Summer Spoonbill

The lower reaches of the Leith Stream are confined between ugly concrete walls. Here, as it runs between the College of Education and the Polytechnic, the river (it's hardly a stream, despite its name), is partly tidal.

I was walking on the footpath beside it and as I crossed over the footbridge startled a shag, which flew off. But I didn't disturb the lone spoonbill, as it looked for tasty morsels in the green algae.

Royal spoonbill numbers have increased since 1940 when they first started breeding in NZ. There is a small local colony which breeds on the small offshore islet called Green Island. That's probably where this bird has come from.

Pietro & Tommaso

Pietro and Tommaso were always arguing.

At dawn the squeaking of their old bicycles and the sound of their voices – Pietro’s hollow and nasal, Tommaso’s husky and sometimes hoarse - were the only noises to be heard in the empty streets. They used to cycle to work together to the factory where they worked. From the other side of the shutter slats you could still feel the sleep and darkness weighing on the rooms. The muffled ringing of alarm clocks began a sporadic dialogue from one house to the next, becoming denser in the suburbs, until finally it merged, as town merged into country, into a back and forth of cock-a-doodle-doos.

The Queen’s Necklace by Italo Calvino. Penguin. 2011

Yellow Carpet of Kowhai Flowers

Our garden kowhai is usually a late flowerer.

This year it has flowered to excess.

As have most of the flowering trees and shrubs around town - the rhododendrons have been magnificent.

Of course, as spring progresses, the florets fall - leaving a bright yellow carpet.

Filling up the very large leaves of the Chatham Island Forget-me-nots, like some overflowing wine goblet!

Muted Cello Notes

She would have liked, and did try, to keep it light, giggly, and Australian, but in spite of herself the muted ‘cello notes rose from her thicker throat, as he had heard them also in her mother. Dulcie, though, it was obvious, the matter-of-fact yet still ready-to-become-hysterical young girl, had not experienced the full agony of ‘cello music.

…

The moon was rising, however jerkily, as Dulcie began to play.
Waldo at once knew how wrong he had been to encourage her to make an exhibition of herself. Needn’t have accepted, of course, if she hadn’t wanted to. But it was going to be a heroic struggle. Not in the beginning, not in the Adagio what’s it. There she could lay the atmosphere on, and did, in almost visible slabs. Dulcie’s ever so slightly hairy arms were leaning on the solid air, first one side, then the other. Building up her defences against inevitable suicide somewhere along that road which was never moonlit enough. Her shoulders, however, were getting above themselves. If she had started humbly, the music had made her proud. It was kidding her all over again into becoming the genius she was never intended to be, dissolving the bones in her arms with a promise of release, offering a universe of passion instead of plunketty-plunk on the home upright.

Quotation from: The Solid Mandala by Patrick White.

Moss Garden Two

A veritable jungle of mosses, the bright green of a patch of a Bryum species, most likely the silvery bryum. The online NZ Enyclopedia has this to say:

Silvery bryum looks silvery because the cells of the upper third of its leaves die and lose their chlorophyll. Their skeletal remains are white and shiny, especially when dry. The dead tips act like a layer of sunscreen, protecting the still-living lower two-thirds of the leaves from damage by ultraviolet radiation. When the dead leaf tips are dampened by rain, they turn glass-like, allowing light to penetrate the moss cushion.

This patch of Bryum brightens up a a large colony of our old favourite Tortula muralis.

Pablum and Duck Milk

I, a demon, bear witness that there are no more demons left. Why demons, when man himself is a demon? Why persuade to evil someone who is already convinced? I am the last of the persuaders. I board in an attic in Tishevitz and draw my sustenance from a Yiddish storybook, a leftover from the days before the great catastrophe. The stories in the book are pablum and duck milk, but the Hebrew letters have a weight of their own. I don’t have to tell you that I am a Jew. What else, a Gentile? I’ve heard that there are Gentile demons, but I don’t know any, nor do I wish to know them. Jacob and Esau don’t become in-laws.

I came here from Lublin. Tishervitz is a godforsaken village; Adam didn’t even stop to pee there. It’s so small that a wagon goes through town and the horse is in the marketplace just as the rear wheels reach the toll gate.

The Last Demon. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Penguin 2011

Dessert, Glasses & Napery

He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not do otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere; and as I lay in bed and recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focused, shaded table light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and me, and the pleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared, making them for a time a bright little world quite cut off from everyday realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. ‘He was mystifying!’ I said, and then: ‘How well he did it! … It isn’t quite the thing I should have expected him, of all people, to do well.’

Afterwards as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found myself trying to account for the flavor of reality that perplexed me in this impossible reminiscences, convey – I hardly know which word to use – experiences it was otherwise impossible to tell.

H.G. Wells The Door in the Wall Penguin 2010

 

Drowning in Poetic Messages

To compose a poem that is worth reading and remembering is a gift of destiny: it happens to only a few people, without regard for rules or intentions, and to them it happens only a few times in their lives. Perhaps this is good thing; if the phenomenon were more frequent, we would be drowning in poetic messages, our own and those of others, to the detriment of us all. To Pasquale, too, it had happened only a few times, and the awareness of having a poem in his mind, ready to be caught in flight and fixed on a page like a butterfly, had always been accompanied by a curious sensation, by an aura like that which preceded epileptic fits: each time, he had heard a faint whistle in his ears, and a ticklish shiver ran through him from head to foot.

In a few moments the whistle and the shiver disappeared, and he found himself clear-headed, with the core of the poem lucid and distinct; he had only to write it down, and, lo and behold, the other lines hastened to crowd around it, obedient and strong. In a quarter of an hour the work was done: but this flash, this instantaneous process in which conception and birth succeeded one another almost like lightning and thunder, had been granted to Pasquale only five or six times in his life.

Quotation from:  The Fugitive. Primo Levi. Penguin 2011

We were warned!

A couple of weekends ago, our second blast of wintry weather was forecast. Here came the first of many snow flurries during the day.

The locals didn't think much to getting their feet wet, I watched as one of the local cats delicately picked its way across our driveway.

And this pigeon was forced to just sit it out.

Ah, but though from behind glass in the warm, it did look pretty.

 

It began to melt properly on day three, making it all look messy and tired again. Down the valley some sad looking large lumps of snow remained where children had built once proud looking snowmen.

All over town the early red rhododendrons dropped their petals. Now a couple of weeks on, they have all fully recovered and bushes are covered once more in blooms.

Snow Days

As we left for our Sunday brunch at the seaside it began to snow.

Angry looking storm clouds at sea, proved what the forecasters had predicted--there was a southerly storm brewing.

The white on the sand dunes is snow - proving snow to low levels was correct!

Deteriorating conditions on the way home.

And a poor view from the supermarket carpark, as we stocked up on frozen food - a good day to shop for frozen food no chance of it melting on the remaining way home.

Couldn't see across the valley as the snow and hail fell.

So we spent the afternoon indoors.

In front of the fire.

Day two dawned and all the snow had turned to ice - so we stayed home again. It's been sunny, but the white stuff is not melting very quickly. The steep icy hills make Dunedin particularly treacherous, the gritters grit but unlike the UK there's no salt in the grit so the roads remain icy.

The Struggle for Existence

There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly moustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterward and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents – punch-bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses, wine-glasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes, decanters, and cases – for, though cut glass was nothing new in the nineties, it was then especially busy reflecting the dazzling light of fashion from the Back Bay to the fastnesses of the Middle West.

After the wedding the punch-bowls were arranged on the sideboard with the big bowl in the centre; the glasses were set up in the china-closet; the candlesticks were put at both were put at both ends of things – and then the struggle for existence began. The bonbon dish lost its little handle and became a pin-try upstairs; a promenading cat knocked the little bowl off the sideboard, and the hired girl chipped the middle-sized one with the sugar-dish; then the wine-glasses succumbed to leg-fractures, and even dinner-glasses disappeared one by one like the ten little niggers, the last one ending up, scarred and maimed, as a toothbrush holder among other shabby genteels on the bathroom shelf. But by the time all this had happened the cut-glass age was over, anyway.

Quotation: The Cut Glass Bowl by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Penguin 2011

The Blind Man

He went away upstairs. She saw him mount into the darkness, unseeing and unchanging. He did not know that the lamps on the upper corridor were unlighted.He went on into the darkness with unchanging step. She heard him in the bath-room.

Pervin moved about almost unconsciously in his familiar surroundings, dark though everything was. He seemed to know the presence of objects before he touched them. It was a pleasure to him to rock thus through a world of things, carried on the flood in a sort of blood-prescience. He did not think much or trouble much. So long as he kept this sheer immediacy of blood-contact with the substantial world he was happy, he wanted no intervention of visual consciousness.

In this state there was a certain rich positivity, bordering sometimes on rapture. Life seemed to move in him like a tide lapping, lapping, and advancing, enveloping all things darkly. It was a pleasure to stretch forth the hand and meet the unseen object, clasp it, and possess it in pure contact. He did not try to remember, to visualise. He did not want to. The new way of consciousness substituted itself in him.

Quotation: The Blind Man by D.H. Lawrence. Penguin, 2011.

Stress of a Hunger Migration

It would seem, indeed, that these large and agile creatures living in the sea, must, to a large extent, forever remain unknown to us, since under water they are too nimble for nets, and it is only by such rare unlooked-for accidents that specimens can be obtained. In the case of Haploteuthis ferox, for instance, we are still altogether ignorant of its habitat, as ignorant as we are of the breeding-ground of the herring or the sea-ways of the salmon. And zoologists are altogether at a loss to account for its sudden appearance on our coast. Possibly it was the stress of a hunger migration that drove it hither out of the deep. But it will be, perhaps, better to avoid necessarily inconclusive discussion and to proceed at once with our narrative.

Mr Fison, torn by curiosity, began picking his way across the wave-worn rocks, and, finding the wet seaweed that covered them thickly rendered them extremely slippery, he stopped, removed his shoes and socks, and coiled his trousers above his knees. His object was, of course, merely to avoid stumbling into the rocky pools about him, and perhaps he was rather glad, as all men are, of an excuse to resume, even for a moment, the sensations of his boyhood.

Quotation from: The Sea Raiders by H.G. Wells. Penguin 2010

Volcanic Moon

A normal moon-rise over part of the University campus, before the ash plume from the eruption of the Chilean volcano reached New Zealand.

This hand-held shot of the moon taken the following evening, at about the same time, shows a distinctly red moon. Seen through some trees and through layers of atmosphere filled with ash and volcanic dust, it appeared red.

As the moon rose higher in the sky it lost its red colour.

Gulls and Chips

One calm sunny day at the beach, the gulls bothered some people for food. They sniff out free grub easily, even if the grub is safe inside a car with the windows up. Visual cues are important too, as it seems like you only have to pretend to eat and the action of hand to mouth will be enough to elicit gull curiosity.

However, in they are not usually fooled for long, and in this case have decided to settle on the railings.

Or on the beach.

There again there's always one or two who get overexcited and won't settle down for love or money.

Arguing

Pietro and Tommaso were always arguing.

At dawn the squeaking of their old bicycles and the sound of their voices – Pietro’s hollow and nasal, Tommaso’s husky and sometimes hoarse - were the only noises to be heard in the empty streets. They used to cycle to work together to the factory where they worked. From the other side of the shutter slats you could still feel the sleep and darkness weighing on the rooms. The muffled ringing of alarm clocks began a sporadic dialogue from one house to the next, becoming denser in the suburbs, until finally it merged, as town merged into country, into a back and forth of cock-a-doodle-doos.

Quotation: The Queen’s Necklace. Italo Calvino. Penguin. 2011

Knox Church Tree Ferns

My attention was caught by these mosses growing happily on some masonry high on the face of Knox Church. The light was just right. But as I moved the camera down to check that the photo I'd taken was OK, I saw below me, in the gap between the church wall and some steps, that someone had planted ...

a whole bunch of tree ferns. Obviosuly they were planted some time ago as they are now comfortably growing in this sheltered spot.

Direct Experience

Yet as Vashti saw the vast flank of the ship, stained with the exposure to the outer air, her horror of direct experience returned. It was not quite like the air-ship in the cinematophote. For one thing it smelt – not strongly or unpleasantly, but it did small, and with her eyes shut she should have known that a new thing was close to her.

...

Inside, her anxiety increased. The arrangements were old-fashioned and rough. There was even a female attendant, to whom she would have to announce her wants during the voyage. Of course a revolving platform ran the length of the boat, but she was expected to her cabin. Some cabins were better than others, and she did not get the best. She thought the attendant had been unfair, and spasms of rage shook her. The glass valves had closed, she could not go back. She saw, at the end of the vestibule, the lift in which he had ascended going quietly up and down, empty. Beneath those corridors of shining tiles were rooms, tier below tier, reaching far into the earth, and in each room there sat a human being, eating, or sleeping, or producing ideas. And buried deep in the hive was her own room. Vashti was afraid.

Quotation: E.M. Forster, The Machine StopsPenguin 2011 (originally published 1928).