In 2006 we were looking for a house to buy. We'd seen a collection of smallish villas within our price range, but all of them suffered from one of Dunedin's real estate traps: shade, wind or the ravages of old age. On a whim Clemency dragged me off to see this place, substantially out of our budget. It had a large garden, laid out to the sun with a school on one side and a reserve on another. Macrocarpa and blue gums towered 80ft into the sky to the South, sheltering the wind but not taking away any sun. It had a view to the harbour. Inside the house was tired, but it was light and airy and warm and even though it was small it felt spacious. It had two bathrooms and wooden ceilings soaring, in places to 20 ft above the floor. Every room was on a different level. It felt right. We bought it. it's been a stretch but we will retire without a mortgage.
After renting it out for a few years we moved in 6 years ago. I built a study on one side which is my happy place. Clemency has the garden for hers. It is sheltered from every wind except the Nor' Easter, and on days when we see the city on the other side of the harbour shivering in wind and shadow, we are in stillness and sunshine with our French doors open onto the deck. The woodburner or the heat pump quickly heat it on the coldest days. I have a list of things which need attending to once April rolls around. It needs painting, and the kitchen needs a revamp, and the deck is a bit grey. But East West and all that, and it's the garden which is the real hospital for tired souls.
It has all been laid out well, and it has grown past its original formality into a kind of tangled wildness. There is greenery at eye level everywhere, but because it slopes gently away towards the sea it never feels enclosed. It is a place which invites presence
We toy with the idea of moving, but really, why would we do a crazy thing like that? We have every part of our lovely city within 10 minutes drive, and within 20 we can be standing on any one of 20 different beaches. Where would we find anything like this, anywhere else? We are happy to approach our codgerdom, reveling in our memories, right here. So, I'll leave it to another bunch of boring old farts to reach into their memory bag, and mine, to express it for me.
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Barbara Withington said…
When we 'retired' last year, many of our friends asked where we would go. Why shift I ask when we found just what we were looking for right here in Millers Flat all of 30 plus years ago.
Anonymous said…
Before you go, what insight do you have into this: http://www.anglican.ink/article/perth-archbishop-steps-down-over-abuse-cover-allegations
I don't think I have any insight into this. I know no more about it than I have read in this article. Roger Herft was once Bishop of Waikato and I was one of his priests. He was the best bishop I ever had. I have seen him only once since he moved to Australia in the early 1990s. From what I read in the article you shared it appears he made a very significant error of judgement in not reporting criminal activity to the police and he is right to resign over it.
Anonymous, I don't usually publish or respond to anonymous comments, and this particular thread is well off topic. But I do recognise the importance of the matters you raise. If there is something you wish to raise with me privately please feel free to contact me personally. I assure you, I will treat whatever you say with the utmost seriousness and confidentiality. My contact details are available on our diocesan website
Kelvin, your photographs are astonishing. I will mention your blog to a Methodist minister friend who is a devotee of Ansell Adams. Best wishes with developing your home.
The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on. I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...
In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
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