by Yesterday morning was bright and sunny, and while Mum went to church and her after-mass coffee meeting, I joined Dad at the Model Aero Club near Pleasant Point. It’s a nice drive out there. I saw that the Pleasant Point taxidermist had sadly closed down. Dad was one of six flyers at the club, all aged between 60 and 80. Dad and one either guy make their planes painstakingly from balsa wood – for Dad, that’s the whole point, and having spent decades honing his fine motor skills, he’s pretty good at it. The others use ready-made planes, often made from foam. Unlike Dad, their focus is servos and resistors and diodes and all that technical stuff. (I was impressed that Dad had got a sufficient handle on all of that, because it isn’t his thing at all.) Dad’s blue plane was up and away, then after two minutes the engine cut out. Not to worry, he should be able to glide it in … but he was flying into the sun which blinded him, and the plane nosed into the ground. He says it’s fixable, but for that particular morning it was game over. I had a chat with one of the guys about Windows 10 and 11 (don’t upgrade to 11!) and Covid in Romania. One (British-born) bloke had a smart Commer van that his in-laws bought new in 1965; he regaled me of his road trips around Europe in it as a young man. (Commer vehicles were used in WW2. One time the comedy writer Frank Muir was driving a Commer which spluttered to a halt; he famously said over the radio, “The Commer has come to a full stop.”)
We went home via Hanging Rock. I hadn’t been there for ages. I probably swam in the Opihi there during our 1986-87 trip. When we got home, Mum opened an official-looking letter that had been sitting there for a couple of days. Dad had been hit with an $80 speeding fine. She took it pretty well; had she opened it the previous day when she was in an especially vile mood, she’d have hit the eleven-foot-high ceiling. I showed Dad a picture of the damage his Piper Cub sustained when it crashed when I came to the club in 2009 – he’d forgotten about that. I’m a jinx, it seems.
The day before yesterday Dad and I tried to sort out my crap in the garage. Boxes of books, mostly. I’ll take a few back with me, but I was happy to see most of them go to a charity shop. I’d also accumulated a surprising number of shoes that were all in a blue sack. Many of them will go too.
On Saturday night I watched my first rugby match for decade or so. It was a provincial game between Tasman and Auckland, played in Blenheim. Mum was particularly interested because the Tasman team – who ran out quite comfortable winners in the end – included both her sister-in-law’s nephew (if I’ve got that right) and someone she used to teach at Waihi, back when she still did relief teaching. What a weird game rugby is. Scrums and lineouts are really quite bizarre, when you think about it. Tasman’s star player in the first half – a heavily tattooed battering ram – was almost neckless. Auckland’s forward pack weighed 919 kg, or 115 kg per man. After that, England played Colombia in the women’s football World Cup. An end-to-end first half finished with a quick exchange of goals; England won 2-1 to make the semis where they’ll play Australia.
Also that evening we played the card game Skip-Bo. I’d found a pack in the garage; Mum must have bought it in 1993 after her brother in Auckland showed us how to play. It’s mostly (but not entirely) luck-based. While we were playing, I reminded Dad of a five-handed game of Skip-Bo we played on New Year’s Eve ’93, involving his father. He was a couple of years younger than Dad is now, and had quite advanced Alzheimer’s. He needed considerable help with the game. I remember that whenever my grandad had a lot of a particular numbered card, he’d say “I’ve got eights (for example) up the ying-yang.”
Tonight I’ll be taking a Romanian lesson and giving an English one.
