Mt Cavendish views

Went for a little trip yesterday up the Gondola to the top of Mount Cavendish. (This is in the Port Hills above Christchurch for readers overseas). I've got an annual pass, and haven't used it very much, so I'll try and get my money's worth, as they say. The picture above is the view north over the Christchurch estuary towards Pegasus Bay and the foothills of the Southern Alps, obscured by the haze.

Looking down on the other side of the hill of the Port of Lyttelton and over to Diamond Harbour. This harbour is the flooded caldera of an old volcano, about 12 million years old (quite new!) now collapsed and eroded. Another eruption of this hotspot created another harbour, Akaroa Harbour, to the south east of this, about 8 million years ago. We have interesting geology here in New Zealand. Being geologically young means you can see a lot of  different landforms; glaciated landscapes, young fold mountains, karst, and volcanoes both active and extinct. This particular volcano was really a series of volcanic eruptions which built up a mountain about the height that Mt Etna is today. It was huge, and was originally an island out at sea. The remains of the volcanoes were tied onto the mainland by huge shingle fans from the rapidly eroding Southern alps, flushed down into the sea by powerful river systems. These shingle beds created the Canterbury Plains.

View to the south east - the landscape is very dry at this time of year. The bluffs on the left are part of the crater rim. A walking track runs along the tops, fabulous views but can be very cold and exposed. The climate up here is really almost sub-alpine, harsh extremes of cold, wet, dry, hot and windy. And sometimes all in one day.

View to the south-west. The outcrops on the far right are known as the Seven Sleepers. Quail Island in the middle distance was a quarantine station for leprosy sufferers in the bad old days before drugs made leprosy less of a death sentence. It also acted as a quarantine station for dogs and horses taken by Scott and Shackelton on their various expeditions to the Antarctic.

Recommended reads/views

Autumn advances little by little here in NZ. The rudbeckias are out;

the morning sun is a little more subdued and sometimes the air is foggy, but a cat can still enjoy sitting out in the wicker chair. The evenings are drawing in, and there's only a few weeks to go before the end of daylight saving. I've had a little blogging break while I've been on holiday, reading and viewing loads of things. My picks:

Roz Chast is a cartoonist with the New Yorker magazine. This is her tribute and record of her parents' decline into old age and death. It sounds depressing, but is often funny and thoughtful, and those of us who have had to deal with aging parents will recognise many of Roz' observations and concerns. It had special resonance for me, as Roz is also an only child of parents who grew up in the Depression, when talking about unpleasant things was considered inappropriate (as we would say today). My mother used to use this very phrase whenever something came up that she was not comfortable discussing.

I also watched 'Daniel Deronda" again. Loved everything about it, the acting, the story, the costumes. Hugh Bonneville plays what has to be one of the nastiest pieces of work in fiction. And gorgeous Hugh Dancy has the more difficult part of playing a good and earnest young man, and carries it off convincingly. 

I've wanted to see this movie for a long time, having heard a great deal about it. It's rather stagey in some parts, and you sometimes wish they'd turn the background music off, but that was the fashion in movie-making at the time (1963). Odd to see Burt Lancaster as a Sicilian count too, but he carries it off well. Claudia Cardinale is stunning, you just know that she is going to be the cat among the pigeons of the fading aristocracy that she will marry into. She is an interesting person. Born in Tunisia of Sicilian parents, her mother tongues were French, Siciliano and Tunisian Arabic. She only learned Italian after she had begun making movies in Italy, and her voice was dubbed in her first few  movies because it was considered too hoarse  and deep for an actress. 

And the costumes! Worth seeing the movie if only for these!

Little man, you've had a busy day

Thomas and Jiro on the alert

Busy day for the baby boy today. Thomas has accepted him, albeit grudgingly, and they've been chasing around the garden, disputing ownership of the deckchair. Jiro spent a lot of time right at the top of the pear tree, observing the birds coming in to feast on the pears. Fascinating! He was also introduced to the joys of gardening, the wonder of watering, and had a brief contretemps with the neighbours' cat. He's sitting on my lap right now, observing the cursor and the appearance of the string of words. I've been making plum sauce and bottling pears, plums and nectarines; the fruit garden has been very good this year, unlike the vegetables which have suffered from a slow, cold start to summer, followed by a drought. I'm on holiday for the next two weeks, hope to get all the fruit squirrelled away and the winter veges started.

New cat!

Here is my new cat! I've finally succumbed to temptation and got this little black boy from the SPCA. His name is Jiro, after Jiro in "The wind rises" an animated film by Hayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli) which I was watching the night before I collected him. The name Jiro appropriately means 'second son' in Japanese. Thomas is not very happy with having Jiro here at the moment, but they did have a little meet and greet today at which both cats were well behaved. Jiro is super smoochy and energetic, a real cutie, needless to say he picked me, throwing himself at me against the bars of his cage. He's about 3 or 4 months old, older than most of the kittens there, like Thomas was, and like Thomas, was found abandoned. He was roaming around a shopping mall carpark, and the SPCA advertised for his owners but no one came forward. 
  It's quite a lot of work having two cats. There's the older one to reassure and fuss over and play with and the younger one to entertain and change poopie trays for. Jiro is fully house trained, thank goodness, and knows what the tray is for, although he did pee in the bath on my shower mat, but at least that's easy to clean.
  So, not much is getting done housework and garden-wise. I've got fruit to bottle and plum sauce to make, but.... it's more fun playing with the little boy.

I'm on a break

I'm going to take a break from blogging for a little while, a couple of weeks to a month probably. I'm starting to repeat myself, I find, and am not very interesting at the moment, feeling very tired and lacklustre, due to some health problem that has to be sorted out. I've consulted Doctor Google and come up with anaemia, diabetes 2, bladder infection and worse, of course. Thankfully, I probably do not have bilharzia, yaws or kuru. Hopefully will see a real doctor tomorrow and get some answers. It will probably come down to somatized depression ie. it's all in my head. Still, it should be investigated.
  I'll leave you with some pictures from my very first visit to Italy in 2002, when I walked part of Tuscany with a group. These are photos of photos, taken with an old film camera (digital cameras were beyond my budget then), so they look a little olde-worlde.

Church of San Giovanni Battista, Pernina. I had not noted the name or location of this church, so searched for it last night on Google Maps. I knew it was near the Villa Cetinale, so googled Cetinale and google came up with the precise site I was looking for. Very synchronicitous. We had lunch here, overlooking Siena in the distance.

The front of the church - pure Piero della Francesca. The little dove didn't move away, but sat there quite happily.

Tower of the church. Built originally in 1074.

Lunch spot in front of old buildings next to the church

A view from the Romitorio or Hermitage, a little further on. It was  inhabited by monks whose vocation was to tend the dying...

...after the dying had crawled up these steps in penance. (The hermitage can just be seen on the hill). If you weren't dying at the bottom of the steps, you'd be pretty near it when you got to the top.

A back view of the famous Villa Cetinale, the gardens built on a strong axial plan that embraces the steps up to the Romitorio. I think it was used as the location for the movie "Up at the villa".

       Yes, I would like to go to Italy again.

"Big with rich increase"

It's been really hot the last week, a couple of days in the 30C range. Everything has dried up in the garden, although the lawn is still fairly green. I've experimented with not mowing it this year, and it seems to have kept fresher looking, although there's quite a lot of seed heads from the grasses. The pears are starting to fall, and I've had some plums too, so it's the start of the silly season, when lots of bottling and preserving goes on. I love having my own fruit in the middle of winter, in pies and crumbles, so I don't begrudge the time too much.

And of course, the zucchini have become marrows, just as I knew they would! It's a great year for zucchini, and everyone who has a garden has more than they know what to do with. You can't give the wretched things away. I'll probably cut these into cubes, blanch them and freeze them for ekeing out winter casseroles.

With the hot weather, we've had some grass fires here in Canterbury, and just yesterday some homes were burned down on the western outskirts of the city. Nothing like the Australian bushfires, but quite scary and close to  the suburbs. Terrible for the people; there was nothing they could do but run, the wind was gale-force and the fire was racing away.

Tomorrow is Waitangi Day, our equivalent of Fourth of July or Australia Day, commemorating the signing between Maori and the British Crown of a treaty that has ever since been the source of huge controversy, which it would take pages of blog to tell you about. Anyway, the weather is supposed to be cooler tomorrow, so I may make some spicy plum sauce with the first gathering of the plums.

Summer roses

These are Perle d'Or, Whisky and Princess Margarethe, with jasmine. Somehow the scent of jasmine seems to accentuate the scent of the roses and vice-versa.
  Having strange weather here, very humid and cloudy, but without rain, which we really need. I don't like humidity, it makes me feel as if I am ill and feverish, bathed in sweat at the slightest exertion; I prefer dry cold or dry heat. Not much we can do about it though. Tomorrow there is a street party, down at the nearby park - it will probably rain then!
  Reading George Eliot's first published work, the compilation of three novellas known collectively as 'Scenes of clerical life". I'm quite enjoying the stories. Also reading a book called "The adventures of Henry Thoreau" by Michael Sims, a biographical work which looks at what Henry did before he went to live at Walden Pond and wrote his famous book. He was an oddball, no doubt about it, and many of his non-Transcendentalist neighbours thought him mighty peculiar. Today he'd be diagnosed as autistic or with Asperger's syndrome no doubt, and have his brilliant peculiarity medicated away. 
    It seems that each age has a puritanism particular to itself;  witness the furore over Mr Cumberbatch's gaffe with 'coloured people' when he should have said 'people of colour'. So many things are now offensive to so many people, that we dare not say anything anymore, even if well-intentioned. Sigh.