“KIA Ora” - our hosts have said to us in more than one of the homes we have stayed in on our visit to New Zealand.

At first I thought they were asking if I wanted a drink of the luminous orange juice stuff you could buy in the cinema.

In fact, our friends and hosts were offering us a traditional welcome, and that is certainly what we are experiencing here down under.

Everyone we meet has stopped to have a word and seem delighted that we are taking the time, and spending some money of course, in their country.

Tomorrow we are off to stay on a working dairy farm. John can’t wait. But the visit reflects the breadth of experiences we have been exposed to in New Zealand.

A British take away food that seems as iconic in New Zealand as it is back home is fish and chips. Only here it is pronounced fush and chips. After several gourmet evening meals where our hosts were determined to show us that New Zealand lamb and Aberdeen Angus beef was equal, if not better to anything we could produce, we decided to treat ourself to a take away.

After making the choice between gurnard and snapper, although apparently species such as elephant fish, blue warehou and red cod are the preferred species in South Island (and we are on North Island currently), we took ourselves off to the beach to enjoy our lunch and admire the surfers regularly getting knocked off their boards into the waves.

Nearing the bottom of my bag of chips, I idly tossed a crunchy piece of batter to a hungry looking seagull who had been patiently sitting beside us while we ate. Big mistake.

From out of nowhere about 20, then 30 seagulls landed. Where had they come from? Ten seconds ago there wasn’t one, and now there was a whole flock of them squabbling and flapping and squawking. All attempting to mug my friendly little bird for his scrap of food. Then as one, they realised I was still possessed of scraps of their target sustenance in my hand.

I don’t know whether you have seen the Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds, but the swarm of gulls in one of the scenes was eerily reminiscent of the aggressive flock around me on the bench with my remaining chips.

As if in a dream I recalled John’s prescient words as we walked up to the bench to eat our lunch. “Whatever you do, don’t feed the seagulls, they’re a menace in places like this.” If only I had listened. But then apparently, I never do.