Last Saturday’s Dominion Post front page story was about the local red-hot housing market.

Lower Hutt’s biggest residential real estate firm’s boss, John Ross, was quoted saying he’d never seen a market with so much demand pressure. To various extents this is the case nation-wide.

Scarcely a day passes without our dying newspapers publishing something about Harry and Meghan. The items are invariably empty speculative nonsense.

Now I’m always happy to look at photos of Meghan although unfortunately they’re marred by including a ginger bearded bugger in the shot and no-one wants to look at that.

I read a rich variety of books. One I bowled through recently was now 65 year old San Francisco poetess Kim Addonizio’s “Bukowski In A Sundress”.

I’m not a Bukowski fan as this uniquely American genre always strikes me as trying too hard to say aren’t I quite a lad?

Kate Walsh is an American actress currently trapped in Perth by the virus lockdown, and evidently happy to be there.

She told the Australian Financial Review of the “massive opportunity” to build Perth and Freemantle into film studios, noting the two cities largely missed out in the Federal Government’s recent A$400 million funding to promote foreign film-making in Australia.

Is there any limit to human optimism? I mention that first in respect of a new high-rise hotel currently off and on being constructed in a desolate site in Lower Hutt’s CBD. The hotel is reportedly targeting tourists.  So why would tourists go to Lower Hutt?