Peggy Lee - Why don't you do right

The incomparable Miss Peggy Lee. Music so good it makes me weep

Delayed gratification

My house smells like a fruit-shop at the moment. Pears, nectarines, apples all sit around waiting to be eaten or transformed into jars of preserves. It's tedious work, cutting up windfalls and cooking them and bottling them, but it's all worth it in the depths of winter when I can open a jar and have gorgeous flavourful fruit for crumbles and pies and breakfast. Supermarket canned fruit is just blah compared to the real thing, and some of it, ridiculously, comes from China. I bought some pulped apples once (I was pushed for time and apples were out of season) and found out that all but one brand (Roxborough, I think) consisted of apples grown in New Zealand and Australia, shipped as pulp to China, canned there and shipped back again! Mad world.
   So tomorrow I take my vorpal sword in hand and turn on the music and work my way through the produce pile.

Acting

Been watching Downton Abbey tonight. Got to the part where Matthew returns from the war with a spinal injury that means that not only will he be paralysed, he won't be able to "be a proper husband" to his fiancee.  I wonder if actors get attached to the people they play. Do they feel annoyed or grieved when the scriptwriter decides to have something horrible happen to their character? Poor William has just died of lung failure, so I bet his actor was pissed off at being written out. That's the great thing about being a writer I guess, the God-like power to invent characters and have them suffer, die, love, give birth etc. Perhaps God is The Great Scriptwriter, just having a hell of a lot of fun playing about with us. I know this is not an original idea, Shakespeare had it way before me. Remember "Lost"? It was just like real life, a lot of dashing around the jungle for obscure reasons that turn out to be no reason at all, the whole thing was a load of rubbish - at the end they all "went into the light".What a swizz. If I'd paid money for that series, I'd want my money back. And left us with more questions than answers. I still don't know why the polar bear appeared. Why was it on the island? And what happened to all the other survivors of the plane crash that weren't Jack, Hurley, Kate, Sayeed, etc., the other nameless dudes on the beach who hung around out of focus in the background?  Was the series symbolic or metaphoric, or just an intriguing waste of time?
        And why am I still thinking about this?

Big time

Autumn approaches, with its treasure of fruit and vegetables. At the moment I have pears and nectarines, and a whopping great marrow. Usual story, you leave the garden alone for half an hour and the little zucchini turn into pods fit for bodysnatchers to hide in. The Washo tribe of California called the autumn Big time or Gumsaba, so I too think of autumn as Big time, it seems an appropriate name. (The Washo tribe were the first North American natives to be totally exterminated by the whites. There is a wonderful novel called "Rabbit boss" by Thomas Sanchez that details the demise of the tribe through several generations - I've been trying to get it for ages but it's out of print). Shakespeare called the season "the teeming autumn big with rich increase", and Keats described a "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness", so autumn has always been an inspiration.

      These tomatoes I bought at the market today are Oxheart tomatoes. I was not initially thinking of eating them, but painting them, they are so attractive. Part way through a coloured pencil drawing at the moment, but it's difficult to get real intensity of colour with pencil, for such flamboyant subjects as these. Once I've immortalized them in pencil and paint, I'm going to cook them down into passata. Yum.

Want to laugh?

Want a really good laugh? Go to a website called Happy place and look at Pics and posts, especially the smartass comments left on perfectly innocuous signs. Good to see that wit and imagination are not dead. You too can be chased by worms, (or snakes if you wear mittens) and have to fight off a drunken octopus.

Old books

I was lucky enough to find this old book on the second-hand bookbarrow at Little River railway station.
The title sounds like the worst kind of bodice-ripper, but it's a fascinating account of four women who travelled to the East and fell in love with it. I had read of Isabel Burton before and her obsessive love for her complex, difficult and remarkable husband, but the other three women, Jane Digby El-Mezrab, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery and Isabelle Eberhardt, no.
Aimee Dubucq de Rivery's story is the most riveting. A Creole girl from Martinique, she was Josephine Bonaparte's cousin and was brought up with her. Sent for some years to a convent in Nante for her education, she was kidnapped by Barbary Corsairs on her return home. Ironically, her beauty saved her virtue: the pirate captain realised that she was a special prize, and she was eventually sent as a gift to the Sultan of Constantinople by the King of Morocco. Entering the harem, never to be seen again by her family, she became the youngest wife of the Sultan, and mother of his heir, Mahmoud. Thus the Ottoman Empire became a little more open to the West, and a little less insular in its dealings with Europe.
And proof that fact is stranger and far more interesting than fiction.

The wilder shores of love - an old/new treasure

Pin it!

Having a great afternoon with Pinterest, a site that lets you "pin" your favourite images as you trawl around the web. You put together theme 'boards' so you can curate them and have everything in one place. It's a very visual site, great for when you see a stunning image and want to get back to it without scrolling through a whole site on a favourites tab. At present, it's run like a facebook site, and signing up is by invitation only. I don't know what sort of criteria they use for weeding out people who are shonky - I can imagine some would use it to put together all their favourite porno - but I seem to be safe enough to have made the grade. Although I have spent the last hour trawling Google Images for pictures of my favourite men. But all entirely decent and mostly above the waist, except for Slash, but then he is exceptional. It's fun to see how fast things get repinned by other people. At present the faves are the Nike of Samothrace and James MacAvoy! I have only three boards at the moment but I can see I will be adding to these.
       On a sad note, my cat Eddie had to be put to sleep on Friday. The tumour in his jaw was growing down his throat and he had lost weight, so I made the very hard decision to have him taken away while he was still himself, not some shivering ball of pain. I'm still unsure about which is the bravest action; to have a beloved animal put to sleep, or to let him go slowly in suffering. Did I not have the guts to see it through to the bitter end, or did I have guts in choosing to end his life peacefully on his behalf? It's particularly hard not to be able to discuss this with the patient - what would he have chosen to do if he had the power to make the decision? Emma is missing him, we both are. Every time I get up in the morning and open the door I still expect him to be there. He was such a good cat, a gentle gentleman. Bye, Eddie.

What I did in my holidays

Remember your first day back at school after the summer holidays? The first assignment you'd always be given was to write about what you did in your holidays. So predictable, just a lazy teacher's way of finding out a little about her/his new pupils lives and whether they could spell, punctuate, etc. I often wondered if I just made something up, such as "in my holidays I was abducted by aliens/woke up as an old lady/found a time machine and went back to a time when teachers didn't ask what I did in my holidays", but I was never brave enough.
Adults seem so dull to children. Every Sunday at Sunday school we had to sing "All things bright and beautiful". Even today I dislike that song, and I think of you, Miss Tooth (kid you not, this was her name) my Sunday school teacher. And at Christmas, it was always "Away in a manger", prompting visions of Baby Jesus hooning round the stable in a souped-up feeding trough on wheels.
Anyway, I had a great holiday. Even the car trouble was sorted, due to the skills of Simon from Little River Garage. Country mechanics are usually excellent, because they have to fix everything from lawn-mowers to sheep-trucks, so they get a lot of varied experience. Plus they have to be more ingenious, there's no parts warehouse just down the road, and if they don't run a good business word soon gets around in a small town.
Revisited some places I haven't been in years. Pics follow, hopefully.

                         Rudbeckias at Okuti Garden

Easterly fog rolling over the top at Otepatotu - looking down to Akaroa Harbour and Onawe

Filmy ferns at Otepatotu Scenic Reserve

The "ramparts" at Otepatotu

Birdlings Flat, looking down Kaitorete Spit

Looking the other way- these eroded volcanic cliffs mark the south-western end of Banks Peninsula

Lovely moody shot with Mt Bradley in the far left distance. Taken from inside a little brick hut built to store explosives at Kaituna Quarry, on the Little River Rail Trail.

Back again

Back at the lovely Okuti Valley again, in the housetruck. Had some car trouble on the way here, but the mechanics at Little River have taken her in hand and hopefully will fix it for nothing (yeah right). Walked back from Little River to Okuti, weather is great, really sunny, but cold at night. I have my trusty thermals with me to use as pyjamas. Nutmeg the dog is racing round like a mad thing, and pears are falling and possums are eating them at night. Went to the loo about four in the morning and came back, stood under the tree and heard crunch, crunch, munch from somewhere above me. Felt a few tremors today, one just over an hour ago at 4. something, so we rock on. Have to go and do the dishes now, so may write again tomorrow.

Pretty things

Woken up at 10 to 7 this morning by another smallish quake. We haven't had many lately, which is a little worrying as it makes a person feel as if  there's pressure building up somewhere that could go off nastily. I don't know whether its worse to have quakes or not to have them. It's a little like waiting for the other shoe to drop. It's a holiday today too, and we seem to get shakes on holidays - Boxing Day, Christmas Eve - so perhaps this is the start of a rocky day, I hope not.
Went to the Shabby Market yesterday and bought these doilies and tray covers to add to my collection. I think the one with the blue flowers  may be from the 1930's or 40's, judging by the style of the embroidery (trellis was a popular motif then - the original wallpaper (1938) in my bathroom had trellis and pink roses on a brown background) and the fabric, which looks like sugar-bag material. The linen that sugar-bags were made of was densely woven, so made a good-quality material when washed and bleached. I hate to think that these things might get thrown away - some anonymous woman, now probably dead and gone, spent time and effort to produce something that would be pretty and cheerful, maybe because her own life was anything but.

Marmite stocks may run dry!

Yesterday was a bit shitty. I've got two sick cats at the moment. Eddie has an inoperable tumour on his jaw, but he's keeping well, with the vet's help. The other day he killed and ate a bird, then shinnied up the cabbage tree, so he's still enjoying life. Emma has chronic recurring rhinotracheitis, which means she sneezes snot everywhere, and is not her usual naughty self. I had trouble getting appointments at the vet, probably because there's a holiday weekend coming up. (Feb. 6 is Waitangi Day, for those of you who aren't NZers, a day when we celebrate being NZers.)
Driving back home, I annoyed another driver (Mr Turdface Arsehole) by not waiting far enough to the right on an uncontrolled right hand turn. He actually had to slow down. How awful. He yelled at me and I flipped him the fingers, which I think surprised him because he thought I was a nice old lady. Hah! I had a sudden urge to smash his windscreen in with my car lock. If only he'd stopped I would have enjoyed taking him and his car to pieces. This is road rage, folks, like a sweet wild rush of battery acid to the brain.
Well. Back to being a nice middle-aged lady, I found a website called pinterest, which lets you make a virtual pinboard of favourite stuff that you find surfing the net. This may go big, may be another Facebook, but I can't see it appealing to straight men, so perhaps not.
Looked at the news headlines on MSN this morning. 73 people are dead in Egypt following a soccer riot, but the bigger headline was "Marmite stocks may run dry" following the closing of the local Sanitarium factory. Gotta love parochialism. We concentrate (pun alert - Marmite is a concentrate of something, God knows what) on the really important stuff in NZ.
I don't like Marmite. I once went on a field trip to the factory and saw how it used to be made. Imagine great black blobs of the stuff extruded through an anus-like construction in the factory ceiling, collected in buckets by eager acolytes. Health foods they used to be called. Read "The road to Wellville" by T.C. Boyle for a fictional account of John Kellogg, the founder of the health food industry - all a bit twisted and obsessional, and scary too - to think that people used to inhale radium for their health. Makes me wonder how present day "health" programmes will be viewed in future.