Fresh Words Daily

Common Sense I Say

freshwordsdaily — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 01:58:23 +0000

It is always a bit unnerving for me to read about studies that are done and the amazing conclusions that have been reached when I see it all as merely old fasioned common sense. The latest world shattering discovery is that children who have charge of the remote for the television are more likely to be less involved with their fellows, and often not doing well at school. Well Yeehah what a breakthrough. I would have thought that anyone would have been able to work out that the more a kid is involved with television, ipod, internet, mobile texting they are isolating themselves. They have fewer ideas generated, less opportunity to understand their fellows in kidland and generally be poor at just about everything. It comes down of course to parenting – well doesn’t everything. It seems to me that parents want to be ‘mates’ with their kids rather than parents. Is it fear that the children won’t ‘like’ their parents? Lots of children go through a phase of not liking their parents that’s part of growing up. Some parents go through phases of not liking their kids much too – but usually they never stop loving them. So some obvious things are – don’t have TV on except when there is a programme to watch. The adult has the right to first use of the remote. Dinner is served at the table and everyone eats and talks together. Mobile phones are put in a dish in the kitchen (not simmering!) and collected when the owner leaves the house. Texting is not tolerated at the table, and I know of one mother who doesn’t allow it in the car. Good for her – and every kid that gets in her car is told the same thing – usually by one of her own offspring, “Mum doesn’t let us text in the car.” They talk to one another and I know those children are top students at their school and they are not repressed or miserable they are wild and outgoing and fantastic.

So who paid for this great piece of research on children with the remote? Hope it wasn’t me the taxpayer.

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

freshwordsdaily — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 01:38:46 +0000

Three diverse women who become connected. The novel is set in Cape Cod and London. Iris is the postmaster in a small town in Cape Cod. She loves her job as the postmaster and believes that if everything was as ordered as her post office with her letters neatly filed and the American flag flying from the flagpole everyday, life would be much better for everyone.

Francie is a tall leggy blonde who is a journalist in Londona and who comes to America via the radio. She tells of the bombings and disasters of London in 1940.

Emma is the frail doctor’s wife who is left pregnant when her husband decides that he must go to England and work amongst the suvivors of the blitz. He comes to this decision partly through the talks he hears from Francie, but also when he botches a baby delivery and the mother dies. He feels reponsible.

This is an uneven book. Both Iris and Francie are believable characters but Emma is just a little cardboard cutout – she isn’t meant to be forthright, but her inclusion in the story doesn’t add much excitement. More she is ‘everywoman’ the woman who sits at home waiting for the mail, while her man goes to war.

For me the best part of the book was the middle section. Francie has left London and begins catching trains across France linking up with refugees on their way to Spain. As an American she can still travel freely in the occupied country. She takes with her a recording device to gather the words from the people on the trains. This is to be real radio part of her programme being beamed back to the USA. Many of the voices are Jewish, many voices appear only for a few minutes there is a poignancy about this diaspora of disenfranchised people, children, old people mothers.

The book moves back and forth between America and England and Europe and the Postmaster continues sorting the mail and the little wife continues waiting for her husband. Harry a local who is in love with Iris coninues to look through his telescope out across the bay. He believes we will be the first person to spot a German submarine if it comes.

Although the book is called The Postmistress Iris is always insistent that in America the job is kown as that of Postmaster so I wondered about this terminology – and yes it is resolved in a subtle way. I think the end of the book is a bit of a let-down but that may be because the central portion is so strong. Often life is like that – huge activity, great danger, and then anticlimax.

There is a quote from Martha Gellhorn a war correspondent at the beginning of the book: “War happens to people, one by one. That is all I have to say, and it seems to me I have been saying it forever.”

Perhaps that is something we forget when we are overfilled with images of troops, technology and machiner. War is people.

Publisher: Viking/Penguin Price: $NZ39.00

theatricals

freshwordsdaily — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:28:27 +0000

It was very quiet in the auditorium. Usually the set builders are talking, arguing, hammering or there is the swish of the paint brush. They were silent, the temperature was cool and every action was definite. Things were not going well with the director. There had to be changes made. “Bloody directors” said one of the men to me daring me to react. When a play goes on in any theatre there is often more drama before the opening night. Set designers are fantastic people but it is the set builders that I take my hat off to. The ones at Howick Little Theatre are the best – they can build from a shaky bit of a drawing dashed off on the back of an envelope to a sophisticated plan with all the measurements. They try hard to do what the director wants but not everyone who can direct, or act can hold a colour in their head – understand dimensions outside of reality, or realise the size of furniture in relation to the set – the set builders accommodate, and if it is sometimes with gritted teeth I don’t blame them. What always fascinates me that through the maze of irritations, grumbling, director’s mind changing, out of it all comes a play. A set which is spectacular, a play which entertains. Howick Little Theatre do it well – worth coming to see Mammals which is on until 27th March. On the 28th March the set gets broken down, furniture goes back into store or is sold on Trade Me and they are ready to start the process all over again. A cheer loud and long for the forgotten heroes in the theatre – the set builders.

Winter Olympics

freshwordsdaily — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:57:55 +0000

I am so impressed with ice skaters. Not only can they stand up on thin bits of steel they can twirl and leap and stand on one foot, and do amazing things called a double axel and a camel – things that remind me more of transport rather than of sport. They glide they slip and sometimes fall but always manage to leap again and smile. If it were me I would be sobbing into the ice so heavily the salt from my tears would melt the surface. Not these wonderful athletes. I have learned to ski. We once went to Threadbo in NSW Australia because our son was working there and I thought it was time we saw him. It had never been my intention to strap bits of wood to my feet and skim across a snowy hill but it was snowy and we were there so I did. I had a lovely instructor called Lavinia who was patient and kind and eventually I managed to float down the beginners slope and get my bum onto the ski lift and do it all again – I loved it. My husband, a sailor, hated it all and his downward flight was usually straight for a red wheelbarrow at the back of the utility shed. Once though he barrelled through the queue waiting for the ski lift. Oh so popular! At the end of the day he said he was convinced it was a sport that would never catch on. Try telling that to the fantastic athletes in Canada.

Master Chef

freshwordsdaily — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:58:45 +0000

It has hit New Zealand after many years in the UK. The Master Chef programme on television. All the hopeful cooks have lined up in fact queued way down the street in the hope that they would be the chosen one. I have to ask WHY? What is it about winning the title of master chef that is so seductive? Is it merely a chance to be on TV to cry a little to hug the judges when they give you a pinny. Gosh my mother used to make masses of them for the Presbyterian Church Bring and Buys – florals with matching plain bindings. Works of art really. But maybe it isn’t for the apron because every contestant talks about their passion for food, their passion to cook and they want one day to own their own restaurant. STOP!! It is a rotten job cooking in heat, trying to make food that fussy customers will like. Spending huge amounts of your life cooped up in a kitchen with people you may not necessarily like. Trying to pay the bills for rent, wages, product, and then the staff don’t turn up. Madness I say. I also have a passion for food, but I am happy to cook a little in my little kitchen for my family and friends, and then to eat a few times at restaurants I like – but doing it every day for a living. Never Never Never. I would be weeping on the programme too if I knew that I would have to have three fussy men looking at my food as if I have resurected it from the dustbin. Forget it folks. Go to the beach, go to the library, read a book, but cook every day of your life nada.

Remembering the Dead

freshwordsdaily — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:32:30 +0000

In Mexico they have a “Dead People’s Day” and those who have passed before are remembered. On the Marae when entering the meeting house after having removed your shoes you walk to the end and honour the ancestors – pictures of those who have gone before. Today I had lunch with a friend whose son would be 40 today if he had not died from an infection which spread like liquid silver through his body 3 years ago. We talked and wondered how those mothers whose sons went to war ever survived the grief of their death far from where they can be remembered. Then I said that at the weekend I had made a pineapple mustard sauce to go with the hot ham we were providing for a dinner of 12 people. It was my sister’s recipe and it was in her handwriting. And so there she was again in my kitchen over 30 years since her death. Not all memories are unhappy ones and we remember our dead often not from a gravestone which can become overgrown and rotten as time passes but through the tangibles we pass on. Recipes, books. And then there are the intangibles like laughter and ideas.

All the Colours of the Town

freshwordsdaily — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:31:34 +0000

It is a rare day that I cannot finish a book. Like a good child told to eat up its vegetables before desert I usually persevere and hope that at the end the book will have been worthwhile. This is not the case with this book. I couldn’t finish it. I was seduced into buying it by the luscious Scottish accent of the author who was interviewed on Radio NZ Nine to Noon programme. I bought the book. It is a first novel written by a Professor of Scottish Studies at the University of Otago. He loves writing you can tell that because he continually describes everything. When his character Gerry Conway arrives in Belfast he doesn’t just drive his car of the ferry we get full detailing.

“I bumped up the ramp onto solid ground. I felt that lightening, that release that always comes on disembarking, as if you’d been detained against your will and have somehow made good your escape.” etc etc etc.

Man oh man this book needed a wiley eyed editor with a red pen. For goodness sake just get the car off the damn boat – the description adds nothing to the impetus of the story. So I am sorry author with the lovely scottish accent this book has not been finished. I couldn’t even believe there would be goodies at the end to entice me on. So I dropped it and picked up the fascinating book by Alex Von Tunzelmann called Indian Summer which has kept me enthralled as she reveals the background to partition in India. Well written sparse description and I now have a greater understanding of India and Pakistan.

Sunflowers: A Novel of Vincent Van Gogh

freshwordsdaily — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:05:57 +0000

The story is set in Arles from 1888-1890. In these two years Vincent Van Gogh painted some of his most startling pieces and broke out of the traditional style into wild colourful work. It is during this time that he is supposed to have met a prostitute who became his lover yet managed to continue with her calling as well as being his mistress. Although the reference to the art is true and very well researched the relationship between the artist and the young woman form the brothel is pure imagination on the part of the author. You know when the story opens that there will not be a happy outcome and that doom sits on the shoulder of Vincent and Rachel. The historical parts of the book are well researched and the author has used much from the correspondence between Vincent and his brother Theo. It has become somewhat of a fashion to take an artist and create a life around them. Tracy Chevalier did it with Vermeer very successfully. I don’t think Bundrick is quite so successful. The relationship between Van Gogh and Rachel is not as well drawn as the narrative about the art. The picture of the brothel as a happy home for hookers is a bit hard to accept. It is interesting to look at Van Gogh’s paintings at this period of time at Arles. The book makes the point that Van Gogh was madly creative but not madly insane and that he probably suffered from epilepsy.

A Star Turn

freshwordsdaily — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 03:53:46 +0000

Being a car was a career first. Jeremy Clarkson would be impressed. My latest role at Howick Little Theatre – lines = “Vroom Vroom Vroom, and a squealing of brakes as I shot around the corner of the set. Much laughter (silent) from those backstage and the audience who were pretty puzzled by it all I think. But lots of Fun. Next appearance will be in 2010 – with I hope better lines.

Book Shops

freshwordsdaily — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:01:58 +0000

Borders UK is under management and it seems about to go under but with the hope that it can be held bouyant and that jobs will not be lost. There have been a host of owners for Borders UK. Transferred from one investment company to another all hoping that it will be the golden goose. What the investment companies have forgotten is that books are different from any other product. It isn’t like selling a jar of jam. A book has a different genesis. It is created from an intellect, worked and re-worked and then finally produced for enjoyment, instruction, or illumination from one human brain to another. So selling books is not just cash and wrap, though I have to say that is about what you get in the Borders bookshops. There is no knowledge of the books, there is no love for reading. Most of the people employed are there for a job to enable them to live – and that is a good reason too – but they are not there because they love literature. I once asked a assistant at a Borders bookshop if they had a book on Ernest Rutherford, the famous New Zealand scientist. She looked a bit puzzled and said she wasn’t sure and then brightened and said: “What has he written lately?”

The only good thing about a large conglomerate bookshop going to the wall is that it allows space for the small independent booksellers. These small usually owner owned businesses do know their stock, and they do try to get to know their customers. They are in this world of selling books because that is what they love to do.

I am sorry that Borders may be on its way out – it employs a large staff and they will be amongst the many looking for jobs, but I know that I will always prefer the small independents. A real place for real book lovers.