If a story is best with a few unexpected twists and turns, then meeting up with Tanya Batt, storyteller and writer and full time fairy is set up to be magnificent. I ring her expecting to conduct an interview by phone, only to find she’ll be passing my way (a mere thousand kilometres from her home) in a few days time and just might be able to pop in.

The few days pass and no Tanya. However she calls that morning, and says she’s on her way. Will be here in around an hour.

Not being the most fastidious of house cleaners, an hour represents a mad rush around, picking up children’s toys and clothes, cleaning kitchen benches and other similar tasks. No Tanya. I’m worried. I do not give out the best instructions. Perhaps she is lost and wandering the New Zealand countryside looking for an odd arrangement of tall pine trees, a barking dog and our house, frustrated at the lack of good cell phone reception.

That alone would be a good reason to be late I figure. Tanya Batt, story weaver has another idea that out sells my meagre reasoning. She’s late because a worsted wool pea coat beckoned to her from the side of the road. Passing an Antique shop, where the coat hung, she became slightly diverted. Two hours late, but certainly not empty handed she drives up in her silver story telling machine, with her treasures squished up inside. As she enters my house, she promises to show me her haul before she leaves.

On first meeting, she is everything a full time fairy should be. Elfin, with a turned up nose and a felted top, a matching pixie hat and sublimely beautiful French red dancing shoes. My five year old, who has been expecting layers of taffeta and glitter is a little disappointed but, as I explain, queens, princesses and fairies all need to be able to wear day to day clothes on occasion.

I am quick to prepare lunch- vegetarian for Tanya. Salad with a divine organic cheese she pulls from her van and sadly (for her- perfect for me) forgets to take when she leaves. It does not matter that we are eating mid afternoon. This is fairy time and therefore not constrained by such earthly inventions as clock watching. Even my concern for her ferry crossing later on is met with unconcern. “I can always catch a later one”

Tanya is a storyteller, and like all those who spin a tale, she is best at drawing out another person’s story. To pull out her own tale is harder than spilling out my own, faintly aware that she may store a fragment of my story to be used at some stage in another time and place. But once food is shared and my story played out, she is ready to unfurl her own story.

Storytelling has been her desire since a child. At thirty-five she can see her journey to now began as the eldest of seven children, travelling around as first her father, then step father worked in the outback of Australia. Movement settled in her bones, and she has followed the travelling star since.

Her love of dramatic secured at fourteen when she came to live with her father and stepmother. A huge box of costumes were her playthings, with only young siblings to play with as an alternative. She remembers “Walking along the shore line in as Little Bo Peep, asking people if they had seen my sheep” and dressing as a nun for mufti days at Pakuranga College. “I told everyone I came from a convent.”

She went to teachers College with a firm plan not to teach. ‘I wanted to understand education and I needed the paper to prove myself as a storyteller for education.” Once the paper was received she went out and began to tell her stories.

Storytelling has taken her around the world. She spends her time travelling, and then comes back to her home in Waiheke. She loves taking her home with her- home represented by a biscuit tin filled with rice cakes, and a supremely diverse range of clothing. She is a little eccentric, but entirely (as true eccentrics are) comfortable with it. It is natural, with no airs or reservations.

She considers herself lucky “to make a living out of my creativity” and is looking to new places to cultivate her creative urge. This includes the Storyteller Festival she has instigated on Waiheke Island, which runs during Queens Birthday weekend. Full of stories from herself and other performers, the festival is her baby, designed to move children and adults into an imagined world- one that I see she moves in and out of with facile.

It’s time for her to leave my world, and I walk out with her to her “vantastic.” I have spent the last few minutes thinking about her recent foray into our local antique shop, and can not imagine what she has discovered.

It is a bike. Or rather, it is a horse bike. Think beautifully carved wood shaped into a carnival horse, on cast iron wheels. It is delightful, and entirely unusual. Its new owner cannot resist demonstrating its usefulness, pedalling it on our stony driveway. There's more- a vintage red balldress redolent with sequins and taffeta- just the sort of thing a fairy may wear. “The dress and the horse bike are a perfect match,” she says. “I think I could build a whole show around them”