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On St Clair beach is a group of old pilings. When I first bought a decent (for the time) digital camera I photographed them and made a picture I was happy with. Way back then,  I took the picture at dusk, used a tripod, set the lens to a narrow aperture to get as much depth of field as possible, and used a slow shutter speed (around 20 seconds) to smooth out the water.  I've visited the pilings many times, and made much the same shot. Last night I realised that the tide and the light were appropriate for yet another iteration, and took the picture above. Same settings, though the old wooden logs have aged a bit. We revisit our past. It's not now as we imagined it. Things that seemed so strong and straight are succumbing to the tides of the universe, as everything does.  The piles have suffered the indignities of all that is constant in their environment. They are still lovely in their decline, though, and make their own statement about impermanence and the movement...

The Bay of Biscao: Basque Country.  I have been reading the Codex Calixtinus , or at least a translation of it and commentary on it by William Melczer. The codex was written in the 12th Century and is the first substantial record of the Camino Santiago. It consists of 5 short books which have independent origins but have been combined by an unknown editor/author, who has appended a pseudepigraphic introduction to each in the name of Pope Callixtus II. They are all to do with the development of the cult of St. James in the early middle ages. Book 1 is a collection of liturgical bits and pieces and Book 2 a collection of miracles attributed to the saint. Book 3 records the miraculous transfer of the saint's body from Palestine to Galicia and Book 4 is an account of the military expedition undertaken by Charlemagne and Roland who attempted to drive the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula. Book 5, the one which I am really interested in, is a pilgrim's guide to the Camino: the ...

I read this chilling book at the recommendation of Mike Corkery, the warden at Selwyn College. It is a book which, because of its subject matter, was difficult to finish but which I am very glad I have read. Published in 2010, it describes the history of that part of Europe caught between the competing totalitarian Empires of Nazi Germany and The Soviet Union between 1933 and 1945. In that 12 year period, approximately 14 million non combatants were deliberately killed by these murderous regimes each under the sway of an ideologically driven dictator. The Bloodlands are the Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, parts of Russia, and the Baltic states. It was here that Stalin deliberately starved 3 million people to death; here that the overwhelming majority of the victims of the Holocaust met their ends; here that millions were murdered or transported in vast programmes of ethnic cleansing. Adolf Hitler had his objective of a racially pure Germany with enough living space in the East to esta...

I had an early start. The plane for Auckland left at 6:50 am so it was a drive to the airport in the dark and the steady, cold, Dunedin rain. I sat near the back of the Airbus A320 and sipped my coffee from a paper cup and managed to meditate for a bit. The sun rose just as the Seaward Kaikouras broke through the morning cloud and we landed in Auckland at 10 after a brief stop in Wellington. The plane to Kerikeri was one of those little Beechcraft where you get to have a window seat and an aisle seat simultaneously, and the only people on board who weren't Anglicans were the two guys at the front twiddling the knobs. We were met by some of the locals and there was a drafting gate - bishops to the left, all others to the right, and us in the purple shirts were driven off to Waimate and the old mission house. We met, eight of us from six dioceses, in the little newly restored Sunday School hall. We celebrated the Eucharist in St. John's church, and we wandered around the old...

The flight from Dunedin left early so I was up at 5 and driving to the airport in the dark and wet. Wellington was cloudy and Auckland, when I arrived slightly misty and, by Dunedin standards, warm, but that doesn't seem to stop the wimpy locals banging on about how chilly it is. I picked up my bargain basement rental car- an aging Nissan Sunny with the performance and handling of a slug negotiating a plate of porridge- and navigated my way across the city with surprisingly little bother. With an hour to kill before the powhiriri I found a cafe near the Orakei basin and bought a large and good and inexpensive latte. I sat and looked out at the streets around which, 35 years ago, I had jogged with a pair of adidas on my feet and a pained but determined expression on my face. This was a neighbourhood near which I had lived during that period in my life when I had first been truly happy, and now it was at once familiar to me and as foreign as Honolulu or Beirut. Through long reme...