The last few days have really been stressful in terms of transport issues. As Matt mentioned on the way to my grandfather's memorial our family car broke down and was diagnosed with a fairly major condition. Then when I got to the memorial late I was loaned my grandfather's car which I then had to navigate off Waiheke Island in the via car-ferry and then find my way home, in the dark, from a part of Auckland I rarely drive in with no map.

Well this morning Sherry frantically texted me at 8.15am asking me to phone her urgently. She was on the train to Uni and had then discovered her train ticket and her wallet were not with her and the train people were going to throw her off the train in Mt Albert (a long distance from both home and Uni). To make matters worse she had an important Biology test at 9 am. The train people would not take my credit card and were basically hardline - produce cash or a ticket or get off the train (fair enough but it still sucked).

As anyone who drives in Auckland knows getting from Henderson to Mt Albert train station and then to Uni by 9am when you are not leaving til 8.15am is seriously pushing it. Worse I was in my pyjamas, so were the other kids and Christian needed to be at school accross the other side of Henderson (equally thick and nasty traffic) by 8.40am. Somehow I got him to school and Sherry to her test only 5 minutes later (with her wallet which I'd found on the floor where she'd been studying last night) and I was about to go "phew" and relax but then I noticed that my grandfather's car was overheating!

ARGH!

About another hour of mucking around with locating water and phoning my dad we (me and the younger two homeschooled kids) were finally on our way home. Though unfortunatly my grandfather's car looks to have an equally serious mechanical problem as our family car.

Give me the days when you could travel by horseback.

UPDATE

Poor Sherry. After getting to her test late this morning and having a long day at Uni she has just texted me to say that the train taking her home has broken down and she has been taken off the train and taken to Newmarket - well off the path between Uni and Henderson - and has no idea how she is going to get home. I just phoned Maxx the transport company and asked how they intended to get her home and first they told me that that train was now fixed and no one had been put on busses (why is she texting me saying all the passengers had been taken off the train and were on a bus then?) and then they said, "well doesn't she have any other money?" I pointed out that she had handed them her train ticket, they'd accepted it and as such they then had an obligation to get her home and to not leave her in Newmarket. Silly me, I thought giving her a train ticket for transport would be sufficient. I got put through to someone else who said she didn't think they would dump the passengers in Newmarket and then she put me through to someone else who she promised me would know but the someone else turned out to be an answerphone that promptly hung up on me. Hopefully sanity and customer service will prevail and they will get her home...

On the ferry to Waiheke Island yesterday as I watched all the Hauraki Gulf's islands pass me by I remembered the hours I had spent on those waters as a child on my Grandfather Mark's boat. I told my children as they too looked out the ferry window that I had been on that beach, climbed to the top of that island and one day I'd seen a wallaby (of all things!) on the one closest to us, Motuihe Island; it had run past our picnic and my younger cousin had chased it along the beach yelling "here wally, wally" at the top of his lungs. I remember Mark laughing and telling us that Motuihe was one of the few places in New Zealand you could find wallabies.

Being in Mark's house for the wake, I showed my kids all the little trinkets that my sister and I used to love, the strange shells, the lump of onyx and the human skull that Mark had once found, whilst walking on a beach, that he used as bookend - only Mark would find a human skeleton and take the skull home! I showed them the poems on the walls, the pieces of art and the simple way he lived and I thought about Mark and about how much time I had spent not being with him and not thinking about him. Like many grandchildren, I was too busy with my own life and yesterday as we gathered as a family and remembered him I found out things about him I had never known.

I didn't know that he was born in England which makes me only 2nd generation kiwi. I knew he wrote poetry and had a passion for the written arts, he was one of the many English teachers our family has produced, but I did not know how gifted he was or of his writing accomplishments until I saw the full array of his published works yesterday and read the Waiheke Gulf News article on him which was published on Thursday; extracts and link below.

Distinguished poet Mark Richards publishes his last volume

Mark Richards – poet, writer, teacher, sailor, musician – died peacefully at home on Waiheke last Sunday. He was 87. Shortly before his death, he had his thirteenth collection of poetry published.

...

It is fat - not a slim volume at all. An extraordinary achievement in the last quarter of his life. The book’s foreword is by New Zealand writer David Hill who notes that “the poems in this collection are vigorous, varied, quickened by verbal and intellectual energy and discoveries, just like their author.”

And looking at poet Kevin Ireland’s brief biography at the front, it’s clear that Mark Richards was no passive observer of life as it passed by.

Born in London in 1922, he was the grandson of the novelist, poet and essayist Maurice Hewlett. He arrived in New Zealand in 1927 with his parents, who farmed near Tauranga before moving to the North Shore in 1933. After an apprenticeship, interrupted by five years in the army and airforce, he became a journeyman printer on the NZ Herald. After attending Auckland Teachers College 1949-51, he graduated from the University of Auckland in 1954, then went on to teach at Takapuna Grammar School until 1977. He became friends with poets A.R.D Fairburn and R.A.K Mason, who deeply influenced his writing and he published early poems in Arena, a quarterly literary journal based in Wellington.

In 1960, he won first prize for his poem Go Back Lazarus in the Cheltenham Festival Poetry Competition, which at that time, says Ireland, was arguably the most prestigious international prize awarded to a New Zealand poet. And for the next ten years his poems, plays (mainly in verse) and talks were frequently broadcast. His books of poems were regularly published from 1958 to the present and his satirical history of New Zealand, 1840 and All That came out in 1991.

From 1996, he developed an interest in detective novels, creating a character called Simon Bridger who stars in three published novellas as an amateur detective helped by his friends. Oh and he married and had three children (and grandchildren and great grandchildren) along the way - Michael [my father], Hugh and Barbara.

His poems range across a broad canvas from war and ageing to personal relationships, visions of the future, sailing and landscapes, particularly around the North Shore of Auckland and the Hauraki Gulf. In form they are also varied – from sonnets to narrative to free verse. I find his writing honest, wry and accessible – intelligent without being pompous. He is especially unflinching about the ageing process;

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David Hill concludes at the end of his foreword. “These are poems of craft as well as art… They fit together nicely, as do the boats, homes and music the author has shaped in his eventful life. They’re strong, well-wrought, and written with respect and awareness. They and their maker have done a damn good job.”