I love Wellington....BUT.....

in a southerly gale it is not the nicest place to be! I finally made it home after a long weekend working in Wellington and then collapsed with the flu - that's why it has been so quiet in my neck of the woods.

But I was going to sing the praises of Wellington not moan about the weather or the flu! It has to be the best capital city in the world - compact, relatively uncrowded, a sane city that manages to create living spaces that constantly surprise and delight me. Heaps of places to eat decent food, drink excellent coffee and sleep undisturbed - all for prices that you Europeans would just not believe! And then there are the theatres and the cinemas and of course Te Papa......

I love Wellington, I just wish it wasn't built on a fault line, I wish I hadn't experienced an earthquake there, I wish the airport didn't get closed by fog and leave me stranded for the night, I wish there was a bit of land between it and Antarctica - but then if my wishes came true it just wouldn't be Wellington!

England, where my heart lies....

When I wrote yesterday that it was in England that my heart lies, like Paul Simon I was referring to a person not the place. Yet it set me thinking..... I am always disappointed when I make that long trip 'home' that I am not overcome with patriotic enthusiasm for the country in which I was born and in which I lived for so long. Every time I imagine that I will feel a rush of pleasure as I fly over London and glimpse the Sussex downlands that were the constant background to my childhood. And every time I am disappointed - sometimes it's raining, sometimes it's smoggy, sometimes I am too exhausted to feel anything but relief to be getting off the plane. Always, before I am ready, I am fighting crowds, gulping pollution, drowning in the endless traffic jam that is the M25.

Instead the enthusiasm comes when I make it back here. The first breath of New Zealand air, the first glimpse of the splendour of the Marlborough Sounds or the turquoise waters of Tasman Bay they remind me of why I made that crazy journey into the unknown in 1992.

The quality of the TV may irritate me, the lack of a decent newspaper may send me daily to The Guardian Unlimited but in New Zealand generally, and in Nelson specifically, I have found my turangawaewae, my 'place to stand'. It is in New Zealand that I come alive. I have no regrets and yet ... and yet ... eventually there will be yet another corner of a foreign field that is forever England. I may never live in England again but every visit reminds me that I carry it with me wherever I go.

Its chalkland built my bones, its rain watered me, its culture moulded me, its seas soothed me, its rivers whispered to me, the fruits of its earth nurtured my body..... and the quiet beauty that lurks in wooded canals and tilled fields and ancient hedgerows and cropped gentle hills nurtured my soul. Without its reflection I would no longer be me.

Some Days You Have To Laugh

Spending most of the day gazing "...beyond the rain-drenched streets, to England where my heart lies..." and drowning in images of people losing their homes in Wellington, and their lives in Lebanon.....when peering expectantly around my office door is this huge smile on this tiny person and suddenly you just have to laugh.......

On Geese and pigeons

Had to finish the day with these wonderful images of my grandson Jude. Geese must seem such strange scary things when they are the same size as you.....imagine walking round the corner and being met by a six foot goose (well ok 5 foot in my case!).....I'd run a mile....but Jude, he just watches and thinks and wonders.....and much later on when you are least expecting it, he suddenly remembers and says "geese"....and then much later looking at a picture in a book that really looks nothing like the geese he saw, he remembers again. That innate ability to transform a two dimensional visual representation into a lived experience never ceases to amaze me - is that why we have such big brains? A guy on the radio this morning was suggesting that they were so big in order to allow us to pass on our social culture, so may be it is related!
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And one last random thought for the day - researchers are pretty confident that they have proved that pigeons navigate by their sense of smell, not by following magnetic patterns. An experiment in the UK (I think) took two sets of 24 pigeons, set one had the olfactory nerve cut and the other set, the nerve that connects to the magnetic sensing part of the brain. Let loose thirty miles from home, all but one of the ones with no magnetic sense made their way home but only 4 of the non-smellers managed it - all the others are still flapping around lost somewhere in the North of England - poor things! (Check out The Observer science column for the real article!)
OK - that's all for today! Off to make jewelry now....

Baked Beans

What is it about Baked Beans.........??? Apparently 1.2 million cans are eaten in the UK every week (that's the baked beans in the cans I think not the cans themselves!!!) and the British are the most rapacious devourers of baked beans in the world (I read that somewhere but can't remember where!) And yet, if you mention them, people snigger! I have to admit that after seeing Blazing Saddles I couldn't face a plate of baked beans for some time and I even now I can't look at a tin without thinking of Mel Brooks! But they taste SO GOOD! Heinz have even spent good research money on developing the recipe for perfect Beanz on toast - truly! The BBC said so, so it must be true!

So what was I saying: Ah yes.....How come if you admit to liking sushi or wasabi people nod in agreement and delight in telling you of their latest discoveries but say baked beans instead and they just blank you! Or at least move out of the firing line, so to speak, pretty fast! Ah well I shall have to just remain a closet baked bean lover until the retro movement gets to food as well as clothes!.

By way of explanation

So having finally sorted out the basics - I'm a bit of a latecomer to blogging! I am ready to lay out a few ideas here - There are a few topics that seem to occupy my mind at the moment:
- being a grandmother when I still feel like a teenager,
- education - something that has taken most of my working life,
- my spiritual relationship with the world around me, seen and unseen,
- what love is or perhaps what it means to love and be loved,
- where creativity springs from
- what time is or perhaps what it means.....

You can see I like the BIG questions(!) and while I don't suppose I have any real answers, I love to explore the questions......
Most of this blog will be journeys and adventures into the potential of these questions and others that will no doubt arise.....

I am reading "Are Angels OK?" (see the sidebar for a link to a related site) at the moment, by Bill Manhire and Paul Callaghan - unlikely that most of you non-kiwis will have heard of them or of the book but it is the result of bringing 10 writers and poets together with 10 scientists and seeing what transpires......Some very interesting questions get explored! So I will be writing some about that later......

In the meantime, a perfectly normal thing for a grandmother to be doing - posting a photo of her only grandson, so that the whole world can share how cute he is! It always fascinates me to look deeply at a photo of such a young face and wonder at the adult lurking within.....who is he?

So Here We Are...

This my first posting and the random thoughts are currently too random to process.