Category: Uncategorized

Darn it

I like to darn clothes, particularly woollen socks and jerseys, if they develop holes. Fine merino garments are a bit more of a challenge. Wool is too thick, so I use cotton – or polyester thread (cotton thread is no longer available as far as I know) and a fine needle. This morning I darned a favourite fine merino top which, like many of my tops, had holes at the front above the hem. I wonder if these holes are caused by leaning on the kitchen bench. I’m trying to break that habit.

My darning is a bit clumsy, but satisfying to do. I do the horizontal threads first and then weave in and out vertically – the weft and warp. I’m reminded of the women weavers in a book I just finished called Unquiet Women by Max Adams. He writes of the huge weaving production barns in medieval times, often attached to country houses, where women sat in lines at many looms working long, hard hours. The making of linen was particularly demanding as the rendering of the flax into fibres for weaving was an exhausting and dirty job. The author quotes a woman’s will in which she carefully details items of clothing to be passed on to her surviving family members. It’s clear that clothing was well made and highly valued.

I am also reminded of the women I saw in Peru and Bolivia, spinning with drop spindles as they watched flocks of sheep and alpaca. Then would follow the dyeing and weaving and the cloth could be seen in the clothes they wore and at markets for sale. The cloth on these spoon dolls is faded (I’ve had them for over 40 years), but the female figure on the left is holding a drop spindle.

In a small way, my darning is part of a long tradition.

Felix at 18 months

Looking at Felix tonight I can see how much he has grown. He is almost too big for the chair.

In February last year, at 4 months old, he was a tidier fit.

But by April last year, at 6 months old, he seemed to have had a growth spurt.

I just did a bit of quick research and learned from several sources that (with the exception of some breeds) cats stop growing at about 12 to 18 months of age. So the chair might do for a while yet.

Mine – or ours?

Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!

Seagulls in Finding Nemo
Felix took ‘my’ chair this morning

Why is it that a cat ‘steals’ the chair where, just moments before, you were happily reading the paper? Could it be the warmth? Is it territorial (mine!)? Or proprietorial (who’s the boss)? Or just canny (she likes that chair so it must be the place to be)?

It reminds me of Finnick the cat making himself comfortable on the bed of Cosmo the dog. At the time I was babysitting, or maybe cat-sitting, at my sister’s family’s house for a few days and had taken Cosmo and his bed with me. This bolshie border terrier decided he was no match for Finnick, and opted for the passive aggressive. By some instinct, he went directly upstairs, in an unfamiliar house, where I found him some time later squeezed into Finnick’s bed and looking rather hard done by.

Finnick on Cosmo’s sheepskin in July 2015
Cosmo in (sort of) Finnick’s bed, July 2015
Finnick was still at it in 2018 – this is clearly a dog’s bed!

While I was searching out these photos, I found other examples of this territorial (if that’s what it is) behaviour. Perhaps it’s just about sharing.

There’s a whole sofa, but this end is best (Cosmo and Skipper) April 2012
This bit of the mat is best shared (Cosmo and Jock) – but we’re not making eye contact. Jan 2017
Just keeping it warm for you… July 2015

To this day, Finnick remains a ‘first in, first served’ cat. He snaffles Mum’s knee when we visit, even while she’s sitting down in the hallway to take off her shoes. Then, once she’s settled on the sofa, Finnick’s there. Koda just has to make do.

Nov. 2021

Wombat adventures

As I picked up my paper at my gate this morning, a woman walking her children to school came over to thank me for the books I’d given them a couple of weeks ago. She said her daughter particularly liked the one written by the same author who wrote the wombat books. “I’ve got those books,” I said. “So have we,” she replied.

The wombat books are by Jackie French, beautifully illustrated by Bruce Whatley, and are based on the true story of Mothball the wombat who takes up residence in a backyard. Imagine having a wombat battering down your back door demanding carrots! In the second book, the residents’ toddler befriends a baby wombat.

from Diary of a Wombat by Jackie French, illustrated by Bruce Whatley
from Diary of a Baby Wombat

I am pretty sure I bought the first wombat book in Australia. My trip to Adelaide and Melbourne was in September-October 2003. The book was published in 2002, so it is likely I did. I definitely bought the plush toy wombat there. It sits on the top of my computer screen.

I looked out my travel journal. I found myself immersed in it and read the whole thing.

I have a couple of shelves for my travel photos and journals. As you can see, I have bought plush toys from other countries as well. The homemade red and black albums on the top are of the 1981 OE (from South America to Europe to Canada), the yellow albums are of China Dec 87-Jan 88. The most recent journal is of Scandinavia, France and Portugal 2018 – the albums are digital; some are on this blog – in fact, that 2018 trip was why I started blogging, not intending to carry on afterward! Every now and again, I will get out a journal and relive the experience.

I sat reading in my egg chair today, watching the occasional plane flying high overhead and wondering why so many people choose to fly. The book I was reading was set in Sweden. Before I knew it, I was reading that journal…

Kind

A pile of library books is waiting to be read and more are knocking at the door, so to speak, as holds arrive at the library or on Libby. Today, I completed Kind by Stephanie Johnson, the title being a reference to Jacinda Ardern’s plea that we be kind to each other during the pandemic. I was reminded of Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood and Fiona Farrell’s The Deck – both also influenced by political events and by Covid. Kind didn’t fill me with the same sense of entrapment and dread as those books, I was relieved to find. The many flashbacks took you out of claustrophobic lockdown and into complex lives, and out into the countryside too, from Christchurch to Arthur’s Pass to the Bay of Islands to Australia – and even to China in flash back. I was also reminded of Kamila Shamsie’s Best of Friends, as the main part of the story is about the life-long friendship of two women growing in self-knowledge perhaps, or perhaps not.

The cover blurb describes the book as satirical, which it is in a way, but not so the characters become types (with exceptions) rather than credible. Some embody rumours and suspicions which abounded during covid about criminal activity, illegal migration, and Chinese interference or culpability. Many show various ways of being kind and how that can be aspirational but also misguided and possibly lead to choices which cause life-long regret.

In the Author’s Note at the end, the author thanks her husband for ‘a certain plot point’. Which one? There are so many twists and turns. I feared I would lose track of the story lines and characters but they all linked together in increasingly suspenseful ways and soon I was completely into it, reading in my egg chair into the warm evening when it began to rain lightly and got too dark to see. I finished the last couple of pages as I cooked dinner.

On to the next book! Something a little more sedate perhaps, to be kind to myself, before I tackle the brutal demands of more literary fiction.

Oaty Autumn fare

We’re back to New Zealand Standard Time today. It’s dark before you know it. Felix is still running to his own clock, asking for dinner at afternoon tea time. Not really surprising as he had his breakfast at 3am which was when Mum, strangely, got up to have her shower, thinking it was 7am. As the mornings will be lighter for a while, it will be easier for her to tell what time it is.

In the meantime, the garden is producing tomatoes, apples, rhubarb. We’ve begun to have soup again, and oaty puddings and biscuits seem right at this time of year.

Anzac biscuits and Apple and Rhubarb Crumble

Impressive Art

It’s the time of year when going to the movies – into a darkened room – is more appealing than during summer. I walked into town in brisk, windy weather after getting my flu injection this morning. During the 20 minute waiting time before I could leave the medical centre, I looked up what is on at the movies and found one perfectly timed after my singing class and just a block away at the Arts Centre. I am impressed by the art of Frances Hodgkins, have been to the European Journeys exhibition and read the book, and was delighted to see that the documentary Frances Hodgkins: Anything but a Still Life which first screened almost a year ago was making a return visit to the Lumiēre cinema. It proved to be wonderful and completely absorbing.

The cinema is pretty impressive too, making excellent use of a part of the Arts Centre overlooking the Botanic Gardens and decorated with style.

After taking this photo, I turned to take one of the gilt mirror with seashell motif opposite and, of course, found I was reflected in it. Not only that, but my lovely passed-on jacket almost matched the colour scheme. I sent the photo to the friend who passed on the jacket and she advised me not to sit on the sofa in case I became invisible!

I was tempted to go to the movie which was about to begin as I left (Wicked Little Letters) but decided to save it for another day and walked home, scuffing through leaves on Montreal Street, dodging scooter riders in Cranmer Square, and reliving the documentary I had just seen.

Post Script for Felix fans: Felix helped unpack the shopping (again) this afternoon.

Pining for the fjords

Since the day had decided to be overcast, I set off for The Colombo and Nordic Chill. I subscribe to the Moomin newsletter and had thought the merchandise was only available by ordering from overseas until I looked on the Nordic Chill website yesterday. I last visited the shop in 2018 before I went to Scandinavia. At that time I was immersing myself in things Scandinavian and discovered the Moomins – not a weird religion as you might imagine, but the creation of novelist and artist Tove Jansson. In Finland, I learned a little of Finnish psychology in Karoliina Korhonen’s ‘social guides’ to Finland which I brought home. The characterisations seem similar to those in the Moomin books.

The new shop design on the website made me even more nostalgic and keen to see it this morning. It features the classic Scandinavian house which you see dotted through the countryside and along the fjords and coast, often on islands. Usually painted red, these are summer retreats – although that word seems wrong as Scandinavians come out into the sunlight after the long northern winter. I put on my red house earrings from Finland and set out.

I found the shop is in two parts – one featuring a lot of Ikea furniture, and the other woollen clothing and throws, children’s toys, books and homewares. Little mice seem to be the latest thing. Not like the one Felix tormented to death yesterday, but ones that wear clothes, live in houses, go to the beach, and do the vacuuming (with a Nilfisk of course).

But it was Moomins I was most keen to see. And there they were.

There were books, a little Moomin house, placemats, toys, tins, key rings, caps, socks and comic strip magnets. I wonder what Tove Jansson would think of it all. She came to resent that the popularity of the Moomins left little time for what she considered her real art.

An article about Tove Jansson from The Simple Things magazine Nov. 2017 – with a book and plush toy from Copenhagen, mug from Helsinki, and a book from Telling Tales

I came home with a few things (having made room by decluttering recently…)

– including a backpack which by happy chance matches the very nice jacket passed on to me by a friend in the weekend.

This afternoon I watched a couple of episodes of MoominValley on TVNZ+ (voices of Matt Berry, Taron Egerton, Rosamund Pike, Jennifer Saunders, Richard Ayoade, Kate Winslet, Alison Steadman, Matt Lucas, Bel Powley…and more). Now, on the cusp of afternoon and evening, the sun is shining.