Planning dinner
Shopping
Clearing magazines from coffee table
Thinking stuff to amuse humans
Ain’t Easy Being a Cat
Lunch on the Way
Thames Junction Hotel. A historic building established in 1869, the beginning of the gold mining days. This was the days of steam. The days and nights of the gold stampers, noise, ground vibrating, and at midnight Saturday the citizens would wake. Silence. The Lord’s day. All this 20 years before the advent of electricity, but, at the bottom of the South Island.
Dec 2019, behind me, young women are meeting for an end of year work lunch. Platforms have been recently extended onto the road. A couple of fewer parking spots, but, with the advent of the electric bike…
Head up. Shoulders back
The mysteries of supermarket shelves unravelled. Tomorrow…
Prescription, name forgotten, the computer knows it all. Free, long live Public Health. Oops, thought that said pubic for a minute.
Find my car. Look casual, keep looking. It’s grey. On bright days a different colour grey. Look casual.
Home Made
Gluten flour, sunflower seeds, sweat and tears kneading. 37 minutes at 180° Celsius.
A walkway runs beside our petanque terrain.
This time of year we meet visitors, German, Dutch, French.
Two people from Toulouse stopped and watched our play. Accepted the invitation to join in.
Serious players in the thought and precision of each shot.
The Playground is Empty
A child’s sock. A shirt. The river to myself today. 23°.
The Signal Box Still Stands
Restored, remembered, my grandfather worked her. My mother the youngest of seven daughters.
Woe is Me
My grandfather has frittered away my inheritance. From a wealthy family in England to Coromandel NZ he tried his hand at gold mining. And so it came to pass I am born into the working class. Forget the commiserations, just send the money.
Petanque
Two games lost, laughter and sun.
Pohutukawa tree in bloom. Summer.
Sweat and battery power cyclists, dogs tugging on leads, herons nesting above us. A light plane circles above, circuit training.
And the fish are jumping. Fish and chips for lunch down at the wharf.
Early summer. Thames NZ.
Barefoot in the Sun
Barefoot in the Sun
Manuka rod, string, a hook on the end with
a scrappy morsel of meat and barefoot to
the wharf where it was forbidden to play.
Cranes, grown men and language.
Fish, or no fish, who cares, it is Saturday.
Toys and novelty unlimited by a kid’s imagination.
The stuff adults slip their way
who remember their own childhood.
In patched trousers back up the hill.
And the Lyttleton hills in my grandad’s day
Are just as steep as today when I visit,
Ponder, track his footsteps.
The French connection. Pierre Feron of Akaroa,
Lyttleton, then to Christchurch. My mum
Youngest of seven daughters.
“Your grandad did not trust the bank.
Buried his savings in the back garden.”
At eleven years, able to work, he signed up to
New Zealand railways. Kind and grandfatherly,
“Come here lad.”, the Station Master –
Pierre Feron passes matriculation.
Promotion and eventually
A signal box operator.
Maybe, just maybe, some loose change
In a block of weeds in Avonside
Buried in the debris, house gone,
tremblement de terre.
David in Pen and Pics 