We had a great Writers’ meeting on Monday night. The group is supportive and the feedback was carefully thought out and well received. There were five of us which is a good number and the convener says we don’t want more than eight. If a group is too large it is impossible for everyone to read their work and receive feedback – if you want to get home before midnight.  

    On Tuesday I helped with the Picton Museum stall at the stadium in Blenheim. We were promoting books about Marlborough that the museum has for sale and also the proposed museum whaling extension. Ron Perano parked the replica whale boat Swiftsure outside the Stadium, that’s the boat that was invited to take part in the Queen’s Jubilee pageant on the river Thames in June this year. It will be one of the boats housed in the extension wing. The other is the whale chaser Cachalot. Submissions to Council for support of the extension close on 12 September. More on this another time

   I imagine everyone remembers where they were when they heard Princess Diana had been killed in a tunnel in Paris. It’s hard to believe it was 15 years ago. I was standing in the kitchen when the phone rang with the news. When John F Kennedy (no relation) was assassinated I was in bed in my dormitory at boarding school. When the twin towers were destroyed I was in the kitchen helping my daughter get ready to go to school.  More on this next week.  For some reason I cannot recall where I was when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Surely this was the most significant event of all?  And of course the famous words:  ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’  

   In winter I make vegetarian lasagne. My favourite recipe is in Rowan Bishop’s vegetarian cook book.  I buy Orgran  gluten free pasta sheets.  (See the Orgran website www.orgran.com ).  I use my favourite vegetable, eggplant or aubergine plus pumpkin and anything else in season that I feel like adding and spinach from the garden.  First I make a home-made tomato sauce with a red onion and a can of tomatoes and I use pizza thyme for seasoning as it survives the winter well in the herb wheel and broad leaf parsley.  Then I make a white sauce using rice flour instead of wheat flour. I use Blue River sheep milk feta for the topping and rice crumbs for a bit of crunch and bake the lasagne at 180 degrees for about 35 minutes.  I have also discovered a new vegetable, a cross between a brussels sprout and kale and the florets are very sweet. They are best if you cut them in half before stir frying or you can add them to a slow cooker recipe towards the end of cooking. The only thing I don’t like is that they come packaged in a plastic container.

   I am going to a quiz show this evening being organised as part of Adult Learners’ week. Hopefully the questions won’t be too taxing. We have a team of six so it should be fun. 

 

 

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.

 

                                                                                                                                                                        

                                                                                                                                                             

    On Sunday 26 August at 1pm on the Picton Foreshore the people of Marlborough will be welcoming home Joseph Sullivan, 2012 Olympic gold medallist.  It takes dedication and commitment to achieve at such a high level.  

   On Picton Harbour we also see young sailors in their small yachts like optimists and lasers competing with the hope of future success.  Congratulations also to Declan and Taylor Burn and other young sailors from the Queen Charlotte Yacht Club. With its lovely natural harbour and easy access to the Marlborough Sounds it's not surprising that champions like this are produced.

   It’s also good to hear from the Prime Minister, John Key, that our troops could be out of Afghanistan by April 2013. They have done a good job helping with the reconstruction in Bamiyan Province but now it appears New Zealanders may be being targeted in the war zone. The latest three deaths were on Sunday 20 August (NZ time), and included a woman NZ soldier. They were travelling in a Humvee, the last in a convoy of four transporting another soldier to hospital. The three were killed instantly by a roadside bomb. This brings to ten the number of NZ soldiers killed in Afghanistan to date.

   What’s this about New Zealanders not reading NZ fiction? (Sunday Star Times, 20 August, Arts Focus A 13). In my opinion they are reading it. Look at all the Book Clubs around the country and the Writers and Readers Festivals. What I think is more likely is that people are getting NZ fiction out of their local library (along with novels by overseas authors), and buying non-fiction so the publishers respond accordingly. Library issues of fiction are much greater than for non-fiction according to statistics from my local library.

   Congratulations to Craig Potton publishers for winning the 2012 NZ Book of the Year award in the NZ Post Book Awards.  New Zealand’s Native Trees is a beautiful book and the photography is outstanding. Did you know that kohekohe mentioned in a recent Marlborough Express article about a planned 1080 drop at Ship Cove is also called NZ mahogany and in the South Island is restricted to the Marlborough Sounds and Golden Bay?

Writers' meeting

We had a great Writers' meeting last night. It was decided to have two groups, a beginners' group and also a group for advanced/established writers. They will both meet on the same day, the 1st Monday in the month. The beginners' group will meet from 1-3pm and the other group at 7pm. We want to create an atmosphere where people can receive feedback in a constructive way based on the Toastmasters' idea of  'Commend, recommend, commend'.
   There's such a lot going on with the Olympics (and NZ is doing so well for such a small country), Tongariro erupting, and the deaths of two of our soldiers in Afghanistan. We are all so proud of Joseph Sullivan for winning a gold medal - and the others of course.
   The birds are calling out for more wild bird seed in their feeder as it is so cold but they will have to wait until it stops raining.

One of our best known authors Margaret Mahy died yesterday of cancer in Christchurch. She was 76.  This is a shock and a great loss to lovers of literature. I had expected her to be around for a long time, writing more books and enjoying her life in Governor's Bay. Tributes are coming from all over the world. She was highly intelligent, had a great sense of fun and made the world a magical place. She was awarded the Order of New Zealand in1993. Margaret Mahy won the Carnegie medal in1982 and 1984 being the first writer outside of  Britain to receive this award. She was awarded the Hans Christian Anderson award for her work in 2006. Margaret Mahy wrote for children and young adults. The Lion in the Meadow was the book that launched her career, a story about a young boy who sees a yellow whiskery lion in the backyard but his mother doesn't believe him. A Margaret Mahy Treasury was published last year containing 11 of her best known stories.

Frankfurt Book Fair

My book Katherine Mansfield in Picton (Cape Catley 2000) has been selected to be on display at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October this year. The New Zealand Society of Authors (PEN NZ Inc) selected 40 books that had been self published or where the rights had reverted back to the author (like mine), as the book was now out of print and the publisher did not intend to republish it. The NZSA stand will be in Hall 8, Stand M950 and you are welcome to visit the stand if you are in Frankfurt and talk to someone from NZSA Head Office.
   The book traces the connection the Beauchamp family had to Picton and the Marlborough Sounds and shows the influence of the region on her writing both her stories and letters. It contains historic photographs of Picton and the Beauchamp family and a Family Tree. The book also includes the short story, 'The Voyage', that is based on a ferry crossing from Wellington to Picton. My favourite image shows Katherine Mansfield as a young woman standing on the deck of a ship in a harbour. I saw this image on television one night when TV1 had a series of 'Millennium Moments'. It took ages to locate it and I finally tracked it down (via email), in the Queen's University Archives in Ontario, Canada in the Alpers' Collection.
   I wanted to use a photograph of Katherine Mansfield in a deck chair (taken in France) as it seemed to fit the more casual life style evocative of Picton and the Sounds but I already had a large number of images in the book and the 'daisy' image on the cover was more widely known. I hope one day it will be converted to an ebook and maybe it could be aded then along with the three versions of her story 'The New Baby' that appeared in the Notebooks.
   Also I read very interesting news today that four more stories have been found. See the link I posted today on Twitter.