by The builders and electricians are hard at work. They’re listening to a classic hits station, and I’ve just been reminded that there’s nothing like a Crown – for picking it up and putting it down. As I write this, they’re playing Blind Melon’s No Rain. Mum and Dad’s plan is to head to the West Coast tomorrow. They’ve had the map out so they can decide on what route Mum wants to take. I’ll just go with whatever. (Next year Mum and Dad plan to visit Romania. We’ll probably go on some kind of road trip. Just imagine if I arranged the whole thing, with accommodation for four or five nights, without asking Mum if she’d like to do this or if that would be too far.)
Because the weather looked dicey yesterday morning, Dad didn’t attempt to fly his plane. With the flying a no-go and Mum at church, Dad and I went for a walk at the wonderfully named Pekapeka Gully. I drove an electric car for the first time – I was behind the wheel for all of three minutes. On Saturday Mum saw the Barbie movie at Geraldine Cinema with some friends from church or golf or both. Dad and I nearly went too, but we stayed at home and watched Dune, a film based on Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel. I think Mum had recorded it. We expected it to be a modern version, but it was from 1984 and it showed. A youngish Sting was among the cast. It was hard to make head or tail of, and Dad said it bore little resemblance to the book. Unlike me, he’d actually read it. Just before Mum got back from Barbie, my brother rang, and we saw the little one who is already not so little. My brother asked when my parents would be coming to the UK, and he asked again when Mum called him back after she returned from the cinema.
Dad had been trying to find his record collection. He said it was buried somewhere in the spare room, beneath cushions and boxes of mason jars and, well, paintings. When my parents were out I rooted around in there and found it. He doesn’t have a big collection – perhaps two dozen records in a single box. I was surprised he had so much classical music. He told me he had Paul McCartney’s Ram but he must have misremembered. He had Wings’ greatest hits plus the Beatles’ Please Please Me and Abbey Road. He put on Abbey Road but his record player needs fixing – it only has one working speaker.
I finally finished my book yesterday – Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. It was one of the books the previous owner of my flat had left behind. (I doubt I’d have chosen something with Love in the title otherwise.) Some books are so absorbing that you can glide from one page to the next, even if there’s background noise like the TV or building work. This one is firmly in the other category. Extremely well written, but so much complexity of plot (often fantastical) and language. It was translated from Spanish, after all. As soon as you see the past perfect (and there was a lot of past perfect in this book), you know the going will be tough.
On Sunday mornings Radio NZ has a segment named Calling Home, where a New Zealander who has moved overseas calls in to the programme. Calls home. Recently somebody called in from Uganda. Mum suggested that I write in, but I’m not a born and bred Kiwi, and New Zealand isn’t quite home. Nowhere is, really – Timișoara is the closest thing I have. In the film Miracle Club, Daniel, the boy who didn’t speak, finally said one word – home – when he returned from Lourdes. It’s one of the most powerful words in the English language. The sound of it – the long O, a diphthong, before the satisfying ‘m’ sound – makes it especially evocative. To lack a home, a base, a rock, certainly can’t help one’s mental health.
The Skip-Bo scores are now 4-2-2.
