Home on the range

Lord Asher surveys his estate and
waves to the peasants from
on high (Gracie actually)

Wie geht's?

Recently, we had a great family weekend, with Jade and William and Asher staying for a few days and then a family Zoom with all 7 of us on the call. Magic!

During her visit, Jade sat down with all the artwork we have kept over the years (okay, Jacky has kept) from the kids' school days.

We had a great time looking through them all and noticing how much the art reflected each of the four very different personalities.

I especially liked the self portraits - uncanny how they captured their distinctiveness. Not sure about the one Adam, age 5, painted of me with a red beard. Got the glasses right though. Strange that one!

More of these to come in the next post.

Love and peace - WNP

A frouzy mourning of soot and smoke attired this forlorn creation (Charles Dickens)

Wie geht's?

Books bought: as above. All from The Little Red Book Shop in Hastings. 

Books read: Great Expectations (and I'm still going)

With being back to school and school being crazy busy this week, I've only had brief snippets of time to read for pleasure; 15 minutes while eating breakfast and 15 minutes while Jacky has her bath.

I'm loving Great Expectations - so different to the other Dickens' novels I've read this year. The language continues to amaze, excite, baffle, and delight.

Here are a few words I have come across so far that were new discoveries:

Farinaceous 

Contumaciously 

Gormandising 

Ophthalmic (steps) 

Excrescence 

Frouzy (mourning of soot)

Aren't they great!!

Love and peace - Wozza

Happy birthday to you

Wie geht's?

Little Fanfa has her birthday today, sorta. It's complicated.

Her birthday is on May 16 but she lives in San Francisco so it was her birthday in NZ yesterday, and it's her birthday in SF today.

As you can see, she's not so little anymore, but she is still polite (pleuse) and a girl who likes rapid forward motion ("hurry" "up"! said Samantha).

Happy birthday Samantha!





Love (of the unconditional and forever and ever kind) - Dad!

Go ahead on Mr. Business man, you can't dress like me (Jimi Hendrix)

Wie geht's?

These three photos include my dad (try and spot him*). Each photo is a perfect document of the times. 

The top one is a fifties shot of the staff at the NZ branch of Burroughs Wellcome. The hair styles, the cut of the uniform suits, the poses are all very much 1950s.

Dad must have been doing okay - he'd just moved from working as a pharmacist at Walls and Roche Chemists in Royal Oak (before that Eccles Pharmacy in Queen St. where he met mum) to a management position with this huge international drug company. Now he's pictured in the front row, on the boss' left.

The seventies one is a classic too with the riot of colour, suits are a mixture of smart casual styles and the informal grabs indicate that some of the wives have joined in on the company picture. Dad, however, still looks like Mr Conservative.

Looks like a conference setting - not sure where though, mum must have stayed behind with us at home so maybe the south island? 

The last one is from dad's retirement do in 1988. Very eighties business casual this one. Interesting that all those men are also in the first photo - a fun activity for you - see if you can trace them back to their bloom of youth. Clue for you to get started - Harry Makin, the boss from the fifties photo, is next to Nita. 

A loyal bunch back in the day.

Love and peace - WNP

* Bottom row, 7th from left; Back row, 3rd from left; 5th from left next to Nita.

Zoom, just one look and then my heart went boom (Fat Larry's Band)

Adam and Ashleigh, me and Jacky, Samantha and Jesse, Asher William and Jade, and Keegan on the birthday call.

Wie geht's?

Recently, Asher's first birthday was a big day of celebration for the Purdy whanau, pictured above on Zoom.

The Level 3 Lockdown didn't help, but given the five zoom participants are in four different countries, this was always going to be our best bet to party down with Lord Asher. 

Apart from the superb massed choir singing happy birthday, highlights included the two cakes Asher had to blow out (from Fanfa and Jade) and Asher's keyboard skills, which are progressing super well!

Love and peace - Gdad

The long chain of gold that binds me.

Wie geht's in your lockdown bubble?

These are memorable days! Or are they?

I'm going to riff on this for a few posts (probably, or it could just be this one - that's the way I roll).

This idea was prompted by a great passage in, erm, Great Expectations. Here's Pip:

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

Pause.

Iron or gold, thorns or flowers: I have so many memorable day examples to draw upon it's not funny, but I'm going to narrow it down to three major gold links in the chain, without which my life would have been much different:

1 The day I watched the Ed Sullivan Show and a group called The Beatles came on and blew my socks off (not literally but they rocked my world for evermore). 

Place and time - our lounge at 18 Korma Ave., Royal Oak, NZ. Although the show happened originally in February 1964, it didn't reach NZBC until many months later.

Picture me - age 7, alone in front of our black and white set. Mesmerised by John Lennon.

Without that seminal experience my obsession with music in general, and The Beatles in particular wouldn't have happened.

2 The day I attended an interview at Mt Albert Grammar in late 1970, and answered Mr Hall's question, "Do you have a career in mind for when you leave school?" by saying, "Yes, I want to become a teacher'. 

Picture me, as an out-of-zone applicant from Manukau Intermediate - age 12.

Without that response, and if I'd failed at that interview - no teaching career, and consequently no number 3 below. 

Luckily, my dad was a MAGS old boy so I got an out-of-zone place and no one there ever tried to dissuade me from my goal - even though I failed everything!

3 The day in December 1982 when the Headmaster at New Plymouth Boys' High School, Tom Ryder, rang me at home (4 Ramelton Rd., Mt Roskill South) and asked me a few questions and then said a telegram was coming offering me a job!

Picture me - age 25, off and running in my first teaching job.

Without this day I would never have met Jacky, our four children and one grandchild wouldn't exist and the world wouldn't be spinning correctly on its axis.

Love and peace - Wozza