Here for a Good Time? Insanity? or just want to know How To survive the Modern World?

Need some recommendations for Christmas reading? A bit of a mixed bag above, right? It's a nice sandwich with a shit filling right there. And that's just here, in Aotearoa. I haven't even gone to threats of nuclear war, the orange blob still not in prison, and hundreds of thousands of people suffering, losing their …

Decision Tree

At the moment I am reading a book called The Sweetness of Water and I came across this paragraph: I hate to think what my tree would look like. Not a blossom tree, far too pink and admirable, a bonsai? Never reaching any potential, a rotten and dying tree? I'm being a bit more positive …

Home again, home again.

Five weeks in a flash and a month of Sundays or longer. Clear perfect blue skies day after day with absolutely no skin-peeling sunburn. Clockwork gloriousness, every day something joyful, marvellous, beautiful and different. And now here I am, jet lag over, all the familiars gathering around me, possibly jeering and leering at me, beached …

What should it be – head in the sand, the clouds or head in a mess?

World news right now is a pretty frightening menu of war, recession, Jan 6, climate (not) change, and Jacinda Arden bashing by the main stream media. The anti vaxers are out in very small numbers and don't seem to quite know that they are protesting about. Sometimes it's vaccine mandates, which no longer apply, sometimes …

“Objects divorced from their stories are down-graded to mere knick knacks.”

From The Song Collector, a novel by Natasha Solomons There has been a lot written about “decluttering” in the last few years and about how liberating getting rid of stuff is. I have experienced this liberation by downsizing to a very small and manageable wardrobe. However, I still have a lot of “stuff”, in the …