FOR THE PAST ten years or so, from the time my income began exceeding my outgoings, nothing has given me more wintry pleasure than the magical day each June when I pick up the freshly-printed New Zealand International Film Festival programme.

I most like to get it from Auckland’s Civic theatre, because that is where I most like to watch films: that fantastic starry palace where I could watch a blank screen for 90 minutes and still come away quite moved. Most years, there are only two weeks you can watch films at The Civic, and those are the two weeks of the film festival.

The festival programme is filled with elegant, funny, loving descriptions of the films, written by the geniuses who spend months carefully choosing them. To sit with it for a day or so, when I should be doing productive work, is the best imaginable waste of my time.

For weeks after first picking up the programme, I spend many work hours fantasising about the films and the day – usually a Saturday, grey, wet, cold – when I will finally make the delicious drive, heater full on my feet, from my home to the Auckland CBD, park underground and arrive warmly for my first film at The Civic.

Many June and July days are framed by the soft-focus thought of arriving in that grand lobby full of warmly dressed people drowning in perfumes and good, thick clothes. The moment, when it comes, is pretty great too, but the real power has always been in its anticipation, that distant spark of midwinter brightness.