Birthday parade

Just when I thought it was a fan­tas­tic enough week with birth­day gifts galore from Naomi, she went and organ­ised a huge parade on the bay which con­cluded with a fire­works dis­play over the water.

There were march­ing con­tin­gents, heli­copters, speed­boats and para­chutists, and we saw all this from the com­fort of a nice din­ing room over­look­ing the bay and the finan­cial dis­trict. I don’t think anyone’s had a bet­ter thirty-, um, some­thingth birthday.

If you, like us, were pre­vi­ously blasé about the NDP, this year’s extrav­a­ganza on the world’s first and largest float­ing stage will really de-blasé you. And this was just the rehearsal! The Ang Mohs in our midst (because we were in a hotel after all) were impressed, and said so them­selves, even if they were a lit­tle taken aback by our Air Force’s F16s, which flew right at us, and then pulled up over our building.

“That’s usu­ally the last thing you see when these things fly at you”, said the Ang Moh, who later told another Ang Moh that he was “from Belfast, so I’m used to see­ing Orange Men marching”.

Another thing that made this the bestest birth­day I’ve ever had was that we got here in time to watch the Bledis­loe Cup and Tri-Nations Cham­pi­onships decider on the telly, and although it would’ve been bet­ter if the Wal­la­bies didn’t implode in the sec­ond half and lose both pieces of sil­ver­ware, I’m still per­fectly happy.

I’m the luck­i­est man on the planet.

The only other thing that threat­ened to derail our cel­e­bra­tions was that we mis­placed Naomi’s phone while mov­ing rooms, but a big hur­rah to the staff, and espe­cially Ms Sarah Tan, of the Ritz-Carlton Mil­lenia for doing every­thing pos­si­ble — and we mean every­thing from con­tact­ing every­one on her walkie talkie to clos­ing off the guest room we’d just vacated, so that we were reunited with the phone a few hours later. It had been safely lodged with the lost and found when it was dis­cov­ered by the guy who checks your mini-bar to see if you’ve swiped any­thing from it after vacat­ing your room.

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