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Imogen & Jeremy in NZ - week four

Friday Oct 10th - Jeremy proposed a walk. Conversation went like this:
Me: How long a walk? I'm not going on a Harding route march.
J: It's a bit of a drive, but it's only a short walk.
Me: Ok, as long as you promise it's a short walk.
J: The views are spectacular.

It transpired he wanted to climb the Monument (711 m) behind Purau.
It is not a short walk. it is not a walk. It is a slog followed by a scramble, followed by a rock climb.
However, he was correct in one thing, the views are spectacular, though at intervals I had to point out that when you've seen one view you've seen them all.
However, felt extremely virtuous afterwrds, if footsore.
 
Saturday Oct 11th - A fine breakfast with Angela Williams, who like everyone else has succumbed to the allure of the countryside and now has a splendid pad at Port Robinson with views of the Kaikouras, sea etc.

Then on to Coles winery at Omihi - the realisation of their dream, or at least of Graeme's dream. Variously known as Successors, Crater Rim and les Volcanes, they have leveraged on the great skill of Theo as a winemaker, to produce several award-winning wines. We admired the vast winemaking shed,  which would double as baronial hall if necessary, with its great army of vats and barrels,lined up like a shined-up  tank regiment from the First World War.

We obediently tramped the bounds of the farmlet, passing rare brooms, dead sheep, ploughed fields and newly planted vines. We marvelled at the works done, and the works yet to do, and were rewarded with a splendid meal and several bottles of the choice wines - most of them way above our pay grade.

We wonder where our friends get all the energy to develop these farms and then maintain them. The mere thought of all that ploughing, planting and harvesting makes us flop exhausted into our armchairs, glass of not-very-expensive wine to hand. 

In the photo you can see I am cradling two bottles of Crater Rim wine with ill-concealed lust.

I think we will drink them to celebrate Jack's christening - it needs an occasion of such significance.

Nice website: Crater Rim

Lana showed us where the beech groves are planted - a lovely throw-back to her Ukrainian roots. It will all be so lovely in five years it makes one weep.

Sunday Oct 12th - After lavish and leisurely breakfast at Omihi Rise, we ooze on to the choir lunch at Bernard & Shirley Richards, who alone of all our friends, have DOWNSIZED. They have managed to find enough wall space for their fine collection of paintings, most by or of Ber himself.

Some of the pictures are visible in this photo. The reverend father himself is on the left of the photo next to his outrageously naughty son, Philip. You will notice  that I am holding a tea-cup.  This is the only photo on record of me doing that.

n the evening to dinner with the family at Cafe Valentino to re-celebrate Mary's 80th - just in case we had not celebrated it enough. The event consisted of eating and drinking and talking and jokes. So  that was a bit of a novelty.

Monday Oct 13th - A merry day buying suitcases to take the remnants of our book collection back home. It transpires that all the precious ones, and the pictures, and the fine wine from Omihi (see above) will fit within our baggage allowance. Then after buying quantities of Merino silk knitwear to see us through the winter from the Weft factory shop (never be cold or uncuddly again) on to Isabelle Teresa & Mark's pad in Sydenham. They, who were the coolest of the cool back in London - gigs, events, rock concerts, alternative theatre, raves, extreme parties - are renovating a cottage and have built a water feature. The logical equivalent of everybody else's lifestyle block.

Imogen & Jeremy in NZ - Mary's 80th birthday

 Tuesday 7th Oct - all the immediate family who are in Australasia foregather - sixteen in all, spread over two houses. A feast of lamb ribs is prepared, in the giant barbeque oven, a terrifying object which everyone seems to possess, like an Italian outdoor pizza oven, only not.

Speeches are made, by the four progeny and some of the partners, of varying degrees of length and sobriety. We have the videos, but these are suppressed.

The cake was cut.
Jeremy & Emma decide to sing Tom Lehrer's Irish Ballad, for reasons best known to themselves. This happy tale of simple folk is about the girl who knocked off her family one by one.

Her mother she could never stand,
Sing rickety-tickety-tin,
Her mother she cold never stand,
And so a cyanide soup she planned.
The mother died with a spoon in her hand,
And her face in a hideous grin, a grin,
Her face in a hideous grin.

My comment was:-  Family values.
Then we sang God Save the Queen, changing the words to suit the occasion, and Jeremy attempted Rule Britannia in German.

A very good time was had by all.

Imogen & Jeremy in New Zealand - week three

Saturday 4th Oct - riotous afternoon/evening at the Paseas, with Stephen & Lindley, during which we did not quite empty Doug's cellar, but according to him, broke all previous records. Just exactly as we had done every week on the famous Thursdays at Elm Grove. And what wines (those that can be remembered.)

As the evening progressed, and the wine penetrated the interstices, the years fell away, and we are just as we were, regardless of the illnesses, worries, disappointments and triumphs that have intervened.

Sunday 5th Oct - over to Lake Kaniere where Emma & Ian have their bach. So called, as it turns out to be larger, pleasanter and more comfortable than most people's first houses. Such are the deep rewards of success.  It is surrounded by bush through which the tuis are currently scooting and surfing. The fat native pigeons flap from tree to tree with divine unconcern. The air is heavy with silence punctuated by birdsong of ineffable beauty.
In the evening we walk out in sharp darkness to see the glowworms. There are only 3 glow worms according to Emma, but we seem to see more. It could be the romance of the moment, or possibly the wine.

A small disaster caused by my knocking a glass of wine over my computer, which blinked, whimpered and died. Taken apart it smells quite amazing. Perhaps one should market scented notebooks.

Monday 6th Oct - A glorious day. Ian takes us for a jet boat tour of Lake Kaniere.  This consists of very fast, very cold, very noisy spurts across the water, during which every morsel of waterfowl rises to its wings and flees, punctuated by idyllic passgaes where Ian skillfully steers the boat into a little cove and we explore the bush in perfect silence and tranquillity.  He introduces us to the Dorothy Falls, which are quite lovely.

Imogen & Jeremy in New Zealand - week two

Tuesday 30th September
Ok so now I'm starting to lose track of whom we've seen when and whom we have to see next.
Spent a delightfully carousing night with Stephen Hawes and Lindley Turnbull out at their 5 acre plot at Greendale. Stephen strides around his land with his dog, like an eighteenth century squire, monarch of all he surveys, while Lindley discourses on the vertical history of the High country, and takes me on a guided tour of her art collection - spread out over the many walls of the extensive house. We reminisce about the many splendid people-and-ideas evenings (now gone) spent with the most interesting people in Christchurch crammed into her old kitchen, approximately a quarter the size of the new.

Fabulous views tho'. There's always a compensation.

Wednesday 1st Oct
The much-dreaded visit to our house at Elm Grove turned out to be quite cheering. Our wonderful wilderness of a garden was still enticingly wild, but in a managed way, as if it was supposed to look like that rather than simply escaping without a comb.  You can still wander into crannies and nooks, but each corner brings a delight rather than a random sampling of weeds.
Stormshadow had grown even leaner (were that possible) and has mellowed alarmingly (evidence).
Inside the house was a succession of rooms of books, journals, magazines, posters, pictures and papers, in shelves, and piles and boxes and folders, or just plain lying about. My father proudly showed us his new acreage of bookshelf, a complete cabin of shelves around his computer, effectively a room within a room, slightly like the Holy House at Loreto.
Our books were all neatly boxed up in the garage. We decided to get them out to decided what to keep, what to ship and what to throw away. Behind 20 neat and modest cartons of Cressida and Jon's stuff, were our boxes of books. There were 65 of them, some so large two of us staggered to lift them. They were labelled Misc Novels. Maths. Maths. Maths, Misc Novels. or just plain Misc Depressingly, as we spread out our laboriously collected library, every book with its tiny scrap of personal history, the keep and ship piles stayed tiny and the throw away piles teetered all over the room.  A mountain of books, amid the mountain range that already inhabits the house.
I did however find my small collection of valuable books, and my precious letter from Tolkien, and we have found a few pleasant works of art which will look good in our John-Lewis-catalogue living room.
My father, incidentally, has 60 coffee mugs on mugs trees, no washing machine, and likes to hang decorative tea-towels on his windows. This is a new take on the curtain.

Thursday Oct 2nd  - The tidal wave of family is building up and threatens to break over our heads, so we take a deep breath.

In the evening I talk to the Christchurch Shakespeare Society (average age 78). They are expecting me to talk about Twelfth Night the Musical, but instead they get a crash course on the directorial challenges of Measure for Measure, which I suspect have not been keeping them awake at night. Before I start my talk, we have selected readings from and about the Bard by members. It's nice to know that the old boy is so reverenced. I am more robust in my admiration.

Friday Oct 3rd - A gruelling morning working on the NZ library, at the end of which we have found all the precious or valuable books, and formed a heap with the pictures we wish to salvage. Then to lunch with the Chackos in their dacha, which now has 10 bedrooms spread among 3 buildings, and will shortly house but one couple.  However at the precise time of  lunching, my goddaughter Maria was there, with her children and sister Hannah and her baby, so it was a scene of family jollity and harmony, of the kind I suspect the Chackos planned on when they built the estate all those years ago.

In the evening, the 21st birthday party of Jeremy's nephew Luke. A classic New  Zealand social event of the type I thought had died out. Including the drunken stories of adolescent misdemeanour, cute photographs of the subject when a cute two year old,  doing something cute, and the yard arm of beer which must be consumed. I guess they moved onto the deserted dance floor after we beat our retreat.

Imogen & Jeremy in New Zealand - week one

September 27th - The direct flight to NZ is never as fearsome as you think. Jeremy doesn't agree with this, and groans before, during and after, which is at a slightly higher pitch than snoring, but in other ways identical. I quite relish the chance to watch endless movies I would never stoop to at home (Hairspray, for example) and get fed at regular intervals while not being required to move AT ALL. I got to hear Far from the Madding Crowd two and a half times, because I kept falling asleep during and waking up to find someone had died or come back from the dead, and I'd missed how. This made quite a suitable companion for the groaning zombie in the next seat.

Once we have arrived, the month long party starts. Do people in New Zealand ever take a break from going round to each others' places, pouring drinks and cracking jokes. Oh yes, that's right, they go out into the garden, the boat or up into the mountains, and bring back potatoes/wild pork/salmon.

Sunday 28th - first visit to St Michael's after seven years.  Such a strange experience  - it is so familiar, the site of  so many significant moments of my life, and yet, now, it is the  domain of strangers.  Christchurch is the same story writ large. So many places which are vaguely as they were - and yet look like Mars.

It all looks a bit like Mars - or the Truman show - a city imagined by someone who had heard about Europe and America, but wasn't quite sure. So you get fine buildings in every style in the catalogue stacked next to each other, each with its lovely garden and well-maintained fence, freshly each painted and trim and spacious, but creating no sense of a whole.

Went out to visit Jeremy's brother Philip at his estate some miles outside Chch and inspected the tractor, harrow, cultivator, three boats etc. Surveyed fine swimming pool, acres of lucerne and walnuts and marvelled at the energy required to keep up such a holding. Kay confessed that mowing the lawn takes an hour every 5 days. This on top of a demanding job as principal of a very large school (him) and main salesperson for their business-on-the-side (her).  Although we like to think we are hard workers, the thought of so much work, and on such a scale, makes us need to sit down.

Monday 29th - Lunch at the Arts Centre with Sharon Mazer, as gracious as ever, which now sports a new installation, a reflecting pool. but there is certainly something missing, because I remember sitting under a tree in the courtyard when it was the English Department, with my supervisor having a very intense conversation, and the tree is not there. Sharon tells me that said supervisor plagiarises his students' work. He never plagiarised mine, which is not very flattering. Unless of course he did, and I never realised it?

Walked around the Botanic Gardens talking of death and decay amid the spring flowers.

Michaelmass Preaching at St Mike's in the presence of the new Bishop, Victoria Matthews. NB. Victoria.

It was as if everyone was there that I've ever known, and and some I had not met but wished I had before : Don Binney the painter, a soul-mate if ever there was one.

Lovely Michaelmas poem from Evan Lewis here:

Download subject_nothing_in_particular.doc

Sermon text here:

Why angels are not the derivatives of God.

Download Derivatives.doc

 

Imogen & Jeremy in New Zealand - week zero

Week zero -

• 16 boxes of cat food
• 4 bags of cat litter
• 6 packs of Scented Good Kitty Litter tray liners
• 8 credit card companies warned
• a hundred assorted gowns and cloaks moved out of spare room
• five kilograms of book laid in for the journey
• builder primed
• two pages of instructions issued to house-sitter

Sean, my manager, urged me to go home early from work, as I must have plenty to do. I replied that there really was no need, as we were rather well organised. Rather too well organised, as J is wandering round the house the morning of our departure trying to find things to do; rather like the smaller (nicer) cat who is wandering round the house trying to get her tiny feline brain around what is happening.