Available Light

The more astute amongst you might have intuited that my rate of posting on here has dropped off just a tad lately. There was no shortage of  things to write about. The problem was, there was no shortage of things to write about and they took up all the available time. Things quietened down a bit just before Christmas, and between Christmas and New Year Clemency and I went camping. For as long as we've known each other, that is about 40 years we have done this. For a while it was in our 1962 Volkswagen Kombi. In company with Megan our Rough Coated Collie we parked the Kombi on DOC sites and lakesides and remote beaches quite literally from North Cape to Bluff; sometimes because we liked the view, sometimes because I had to lie under the van and fix something. When the kids arrived we progressed to a series of tents, culminating in an orange and brown 15'x9' frame tent. Because we had been to so many places in the Kombi we knew a good number of out of the way spots where...

  So why not upgrade to Windows 8? The upgrade is cheap. It's very easy, just download the updater program and the computer does it all for you. I did it the other night, but on the whole I'm still asking that question. Windows 8 seems to run a bit faster than Windows 7 did on my Acer desktop computer, but it has crashed on every one of the four days I've had it, so it's about par for the course for a new Windows operating system. Once the installer has done its party piece and the new system is up and running the computer reboots to give you essentially, two different GUIs which you switch between. One of them is pretty much identical to Windows 7 except that the start button is missing from the bottom left hand corner of the screen.The other GUI is accessed by moving the mouse into parts of the screen - the Right hand border or the bottom left corner and clicking. This second GUI is the array of brightly coloured patches illustrated above, each of which opens ...

Before we left, I published a list of our camino gear . Now that we've returned I want to comment on how well it all did its job, and the answer is, by and large, very well indeed. There are a couple of changes I will make before the next time though, and yes, there will be a next time. 1 Osprey Talon 44 pack, with hydration bladder, pack liner and pack cover This pack is brilliant. With its soft structure and plethora of overly long adjusting straps it is not the prettiest pack in the world but it is light, comfortable and robust enough for the Camino Santiago. I carried about 7 kg, which would have just qualified as carry on luggage had I not been carrying a large folding knife. Next time, I will buy the knife in Spain and mail it home to myself at the end. For checking them into an aircraft hold, I fitted the pack covers to the packs backwards - that is, over the straps - and tied them with a length of rope. It kept the straps safe from jamming in the automatic luggage syst...

I didn't take a lot of photos on the Camino; as often as not, taking snaps just didn't seem appropriate, but some of the ones I did take I am now putting into my Camino posts. Actually, the pictures are a mix of mine and Clemency's. For those interested in that sort of thing, the camera I used was a Nikon Coolpix P7100 . It is an excellent camera, though very prone to water damage. Clemency began the trip using a tiny Samsung point 'n' shoot, but after a very short while put it in the bottom of her pack and used her cellphone, an HTC One V . Her results were pretty impressive. You can check our photos out by looking at the older posts, below. I hope to finish posting pictures in the next few days. And in the meantime, here are a few others: A view from the city wall, Astorga Complicated overbridge specifically for the Camino, just before Astorga local bodies take the Camino and its infrastructure and also care of pilgrims very seriously. It is, after a...

We had an easier than expected flight back. Clemency sat in a wheelchair which meant we went straight to the front of the queue when boarding or going through customs, and there was always some pleasant person who knew where they were going to push her around the miles of airport corridors. We arrived home late on Thursday afternoon, and on Sunday had a pretty full day. In the morning we went to Oamaru for the 150th anniversary of St. Luke's parish, and in the evening to the cathedral so that I could dedicate the wonderful stained glass window donated to the cathedral and to the city by the Cullington family. The window is a truly magnificent piece, crafted by local artist Peter MacKenzie from Stella Cullington's ideas. Kiri Te Kanawa was the model for St. Cecilia who frames the right hand side of the window and modesty forbids me from telling you who was the model for St. Paul who stands on the left. Apart from rushing around the countryside and blessing windows and so fo...

I'm in Kuala Lumpur, waiting for a plane to Auckland. I have texts and emails from the home, and pictures from my children waiting in Whatsapp, but none of the life I will pick up again tomorrow seems, as yet, quite real. I have been astonished at how completely the Camino Santiago de Compostela had taken over my mental processes. There is another sense that the Camino is a spiritual exercise; that is, for the entire time one is walking the Camino, one lives in the now. Every day a pilgrim lives with a long term overall goal, that of reaching Santiago but until the last couple of hours on the last day that is just some vague future possibility that you hope will one day arrive, like retirement or Christmas. Every day there is a smaller goal: that of reaching the town you have designated as the next night's resting place, but that will inevitably happen, probably around 2 o'clock and can't be hurried, so that is never much in mind either. Instead of the immediate...

The trick to seeing Santiago Cathedral is to get there early. It opens at 7.00 am every morning, though it is the back doors that are open, not the big front ones. We got there around 8.15 and basically spent the morning there. The first thing for me to do was to visit the crypt and pray before the bones of St. James. I´m not entirely sure why, as readers of previous posts will know, but somehow, for me the Camino was not complete until I had done this. There in a small cellar, down a flight of steps was a silver casket containing James´ mortal remains. A young woman prayed before them and then pushed several copies of her CV through the grill to lie before the coffin. Unemployment is high in Spain, and I guess both her faith and her intention were obvious, and I found the sight intensely moving. I knelt there and remembered several things. A parish priest who, at the end of his pilgrims blessing had asked us to pray for his parish when we got to Santiago. Then a farmer tending ...