Toon

While we were in Auckland over the last couple of weeks, we frequently noted trees with strongly pink leaves scattered around the city.  They were quite striking, and stood out wherever we saw them.

By chance I met a lady at the zoo - where there were several of these trees - and, since apparently she knew something about trees, I asked her if she knew what the name of these trees were.  She said she thought they were called a Chinese Toom Tree.  I may have misheard her, because in fact they're called Chinese Toon Trees.  She made the interesting comment that while the trees are striking when they're pink, they're almost unnoticeable once the pinkness goes, and they revert to a much more common green.

Seemingly these trees are well-known in many parts of the world, and quite apart from their colour, their wood is useful for furniture, and their leaves for medicinal purposes.


Curiously, neither of the Wikipedia articles I looked at mentioned their wonderful colouring. Yet that seems to me to be their greatest feature. Obviously those who wrote the articles thought in terms of practical uses. I tend to think, as I so often do, in the purely un-useful: therefore it's the appeal to the eye that I found most interesting.

I don't know whether they grow here in Dunedin, but if they do, I'd love to have one!

On the Street Where I Live

We’re so serious about our New Zealand music. I’ve just been watching Jack Body’s On the Street Where I Live, which features Stephen de Pledge playing the piano, and Body’s (disembodied) voice talking casually about his house.
At the end of the video we have a quite unnecessary few moments of Body himself telling us something about the piece. But what is there to tell? It’s all there in the work: a composer chatting on about his house, the birds, the street; a pianist fitting in a random bunch of notes that sometimes fit neatly to the words, most often merely trickle around them. Seldom do they add much to the speech, which is a pity, because it’s plain that Body could have done something with more depth in it. What he says is simple and charming; what the music does is just twitter away in the modernist style, offering little for the listener to get hold of, and doing a few crashes when Body talks about being overwhelmed by stuff in the house, and a few knocks and whistles when he talks about birds.
The music's about as interesting as office furniture. It's there for the voice to sit on, but contributes nothing to the listener.
Stephen de Pledge plays it all with a seriousness that probably mostly comes from having to concentrate deeply in order to make sure he fits in with the recorded voice. And he does that perfectly. Full marks to him, at least.

Out with the old

We’ve been shifting stuff around in our house over the last week, because we’re now back from overseas and have to get everything we locked away out of storage and back into the rest of the house. (We used one bedroom for storing.)
This has involved throwing out some old furniture, because there comes a time when it’s just served its purpose, and even the borer are barely holding the thing together. (We actually tossed one item of furniture out of the upstairs window – or rather, the various pieces that made up that piece – and thoroughly enjoyed the disintegration that went on below us. Why do humans like a bit of destruction every now and then? There’s a kind of vandal in all of us, I think. I’m sure you’ve seen people at the dump/tip/refuse place/transfer station throwing things off the back of their trucks: the smashing and crashing that goes on seems to get something out of their systems.
The only problem of course with breaking up old furniture is that you have to replace it with something. In our case that’s not too much of a problem, though I wouldn’t mind swapping my very elderly computer desk (it must have come from some office at some point) for the item in the picture. It’s a piece of Bush furniture – and ain’t it grand! The only problem is it would take up the entire space in my ‘office’. Not being able to get at it to do my blogs or write music might be a bit of an issue!

My office(s)

Sometimes readers like to know a bit more about the people who are writing to them, for example, what their office furniture is like.
At present I’m typing this at a kitchen breakfast bar, because I need the laptop to be close to a plug to keep it charging. But otherwise, while I’m in this house in the UK, I tend to work in someone else’s office, where there’s a proper computer desk, a proper swivel chair, and a fridge for the drinks.
Normally, back home in NZ, my office is a little different. The desk the computer sits on is an old office desk whose origins are unknown. Suffice to say it’s scratched and well used, and the drawers have sticky bits on the bottom. The drawers are full of everything that doesn’t fit elsewhere, and is small enough not to make the drawers unopenable.
The chair will be one of two sets of chairs we have around the house; it may depend on how recently we’ve had a load of family in as to whether it’s one of the regular chairs or one of the tall chairs (I prefer the former).
There’s a table for all the accumulated junk: mail, notes, books, bills, statements - you name it. There are at least two bookshelves on the floor, plus another one hanging on the wall. There are plenty of books.
On the desk are the computer, (a PC), two printers (one has been superseded by the other), various wires and cords, bits of paper, dust, and coffee cup stains.
Hanging on the window is one of my wife’s stained-glass decorations.
In the corner is a CD player, and there are two lots of CD shelving. But because I’m lazy, the same three CDs may play indefinitely. Or else I’ll listen to streaming radio, or the concert program.
There, does that suffice?

Sit Up Straight!

I think one of the things that amazed me, going back into the corporate workforce at the beginning of the year, was the way money was thrown at office furniture and stationery. The budget for these seemed limitless, and the spending on them was helped equally by one woman who thought that catalogues were for ticking off the things she liked, and by the nurse who came in once a week, and could spot a health and safety issue a mile off.
In the old days we put up with a lot of things that people don’t even think twice about now. Yes, I know that sounds like the ‘old codger’ syndrome, but am I alone in thinking that there’s a great deal of fuss made today over things workers of the past would consider trivial?
Certainly the advent of the computer in offices has meant that a lot of people have to sit at desks longer than in the past. But the advent of typewriters must have caused the same issue, and you don’t hear of problems from those days. Perhaps people were taught to sit up straight when they worked (I remember the ramrod straightness of the women in the typing room at my first office), and perhaps, rightly or wrongly, they were expected just to get on with life. Part of the issue today, I suspect, isn’t just that we’re much more careful about people’s health, but that the people themselves are much more fussy. I hate to say it, but I think the women in offices are more the culprits here than the men. Nevertheless there’s a great deal more fuss made over small things than ever in the past – from both sexes.

So what is a futon again?

Don’t know that I’ve ever been sure what a futon is. Had a suspicion it was either one of those things you cooked cheesy mixes in and then dipped your bread into – onto a tiddly little fork – or else it was more like a crouton.
However, it turns out a futon is a day bed: something that looks more like a settee in the day time. I was looking at the home furniture on one site and came across their futon section. Man, futons are cool! They’re elegant, they’re stylish. None of your crumpled up old bed pretending to be settee type of thing; these are models of chic.
When we built another storey onto our house for my mother to live in, the architect provided what he thought would be a long walk-in storage area above the stairs. The only trouble was it was in the lounge and it seemed unnecessary to have something like that there. So my mother put her grandfather’s old settee in the space, loaded it up with pillows and spent some years of her life using it as a day bed. She watched tv from it, she entertained grandchildren and great-grandchildren on it, various people would sit on it and cuddle her and so on. It became a place of serenity in the midst of chaos.
I don’t know that she would have wanted to exchange her grandfather’s old woodeen settee for a futon, but it would have been kind of classy in that spot, all the same.

Rocking chairs....mmmm!

Is this piece of home furniture cool, or what? It’s a Leilani Rocking Chair by Euro Style Furniture. It’s got a rattan seat and back; you know, that old wicker style that your grandmother and grandfather used to have – out the back of the house somewhere; maybe on the porch where it had been rained on a good deal but was still usable. Rattan is both sort of comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time. It’s the sort of material you can never make your mind up about, and by the time you do – if you do – you can’t be bothered moving anyway.

I guess this rocking chair has been tested for over-rock. By which I mean, it has just the slightest look about it that if you rocked too far back you’d do an amazing head over heels. Maybe that’s part of its charm!

Anyone remember that marvellous moment in the otherwise violent movie, Patriot, when Mel Gibson sat in the rocking chair he’d just finished making and it collapsed? This rocking chair ain’t gonna collapse. Even if you can do flips in it, it’s gonna endure.

Moving right along...!

The need for self storage is huge these days, with half the world’s population seemingly constantly on the move – and I’m definitely not talking about refugees.
What did people do in the past? Probably what our kids still do: leave all their gear with Mum and Dad. It’s just as well we’ve got a large house. At one time we had all the furniture and most of the belongings of my son and daughter-in-law packed into the room I’m typing this in, packed to the gunnels, in fact. And we also had various other items belonging to the other children, stuff they’d left (and in some cases forgotten about) and stuff they intended to pick up…some time.
Here in Dunedin we’ve got several storage facilities. The old Roslyn Mills, where my mother worked for many years, has now been partly turned into a self storage facility. And it’s amazing how much you can pack into a small space. I remember helping shift someone who’d had most of their stuff in storage. We walked down this alleyway of what was rather like a prison without any little windows in the doors to see the prisoners, arrived at what appeared to be a pokey little ‘room’, and found that it contained, quite happily, a houseful of goods. When we have our furniture stacked around the room, we don’t realise how little the space is that it would take up if we packed it all on top of itself. Not so convenient for the average householder of course, but it would leave quite a bit of floor space free. (To put up a large table-tennis table, as we have.)
Moving.bz (haven’t seen one of those suffixes before) is a great site to figure out in advance where you’re going to put all your gear. And what’s more it has some very good advice on the whole process of moving.
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