South of the border, west of the sun – haruki murakami. A short novel from Mr Murakami this time and the shortness works in its favour as often his books can seem a bit drawn out. This tale is of lost childhood love and the choices faced in mid-life, not an uncommon theme but this time the main hero is not an expert cook. One of his better ones.
Category: Musings
Sophie’s world – jostein gaardner. Interesting basic introduction to a number of philosophers with bizarre tacked on ‘alternate reality’ plot. Targetted more at late teen age rather than adult so a lot of the characters (such as Sophie herself) are extremely one dimensional to the level of being annoying avatars. Not bad.
The luck o’ the mattish
Just about to head back to England after a fun few days over in Dublin visiting Louise (with big thanks to Roseanne and Vinnie for letting us stay). Seen lots of sights – well, lots of bars anyways, and of course the Guinness brewery which has mad views of the whole city from the gravity bar at the top. So, of course, drank some Guinness and whiskey, visited Bono, Enya and Eddie Irving’s palatial residences and looked at the new big pointy thing in the town center. Mmm… pointy.
At the moment though I’m hoping my flight back is a lot less precipitous than the flight over. Having almost enjoyed a 24 hour flight back from New Zealand I find it ironic that a one hour flight can freak me out so much purely due to the fact that the plane tipped 45 degrees right after take off (followed by some more turbulence). Of course this was the first flight in ages that I hadn’t taken any Dramamine (my flying drug of choice) and was sitting right at the back of the plane so that just made things worse. Luckily though my weekend flu-like illness, replete with dry cough and muscle aches, seems to have subsided meaning that it probably wasn’t SARS after all…
Hangin’ Around
For those of you who’ve been wondering where my usual witty and urbane bloggy banter has been (hi mum) I just worked out that Blogger had managed to lose my page template somewhere, hence it wasn’t updating properley. Oops. Anyway, should all be fixed and luverley now so onto a quick update…
Ah, Easter bank holiday. A four day weekend when everyone rushes out of London to see some other part of the world, which is normally the motorway for at least the first six hours. Luckily for me I was driving into London on Thursday lunchtime to drop off my rental car, watching the queues of traffic the other way growing fat as more folk escaped from the city. Of course the great thing about this is that London becomes very quiet and chilled out for the whole weekend, with pretty much most things open as usual.
Dance dance dance – haurki murakami. An even stranger than usual story from Murakami… The hero has strange dreams about a hotel he used to visit with a prostitute in another part of Japan and decides to go and try and find out what it means. What follows is a tale of random (and not so random) connection culminating in a slightly confusing ending. The ride along the way is good though this is not one of my favourite Murakami books. Oh, but it does have the interesting aside of a character who is an author called Haruki Murakami – this is apart from the hero who, as usual, is an intelligent loner who likes cooking and occaisionally bedding attractive woman but not falling in love.
Factotum – Charles Bukowski. Another Fopp special picked up for only �3 (I love Fopp). Oh, and another great read from Bukowski. Much like Post Office, Factotum describes the life of Henry Chinaski (a pen name for Bukowski) as he makes his way from drink to drink, job to job and woman to woman. Each chapter pretty much describes a new job, and given each chapter tends to only be a few pages long you get an idea of how many jobs Chinaski has had. All of this is described in Bukowski’s sparse yet poetic style, showing us the life of someone who lives in the moment but without the spiritual aspirations of Buddha. Good stuff.
Life of Pi – Yann Martel. This is the wonderfully fascinating and readable story of Pi Patel, the only surviving member of the Patel clan after a ship wreck on the way from India to Canada. The prose flows along at a rapid rate and the book is practically impossible to put down. Martel seems to imply this is actually a real story he picked up but even if so there is some strange embellishment that goes on and a wonderful twist in the tale at the end. Another must read I’m afraid – ask me if you can borrow it!
Home again
Well, as you might guess, I arrived safely back in England and appear to have gotten through the incubation period of SARS with no ill effects. Huzah! The flight went pretty quickly on the way back. It’s interesting how as soon as you’ve done a long flight your brain can instantly block it from your memory, I guess that’s because nothing much happened so it’s equivalent to the time loss experienced when watching EastEnders and other such pap. Having said that I did meet the guy who carved Gollum for Lord of the Rings so had a fascinating chat with him.
So now I’ve met my new nephew (photos on the photo site) and gotten to do all the important uncle type things like holding him, going ‘ah, bless’, comparing hairdoes and then going ‘I think he wants his mum’ whenever he looks like he’s about to do something like throw up. He is lovely though, but I found out I’ve been mis-spelling his name – it’s Nathanael, not Nathaneal. Sorry about that, Nat. Strange coincidence – Nat was the name that Bob used in his book to replace my name… maybe Bob’s psychic or sumfink.
Also had the fun of my step-brother’s wedding. Oliver and Alena Green got married in White Waltham on March 29th. There was a civil service first in a barn, then a church blessing (with sermon by Simon, by brother in law). My fun for the day was wearing a morning suit, ushering type duties and driving the Riley around between places. Once that was all over my duties then involved getting drunk and dancing in a completely different way to my dad, although he disagrees. Luckily I have video…
Since then I’ve been catching up with folk back in England, trying to sort my room out again and contemplating flying back to Australia. Oh, and giving lots of money to the dentist – a grand total of around £1000!!! Arse. I’m very tempted at the moment to try and sue coca cola for the damage their drink has done to my teeth and try to reclaim some of my costs plus punitive damages. Gotta be a worth a try, especially after all the things you hear of teeth being dissolved in glasses of coke.
Meanwhile had lots of fun scanning in negatives last night. My scanner goes to 1200 DPI which isn’t too bad, and it seems to do a pretty good job on negs – but it’s not really designed for feeding lots of them through at once! It has this cool attachment (like a light box) that goes behind the negs and shines light through them rather than reflecting it back. Looks very strange in use. Strangely used this to identify that a set of negs were my sister’s not mine, but in the process found a picture of my first ever girlfriend (who went to my sister’s school) – ah, bless.
I was up till about one scanning things in – it’s a slow process. Each neg takes about 4 minutes then you’ve got cleanup time in Photoshop. Ouch. Starting to get worried that I don’t know how to callibrate my computer screen, so what I see on the there in terms of colours could bear little resemblence to what would be printed out. Hmm.. Guess there’s a new learning curve to be gone over there. Ah well. One of these days I’ll actually get a portfolio of images together and then maybe even do a show…
Plane Sailing
Well, not long now till I spend 24+ hours in a plane to get back to sunny ol’ London town. Luckily I get an hour stopover in LA on the way – phew! In the meantime I’m in Auckland again having completely not manage to make the south island. Spent the last few days up in the Bay of Islands, north of Auckland – another amazingly beautiful area of New Zealand. Hike up to a waterfall, then kayaked up to it over the mangroves – pulling fresh oysters from the mud on the way. Then a long drive down the west coast back to drop off the car – passing amazing sand dunes and stopping off to look at stupendously large trees, the kauris in cathedral grove. Amazing. We got there quite late, so had the biggest tree (2000 years old and 13m in diameter) to ourselves for some silent contemplation of just how frikkin’ big it is. Big.
And apologies for everyone who can’t get to my site via ultrahi.net. Enom, my DNS lookup provider, have now told me there was ‘some problem’ with my credit card but won’t say what. To rectify this I need to fax over a copy of my credit card and a copy of my latest statement. Muppets. Obviously this is not straightforward when you’re travelling round the world so it will be a few days to fix – plus, because they’ve disabled my account, I can’t even check to see which credit card I used to try and pay for the URL. Sigh.
In the meantime found a cool new language – sinhalese! This is one of the most wonderful looking scripts that I’ve ever seen, really curvy. Some of the characters look like cats or foxes and others like… well, let’s just say it’s rude and leave it at that, missus.
Steamed
One thing about New Zealand is that it has amazing amounts of naturally generated energy, mostly from hydro-electric and geothermal sources. This was brought home yesterday when we went to see the dam open just north of Taupo – an almost empty, serene little pool suddenly transformed into this raging white water torrent, an act that is repeated five scheduled times a day over half an hour. Having said that I wasn’t in the best way to appreciate it having had a heavy night out in honour of a) St Patrick’s day and b) having a new nephew.
Yes, Nathanael James has finally decided to come play in the outside world (although it has been chilly in Britland of late so you can’t really blame him for wanting to stay warm and comfy in my sister, Georgette, for a bit longer). Although Nathaneal isn’t actually a Paddy’s day baby (by the mere matter of an hour) I got a text when the celebrations had already kicked off down here in New Zealand. One bottle of champagne and numerous toasts later Louise and I were well on the way to a suitable frame of mind for the yearly Irish celebration. I’ve now been enjoying slightly too large emails from my family, who will be getting free tutorials on email etiquette and image compression when I get back home, to see Nathaneal’s wrinkled little face for the first time. I’ve uploaded these to my photo site if you fancy a look for yourselves – ah, bless.
So now the family titles have been extended – I’m an uncle, my older sister is a mother, Abigail is an aunt (at 12), mum and dad are grandparents (and will be reminded of it regularly) and nan is a great grandmother! Feel like I need to get a ‘Dummies guide to being an uncle’ to understand what my uncling duties should be… Have to have a chat with my own uncle, Steve, to find out what he thought about that. A quick search of the web seems to reveal nothing relevant so maybe I’ve found a niche in the publishing market. I’ll file that with my idea for make-up that contains multi-vitamins so you look healthy and feel more healthy at the same time (copyright 2003, Matt Hobbs TM).
Right – enough family stuff (for now). I’m off out to enjoy the delights of the Cormandel Pennisula, including its famed hot beach where you can dig your own spa around low tide due to thermal heat under the beach. Crazy. Think I’m getting addicted to spas now which is worrying. Had a great time on St Paddy’s day hiking up to some falls north of Taupo and stopping for a swim in the beautiful, freezing, clear river, before sitting under the hot spring that flows right into it. Ah…