Oamaru, worth a stop over. Otago Peninsula, my home ground.

On our road trip to Dunedin, we stopped off at the old part of Oamaru where there are some lovely buildings and interesting wee shops. Next time you are going through do make time to see the old quarter down by the harbourside. Below are some photos from my favourite curiousity shop.

I was brought up in Dunedin but my father was given an old house for free and he cut it in half and moved it onto leased land down at Harrington Point. it had no bathroom of course and the long drop at night was a scary procedure. The Heggies ruled the beach, all six of us marauding and coming home when we were hungry and going to bed when we were tired.

We collected mushrooms and blackberries, fished for cod, waded with spears for flounder and lit bonfires to cook our spuds in foil. We rowed about in the Doris H, named after my mother and threw hard painful sea weed balls at any one we didn’t fancy. It was a good life!

Bev and I made a nostalgia trip down there and how small everything seemed. I still nurture a mad dream of living there again one day and writing the Booker prize winner…

Sadly, when Cilla McQueen, the poet was living there our house burned to the ground. She, fortunately survived.

She was the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in Dunedin in 1985 and 1986.

“Her first collection of new work after 1990 was Markings (2000), a collection of poetry and drawings. The poems trace the lives and voyages of her ancestors, and the living history of her husband’s people. She travels through the fire that destroys her house at Otakou to a new home in Bluff, tying together the separate threads of her journey and moving from one harbour to another.”

I sometimes feel sad that Sam was very much a cappuccino kid and didn’t have the freedom and a special place to belong to.

Have a good week, FG

It’s nearly Christmas and my Christmas cake, which is theoretically for Bruce is already half eaten.