Available Light

It rained last night. The roses sustained a bit of damage, but they're tough little blighters. They still managed to put a brave face on things for us when we took our coffee and went out to pay our respects. There is an impossibly gaudy lily at the bottom of the garden, near the fence. Apart from trimming off some excess, these are unretouched. They do look like this. I'm not even sure what these things are called. They grow in the shady places and I'm told, on very good authority that they're special. It's an acquired taste, obviously, but I think I may be starting to grasp their art deco appeal. The flowers are nothing without the green bits. These little guys keep the gaudy bits alive. Keep you and me alive, actually. And when I look closely, each one is a masterpiece of beauty and complexity and elegance.

 I live with a woman whose happy place is the 1350 square metres surrounding our house, and she's very often happy. When required I saw off branches and dig holes and move stuff around in the wheelbarrow but mostly, my role is to be the audience. It's what we do before breakfast, with coffee, when even in November there is a dew and you can see traces of your breath in the clear, early air. Bring your camera, she says. Look at this. Quick, over here, this is special. A bellbird proclaims his dominion and her friend the blackbird is loitering, hoping she may be doing something with the worm laden compost. The vegetables are coming along nicely. The wisteria is in bloom. How did this happen? How did we end up here? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Photos: Nikon D7100, Micro Nikkor 105mm 2.8 

Our homes are metaphors. They are statements of our being in the world in much the same way as our clothes are or our habitual facial expressions or our stance and gait. As a parish priest I liked to visit people's homes because I learned far more about people in the first five seconds over their threshold than I would in five years of conversation over coffee after church. It's not about judgement, it's about revelation. It's incarnation, which is the immaterial self finding expression in the material world. Ah. So this is who you are! The one who would live in this place and surround yourself with these things and arrange them in this way. My house at the moment is swathed in scaffolding.  There are guys clambering over our roof and through our doors, changing things and fixing stuff and painting it. It's their music and their conversation which engulf us, and very informative it is, too. The metaphor is perfect. Perfect. Our houses and clothes define us no...

Here we are home again, and Hawaii is fading away into the background as I come to terms with exactly how much needs to be done in the Diocese and how little time there is to do it. Hawaii is a strange place, sitting between two worlds like nowhere else I've ever seen. It is very American, with freeways and Hershey bars and Macy's and light switches that work upside down and those odd, shallow, flat toilet pans which give you more information than you ever needed or wanted to know. It is also very Pacific with reefs and coconut palms and earth ovens and pois and a language whose relationship to Maori is obvious and intriguing. Of course we only saw a bit of it: Oahu, at one end of which sits the city of Honolulu. Honolulu is like Disneyland without the rides: a city built on vacations and therefore on escape and fantasy. At the other end of Oahu is a series of small towns with plain architecture and tiny, tired shopping centres and steep, stark, buttressed mountains and gorge...

Over the years, the Diocese of Dunedin has changed the Episcopal residence a few times, and at every trade and exchange, the house has got a bit smaller. We will be carrying on this proud tradition by moving into our own house sometime in the next month or two. The official episcopal palace in Mosgiel is a nice enough place but we'd prefer the novelty of paying our own mortgage and of planting a garden that isn't going to be handed over to a non gardening successor and a committee of blokes with chainsaws in a decade's time. We bought our little house in Glenfinnan Place, Anderson's Bay about 3 years ago with the intention of retiring there some day. Who knows? We may still. But in the meantime, it will serve us very nicely and the fact that it is really just a three bedroom town house is part of its appeal. Anglican bishops have long since ceased to be princes of the Church and it's time to remove any vestige of pretence that they are still. Time, perhaps, to rem...

When we first saw the St. John's Vicarage it was 4 degrees celsius outside the house and 4.5 degrees inside. We went home to the green, wet, warm Waikato with a memory of a large dark scruffy house with gray walls and a bizarrely patterned carpet. The opportunity to live at 373 Highgate wasn't high on the list of motivations for becoming the Vicar of Roslyn, but after 11 years of living here, we are very loathe to leave. The house was built in 1925 and its first occupant described it as "well designed and well built, providing what is desirable without showiness or unnecessary luxury." It has 5 bedrooms, 4 living rooms and a couple of sunrooms. All the walls, interior and exterior are double brick and sit on immense concrete foundations, so that both stories and the basement all have the same floorplan. You can feel the solidity of the place as soon as you walk over the threshold. Doors and stairs are of thick, simply fashioned cedar which hasn't warped or cracked...

We got into Auckland early on Friday and were back in Dunedin by 9:15. It was cold. Unbelievably cold. Cold as in the there's absolutely nowhere in this house where I can feel warm and nothing I can put on that seems to make a blind bit of difference kind of cold. Our big brick house had stood empty for three months, leaching away the stores of heat it had piled into all those solid internal walls and gradually absorbing moisture. It has taken six days of heat pump and firewood for it to begin to feel cosy again, but we're getting there. On Friday night we both slept 13 hours, and both woke, independently in the wee small hours, thinking "where do we have to get to today, and where is the toilet in this place?" On Saturday we slept 12 hours and Sunday 10. There was a large box of mail, a couple of very full inboxes and a pile of old Listeners in their plastic bags. On Monday morning my computer died. It had been on the way out for a while, but sitting idle for a long ...