed so much bread with aioli as I did living there.
Serves: 4
Ingredients
16 large raw prawns, defrosted Zest of 1 lemon 1 teaspoon paprika 2 chorizo sausages ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil 3 large garlic cloves, roughly chopped ½ cup roughly chopped Italian parsley Juice of ½ a lemon 1 red chilli, thinly sliced Fresh focaccia and aioli to serve
Method
Combine the prawns, lemon zest and paprika in a bowl. Set aside.
Cut the chorizo into 1cm slices.
Heat a medium pan on a medium heat. Add the chorizo and fry until crispy on both sides. You don’t need to add oil as the fat from the sausage will be enough. Put the cooked chorizo on a plate. Don’t clean the pan.
Using the same pan, turn down the heat to medium/low. Add the oil and garlic, then cook for 2 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Add the prawns and fry on both sides until just about cooked (this will only take a few minutes).
Return the chorizo and all its delicious oil back to the pan. Add the parsley and lemon juice, then stir well.
Garnish with chilli and serve with focaccia and aioli.
Extracted from Miss Polly’s Kitchen by Polly Markus. Photography by Melanie Jenkins
Studio Home’s Julia Atkinson-Dunn knows a thing or two about flowers. Here’s how to grow and arrange her favourite blooms like floral-pro.
1. Dahlias
When I was fresh to flower gardening, dahlias were a kind of rite of passage. After I had played around with fun annuals, then dipped a toe in uncomplicated perennials, dahlias not only demanded a little more attention in their preparation and care, but rewarded me with the most impressive blooms.
How to grow Dahlias
Dahlias come in a huge and endless rainbow of colours and species. These are mostly identified by the form of their blooms and include cactus, decorative, pompom, ball, anemone, collarette, single, peony, orchid, waterlily and dinner plate, among other subspecies. It’s really exciting to trawl through dahlia catalogues to make your choice!
They need a sunny spot, with dappled shade at the very most. They also have brittle stems and limbs that may well need support as they mature.
Dahlias are most commonly grown from tubers, weird- looking storage organs that not only deliver you a flowering plant in their first season, but also readily multiply to be dug up and divided to create more plants in the future.
Plant your dahlias when you are well clear of frosts in mid to late spring. Lie tubers horizontally with the eye facing upward in a hole around 10-15cm deep.
Dedicate yourself to picking for a vase or deadheading spent flowers during the season. Removing them before they form seed heads will encourage your plant to keep producing. Do this by cutting the flower and its stem off right near the point it meets the main stem. It is from that wee intersection that a new stem will form.
In late autumn, with the arrival of frosts, your plant will slowly start “putting itself to bed”. No longer blooming, leaves will start to die back and you should let them do so before pruning completely for winter. The clump needs to feed off its wilting foliage, so wait a few weeks to then simply cut off all stems close to the ground.
To lift or to leave?
In colder climates that experience months of snow, gardeners gently dig up and “lift” their dahlia clumps, storing them in a dry, dark place over winter. In spring, before planting, they will divide these clumps to create new plants which they can sell, give away or replant. The jury is still out for me here in coastal Canterbury. I have lifted clumps over winter to divide, then replanted with success. I have also left them in the ground with a nice thick layer of mulch over the crowns of the clumps which I dust off in early spring.
Regardless of whether you choose to lift or leave your dahlias, it is a good idea to dig up and divide every few years. You will be amazed at the multiplication of tubers below ground level! Dividing is not nearly as intimidating as it sounds. Armed with my phone, I carefully snip through my clumps, removing small or damaged tubers and identifying healthy ones with an “eye”, all the while kept in good company by a YouTube garden expert doing the same.
My favourites
The first dahlias I ever planted are still my favourites – tall-growing pompom ‘Rococo’ with its deep crimson balls, and ridiculously lush ‘Shiloh Noelle’ with her huge blooms, a blush centre and creamy petals. ‘Shiloh Noelle’ is a decorative dahlia that’s an interesting alternative to florist favourite ‘Café au Lait’.
For the vase
You’ll no doubt become a dahlia watcher, noticing as your buds begin to bloom, deciding which you’ll leave and which you’ll cut for the vase. Dahlia blooms have the best chance at a good vase life if picked just as they have opened fully.
2. Cosmos
White Cosmos ‘Cupcake’ and a double-petalled variety mixed casually with fennel, Queen Anne’s lace, snapdragons, lupins and Shasta daisies.
Once you have cosmos in your garden, you won’t want to do without them. They bring a rambling, wild lightness, greeting you with sunny faces and delicate, winding stems amid light, ferny foliage. There are lots of beautiful and novel varieties to be explored, and providing you can give them a sunny spot and a gentle deadhead when needed, they will flower and flower until the frosts hit.
How to grow Cosmos
Easily cultivated from seed, cosmos are also good self-seeders without being invasive. Punnets of cheerful healthy seedlings can also be purchased in spring and summer to plant directly into the garden. Alternatively, sow seeds in New Zealand from early summer, or raise seedlings under cover from mid spring, planting out in late spring to early summer.
Once seedlings develop 2-3 pairs of leaves, pinch out the growing tips to encourage a bushier plant. This seems scary, but you will be on the receiving end of triple the blooms.
To harvest for your vase or encourage endless flowering until the first frosts, simply snip off spent flowers close to where they meet the stalk.
As the season cools, halt deadheading and let your flowers go to seed in early autumn. Allow them to dry completely on the plant before either snipping off heads to store in a dry envelope or scattering in position to encourage a nice self-seeded crop next year. Once plants look like they are dying, simply pull out from the roots and throw in the compost or green bin, leaving that part of your garden clear for self-seeded seedlings in spring or whatever else you choose to plant!
My favourites
For your classic cosmos form, look for punnets of ‘Sonata’ in white and pink from garden centres. Just be sure you identify them as dwarf or tall! As eager, strong germinators, they are fun to grow from seed, so look out for ‘Sea Shells’, which has crazy fluted petals, or ‘Cupcake’, which, astonishingly, looks like paper cupcake wrappers. For richness in colour, find burgundy ‘Rubenza’ or for soft yellow tones, choose ‘Apricot Lemonade’. ‘Double Click Cranberries’ is a must for those seeking impossibly frou-frou blooms.
For the vase
Cosmos are long-lasting cut flowers that give a lovely casual romance to all bunches. They look amazing gathered en masse with their lacy foliage as much as they do weaving through a mix of their seasonal friends.
3. Japanese Anemones
Just when you feel a bit sad about the end of summer, the happy faces of Japanese anemones rescue you and your garden. For me, they are endlessly satisfying both in the garden and in the vase, adding interest with their long stems emerging from broad, leafy clumps – they come with an inbuilt cheeriness.
How to grow Japanese anemones
The fastest and easiest way to establish Japanese anemones in your garden is by planting divisions or root cuttings. Japanese anemones take around two years to really establish and then you’ll notice not only that the main clump will increase in size, but that it will shoot out runners which are forming new small plants away from the original. It’s these that can be very easily lifted and relocated as you please. After replanting these babies, they will look as if they are dead, but it won’t be long until you see new green shoots emerging. Plant them around 60cm apart as they will certainly claim their space.
After flowering, I allow my plants to form their attractive seed heads and cut the entire plant down to around 20cm above the ground in winter, from where it will regenerate with lush, healthy foliage in the spring, preparing for flowering in late summer.
My favourites
There are so many variations of Japanese anemone out there and, due to them being “thieved”, I don’t know exactly which mine are. I believe my white one is Anemone x hybrida, and my pink one perhaps the same. However, with a little research you’ll see there are some fabulous deeper pinks and double blooms out there. Have some fun!
For the vase
Japanese anemones are totally glorious cut flowers! Every piece of them in fact. Their lovely long stems allow you to scale up your normal arrangements and they have a terrific vase life. Don’t overlook making use of their lush foliage, and I am super fond of their little ball-like seed heads that reveal themselves when the petals drop.
Often I am able to graduate the stems that have long since lost their petals from one arrangement into another. Allow them to dry standing in a vase, for an arrangement through the winter months. They are such a terrific shape!
These blissful spaces prove that bathrooms don’t have to be a bore. Look at it as an extension of your personal style and create a bathroom with serious chemistry.
Back To Basics
IMAGES: Greg Cox/Bureaux & Warren Heath/Bureaux
If ever there was a perfect marriage of restrained industrial cool and free-form organic spirit then this bathroom is it. Every element is perfectly curated for functionality as well as aesthetic balance, from the precise lines of the bespoke black galvanised-steel shelves set against creamy white, artfully imperfect Zellige tiles, to the collection of apothecary bottles filled with scented bath salts and the untamed arrangement of air plants hung from a metal chandelier frame. Large white marble floor tiles and a tree-stump table further enhance this union of nature and machine-made, rustic and modern.
Tips for this look
Air plants are ideally suited to the steamy bathroom environment, not to mention people who need their living decor to be low-maintenance.
Beware of overcrowding. Decorative restraint allows the balance to be maintained and the beauty of the features – the tiles, bespoke shower fixture and shelving – to stand out.
An all-white palette is grounded and modernised by interjections of black and living greenery as well as coloured glass (in this instance the warm amber of apothecary-style bottles).
White Haute
IMAGES: Greg Cox/Bureaux & Warren Heath/Bureaux
Why be basic when you can be extra? This bathroom elevates traditional elements such as vanity mirrors, old-school basins and the classic combination of white and brass by combining them with showstopping features that include a custom-designed XXL round mirror, contemporary hexagonal tiles, and bare bulbs hung from cord cables that have been creatively positioned on the wall with bespoke brass supports rather than being suspended more conventionally from the ceiling.
Tips for this look
Strategically positioned mirrors will make the space feel bigger and lighter.
A recessed wall niche fitted with floating shelves is a space saver as well as an eye-catching feature.
Maximise storage. Here, open brass shelves under the basins provide space for bath and hand towels.
Baroque And Roll
IMAGES: Greg Cox/Bureaux & Warren Heath/Bureaux
What at first seems to be a traditional bathroom space reveals a modern edge with contemporary drop-pendant lighting, a beautiful gold side table with a delicate profile and a deep Victorian-style claw-foot bathtub that has been updated with a coat of glossy graphite-hued paint. The carved-frame mirror – an antiques-shop find – is a dramatic focal piece and connects visually with the ornately framed portrait.
Tips for this look
Indulgence and functionality can co-exist. Beautiful lighting, a feature rug, or a striking piece of furniture can look right at home.
As long as a bathroom is light and well-ventilated, it’s fine to introduce artworks. Just make sure they are not in the direct line of bathtub or basin steam.
Engineered hardwood can work well in a properly ventilated bathroom that’s not overly humid or prone to frequent flooding. (Kids, we’re looking at you!)
Pretty In Pink
IMAGES: Greg Cox/Bureaux & Warren Heath/Bureaux
Don’t shy away from all-over colour in a small bathroom. As well as enlivening the space, colourful walls will deflect attention from any design shortfalls. Pink, a shade that has crossed the line from accent colour to full-on classic, is a fun, lively and fresh choice.
Tips for this look
Repurpose an office drawer by painting it a fashionable shade to use as a quirky bathroom storage unit.
When not in use, leave the bathroom door open – a pop of bright colour adds joy to a home when it catches the eye, especially in a small space.
Take your passion for colour to the next level and extend the wall colour onto the bathroom door, both inside and out.
Industrial Luxe
IMAGES: Greg Cox/Bureaux & Warren Heath/Bureaux
In this open-plan bedroom, the en-suite bathroom has been defined by a raised concrete platform. The industrial-style glass and steel shower cube is a showstopper, and the restrained glamour of the space is enhanced by elegant details such as tessellated tiles, an oak vanity, a chandelier, a large framed mirror and a decorative ladder for towels. The limited colour palette gives the area a clean and fresh look.
Tips for this look
Lean items such as mirrors, artworks and ladders instead of affixing them to the wall – it’s called casual chic, darling!
You can never have enough baskets in the bathroom (or your home, for that matter). Larger ones will work as a laundry basket while smaller ones can store everything from cotton wool and plasters to toiletries, make-up and hair accessories.
Pale And Interesting
IMAGES: Greg Cox/Bureaux & Warren Heath/Bureaux
A monochromatic scheme makes this bathroom feel poised and contemporary. While simplicity reigns, there is still plenty of interest, from the contrast of the shiny tiles with the matt finish of the stone floor and main walls, to the play of angular shapes (the taps and black metal cupboard) versus round (the mirrors, basins and pendant lights). The simple basin stand made from reeds gives texture and warmth.
Tips for this look
Play with shapes such as circular elements in rectangular rooms. Round mirrors and curvy vessels are a good starting point.
When limiting colour it’s still possible to create interest with contrast – think matt versus glossy, and sleek versus tactile.
To keep a monochromatic palette fresh and modern, stick with blacks and whites that have the same tonal depth.
Shades Of Grey
IMAGES: Greg Cox/Bureaux & Warren Heath/Bureaux
Old meets contemporary meets futuristic in this striking bathroom that boldly places grey on grey on grey. Glossy subway tiles and a painted concrete floor look unexpected and fresh in combination with vintage-style ceiling panels (on the wall) that lend texture and pattern. An antique walnut plant stand, ornate period lights (given an update with white paint) and the nostalgic pressed panels act as a counterpoint to the curves and modernity.
Tips for this look
Gloss and matt surfaces create a mood that’s very of-the-moment. This nifty style trick also creates a sense of layering and energy in a space where colour is muted.
Pops of colour – in the form of an art print and indoor plants – as well as natural wood lend warmth and personality.
Jewel Room
IMAGES: Greg Cox/Bureaux & Warren Heath/Bureaux
The North African influence is a magic formula for statement bathrooms. In this steam and shower room, the main event is, of course, the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling tessellated tiles in lapis blue with their subtle variations in texture and tone. Restraint in the fixtures – a simple door, brass fittings and a solid marble basin and stone shelf give a classic look that’s never gimmicky.
Tips for this look
On a budget? Invest in one “wow” piece – a beautiful light, a show-stopping basin, or a tiled or wallpapered feature wall – and keep the rest of your fittings and decorations simple, minimalist and timeless.
Photo-real vinyl stickers are effective in cheating the North African-inspired tiled look.
Material World
IMAGES: Greg Cox/Bureaux & Warren Heath/Bureaux
In this bathroom, the juxtaposition of texture and finishes delivers major character and visual interest. A modern, dramatic overall effect is created by polished stone countertops, square tiles, a glossy concrete floor, ornate glass wall-sconce lights and curvaceous, oversized basins. Together, they contrast against a white-painted exposed-stone wall, a distressed, oversized mirror, chunky exposed ceiling beams and smaller details such as a rough-cut stone stand for toiletries in the shower zone.
Tips for this look
A reflective floor can bounce natural light.
It’s not always necessary to tile an entire wall, which will save on costs. A large section of tiled wall suffices in the shower zone, framed within the remaining wall.
Think about shape when creating contrast. The tiles in the shower area connect visually with the mirror.
Roughed Up
IMAGES: Greg Cox/Bureaux & Warren Heath/Bureaux
Unique details, layered textures and a rich, warm palette give this space its inviting character. The ruggedness of the raw-brick wall has been exaggerated by a distressed finish and, while it is the main architectural feature, it harmoniously aligns with the concrete that makes up the rest of the flat surfaces. Vibrant plants with reflective, waxy leaves and the high-sheen copper ball-and-claw tub provide a smooth, glossy contrast to the rustic textures. Furniture, accessories and fittings bring a touch of nostalgia and individuality. The end result is the antithesis of showroom sterility.
Tips for this look
The bathtub has been slightly raised on a tiled platform, drawing the eye and introducing a sense of architectural layering.
Indoor tropical plants thrive in a steamy bathroom environment, but natural light is still important to their wellbeing.
A plumbed enamel basin on a converted dresser makes for a beautiful and unique vanity.
How is your general health? Our expert shares simple and safe ways to track your wellbeing at home.
Previously, we’ve looked at some of the tests it’s useful to understand and important to schedule. There are also other simple tests we can do ourselves to keep track of how well (or not) we’re doing healthwise. Try these and think about tracking them – you might find some of the results surprising.
1. Flexibility and Strength
There are a few ways to test flexibility – google it and you’ll find some fun ones. An interesting flexibility and strength test is the sit/rise test; there’s some evidence that links doing well in this test to living longer, though studies were based on older people. It’s not a perfect test, and for some people it won’t apply at all. But if you’re after a challenge, try this one.
How to do it
Stand barefoot with your legs crossed. Try to lower yourself to the floor, without using a steadying hand, knee, arm, or the sides of your legs. Then, try and stand back up the same way. If you can do both, you score a perfect 10. Deduct one point for every extra body part you’ve needed. Don’t worry too much if you find this hard – I did!
There are many factors that affect our ability to get off the floor, including genetics. But it might be a good reminder to make sure you’re doing some strength training in your exercise routine, to maintain the muscle we lose as we age.
2. Resting Heart Rate
Measuring your heart rate gives a real-time snapshot of how your heart muscle is working. Heart rates can naturally vary. But generally speaking, a rate between 60 and 100 beats per minute is considered normal. A slow heart rate might just mean you’re super fit; a fast rate could just be because you’ve been exercising or you’re feeling excited. But both could also be signs of trouble.
How to do it
While you’re resting (a good time to do this is first thing in the morning), hold your index and middle fingers on the inside of your wrist, or lightly press the side of the neck just below the jaw. Time the number of beats for 15 seconds, and multiply that by four. It can be useful to take multiple measurements over a few days to get an accurate picture.
3. Waist-hip Ratio
Knowing your waist and hip measurements can help with more than just ordering clothes online. A larger waist measurement or a higher waist-hip ratio might be a sign of what’s known as central obesity or normal-weight obesity (the latter is sometimes described as being “skinny fat”). This is basically an unhealthy accumulation of fat around the middle and the organs; it can be a risk factor for metabolic syndrome, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
How to do it
Measure around the middle of your body, about belly button level. Try not to suck in too much; breathe normally. If your waist is more than 80cm, it could indicate normal-weight obesity; over 88cm adds higher risk.
To find your waist-hip ratio Measure around the widest part of your hips and bum, then divide your waist measurement by this number. A ratio below 0.85 is considered healthy.
4. Walking Speed
How fast we walk can also be an indicator of how well we’re ageing. In one study, people with brisker walking paces had longer life expectancies. Brisk walking, in this case, meant a speed of around 4.8km/hour.
How to do it
If you want to test this, just time yourself walking for one minute, at the same time counting your steps. A rate of 100 steps a minute puts you on track for a longer life.
Growing your own food is one of the most satisfying things you can do for yourself and the planet. But what should you grow? Rachel Clare nominates some standout fruit and veges with admirable attributes.
Just like Bird of the Year, in my garden I have my own official Vegetable of the Year. In 2018 it was cucumbers. We came home from a camping holiday and harvested about 20 of them. The following year it was strawberries. They were so perfectly red and juicy that I photographed them displayed in a blue and white bowl in various areas of the garden, then proudly posted pictures of them on Instagram.
Kohlrabi.
Then in 2020, it was kohlrabi, a type of cabbage that is also known as a space cabbage because it looks like an alien. I’d never grown or eaten kohlrabi before, but unlike other forward-thinking gardeners, who’d cleaned the garden centres out of edible seedlings before we went into Lockdown 2020 Season 1, I hadn’t been that organised, so I raided my seed stash and ended up sowing lettuces and kohlrabi.
Despite the weirdness of that time, which included losing a job I loved, unsuccessfully trying to homeschool my children and many fraught family bike rides, my successful crop of kohlrabi will always be a feature. When lockdown ended we hosted a massive dinner party in our very small house for all our friends and their kids, and I served up roasted kohlrabi.
It was heartening to see how many people turned to gardening during that first lengthy lockdown. Our reliance on the convenience of supermarkets and our busy lives have expedited the loss of that skill. But growing your own food is one of the most empowering things you can do. And while I’m never going to say gardening is cheap (my bank statement is testament to that) or that it’s the answer to widespread food insecurity in Aotearoa, I promise that growing what you love to eat will bring you joy. I’ve rounded up some crops with chops into individual categories based on their standout qualities.
Cucumber in the garden.
Most Fun To Harvest
When I was a kid, I went to a couple of “Big Dig” treasure hunt days at the beach where you dig with a spade for a prize and never won a thing. My sister was successful, however, and won a plastic visor, which I remember her showing off about quite a lot.
Mature silverbeet ready to be harvested
For me, growing potatoes has reversed some of that childhood disappointment. You plant one seed potato in the ground and 80 to 100 days later you dig up 10 to 15 of the waxy little beauties – they really are like edible buried treasure. You can buy seed potatoes from garden centres now. Plant them around 10-20cm deep in free-draining soil in a sunny spot. If you live in an area with a short summer, fast-track them in the garden by chitting them first. This involves laying them out in a single layer in a warm, well-lit room until they grow sprouts about 2.5cm long. If you don’t have much space, good news! Potatoes grow very happily in pots. Drill holes into the bottom of a 10L bucket. Half-fill it with garden mix, add two spuds, then fill up the rest of the bucket with more garden mix. Water them around once a week.
Freshly dug potatoes
Best For Bulking Up Meals And Saving Bucks
Some vegetables are so easy to grow that once you have them in your garden you’ll be outraged at the idea of ever buying them again. Leading in this category is a vegetable many of us take for granted – good old silverbeet. While some of us are traumatised from childhood family meals where it was boiled to bits, it’s actually a very versatile vege and can be used in place of spinach, which is a lot more finicky to grow. I pack it into lasagnes and cannellonis, add it to vege fritters and also like stir-frying the young leaves with ginger and soy sauce. ‘Rainbow Lights’ silverbeet has gorgeous crimson, yellow and pale pink stems, and looks pretty as a picture in the garden. A doppelganger for silverbeet is perpetual spinach, which also grows a treat. And don’t forget about rhubarb – a perennial that will provide you with fruit for crumbles and muffins for years.
Top Crops For Avoiding Chemicals
Growing your own food means you know exactly where it comes from and can ensure it’s been grown without the use of herbicides or pesticides which aren’t good for us, wildlife or our soil. Every year in the US, the Environmental Working Group ranks pesticide contamination in 46 popular fruit and vegetables, then publishes a list of the top 12, called the Dirty Dozen. Celery and strawberries consistently appear on it, which is why I choose to grow these foods organically at home. Celery can be tricky to grow from seed, so plant seedlings instead, and be sure to keep it well-watered so it develops nice juicy stems. Strawberry plants will also be available in garden centres for another month or so. Spread a thick layer of mulch, such as pea straw, around strawberry plants to lock moisture into the soil (water the soil first) and to keep the fruit off the bare soil.
Grow your own strawberries.
Most Environmentally Friendly
We’ve made good progress with ditching single-use plastic bags, but too many products come wrapped in plastic, and one of the worst offenders is the shrink-wrapped cucumber. It’s a trick producers use to keep them fresher for longer, but beat that and grow your own! It’s too early to plant cucumbers outside now but you can get them started indoors in a sunny spot. Plant individual seeds in pots around the size of a 500g yoghurt pot, then plant them out after the last frost (usually around Labour Day weekend or later), and give them something to climb. Or skip the seeds and buy seedlings in late October or November.
Always Worth The Wait
If delayed gratification excites you, then you’re a perfect match for asparagus. It takes two years from planting before you should harvest this coveted spring crop. Once your asparagus bed is established, it will reward you for years. You can buy crowns (a royal-sounding name for root clusters) from garden centres until mid-spring. Plant them into 20cm-deep trenches, covered with just 5cm of soil, in a sunny spot in your garden. Because it’s a long-haul crop and asparagus beds can look a bit messy (they’re the same family as asparagus ferns), put some thought into where you’re going to grow them before you commit.
Top Of The Pots
You don’t need a quarter-acre section to grow your own food. If you can remember to water your plants (set a reminder on your phone if you can’t), then you can grow a range of crops in pots. Herbs are some of the easiest edibles to grow in containers, particularly Mediterranean ones such as thyme, sage and oregano, which can hack dry conditions. Buy herb plants from the garden centre rather than supermarket herbs, which have been grown hydroponically and won’t adapt to life in the dirt. Other great crops for pots include sugar snap peas – provide them with something to climb – carrots, and cherry tomatoes.
Best Lucky Dip
My 10-year-old loved it when we sowed a crop of ‘Rainbow Blend’ carrots. You never know which colour – yellow, purple, white or pink – you’re going to pull out of the ground. Similar are ‘Easter Egg’ radishes which are a pretty-as-a-picture mixed blend in different colours. Always sow root crops like radishes and carrots from seed, rather than seedlings, into well-tilled soil. And if rainbows are your thing, then glass gem corn is also a beauty with its multicoloured kernels and can be sown in late spring and early summer.
Kohlrabi microgreens.
Speediest
If you want fast food, sow a crop of microgreens. Sprinkle seeds onto a tray of damp potting mix or seed-raising mix, press them in gently and sprinkle a tiny bit of mix over time. Spritz your microgreens daily, being sure to keep them moist at all times. After 10 days they’ll be ready to harvest. Follow this method for mesclun mixes as well, which you can treat as “cut and come again” crops, harvesting what you need while the plant keeps growing.
Get back to basics with this quick and easy recipe for pickled cucumbers. Great for your gut health, this little side dish will be a winner at dinner time.
We used to eat a lot more pickled veges in the old days before refrigeration. It was a great way to preserve them but it was also widely known that eating a little fermented food with your meals aided digestion. We now know that fermented foods are great for our gut microbiome. So popping a bit of sauerkraut or pickle on the side of your plate is not just about taste but health as well.
This is a lovely, quick recipe that makes a wonderful pickle to go with fish and meat.
Ingredients
1 telegraph cucumber or two small cucumbers, unpeeled and sliced very thinly 1 tablespoon coarse sea salt
11⁄2 cups water
1⁄2 cup white wine vinegar
1 cup sugar
1 bay leaf
2 allspice berries or 1⁄4 teaspoon ground allspice
Method
Place the cucumber in a colander, sprinkle over the salt and let it stand for 30 minutes.
In a saucepan, combine the water, vinegar, sugar, bay leaf and allspice, and bring to the boil. Remove from the heat and leave to cool.
Rinse the salt off the cucumbers and, using your hands, squeeze as much moisture out of them as you can.
Place the cucumbers in a large jar and pour the pickling liquid over them.
Cover with a tight-fitting lid and refrigerate for at least three hours before using.
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