Time melts at Riwaka

My tap on the old fellow’s window at 4am received a soldier’s shout in return. Even now he has the reflexes.

Time seems to melt at Riwaka.  A week has gone by with little effort.

Dad quavers and blusters by turns.  He doesn’t ask if you’d like to hear him read his poems, he just rears up and acts out vignettes. They are emotional, sometimes incomprehensible unless you know the circumstances, often ingenious and always unexpected.  He has an unusual way of marshalling his thoughts.

His spur-of-the-moment performances enliven the unhurriedness. He will say over and over how he loves making faces at the babies in the supermarket and flirting with their mothers. A Catholic convert he delights in calling the priest “vicar”.

Dad is an extraordinary chap for whom life has presented a series of challenges: sounding like an improbable English toff in a place where sloppy speech is the norm and spending most of his adult life as an undiagnosed bi-polar and dyslexic – thereby - being generally out of step at every turn. He has cultivated a wicked sense of humour; which sees him through most situations or he sees through them: that's uncomfortable for some.

It’s relaxing to stay where not much happens. I find things to do like extracting the juice out of grapes that would otherwise rot on the vine. Squeezing grapes through a simple tool is a quite fiddly but enjoyable task, especially outside in the sun; the resulting liquid has to be strained for spiders’ legs and whatnot. Delicious.

Tomoko our neighbour and I walked to Riwaka wharf with her daughters Hikaru and Hana. It was cold in the shadows, warm in the sun with hilarity, discovery and new friendship. The natural world provided a spectacular backdrop and in the foreground the girls pick up tiny, shelled creatures and ages-old marble in shades of maroon and lightest violet.