Nigel | Welcome Bay, Bay of Plenty

“I originate from a long way up north, and when we moved to New Zealand six years ago, we first lived on The Mount. We’ve still got a house here, and we now live up at Welcome Bay, but I think home is where you’re happy.

Where you’re happy and you feel safe, and you feel content, and I think there’s too much pressure put on a lot of youngsters, especially this day and age, that you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that, but things will happen throughout your life, and you will just become comfortable in a place and in my opinion, you’ll make home where you feel comfortable and you feel happy.

I don’t know about an anchor in your life. I think the place that you originate from will always resonate with you at some point in your life but whether it’s your home or not, I don’t know. I come from the UK, but my home is now New Zealand. It’s where I feel comfortable, but I do think it’s important to have roots, obviously, and come back to where you feel safe and content, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be where you originate from.

So I operate the V8 Trikes down at Mt Maunganui, and we’ve been doing that for the last five-and-a-half, six years now, and it’s a pretty good business when the cruise ships are on. We make quite a nice living out of it. Obviously it’s a bit difficult at the moment with COVID and everything else, but I think as a community, everybody’s pulled together, and we are trying to help everybody out. Everybody tries to help everybody out, particularly in the business where we are now. We like where we are, and we love what we do. 

I value family wellbeing and happiness. We operated a fairly large business in the UK, and we had quite a nice lifestyle over there, up until when we had some unforeseeable events happen over there and it makes you re-evaluate everything that you’re doing. It’s not necessarily all about money. People say money doesn’t make you happy. It certainly goes a long way to help, I feel for sure, but that saying is very true. If you don’t have to worry about money, business becomes a whole lot easier for sure.”