Year in Pictures Part 1

This is home for the next week or so. We have come south to walk the Kepler Track and to enjoy all this. 4G is fairly good in Manapouri but of course there are many parts of Fiordland with not even a single cellphone tower, so I’m hoping that the miracles of scheduled emailing will keep your daily newsletters coming. 

Have no fear though! If there should be a day or more when nothing happens, your subscription will be extended for one further day or more at no charge. Hope that’s an agreeable arrangement for everyone. 

Being out and away from the keyboard also means I won’t be able to cover every last move the world and David Seymour makes. 

So I have prepared some words for just such an occasion: the year in pictures.

The mission statement of this newsletter is looking in the rear view mirror and wondering what we’ve run over now. Sometimes, getting a little bit further down the road gives you a better picture of the mess. So here we go: the year in pictures.

A year, for me, begins and ends on Christmas Day. All the scramble of getting things done for people, all the shopping for presents and groceries and bbq gas bottle, all the getting finished, all of that is at an end. Wherever the cards are lying, that’s where you are now. Relax. Enjoy the still and the tranquility and time in suspension. 

Greetings More Than A Feilding reader Terry Baucher! Many thanks again for being stood outside the very-shut dairy with your fellow morning cyclists one recent Christmas morning when I came along hoping to find it open, and stocking goats cheese, because that’s what I’d forgotten to get.

We’ve got some in the fridge said Terry, I’ll drop it round. Mate. For Christmas that year we were able to enjoy Engine-Room-twice-baked-goat-cheese-soufflé because Terry popped round with a Christmas miracle. 

There is a second reason for beginning this review on Christmas day. On the first day of this year Australia was on fire. This will surely be the image appearing at the beginning of every 2020 year in review that gets written. 

So here’s a picture of us out walking on a lovely still sunny Christmas morning in Devonport

and here’s a tractor.

Back home, a turkey is turning golden. Turkey for two, plus one vegan.

Later we go down to the beach and the whole day is golden too and as the afternoon comes to an end Mary Margaret says how about we go up onto the maunga for leftovers and maybe a quiet blaze. 

My thinking when I stopped drinking was: I expect to be smoking a bit more instead. But no. I found I preferred to drop everything altogether. No booze, no weed, no nothing.

That was in the middle of February. Now it’s Christmas day. Ten months on, I’ve come arrived at a different frame of mind.  I’d rather not smoke at all. No escaping, no props. Also, I worry: what if weed turns out to be a gateway drug to booze? What might I do in a more mellow frame of mind? Pour myself a whisky? 

But it’s a nice gesture, and it’s Christmas day. I think, well, let’s see what happens if I have a hit or two. What happens is I get a bit mellow, and it takes me nowhere further. It’s very nice being there on a tranquil Christmas day in the late afternoon light, where everything is in suspension, and now I am too.

But no addiction is roused from its sleep, no reawakening of the thirst. My feeling is: that was nice, but I don’t need it. I may say yes thanks if you pass me one but I won’t be asking for more and if I go two or five years without it, that’ll be perfectly fine too. That’s all the smoke I need.

The new year begins and smoke is everywhere. Poor Australia has been on fire now for weeks. Poor millions of animals. Poor planet for having to take all this crap from climate-crisis-denying pissppor Murdoch media. Watch them do their level best to blame greenies for not destroying enough bush, even as people cluster on beaches ringed by fire in a scarcely imaginable hellscape. There’s no denying this is a picture of where the climate crisis is taking us, but have no fear, this coal-licking denialist Murdoch media will give it their best shot.

Meanwhile there's a small drumbeat running for a story about another virus that sounds like the SARS and the MERS and something to do with wet markets in China.

Karren is paying close attention to it, turning up the radio when it comes on. I’m thinking: the authorities seem to be pretty good at watching these things. Daresay they’ll have this covered. Let’s hope so. 

Meanwhile, smoke has been rolling across the Tasman and now all of a sudden the mid-afternoon light fades from the sky like someone turned down the dimmer lights. I look out the window and cannot believe what I’m seeing. It feels like gathering dusk and its just gone 2pm.

Mary Margaret messages from the pub I cannot believe what I’m seeing. 

I think: should I interrupt Karren’s snooze? She will not believe what we’re seeing.

The fires keep burning. Each night the sunset is unimaginably beautiful. Each night you post photos on Instagram and you all say beautiful but also you wonder how you're supposed to feel about this when you know what’s causing it.

Our friends Deirdre and Ian in the hills of central New South Wales have land and a house on poles they built themselves. Where they live is a bit green, a bit hard case, a bit boho. They all belong to the fire brigade. There’s plenty of bush. Deirdre wrote on her Facebook page before Christmas that the whole valley was on fire and they had lost most of the trees on their forty acres but the house had been kept safe by their hosing and the clear margin they maintain away from trees. Most of the other houses in the valley had been burned out. 

Karren is tracking the online fire reports. There’s a map that shows each of the fires, all of them growing from small dots to vast swathes of land. Each fire has a name. Deirdre and Ian’s is the Rumba Dump fire. It’s both comical and menacing. In the age of Trump there’s so much of that. 

Karren continues to listen attentively to the virus news. I think back to the Stephen Lewis book about the absolute state of things in the Trump administration. It opens with a summation of the neglect of their pandemic preparedness.  I think: this could be a bit of a worry. 

Karren keeps following the Rumba Dump fire. It rises and falls and finally mercifully expires.

She also keeps following the virus news. It doesn’t seem to be relenting at all. On January,  30 the WHO declares the outbreak of COVID 19 as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. 

There are fireworks on the harbour one night, and I save this photo as the coolest of the explosions. Only now, months on, do I look at all those spikes protruding from the red ball and think: what does that make you think of?