Ngā mihi o te tau hau (Happy New Year)

volunteering with homelessness charity Crisis in London on New Year's Day, wearing my Michael Connelly charity t-shirt - a nod to crime fiction, a great message, and fittingly was also produced and sold to raise funds for a LA homelessness charity

Craig every second Tuesday

Kia ora and gidday everyone,

So we've turned the page on 2024. Amazing how the months and years fly by. How did you spend your festive season and the turning of the calendar? I hope wherever you were and whoever you were with, you had a good break and are entering 2025 with some degree of hope and optimism, even if world news and events can be depressing. 

I had a rather quiet New Year' Eve this year (technically, 'last year' now, I guess), especially compared to past escapades and adventures. I'd spent much of the day volunteering with Crisis, a homelessness charity in the UK, and was doing the same on New Years day itself.  To kickstart 2024 I'd run a special New Year's Day parkrun at 9am then volunteered at Crisis, but this time I was on breakfast shift so no parkrun on 1 January 2025. Just straight into  helping to feed a lot of people who had it tough, which wasn't a bad way to start 2025, in its own right. 

Man, time flies. I remember being a wee kid, working out how old we'd be in the year 2000! Now we're a quarter century past that. Calendar changes are often cause for reflection, eh? Whether we consciously mean to, in terms of making some resolutions etc, or not. 

As I was walking to the tube in the pre-dawn London darkness last Tuesday, it struck me that I was spending the last day of 2024 doing pretty much the same thing I was doing on the first day of 2024, volunteering with a great group of people at Crisis. And last Wednesday when I kicked off 2025 by doing the same, I dressed rather appropriately with a nod to my love of crime fiction by wearing one of my 'Harry Bosch' t-shirts, which has a great message on it. 

"Everybody Counts, or Nobody Counts," is Harry's credo throughout Connelly's fantastic series. 

Michael Connelly wearing 
one of the t-shirts

Not bad words to live by. My t-shirt got several positive comments from our guests (rough sleepers) at Crisis today. Perhaps fittingly, I'd actually bought it a few years back when Michael put them up for sale to raise funds for a homelessness charity in Los Angeles. It's long been an issue, and in recent years seems to have gotten even worse. 

It's my sixth 'Christmas' volunteering with Crisis. If I couldn't be back 'home' in New Zealand for the holidays, I was very grateful to be ending my year and starting a new one by spending my time doing something to help others, with some great people - fellow volunteers and our guests - once more. 

You can read more about Crisis and the work they do, and how my own eyes were opened by my time volunteering there over the years, in a previous piece I did for this Murder is Everywhere website. 

Last night and early this morning before I went on shift I was thinking about all the different kinds of 'New Year's Eves/New Year's Days' I've had throughout my life. 

For more than 20 years, from when I was a new entrant at primary school, my New Years' were always in the Top of the South Island of New Zealand, whether camping by the beach in Kaiteriteri or hanging out with family and friends. Throughout school, university, being a young lawyer, and even my first years of travels, I'd always be home or return home to the Nelson-Tasman region for the holidays. Looking back, as Fred Dagg used to sing, "We don't know how lucky we are". It's a pretty great part of the world to get to call home. 

My first overseas New Year's Eve and New Year's Day was, funnily enough, still a summery one, in Colonia (Uruguay) with my then-girlfriend and a couple of law school pals, who were randomly passing through Buenos Aires at the same time as us, as 2007 ended and 2008 began. We took the ferry to another country for some fun beachside celebrations and shenanigans. 

Summery NYE in Uruguay, 2007

Since then it's been a real mix of home and away, from an Egyptian feast with snakes and table dancing in Luxor on New Year's Eve, to US summer camp reunions when I'm just off the plane from a Christmas in Lapland, to 1 January sunrise walks with my daughter around New Zealand rivers and vineyards or quiet parks in COVID-era London or through Kauri forests in Northland.... 

On the first day of 2025, as I unwound from another Crisis shift, I felt very  grateful for it all. Even the bumps and bruises along the way, in among many joyful moments. 

To all my pals reading this, my first Murder is Everywhere post for 2025, I hope that however 2024 went for you, that this new year brings you plenty of joy, adventure, and love. Time flies, and life changes, but it can be full of lots of good things along the way. In the small moments as much as the bigger ones. Here's to a great year of crime and thriller reading, and many other good things for us all. 

Until next time, Ka kite anō

Whakataukī of the fortnight: 

Inspired by Zoe and her 'word of the week', I'll be ending my fortnightly posts by sharing a whakataukī (Māori proverb), a pithy and poetic thought to mull on as we go through life.

“Iti noa ana he pito mata”

(From the withered tree, a flower blooms)