Winter in Wellington

It’s a cold and miserable winter’s day. Again. We seem to have had a lot of them this winter, which also seems to have lasted since March or April this year. With no real end in sight just yet. I had to go out this morning, requiring multiple layers, a warm coat, a scarf and boots, wishing I had a hat and gloves too. I don’t dislike that, in fact I almost relish it, when I know I’ll be warm and toasty when I get back home. I like weather, and I like seasons. (Well, except for spring. I might talk about that another time.) But still, unlike some winters, I am soon going to be ready for this one to end.

In between the miserable days, we’ve had some nice, calm days when we could go on walks around the hills or the harbour. The harbour is different from day to day. One day when a southerly had come through, the harbour had rough waves, spray over the motorway and onto the carpark where we like to sit with lunch sometimes in the summer. A few days later, we went for a walk and it was flat and glassy. Some days it is completely washed out, and other days is a vibrant Mediterranean blue.

Before the storm hits

When the cold has led to snow on the mountains, it’s an excuse to visit the café on the South Coast, and take some photos of the rocks and waves and mountains across the strait. When it’s not too windy.

Finally, it is August and spring is just around the corner. The camellias in my garden know it, even though their arrival almost always surprises me. They’re the perfect flower for a non-gardener – they just appear, every year, on the camellia bushes. It’s a pleasure to look through my window when I am working in the kitchen and see the sun hitting a flower just right. The bursts of colour are welcome on this long winter.

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What’s saving my life this winter

Another idea I stole from Loribeth.

• New hearty recipes from my Dish magazine subscription. Recent successes included a chilli chipotle meatball recipe, and a spicy cashew, pumpkin, and ginger chicken (chicken optional – would be delicious just with root veges) bake. Amongst my list of recipes to try is a vegetable curry recipe, and chicken, lemon and zucchini meatballs, and I have a whole new magazine to go through.
• So much sport! Wimbledon matches kept me up all night, but being able to sleep all day helped. Now we have the Women’s Football World Cup in our time zone, the Women’s Netball World Cup (not in my time zone), and coming up in September and October is the Men’s Rugby World Cup in France. It’s lovely to watch when I’m warm inside on the couch under a blanket.
• Our new heating system we had to install back in April is keeping me toasty and warm.
• Mild days with lots of sun and little wind since we returned in June. Though the last few days have been a bit miserable, we’ve been very lucky.
• Beautiful scenery on walks around the suburb, or when we’ve made it out to one of the coasts for a seaside walk.
• Friends – days out over the hill, dinners, a play, a movie today, a farewell dinner on Wednesday.
• Intermittent fasting is keeping the weight down from the new recipes! So far. Fingers crossed.
• Reading some good books, and listening to good audiobooks. Winter means I feel like I have permission to read during the day when it is cold outside. I’m back on schedule to meet my Goodreads target this year.
• Remembering our trip, working on my photos, and planning the next trip. Thinking about 2024, which is filled with opportunities, and no decisions yet. There’s something exciting about that.
• Ignoring the house maintenance because it is winter. That’s allowed, didn’t you know?

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Monday Miscellany: August version

How can it possibly be the end of August already? This year has gone so fast (so far), and it is crazy that spring is just a few weeks away. We haven’t done a lot this year – no exciting travel, international or domestic, not a huge amount of socialising in person, no major renovations. It’s as if Covid has made everything slow down or stop. We haven’t even done any renovations/maintenance on our house, because there are so many horror stories about the inability to get tradespeople or basic materials, to complete our work. That said, I haven’t been bored. I have this space (and others) where I write and read others who write too. I read, I’ve watched some great stuff on streaming services, there’s been sport to follow, there’s always exercise, and there are always things to photograph. I can never understand people who say they’d be bored if they weren’t working.

I always find August a weird month. Spring is on the way, but unlike a lot of people, I find myself wistfully regretting the approach of spring, and hoping for a few more weeks/months of colder weather and winter foods. I’ve barely worn a scarf this winter, let alone a hat or gloves. Our winters are mild, comparatively, and I relish a good cold day, as long as I can be warm inside!

That said, the weather over the last three to four weeks has been crazy! We had wild winds, then two very cold weeks, which of course I loved. We even dug out our “winter duvet” which we haven’t had to use for a few years now, and I’ve loved snuggling under its weight. Almost immediately after the cold snap, New Zealand got hit with what they call a “rain river” that has come down from the tropics. In what was already a wet winter, it has brought high temperatures (for this time of year) and days and days of enormous dumps of rain. Family from overseas texted us again to check we hadn’t slid (yet) to the bottom of the hill. Others around the country weren’t so lucky. Roads are closed and houses have been condemned from flooding or landslides (slips). Everyone seems to have the odd leak in their house (or two). Wellington has not been immune. There have been hundreds of slips in Wellington in recent days. Today it’s not raining, but it’s due to start again soon. And online, we watch the news of lakes and rivers drying up, of forest fires, and of surging temperatures in the northern hemisphere. It’s hard everywhere right now.

On the bright side, August also means Wellington on a Plate! It’s a mid-winter festival aimed at boosting attendance at restaurants when so many of us (me included) often hunker down at home. The poor old hospitality industry has had such a hard time the last few years (although the NZ industry has probably done better than most) that it is great to go out and support them. The last two weeks of WOAP means the Burger Wellington competition. We went out last week for a delicious burger, and we were planning on going on Friday, but it was such a horrible day we didn’t. We plan on a couple more this week, trying some places we rarely visit, trying burgers that are not your typical examples.

Our camellias are in full flower at the moment, which is lovely. I look out from our kitchen sink, and see bushes covered in bright pink flowers. It’s a very cheery sight, and a daily delight. As are the easy bird sightings given the lack of leaves in our trees. Winter may be gloomy, but it’s not all bad.

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Images or Words or Both?

The doorbell rang and there was a knock on the door about 8 am this morning. I confess I was still in bed, though I was awake and checking on the morning news. It’s true! It was a photobook I recently completed and ordered. It’s the first book I’ve ever done with photos of New Zealand, as all my others have been around overseas trips. But over the last five years, we have taken longer trips around the South Island, especially last year’s pandemic trip that was taken instead of travelling internationally. Last year in particular, we decided to take a trip as if we were overseas, and we organised it accordingly. And so I decided it might be time to document our travels, and use the photographs that are just as stunning as anything we’ve taken overseas.

It looks beautiful, as beautiful as any coffee table book from a professional photographer, which is what I was aiming at. Okay, I might be biased, but (I think) you can check it out here.

In recent years, since I really started to enjoy my photography, I look closely at my environment, at the things around us, and at the light. I often wish I had my camera with me, and take snaps in my head. I realised this morning that I used to do this before, but in the early years of my blogs, I would try to describe what I had seen, and what I had heard and smelled and felt. I’m not sure when I stopped doing that as much. I suspect it might have been when I was in Italy. As some of you know, I wrote a trip blog at the time. My intention was to describe the little things I saw, and the feelings and sights and sounds. But no sooner than I had put up a few posts than I was inundated with requests for visuals. I caved, and I wish I hadn’t. It put so much pressure on me to take photographs, and then to find and edit the perfect photos for each post, that I lost the joy in the writing. The photos too, often excused me from describing where I was in any detail. Yet I love the photography, and I love the photos of my travels, as much as I love writing a post without a picture that explains where I am and what it feels like to be there.

On Friday, I went to an exhibition of entries in a Portraiture Award. The artwork was brilliant – such different styles, from photorealistic closeups of a child or the artist in the mirror, to a series of self-portraits painted on axe-heads, each one exquisitely rendered in tiny detail, to a huge black and white painting with only a few brushstrokes, that still made me feel something about the subject. I thoroughly enjoyed myself as I took in each portrait, even if I didn’t agree with the judges’ choices – but what do I know about art? To get there I wandered along the waterfront. I snapped a few shots of the perfectly calm harbour, the water reflecting some of the wharf buildings, the sky blue, and the air crisp and cool, a lovely winter’s day. I then picked up some lunch, and drove around the bay to eat it. I sat on a park bench, dedicated and donated to a man who had lived most of his life in the bay, and took in the view as I sipped my coffee. The fountain was beautiful in the sunlight, the water glistening as its spray was caught in the sunlight, reflected in the water right up to the sandy beach. Seagulls lined up along the sand, taking a break out of the water, or occasionally swooping around the fountain in search of food. Walkers were out in force, enjoying their lunchtime exercise, groups of young women walking in their exercise gear, a few friends on scooters, and several people walking their little dogs. There were even a couple of daring swimmers, though well covered in wet suits to protect them from the cold June water. If I hadn’t had the coffee, I’d have considered a gelato to finish my lunch; it was the kind of day that feels like summer, except for the temperature. There’s a special joy in days like that in the middle of winter in Wellington, when we relish the lack of wind, marvel at the clear, sparkling light, bask in the sun’s warmth, and appreciate the beauty of our harbour and city. Without the wind and rain (that is coming again this week), these perfect days would never be so deliciously sweet.

I posted some photos on social media. It was quick and easy. But I think I like my words here better. There’s obviously a happy medium between words and images. I need to find that.

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Matariki: A celebration

This Friday, New Zealand is celebrating the first public holiday for Matariki. It is a festival marking mid-winter and the Maori New Year, the beginning of the return of the light. Our public holidays have previously comprised religious holidays (in a country that isn’t very religious) like Christmas and Easter, colonial holidays such as Queen’s Birthday, and Labour Day (which rightly celebrates NZ being the first to introduce an eight-hour work day), and New Year. For years we have recognised 6^th February as our national day, now known as Waitangi Day, marking the day that the Crown and Maori signed a treaty agreeing to share this land back in 1840. But Matariki will be our first home-grown public holiday, one that has increasingly been recognised over the last ten years or more. It marks a long overdue but welcome addition to our list of public holidays.

Matariki is the name for the star cluster others know as Pleiades or the Seven Sisters, that appears in the morning sky in New Zealand in the winter months. It is known throughout the Pacific, and is Makali’i in Hawaii, and Subaru in Japan. The reappearance of the constellation marks the end of the past year, and the beginning of the new. Maori mark Matariki in three ways:

1. Remembrance by honouring those who have been lost since the last Matariki
2. Gratitude for what we have, and celebrating the present
3. Anticipation of the new year, and our hopes and dreams for it

The focus therefore is on whānau (family), on feasting, on learning, sharing, discussion, and decision making, often with a focus on the environment. It sounds like a pretty good mid-winter celebration, don’t you think?

I don’t have plans to get together with others this weekend, but I’m sure I can manage a feast with my husband. And although I haven’t lost anyone in the last year, I will take a moment to think of those I have lost, and those who have been lost in the last year in this pandemic, and those losses that continue. I’m grateful for my husband, my family and friends, my home, my health. I’m grateful that the world is opening up, and that we may be able to resume travel again soon. And I am filled with anticipation for the next year, for the changes I can make in my life, for the joy it might bring.

Mānawatia a Matariki!

(Happy Matariki)

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