Issue 151

I’m personally not convinced that vitamin supplements are a vital adjunct to modern living and I decided to give up taking vitamins more than twenty years ago with no noticeable ill effects – which didn’t entirely surprise me as they’d had no noticeable positive effects over the period I took them either. That’s not to…

..anything at all! Anyway, it was a perfect early autumn morning when we pulled over outside the Selwyn Gallery in Darfield, a two-horse town twenty minutes west of Christchurch where the snowless Southern Alps loom over the parched Canterbury plains, this day under a blank blue sky. Unlike the other very fine galleries we’d visited…

.. significant investment in both money and occupied space. If I was adding up – which in my darker moments I am – some might consider it a considerable investment. Which, in my darker moments, I do. I don’t know what some of these devices do – though there are a number that bear a…

..even a craze. Remember crazes? I was gardening in my garden that could pass for a jungle the other day and The Ballad of Davy Crockett infiltrated my brain and I started to sing the story of Davy Crockett so well known to every American and Australasian child of the era; Born on a mountain…

..also was invited by landed gentry and aristocracy into the country houses of Central Europe.’ These days he is a relatively unknown figure, but during WWII he pulled off one of the more extraordinary stunts of the conflict. It was made into a passable film with an entirely miscast Dirk Bogarde, but achieved true immortality…

.. footnote as it’s not at the bottom of the page ) there are some interesting parallels with another of my favourite movies ‘Ikuru”, the far more understated yet more touching work, by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. If I have any regular readers they may, hopefully, have realised that I am not a…