As I write this from my temporary office in the upstairs bedroom, workers outside in heavy fluoro jackets and hard hats are toiling under a scorching sun. There’s noise from diggers and massive machinery, the scrabble of scoria pouring from metal buckets, weighty wheels crunching over rocks.
And I’m enjoying it because, to me, it sounds like progress. We live beside the Western railway line in Auckland and for the past few weeks the track has been undergoing maintenance. But I’m watching closely what’s being done with the drainage.
This time last year, that incessant rain ran down the hill on the other side of the line, under the tracks and came through the wooden retaining wall of our courtyard as a waterfall. It flooded the
