There are mathematical equations for just about everything, and today I pondered whether there might be one that can be applied to wait times. It would surely involve proportionality. Basically, the time you will spend in any waiting room is proportional to the newness and quality of the magazines. I called in this morning, without an appointment, to my preferred beauty therapist. The waiting room is luxurious, and the magazines are pristine, plentiful, current and appealing. I was hoping for a wee delay in appointment availability - say fifteen minutes would have been perfect. But no, I was whisked in straight away.
Conversely, in my experience, a waiting room where the reading matter consists of decades old Readers' Digests and National Geographics, dog-eared and liberally sprinkled with dubious stains, one can be assured of a long wait.
In the average doctor's waiting room, whatever imagined ailment that brought you in will pale into insignificance in comparison to what is waiting to ensnare you as you flick through that 2001 copy of The Watchtower ... and it will have plenty of time to infiltrate your system - you do the maths!
Sunday has really upped its game in recent years. Once upon a time the title phrase above was used to indicate an extraordinary length of time or the slimmest of possibilities - so long and dreary were Sundays that a month of nothing but them would appear to take far longer than thirty days, if it ever passed at all. Obviously Sunday wasn't happy with this slur on its good name, and it has done a real 180 turn.
Like some dull and plodding caterpillar, it has re-emerged as an energetic butterfly. It flits away at an alarming speed, and is a day filled with wonder that, while deeply satisfying and welcome, is fleeting and soon gone. I would hazard to guess, calling upon my knowledge of the time-space continuum and quantum physics, that a month of Sundays would in actual fact barely last a week. Heavens, I only got out of bed and it's already nearly lunchtime - does such a mysterious thing ever happen on, say, a Wednesday? I think not.
So, dear readers, enjoy this precious day for in the blink of an eye in will be but a memory, and some much less conscientious days will prevail and plod.
Whenever I have to leave the house when staying in is clearly more desirable, I always feel at one with the Dr Seuss character from my childhood Sneeches and Other Stories book. Today I had to pick a peck of Snide. Millie and I were snug and safe during the worst of the storm, but the weather is still bad, and even colder. My glimpses of the beach yesterday showed a lot of damage and an amazingly high tide. All those people who were bitching about the council not clearing the driftwood from the beach will be happy now that nature has cleared it onto the road. If this keeps up I will soon have a beach front property. It really is a pyjama day, and the fire was already lit when I reluctantly put on some clothes and went out on my Snide mission - a day at home requires copious amounts of tea, and tea requires milk.
God bless you Mr Dilmah - with your help we shall weather the storm.
It was a quick trip. Workers were trying to secure iron on a roof around the corner that lost half its roof. An excavator was at work on the foreshore. Debris of one kind and another litters the streets. I will do my bit to clean up Collins Street when the weather clears tomorrow. In the meantime, I will wallow in warmth and laziness. I hope other locals can do the same, and not have too much Snide to pick.
I really don't envy the modern child. Often, their lives are micro-managed, they are sleep-deprived and exist on a diet of highly over-processed food-like substances as they are chauffeured from activity to activity, lest they might have to entertain themselves for more than five minutes. But in one area I do feel they have it easy, and that field is television. Heavens, my home never even had a television until I was in Standard One - Year 3 in today's terminology. It was quite a day when our 19 inch rental arrived from Tisco. Our cat, Posy, fled from the room in terror, and we gaped in awe at the wonder of it all.
One channel, black and white, and ours at last. Of course. on week days transmission didn't begin until five o'clock. One had to switch on a good five minutes earlier to allow the valves to warm up and the horizontal hold to finally settle before Felix the Cat started. I never actually liked Felix the Cat, but that theme tune remains embedded in my head to this day.
Last night, while surfing through my many channels I accidentally happened upon Prime just as the All Blacks were starting the national anthem. I sang along, noted the chilly, dark Christchurch sky and marvelled that anyone would either want to watch or play in such conditions. At home, how blessed we are in this day and age to be able to quickly move to another channel before play actually starts, and so my happy home remains a rugby-free zone. Today's lucky tots were already snuggled in their beds or switching their personal sets to the Disney channel. They have it easy.
They have never seen a test pattern, but these were a regular feature of pre-test television viewing in our home. At the weekends broadcasting started at two o'clock and rugby tests were always played on Saturday afternoons. My father saw it as a personal challenge to get the best possible test pattern established well before kick-off. This involved bringing in the mirror from my parents bedroom dressing table and propping it up against the sofa, so that he could view the reflection as he twiddled with the dials on the back of the set. Getting that circle perfectly round, those lines straight and the grey gradients at their best took a great deal of time, but perfection was always frustratingly out of reach. The sound was then turned off and the radiogram employed for the commentary. Finally we could settle down as a family to watch the test.
How I loathed those matches, but it was winter and the Conray heater and the television shared the same room. so keeping warm came at a cost. My father was usually a man who liked nothing better than to answer his children's questions, to the extent it was wise to consider the wisdom of any question carefully because the answer would often be long and involved. This was not the case on match days. The slightest sound generated a terse 'tcht! as the fate of the nation played out before us. Occasionally I managed to slip in a "How much longer?' and if lucky got a "Ten minutes, tcht!" in reply. But this was never so, because all those times when my father was screaming "Hollywood!" at the screen as the St John's boys dashed onto the pitch with their blood buckets, the clock was not stopped. No, just when time should be mercifully up, they would calculate 'injury time'. This could extend a game for a seemingly interminable amount of time. And so it was last night I happily returned to The Living Channel, and gave thanks for progress.
I'm a bit of a collector and one of my current projects is to fill my home with oak framed photographs and artworks. This weekend I scored a real winner.
This impressive oil painting was described as 'Whanganui River Drop Scene' on TradeMe. I had to see off a couple of other bidders, with the auction continually auto-extending as the particularly keen 'HistoryBoy' tried to fend off my auto-bids. I was a bit worried he might beat me, having checked his many previous buys which almost all related to the history of the Whanganui River. Being Whanganui born and bred, I felt particularly drawn to this painting. Now it is safely home and hanging, I couldn't be more pleased with my purchase. On the back there is the top half of the framer's label - the name but not the location. A little research revealed it was framed in Wellington.
They were there in May, 1909 when this advertisement was placed. It makes me wonder who painted my treasure, who it was framed for and where it has lived before.
Further investigation:
The Drop Scene near Pipiriki on the Whanganui River became known as an iconic beauty spot in the early 20th century. A paddle steamer took tourists up the river to enjoy the ‘Rhine of New Zealand’. The name 'Drop Scene' was given to the view because it looked like a painted theatrical landscape, although there was an existing Māori name, Aratira.
