Attention Southland and Otago residents! Over the last year we’ve had the opportunity to try out many of the local attractions we may previously have dismissed as being for visiting holiday-makers. We’ve compiled a very short list of just four of the activities we have enjoyed. Casting an eye over it serves as a reminder of the many things as yet untried. You have a diminishing quantity of time left of having the place largely to yourselves. Get cracking!

I’m told my genius idea is not original but its original to me so I’m claiming it. It is thus: stagger the New Zealand school holidays so that the whole country is not on holiday at the same time. I conceived of this due to the extreme busyness of the July school holidays but there is no reason this could not be an ongoing strategy to spread the holiday load and achieve the double-pronged benefit of making the holiday more pleasant for the holiday makers and give businesses a boom month rather than a frantic fortnight.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the most maligned ingredients can be made appealing to the pickiest of eaters on top of a pizza. Children, programmed at birth to reject healthy food options, are suddenly happy to consume a range of botanical and animal matter otherwise pushed to the side of the plate.

Local body election season is upon us. A triennial test of our commitment to participate in the day to day matters affecting our communities.

The school holidays are upon us and mother nature has blessed us with a plethora of crispy winter blue-sky days. Which would be lovely if she had firstly blessed us with a frenzied three-day blizzard bringing lashings of snow to the mountains. She has instead brought freezing temperatures to our night time toes and somewhat less freezing temperatures to the alpine peaks - insufficiently freezing for the snow guns to make up for the absent blizzard.

Like an extension of the May school holidays, Queen’s Birthday weekend in the Southern Lakes was the long weekend where it was too cold for sun or lake-based activities and too early for skiing. As children we’d meander about during the day or work our way through our book stashes, playing cards or watching a movie in the evening.

I follow Reese Witherspoon on Instagram. She’s a prolific reader and one who has a similar taste in literature to me. I admire almost universally her acting and production work. She is a vocal proponent of equity in the entertainment industry and a champion of it through her production company. She also has great taste in pizza.

We wrote last May about the Creative Cows’ project aiming to spruce up Cow Lane with some street art. Of course we, at The Cow, actively encourage graffiti on our own walls (though in chalk to mitigate the risk posed by the enthusiastic but unskilled).

This is a job advertisement. We need a chef in Queenstown. So do half the other restaurants in the Wakatipu Basin. How, amid the summer scramble for staff, will we attract a culinary whiz who is skilled in the kitchen, fun, flexible, a good team mate, adept at multi-tasking, wanting to make a long-term commitment – ahead of the 60 or so other local food establishments also trying to recruit a chef?

What a fabulous winter we have had in the Southern Lakes. We’re investigating the record for skier days but we think winter of 2018 must come pretty close. Along with the close of the skifields, much of the seasonal work force move to wintery northern climes or head somewhere beachy for a dose of vitamin D. Many of these nomads may return to us, shunning societal expectations of getting a real job or, in many cases, making the decision that working in here is their real job. Others came for the winter and never leave.