Catchup

What has happened to the sketches?

I know, it's been a while, but I have been beavering away in the meantime. Here is today's:

This is the new hotel just around the corner, the Novotel Hobson, from an angle few people ever see it. Here it is on the right of the street, which is one-way in the other direction. The tree in the background is a very rare one; only two in New Zealand, a Jamaican thorn.

It is really curved like this and the front is completely covered in glass.

Just up the street from the hotel is the hillside with the buildings of the Boys High School dotted around it, and trees and cows of the school's agriculture department among them. At the bottom of the hill is the cricket field with the wet-weather practice shed.

 Near the corner of our garage is a Japanese maple tree. We used to have several maples, but when our house was extended they had to be moved and we gave the others away to friends who had more room.

This one has just been trimmed rather heavily because it will persist in blocking the light from the lamp on the garage corner.

A couple of kilometres away is this house something like 100 years old. There is another one almost exactly the same much closer to us, just around the corner almost, which used to belong to a builder so it is well-preserved.

I have also been copying some other work. First, with some chalk pastels, a copy of one of Matthew's photos which you may have seen on our wall:

And then two from Regency China plates, both scenes from the nineteenth century:

This second one is of an old coaching inn in Bristol, interesting to me because that was where my family worked for some years from 1800-1807 after they left Gloucester and before they made the final shift to London.

Perhaps Great-great-grandfather Gaze worked in a scene like this in the mornings getting the horses and coaches ready to leave for London!

Scottish History

I.'ve been reading an old book about Scottish history. And what a shambles!

But the most staggering thing is that I had never heard of most of these people. Or of most of the events. Even the ones after King James VI became James I of England.

Yet at school and university I did courses labelled "British History".

I now realise, most of a century later, that what was sold to me was actually English History.

But a lot of the important political leaders, and leaders in science and innovation, were from Scotland.

Now why did all those brainy people accept without protest that British History was a sham?

Tony Blair or David Cameron for instance.

Now I have no ancestral links to Scotland, so far as I know, but it doesn't take much thinking to see that this is another case of colonialism and oppression. And if you read about Wales you get the same feeling, and I do have some links there.

Perhaps living and breathing in New Zealand, with constant debate about the Treaty, has some universal value, and learning Te Reo might be good for every last NZ child who will grow up to take their place in a global society?

A good film

Last night we watched a good film: the cinema version of Lloyd Jones's Mr Pip.

We were struck by the variety of ideas Jones has packed into the novel. Apart from a cast of interesting characters, and a plot with plenty of action, the themes for the audience to go away thinking about are especially densely packed: differences in culture, the relationship of reality to fantasy or imagination, and are fictional characters like real people?

Through the personality of Matilda, we see the unsophisticated but age-old culture of Bougaineville contrasted with modern culture, peaceful village life contrasted with rebellion and military oppression, Dickens's nineteenth century imagination of Great Expectations compared with life at the end of the twentieth century.  We also get to consider such questions as whether Great Expectations and the Bible are the same kind of book, or whether real-life experience is more valuable than book-learning.

Set on the island of Bougaineville about 2000, the background is a strike by workers at the world's largest tin mine and the oppression of these people and their villages by the government of the day.

Into this situation comes Thomas Watts (Hugh Laurie in the film) to take up a job as village schoolteacher, for which he has no qualifications. His only equipment is his personality and a battered copy of Dickens's novel, which he proceeds to read to the children, and eventually to an appreciative audience of their parents, a chapter a day.

Pip, the hero of Dickens's novel, becomes a central character in the relationship between Mr Watts and the villagers, and especially in his relationship with his star pupil, Matilda, and her mother.

We certainly enjoyed renewing our acquaintance with this story as much as we had enjoyed reading the novel originally. So you have a choice between the book and the film; whichever I know you will find it worthwhile.