Clik here to view.
Summer Days and Thirsty Hedgehogs
It’s high summer in our village, the sea is postcard turquoise blue, and scored with white wakes from little fizz boats having fun. I watch the big game fishing boats with tourists going out with tall...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bullied by the birds
It’s two months since I wrote a blog about the drought called Summer days and thirsty hedgehogs, and since that time we have had no rain. The country is split between those who live in towns- and so...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Seize the day!
Today was not one of those days, but One of Those Days. Yesterday, as I watched the tiny, greenery- yallery birds we call silver- eyes in the trees, hunting for insects and the like, I thought how I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The mystery of other lives
Not a picture of hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil, but a picture of the three fat wood pigeons sitting on the power line outside our house yesterday. They used to be plentiful, but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The longest journey
I’m sitting by the wood fire with the rain falling steadily outside onto the green garden. It’s fragrant with the scent of all the cyclamens I bought this year to put in pots. I hadn’t realised what a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Domestic dramas and our daily bread
Life’s rich pageant is sometimes not quite what I expect. The last week or so was one of those times. I’ll start with the good times… coffee with Friend at a garden cafe. At the entrance the glade of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Serendipity and the Private Life of Rabbits
I don’t know what made me ask. Serendipity. A visiting friend had said his wife hadn’t come with him to see us because they had guests from overseas – a palaeontologist and partner. Out popped the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Paradise is not lost
In this country the sun is reputed to shine twice as often as it does in England, and it shines with especial clarity on Coromandel, so called when a ship of that name anchored where the township is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The birds in our hands
Every morning the pink breasted doves are waiting for me and their breakfast at the top of the steps, cooing like pigeons, and many mornings their cooing makes me think of Cher Ami. Cher Ami, a black...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A summer storm
It arrived unannounced at roughly eleven- thirty in the morning. Before then it had been a quiet silvery morning, still silver sea, and pale grey sky. The wind built up, the clouds lowered, and rain...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Souvenirs of life
These stones and feathers and shells can tell the story of my life in the last few decades… shells collected with the children on a Northland beach, a black and white feather lying outside the door...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ant or grasshopper?
The weather forecasters are calling it an Indian summer. This appals me – sitting here looking out of the French windows, watching butterflies flitting over the hydrangeas, I thought we were still...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Saying yes to beauty
Sitting on the sofa, sipping my afternoon cup of tea, I craned to watch a sooty blackbird. It was pecking with its orange beak at the apple nailed to the fence outside the window. Beyond the fence is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Living takes up all my time
As I drove home this morning I wondered how often I had driven along that same country road with all its winds and curves and hills and one way bridges… ruminating about this, I went back randomly to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Little happinesses and big happiness
I love Autumn… I loved it in England, those early morning mists burnt off by the morning sun… the scents of bonfires and blackberries, picking hazel-nuts from the hedgerows, finding silky, shining...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fifty Shades of Green
It was a term of derision thirty years ago when someone referred to me mockingly as a ‘brown- rice greenie’. These days however, eating brown rice is respectable and being green is mainstream. But...
View Article
