Best sporting event of the year

 We have had another week of gluttonous enjoyment and high octane entertainment. Life is hard at times.

We had organised some neighbourhood folks to come for dinner on Wednesday evening, namely Frances (Mrs Egg from up the road), Jacqui (from the caravan next door), and Elaine and Mike (the new owners of 414, on our eastern side). It seemed like a good opportunity to test a new cookery book, The Australian Women’s Weekly “The Joy of Christmas”. Clem and Pat gave this to us as a house warming gift, when they visited earlier in the year. Some of you will know I have a test for cookery books: pick three recipes almost at random, make them, and see how they turn out. If all three are good, then it’s reasonable to assume the rest in the book are also.

So, for Wednesday night I suggested a number of recipes to Nicky and we picked four, and used one other as inspiration. The inspiration (smoked salmon on walnut soda bread with aioli) was good and went well with the dried fruit and nuts that Frances provided and cheese and dried fruits that Elaine and Mike brought. The main course was chicken and venison terrine with two salads: asparagus, pea & potato and freekeh, cabbage & cranberry. All these dishes turned out very well (so the book passed), but the lentil and pistachio rolls were OK, but bland. Jacqui brought a chocolate chip and ginger nut biscuit and cream (what I think of as Brenda’s dessert) and Nicky made an apple and orange cobbler. Both were very good and consumed with alacrity. Conversation flowed along with the wine and we had a good evening.

Yesterday was the 6th annual Plumber Dan sponsored Whanganui River Duck Race. This is probably the best sporting event ever. It is both eccentric and gentle. The weather came to the party with blue skies, sunshine and a cool breeze, and the scene was set:

The river looking lovely, the big duck which has been moored in the river for a couple of weeks smiling.

The crowds began to gather as the excitement at the start line gathered:

The 2000 or so ducks were loaded into nets on the south side of the Dublin Street Bridge, and then they were off:

The race was on, and the duck management crew were busy keeping them from headlining in the wrong direction:

About 50 minutes later, the finishing line in sight, there were ducks somewhere!

The crowd relaxed as the adrenaline subsided, already looking forward to next year:

We really enjoyed the gentle walk by the river watching the duck flotilla. There were enough people around to make it an event, but not so many that it felt crowded (we have gone off big crowds, even before Covid). We didn’t win anything by the way. No idea what happened to our duck, number 1379.

The rest of the week has been pretty routine. I have had little work, and Nicky has been to Life Group and the final Alpha session for the 2021 course. You may recall that I mentioned last week that our flax has gone ballistic with spouting seed “spears”. Some of the seed pods have started to open this week and the tui have noticed. I briefly saw a pair of them after the seeds on Wednesday morning. I don’t think I have been so close to tui before. Hopefully we will see more of them as more seed pods open.

Elaine and Mike had encouraged us to utilise their skip which was far too big and they would never fill, so on Thursday Nicky and I took them at their word. We have two “piles” in the back garden, on either side of the shed. One is of bits of timber and metal (left by builders and fencers) which might be useful one day, and the other was general builders’ rubbish that didn’t make it into our skip, before it was taken away. This pile has now gone, into Elaine & Mike’s skip, which has also now been taken away. It’s good to have it gone.

Yesterday afternoon, after a post duck race late lunch, we spring cleaned the shed, which basically involved getting out stuff of which to dispose and putting back the stuff we are keeping tidily. It looks cleaner and better organised. In the evening we watched Ghost, the Demi Moore & Patrick Swayze film. Even thought it was released in 1990, neither of us had seen it before. It was different and better than we expected.

We have also been swapping books this week: The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman and The Echo Chamber by John Boyne. We have now both read them both and throughly enjoyed the stories and humour. The Echo Chamber has a particularly good family of appalling characters, and also has a good ending. We can recommend them both.

Take care, Rick and Nicky.