Anniversary

Today (Tuesday 24th) is the anniversary of Judy's death.

It is 42 years since my elder daughter died three days before her fourteenth birthday.

I have now lived longer after her passing than I did before it.

Here she is a few months earlier in her school uniform and the wig she wore after her hair was shaved to facilitate the radiotherapy treatment.

She would have been 56 on 27 November.

I miss her every day.

But now, instead, I have a younger daughter who is energetic, conscientious, altruistic, empathetic, thoughtful, kind and loving like her sister.

And I have four beautiful granddaughters, each one very much in control of her own life, intelligent, enterprising, generous, encouraging, and affectionate in her own unique way.

Julia

Nina

Penny

Carys

Sophie

The problem of Auckland

Staying in Auckland for a few days this week has reminded me again of what a problem modern cities present.

If we are to survive as a race on this planet we will have to solve this problem.

I refer to the unsustainable way we devote space and resources to our daily activities.

Take roading for example. Huge amounts of space are invested in roading systems so that hundreds of thousands of people can travel, one person per car most of the time, one way in the morning and the other way in the late afternoon. Whereas if we could organise our society in flexible working hours, we could get by with much less space devoted to roading.

And half a century ago Ivan Illich worked out that if we totalled all the time spent on roads and vehicles and their fuel, and compared that with the total distance travelled by everyone, the resulting average would be walking speed. I have never seen anyone since who had an answer for that. Illich had a simple low-tech solution, similar to Gandhi's ideas; but no- one has ever been really interested. We're all too seduced by ideas of progress and technology.

But this is only one example. Schools, sports fields, and commercial buildings, which are only used a few hours a day, or a few days per week, are another example of poor investment planning.

In this world of strictly limited resources, especially space, areas left unused for any length of time represent poor management of the planet.

But there does not seem to be any interest in improving this situation: we keep building out into the countryside, when a better solution would be to concentrate population and preserve as much agricultural land as possible for growing food. In fact, housing should really be on otherwise waste space, like high altitudes, over shallow water, and so on.

What do others think?

Two interesting books

I have been reading two books this week, one fiction, one claiming to be non-fiction. There is a common theme to them.

The novel is Ernest Hemingway's The sun also rises, his first. I had read For whom the bell tolls, A call to arms, and The old man and the sea many years ago and enjoyed them, as much for their realistic reporting as for their novelistic qualities. 

The sun also rises is about a group of young affluent Americans living in Europe between the world wars. The title is a literal translation of a French phrase: Le soleil aussi se leve, with the implication that with each change in circumstances people go on making the same old mistakes, and the sun just keeps on rising exactly the same.

You keep hoping that Mike will sober up and make a decision about his planned marriage, that Cohn will stop following the heroine around like a puppy-dog, that she will not fall madly in love with the next handsome man she meets. But none of these things happen, and although the characters move out of Paris to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls, a new location doesn't mean new behaviours.

"Toujours ca change, toujours c'est la meme chose" is also a theme of the other book: Roland Perry's The queen, her lover and the most notorious spy in history. The main character is Queen Victoria, but the book is really a history of the private lives of the Royal Family from 1835 for about 100 years.

After Princess Victoria has an affair with a handsome young Guards Officer in her teens, she is married off by her family to Albert. After Albert's death, and the death of her lover, she meets John Brown and has a relationship like Lady Chatterley (remember the film, Mrs Brown, with Billy Connolly). Later still, after Brown dies, she falls for an Indian language teacher.

The Family seems to alternate between characters like Victoria who can't get enough sex but still make a positive contribution in other ways, (Edward VII, Edward VIII) and strait-laced people like Albert, (George V, George VI) who have a different set of positive qualities and weaknesses.

Victoria and her eldest daughter Vicky (mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II) maintained a massive correspondence for many years, building up an archive of thousands of letters, sometimes as many as four in a day. Vicky had them stored in her home in Germany, but wanted them returned to Britain because they were thought to be extremely dangerous if they became public knowledge.

This is where the spy comes in, being commissioned to retrieve the letters after World War II and enable them to be kept safe on British soil.

What Hemingway observed in his young compatriots in Paris in the twenties, Perry seems to find also recurring in the Royal Family over a century and more. A fascinating comparison!

Sketching this month

I have been staying with my sister while she recuperates from a spell in hospital. Some kind friend had sent these flowers to cheer her up, and they certainly did that. They were also an interesting subject for my acrylics.

Ten days ago our sketching group met at Marsland Hill in the centre of New Plymouth and sketched the city through the view shafts available. If you look carefully you can just make out the Len Lye Centre behind the town clock in this version.

Then again, here is the view of two features on the top of the hill: the carillon on the left, and a memorial from the Land Wars on the right.

Here is another acrylic, this time of cyclamen in flower, again from my sister's home.

And this is a view of the house we lived in in Westown. I had morning tea with the acquaintance who built it and developed the garden, and showed him the sketch and we discussed the house and the contribution each of us had made to its development.

Gallipoli

The book by Les Carlyon

If there is one thing I have learned from this book, it is this: War is an exceptional circumstance, and to pursue it successfully needs some exceptional people with exceptional training and exceptional equipment. In history these three seem to come together very rarely. I hope all political leaders know it as well! And that they realise exceptional people don't occur more than once in each generation.

I had heard the usual story that Gallipoli was a matter of brave and dogged Anzac troops being let down badly by bungling British Officers. After reading Carlyon's version I'm not sure who to blame: but it certainly isn't the rank and file soldier from any country including the Turks.

Certainly most of the generals were incompetent, or lazy, or ill, or shell-shocked, or too institutionalised to tell their superiors the truth. At least one was eccentric or insane; he certainly seems to have been away with the fairies most of the time, until he was finally sacked.

I had known about the landings at Anzac, where the Aussies and NZers got holed up by the Turkish guns on the ridge-tops. What I didn't know was that there were also landings further north at Suvla Bay and further south at the tip of the peninsula, and both involved Anzac troops, as well as Brits, Indians, French and so on. These other beachheads were just as much a failure as the Anzac one.

First because of poor planning, from Downing Street on down. When Plan A failed miserably, the commanders used it again the next day, and the third, losing hundreds each time.

Secondly because of lack of equipment, food, and medical facilities. One general cabled the War Office for more ammunition and was told in effect: this campaign was not planned on the basis that you sit tight and adopt a defensive position. Get up and start moving!

Thirdly because of impossible terrain, where units on the ground got hopelessly lost in broad daylight.

Fourthly because of the old ships the Navy was using in support off-shore, and the admirals' reluctance to take real risks to support army units even in dire situations.

But fundamentally the problems were that everyone was still scrambling to catch up with technological advances. Generals who had trained in the nineteenth century were unfamiliar with twentieth century equipment - and so on.

And it wasn't solved even then. Another book I am reading deals with the Cassino battles in World War II, and it is becoming increasingly clear that even by 1944 there was still a gap between what some modern weapons systems could do and what the humans trying to run the battles understood.

It all does nothing to convince me that war is worthwhile!

An interesting day

Parihaka Day, 2015

It has been a beautiful, cool, sunny day in Taranaki.

The Len Lye Centre is showing the film of The Children of Parihaka to celebrate Parihaka Day, which remembers the Parihaka Incident of 5 November 1881. So I walked along to the 11 am session.

The new little cinema at the Len Lye was only a third full, which was disappointing.

This film is an account of a tour by the Kura Kaupapa Maori from Parihaka of the sites where men who were arrested and imprisoned without trial in 1881 were kept locked up, some of them for 19 years, and all in a way we would regard as unconstitutional. Certainly there was no Habeas Corpus for them, inspite of the promise in the Treaty.

The children visited the prisons at Mt Cook in Wellington, Addington and Lyttelton Harbour in Christchurch, and Dunedin. They saw  roads, stone walls, causeways, stop-banks and harbour works that had been built by the Parihaka prisoners, and graves where they had been buried.

What was not included was the treatment of the Parihaka leaders, Tohu and Te Whiti, who were kept under house arrest in Nelson, far from their families and from any other prisoners in the South Island.

Every New Zealander should know this story thoroughly; this film is one way into it. I hope the apology from the Government planned next year will include some real action to make the apology meaningful, such as 5 November being declared Parihaka Day.

Garden Festival

This week is the Taranaki Garden Spectacular, so we visited two gardens in the afternoon. Both were in Waitara, along the road that leads to the school where our grandchildren go.

We had visited both before, with Ruby, so this time we took an old friend of 95, who coped with the walking and the getting in and out of the car as well as I did.

As we learned during our visits, this is the last year for both gardens. The first is a cottage garden with masses of colourful flowers backed by beautiful rhododendrons and roses and fully grown trees behind that. There are corners with hostas, and corners with ceramic art, a vegetable patch, several water features. One whole area around the swimming pool featured flowers and furniture in bright primary colours: yellow, blue and red.

The second garden was similar in size, and featured collected items of old farming equipment, fewer flowers and more greenery, again lots of mature trees, a maple studded Japanese garden, a red phone booth and letter-box, several old street signs, and a museum shed or two filled with more agricultural implements like scythes, seed-drills, horse-collars, cross-cut saws and so on.

The gardener was Pat Wood, a former colleague of mine at Friends Plus; they plan to stop the garden openings after this year.

Turkish cuisine

In the evening a friend visiting from England took us to dinner at a local Turkish restaurant for meze and iskanders, chicken and lamb. 

The food was superb and the conversation interesting and varied. Our friend has a son and daughter-in-law in Turkey, and has recently visited Oregon, so there was plenty to discuss.

What a variety of cultural experiences for one bright Spring day!

The Good, the Bad and the....?

I have been reading

As I said before, Killing Patton has been on my list. It is a fourth book by O'Neill and his co-writer Dugard with similar titles: Killing Kennedy, Killing Lincoln, Killing Jesus.

I found Killing Patton very unsatisfactory by the finish. There is no clear evidence one way or the other, and no attempt to draw any conclusion, just a series of suggestions and innuendoes.

On the way to the finish, there were interesting descriptions of the action in the last months of the European war in the sector Patton was responsible for, and a clear enough picture of the sort of man he was, together with some doubts cast on the contributions of some other leaders in the same fight.

But what I thought was going to be the presentation and elucidation of a mystery turned out to be a fizzer.

Which is more than could even be said for another story I endured this week.

Yesterday morning we went to morning tea at the local multiplex cinema, where we have joined the oldies cinema club. Then we watched "The Dressmaker" in a packed theatre. Four of us were men, and some of the ladies enjoyed the film immensely because of the wide variety of features it displayed.

Again I had expected an explanation of a mystery death: we got that. But there were several loose ends and no attempt to tie them up, even with a very long anticlimax, taking all of the second half of the film, about the dressmaker's skills and how she fought her way back towards the good graces of the tiny rural Australian community.

So the film really fell apart into two halves: the story of the death and the circumstances leading up to that, and the contemporary (early fifties) relationship between the heroine and the rest, which was at the level of farce.

The dialogue was ordinary, the acting apart from Kate Winslet was amateur, the story as I have said was incomplete. I admit to falling asleep a couple of times. 

The real value is in being able to compare a really faulty work of art with other better ones.

Now I'm reading Les Carlyon's book on Gallipoli; this time it's the message not the messenger that worries me. Watch this space!