Literally Entertained

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The highlight of this week has to be Saturday at the Writers Festival, so that is where I will start, but there have been other good bits too.

The day dawned a little cloudy, but that didn’t dampen our spirits or chill our breakfast boiled eggs and toast. Our first appointment was at an Oxfam morning tea being hosted by Faye who Nicky worked with in New Lynn. Wendy, also of New Lynn library, and Shirley, a friend of Faye’s, also joined us along with Faye’s husband Ivan. We had tea and coffee and a lovely range of home made gluten free goodies, and a good chat.

We left for home to pick up Nicky’s hearing aids and have some fruit before heading into town and the Civic car park. Nicky had been given a free ticket from work to see Camilla Lackberg talking about her Scandinavian crime novels at 2.30, so while she went off to that I got into a free session discussing the difference from the writers perspective of books and film. To oversimplify, books are stories told with words by people who want to tell stories; films are stories told with pictures by people who want to make money. It was an interesting session; Nicky also enjoyed Camilla very much.

After we had met up again we wandered downstairs to get Nikcy’s coat from the cloakroom and found Letty Duddding. We hadn’t seen her for ages, so we went up to the Box café and had three portions of chefs special beef stew, followed by three teas, and a very good chat and catch up. Letty went off for her session about 5, so Nicky and I had a stroll up and down Queen Street to stretch our legs before our main event: An evening with Sandi Toksvig. She was just brilliant, even better than we expected - funny, insightful and charming and didn’t really need an interviewer (who wasn’t very good) at all. It was brilliant.

The whole atmosphere of the event was convivial; strangers engaging strangers in conversation, passing on comments about books, and authors, and gems they had come across during the day. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. 

We got home to have tea and cheese and biscuits and port, and started watching “The Bletchley Circle” on DVD, a three part drama about four women who had worked as code breakers during the war, and used their skills to track down a serial killer. It was very well done so we ended up watching all three episodes as it was a refreshing approach to the genre, as well as highlighting how empty life can feel after doing something significant. We really enjoyed it, and it was a great end to an excellent Saturday.

Monday evening was one of the other social highlights of the week when we dined at Bricklane to celebrate Dennis’ 80th birthday. He is a member of Nikcy’s house group and has been quite ill recently. He has finally retired and in a few weeks will be returning to England with one of his daughters, probably for the rest of his days. He is going to find leaving NZ a wrench. We had a very good evening (about 14 of us), Nicky enjoyed a nice juicy steak with garlic butter, and I had a scallops and pancetta salad which was gorgeous. This was followed by birthday cake made by Doirs.

Lastly on the social front, I went up to The Block with Paul and his lad as they have started serving craft beers on tap, and I had a lovely pint of milk stout.

Work has been very busy again for Nicky, including a meeting in town on Monday. I have quite a few calls too, but this hasn’t stopped me doing the laundry, ironing, shopping and cooking. The weather has been pretty good with sun most of the time, just some showers on Wednesday and Friday had an autumnal feel about it.

Today started off cloudy but the afternoon was lovely and sunny. Nicky went of to prison this morning, and I had a walk and a dip in the mighty sea out at Karekare. This afternoon Nicky has been cutting the lawn with the very quiet mower, doing some general garden tidying, and making scones. I am ploughing my way through The Luminaries, and did the soup (4 minutes in the microwave) for tea. There is ironing ready to be done next week.

Take care,

Rick

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