Available Light

We have a dinky little arthouse cinema in Dunedin. There are maybe 50 seats, a coffee machine and a personable  guy with a few days stubble and an encyclopaedic knowledge of movies who sells the tickets, makes the drinks and chooses the flicks. We go as often as we can, and this Saturday afternoon past it was to see The Way . As veteran readers of this blog will know, we walked half the Camino Santiago in 2009, and we are planning on returning to Spain this coming September to walk the last 400 km from Sahagun to Santiago, so we had been wanting to see this particular film for a while. The 2010 movie, written and directed by Emilio Estevez and starring Estevez's real life father, Martin Sheen is about an American doctor who "accidentally" walks the Camino Santiago. Travelling to Spain to collect the body of his son (Esteves) who has died on the first day of the Camino, the one that takes pilgrims over the Pyrenees, the doctor (Sheen) decides instead to cremate the b...

This weekend past we went to Stewart Island, whose Maori name is Rakiura, land of glowing skies. The long gentle summer we have been enjoying in the deep south continues, and the trip there and back was across a Foveaux Straight as flat and calm as anybody has ever seen it. We travelled, as usual, on the ferry, a large, modern catamaran which makes the journey in about an hour, and we stayed with Peter and Iris who run a very comfortable B&B on a hill overlooking Halfmoon Bay. It's the sort of place which manages the almost impossible feat of being simultaneously homely and luxurious, and our hosts were knowledgeable and engaging. There was a very fine dinner and good wine and lots of conversation. On Sunday morning we woke to one of the skies from which the Island gets its name, and a dawn chorus dominated by the sound of Kaka: a sound that must have once been common throughout New Zealand, but is now heard only in Oban. There was a leisurely breakfast and some ...

For the last couple of days I have been in Christchurch at a meeting of bishops . We stayed in the Chateau on Park Terrace, which I remember being built and to which, when it it was new, and providing I had had enough time to save up,  I would take those girls I really wanted to impress. Back then it was about as flash as it gets in the Garden City but now  it is a comfortable, middle of the range place with quaint early 70s architecture. By and large it is in good nick for a Christchurch building: all that wood and pointy roofing and odd windows seems to have stood up to the rock and rolling pretty well, which is more than can be said for the bits of the city we saw on Thursday. For an afternoon we donned dayglo vests and hard hats and travelled on a big red Christchurch bus through the CBD. I have some photos here . There are fences around the centre of the city and guards in camouflage jackets and we all had to be counted in and counted out and there was not a lot of ...

We've had the Sydney branch of the family over to stay for the Easter break. It's been wonderful: Picnic on the beach; breakfast in the Dunedin sunshine; youngest member of the household establishing, by divine right and with the rapturous approval of her subjects,  an absolute monarchy for the duration; time enough to pick up my camera for the first time in weeks;  you know, all the usual stuff.

Buildings have been the overwhelming motif of year so far. Putting them up. Caring for them. Insuring them. Thinking about knocking them down. The problem we have in the Diocese of Dunedin is  a larger number of unreinforced masonry buildings than any other diocese in the country and a decreasing pool of people willing and able to look after them all. Although we weren't directly affected by earthquakes in the past year, we have, like everyone else in the country, been affected by the consequences of Christchurch's disaster in the form of increased insurance premiums and the prospect of seismic strengthening. Our insurers, EIG Ansvar, pulled out of the New Zealand Insurance market at the end of last year and now, nearly four months later, we are still in negotiation with brokers concerning what we are to do next. Over the past few months I have learned more about insurance than I ever really wanted to know, and I won't bore you with it all here other than to state the ob...

A week or two ago I listened to a talk given by Judy Ringland-Stewart about her daily prayer walks. Every day she takes an hour or so to follow a path from the house she shares with John and their children, though the forest, along the beaches and up to the summits of  the Otago Peninsula. These daily walks are a kind of pilgrimage; an engagement with her surroundings as places of wonder and beauty in their own right but also as an encounter with God. There was a sense of passion and integrity and connection about what she was saying that made me immediately think of two things. Firstly I thought of my own almost daily walks on the same peninsula, albeit on the other side of the harbour. Clemency and I walk whenever we can for all the usual reasons: for the companionship of a shared activity for an hour or so;  for fitness and postponing the inevitable consequences of aging; for the sheer enjoyment of  this ancient, weathered, once was volcano; (the photo at the to...

We bought a bed yesterday. The old one was a bit past its use by date, but you know how these things go - it isn't any worse today than it was yesterday so there is always a thousand things ahead of a bed in the budget queue. But what with the defunct springs and alarming potholes and everything, not to mention the rumours of vast ecosystems dwelling within it, it was getting harder to sleep on the probably important artifact of domestic furniture history in our bedroom. So yesterday was the day. Over the last couple of weeks I made a thorough reconnoitre of the bedding market. It had been a few decades since I had taken the remotest interest in it, so needed to refresh my memory. I googled. I wikipediaed. I looked in showrooms. I found that beds were a lot taller and more expensive than last time I looked. Over a few days I managed to look at every bed for sale in Dunedin and noticed something very odd about the bedding market. Although several of  the major brands were proud...