put a fork in me

...'cause I'm done.

First, a roundup of the Year of the Sock, officially "done" except for the uber-socks, which are little more than a half-centimetre, but they'll keep.

Total Socks - 8 pairs. The first, and monumental, were for me, because that's what you do with your trial stuff on which you make all the mistakes. The second, with the weird and pointy toe (okay, so not all the mistakes were just on the first pair), currently residing on the feet of my dad in England. Third made their way to Deep River, Ontario, to their new owner Rach. Fourth, uh...a yarn I didn't like in the ball but knitted up cute, winged their way to Angela's chilly Minnesota toes. The fifth, all in blue, are now in China with school principal Georgina, who doesn't have central heating. Number Six went to Andrew, who can totally pull off the bizarre and ugly colour scheme and who is so far into the cool stratosphere that being linked to from somewhere so mundane as this will damage his rep, well, irreparably. And seven and eight, the cably goodness of the possum/merino toasties, a sort of bridge between socks and slippers, back to England on the parental tootsies.

Total slippers: 9, I'm pretty sure. Most made from the super-bargain yarn I dyed with food colouring. Serena, in New York, received the first pair, followed by a huge green pair for Chris, the best things about which were that they were totally free (from donated yarn) and felted beeyoutifully. Unbelievably, May saw the first pair of the five family Christmas slippers, again for Rach in snowy Ontario. Four more for her family - the too-big kids' ones "rectified" with elastic round the ankles in the end. I used the rest of the green yarn, plus some other motley bits, to make my emergency slippers when we arrived in this land of cold, damp and no heating. The matching his-n-hers greenies prompted the coinage of a new term, "yurty", courtesy of Frances and Andrew. "Yurty" indicating the sort of low-tech, bicycling, Birkenstock-wearing, vegetable-eating, lefty, recycling, pinko, Utne-reading lifestyle that they perceive us to have. Well, all right, that we do have. Jury's out on whether or not this is pejorative. And finally an ultra un-yurty pair, stripy in food-colouring-turquoise and that neon pink acrylic, brought back the 80s and went off to China again.

Also sneaking into the YOTF were the handwarmers, which Frances (of the yurty judgment) has named "warming-over-a-flaming-bin-chic". Then there was the sweater, modelled here by ma belle mere - not me, although we're practically identical and from a not very great distance, this might as well be me.

And there's one Christmas present left - knitting tradition dictates not finishing one present - which again is the bridge to what looks like it's becoming the Year of the Hand. And below, the fiddly thumbs and fingers become...

(unfinished state of course; they don't come with the needle still stuck in the wrist).

I'm also "done" in the sense of "pooped". December has been a lot of extra days at work and extra hours in the extra days. In the bit between Christmas and New Year, "The Staff" get their time off. In the bit after New Year, commonly known as "January", "The Owners" take their time off. "The Manager", pale and mystical guardian of the portals of literature, just keeps on goin'. She's the Energizer bunny of pale and mystical portal-guardians.

And here's 1st January 2008, another portal. Hope unusual and happy adventures await you on the other side.

a mes cotes le deluge...

Non stop downpour all last night. This morning, the neighbourhood scraggy-looking beaten-up cat who likes to sleep in our driveway can be found on the deck: to the left, le deluge; to the right, the ten inches of dry created by the overhang of our roof.

And one irritated cat. You see he's got one eye closed? Actually he's only got one eye. That's how beaten-up he is.

Look! Thumbs. The Year of the Hand has come early.

You knit these gloves fingers-down. So you make all the fingers separately and then put them together and carry on into the hands. It's massively fiddly but I guess it means you get the fiddly bit done first.

Eight more fiddly bits to go.

once more with passion

I know I said I don't much go to Starbucks. But let's just say today I did. We kept the bookstore open late, and the local cafe people round the corner close at five, so the green medusa-lady beckoned me. That makes twice this year.

I eschewed this time the monster fluffity tea-a-cino, instead opting for a sensible small "Shaken Iced Tea Lemonade" (god forbid they should just call it "iced tea"). Anyway, thinking I had got away with it, I was then faced with having to answer "Do you want Passion or Zen?" It was with some trepidation that I had to ask what was the difference between them. But the absolutely straight-faced, quite serious answer made my whole day; maybe my whole week:

"One comes with passion. And the other comes with zen."

I went for passion.

It was pink. Which is exactly what colour you expect from ICED TEA.

If I ever consider going there again, please will someone shake some sense into me?

meanwhile back at the yarn

There has been knitting going on, amongst all this reading and parading up and down mountains. Much of it has been secret knitting, of which I can't put up pictures. However I did knock out a couple of pairs of these handwarmers, which are a cross between making-it-up and an actual pattern. This is a truly international pair, being made from some of the NZ possum yarn (shh) and from alpaca that mum bought me in Chile.

The final pair of socks for 2007 has also been cast on.

Its a good thing I have the calm of knitting, as I have been driven to the edge lately by flies. I have always been quite live-and-let-live about flies, wafting them away and covering food but otherwise not being too bothered by their existence. Not here. New Zealand flies are stubborn, lazy, and everywhere. A gentle waft means nothing to them; they just stay put and rub their little legs together. There are so many of them, and they're on stuff: the countertop, the floor, the rug, me. When I was bemoaning being able to see my breath in the cold of the house in winter, I failed to realise it was that cold that kept these babies from hatching. Our recent warm spell started up the ticking time bombs, and I've finally snapped and become one of those people who chases around with a magazine whapping frantically at the air.

My sort-of-brother-in-law-in-law is a biologist and a bug guy. His daughters are cool as cucumbers when it comes to bugs; they are unfazed by household spiders and can tell their tussock moths from their, er, non-tussock ones. (I suspect they don't call them "bugs", either). His calm and fascinated approach has brought up no Miss Muffets, but warrior princesses who accept the wonders of nature in all her forms. It's a skill that I aspire to in my future parenting - if only so that my kids can calmly get the glass and the postcard instead of running outside, bolting the door and immediately putting the house on the market when incey wincey spider makes an appearance. So you can imagine how I put this into practice when I spotted out of the corner of my eye, a tropical-sized cockroach wending its way across my floor this morning.

I absolutely. Wigged. Out. I said such words, at such volume, that my sister - who was on the other end of my phone conversation at the time - thought that at the very least the house had been napalmed by axe-wielding maniacs. I think it was the lead-up with all the flies, culminating in this character, who got a cold tea shower as I upturned my mug over its head to imprison it while I calmed down, that led to the final breakdown.

I recently read an article about scientists creating a computer cockroach to change the behaviour patterns of real cockroaches, who are apparently highly impressionable and susceptible to peer pressure. After this episode, all I can think now is - where are the peers, and when are they arriving?

in which four friends take a Very Long Walk

One morning, four friends set off on a Very Long Walk.

They walked up rocks.

They walked in the clouds.

They walked across a crater.

They walked up a mountain.

They stood at the top.

They looked at the view.

They slid down the mountain.

They walked across snow.

They walked downhill. They walked through the grass.

They walked through a forest.

They stopped walking.

Seven-and-a-half hours. One thousand eight hundred metres up, and then down. Seventeen kilometres end to end.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Tongariro Crossing. Check.

p.s.

I'm not making this up. Look.

It's as if there's some sort of, I don't know, conspiracy or something.

the current big thing

I've been buying books this week. Not for me - what kind of bookstore manager do you think I am? I get sent books to read for free. Granted, they're not always the books I would choose to read, but - they're free. No, I've been buying books for the bookstore; that is, nice people from all the publishers come round and show me powerpoint slides of their books and I decide, on the strength of that, what we'll have in the bookstore next March.

The thing is, I've seen quite a lot of lists in the last week and a half, and it seems to me that (whisper it softly) they all look a bit the same.

To my mind, by next March, we in the bookshops should be bringing out the Next Big Thing. We're done with the Christmas sellers, the books with lists of the top 101 this and the worst 1001 that, the buy-it-for-your-dad thrillers, the celebrity cookbook, the local-photographs-from-yesteryear. We're done with the it's-February-and-I'm-too-depressed-to-buy-books phase. Time for something new. Different! NEW!!

This hasn't percolated to book cover designers, though, who instead of pursuing the Next Big Thing, are firmly sticking with The Current Big Thing. I can't count how many crime/thriller/police procedural books I've seen where the cover has a silhouette of a person (or sometimes a car) backlit by a streetlight a la CSI. For example, for example, and yea, for example.

What I can't quite get over is that The Last Big Thing, or even at this stage The Big Thing Before The Last Big Thing, that is to say, The Da Vinci Code, is still spawning not only cover-alikes but also write-alikes. Remember the cover had the eyes of the Mona Lisa with the face sort of obscured by a pixelated brush stroke affair? Well, see The Archimedes Codex, with Archimedes' face partially obscured by a pixelated torn-away page. I think my favourite is The Magdalene Legacy, which combines the two Current Big Things - a write-alike of the Da Vinci Code with a cover that has a silhouette backlit by whatever is the biblical equivalent of a streetlight.

You would not believe how many books there are out there with the Da Vinci formula for the title: The Freemason's Code, The Grail Conspiracy, The Magdelene Cipher, The Romanov Prophecy, The Templar Legacy. Surely this is the We're So Over It, It's Not Even A Big Thing Any More? But they're still coming; in fact I'm planning to jump on the bandwagon myself, with a smash hit provisionally entitled either The Pilate Palimpsest or the Jesus Jigsaw.

Actually, there is a Next Big Thing, so look out. The Next Big Thing is...

The North.

The Iceman cometh, or at least the Icelandic man cometh, and as from January we'll all be reading somewhat dark, often spooky, sometimes crime-y thrillers from The North, viz, Scandinavia, northern Canada, the outer Hebrides etc. There's The Witch's Trinity set in Northern Germany (which is awesome, and has characters with names like "Gurd" and "Jost"); Sacrifice (coming in Feb, I think) set amongst much weirdness in the Shetland Islands; several dozen Swedish crime novels; and I'm currently reading an Icelandic thriller whose author has the unbeatable name of Yrsa Sigurdardottir. Start boning up on your Finnish, kids. The North hasn't looked so appealing since the Moomins.

close Encounters of the Kiwi kinds

Today, we Encountered some Kiwis. At the "Kiwi Encounter". Yes. It's New Zealand - everything can be made into a tourist attraction if you think about it hard enough.

Anyway, the Kiwi Encounter is a hatching place working to increase the population of kiwis, because they are super-endangered mostly due to being more than one sandwich short of a picnic, evolutionarily speaking. In fact, it's a good thing the Encounterers are so intent on increasing the kiwi population, because it seems the kiwis themselves really couldn't give a gnat's toot about surviving. They can't see, they can't fly, and once their chicks are hatched, the parents just wander off and leave them to die at the hands of stoats, weasels, cats, dogs, the weather, and basically anything smarter than a baby kiwi. Chick survival rate - a whopping 5%. Enter the Kiwi Encounterers, who swipe the eggs, bring them to hatcheries, and keep the chicks safe till they're big enough to outrun a weasel. It's all pc though - they do keep a couple of pairs in captivity for more eggs, but they are careful to teach the chicks to be proper kiwis and forage and dig instead of looking for people with food.

Kiwis are like smaller, cuter, fuzzier ostriches, sort of: the same shape of bird with those big legs and ridiculous tiddly wings. They also share the attribute of laying giganta-eggs, which during gestation make up 25% of the bird's body weight, and when laid, are the equivalent of giving birth to a 35 pound baby. Yowza.

Possibly the funniest, stoopidest thing of all about kiwis, is their noses. Most birds have nostrils immediately by their face on the beak. Kiwis have them right on the tip of the very long beak that they use for digging in the undergrowth. You can hear them snorting and sneezing as they get dirt up their noses.

Kiwis. D'oh.

To Whom It May Concern

Dear Knitter,

We understand that throughout the year 2007 you have been knitting socks (cf. "Year of the Foot"). Many of these socks have been created using a self-striping, superwash wool.

However, it has come to our attention that over the last two (2) weeks, you have knitted two (2) pairs of socks using a yarn that you described as "possum". You have freely and publicly admitted that the yarn you used for these socks contained at least forty (40) per cent possum yarn.

In addition, it is noted that you professed to "love" the socks made with this yarn, that it was your "new favourite", and that you described it as both "toasty" and "fuzzy".

We are greatly alarmed.

It pleases us that you conceded the position of possums as "vermin". You also proffered an amusing scenario describing possum shearing, which we appreciated, as you appear to have grasped the ridiculousness of such a possibility. We believe that these could be redeeming factors for you.

Nevertheless, the remainder of the yarn is still in your possession and we have heard from reliable sources that you intend to use it in a pair of gloves or handwarmers. This is reason enough for us to speak out.

Unlike the possum, we are bred for our wool, so that people like you can pursue your creative endeavours. There are few fibres, natural or otherwise, on earth that can match the properties of pure sheep's wool, be it for water-repellence, softness, ease of dyeing, or even the propensity not to burn.

We feel it would be timely to remind you of the hardships we endure on your behalf, year after year, to provide you with unlimited supplies of the knitting yarn that you now appear to shun.

We go cold, and humiliated, for your benefit. Within one week of our shearing, we are forced to overeat to such a degree that our skin thickens to compensate for the fleece we give with selfless generosity.

To hear that you are turning to possum yarn and extolling its virtues to others saddens and shocks us.

Your weak justification that your possum yarn also contains forty (40) per cent merino, is unsatisfactory.

We would like it understood that your future use of any merino, indeed, any yarn of less that 90% pure wool (10% nylon is permitted for elasticity) may result in further action on our part.

In conclusion:

Wool. One hundred per cent pure. You will do well to remember this.

Sincerely,

Sheep, Inc.

I will not be defeated

I was so in love with these socks. We had good times; they knitted up quickly and easily, the cables were cosy, the yarn fuzzy. The first pair was a joy to make and to behold.

Then I started the second pair.

On the left hand side of the picture, see three twisty cable things. On the right hand side, directly opposite that, see...oh. TWO twisty cable things.

I cannot begin to describe how far up the sock this mistake is, because it's practically right at the beginning, and I didn't see it until I was doing the toe (that is to say, finishing it). No, nobody will notice it unless I point it out, but still. Just one of those things that will annoy me till the end of time.

This is not the only thing wrong with the sock, as I misread the foot pattern...it doesn't matter per se, as the recipient has not seen the pattern and what it should look like, and it is still fine. But I KNOW that it's wrong. And on top of that, now I have to do it wrong on the second sock to make them the same.

Speaking of the second sock, I started it, and something has happened to me in between the completion of the first and the casting on of the second. Because to my eyes, the second one looks (to borrow a phrase from a famous knitter) "like ass". The tension seems all loose, even though I am hauling on the stitches as if my life depended upon it. I was tired when I was counting the pattern last night and this resulted in having to rip it back almost to the beginning - twice.

I don't like to fight with my socks. I like them to grow pleasantly and with a sense of achievement and excitement about giving them to their intended new owner. I like to think about them during my working day and imagine adding a little bit more to their cosy loveliness in the evening. But this pair? These are the recalcitrant adolescents of socks. They will fight me till the bitter end, and all I will feel when I mail them next week is relief that I don't have to see them again.

gone feral

The night before last, I dreamt that I was in some sort of vastly important competition, for which I had to organise the catwalk show for Karl Lagerfeld's new collection. Half an hour before it started, someone stole all my staging. My show included an animatronic dinosaur that hatched an egg with a real, live, slippery green baby dinosaur inside. I woke up just after climbing a several-dozen-feet-high part of my hastily rebuilt set, in the process of falling spectacularly to my death.

Then last night I dreamt that while doing stunts for both the Harry Potter and James Bond films, I got accidentally shot and accidentally drowned.

You'll understand then why last night it was rather a relief to dream of nothing more than the lovely Jonathan Pryce, with not a lot going on except a bit of your standard worshipping.

In other news, you'll see from the photo that some of the sock yarn has finally gone feral - here it is nestling happily amongst some of the crap that I hauled out of the garden on the weekend. I was stern, though, and rounded it up mercilessly, for these yarns will be joined together in harmony for the final pair of socks of 2008. They will be knit simultaneously, so that the double striping effect will match, and will bring together the spirits of all the socks I've made during the Year of the Foot, into one uber-pair of socks.

Sweet dreams.

Socktoberfest

What Wellington also has is yarn.

This here is possum/merino yarn, which is my new absolute favourite. It is soft and warm, and when knitted up the item has a sort of halo effect around it because it is so fuzzy. Possum yarn is quite big here in New Zealand. Possums are pesky varmints, introduced by some clown back in the 1900s when all New Zealand had for native wildlife was pretty birds, many of them flightless and near-blind. The possums saw to them pretty quick-sharp and now the native birds are all protected species and the possums are fair game.

I don't know if possum yarn comes from those that the Dept of Conservation traps and disposes of, or if there are possum yarn farms (can you imagine the shearing sheds? Big guys hanging in harnesses wrestling possums to the floor and attacking them with miniature barbers' clippers and then sending them back out, naked and surprised, into the barn?), but either way, the reason it is so exceptionally warm is that possum fur, as is, is hollow. This is difficult for me to get my head around; it is obviously on some sort of nano-sized level with which my brain is not really comfortable, but the hollow fibre gives a couple of atoms' width of trapped air and keeps the possum nice and toasty.

The presque-finished sock on the needles in the first photo is turned over and hidden, cos it is a gift sock, but this is a sneak preview of the astonishingly lovely cable pattern I picked from Handknit Holidays by Melanie Falick. I love these socks like you wouldn't believe. I wish I could make them for every single person I know.

Happy Socktoberfest.

unoriginal

It's not the most original observation ever made about Wellington, but: boy, is it ever windy. So windy that on the day we were due to go, they almost cancelled our flight because the airport was closed (100km/hr winds). So windy that the wee plane teetered crazily as we came in to land, prompting the children aboard to squeal with delight as if we were on a roller coaster. So windy that, on walking along the waterfront, we both got facefuls of sand and spent ten minutes sputtering and blinking and wishing we had a hanky. So windy that, on turning a corner onto the parliament hill, we and every other pedestrian on the street took three giant steps backwards and then looked around for the nearest lamp-post to hang on to as we all got buffeted by huge gusts. We took photos on the sea front of our amusingly slow progress into the eye of the gusts. On parliament hill, we couldn't even get the camera out.

It was windy.

Though you wouldn't think it from this serene bee at the botanic gardens (not my photo - are you kidding? have you seen my photos? Chris took this).

And this.

The tulips were just about over, but they were pretty impressive nontheless.

More on What Wellington Has tomorrow, when it's stopped raining here long enough that I can take a photo of What Wellington Had That I Brought Back.

Wave the Flags; Bang the Drums…Something National This Way Comes

"A country's literature is a crystal ball into which its people may look to understandtheir past and their present, and to find some foretaste of their future." – Robertson Davies

With this higher purpose in mind, I write with a suggestion to the UK book industry. Let’s celebrate an English Book Month, to champion our national literature. I suggest it be in March, when the weather is at its most English. This national celebration can manifest itself in any or all of the following ways:
* Book tours of English authors discussing what it is to be, and write, “English”. They’ll talk about how being known as an “English author” can damage their chances on the world stage; how the national qualifier might relegate them to the fringes.
* A website with a discussion forum on which author most encapsulates Englishness, and how our national literature explores our cultural identity as English people. Noted English authors to blog on the national book scene; an online vote on the “top 50 English books”; celebrities pick their favourite books from our native literature. English-only, mind, and no, Bill Bryson doesn’t count, much as we might like him to.
* Posters, book lists, reading guides, and t-shirts to be distributed to all bookshops, for displays highlighting authors from this country.
* Have a poll on whether Germaine Greer is allowed to be part of the celebrations.

I suggest also a special English Book Month publication. Let’s find, say, six examples of new English writing talent, short stories set in England or essays on Englishness; we can call it The Six Pack in comical reference to our national penchant for beer, and sell it for six pounds.

It all sounds rather ridiculous, doesn’t it. But replace the word “English” with the words “New Zealand” and you get…

Yes, here down under we did all of the above (apart from the Germaine Greer bit, although I did push for it). Even the t-shirts and The Six Pack. Our bookshop windows screamed with kiwiana. Penguin publishers gave independent kiwi bookstores a nod by printing a limited edition of Commonwealth Award-winner Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, complete with signed bookplates, which they’re not even allowing the big chains to sell. Already a bit of a collector’s item; if Jones wins the Booker, it’ll be a major kiwi coup.

Here in New Zealand, Jones is flavour of the month – their first home-grown million-dollar author (incidentally, the Kiwis pronounce his title “Mustah Pup”, which as a Brit I find inappropriately amusing). Yet Jones recently talked about not wanting to be known as a New Zealand Writer. Look, is Toni Morrison, he asked, called an “American Writer”? We strive, we hope, he said, one day to be called just “Writers”, on a level playing field. In fact, in a country such as New Zealand, whose very identity is founded on avoiding tub-thumping – indeed, ridiculing our Big Noisy Neighbour Australia for her nationalistic jingoism – must we insist upon wheeling out National Book Months or Weeks or Lists or Festivals?

Having also spent a few years in the Canadian book industry, I see New Zealand Book Month rehashing arguments I’ve heard before. Why do we harp on about CanLit/ KiwiLit? Why are Margaret Atwood and Yann Martel Canada’s only “writers” while Carol Shields still comes with the qualifier “Canadian”, or worse, “Prairie author”? Is it really necessary to localize and nationalize and trumpet the Canadian (Kiwi) Novel? After all, as (Canadian) poet David Helwig says, “any country is only a way of failing/ and nationality is an accident of time/ like love”. If it seems absurd to look at all English authors’ writing as first and foremost an example of Englishness, then why not in New Zealand and Canada and the Caribbean and Nigeria and all the other nations that are still identified primarily by the term “Commonwealth literature”? Isn’t it time we stopped dividing up literature in English by thumpingly unhelpful national boundaries?

Douglas Coupland makes the same noises as Lloyd Jones. His beef is that Canadian “national literature”, of the sort that gets funding from the likes of national arts councils, is pigeon-holed to exclude his type of urban writing – it must instead be about roughing it in the wilds of Ontario while the Canada geese fly overhead and the Inuit teach you the ways of the ancient ones. If that’s the case, this enforced nationalization can only be reductive.

As technology makes the world smaller, and Gen X makes way for “GenXPat”, according to (sometime Canadian) author Margaret Malewski, National Book Month begins to look like a celebration of the past rather than the present and future of a country’s writing. After all, we stopped using the term “post-colonial” and moved onto “Commonwealth”, which in itself now seems a designation increasingly out of date. As Margaret Atwood pushes her “LongPen”, signing books in North America from London via a robotic arm, as the book industry moves closer to download-on-demand titles for customers to read on portable ibooks, national boundaries should become irrelevant. We little high-street booksellers are forever lamenting the internet juggernaut that will eventually put us out of business, but it could be our biggest grassroots weapon. All a local author will need – whether from Watrous, Saskatchewan, Whakatane, NZ, or just plain Watford – is a few bloggers and the odd Facebooker on the bandwagon to become better and more quickly known internationally, than any publisher or distributor could afford to make them. Slap a Print-on-Demand machine – already lowering in price – into your bookshop and you’re all set for the next century.

In the end, New Zealand Book Month’s biggest publicity has come completely inadvertently and has not the slightest thing to do with our national literature. The logo on the Book Month t-shirt represents what one would see looking end-on at a book open on its spine, its pages fanning up and out. The combination of this with the chosen logo colour of green prompted numerous customers and schoolchildren to ask if it’s National Weed Month. The t-shirts, as you can imagine, have improved the image of the average school librarian considerably.

I’m a newcomer here down under, and a true GenXPatriate: a British citizen with Canadian residence and a New Zealand work permit. With a British/Canadian mother and a Canadian/Kiwi dad, living in whichever of the three countries we’ve called home so far, our future children already have an acronym awaiting them: “TCKs” (Third Culture Kids). And I wonder, as I fold up my National Weed Month t-shirt and take down the New Zealand flags, what their national literature will be.

shame

It's been a while, and I'm sorry. We went to Wellington (on which more in another post when I do the photos). Then we left the computer's power cable in Wellington. And we've been waiting for it to be mailed back to us. So, not a lot of juice left, but I have to share with you quickly my shame from yesterday.

I don't go to Starbucks often. There are local coffee and tea places with good, regular tea that's called "tea". A couple of them even make chai, though not with tea leaves like in Saskatoon or at home, just with chai powder, which is okay. And they call it "chai".

Anyway, for one reason or another, yesterday we went to Starbucks. And now I feel sort of deflated and as if I need a wash. Aside from the fact that it's Starbucks, there is all the following to contend with:
1. My drink was named a "blackberry green tea frappucino (with the copyright mark) blended cream" which meant it took longer to say than to drink. This has got to be the epitome of crazy Starbucks names.
2. It was made with green tea powder and blackberry syrup, so it saw neither real tea nor a real blackberry in the making. It was bright green.
3. Although I did not have a pile of whipped cream on the top, they still gave it to me in a takeout plastic cup with one of those balloon-shaped tops they have for protecting your pile of whipped cream.
4. I drank it with a plastic straw that had been wrapped (though, at least, in paper).
5. The whole thing cost more than six dollars. (although obviously, six bucks NZ is about 50 cents Canadian or US; still, that is the most ridiculous amount I've ever handed over for a drink of tea; in fact, a drink of any kind).

and
6. It tasted pretty good.

I'll be over here, wallowing in my shame.

It's just Not Right

It's beautiful, but it's not right. It's almost October. Where are the crispy leaves and bright autumnal mornings? The show-off fall colours giving their last resplendent gasp?

Yes, I did know this was going to happen when we came to this crazy upside-down world. And I am relieved that the days are getting slightly longer and I can wear slightly fewer clothes (current warmth check: ok; feet a bit chilly in 2 pairs of wool socks, but wearing only regular jeans with no tights or knee socks, with one merino t-shirt and one sweater instead of three and two, is maintaining normal body temperature). It has after all been a really long winter.

No matter that our emotional and psychological body clocks scream otherwise, it is most definitely Spring.

food/foot stylist

I was just reading this magazine called "Gourmet Traveller" (which is pretty funny, since I'm not really either). It has lovely pictures of scrumptious food, like most food magazines do, and each picture has in little words at the bottom the title of the dish you're looking at (e.g. "Apple Crumble With Cheese" - because really, the titles just describe exactly what it is, which is fine, because that's mostly what you want to know). However, on looking closer at the little words at the bottom, I discovered the dish title has a colon after it, and following the colon is a list. The list lists everything that is in the picture and tells you where it comes from. So the tablecloth is from Tablecloths R Us, and the silverware is from Forkerama, and so on.

Now here's what blew me away. In one picture, it tells you the name of the paint on the wall at the back.

And thus, the domain of the food stylist - as in the "other props" are "stylist's own".

Seriously. The name of the paint colour. And where you can get it from. I can just about fathom a realm, although it is definitely not one I inhabit, in which you might wish to replicate the setting when you make your apple crumble and cheese, and know where the napkins and tchotchkes came from so you could rush out and buy them, but - the paint? So, what, you can repaint your dining room to go with supper?

In other news, this Foot Stylist is back to the socks after two more pairs of slippers (one to replace the irreparably-deformed blue-and-orange stripey ones). Sock needles are even more slippery and pointy after playing for so long with big fat plastic children's needles on the slippers. Anyway I am now getting towards the end of all the balls and skeins I bought for socks and slippers, and am making every-more motley pairs as I try to ensure I have enough of a colour to do two matching feet. Hence quite a lot of stripes - because you can look at what you've got left and think, well, I can definitely get two stripes out of that for each foot, but I'm not sure about any more than that. If you did, say, a whole foot in one colour on the first slipper, you might run out halfway down the second. So the stripes get smaller and in a wider array of colours as I get down to the ends.

All I'm saying is, if you're the recipient of a pair of slippers from me, the more clashingly striped they are, the further you are down the hierarchy. If your slippers are a motley of single stripes of unrelated colours, you were about the last on the list. I mean, I love you and everything, but just not as much as the people who get single-coloured or intentionally two-tone slippers. In fact you might not even have been on the slipper list to begin with, but now I've got enough that I can add you, as long as I do crazy striped ones. Don't feel bad. Just, you know, aim for higher next year. You can attain the single-coloured pure alpaca level of friendship by emailing and writing letters and telling me you actually read my blog and sending chocolate and money (or even yarn). I can totally be bought.

Oh, but socks? I'm mostly using self-striping wool, which is purposely dyed in different colours all along the length to stop knitters from stabbing themselves out of boredom when knitting a particuarly repetitive bit of the sock pattern (say, the foot). So they're supposed to look like that.

Honestly.

Food/Foot Stylist Post: Font: Arial. Background in Electronic White. Cup of tea on the desk provided by TradeAid. Blogger's fleecy pyjama sweater from M&S circa 1999. Laptop from London Drugs, Saskatoon. Content: stylist's own.

the results are in

The computer is behaving itself this morning, so here is the final verdict.

From back to front:

1. Dark pink slippers

Result: excellent. This is the pair done in Canada. Felting good and tough and even; slippers stand up like boots. Minor difference in size.

2. Lilac fairy slippers (camouflaged on the step)

Because even dainty little fairies need big honking slippers to keep their feet warm in Canada.

Result: not bad. A little felting, though still slightly floppy. Small different in size mostly corrected by violent stretching; will have to check when finally properly dry. Look far too big for a four year old.

3. Mermaid slippers

If a mermaid had feet, that is.

Result: perfect match in size, finally; slightly better felting than the fairy ones; dye colour has stayed more vibrant. Very happy.

4. Stripey slippers

Result: a complete write-off. Should have unravelled them the moment the monumental difference in sizes became all too apparent, but didn't. Vigorous hand-felting and multiple machine washes made little difference apart from to leach the bright orange dye and make them look a funny fleshy pink colour. Will need to chuck out and start fresh this weekend.

5. Giganta-motley slippers

Result: semi-felted; they would probably go a bit more but I don't want to wreck the dye again. The ankles felted better than the feet, resulting in a sort of bag effect. Not bad, but compared with the excellence of the felting on the first pair, floppy.

And here ends the saga of the slippers. The year of the foot continues.

defeated

So. I just finished reading a book I hated. I went to the post office to post a birthday present and forgot the address. I cooked a dinner in which the dip didn't set (it went like soup) and the roast potatoes didn't roast (instead they soaked up the oil and went like moist oily rags) and made the kitchen into a bombsite in the process. Which I haven't yet cleared up. Despite numerous "sorting out" phone calls to the phone company, we still received bills for two completely separate accounts for services we aren't using. I knelt in front of the fire for an hour cajoling it to stay lit and provide warmth. Now, the computer is playing up and refuses to recognise the existence of the camera on which I have the slipper pics. Which means that I cannot show you the only thing going right today, (and that by only a small margin, let's be frank) ie the knitting.

Oh, and yesterday, I cleaned the shower, which wasn't draining properly. If you can think of any more disgusting activity than de-gunking a plughole in rental accommodation when you know the gunk pre-dates you, kindly fax me an answer as to what it is.

I've felt better

Far too much talk and not enough knit lately. So I set to and finished all the slippers, felting and everything. Now it's night time and I can't take a photo, but here's the update.

1. The slippers were not felting in the washing machine. For those who are new to the saga, you know if you put something woollen in the washer on too hot, and it shrinks and goes hard and unwearable? That's felting, and with the slippers it is what I'm trying to do on purpose, because it makes them thick and fuzzy and hard-wearing. Possible causes for slippers not felting: lots. Probably not the wrong kind of wool, because I knitted one pair before we left Canada and they felted beautifully in Chris's mum's washer. Damn New Zealand and its crazy non-felting washing machines. Could be wrong kind of soap, not enough agitation, water not hot enough. So I set to "helping" the washing machine along with a little hand-felting.

2. Ingredients: a sink, a kettle full of boiling water, some laundry soap, two kitchen implements. Method: put slippers and soap into sink, pour on boiling water, "bien agiter" with kitchen implement 1 while the water is too hot for hands, move to violent scrubbing of slippers aided by kitchen implement 2 when the water is cooled enough.

3. I don't know who wrote The Book on felting knitting; I don't own one, preferring to rely on the oft-proven-inadequate means of a general understanding of how it works and some advice gleaned from the internet. Whatever that Book says, though, I'm willing to bet the farm it doesn't mention the use of either a potato masher or a cheese grater. I think this could be a startling oversight, though, because I put it down solely to the use of these implements that even the modicum of felting that happened, happened.

Yes, I used a cheese grater on my slippers.

What?

The final verdict tomorrow, with full-colour pictures.

gone missing

I had a flick back through m'blog just now looking for a photo, and spotted that last winter, in the brisk blue bone-dry chill of Saskatchewan, I was missing a misty moisty Midlands midwinter.

The irony.

I've got my misty moisty midwinter wish, complete with grey and damp and rains and mud and green green grass. I'm approaching spring-summer, after double winter in the Northern and then the Southern hemisphere...and what am I craving? A crisp autumn chill, burning off into a glorious cloudless sunny day, and then overnight that first big clean snow and the first take-your-breath-away cold day that means summer's gone for good.

Seriously. Is it me, or is it a general human condition, missing whatever you currently don't have?

For me, it seems, it's clinically impossible to remember accurately anything about any place I've ever been, and this leads to a) rose-tinted specs syndrome and b) if I'm not careful, wishing my life away. Example: last winter, on a day when getting across the street to buy bread and milk was an effort too great, after weeks of not being able to get to the public swimming pool or the library or the knitting shop or anywhere not within two feet walking distance of my door, after a ten minute walk to the mall resulted in facial windburn, I said to myself, "when at some point in the future we make it to New Zealand and I feel homesick, I must remember this moment, because I will be all rose-tinted and think I was happy to be doing this." And now, I just think, aww, it wasn't that bad really. I mean, not compared with being able to see your breath inside the house, and all your clothes getting wet in the rain and never really properly drying out.

Then the other day, when I went off on that nice little morning walk because the sunrise was so pretty, I thought, "I must remember this moment later in the day when I feel defeated and cold and homesick, because at this moment I feel happy and I know there are nice things about New Zealand that I would not experience elsewhere." And then I get defeated and cold and homesick and I recall that moment, and I think, shpfff. Wasn't that great. You can get a nice sunrise in anyplace, especially ones that are not this far away from everyone and also only cold on the outside.

Considering I have now lived in three different countries, in several different cities and towns and even a village or two, and considering that in the future the chances of us internationally up-sticking again are quite high, I wonder exactly how much missing can one person realistically do? Supposing we are ensconced back in Canada or England, and I think, okay, yeah, I've got my family and friends right around the corner, and a nice warm flat, and then suddenly start remembering that really nice coffee place here, and how cool it would be to go up the cable car somewhere that isn't geographically flat as a pancake, and how lovely it was to have a real fire blazing in the grate, which wasn't all that hard to light actually...

It can't be healthy to carry on like this. Advice on living in the moment, please. Immediately.

Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes

September 2nd/3rd commemorates the horror of the Great Fire of London in 1666. It decimated a city of 100,000 people, destroying over 13000 dwellings over an area of a mile and a half by half a mile. The story goes that by forgetting to douse embers in his oven that night, the King's baker set off a blaze that raged overnight through a city built of timber, thatch and pitch - basically a tinderbox - and that was to continue for several days before it was finally controlled mostly by pulling down the buildings in its path until there was nothing left to burn.

It's a relief to know that we could never be the cause of any Great Fire of New Zealand, because despite the many hours we spend kneeling in front of the woodstove, poking and rearranging and joggling and blowing on embers, logs, kindling, copious amounts of firelighters and a publishing house-worth of newspapers, our fire takes at least four hours to even begin thinking about providing actual heat, and mostly instead simply chooses to give up the ghost.

I think our stove is depressed. It just shrugs as we carefully stack the logs, pile up the embers, twist the newspapers, position the kindling and firelighters, as if to say, "look, why bother? We all know I'm going to blaze with the glory of a thousand suns while the newspaper's still in here, and I'll give the impression that the logs are catching fire as the kindling burns out, and after that I'll just sigh and fill up with smoke and eventually suffocate myself. You won't get any warmer, apart from the energy you'll expend in blowing on the embers. Put on a hat and another pair of trousers, grab some mittens, find a blanket, and get over it." Sometimes the blaze gets going, and we get excited, and dance in front of the stove to show our happiness, and say encouraging and loving things to it about knowing it could do it and always believing in its ability, and we tell it it's strong enough to start the next Great Fire of London, and it cheers up for a while, but ultimately it sighs sadly, "but I know I'll never keep this up, and I'll only disappoint you in the end, so just get the blankets out and leave me to wallow in my smoky underwhelmingness."

The trouble is, cold is my absolute worst physical condition. Give me hunger or exhaustion over cold any day. When I'm cold, I have much less patience, and eat far more chocolate, and have a tendency towards tears and despair that I don't ordinarily exhibit. As you can imagine, with both the fireplace and me wallowing in misery Chris is having a fair old song and dance of a job keeping us all going. He's seriously going to have to break out the Songs That Won the Second World War soon.

Luckily The Big Sister of Chris has given to the cause by knitting me the above mitties in a warming blend of merino and silk. Their most important function is keeping my rings on my fingers, because when my hands get cold they simply slide off (the rings, that is, not the fingers). The mitties keep my hands just nicely warm enough for the retention of the rings. And that in itself is a triumph over the Great Lack of Fire of New Zealand.

Oh, by the way, September 2nd is Father's Day in New Zealand. We now have 2 different mother's days (March and May) AND 2 different father's days (June and September). Isn't there some sort of International Council of Observed Days that can sort this out, so that ex-pat children don't end up disappointing their parents?

Londinium

Yes, all right, I was writing an article, okay, I totally was. So I was writing away, tappy tap tap, diligently, writing about national literatures and cultural identity, like you do, when I got to daydreaming about London.

I only have nice thoughts about London, because I have never had to live there and thus hate it with the passion only someone who lives in a place can feel for it. London to me is sparkly Christmas (does anyone else remember the year that Liberty's wrapped the entire building in a big red bow?); showing Canadians around the best bits; doing this great big beautiful long walk that starts at the museums and goes through Knightsbridge and Hyde Park and up Piccadilly and the only thing that sucks about it is that you end up in either Leicester Square or Covent Garden, which I don't like all that much but which are part of the London craziness; eating soup and pudding in the crypt of St Michael in the Fields (it's a cafe; I didn't just take a thermos and a tupperware and sit me down among the dead); visits there with my mum which have always been awesome and memorable days (Royal School of Needlework; the King's Road to shop for the "pretty frock" I was told I'd need for Cambridge); visiting m'big sister when she lived there in a flat whose landlord thought I was her girlfriend; having sushi at one of those conveyor belt places; coming out of St Pancras station after going down on the early train and having to dash across to Euston to get breakfast before you collapse; Foyle's and the British Library and the giganta-Waterstones; having insanely expensive cups of tea in beautiful expensive tea places and giggling about the insanity and the expense...and anyway, I only have good thoughts about London.

If only our internet had stayed "down" (sometimes it kicks us off just to show us who's really in charge). But since I was here at the keyboard, and the modem was flashing its LEDs enticingly, I tappy-tapped in "Victoria and Albert Museum" just to, you know, see if there were any exhibitions about, erm, national landscape and cultural identity in the literature of Canada or New Zealand. Because there might have been.

What I found was a whole section on knitting, which is right and proper for a museum of fine and decorative arts. It's historical and modern and informative and interactive and all the things a museum website, or in fact any website, should be.

Anyway now it's time to go outside and see if the clouds have cleared, because what is a wee bite out of the moon for you tonight in the Northern Hemisphere is nothing less than a Total Eclipse here in the South.

I may write an article about it.

win, lose and draw

1. Win
And let it be known that Amber's Sweater For Mum is a winner. Entered unbeknownst to its creator into nothing less than the Evington Village Show (entry cost, 25 of your English pence), it WON the Knitting Category. No information has been provided to the knitter on the actual number of other entries. A photo of the finished sweater being worn by its recipient will be forthcoming once the recipient is home from gallivanting about the country on holiday.

2. Lose
And be it also noted that on Thursday last, this blogger did cycle up the Hill of Death and make it partway to work before thinking she may have left the iron on at home, turning round, and going back to check. Needless to say the iron was not on, but the checking necessitated a second run at the aforementioned Hill. The blogger was later that morning forced to borrow a kind colleague's car to drive home again having realised she had left a window open, it being the sort of window one could simply and easily push up from the outside and remove a sofa through (the kind colleague remembered seeing a cartoon of a woman parachuting out of an aeroplane with the caption "Dot thought she might have left the iron on at home").

3. Draw
And let it finally be noted that the felting of the children's Christmas present slippers, both orange-and-blue stripy and pretty-purple, despite two runs in a hot washing machine, has only somewhat occurred, and also that the slippers appear to be the wrong size and shape anyway, and that with two pairs done and three pairs to go, their creator is wondering whether to just give the whole thing up as a bad job and think of something else, or whether to carry on with the three other pairs and the washing and the agitating, bearing in mind also that the hot water bill this month is the highest she has ever seen in any country in which she has lived, and that takes into account the exchange rate, i.e. it is more even in pounds than in England.

And be it understood that the blogger realises that the above "item 3. Draw" is, upon reflection, actually another "Lose".

how long have you got?

I went down the street in my lunch break today, to the TradeAid shop (like Ten Thousand Villages without the religion), to buy some sugar, and also as it happened a little choccy bar to lift my spirits. Imagine my surprise at being served at the counter by a lady who sounded suspiciously like she was from Derbyshire.

She was; Belper, to be precise. Although her accent suggested she arrived on the last boat, she has actually been here in New Zealand for thirty-four years. She'd just returned from a trip back to England for her mother's 90th birthday, where she had enjoyed, as she put it "rekindling friendships" - some with people she hadn't seen for fifty years.

Anyway, finding things a litle difficult today re: homesickness (and I don't even know which "home", though to be honest, a bit of all of them) I asked her to share her secrets of having well and truly settled this far away.

Here was the cup of comfort. She stopped wishing she could go home...

...after eighteen years.










The space was for you to digest that fact.

I wondered later what if, after eighteen years, you found you still kind of wanted to go home? Would ya give it another six months? Another year? Another eighteen?

I also wondered if she said anything at the time? "Gee, honey, I've been sort of unhappy for the last nine years. I'm not sure, but I think it might be more than just missing Tetley's tea and Ribena and Soreen malt loaf. Shall we check in again this time next year and see how I'm doing?"

What on earth do you do with eighteen years of homesickness? How can it not simply press you most utterly and completely into the ground? Or at the very least, make you really, really sick?

Other people's lives are so endlessly fascinating. It can't be just me that now wants to hear the story of those eighteen years (complete with three children, now all around my age). For one thing, sure, I'll bloom where I'm planted and I'll give things the old fair go, but I'm pretty certain that is a kind of strength I don't have - to keep doing something that makes you unhappy for that long.

The nice lady from Belper told me to drop in anytime for a chat, but I don't think I'll ask her about it.

day of the...

...pretty knitty tulip, or the hairy scary triffid?

You decide. Is this the best use of the pinkness? Or could it be better employed (say, in a search-and-rescue capacity?)

Answers on a postcard.

taking the air, a photo-story

In the breaks between the rain this morning, I thought it was time for the knitting to get some fresh air. So we hit...the driveway. (Hey, baby steps, okay?)

Fig.1 the violent pink montrosities nestle in the dewy grass waiting to strike.

Fig 2. The latest sock hangs out with next-door's orange tree. All my socks are a variation on Glenda's sock pattern from The Wool Emporium; the "variation" basically being how long I can be bothered to knit the leg for. Oh, and the variation I did on dad's pair was a big weird pointy bit around the toe of one of them, that I couldn't fix and will annoy me forever and ever (and probably my dad too, since he is the one who has a pointy exta bit of sock to tuck into the toe of his shoe).

Fig 3. This is not me rising to the challenge of the pink acrylic. (What it does look a bit like, though, is the pink acrylic rising into the air; you can see it's propped on the weird-looking bush if you look carefully, but it is so extravagantly bright that it does sort of just look as if it's levitating, magic-carpet style). Anyway. No, even I can manage something a bit more complicated than this. What this is, is for a window display at the shop, which required a bit of knitting, and since this was there and it was free and it's pink, which the whole window will be, I knocked this up yesterday lunchtime ready to do the display on Monday.

Finally, this morning I was wasting time surfing the net, and came across this blog: Bagatell. And now I want to move to Norway.

Avert your precious eyes

This photo has been taken under professional conditions, using several dozen light filters and shades. Do not look directly at the wool in this photograph. It may only be viewed through half-closed eyes in a sideways glance. Failure to follow these instructions may result in the complete and total annihilation of your retinas.

It's the filtering (and the non-natural light) that makes it look orange, but believe me when I tell you this wool shines with the pinkness of a million flamingos. If I turned off the lights, it would glow. It is purest pinkest 100% acrylic, which is basically the polar opposite of an actual sheep fleece. This stuff has never even heard the world "natural". It has apparently been knocking around in a box at work for some years following some long-forgotten promotion or other.

Pink acrylic, lo I kneel and accept your challenge.

iz in ur bocks...doin ur filin'

Yes, folks, quite by accident, I've been taken over by lolcats; one of the few thing that is making me laugh these days.

To see what I mean, go here:

I Can Has Cheezburger

What IS the point of knitting or books, of writing or deciding what to do with your life, when you can spend all evening surfing through endles pictures of kittehs wid funny accentz, u no? There is literally no point at all.

It hardly bears telling you that I finally invested five bucks in one of those mesh laundry bags so I could put all my slippers on hothothot in the washer and have them meet their destiny at last.

Naw. Go see de kittehs. Iz mor wurthwiyul.

sibilance

These stripy slippers come with a sense of sadness and stupidity, and substantial dissatisfaction, since they suffer from the sizes simply not being the same.

the year of the foot

We had a genu-ine earthquake here last night, and the couch did a sort of jolt and juddered a bit, and then a few times for the rest of the evening it felt like a big gust of wind had hit the house with a whoomp. Oh, and lest you imagine I have finally stopped going on about the weather, it turns out that July was the wettest they've ever had here. Lucky us, hey?

But to get on to the real news, the knitting is back, as you knew in your hearts it would be.

It is astonshing that, even equipped with Chris's new kick-ass camera, I can manage to take photos that are such utter arse.

These little slippers, finished on the plane to the land of rain and chilliness (that is to say, here), are a beeyoutiful lavender colour, hand-dyed by me during my crockpot phase, and exactly the sort of colour a little girl could feel like a tiptoe fairy in. Instead they look mildly brown.

You will notice that you can see all the stitches, and this is because (as I mentioned before) I haven't dared to chuck them in a super-hot washing maching to make them not only lavendery and pretty but also cute and fuzzy. So they will in fact be quite a bit smaller and less floppy and more fluffly than this in the end, and hopefully I will manage to put something pretty on like beads or sequins or sparkles or other things that your average adorable Ontarian four-year-old would like at Christmastime. Then I might show you another picture, and hopefully I will have figured out by then how to unbrownify my photos.

I am also currently reading a very wonderful and magical book, and I might tell you about it sometime, but at the moment it is too precious and fragile.

folding, formatting, and the logo that broke the bookseller's back

It's easy to lose perspective when you're, you know, me.

Over the last week I've been producing a Great Big Newsletter to mail out to no less that a thousand people, along with a few other publishers' catalogues and lists. My Great Big Newsletter is 4 pages of book cover pics and blurbs, a covering letter and an order form.

Given that the programme I'm using of necessity is simple old Word, I've not done at all badly with my text boxes and my tables and my logos and it looks a pretty bang-up job, though I says it as made it. However, when it came to the order form, my tables and my text boxes began disagreeing with each other, and since the computer picked that exact moment to implement a go-slow, the frustration started mounting.

As we all know, that is the moment to go for a walk, or at the very least a cup of tea and a flick through the jobs section of the Dominion Post, imagining we'd really prefer to go for that "Sophisticated Lady Hostesses - earn a thousand dollars an evening" advert, or in fact anything that didn't involve a computer ever again, before taking a deep breath and starting again. And as we all know, none of us accept that at the time, and continue to sit and click and click and sit and click...

Eventually, due to the disagreement between the table and the text box, and their insistence that our fax number and email simply didn't belong in either of them, the computer made a final decision that an illegal operation had occurred and it must immediately close down and not let me back into my document.

Twice.

This meant bringing home the rest of the afternoon's other work to do in the evening, and it was while working on the general store newsletter last night that the final straw came. I duly downloaded the New Zealand Book Month logo (September, since you ask), and...it disappeared.

When I tried to put it into my newsletter, I couldn't find it. My little doggie search icon with his magnifying glass shrugged and said he couldn't find it either. Yet it was downloaded, and squatting insidiously like Philip Larkin's toad somewhere on my hard drive.

This is what finally brought me to tears last night.

I'm feeling much better now. I spent much of this afternoon folding a thousand pieces of paper from Auckland University Press in half and realigning my perspective settings.

Knitting? What knitting?

cold is a concept

...and if I tell myself I Am Not Cold, then I won't be. Repeat: cold is a concept.

Here's a nice toasty picture of that wool I dyed using the magic of the crock pot and the food colouring many aeons ago, in a country currently suffering from 30 degree summer heat. Much of it has now become nice toasty slippers, unfelted as yet as I am too scared about buggering up our rented washing machine with fluff. We really can't afford a buggered up washer on top of everything else right now.

Anyway there has been no need lately of toasty slippers, nice or otherwise (the motley pair is definitely on the "otherwise" side of the equation, though they are totally free because they come from the ends left over from other projects), because we just had a weekend in the seething metropolis of Auckland, where it is several degrees warmer. It also helped to be staying in a rather nice hotel, with duvet, bath, thermostat, and tea-making facilities. This all came courtesy of Random House publishers, who were kind enough to sponsor me to attend the national Booksellers' Conference. They provide a sponsorship each year for someone who's never attended this esteemed event before, and as I've only been in the country a month, that definitely meant me.

Not only did I get to go to the Conference, meet everyone who's anyone including a whole lot of Awesome Folks Who Do Stuff With Books, AND stay in a rather nice hotel with the above warmth-related facilities, but I also got to go to TWO posh dinners. The first was the industry awards night; the second, the Montana Book Awards, a super-glittering event involving bigwigs and prizes and gourmet food and the Prime Minister. I felt quite whelmed over, though it was mostly by the niceness of all those aforementioned Folks (and also by starting the days at eight a.m and keeping going till after midnight). Lordy. What an introduction after only four weeks in the country.

Oh, and when I got home, the local freebie paper had a little bit about our Harry Potter event and there was a picture of me on the front page.

However, today we came back to earth with a bump - the gas company had come to cut us off. We didn't even know we had a gas water heater, hence not paying the gas company any money. We're all right now, but it's another hundred bucks "set-up charge" to add to the bills...what is that for? Typing your name and address into the system? What a bargain. But since the gas, electric, phone, internet and rental companies (both house and appliances) all demand it, it'll be a hell of a month. Better turn off the heater. It's a good thing cold is just a concept.

a hongi and a hangi

Tena koe!

As Maori Language Week draws to a close, I'm pleased to report I've done both of the above.

At the request of the author, we attended a book launch this week at the local tertiary college, which has its own marae (like a big ole meeting house), and they had The Whole Ceremony prior to the launch.

As you approach the marae as visitors, the hosts (in this case the staff of the college) issue a chant, the someone from the visitors' group responds. Then you're allowed through the gate and there's another chant and response, and you approach the building with lowered heads.

Inside, the speechifying begins - a man from the hosts gives a verrrrry long speech and then they sing a song, then a man from the visitors responds with a speech, and the visitors sing a song. Then it goes back to the host, speech and song, and the visitors again. It takes, in the words of a woman who taught at the institute who I sat with during the meal "as long as it takes"...and that is very true! (to another of our dinner companions, also a teacher at the college, she said "only two hours over time," to which the other lady responded "as usual...") Anyway after the multi-speeching, everyone sort of gets a bit more jolly and that's when the hongi is. All the hosts line up and you move along the line touching foreheads and noses or kissing on the cheek. It does rather feel as if you've very much met everyone.

Thereafter the book was blessed, and there were innumerable more speeches, and after that came the hangi. This is a great big meal of slow-cooked comfort food from a big underground oven (because this is the world of thin-crust Earth, with the bubbling mud and the sulphur and the geysers and the steam). It's meat and potatoes and kumara (root veg somewhere between potatoes and yams, sorta), and pumpkin, which btw is in EVERYTHING over here, and stuffing and good solid winter food, also with bread and jam and sponge cake in custard on the side.

Fortunately, the rather large hill in the picture is the very first thing I cycle up every single morning to get to work. So I can definitely afford to eat at a few more hangi.