Available Light

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it...

Lake Hauroko, Fiordland National Park Catherine, my daughter, had, until recently, two criteria by which you could distinguish a genuine holiday from an ordinary run of the mill road trip. To qualify as a holiday, at some stage it was necessary to a) dig a slop hole and b) eat at least one meal cooked over an open fire. She's changed a bit, and so have we, although there is one holiday preference that we still adhere to, and that is the one of backing the car out of the driveway with only the vaguest idea of where we might be going.  Over the last couple of weeks we went South, intending to drive to the end of the road and see what was there and I didn't take a shovel or for that matter a box of matches. Instead we took a gas stove and a fridge and a bed with an innerspring mattress and a shower and toilet all swaying gently behind the car in a big white box. It rained a lot; nearly every day in fact, but who cares? We also took a pile of books and a DVD player and a scr...

Since Christmas I have been rereading the Hobbit for the first time in, oh I'd say, about 40 years. It's an engaging little book but not really a demanding read. The plot is inventive but not very complex. The characters aren't very well developed, and are not meant to be, for, as the constant asides from the author to the reader remind you, this is a children's book. So I was intrigued to go to the Rialto last night and watch the Peter Jackson movie in glorious 3-D. To be frank, I wasn't expecting much, as the reviews have been muted and I couldn't see how the 315 pages recounting the doings of a small band of adventurers could possibly be spun out to cover the 9 hours or so of the projected 3 Hobbit films. I was pleasantly surprised. Very pleasantly indeed. We plonked down our $43(!) for tickets, coffee and glasses and sat in the fairly full theatre. The credits rolled and within a minute or two my eyes had adjusted to the technology. I found the 3-D ju...