Charles Conversation

Charles conversation was as flat as a street pavement, on which everybody’s ideas trudged past, in their workaday dress, provoking no emotion, no laughter, no dreams.

…

She was getting generally more irritated with him.  As he grew older he became grosser in his ways.  He used to whittle down the corks of the empty bottles during dessert.  He sucked his teeth after eating.  When he drank soup he made a gulping noise at every mouthful. And now that he had begun to put on weight, his puffy cheeks seemed to be pushing his eyes, which had always been small, right up into his temples.

Quotation from: Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert

Stopping Time

I too read in bed. In the long succession of beds in which I spent the nights of my childhood, in strange hotel rooms where the lights of passing cars swept eerily across the ceiling, in houses whose smells and sounds were unfamiliar to me, in summer cottages sticky with sea spray or where the mountain air was so dry that a steaming basin of eucalyptus water was placed by my side to help me breathe, the combination of bed and book granted me a sort of home which I knew I could go back to, night after night, under whichever skies. 

No one would call out and ask me to do this or that; my body needed nothing, immobile under the sheets. What took place, took place in the book, and I was the story’s teller. Life happened because I turned the pages. I don’t think I can remember a greater comprehensive joy than that of coming to the few last pages and setting the book down, so that the end would not take place until at least tomorrow, and sinking back into my pillow with the sense of having actually stopped time.

Quotation from: A History of Reading by Aberto Manguel, London, Penguin, 2014.

Autumn Swells

It's not surprising that St Clair often hosts the NZ national surf championships. 

It's an ideal location these were taken within about five minutes one sunny Saturday afternoon, from the esplanade with no effort on my part! 

The light was right, the surf was up.

Lots of waves.

A few gulls.

Many photographers, most with better cameras than my little pocket job.

Lots of surfers, waiting for the right wave.

which was caught... sometimes.

Beech Trees

The early settlers in this colony greatly missed—that is, those who had eyes for such things—the change of the seasons which marked the year in the land of their birth, and which helped so greatly to diversify their life in the old home. They noticed that the weather got colder as the Autumn waned and the Winter came on, and again as the days lengthened there was a gradual increase in warmth; but the erratic nature of our climate, which often gives us an Indian summer in mid-winter and then freezes us up in the middle or end of our Spring, took away from the sharpness of the impression, and Nature helped but little to deepen it.

Quotation from:  A New Zealand Naturalist’s Calendar: and notes by the wayside by George Malcolm Thomson. Dunedin, 1909

No doubt therefore this is why the early settlers planted European beech trees, seen here in full autumn glory. Compare with the New Zealand native Southern beech tree to the left of this picture.