Update

This is 18.05.2009. I went to set up a blog, and discovered I already had two from way back some time. It was interesting to read them and see how I have moved on in that time. Blogs are by their nature egocentric, and that is what I am trying not to be. But you can't write a blog without the use of the first person singular pronoun. And that's an irony, because I have just been fulminating about what the NZ Herald currently calls journalism -- which so often consists in columnists interviewing themselves, one way or another, about some apparently newsworthy person.

How do you feel about...? It's the standard interviewer question, and often it's astoundingly banal and inappropriate. It assumes that how someone feels about someone or something is news. Typically people these days haven't the remotest idea about facts and circumstances, subtleties and history, but they sure know how they feel. So egocentrism rules.

My wife Mary and I are now living at Algies Bay, which is about an hour's drive north of Auckland. You go to Warkworth, a lovely town but steadily now being ruined by "development", and then about 11 km out to the coast, via Snells Beach. We bought this property back in 1981, after we came back from Fiji. It was to be out retirement home, and in the meantime a holiday place. About 3 years later the estranged husband of a tenant burned it down. So we built this house, with a little self-contained flat downstairs for our holidays, but tenanted upstairs. Now it's all ours, completely renovated -- and we look out over Kawau Bay and watch the changing light and clouds and boats and weather effects. It's all lovely. We are growing feijoas and guavas, apples and plums, and during the renovations we got a raised vegetable garden built, which Mary has now planted in useful things.

But Mary had decided to do a 3 months locum back in her old workplace, Middlemore Hospital. So until July she is heading back to Auckland on Mondays, giving our daughter Rachel a few hours with our lovely grandson Stephen David Ross, and then on to the apartment the hospital is providing for her in central Auckland. From there she can take the train to Middlemore and back on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and then drive back here on Fridays, again via Rachel, Simon and Stephen. I think it's working well, but I'll be glad when the 3 months are up.

I resist various attempts to enlist me in this and that worthy local community thing. Despite this blog, I actually prefer my privacy -- especially from the church, right now.