Skiing

I've just been skimming through my Evernote clippings to see what I've got in relation to the topic of skiing (that nasty word that occasionally turns up in crosswords or CodeCrackers and fools you because of the two letters i sitting together).  The list wasn't long, to my surprise, and curiously, Evernote claimed that the word appeared in several articles in which it plainly didn't! I wanted to connect it up to the phrase: Peter Glenn ski wear.

However I did turn up this bit of nonsense by one of my favourite short-piece writers, Kim Fabricius. 
 
Après ski, two theologians were avidly discussing the phrase piste christou.
I’ve been closely following the pistis christou debates, and I can’t tell you how relieved I am that, according to some scholars, I am justified by an objective genitive. I’d been getting so worried that I might need some complex periphrastic or optative construction to get saved that I’ve been brushing up on my Metzger and Moule.

Not being a Greek scholar, I didn't know what the pistis christou debates were - that doesn't stop the joke being funny, since plainly piste has both a skiing connection and a theological one.  For those who want to know what the pistis christou part is about, here's an explanation from Andrew Wilson: For a generation, the discussion has been raging in academic circles over whether the Greek phrase pistis Christou should be understood as meaning ‘faith in Christ’ or ‘faithfulness of Christ’. For almost all interpreters until the last few decades, the question hasn’t really been a question: it means ‘faith in Christ’ (the ‘objective genitive’ reading, since Christ is the object of the faith). But writers like Richard Hays and Tom Wright, along with an increasingly large contingent within New Testament scholarship, have argued strongly that it should instead be translated ‘faithfulness of Christ’ (the ‘subjective genitive’, since Christ is the subject of the faith/faithfulness.) And unlike a lot of debates in Pauline scholarship, this one could actually make a substantial difference. 

Okay, that's a long way from skiing, but I thought it was interesting all the same.  Kind of.

Anyway, in relation to skiing and writing, I found this bit of useful information - for writers: a mystery set in a ski resort will not necessarily appeal more to skiers than others.  Why, you ask?  Because people who know a topic get irritated when an author plainly isn't as familiar with it as they are.  In the author's defence, he or she is merely trying to give colour to the mystery, which is more important than the setting.  Dick Francis went through a long patch of giving his thrillers a particular focus - photography, for example, or wine, or archery.  (They're just the ones I remember.)  These were interwoven with the usual horseracing aspects of the story, and gave it additional weight.  I remember my mother, who was a great fan of these books, saying that you learned a lot about these subjects when you read one of Dick Francis' books. I suspect you only learned as much as Francis needed to tell you, and that a person who really knew about the matter might think his information thin. Nevertheless, everyone gained - except the people who really knew about the topic, and they, as the quote above indicates, may not have read the book in the first place, at least certainly not for the facts about wine or archery or whatever. 

Finally on the topic of skiing, we have this delightful paragraph from Gerhard Forde, a theological writer I'm not really familiar with, but whose writing appeals to me all the same (I've seen a number of examples of it on this site). 

“Am I making progress? If I am really honest, it seems to me that the question is odd, even a little ridiculous. As I get older and death draws nearer, it doesn’t seem to get any easier. I get a little more impatient, a little more anxious about having perhaps missed what this life has to offer, a little slower, harder to move, a little more sedentary and set in my ways. It seems more and more unjust to me that now that I have spent a good part of my life ‘getting to the top,’ and I seem just about to have made it, I am already slowing down, already on the way out. A skiing injury from when I was sixteen years old acts up if I overexert myself. I am too heavy, the doctors tell me, but it is so hard to lose weight! Am I making progress? Well, maybe it seems as though I sin less, but that may only be because I’m getting tired! It’s just too hard to keep indulging the lusts of youth. Is that sanctification? I wouldn’t think so! One should not, I expect, mistake encroaching senility for sanctification.”

The self-deprecating paragraph was quoted on the Mockingbird blog.  Mockingbird seems to be run by a group, so I'm not sure which member of the group wrote the blog post this quote appeared in.

The photo comes from skiing knee replacement archives - which is a bit off-putting...if you have any interest in skiing...

A different approach to learning lines

I've just been running through one of the bigger scenes in The Sunshine Boys with my wife reading in for the other character(s).  I'm very pleased to find that most of the lines are intact in that scene, as they are in the first scene.  So that's great progress.  There's only one other big scene to get to grips with, and some of it's already there.

I don't know whether it's a matter of experience but I'm finding it easier to remember the lines for this play than I have for practically every other play I've done.  In fact, I've been confident enough to put down the script quite early on and just see how much I can remember in the rehearsals.  I remember that in many of the previous plays I've done I've been quite anxious about this aspect of acting; it seemed as though as soon as I got hold of a line it would go, and then when I got hold of it throroughly it could still vanish when I needed it in a rehearsal.  In the past I've tended to aim to be able to work through all my lines without necessarily referring to the cues - I've known that the other actor(s) will be saying 'something' but I won't necessarily know what they're saying.  This isn't the best way.  It may seem to be a good thing to be able to go through all your lines in your head in order, but it doesn't hold up well when it comes to the actual performing. 

This time I started out in the usual fashion, even putting the other actors' lines on a recording and leaving room for me to fit mine in.  It worked, but only in a kind of fashion.  I reverted to the way I'd started out learning these lines: holding a bit of paper over the line and reading the other character's cue.  Then I'd attempt to say my own line.  To my surprise this has worked far better than I expected.  I can't comfortably run through every one of my lines in order, the way I've done in the past, but when the cue comes I know what my line is. That's an odd thing: it's encouraging and yet it's not at all like I've worked in the past.  It creates much less anxiety because I'm not relying on myself to remember everything, but on the other actor's cues to act as a prompt.

Now the thing is, I'm not learning the other actor's lines; that would be more than I need to do. But reading them frequently while following up with my own, I find that I've got enough of a handle on their line to be confident to know what comes next.  The trick is, of course, that the other actor has to be as confident of his lines as I am of mine.  Many of the scenes in this play have just two actors on stage - so it's a business of bouncing the ball back and forward between you.  If one of you drops the ball, of course, it makes it tricky, but usually you find you have a pretty good idea what's coming next, and you can ad lib to help the other actor get back on track.

The memory is a fascinating thing.  I've spent years attempting all sorts of techniques and tricks to help me remember things, and yet here I'm relying greatly on an outside source - the other actor - to become my memory prompt.  It's most intriguing, and feels like something of a breakthrough. 

Control

Having trouble controlling how big the portions are in your evening meal?  You can get portion control dinnerware. This divides your plate up into three portions; you then put a certain amount of each food item in each section of the plate, and voila! instant self-control.  And if you're an eco-friendly person, these plates come in fully compostable versions, so you can dump 'em straight in the compost at the end of your picnic.  If there's a compost available.  The plates apparently provide 'portion control with a conscience.'  Right.

And talking of control, in Saudi Arabia, a Lebanese man was sentenced to 300 lashes with a whip and six years in prison for his role in helping a Saudi woman convert to Christianity and flee the kingdom in the latest example of the religious intolerance that grips the region.

I'm not sure how many people would survive 300 lashes.  His offsider, a Saudi man, received 200 lashes. I'm also not sure how you convince the Saudis that 'freedom of religion is an internationally recognised human right' as Joe Pitts, the representative for the Helsinki Commission and Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, claims. Islam is not fundamentally a religion of tolerance; expecting it to suddenly become one is probably like banging your head against a brick wall repeatedly. 

 

Control is something human beings have a leaning towards: North Korea is an example of a different kind of religious control (though of course we all know, don't we, that Communism isn't a religion?). Try to be anything but a Communist in that country and you're either executed or sent off to the North Korean equivalent of Siberia.  But I think there's more likely to be some change of stance in North Korea than in the world of Islam.  If Albania, the most Communist nation in the world, can revert to normality, then North Korea can.  It's a matter of time - perhaps waiting to see the old warlords die off. 

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.

Little Red Riding Who?

It occurs to me that Little Red Riding Hood is an odd name to give anyone. In fact, it's not a name at all, it's a description, and worse, it's not a description of a person, but an article of clothing.  In which case, why, when we say Little Red Riding Hood, do we immediately think of some anonymous little girl rather than something to wear? How did she get to be called that?  Did her parents go in for the modern fad of oddball children's names?

Yet, in spite of being called after an article of clothing, there's a famous fairy-tale about her in which a wolf wants to eat the child, puts off eating her until he's eaten her grandmother as an appetiser, and then, just when everything seems to be going his way, is chopped open by some woodcutter - in front of the child's eyes.  Extraordinary.  Exceptionally Freudian.

How did a story with such an odd name come to be so popular?

We'd be unlikely to read - let alone buy - a children's book entitled Horseback Riding Pants.  Even though a book entitled Horseback Riding Pants might be about a little boy, the youngest of three brothers, who goes off to seek his fortune when his aged father marries a wicked stepmother. Even though Horseback's bigger brother might be called Long Riding Crop, and his oldest brother, Safe Riding Helmet.  But the name of the book is a real turn-off.  (The older brothers' names don't help much either.)  Horseback Riding Pants isn't likely to go whizzing off the shelf, or get downloaded by the hundred-fold from Kindle.

So why on earth is Little Red Riding Hood still popular after all these years?  There's even been a movie made about the story recently - admittedly a story which has taken the bare bones of the fairy-tale and turned it into something in the horror genre, with a werewolf, and a priest who can exorcise the man trapped inside the wolf's garb.  Try selling a movie entitled Horseback Riding Pants. I don't think it's going to happen somehow.

Circus Quirkus

Yesterday I went to the Circus Quirkus with my daughter, my grandson and one of his friends - courtesy of free tickets from Rotary, who apparently sponsor the shows throughout New Zealand.  Good on them!

A slightly unusual circus in that it was performed in a theatre rather than a tent, but that didn't stop them being a very entertaining group.  There were only ten or eleven performers all up, including the ringmaster, so there was a lot of work for all the cast to do.  The three 'blokes' from Melbourne who did tumbling and acrobatics and slapstick were definitely among the crowd favourites because of their humour as much as anything - certainly humour adds significantly to the entertainment value of circus acts - but they were a very sharp group with great timing, energy and muscle.

Equally the clowning done on the tightrope at the end - by both the woman and the man - raised the bar considerably in what would have otherwise been a straightforward routine.  One or two of the other acts might have benefited from more involvement with the clowning side of the circus.  As we discovered from the two kids we had with us, something that is plainly difficult to an adult (even if it's made to look easy) doesn't necessarily grab children.  The performers may be risking life and limb, but the kids are very blase these days about such feats, because of television, I guess.

Fortunately, this Circus Quirkus group has at least six men who can clown well, and who consequently engage the audience effectively.  A couple of the women also did some clowning, though that wasn't the main aspect of their acts. There's something about clowning that involves, it brings the audience and performer together in a way that serious performance doesn't tend to do so well. 

Oddly, the production chose to put a solo act on as the last one before the interval - a contortionist who finished up her act by shooting an arrow at a balloon.  She held the bow in one foot and the arrow in the other, all the time balancing on one hand on an area only the size of her hand, and being twisted over the top of herself somehow.  Unfortunately she missed the balloon twice - that's the sort of thing you can get away with in a humorous act: in a serious act where it's obvious what she's aiming to do, not doing it is quite a let down (and not just for the audience).  She was a marvellous contortionist, there's no doubt; she had wonderful balance, and considerable grace.  But something was amiss with the bow and arrow part of the act, which was a pity. 

No doubt she'll get it right in other centres.  I'd recommend this circus greatly. 

The photo at the top is of last year's group; only some of them are in the current tour.

Some thoughts on being Intuitive

Recently I've been more and more thinking of myself as an intuitive writer/composer/actor.  Creatively I work by discovering the creation piece by piece rather than forming it carefully in advance. Certainly I've worked on structure, and the musical (Grimhilda!) was pretty well structured, but I think that was because I had someone else assisting with that side of things.  On my own the process of structuring something (especially something large) doesn't come easily to me. 

The intutitive aspect is probably also why I tend to absorb stuff, like books I'm reading, rather than learning the details, or the arguments. Even though it hasn't been consciously 'learned', the information will often turn up when needed at a later time. I don't have to search my brain for it; it arrives in some sort of subconscious way. 

I learn how to do things properly if I have an enthusiasm for them, but I'm not good at retaining 'facts' or 'information' by trying to learn them. I tend to absorb them in a way that I don't understand - probably like a child learns language. 

This intuitive approach can be unhelpful at times, especially when you know something you've written isn't working but can't see why, or you know a piece of information, but getting it to come to the surface is a problem, or when faced with the need for lateral thinking, you seem to fall over completely: the ideas will come, but long after you need them for that situation.   

I look with some degree on envy on those writers who can churn out work at the drop of a hat; they plan the structure, and then just get on with it.  I have to discover the whole thing (or a good deal of it) before I know I've got anything to structure.   

Yet give me a topic - like getting rid of moths, for example - (and even better, a deadline to go with it) and I'll produce something out of the blue.  I won't have any idea at the beginning where it's going, but it will slide out of the brain bit by bit and then, with a bit of editing and sorting out, it will be formed.  I used to do a lot of my columns for the Star Midweeker in that way...especially it they were needed the following morning and I hadn't managed to write anything in time. If I needed to do any research, I'd do it once the thing was done - generally.  Although this wasn't a hard and fast rule.  

The flash fiction I've written for the Flash Frontier site has tended to arrive in this way: having a theme means I've got something for my subconscious to get its teeth into, and having a deadline helps as well.  And I remember writing a couple of songs by request for our current church, and doing them with ease at a couple of days' notice.  It helped, again, that there was a topic, and a deadline.  (And at our previous church I wrote a script and several songs within a very short time because we had to start rehearsing so we could present the thing by a certain date. Amazing what happens when you're under that sort of pressure.)

However, things that involve a lot of facts and information, things that needed compiling into order, from different sources, are sheer hard grind.  I can do them, and it's usually satisfying in the end, but the process is much harder for me than doing something that has no obvious order when it starts.  This was the kind of work I did in my last job before I retired.  It took a lot more concentration than the purely creative stuff does.  Which is curious.

 

Updating the list of plays

This is now being updated here. 

14th Feb 2015: This is yet another update to this list. It's easier to keep it in one place rather than blogging all over again...I've also included the authors of the plays, something that for some reason I failed to do previously. 

Back in October 2011 I listed out the plays I'd performed in this century. The ones I acted in before that were in the 60s, so I've pretty much forgotten the details, though I did have a couple of small roles in a curious comedy called Lady Precious Stream, which we performed at the Globe Theatre in Dunedin. I also had some roles in one act plays that we performed the British Drama League competitions.)  

Early 2012 was taken up with working on Grimhilda!, as a repetiteur (rehearsal pianist), occasional assistant conductor, general factotum. No acting, but plenty of associated work. After that a bit of a hiatus until Easter this year, when our church put on a play in celebration of Rosalie Macgeorge, the first Baptist missionary to leave New Zealand. She went to what is now Bangladesh, and only survived the climate and the diseases for four short years.

The following is a complete list of productions I've been involved in this century:

1.      Mr Beaver in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, [second production by Narnia Productions], 2004 (Teachers’ College auditorium) - Director (and scriptwriter): Erina Caradus

2.      Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, Sept 2005 (Teachers’ College auditorium) - Director (and scriptwriter): Erina Caradus

3.      Mr Dussel in The Diary of Anne Frank (Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett), 2006 (The Playhouse) - Director: Liz Nisbet

4.      The Father in And Then They Came for Me (James Still), May 2008 (Globe  Theatre) [also co-directed with Carol Krueger]

5.      Reepicheep in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Sept 2008, (Mayfair Theatre) - Director (and scriptwriter): Erina Caradus

6.      Ormonroyd in When We Are Married (J B Priestley), May 2009, (Playhouse Theatre) - Director: Natalie Ellis

7.      Jacob Marley and Mr Fizziwigg in The Christmas Carol (adapted from Charles Dickens' story; dramatist unknown), Nov 2009 (Mayfair Theatre) - Director: Liz Nisbet

8.      Pianist/Composer for Love – or Nearest Offer (Hugh O'Brien), Apr 2010 (Playhouse Theatre) - Director: Natalie Ellis

9.      Rev Harry Harrington in Shadowlands (William Nicholson), May 2011, (Playhouse Theatre) - Director: Natalie Ellis

10.   Paravicini in The Mousetrap (Agatha Christie), October 2011 (Mayfair Theatre) - Director: Bert Nisbet

11.  Grimhilda! - general all-round dogsbody [Mike Crowl & Cherianne Parks/music by Mike Crowl] April-May 2012 (Mayfair Theatre) - Director: Bert Nisbet

12   Reverend Hinton - Harvest Field: the ministry of Rosalie Macgeorge (Greg Brook)- March 2013 (Otago Boys High School Auditorium) - Director: Greg Brook

13   Al Lewis in The Sunshine Boys (Neil Simon). The Playhouse, June 2013 - Director: Natalie Ellis

14.  Padre in Hamp (John Wilson) The Playhouse, August 2014 - Director: Bert Nisbet
15. Sir William Rollander in Verdict (Agatha Christie), The Playhouse, March 2015 - Director: Natalie Ellis

Making the most of the time

Just came across a long extract from William Barclay, on the subject of writing that I posted on one of my now-defunct blogs. There's some very good advice for writers in it, but one particular thing struck me afresh. He writes: My second rule is Keep Going. One of the greatest time-wasters, I find, is the habit we have of saying: 'I've only got twenty-five minutes. It's not worth starting.' But I find it is always worth starting. To return to John Wesley, he did most of his reading on horseback. It is amazing how much you can get done in the odd quarter-hour or half-hour. There is not one unit of time that cannot be used.

Wesley, according to Barclay, preached forty-two thousand sermons in fifty-three years, averaged four thousand five hundred miles per year in travel, and wrote or edited four hundred and fifty books.

I think this is something worth noting, that we don’t use those odd minutes well.  I used to be able to cope at a job in the Dunedin City Council where the phone would ring constantly, and you had to get on with your other work fitting around the phone calls. You learned to move from one thing to another without difficulty. It was somewhat the same at the bookshop: you’d be in the middle of something when a customer walked in.  Drop one thing, take up another, and then come back to the first. Yet I was very productive in those days.  In my last office job, it used to annoy me when the person senior to me would interrupt my work, especially if it meant putting something aside completely; but in fact it was no different a matter than in those other places. 

These days it's not a matter of interruption so much as of making the most of the odd minutes I do have (yes, retired people can be surprisingly busy in a day!) Some piece of creative work can be moved forward a paragraph or two in quarter of an hour - it's not the same as getting a sustained period of time,  but it's still of value. The thing is to do that rather than flitting through Facebook or Twitter or something else. Or writing blog posts about doing it!

John Wesley: Riding a Horse Whilst Reading a Book
by Richard Gilmore Douglas

Suitable place

I think, to have a wall fountain in your house, whether a slate wall fountain or some other design, you'd need a house that can accommodate such a design feature.  Soothing and all as these things may be, having one drizzling down your wall in a room that was barely large enough to fit you and the family dog, is probably not ideal. On the other hand, I'm sure one would go well in one of those large houses we walked passed in St Clair the other day, the ones that overlook the sea, with the horizon cutting the view sharply in half, and the cliff edge falling dramatically away from your backyard. 

Compressed

While checking through Evernote for items containing the word, compressed, I came across an article which talked about ten things you can do to improve your computer's performance.  I immediately tried one, that of dealing with some of the items in the start-up of the computer.  Skype has been insisting on starting up when I open up the computer, and getting a call from a relative when you're still in your pyjamas and haven't put your teeth in is a bit disconcerting.  So that's been sorted. 

I've was interested to note however that the article also talked about opening up your computer and cleaning its inside.  Crikey.  That sounds a bit scary.  Making the computer work without opening anything extra up is enough at the best of times; opening the machine itself sounds too technical for words.  Not that I haven't been inside a computer a few times in the past, but that's usually been out of necessity, not for a spring clean. 

Anyway they suggest, among other things, using a can of compressed air to dust the interior parts.  Don't touch anything!, they also warn; just let the air do the cleaning.  You don't need to set out and buy air compressors for the task; that's overkill (or is likely to kill your computer dead, from the inside out).  A small can is all that's needed. 

Continuing on with the subject of compression, I was reminded that there's talk of using cassette tapes as data storage, in this case, big data storage, like all the information that floods through Facebook on any one day, or the 1 petabyte of info (that's a million gigabytes to you) from the world's largest radio telescope.  Now presumably, just as you won't be using a full scale air compressor to clean out your computer, you won't be using one of those manky old cassette tapes you've had stuck in a box since the 80s to store any data on.  These tapes will store "35 terabytes of data - about 35 million books worth of information - on a cartridge that measures just 10 centimetres by 2 centimetres."  The tape will be coated with particles of barium ferrite.  Of course you all know what barium ferrite is, but I had to look it up on Wikipedia, and truth to tell, I wasn't any the wiser when I had. Anyway, this fancy stuff seems set to change the way we store data.   As long as the cat doesn't get hold of the tape, and play at running around the kitchen with it, unravelling it as it goes...

Superannuation

Yesterday there was a bit of flutter on Twitter about a pensioner in the Hutt Valley who was now being made to pay back his student loan - which he took out in 1999 for study - because the recent increase in the pension has meant he's crossed the threshold for repayments.  He complained about this being unjust, and got called a 'cry baby' in some places, as well as being reviled on Twitter.   I think the 'cry baby' post was perhaps a little over the top, but I guess that paying back the loan was always a possibility.  (It's a very small amount, though see below.)

However, what I found unpleasant on Twitter - and on the site where he was called a cry-baby - were the sarcastic and aggressive comments of younger people who have yet to experience what it's like to live on a pension, and nothing but a pension.  This is the pension where, if you're married, you actually get less each than if you're single.  Yes, I know there are ways for two people to economise, but why should they be treated as some double act financially just because they're married?

This is the pension that has been paid for in advance by years of taxation.  I worked for nearly fifty years.  I paid tax throughout that time.  I paid for that superannuation over the fifty years I worked.  Younger people go on about how they're paying for superannuitants.  No, they're not.  Superannuitants have basically paid for their pensions through their tax, just as those now working are paying for their own future pension. 

This is the pension that is about half of what I was earning before I retired. The figure I earned in my last three years of work was possibly the highest I'd ever received, and it wasn't anything like NZ's mean income.  I'd often worked for incomes that were considerably less than that.  Earning that kind of money makes it very hard to put anything away for your retirement, so in the end you're forced to rely on the superannuation.

I'm grateful for the pension, make no bones about it.  However, what many younger people won't be aware of is this little catch.  My wife isn't yet 65, but no longer has a job.  Because I'm on a pension, thankfully she is able to receive a 'supplementary' pension.  As a result, until she's reaches the age of 65, my superannuation figure goes down somewhat from the normal payment, and her payment equals mine.  So we get less than many married pensioners.  During the year she was able to pick up some work.  However, between us, we're only able to earn $100 a week over and above our pensions - until she reaches 65.  (The $100 a week, is of course, taxed, as is the pension itself - something many people don't think is the case, including Michael Laws.) The part-time, casual work she did in the last Work and Income year caused us to go over that threshold figure.  Every dollar she earned over that $100 a week, is taxed at the end of the income year at 70%.  This is not a typo.  You have to make up your mind whether you think it's worth working and having some cash in hand, or whether it's not and thus avoiding the additional tax you incur (it's worked out at the end of the W&I year). 

Perhaps I would at one time have thought superannuitants had it easy (although I was aware what my retired mother was receiving for many years, and it was never much).  But in fact many superannuitants in the country are much worse off than we are, and we don't exactly consider ourselves flush for cash.  So before you start criticising those over 65, think about what they may really be earning.  Once they've paid for the essentials each week (if they can afford to do that) there's next to nothing left.  Not much to show for years of giving your life to your country. 

Busy, as usual

I've finally managed to post on one of my other blogs another one of the letters I wrote to my mother from London back in 1968.  This one discusses the Double Bill we presented (Angelique and Dido and Aeneas) and the imminent Christmas holidays. 

I haven't had the time to type up more of the letters recently: there have been several things on the go. I've been working on the latest draft of the novel version of the musical I wrote, Grimhilda!, and getting some feedback from people about different chapters.  I'm learning the lines for another play, The Sunshine Boys, which I went straight into after finishing the play we did for our church's 150th anniversary.  And I'm working on various pieces of music: one of them is the accompaniment for Enesco's Legend, a piece written for Trumpet in C, but the soloist in this case will be playing a cornet.  It's a good piece, but has some sections that take quite a bit of working out in terms of time, with hemidemisemiquavers scattered about all over.   I'm also (slowly) writing another piano piece: it started off well, but has stuck one of those points that music sometimes does. 

Twice a week I've been going to a course run by English Language Partners; it's to learn how to tutor a person for whom English is a second language.  This is done in their own home, on a one to one basis.  I was supposed to be there this afternoon, but had a spell of ill-health yesterday afternoon/night, and so was still feeling rather under the weather when I got up this morning.  The last session is on Wednesday, so I'll need to be there for that.  It's been an interesting group: included amongst the participants have been two Muslim ladies, two women and a man with Chinese backgrounds, along with half a dozen or more Kiwis. 

And of course, my wife and I have been going for some long walks.

Keeping fit

Recently I wrote about a walk in which we discovered Braeview Crescent; it was just one of a number of decent walks we've been doing of late, walks that may be up to seven kilometres long and/or an hour and a half (or more).  Some of the time we've used the Intriguing Dunedin Walks books, but over the last three days we've done walks that we've just discovered for ourselves.

On Thursday we left the car opposite where the Monarch is berthed, down at the wharf, and did the old Crowl family trick of turning left, then right, then left again and so on. Nearly seven kms later we'd got all the way to the University area, walked around some of it and come back to the car via a different way.

On Friday we did a rather more adventurous - and more exhausting walk.  (The Thursday one had been almost entirely on the flat.)  This time we parked near my son and daughter-in-law's place in Helensburgh Rd, climbed up the street to discover that Wakari Rd ran across the top, walked right along that road for quite a distance (doing detours into Caleb Place and Joshua Place - yes, I know - and discovering that one of them had a little walk through a private garden that was open to the public).  Then, in due course, we went down Polworth Rd towards Burma Rd, which runs through the Ross Creek reserve.  We thought we'd give ourselves some variety and go through the bush, but the track we were on dropped off a small cliff in two different places, which wasn't ideal - so we backtracked onto Burma Rd, found the usual track that we've been on before and climbed back through that until we reached Cannington Rd.  Thought we'd be clever and take a shortcut through the golf course - and managed to, though with the dog in tow it seemed likely we might suddenly get thrown off the green.  Managed to find a gate to climb over and then did the relatively heavy climb back up to Helensburgh Rd.  Had a cup of coffee with our daughter-in-law after around two hours walking...

Today went out to Tomahawk, and climbed up it until we reached Centre Rd, which we then proceeded to climb until we'd done 3.5 kms of climbing.  What views!  The sea on one hand, the lagoon on the other, Saddle Hill in the distance, Brockville at the same level, fields, cows, horses, sheep (pong!).  All made all the better by a glorious sunny day.  Plainly the wind is strong up that way, however, as the macrocapras were bent almost completely over in places.  We were going to climb up to the monument that sits on one of the peaks, but there didn't seem to be a road to it from Centre Rd, so we went as far as the bend and came back again.  Got in the car and went back up to the Tautuku turn-off, and discovered the most wonderful old stone house down at the water level.   We'll have to do the Tautuku walk another day.

1. I talk to a horse (but he don't listen to me....)
2. Celia at the highest point we reached.
3. One of the views from on high.

Being random, as the blog's title implies

1. My wife and I were outside this morning in the sun chopping down the upper half of the holly hedge that separates our house from our neighbours' place.  It was a beautiful morning.  We then spent nearly an hour around 1pm talking to my son and his wife in the States, on Google's equivalent of Skype, went to go outside and found it was pouring with rain.  Since then the temperature's dropped considerably and we're now trying to get the house warm.  After all the fine weather we've had any cold day comes as a bit of a shock.

2. A friend lent me a copy of Edmund Gosse's book, Father and Son, a couple of weeks or so ago.  I'd heard of this book over the years, but never got round to reading it, even though it has some status amongst the English classics.  What an odd book!  Gosse was the sun of Philip Henry Gosse, who was a famous zoologist in the 19th century, around the time of Darwin.   He was also a Puritan Christian, as was his wife - the mother of Edmund: she died of breast cancer when Edmund was still under ten years old.  Philip married again, a few years later. 

The book is supposedly the factual memoirs of Gosse as a child, and of his relationship with his father, who, according to the book, was virtually a recluse, and a very rigid Christian.  (Gosse's mother was as puritanical as her husband, according to Gosse junior.)  The book claims to be fact, but later biographers of both father and son have found a good deal of fiction in the writing.  It's very much the view of a man who has cast his parents aside along with his religion, but in writing about it he colours the characters of his parents - his father in particular - in such a way as to make the reader recoil from them. Knowing that Gosse's writing is more biased than not is quite helpful in reading the book: you see how he shows himself as the one treated somewhat unjustly, when in fact this was apparently less than the truth.  He also, perhaps unwittingly, shows himself as rather pompous and quite class conscious.  Those who are lower than him in the social scale are written about in such a way as to show that Gosse despises them - it's not just what they do, it's how the author describes them.  For example, in describing John Brooks, a poor man who doesn't do the right thing according to Gosse's lights: John Brooks was a heavy dirty man, with a pock-marked face and two left legs...  I'm not sure how Brooks manages to have two left legs, but doesn't it immediately make you feel he's something of a monster?

I'd got to a point with the book where I thought I wouldn't finish it, but I will.  However, Gosse has lost my sympathy quite some time ago! 

3. I'm currently learning lines for the play, The Sunshine Boy, in which I'm playing Al.  He has a substantial enough part, but it's nothing like as long as that of the main character, Willie.  There's a great deal of humour in the play, and it'll go across well with an audience.  The line-learning has kind of interrupted my latest attempt to learn Psalm 119 (the longest in the Psalmody).  It's a tough psalm to learn, but I'm making slow progress on it.  I'm also singing with the Sunny Side Up group tonight, at one of the retirement villages, and I'm revising words and music for that as well.  So the brain is getting quite a work out at present!

Watch the fingernails

It's a pretty sure bet you'll come out of Danny Boyle's latest movie trying to figure out all the twists and turns in its plots.  It's probably a good idea to give up, because I suspect the plot doesn't actually hold water too well. 

Trance starts off with telling us how a certain London art auctioneers manages its security - especially when it has a painting for sale that's likely to bring in more than 25 million (and that's pounds, I assume).  James McAvoy is the narrator at this point as well as being part and parcel of the set-up.  And then the set-up becomes the real thing, we go through the process for real, and the two main characters that we've met so far both turn out to be not quite what we were told.  McAvoy comes off very badly in the ensuing rough and tumble and winds up in hospital for weeks, with, among much else, his memory damaged.  The bit of his memory that's damaged holds the key to where the painting that was stolen went, and so off he goes to a hypnotherapist to find out where the painting is.  Except that none of this is quite as it seems, and by the end of the movie, everything we've seen is either in someone or other's mind, or is a lie, or is twisted.  Cassell is exposed as the villain of the piece very early on, and stays a villain throughout...except that he's not the real villain, and the hero isn't quite the real hero, and the hypnotherapist, while certainly a hypnotherapist, is also a good deal more.  Even the ending has some ambiguity about it. 

Critics of the movie have complained that the plot can't be explained properly, and that's right.  But this is a plot with not only an unreliable narrator (in the brief patches when he acts as one) but at least one other very unreliable storyteller, and a director who cheats at times.  Keep your wits about you, and keep an eye on the damaged fingernails. 

The direction is superb, of course, with a great deal of mirroring and reflecting of the actors, a lot of use of people on different sides of glass, or seemingly in touch when they're not.  If the story was even more unbelievable than it is, this would still be a very watchable film.  The cinematography is top notch as well (Anthony Dod Mantle also worked on Slumdog Millionaire), and the music is extremely unsettling - in the opening exposition, for example, the music is running with a different edge to what we're watching, and you're trying to think why this should be. 

It's not uncommon for audiences to have to keep up in modern movies - we're often given less information than we require and have to make assumptions - but Trance takes this to the extreme; like Inception, it leaves you guessing quite a bit of the time, even in its last stages. 

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!

Vibrato

While driving to a rehearsal for the group, Sunny Side Up, today, I was thinking about the use of vibrato in singing because a bass singer in Don Carlo, which was on the car radio at the time, seemed to be making excessive use of it. I have a bit of a thing about vibrato: I tend to think that it's an overdone practice, and certainly opera singers from some countries make more use of it than others.  Supposedly vibrato is natural in a singing voice.  If that's the case I'm not sure why certain singing teachers insist on increasing the use of it, something that young singers often find quite hard.

String players and wind players make use of vibrato too, some to an extent that it becomes irritating.  Again this seems in part to depend on the nationality of the player.  Vibrato isn't quite the same as tremolo - pianists can play tremolo, for instance, whereas they can't do vibrato in any sense - but the words do get interchanged.  Thus when you go to buy a Floyd Rose tremolo at GC you're basically buying a tremolo for your guitar, since a Floyd Rose tremolo is a type of double-locking vibrato arm to keep your guitar strings from going out of tune when you produce a tremolo effect.

Apparently if you say the words, Floyd Rose, guitarists will understand that you don't mean the person, Floyd D Rose, [pictured at left] the man who invented the locking vibrato arm, but the device itself.  Thus a person's name gets taken over by his invention, as did Alessandro Volta's name by electrical voltage.

The Sunshine Boys

I've been offered a part in the Repertory Society's coming production of The Sunshine Boys, a play by Neil Simon.  I'd heard this was in the offing three or four weeks ago, and got a copy of the play to read.  It's very funny, sometimes in a kind of aggressive way, and the three main characters are great to play.  I'm doing Al, who doesn't appear till the second scene. He's the bête noire of the main character, who's being played by Bert Nisbet.  Bert's character is onstage for a great deal of the play - even when he's not onstage, he has lines that he has to fit in from offstage.  I'm relieved that I have several sections of the play when I get a break - and time to cram up on my next lot of lines, no doubt! 

Apropos of this, I've been memorising Psalm 119 over the last few weeks - it's a slow process, because there isn't a kind of narrative flow to the psalm.  The sometimes seemingly random statements - which use the same words over and over in different ways - don't easily connect to one another in the brain, so you have to have all sorts of links to keep track of things.  The part in the play is a piece of cake to learn by contrast with Psalm 119, so in a way I've been doing some mental exercises in preparation.  However, it's also the longest part I've ever learnt, I think, and will be kind of tough to deal with.

I was in a play last week on the life of Rosalie Macgeorge, the first missionary to leave New Zealand from the Baptist Mission Society.  I had only around twenty-five lines in the play all up, and for once I was word-perfect.  My aim is to be word-perfect in this play too, because I feel that if you don't get the words right, not only does it do a disservice to the author, but it also makes it harder to remember whether you've got the line quite in its proper shape.  The brain delights in muddling those who don't learn things exactly (it can muddle those who do know things exactly).  It may seem picky to want to learn the thing perfectly, but I know from experience that if I don't I'll have trouble at some point in the performances.