Here's something that popped into my head a while ago:
If a pig with laryngitis could be said to be disgruntled, how would you describe the following (answers further down):
1. Ozzie Osbourne after being dumped by Black Sabbath
2. The Venus de Milo
3. A sacked board or committee member
4. A nudist
5. A former peer of the realm
6. Something that has been flattened out
7. Someone who has been thrown out of a club
8. A skinhead
9. A new bride
10. A wizard who has lost his powers.
11. A former model
12. Someone who has been exorcised
13. A child left at home alone
14. A person who has recovered their voice
15. A failed medium
16. Someone who has been rescued from a cult
17. Someone with St Vitus’s Dance
18. A footballer sent to the ‘sin bin’
19. A failed detective
20. Something lost or mislaid
Answers:
1. Disbanded
2. Disarmed
3. Disappointed
4. Discovered
5. Disentitled
6. Disinclined
7. Dismembered
8. Distressed
9. Dismissed
10. Dispelled
11. Disposed
12. Dispossessed
13. Distended
14. Disquieted
15. Dispirited
16. Dissected
17. Distilled
18. Displayed
19. Dissolved
20. Dislocated
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Thursday, March 5, 2009
The Sin Eater
The other night I watched a film on television called The Sin Eater (known in the US as The Order - not nearly such a good title in my opinion). Two things drew me to it, despite a fairly mediocre rating on the Internet Movie Database: it starred Heath Ledger, whose acting I enjoyed in Brokeback Mountain and I'm Not Here; and it was about Weird Religious Stuff (TM). It also, as it turned out, starred a rather delicious German actor called Benno Furmann as the eponymous Sin Eater, and the lovely Shannyn Sossamon, whom I last saw as a vampire in the late, lamented Moonlight. Good enough recommendations for me!
By a strange piece of synchronicity, earlier that day I had heard a radio talk by Margaret Attwood, part of a series on debt, in which she discussed debt as a religious issue, and specifically whether Jesus was referring to financial debt when he said, 'Forgive us our trespasses' in the Lord's Prayer. Apparently the church she attended as a child rendered this phrase as 'Forgive us our debts', which is interesting, given the Jewish custom of debt forgiveness at New Year (I think that's right - feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). She also mentioned the custom of 'sin eating'.
According to Wikipedia (that fount of all knowledge!):
'The term sin-eater refers to a person who, through ritual means, would take on by means of food and drink the sins of a deceased person, thus absolving his or her soul and allowing that person to rest in peace. In the study of folklore sin-eating is considered a form of religious magic. This practice was said to have been practiced in parts of England and Scotland, and allegedly survived until modern times in Wales. Traditionally, it is performed by a beggar, and certain villages maintained their own sin-eaters. They would be brought to the dying person's bedside, where a relative would place a crust of bread on the breast of the dying and pass a bowl of ale to him over the corpse. After praying or reciting the ritual, he would then drink and remove the bread from the breast and eat it, the act of which would remove the sin from the dying person and take it into himself.'
And this is basically what the film is about. Heather Ledger plays Alex Bernier, a young priest who belongs to a secret Roman Catholic order called the Carolingians, whose purpose is to hunt down and get rid of demons and other non-human evil influences. When the head of the order dies in Rome, apparently of suicide, Alex and a colleague, Thomas (played by English actor Mark Addy, whom I last saw in an enjoyably bizarre TV comedy series called Bonkers) go to Rome to investigate, along with a young artist called Mara (Shannyn Sossamon), on whom Alex once performed an exorcism, and who is clearly in love with him.
When Alex discovers strange marks on the body of the dead priest, he believes they are the marks of a sin eater, a renegade who offers absolution, last rites and therefore a path to heaven outside the jurisdiction of the church. And he's not wrong! Through a series of events that I found a little hard to follow, he finds and confronts the sin eater, who has lived since the time of Michelangelo, when he first unwittingly took on the role. After all this time, he is desperate to pass it on - which he had tried to do with the head of the Carolingians, who thwarted him by killing himself before the transfer took place - and tries every trick in the book to persuade/cajole/force Alex to become his successor.
It was a fascinating idea, and if they'd just just left Mara back in America - or out of the film altogether - rather than attempting to use her as a completely unnecessary love interest for Alex, the film would have been considerably better for it. The parts that address the conflict between Alex and 'William Eden' (the current identity of the Sin Eater) are great! They're well acted, and brimming with dramatic energy.
Altogether, not the best film I've ever seen, and a bit choppy and hard to follow in parts, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. It was well-acted and atmospheric, and I learned something new about one of the more arcane aspects of religion - never a bad thing in my book!
By a strange piece of synchronicity, earlier that day I had heard a radio talk by Margaret Attwood, part of a series on debt, in which she discussed debt as a religious issue, and specifically whether Jesus was referring to financial debt when he said, 'Forgive us our trespasses' in the Lord's Prayer. Apparently the church she attended as a child rendered this phrase as 'Forgive us our debts', which is interesting, given the Jewish custom of debt forgiveness at New Year (I think that's right - feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). She also mentioned the custom of 'sin eating'.
According to Wikipedia (that fount of all knowledge!):
'The term sin-eater refers to a person who, through ritual means, would take on by means of food and drink the sins of a deceased person, thus absolving his or her soul and allowing that person to rest in peace. In the study of folklore sin-eating is considered a form of religious magic. This practice was said to have been practiced in parts of England and Scotland, and allegedly survived until modern times in Wales. Traditionally, it is performed by a beggar, and certain villages maintained their own sin-eaters. They would be brought to the dying person's bedside, where a relative would place a crust of bread on the breast of the dying and pass a bowl of ale to him over the corpse. After praying or reciting the ritual, he would then drink and remove the bread from the breast and eat it, the act of which would remove the sin from the dying person and take it into himself.'
And this is basically what the film is about. Heather Ledger plays Alex Bernier, a young priest who belongs to a secret Roman Catholic order called the Carolingians, whose purpose is to hunt down and get rid of demons and other non-human evil influences. When the head of the order dies in Rome, apparently of suicide, Alex and a colleague, Thomas (played by English actor Mark Addy, whom I last saw in an enjoyably bizarre TV comedy series called Bonkers) go to Rome to investigate, along with a young artist called Mara (Shannyn Sossamon), on whom Alex once performed an exorcism, and who is clearly in love with him.
When Alex discovers strange marks on the body of the dead priest, he believes they are the marks of a sin eater, a renegade who offers absolution, last rites and therefore a path to heaven outside the jurisdiction of the church. And he's not wrong! Through a series of events that I found a little hard to follow, he finds and confronts the sin eater, who has lived since the time of Michelangelo, when he first unwittingly took on the role. After all this time, he is desperate to pass it on - which he had tried to do with the head of the Carolingians, who thwarted him by killing himself before the transfer took place - and tries every trick in the book to persuade/cajole/force Alex to become his successor.
It was a fascinating idea, and if they'd just just left Mara back in America - or out of the film altogether - rather than attempting to use her as a completely unnecessary love interest for Alex, the film would have been considerably better for it. The parts that address the conflict between Alex and 'William Eden' (the current identity of the Sin Eater) are great! They're well acted, and brimming with dramatic energy.
Altogether, not the best film I've ever seen, and a bit choppy and hard to follow in parts, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. It was well-acted and atmospheric, and I learned something new about one of the more arcane aspects of religion - never a bad thing in my book!
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Why I had to Move House
I recently moved house. I hate moving at the best of times, and I certainly hadn’t planned to do it again after only a year in a flat I really liked, in a delightful position near the beach and next to a wood.
The whole sorry saga began last winter. My next-door neighbour, a dour gnome of a woman, decided she needed a heat pump to keep her flat warm. Fair enough, you might say, especially as she’d previously suffered a stroke, and was most likely on blood-thinning medication. The local council, which owns the flats, apparently thought so, as they gave her permission to install a pump. What they didn’t think to do was to tell her to make sure it was a quiet one.
So, in the early hours of a Sunday morning, while I was having a quiet read in bed in preparation for sleep, a loud humming noise from outside assailed my ears. At first, I thought a car had started up somewhere near, but the noise kept on for long enough to discount this possibility. Then it stopped. With a sigh of gratitude, I settled down to sleep. Just as I was becoming pleasantly drowsy, the damned noise started up again. For some time I lay listening to what sounded like a refrigerator starting and stopping, only considerably louder. Finally, I could stand it no longer.
I dragged on my dressing gown and stumbled outside – never much fun in the middle of a winter’s night – to be confronted by the all-too-solid presence of the outside unit of the new heat pump, which my neighbour had placed practically outside my bedroom window. Never one to welcome confrontation, I dithered for some time before finally summoning the determination (or desperation) I needed. I went and knocked on the door.
And waited. And knocked again. And waited some more.
Finally, a light went on in the bedroom, and eventually my neighbour could be heard making her way to the door. The door opened and the gnome peered out, accompanied by a blast of hot air from the overheated lounge. Apologising for waking her, I entreated her to turn off the heat pump as the noise was keeping me awake.
‘But I need to keep warm,’ she said, heedless of the fact that the interior of her flat currently bore more than a passing resemblance to a fan oven.
I politely pointed out that she scarcely needed to heat the lounge while she was in bed in the bedroom. It took some time, but eventually she agreed, albeit grudgingly, to turn the thing off at night, though not without reminding me – a trifle smugly, I thought - that she got up much earlier than me, and would be turning the heat pump on again around six o’clock in the morning.
As the day wore on, I discovered the damned thing was not only loud enough to disturb my sleep, but also to make itself heard above my television or radio.
My next step was to telephone the Housing Officer at the City Council whose job it was to look after the flats and their tenants. She sounded sympathetic, and said she would check the situation out. This phone call was but the first of many, all equally fruitless. After several weeks of increasingly agitated endurance, I finally wrung out of her a promise to come and hear for herself the following day. Having realised by now the pointlessness of waiting for her to get back to me, I phoned her yet again some days later.
‘Actually,' she said, 'I didn’t think it was that loud.’
I pointed out to her that, since she didn’t have the misfortune to live next to it, she was possibly not the best person to make such a judgment. However, it seemed clear enough she had little intention of doing anything to help me.
After yet another interval of attempted stoicism, I decided to try moving further up the City Council hierarchy. I wrote to the Housing Manager describing my problem, and emphasising that there were, at that time, two empty flats in the housing complex, and asking if I could please move to one of them. I then settled down and waited for a reply. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. I never did hear back from him.
An approach to my local Member of Parliament’s office was similarly without result.
By now I was in a state of considerable stress, not just from the noise of the heat pump, but also from the realisation that those whose job it was to look after us tenants had no intention of doing so. I decided to give up, on the principle that at least I'd be avoiding the stress of trying to deal with the City Council and its dilatory minions. For a while, this seemed to be working – more or less. Eventually, however, the noise intrusion once more became too much for me, so I decided on another onslaught on the Powers that Be.
After several weeks of repeated phone calls to the Housing Officer, it became clear that not only had she no intention of addressing the situation, but she seemed to be actively avoiding me. My suspicion appeared to be confirmed by the fact that, when I finally got through to her, she immediately hastened to assure me that she hadn’t been ignoring me.
Not long after that, I read in a circular distributed by City Housing of her imminent retirement, which perhaps went some way toward explaining her lack of interest in my case. Yet again, I was forced to retreat. However, on arriving home one day I found a note in my letterbox from the new Housing Officer introducing herself and giving – be still, my beating heart! – her direct-line telephone number! Needless to say, I lost little time in phoning her. Of course I more or less had to go back to square one, but I hoped for a little more efficiency from the new broom.
It didn't take long for my hopes to be dashed. You’ll have guessed by now that I have more than my fair share of stubbornness, but this comes at a price, and by now I was thoroughly stressed out on two fronts: the heat pump and the lack of action by City Housing. And to add insult to injury, I discovered that one of the new tenants who moved into the empty flats was completely deaf, and therefore wouldn’t have been bothered by any heat-pump noise. So why on earth didn’t they let me move into his flat and put him in mine? Presumably a solution that sensible is beyond your average council employee. Finally, out of sheer desperation, I sent an email to the Mayor, attaching a copy of the fruitless letter I had sent to the housing Manager. This was on a Friday afternoon.
On Monday, I arrived home from work to find a telephone message from the Housing Officer asking me to phone her. The next morning I did so, and lo and behold, a unit had just become available in another housing complex a couple of streets away from mine. Fancy that! Obviously it pays to go to the top. When I went to see the flat, it was disappointingly dingy and scruffy looking, having been lived in for quite some time by an elderly lady, apparently without any kind of refurbishment during that time. However, I decided I’d better take it, since goodness knew how long it would be before something else became available. Besides, the Council always seemed to carry out some degree of refurbishment between tenancies, so at the very least I could expect it to be cleaned. In the event, it was completely repainted and new carpet and floor vinyl laid.
The actual process of moving was almost low-key compared with the previous six months or so, although I had to hire a removal firm, which cost considerably more than I’d expected, due to poor access on both sites. However, I had help from several very kind friends, for which I was exceedingly grateful.
I’ve now been in my new flat for two weeks and, on the whole, I like it very much. The kitchen is tiny and has almost no storage, and I’m still looking for someone to help me put up some shelves so I can unpack the rest of my foodstuffs. The bathroom is a bit cramped, due to housing the laundry as well as the usual shower, basin and toilet – and, temporarily, my cat’s litter box. He has twice gone back to my old flat, so I have to keep him inside for a couple of weeks. He hates this with a passion, and spends much of his time wandering from window to door wailing piteously and launching determined assaults on the locked cat door. It’s a lot like listening to a whining child.
I had to hire an electrician to hardwire the washing machine cord into the plug, as it seems it’s now illegal to use a normal plug in a bathroom. And I’m still waiting for a council handyman to come and make the wardrobe usable. Someone – probably a man – has altered it so that there is approximately 20 inches of rack on which to hang clothes, the rest consisting of a number of shelves and what I can only describe as shelflets, completely useless for stowing anything larger than socks. I currently have piles of clothing on the bedroom floor and the dining table and boxes of foodstuffs that I can’t put away, and I’ve had to buy a new iron because I couldn’t find the old one and was running out of neat work clothes.
Oh, and I managed to turn on the wrong stove element, burning through the cord of the toaster, which was sitting on the element at the time as I had nowhere better to put it. The toaster was plugged into the plug point on the stove at the time, so the stove wiring burnt out, too, all just as I was starting to cook my dinner on Saturday night. Until someone came to fix the stove, I was reduced to boiling water for tea or coffee in a saucepan on a gas camping stove.
On the plus side, however, the living room has more room than in the previous flat, and the flat itself is very private – almost like a miniature town house with its own little garden. And I’m close to the beach, so the air is lovely and clean And - best of all - no heat pump!
PS. I wrote this about three years ago. I'm still in the new flat, and I love it! My neighbours are friendly without being intrusive, and, with the help of my gardening lady, byt tiny garden is now a haven of green. Sadly, my cat never acclimatised to his new home, and was eventually taken in by the SPCA and put down. However, I now have a beatiful tabby cat called Merlin, who loves to cuddle up beside me on the couch and have his tummy tickled. And I've heard through the grapevine that my erstwhile neighbour moved into a home, and the tenants all had a party to celebrate!
The whole sorry saga began last winter. My next-door neighbour, a dour gnome of a woman, decided she needed a heat pump to keep her flat warm. Fair enough, you might say, especially as she’d previously suffered a stroke, and was most likely on blood-thinning medication. The local council, which owns the flats, apparently thought so, as they gave her permission to install a pump. What they didn’t think to do was to tell her to make sure it was a quiet one.
So, in the early hours of a Sunday morning, while I was having a quiet read in bed in preparation for sleep, a loud humming noise from outside assailed my ears. At first, I thought a car had started up somewhere near, but the noise kept on for long enough to discount this possibility. Then it stopped. With a sigh of gratitude, I settled down to sleep. Just as I was becoming pleasantly drowsy, the damned noise started up again. For some time I lay listening to what sounded like a refrigerator starting and stopping, only considerably louder. Finally, I could stand it no longer.
I dragged on my dressing gown and stumbled outside – never much fun in the middle of a winter’s night – to be confronted by the all-too-solid presence of the outside unit of the new heat pump, which my neighbour had placed practically outside my bedroom window. Never one to welcome confrontation, I dithered for some time before finally summoning the determination (or desperation) I needed. I went and knocked on the door.
And waited. And knocked again. And waited some more.
Finally, a light went on in the bedroom, and eventually my neighbour could be heard making her way to the door. The door opened and the gnome peered out, accompanied by a blast of hot air from the overheated lounge. Apologising for waking her, I entreated her to turn off the heat pump as the noise was keeping me awake.
‘But I need to keep warm,’ she said, heedless of the fact that the interior of her flat currently bore more than a passing resemblance to a fan oven.
I politely pointed out that she scarcely needed to heat the lounge while she was in bed in the bedroom. It took some time, but eventually she agreed, albeit grudgingly, to turn the thing off at night, though not without reminding me – a trifle smugly, I thought - that she got up much earlier than me, and would be turning the heat pump on again around six o’clock in the morning.
As the day wore on, I discovered the damned thing was not only loud enough to disturb my sleep, but also to make itself heard above my television or radio.
My next step was to telephone the Housing Officer at the City Council whose job it was to look after the flats and their tenants. She sounded sympathetic, and said she would check the situation out. This phone call was but the first of many, all equally fruitless. After several weeks of increasingly agitated endurance, I finally wrung out of her a promise to come and hear for herself the following day. Having realised by now the pointlessness of waiting for her to get back to me, I phoned her yet again some days later.
‘Actually,' she said, 'I didn’t think it was that loud.’
I pointed out to her that, since she didn’t have the misfortune to live next to it, she was possibly not the best person to make such a judgment. However, it seemed clear enough she had little intention of doing anything to help me.
After yet another interval of attempted stoicism, I decided to try moving further up the City Council hierarchy. I wrote to the Housing Manager describing my problem, and emphasising that there were, at that time, two empty flats in the housing complex, and asking if I could please move to one of them. I then settled down and waited for a reply. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. I never did hear back from him.
An approach to my local Member of Parliament’s office was similarly without result.
By now I was in a state of considerable stress, not just from the noise of the heat pump, but also from the realisation that those whose job it was to look after us tenants had no intention of doing so. I decided to give up, on the principle that at least I'd be avoiding the stress of trying to deal with the City Council and its dilatory minions. For a while, this seemed to be working – more or less. Eventually, however, the noise intrusion once more became too much for me, so I decided on another onslaught on the Powers that Be.
After several weeks of repeated phone calls to the Housing Officer, it became clear that not only had she no intention of addressing the situation, but she seemed to be actively avoiding me. My suspicion appeared to be confirmed by the fact that, when I finally got through to her, she immediately hastened to assure me that she hadn’t been ignoring me.
Not long after that, I read in a circular distributed by City Housing of her imminent retirement, which perhaps went some way toward explaining her lack of interest in my case. Yet again, I was forced to retreat. However, on arriving home one day I found a note in my letterbox from the new Housing Officer introducing herself and giving – be still, my beating heart! – her direct-line telephone number! Needless to say, I lost little time in phoning her. Of course I more or less had to go back to square one, but I hoped for a little more efficiency from the new broom.
It didn't take long for my hopes to be dashed. You’ll have guessed by now that I have more than my fair share of stubbornness, but this comes at a price, and by now I was thoroughly stressed out on two fronts: the heat pump and the lack of action by City Housing. And to add insult to injury, I discovered that one of the new tenants who moved into the empty flats was completely deaf, and therefore wouldn’t have been bothered by any heat-pump noise. So why on earth didn’t they let me move into his flat and put him in mine? Presumably a solution that sensible is beyond your average council employee. Finally, out of sheer desperation, I sent an email to the Mayor, attaching a copy of the fruitless letter I had sent to the housing Manager. This was on a Friday afternoon.
On Monday, I arrived home from work to find a telephone message from the Housing Officer asking me to phone her. The next morning I did so, and lo and behold, a unit had just become available in another housing complex a couple of streets away from mine. Fancy that! Obviously it pays to go to the top. When I went to see the flat, it was disappointingly dingy and scruffy looking, having been lived in for quite some time by an elderly lady, apparently without any kind of refurbishment during that time. However, I decided I’d better take it, since goodness knew how long it would be before something else became available. Besides, the Council always seemed to carry out some degree of refurbishment between tenancies, so at the very least I could expect it to be cleaned. In the event, it was completely repainted and new carpet and floor vinyl laid.
The actual process of moving was almost low-key compared with the previous six months or so, although I had to hire a removal firm, which cost considerably more than I’d expected, due to poor access on both sites. However, I had help from several very kind friends, for which I was exceedingly grateful.
I’ve now been in my new flat for two weeks and, on the whole, I like it very much. The kitchen is tiny and has almost no storage, and I’m still looking for someone to help me put up some shelves so I can unpack the rest of my foodstuffs. The bathroom is a bit cramped, due to housing the laundry as well as the usual shower, basin and toilet – and, temporarily, my cat’s litter box. He has twice gone back to my old flat, so I have to keep him inside for a couple of weeks. He hates this with a passion, and spends much of his time wandering from window to door wailing piteously and launching determined assaults on the locked cat door. It’s a lot like listening to a whining child.
I had to hire an electrician to hardwire the washing machine cord into the plug, as it seems it’s now illegal to use a normal plug in a bathroom. And I’m still waiting for a council handyman to come and make the wardrobe usable. Someone – probably a man – has altered it so that there is approximately 20 inches of rack on which to hang clothes, the rest consisting of a number of shelves and what I can only describe as shelflets, completely useless for stowing anything larger than socks. I currently have piles of clothing on the bedroom floor and the dining table and boxes of foodstuffs that I can’t put away, and I’ve had to buy a new iron because I couldn’t find the old one and was running out of neat work clothes.
Oh, and I managed to turn on the wrong stove element, burning through the cord of the toaster, which was sitting on the element at the time as I had nowhere better to put it. The toaster was plugged into the plug point on the stove at the time, so the stove wiring burnt out, too, all just as I was starting to cook my dinner on Saturday night. Until someone came to fix the stove, I was reduced to boiling water for tea or coffee in a saucepan on a gas camping stove.
On the plus side, however, the living room has more room than in the previous flat, and the flat itself is very private – almost like a miniature town house with its own little garden. And I’m close to the beach, so the air is lovely and clean And - best of all - no heat pump!
PS. I wrote this about three years ago. I'm still in the new flat, and I love it! My neighbours are friendly without being intrusive, and, with the help of my gardening lady, byt tiny garden is now a haven of green. Sadly, my cat never acclimatised to his new home, and was eventually taken in by the SPCA and put down. However, I now have a beatiful tabby cat called Merlin, who loves to cuddle up beside me on the couch and have his tummy tickled. And I've heard through the grapevine that my erstwhile neighbour moved into a home, and the tenants all had a party to celebrate!
A Memory of Bees and Heat
As I’m waiting for the traffic lights to change, a bee lands on my windscreen. I can see the nectar sacs on its back legs as it crawls across the glass. Its abdomen, almost translucent and the colour of honey, pulses rhythmically, the tiny segments like a telescope opening and closing, giving the impression that the creature is panting.
All of a sudden, I can smell hot beeswax. I’m back in the honey-extraction room of my father’s honey shed. My father stands over a rectangular metal tub, his shirt removed against its heat, wielding the knife with the heated blade that slices the wax caps off the honeycomb in its wooden frames to release the golden sweetness. Bees crawl all over his sweat-covered torso, but he ignores them. Either they don’t sting him or he has become immune to their stings. I wish I could feel so sanguine about the insects that fill the air with their whining buzz. Instead, I swelter under a protective layer of clothing, my head and face enclosed in a beekeeper’s hat and veil, thick gauntlets covering my hands and forearms.
The wax sizzles as the hot blade cuts through it, wax fragments falling into the heated tub where they are melted down along with any honey still clinging to them. Later, the honey will be separated from the wax, and the wax poured into tins to solidify. These will be sold to a business that turns them back into sheets of honeycomb that the bees can build on to create another store of honey.
As each frame is shorn of its wax capping, my father hands the frame to me and reaches for another. I man the extractors that stand against one wall of the room, metal cylinders fitted with slots around the perimeter for the frames to slide into. Once all the slots in one of these are filled, I turn it on and the honey is spun out by centrifugal force, running through an opening in the bottom of the cylinder into a tank on the ground floor. Later, honey tins and waxed-cardboard pottles will be filled from this tank - another of my occasional jobs.
Right now, however, my world consists of heat, the scents of honey and melted wax and the hum of bees and extractors. Extracting the honey is a summer-holiday job each year for me. This time of year is as busy for a beekeeper as for the bees that journey out each day to rob the summer flowers of their nectar. On a fine day, my father will take off in his old truck for one of the farms where he keeps hives. The white clover that produces the most prized honey is also an important feed crop, so farmers like to have beehives on their properties so that the bees will fertilise the crops while collecting honey. Later in the day, my father’s truck will turn in at our gate, piled high with boxes containing wax frames of laden honeycomb, surrounded by a buzzing cloud of bees. And I know the following day will be spent extracting honey.
Another of my jobs is to seal the honeycomb starters into the wooden frames that fit into the hive boxes. These frames, which my father makes up, are fitted with two fine wires stretched across their width, held in place by a small screw at each end of the frame where the wire pierces the wood. My job is to lay one of the wax rectangles, stamped with the hexagonal indents that the bees will later build up into honeycomb, onto each frame, then to touch the screws at each end with electrical conductors. These heat the wire so that the wax melts on to it. I have no idea who first invented this method, but it’s simple and ingenious. Once the honeycombs are attached to the wires, the frames are slotted into the rectangular boxes that, piled three or four high, will make up the hive.
One day, my father buys some bees from another beekeeper. He tells us they are pretty wild, as no one has tended them for over a year. When he goes out to tend them, the whole family – my mother, brother and sister and me - go with him so we can have a picnic in the countryside. We often do this, and it’s usually fun, with wild countryside to explore, sometimes an ice-cold stream to paddle in, and, of course, a picnic lunch. This time, however, we soon realise my father was right about the bees being wild. As soon as he opens up the hives, they are everywhere, buzzing angrily at being disturbed. There are only two things I remember about this day. One is having a bee entangled in my very curly hair, listening, terrified, to the buzzing that seemed to be almost inside my head. The other is losing my favourite, navy-blue knitted cardigan, which I had to take off because there were bees in it. I was simply too frightened to go back and get it.
After this, I become increasingly afraid of bees, and refuse to help out in the extraction room any more. My father is furious - his usual way of dealing with anything he doesn’t like - but my fear of the bees is greater than my fear of his anger, and I cannot bring myself to back down. It’s a pity not to be earning the money he pays me for helping out, but to me, at this time, the fear of being stung overrides all other considerations.
The lights turn green. As my car moves off, the bee clings to the windscreen for a minute or two, and then flies off. I thank the little creature for the memory she has given me of a time long past.
All of a sudden, I can smell hot beeswax. I’m back in the honey-extraction room of my father’s honey shed. My father stands over a rectangular metal tub, his shirt removed against its heat, wielding the knife with the heated blade that slices the wax caps off the honeycomb in its wooden frames to release the golden sweetness. Bees crawl all over his sweat-covered torso, but he ignores them. Either they don’t sting him or he has become immune to their stings. I wish I could feel so sanguine about the insects that fill the air with their whining buzz. Instead, I swelter under a protective layer of clothing, my head and face enclosed in a beekeeper’s hat and veil, thick gauntlets covering my hands and forearms.
The wax sizzles as the hot blade cuts through it, wax fragments falling into the heated tub where they are melted down along with any honey still clinging to them. Later, the honey will be separated from the wax, and the wax poured into tins to solidify. These will be sold to a business that turns them back into sheets of honeycomb that the bees can build on to create another store of honey.
As each frame is shorn of its wax capping, my father hands the frame to me and reaches for another. I man the extractors that stand against one wall of the room, metal cylinders fitted with slots around the perimeter for the frames to slide into. Once all the slots in one of these are filled, I turn it on and the honey is spun out by centrifugal force, running through an opening in the bottom of the cylinder into a tank on the ground floor. Later, honey tins and waxed-cardboard pottles will be filled from this tank - another of my occasional jobs.
Right now, however, my world consists of heat, the scents of honey and melted wax and the hum of bees and extractors. Extracting the honey is a summer-holiday job each year for me. This time of year is as busy for a beekeeper as for the bees that journey out each day to rob the summer flowers of their nectar. On a fine day, my father will take off in his old truck for one of the farms where he keeps hives. The white clover that produces the most prized honey is also an important feed crop, so farmers like to have beehives on their properties so that the bees will fertilise the crops while collecting honey. Later in the day, my father’s truck will turn in at our gate, piled high with boxes containing wax frames of laden honeycomb, surrounded by a buzzing cloud of bees. And I know the following day will be spent extracting honey.
Another of my jobs is to seal the honeycomb starters into the wooden frames that fit into the hive boxes. These frames, which my father makes up, are fitted with two fine wires stretched across their width, held in place by a small screw at each end of the frame where the wire pierces the wood. My job is to lay one of the wax rectangles, stamped with the hexagonal indents that the bees will later build up into honeycomb, onto each frame, then to touch the screws at each end with electrical conductors. These heat the wire so that the wax melts on to it. I have no idea who first invented this method, but it’s simple and ingenious. Once the honeycombs are attached to the wires, the frames are slotted into the rectangular boxes that, piled three or four high, will make up the hive.
One day, my father buys some bees from another beekeeper. He tells us they are pretty wild, as no one has tended them for over a year. When he goes out to tend them, the whole family – my mother, brother and sister and me - go with him so we can have a picnic in the countryside. We often do this, and it’s usually fun, with wild countryside to explore, sometimes an ice-cold stream to paddle in, and, of course, a picnic lunch. This time, however, we soon realise my father was right about the bees being wild. As soon as he opens up the hives, they are everywhere, buzzing angrily at being disturbed. There are only two things I remember about this day. One is having a bee entangled in my very curly hair, listening, terrified, to the buzzing that seemed to be almost inside my head. The other is losing my favourite, navy-blue knitted cardigan, which I had to take off because there were bees in it. I was simply too frightened to go back and get it.
After this, I become increasingly afraid of bees, and refuse to help out in the extraction room any more. My father is furious - his usual way of dealing with anything he doesn’t like - but my fear of the bees is greater than my fear of his anger, and I cannot bring myself to back down. It’s a pity not to be earning the money he pays me for helping out, but to me, at this time, the fear of being stung overrides all other considerations.
The lights turn green. As my car moves off, the bee clings to the windscreen for a minute or two, and then flies off. I thank the little creature for the memory she has given me of a time long past.
Road Trip
Some forty years ago, when I was a university student studying for my BA degree, a group of us - me, my brother and his girlfriend, and several of our friends - had decided to go up to the North Island during the summer holidays to stay at a beach house at Ahipara that belonged the parents of one of them. Ahipara is a tiny beach settlement in Northland, at the lower end of the erroneously named Ninety Mile Beach (I think it's around 65 miles, but it's definitely less than 90), so it promised to be a relaxing and fun holiday. Or so I thought.
I arranged to hitchhike to Auckland with a friend of my brother's. This was, of course, back in the days when it was still safe to hitchhike - sadly, those days are long gone. Roger was a very pleasant young man, tall and thin with floppy blond hair, but definitely a little on the strange side. He was a mathematics wizard who whiled away his time on the road by performing complicated mathematics with the numbers on car registration plates. It was he who told me that if you punch the button at a pedestrian crossing five times, the light will change more quickly in your favour. I have no idea whether this is true, but to this day, I find myself doing it. Another of Roger's gifts, I discovered, was the ability to walk for hours on a single Crunchy bar. My idea of hitchhiking is encapsulated in the advice given to me many years ago by a hairdresser who had hitchhiked through France: you can't walk all the way, so why bother walking any of it. Just sit tight and only get up and walk when you see a car approaching. This makes perfect sense to me, but Roger was clearly made of sterner stuff, and it was all could do to keep up with him.
We took a bus to the Main North Road just beyond the motorway, and, although there was little traffic, it didn't take long before we got out first ride. A man in a Land Rover drove past us, then turned back to pick us up. I suppose we should have taken the warning when he informed us God had told him to return for us, but when you're hitchhiking, any ride is a good ride, so we hopped up beside him, and off we went.
I don't recall that he made any attempt to convert us, but his faith clearly wouldn't allow him to drive very fast, and our hopes of catching the afternoon ferry to Wellington began to recede. When he stopped to take his part in a 24-hour prayer vigil (I imagined a sort of religious relay), leaving us to entertain ourselves with a bag of peppermints and some religious tracts, Roger and I seriously considered absconding to try our luck elsewhere. But the traffic was not exactly heavy, so we decided that a religious zealot in the hand was probably worth two other drivers possibly somewhere in the distance.
We finally rolled into Picton in the early evening, too late, as we'd feared, for the ferry. Being students, neither of was exactly flush with spare cash, so we decided the Youth Hostel would be our best bet. Only there wasn't one. This we discovered when we enquired at the local police station. But, we were told, the new cell block had recently been completed, so we were welcome to spend the night in the old one. Well, beggars can't be choosers, so there we were, an hour or so later, partaking of fish and chips and brandy in a police cell, and reading the graffiti scrawled on the walls - none of which was particularly edifying, much less memorable.
Early next morning, we made our way to the ferry terminal and caught the early ferry to Wellington. Three rather uncomfortable hours later, we were in the capital city. But we didn't hang around to see the sights. We caught a train to Paekakariki (which someone once told me is Maori for: 'Two parrots sitting on a log'), north of the city, and stationed ourselves to attract the attention of any passing traffic. The weather was warm and golden; the sky was the colour of cornflowers - perfect for life on the road. Before long, we had our first ride.
We were set down again just outside the evocatively named town of Bulls, and began to walk along the side of the road beside long grass and white-flowered yarrow. As we walked, the sky began to cloud over, and we wondered if it might be a good idea to get our waterproof jackets out of our backpacks. But in the time it took to have these thoughts, and before we could do anything about them, a sudden cloudburst dumped a swimming pool of water on top of us and soaked us to the skin. A word of warning here: generally speaking, people don't like giving rides to drowned rats.
The rain didn't last long, but the damage had been done. No one stopped to give us a ride. So on we trudged, despite our soaking clothes and sandals (you may detect a smidgeon of Roger's influence here). I could feel blisters beginning to form on my sodden feet. Finally, a man wearing khaki shorts and gumboots - and apparently nothing else - gave us a ride to Taranaki, a small farming town where we were able to change into dry clothes (though not, sadly, dry footwear, at least for me; I hadn't thought to bring a change of shoes) in the toilets at the back of a fish-and-chip shop. Having refuelled on fish and chips and a welcome cup of tea, we set off again. Not even the sight of the near-perfect cone of Mt Taranaki piercing the late-afternoon sky could induce us to linger in the home of the annual gumboot-throwing contest. But the approach of nightfall found us in the middle of nowhere, with visions of having to sleep in a paddock somewhere. I kept thinking of my brother's girlfriend's tale of going to sleep in a wheat field and waking to find a harvester bearing down on her. And, just to round off our day, it was raining again. Eventually, however, someone stopped for us. He was going to Rotorua, which is a bit off the beaten track for Auckland, but we accepted the ride anyway. At least in Rotorua we stood a chance of having a roof over our heads for the night.
Said roof belonged to a small travellers' lodge, where we were able to find a cheap room with two single beds. There, as we breathed in the trademark sulphurous air that pervades Rotorua from its volcanic hot pools and geysers, Roger pulled out a small black box and opened it. It contained a couple of syringes. Not the plastic sort you get today, but the real deal, in glass and metal. Thank God he didn't do anything with them beyond gazing at them lovingly for a while. I heard some months later that he'd been fined for possession of a restricted drug, and, later still, that he'd become a pharmacist. So I suppose one could say he'd already started on his career path.
By the following morning, I had developed massive blisters on the soles of my feet, and my legs had seized up so that I could barely walk. So, while Roger continued on foot, I bowed to the inevitable and took a bus to Auckland and a ferry across Auckland Harbour to the North Shore where I was to meet up with my brother and his friends. As it happened, they were waiting for the ferry too, so we all chugged across the harbour together. We gathered at the rather palatial home of the father of a fellow student who was generally known as Aardvark, possibly because he had been born in South Africa. Or possibly not.
His father, a lawyer, was away hiking around Australia. The son seemed to have inherited his father's eccentricity. He once stood for president of the student council on the platform of declaring himself Emperor for life if elected. He wasn't joking. And his response to the forming of a local branch of the Procrastination Society - dedicated to doing nothing, preferably late - was to found the Anti-Procrastination Society, which was, naturally, dedicated to doing anything and everything, as soon as possible. Under its auspices, wild oats (for the sowing of) were distributed amongst the student population, along with supposed birth-control pills (a new and wondrous invention at the time, and not too readily available). Inspired by these splendidly gratuitous acts, and by the sight on television of Chinese mass-gymnastic displays, I organised a Mass Poetry Reading. We gathered in the upstairs common room of the Student Union building and read The Charge of the Light Brigade (chosen mainly for its galloping rhythm) over and over again until we attained catharsis. Well, actually, until we got sick of it, at which point we read it backwards. When we got sick of that, we took all the spare copies and handed them out to unsuspecting passers by ("Here you are, sir, have a bit of culture.' 'Oh, ah, thanks.'), finishing up at the local student watering hole shortly before closing time.
By the time we arrived at Ahipara, I literally had blisters on my blisters, and was reduced to a sort of crouched hobble reminiscent of a Neanderthal. Ahipara, however, was beautiful. There were ginger flowers growing along the beach, and the beach itself, stretching away to apparent infinity, provided me with my first glimpse of white sand. And there were local Maori riding horses on the beach, bareback with just a piece of rope as combination bit and bridle. The house we were staying in was a rundown, blue weatherboard affair with faded wood panelling, old-fashioned pictures in wooden frames, and colonies of ants in the fridge. The room I slept in contained a massive, ornate kauri dressing table that resembled nothing so much as a shrine, and an elderly - though still functional - radiogram.
This was the marvellous Sixties, and we were all into magic and mysticism - for some of us, quite literally. My brother and his wife belonged to a kabbalistic society that claimed to be a successor to the Order of the Golden Dawn, a late 19th - early 20th century group that practiced kabbalistic magic and contained such luminaries as the Irish poet W B Yeats and the self-styled 'Great Beast' Aleister Crowley, dubbed by newspapers of the time as 'the wickedest man in the world', a sobriquet he did his utmost to live up to. Whether it was this influence I don't know, but I recall lying in bed one night and suddenly feeling as though I were leaving my body. I was so terrified I had to get up and turn on the radio. Thank goodness it was actually working!
Our holiday over, we all made our way back to Aardvark's father's house in Auckland for a proper shower and some decent food before starting on the trek home. I still didn't feel up to hitchhiking, so I decided to take the night train down to Wellington, where I could catch the inter-island ferry.
Which is how I came to be in a train carriage filled with a drunken rugby team returning from a match somewhere and an entire class of Jewish children on their way to a school-holiday camp. To make matters worse, I was seated next to a middle-aged man who kept putting his arm round me every time I tried to compose myself for sleep. (These days, he would have been given very short shrift indeed, but I was in my twenties then, and shy. Mind you, these days I don't suppose he would have dared to try it on.) And, as if all that weren't enough, my period had started, so I was in pain, and desperately in need of 'freshening up'. Eventually, to my enormous relief, a conductor came and moved my would-be amorous companion. It seems he was sitting in the wrong seat. (I could have told him that!), and I finally managed to make my way past the sozzled footballers and rambunctious Jewish kids to the 'rest room'. After that, I was more or less able to settle down for the rest of the journey, though I don't recall getting a great deal of sleep.
A day later, after an uneventful ferry trip, I arrived in Picton and boarded the bus to Christchurch. I was feeling a bit peckish, so I took a packet of biscuits from my bag and opened them. A plaintive voice next to me said, in a strong English-midlands accent: 'Can I have one of those, please? I haven't eaten for three days.' It belonged to a skinny, slightly scruffy young man who, I found out, came from Birmingham. Naturally, I was happy to share my biscuits, and we spent a companionable journey chatting and munching. It turned out he worked on the rubbish trucks in Christchurch; I saw him several times, and he always gave me a wave and a cheerful grin.
Looking back on that trip, I'm amazed at how adventurous I was - how adventurous we all were - to hitchhike the best part of the length of New Zealand with very little money and even less preparation. I didn't even have the price of the train fare from Auckland to Wellington, and had to sign an IOU for the conductor (imagine trying that on today!). No sensible person these days would embark on such a trip - for one thing, it wouldn't be safe. There's no doubt most of us are better off in so many ways than we were then, but I can't help thinking we've lost something very precious along the way. All of us, back then in the sixties, had a kind of innocence that doesn't seem to linger beyond puberty nowadays. Perhaps it's just that I'm just getting old, but, thinking back on that trip, for all its discomfort and awkwardness I can't help but sigh: 'Aah... those were the days!'
I arranged to hitchhike to Auckland with a friend of my brother's. This was, of course, back in the days when it was still safe to hitchhike - sadly, those days are long gone. Roger was a very pleasant young man, tall and thin with floppy blond hair, but definitely a little on the strange side. He was a mathematics wizard who whiled away his time on the road by performing complicated mathematics with the numbers on car registration plates. It was he who told me that if you punch the button at a pedestrian crossing five times, the light will change more quickly in your favour. I have no idea whether this is true, but to this day, I find myself doing it. Another of Roger's gifts, I discovered, was the ability to walk for hours on a single Crunchy bar. My idea of hitchhiking is encapsulated in the advice given to me many years ago by a hairdresser who had hitchhiked through France: you can't walk all the way, so why bother walking any of it. Just sit tight and only get up and walk when you see a car approaching. This makes perfect sense to me, but Roger was clearly made of sterner stuff, and it was all could do to keep up with him.
We took a bus to the Main North Road just beyond the motorway, and, although there was little traffic, it didn't take long before we got out first ride. A man in a Land Rover drove past us, then turned back to pick us up. I suppose we should have taken the warning when he informed us God had told him to return for us, but when you're hitchhiking, any ride is a good ride, so we hopped up beside him, and off we went.
I don't recall that he made any attempt to convert us, but his faith clearly wouldn't allow him to drive very fast, and our hopes of catching the afternoon ferry to Wellington began to recede. When he stopped to take his part in a 24-hour prayer vigil (I imagined a sort of religious relay), leaving us to entertain ourselves with a bag of peppermints and some religious tracts, Roger and I seriously considered absconding to try our luck elsewhere. But the traffic was not exactly heavy, so we decided that a religious zealot in the hand was probably worth two other drivers possibly somewhere in the distance.
We finally rolled into Picton in the early evening, too late, as we'd feared, for the ferry. Being students, neither of was exactly flush with spare cash, so we decided the Youth Hostel would be our best bet. Only there wasn't one. This we discovered when we enquired at the local police station. But, we were told, the new cell block had recently been completed, so we were welcome to spend the night in the old one. Well, beggars can't be choosers, so there we were, an hour or so later, partaking of fish and chips and brandy in a police cell, and reading the graffiti scrawled on the walls - none of which was particularly edifying, much less memorable.
Early next morning, we made our way to the ferry terminal and caught the early ferry to Wellington. Three rather uncomfortable hours later, we were in the capital city. But we didn't hang around to see the sights. We caught a train to Paekakariki (which someone once told me is Maori for: 'Two parrots sitting on a log'), north of the city, and stationed ourselves to attract the attention of any passing traffic. The weather was warm and golden; the sky was the colour of cornflowers - perfect for life on the road. Before long, we had our first ride.
We were set down again just outside the evocatively named town of Bulls, and began to walk along the side of the road beside long grass and white-flowered yarrow. As we walked, the sky began to cloud over, and we wondered if it might be a good idea to get our waterproof jackets out of our backpacks. But in the time it took to have these thoughts, and before we could do anything about them, a sudden cloudburst dumped a swimming pool of water on top of us and soaked us to the skin. A word of warning here: generally speaking, people don't like giving rides to drowned rats.
The rain didn't last long, but the damage had been done. No one stopped to give us a ride. So on we trudged, despite our soaking clothes and sandals (you may detect a smidgeon of Roger's influence here). I could feel blisters beginning to form on my sodden feet. Finally, a man wearing khaki shorts and gumboots - and apparently nothing else - gave us a ride to Taranaki, a small farming town where we were able to change into dry clothes (though not, sadly, dry footwear, at least for me; I hadn't thought to bring a change of shoes) in the toilets at the back of a fish-and-chip shop. Having refuelled on fish and chips and a welcome cup of tea, we set off again. Not even the sight of the near-perfect cone of Mt Taranaki piercing the late-afternoon sky could induce us to linger in the home of the annual gumboot-throwing contest. But the approach of nightfall found us in the middle of nowhere, with visions of having to sleep in a paddock somewhere. I kept thinking of my brother's girlfriend's tale of going to sleep in a wheat field and waking to find a harvester bearing down on her. And, just to round off our day, it was raining again. Eventually, however, someone stopped for us. He was going to Rotorua, which is a bit off the beaten track for Auckland, but we accepted the ride anyway. At least in Rotorua we stood a chance of having a roof over our heads for the night.
Said roof belonged to a small travellers' lodge, where we were able to find a cheap room with two single beds. There, as we breathed in the trademark sulphurous air that pervades Rotorua from its volcanic hot pools and geysers, Roger pulled out a small black box and opened it. It contained a couple of syringes. Not the plastic sort you get today, but the real deal, in glass and metal. Thank God he didn't do anything with them beyond gazing at them lovingly for a while. I heard some months later that he'd been fined for possession of a restricted drug, and, later still, that he'd become a pharmacist. So I suppose one could say he'd already started on his career path.
By the following morning, I had developed massive blisters on the soles of my feet, and my legs had seized up so that I could barely walk. So, while Roger continued on foot, I bowed to the inevitable and took a bus to Auckland and a ferry across Auckland Harbour to the North Shore where I was to meet up with my brother and his friends. As it happened, they were waiting for the ferry too, so we all chugged across the harbour together. We gathered at the rather palatial home of the father of a fellow student who was generally known as Aardvark, possibly because he had been born in South Africa. Or possibly not.
His father, a lawyer, was away hiking around Australia. The son seemed to have inherited his father's eccentricity. He once stood for president of the student council on the platform of declaring himself Emperor for life if elected. He wasn't joking. And his response to the forming of a local branch of the Procrastination Society - dedicated to doing nothing, preferably late - was to found the Anti-Procrastination Society, which was, naturally, dedicated to doing anything and everything, as soon as possible. Under its auspices, wild oats (for the sowing of) were distributed amongst the student population, along with supposed birth-control pills (a new and wondrous invention at the time, and not too readily available). Inspired by these splendidly gratuitous acts, and by the sight on television of Chinese mass-gymnastic displays, I organised a Mass Poetry Reading. We gathered in the upstairs common room of the Student Union building and read The Charge of the Light Brigade (chosen mainly for its galloping rhythm) over and over again until we attained catharsis. Well, actually, until we got sick of it, at which point we read it backwards. When we got sick of that, we took all the spare copies and handed them out to unsuspecting passers by ("Here you are, sir, have a bit of culture.' 'Oh, ah, thanks.'), finishing up at the local student watering hole shortly before closing time.
By the time we arrived at Ahipara, I literally had blisters on my blisters, and was reduced to a sort of crouched hobble reminiscent of a Neanderthal. Ahipara, however, was beautiful. There were ginger flowers growing along the beach, and the beach itself, stretching away to apparent infinity, provided me with my first glimpse of white sand. And there were local Maori riding horses on the beach, bareback with just a piece of rope as combination bit and bridle. The house we were staying in was a rundown, blue weatherboard affair with faded wood panelling, old-fashioned pictures in wooden frames, and colonies of ants in the fridge. The room I slept in contained a massive, ornate kauri dressing table that resembled nothing so much as a shrine, and an elderly - though still functional - radiogram.
This was the marvellous Sixties, and we were all into magic and mysticism - for some of us, quite literally. My brother and his wife belonged to a kabbalistic society that claimed to be a successor to the Order of the Golden Dawn, a late 19th - early 20th century group that practiced kabbalistic magic and contained such luminaries as the Irish poet W B Yeats and the self-styled 'Great Beast' Aleister Crowley, dubbed by newspapers of the time as 'the wickedest man in the world', a sobriquet he did his utmost to live up to. Whether it was this influence I don't know, but I recall lying in bed one night and suddenly feeling as though I were leaving my body. I was so terrified I had to get up and turn on the radio. Thank goodness it was actually working!
Our holiday over, we all made our way back to Aardvark's father's house in Auckland for a proper shower and some decent food before starting on the trek home. I still didn't feel up to hitchhiking, so I decided to take the night train down to Wellington, where I could catch the inter-island ferry.
Which is how I came to be in a train carriage filled with a drunken rugby team returning from a match somewhere and an entire class of Jewish children on their way to a school-holiday camp. To make matters worse, I was seated next to a middle-aged man who kept putting his arm round me every time I tried to compose myself for sleep. (These days, he would have been given very short shrift indeed, but I was in my twenties then, and shy. Mind you, these days I don't suppose he would have dared to try it on.) And, as if all that weren't enough, my period had started, so I was in pain, and desperately in need of 'freshening up'. Eventually, to my enormous relief, a conductor came and moved my would-be amorous companion. It seems he was sitting in the wrong seat. (I could have told him that!), and I finally managed to make my way past the sozzled footballers and rambunctious Jewish kids to the 'rest room'. After that, I was more or less able to settle down for the rest of the journey, though I don't recall getting a great deal of sleep.
A day later, after an uneventful ferry trip, I arrived in Picton and boarded the bus to Christchurch. I was feeling a bit peckish, so I took a packet of biscuits from my bag and opened them. A plaintive voice next to me said, in a strong English-midlands accent: 'Can I have one of those, please? I haven't eaten for three days.' It belonged to a skinny, slightly scruffy young man who, I found out, came from Birmingham. Naturally, I was happy to share my biscuits, and we spent a companionable journey chatting and munching. It turned out he worked on the rubbish trucks in Christchurch; I saw him several times, and he always gave me a wave and a cheerful grin.
Looking back on that trip, I'm amazed at how adventurous I was - how adventurous we all were - to hitchhike the best part of the length of New Zealand with very little money and even less preparation. I didn't even have the price of the train fare from Auckland to Wellington, and had to sign an IOU for the conductor (imagine trying that on today!). No sensible person these days would embark on such a trip - for one thing, it wouldn't be safe. There's no doubt most of us are better off in so many ways than we were then, but I can't help thinking we've lost something very precious along the way. All of us, back then in the sixties, had a kind of innocence that doesn't seem to linger beyond puberty nowadays. Perhaps it's just that I'm just getting old, but, thinking back on that trip, for all its discomfort and awkwardness I can't help but sigh: 'Aah... those were the days!'
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