Green ticket to ride

She has geckos behind her bread board, long-tailed bats and eels on her property and she drives an electric all-terrain vehicle. Is Celia Wade-Brown the perfect Green MP?

- MICHELE HEWITSON

Celia Wade-Brown, the former mayor of Wellington and the Greens' newest MP, is emphatically not a hippy. I had made the mistake of saying she looked like a hippy. I'd been looking at pictures of her when she was the mayor. She had a short, sensible hairdo which, heavens, may even have had a passing acquaintance with a bottle of dye, and sensible suits. She wore a smidgen of makeup. She was doing a good impersonation of a member of the Wellington establishment, albeit a Green one. Now, she wears her hair long and grey and sometimes a bit wild. Honestly, she looks like a different person. "Oh," was all she said then.

About 40 minutes later, she said, apropos of nothing, that she couldn't be a hippy. She doesn't wear dozens of clinking bracelets and what's more, she'd brushed her hair nicely. So there. She's not a hippy. What she is is funny. She has a talent for drollery.

At the end of our interview, she asked whether I'd found anything surprising about her. She'd have to wait to find out, I said, while thinking: How about almost everything? Including her sense of humour. I asked her age and she said, "The same as Gerry Brownlee." She arrived to pick me up at the gate to her 250ha property bordering the Tararua Ranges, an entrance signalled in advance by a chug, chug, chugging. She splashed across the river in Peggy, a bright-yellow electric all-terrain vehicle. Peggy is cute, but I look at her in trepidation. "Have you got your seatbelt on?" she says. This is not reassuring. She assured me she had off-road-driving training. Somehow, this was also less than reassuring. I had already travelled down the most terrifyingly narrow gravel road, which consisted mainly of blind corners and hairpin bends, just to get to the gate.