A jaunt before the first coffee of the day

Just been on an hour and a half's walk up around Queen St, the street that really doesn't do much honour to anyone royal, since a few hundred metres of it is stuck down on the flat by Woodhaugh Gardens, a chunk climbs up umpteen steps to the top level, and then it's divided in two for quite a way before finally settling down into being one actual street.  In the section where it's divided in two, there are two lanes side by side, both part of the street, and both of these are no exits as far as cars are concerned....unless they want to do a plummet over the cliff into Malvern St.  There are steps and lanes and more steps and houses so much higher on one side than the houses on the other that the roofs of the lower ones are substantially below the basements of the other. 

The walk (which comes from Paul Hayward's Further Intriguing Dunedin Street Walks) took in various other bits as well, of course, with more lanes and more steps (we didn't go up Khyber Pass, which was something) and the discovery of the Cosy Dell Tennis Club, which I didn't know existed.  We also found that the area has perhaps more large mansions and houses per hectare than most other parts of the city.  Some of them, in Regent St, for example, sit so far above the actual street than another house could be fitted in comfortably below them.  That's not an area I'd like to be in an earthquake...

My wife says I should mention that I got rather irritable on the walk.  It may be because I'm now yet another year closer to seventy, or maybe it was because the dog was more frisky than usual and not listening to instructions (he says that's definitely not the case) or it may be that I found Hayward's instructions for this particular walk a little obscure in places (unlikely, but possible).  Anyway, I'm now in recovery mode, having my first coffee of the day.  Which reminds me that I gave the world premiere performance of one of my new piano pieces last Saturday, at the fundraising concert held at St Peter's Church in Hillside Rd.  It was a piece called, (somewhat long-windedly), Rachmaninoff has his first cup of coffee of the day.

Undiscovered Dunedin

My wife and I went for an hour and a half walk yesterday, using one of those Intriguing Dunedin Street Walks books as a guide.  They were written by Paul Hayward in the nineties, and there are either four or five or them.  A number of things have changed since the booklets were first published, but fortunately none of the streets have moved, so this is a plus! 

The other plus is discovering bits of Dunedin that have existed longer than I have and yet I've never realised they were there before.  Yesterday's big surprise was finding Braeview Crescent.  Now, to those who live in the street, or know people who live there, the Crescent will come as no surprise, but, as Hayward notes, it's not a street you find easily: one end is only accessible by a pathway. 

The more interesting thing is that as you come down the pathway you walk into what Hayward calls the equivalent of an English country lane, complete with (very high) hedgerows, and blackberries growing wild (and not sprayed with poison either, as far as we could tell).  But the next surprise is that once you get past the hedgerows you discover that you're walking along the edge of a cliff, one that drops some hundred metres or more down into the lower Leith Valley area.  You get a marvellous view over the North end of the City, but you also take your life in your hands if you go too close to the edge.  Fortunately the dog wasn't interested in doing so, though I imagine if we'd taken my youngest son there when he was a child, we would have had our hearts in our mouths.  I can remember my brother-in-law, years ago, being shocked at how casual my son was in regard to danger: at that point he was on top of the cliffs at Tomahawk. 

Anyway, after the cliff-top excitement you find that there are houses built on plateaus at the edge of the cliff.  Great views, but I'm not sure if they would be my ideal location. 

The Hayward books are great for helping you discover lanes that you've never noticed before, little pathways that run between streets.  I'm sure most cities have these, but they're easily missed.  We went down one this morning that had the rather over-the-top name of Mentone Avenue.  It was barely wide enough to walk down with your arms stretched out.  It apparently has some connections with Menton, in France, where there is a villa that writers can go and live in for a year, courtesy of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship.  Most lanes are unnamed: they're just a way to get from A to B.  They serve their purpose and good on them!