Among the most interesting discussions I’ve had on world politics since being in New Zealand have been those I’ve had with taxi drivers. The man driving the taxi which brought me into Christchurch when I arrived by air from Nelson on Sunday was originally from Biafra. He told me that he had been in New Zealand for forty years, though it could have been fourteen, my hearing isn’t great even with hearing aids. He had passionate views about the Biafran war, which I could just remember reading about from over fifty years ago, and about British colonialism in Nigeria-Biafra . He did not see many positives.

Many of the Uber drivers here in Christchurch originally came from the Punjab. It gives me some credibility that I visited Amritsar three years ago. Four of these Punjabi drivers were from Amritsar and I knew I’d be on fairly safe ground with them when I declared my lack of enthusiasm for the policies of the current Prime Minister of India. But another Uber driver was from Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Modi, and he wasn’t all that enthusiastic about his policies either. None of them blamed the British for anything, it seemed.

But it’s not only been politics. Another Uber driver was an older man formerly from Singapore and we talked food. We reminisced about the wonderful chilli crab you could get from a restaurant at Pongoll Point and the stall in the Serangoon Garden Estate where they did the best Hainanese chicken rice in the whole of Singapore. With one of those who came from Amritsar we talked about the best place for puri and chick peas.

I had a good talk with another, originally from Sri Lanka, about the evolution of politics since Mrs Bandaranaike was prime minister there, and another told me about Moscow where he had been born and knew well and where I’ve never been and I told him about St Petersburg where I have been and he hadn’t.

With a young Chinese woman we talked about life in Christchurch as I did with a man originally from Iran. Each of them had started out their New Zealand lives in Auckland and had moved to Christchurch which, they said, they preferred. Today I was driven to the airport by a woman from Chennai with a daughter at High School in Christchurch and who had started her education in India. We talked education systems about which I know very little.

I’m taking Ubers when I don’t get the half hourly 29 bus into the centre of town because I was stupid enough not to notice that my driving licence expired last August. But talking to these drivers, all New Zealanders, reminded me once again that we New Zealanders are all immigrants or descended from immigrants. I imagine most of these immigrants came here by air in a day or two at the most. I know some had had time in Australia before coming on here.

It took my great grandfather 87 days, nearly three months to get to New Zealand from England by sailing ship in 1854. The forebears of my Maori cousins came here much earlier by canoe probably over a shorter distance and in less time, depending, of course, on where you take as their starting point. My English grandmother came here by steam ship in just seven weeks.

Whatever the time scale I certainly see immigration, controlled in recent years, as a great positive. The wealth of ideas and cultures and attitudes let alone food, which some of us would consider the most important, immigrants bring to New Zealand, seems to me to be huge. I suspect it may also bring a certain genetic restlessness and courage, ambition, determination and looking ahead which surely exist in the immigrant and which I see also as positive forces.

There are dangers in New Zealand’s geographical isolation as well as benefits. It’s great living with few restrictions at the moment. And whatever the deeper significance of immigration for New Zealand as a country and for society here, it’s wonderful, when travelling by taxi, to be able to talk about more than the weather.

There seems to be a custom here in New Zealand that when a group of people of a certain age (about my age) get together and someone mentions their health, someone else will say, ‘The Organ Recital will last for no more than two minutes’. I’m not sure if the eye is an organ but this recital may take a little longer.

There was a problem with my eye, my right eye. It was sore. I can’t have knocked it other than in my sleep or I would have known. It was still there a fortnight on so I made an appointment with a local optician. A friend recommended the optician. He did all the usual stuff which these days seems only to involve me resting my chin on a ledge on a machine and him doing all the work. He scanned each eye.

The upshot was that I had had, I gathered, a slight bleed behind the right eye and, he suggested, it should be attended to. He sent the scan three ways – to the Christchurch Public Hospital, to a private Eye Clinic in Christchurch and to the Ophthalmologist in London who had done my cataracts a couple of years ago. I worked out that I had three options. The first was to get something done here and now; the second to return immediately to the U.K. to get something done there or, thirdly, to wait until I am due to return to London in early March.

The consensus was, option one, here and now. I had no expectation of an early response from the Public Hospital and I was able to get an appointment, squeezed into a lunch hour, privately. I made that appointment. The private clinic, 12.30pm on Wednesday. On Monday I had a phone call offering me an appointment at the Public Hospital at 3.00pm on Wednesday. I accepted. I phoned the Clinic.

‘You’ve done exactly the right thing,’ I was told. ‘You could well get one of our doctors- they work private and public – you may have to wait a bit.’ I have time. Waiting is not a problem.

I turned up in good time at Out Patients. I gave my details. A very pleasant woman gave me an eye test. It was very conventional. I sat in a chair. No machinery at all. She covered my left eye and said,
‘Please read the letters on the chart’.
I said, ‘ I can’t see the chart.’
She said, ‘What can you see?’
And I replied, ‘I think I can see the wall.’
She then covered my right eye and I was able to see the wall, the chart, and the letters on the chart, almost down to the bottom line. That was a relief.

I was put on the acute list and over the next two hours my eyes had drops put in and were then extensively scanned and photographed. In due course I was seen by the registrar who appeared to be about fourteen years old but assured me he had finished his medical training at the University of Otago – my grandfather had trained there so it must be good – and by a Visiting Fellow from Singapore. The Visiting Fellow was on his way to do an operation and he told me, charmingly, that he would explain what was to be done to the registrar who would then explain things to me in layman’s terms. I was grateful for that. Certainly I understood nothing of what he said to the registrar.

I’ve never really understood what goes on under the bonnet of a car. As long as the car starts, moves and responds to my moving of levers, pedals and steering wheel that is all that matters to me. How that happens I’m happy to leave to the experts. I feel a bit the same way over my body and matters medical. I’m happy to leave it to the experts and to do what I’m told. So the registrar explained and I didn’t understand – I did try, and, I hope, looked as if I was listening intelligently. I happily signed the paper consenting to whatever.

Over the next two hours I was lasered and injected. Well, my right eye was. The lasering was rather as if the registrar was playing some sort of computer game while I had my chin on the ledge of the lasering machine. It didn’t take more than ten minutes. Then I was taken to a different room and lay down on one of those examination room beds for the injection. When I was told that the local anaesthetic was about to be applied I said, ‘Yes please, lots.’ I claim to have a low pain threshold. Maybe I’m a bit of a coward. I certainly am when it comes to injections. When all was done I went home in an Uber.

Now, five days later, when I close my left eye I can see as before all of this and the eye is no longer sore. I will be given another appointment for about four weeks time. All this has cost me nothing other than the modest payment for my appointment with the optician. I’ve given him a bottle of wine to say thank you for getting the ball rolling. The U.K and N.Z. have a reciprocal agreement for free care in cases of emergency or acute conditions. And anyway I am a Zealander as well as being British. The Christchurch Public Hospital certainly fulfilled that agreement as far as I’m concerned and did so with great efficiency, kindness, charm and expertise. Phew! This car is running again and the Organ Recital has concluded with a triumphant chord in a Major Key.

In response to ‘January 8th Sunshine’ it was suggested to me that there is a third school of thought ‘Gloat’ and that I was gloating at my situation here. I very much hope not. Certainly as I was growing up that was not considered an option. And I’ve not met it anywhere in this covid free New Zealand.

There is certainly a recognition of how fortunate we are here and a real concern for the rest of the world which, I think, New Zealanders, isolated as we are, have always felt – you only have to think of the New Zealand commitment in two world wars – but gloat, no.

I have felt a sense of guilt at being here when others are there. But I’m sure that sense of guilt needs to be examined critically. Feelings of guilt are so unproductive. I know some Christchurch people who were away from Christchurch when the earthquake hit felt bad about not sharing in the fear and destruction the earthquake brought.

Some of those who left Europe and Britain for the safety of the U.S. and Canada during the war felt the same. I suspect that was more about not being part of a shared experience rather than guilt.

A bit of social guilt on the part of those of us who have clean water, weather proof houses and all the rest, in the face of those who don’t, might not go amiss if it leads to action. But generally feelings of guilt? No.

Perhaps the ‘gloat’ response contains an element of the first school of thought – ‘If I cant have it no one should have it!’

And I have had another response – from the United Kingdom. ‘Please don’t give up on food parcels! Send New Zealand marmite and Fix and Fogg peanut butter. They’re far superior to any British product.’

There’s a school of thought which suggests that if everyone can’t have something no one should. There’s another which suggests that if only one can have it the others should rejoice at their good fortune. I was brought up in the latter school – perhaps because there were six of us.

Today the sun is shining and I’m in Christchurch. Just two weeks ago it was Christmas Day. After church in Havelock North, Hawkes Bay, we went to the beach at Waimarama for Christmas dinner – legs of lamb cooked on a barbecue, ham, Christmas pudding with holly stuck in and burning brandy poured over, all of that. The weather wasn’t great but there were lots of family, more than twenty of us, and the beach houses are very comfortable. When we drove back to Havelock, two days later, we made a detour and called in on some cousins for coffee. They had been fishing in the morning and checking the lobster pots. They gave us two crayfish (lobsters) to take home for lunch.

Once home I prepared the crayfish, made some mayonnaise (the egg from my nephew’s hens) and asked my sister if she had any lemons. She said that she had, and pointed, I thought to a basket where there were avocados but no lemons. She was pointing to a tree outside the kitchen door. The lemons were on the tree. The avocados were from another tree in the garden. The stewed apricots I’d had for breakfast were from another.

Life in New Zealand, seems quite ‘other worldly’ to me at the moment. I think that many of my friends and relations here have, and cannot have, any idea of what life is in London. I, who am closer to it, am finding it difficult to imagine.

When I was very small, three and four years old, I would go with my mother to meetings of the Peel Forest Red Cross. My mother was president of this local branch in South Canterbury, New Zealand. I remember seeing the women knitting socks, scarves, and ‘Peggy squares‘ to be sown into blankets. These were for men in Prisoner of War Camps overseas. Fruitcakes that had been wrapped in grease proof paper were put in cake tins and soldered airtight before being sewn into hessian bags with a square of cotton, cut from an old bed sheet, sewn on. On the cotton patch, written with indelible pencil, an address in England. These memories are of New Zealanders doing their bit for family and friends in wartime Europe and Britain. They had something tangible, something useful, to do.

We here have nothing useful to offer. Food parcels are not what is needed. We can telephone and Zoom and all of that, to try to keep spirits up. And, like our wartime forbears, hope and pray that it will be over soon.

December 12th New Zealand

The Christchurch Town Hall was not full but the centre sections of the gallery and the stalls were. It’s an annual event, The Messiah, that is, and for everyone there it was, I imagine, normal. For me it was extraordinary. It was the first live concert I’ve been to for about ten months.

As I had a couple of hours to spare I’d wandered through the town centre before the performance. There were people queuing outside the Theatre Royal in Gloucester Street for the ballet, ‘Nutcracker’. Then after walking through Regent Street, the wine bars and cafes already full, I passed ‘Piano’. There were people going in to what I discovered later is a small concert venue chiefly used for chamber music.

I arrived at the Town Hall three quarters of an hour before Messiah was due to start and was surprised at the number of people already in the foyer. Then I realised that as well as the main auditorium there’s also a theatre. There was a performance of Irish music and dance there starting at 7.00pm. Somewhere else in town some of my family were at the Court Theatre for a performance of ‘Jersey Boys’. It’s booked out into January.

Christchurch, New Zealand has a population approaching four hundred thousand. It was devastated by earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 . Much of the centre city still shows signs of the destruction, buildings shored up and empty city blocks where buildings have been cleared. The cathedral which was partly destroyed is in the process of being rebuilt.

And on the evening of Saturday December 12th 2020 in this comparatively small cathedral city there was chamber music, ballet, theatre, dance and Handel’s Messiah.

December 16th Beethoven and Canterbury

This morning, along with about a hundred others, I celebrated the anniversaries of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven in 1770 and the arrival of the SS Charlotte Jane in what is now called Lyttelton Harbour, Canterbury, New Zealand in 1850.

The former anniversary needs little comment other than this. To be part of a gathering coming together on a sweeping lawn surrounded by trees in the late morning of a warm summer’s day and then to move into a large and elegant drawing room for a performance of Beethoven’s music, two Sonatas for Violin and Piano, and afterwards to mingle on a terrace sipping a sparkling wine, was an extraordinary and I suspect unique experience in the world as it is today. Here Beethoven was being celebrated in a way not possible, I suspect, anywhere else in the world. I think most New Zealander’s have no idea how fortunate they are.

The second anniversary, of the arrival of the Charlotte Jane, and therefore of ‘Founder’s Day’ for the Province of Canterbury, New Zealand, has, understandably, less international significance. We celebrated both. A toast was proposed, in Maori and in English, to Beethoven and to the Province, and we drank it with gratitude.

December 17th The Geraldine News

The weekly newspaper has a review of a musical presented by a local village primary school. The village is Woodbury. The musical ‘A Very Woodbury Christmas’. There were four performances in the village hall with a demand for an extension to the season. From the newspaper report I gathered there had been a good deal of local cooperation and support and that local characters and situations featured in the production which had been created by one of the teachers at the school. Every one of the 102 pupils were involved.

The musical was described by the newspaper as, ‘Based loosely on a Christmas theme in a rural community where everyone had forgotten what the real meaning of Christmas was about’. The community discovers the real meaning of Christmas amidst all the commercialisation and busyness. The show included Christmas carols with a local twist – ‘Jingle Bells’ became ‘Tractor Wheels’.

In due course a little angel, performed with considerable enthusiasm by a very young pupil, the newspaper reported, helped the community to discover that ‘the real meaning of Christmas is spending time with the people you love’.

I’m sure it was great and very good for a local community where the realities of Covid19, in whatever mutation, barely exist. However I am especially aware of so many of my family and friends this Christmas who, because of the law, regulation or common sense, cannot spend time with the people they love.

And I think of that even greater reality of Christmas which is centred on a baby in a crib, on God become human, and a message which goes further than being or not being together. Behind every authentic Christmas crib there is the shadow of a cross. And there is the star which is surely at least a hint of the light of the resurrection.

December 19th Blue Christmas

There was a service at St Mary’s Geraldine this evening for ‘Blue Christmas’. When we came in the music was a recording of Bach’s ‘Air on the G String’. The service was quiet, reflective and thoughtful. It was especially for those for whom Christmas includes loss, and was attended, chiefly, by widows and mothers whose children had died. During the service we sang verses of ‘O Come, O Come Emmanuel’ and we were reminded that this hymn is a song of people in darkness longing for God’s light.

We were invited to light candles of remembrance and the readings included the one from Isaiah chapter 40, ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people’, which I’d heard sung on Saturday the 12th, and from Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 11, ‘Come unto me all you who labour and are heavy laden.’

Among the Vicar’s closing words were,
‘As people who are familiar with the darkness, we also know that our way is illumined by the light of the Christ Child this Christmas Season. May the hope and light of Christ sustain us in our darkness.’