What a weekend in Picton.  Even though the weather was not great the welcome for Olympic gold medallist Joseph Sullivan went ahead on the Picton Foreshore. He arrived by water sitting in the bow of an old quadruple scull skiff and received a great welcome from the crowd. He made a speech, signed autographs and had his photograph taken with his fans. The Mayor referred to him as 'Marlborough's greatest sportsman'. Now there's going to be a road named after him down by Endeavour Park next to Queen Charlotte College.  Also there is a big sign as you enter Nelson Square.

I had to spend some time on Monday sorting out access to the Internet and my email because I have a free McAfee security suite with Telecom which I have had for quite a long time. McAfee updated the service last Saturday and for some reason some customers at different times were affected.  Anyway after talking to a very helpful Telecom representative and being transferred to McAfee somewhere in the world, maybe in the USA, I had to uninstall the McAfee Security Suite and then download it again which went OK until I entered my password. For some reason I had to change my password for McAfee though my old password still works fine for Telecom and Xtramail.  It makes you realize how much we rely on communication by email and being able to access the news and other information on the Internet, not to mention our Picton Poets’ group on Facebook and being able to write this weekly blog and occasional tweet.

I have never understood why Marlborough misses out on all the film festival films. I remember the excitement when I lived in Wellington of not being entirely sure that you had picked the right films – the ones everyone else talked about later. And why did ‘The Door’ with Helen Mirren vanish so quickly from the movie theatre in Blenheim? I was still trying to find out about the statement ‘content may disturb’ when it disappeared.  Anyway ‘Hope Springs’ with Meryl Streep looks like it could be a film worth going to and the ‘Well Digger’s Daughter’.  I caught up with ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ on DVD in the weekend. I really like Bill Nighy and of course Judy Dench was superb (and how come these famous names aren’t in my Microsoft Word vocabulary and are all underlined in red so I have to make time to right click and add them?).

Our local Picton Cinema has some good art house films too but you often find yourself as an audience of one or two and the seats aren’t very comfortable though the two small theatres are well heated. I am not quite sure why Picton people don’t support this initiative though they do support films shown at a group screening like for the Kaipupu Point Mainland Society, local churches and so on.