Kitchens today

I've got a new kitchen in the modern sense – not a new room but new cupboards and benches. My 33 year old built-in kitchen with its smelly old particle board has just been removed and the new kit is in with the cheapest oven and cooktop I could buy. From a cramped narrow room I've

somehow acquired a bigger looking room with wider benches and deeper cupboards. Cool.

Stressful though. Builder kept disappearing for hours on end and I had over four days camping out in the lounge with a kettle, microwave and bucket.

Now I know what people mean when they say, “I’m getting a new kitchen”. These factory built kitchens are slotted in without glue or nails and can be replaced every decade or less. 

Cabbage Trees

In my patriotic little heart there's a special place for the cabbage tree. They are such a distinctive part of the New Zealand landscape. They're not pretty or symmetrical or soft or gracious but sharp, spiky, irregular and unusual. Festooned with their sweet smelling, cream coloured flowers in late spring, they have a few weeks of glory. 

There's a sickly little grove of cabbage trees on the Orewa estuary walkway. The grove is totally monocultural which is quite unusual and because they are growing close together and are spindly and yellow, they add a spooky touch to that part of the walk. 

The trees in the Hatfield's Beach wetland are in spectacular flower this season. 

Popchik

I've just finished a wonderful new novel called The Goldfinch. It’s by Donna Tartt and featured a protagonist who was always on the brink of disaster. While it was nerve-wracking, all 700 pages of it, it ended on a philosophical note and contained some of the most lovable characters I've come across for some time. One of them was a little Maltese terrier called Popper in English and Popchik in Russian. He was important because while the main character was always in dire straits (drugs, alcohol, and the criminal underworld) his affection for the dog never wavered. He even took Popchik by bus from Las Vegas to New York. He hid him in a sports bag!

 Here is the first appearance of the little dog who bursts out of the house after Theo’s feckless father and girlfriend take the boy home to Las Vegas. Popper has been locked in the house for days:

“Before she’d opened the door all the way, a hysterical stringy mop shot out, shrieking, and began to hop and dance and caper all around us.”

That hysterical stringy mop is badly neglected in Las Vegas but becomes a part of Theo’s strange household in New York. Over a decade later Popchik is still there when Theo comes back from Amsterdam, pacing around his feet “in staunch geriatric figure eights of greeting”.

And on a different note, a photo of Orewa from the path to Hatfield’s beach, taken last week. 

Political headache

Woke up at 4 am with an intense headache on the right side of the back of my head. Third time I've had this and this morning it wouldn't go away. I took the usual painkillers and tried to sleep on a bag of frozen peas. They both helped but didn't ease the pain enough for me to feel that I could cope. Got up, had a coffee and digestive biscuit, watched a bit of Breakfast and checked a few things on the internet. Oh blessed, relief, it subsided and now is just a vague niggle.

It wasn't a migraine and I don't think it was a tension headache because they are not so focused. It could be a rebound headache from all the painkillers I'm taking for my back or a muscle thing. It's worse if I lie on my left side. 

I've been crossing my fingers that the Labour Party conference would go okay and it seems to have. Cunliffe's speech made all the right noises and was spectacularly oratorical. He left the podium and walked around the stage like a Maori orator, gesturing at the audience and addressing them directly. He couldn't have had an autocue and there were no notes. An extraordinary performance. And yet ... it seemed a bit too general. I preferred the speeches he made while he was a backbencher last year. 

The policies of KiwiAssure, housing solutions in Christchurch and gender equity in the caucus seem pretty good.