Autumn in Christchurch

It's been a wonderful Autumn here in the South Island. Usually, Autumn is a fairly brief affair - the leaves turn, the Nor'westers blow into town and then it's all bare trees and Winter. All over in about a fortnight. This year, the Nor'westers haven't turned up at all. The leaves have turned yet fallen only slowly; it's been going on for a month now - all very beautiful.

These are all from Thursday's annual walk through the Christchurch Botanic Gardens, on my way to my routine hospital appointment where, for the fourth year in a row, I continue to confound the doctors by showing an apparent improvement in what is supposed to be a degenerative disease. (He, he.)

Oh, and before you ask (you were going to ask weren't you?) I am still shooting in black and white. It's just that when the post is about Autumn colours, it seems important to illustrate it in ... well ... colour.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Creating a new currency

After the aborted attempt to change our flag, I think New Zealand should consider having a new currency.

Basically, our existing currency is broken - too much of it has found its way into the hands of too few. Money is a bit like those iron filings we used to hold over a magnet when we were at school; tap the paper and the filings start to show the magnetic field. We have tapped the paper of "free market" ideology so much that most of the money has gone to the poles - we can't see a fair and equitable society anymore because there's precious little left to mark its position. 

It wasn't always like this. When I first came to New Zealand, in the 1980's, we had a more egalitarian society. I willingly sacrificed thousands of dollars a year to take my first New Zealand job, because my wife's job as a temporary secretary had been enough for the four of us to live on while I looked for work. The lower paid and the higher paid were not so far apart then. Not any longer; we threw that all away when we embraced free market ideals and less government intervention. Something important in the New Zealand make-up shrivelled and died at the end of the last century.

We need a new mechanism. Something that properly values contributions to our society other than economic contributions. Who is it that decided that a banker is worth more than a nurse, that a marketing executive is worth more than a teacher? In our present economic system, the dollar is the only measure - if you are good at making dollars, you get more dollars. But if you're good at making people well, or educating them, then that doesn't count for so much. It's the money system that says, because your rare illness requires expensive medicine and we can save one hundred people with another illness for the same money, then you can't have the treatment. The money system, left to its own devices, can't value a lot of things that are important to many New Zealanders. There are things you just can't put a price on.

Now, I do know that we will not easily get rid of the NZ$ so my proposal is to create a second currency. Perhaps we can call them 'ferns'.  The exchange rate could be fixed - one fern for one dollar - nice and simple. We raise ferns, by creating a new, voluntary, tax. The tax, based on income. would rise from (say) 1% for the low paid to something like 20% for high earners (in addition to existing taxes). Businesses would also have a fern tax, say 10%, on all earnings. As I said, the tax would be voluntary, so those who thought they couldn't afford it could take a pass. The earnings from the fern tax would be used to more fairly compensate groups in our society that we value, like health care professionals, or educators, and to assist people who can't help themselves, like the sick or disabled. 

But who on earth would pay such a voluntary tax? Well, if you are a business and you pay the fern tax then you get to advertise the fact that you are part of the fern economy. That way consumers get to know who the good guys are and who are the 'greedy bastards'; who would you rather do business with? If you're an individual you get to put special style plates on your car or stickers on your house (like those neighbourhood watch stickers; remember them?). You get to carry a special ID card to show that you're a real New Zealander with New Zealand values. As I said, voluntary, but a tax that would earn you something else that New Zealanders value - respect.

Yes, I know, it would never fly. There will never be a fern currency any more than there will be a fern flag. But it's a nice idea to play thought experiments with. Perhaps we could have a referendum, I hear they cost about $26 million each, a small price to pay to give inequality a big kick in the guts.

Completing the circle

When I first started taking photographs back in my teenage years, everything was black and white. There was colour photography of course, but not if you wanted to process at home in your own darkroom. Gradually, colour processing did become available and many of us migrated to the world of colour.

Digital, of course, is naturally a colour medium, so colour has become the default setting for the majority of today's digital photographers. But recently I have been asking myself why; what would happen if I decided to work almost entirely in black and white again? Sure, my files would still come out of the camera in colour, but that is quickly removed - the bigger challenge is to think in black and white when taking the picture.

I like the way that black and white can bring out the drama in a picture. The colour version of the blacksmith is a nice picture but nowhere as dramatic as this black and white.

Black and white also helps emphasise shape and tonality without the distractions of colour. Both these first two photos were taken at Iron Ridge Quarry, an interesting sculpture park in the Hurunui.

Back in Oxford, the old West Oxford Hotel has now been refurbished and rebranded as  the "Rustic Country Hotel".

So, perhaps it's time to close the gate on colour for a while and explore the world of black and white once more. Guess that means I've come full circle.

My kinda church

Recently, in an online faith community I frequent, there has been much discussion on the subject of church attendance. Perhaps surprisingly for an online community, the vast majority of participants are committed church attendees, a number being actively involved in the life of their churches well beyond basic Sunday attendance. I have been like that too. But part of the discussion included this blog post in which the writer promotes the view that it's not possible to be a Christian unless you regularly go to church. Allow me to disagree.

But, before I disagree, it must be said that there are ideas about being a Christian and what church is that do support that blog writer's point of view. If by 'church' you mean an institutional church and if by 'Christian' you mean a member of an institutional church then, of course, Christianity and church attendance are inextricably entwined. But, I submit, Christianity is not an institutional thing, it's about a person, an individual we call Jesus Christ, and to be a Christian is nothing more nor less than being a follower of Jesus Christ.  'Church,' in this context is the universal fellowship of Christian believers and not the building down the road.  In this understanding, we create a serious problem if we attempt to make being Christian dependent on institutional church attendance.

Of course, none of that precludes church attendance. But it does tell us that our Christianity can't be confined to a church nor defined by our attendance at a church.  Christianity is a lived faith, not an institutionalised belief system. At its core, Christianity is a faith where our relationship with God is mediated by only one person - the Christ who makes us Christian (and not only in language terms). Where the institutional church and its professional clergy do have an important role to play, is in guiding us flock of Christians towards a spiritually mature participation in the Kingdom of God. Historical power structures may have made it otherwise in the past but here, in the twenty-first century, the institutional church must take up the role of servant-guide and foot-washer if it is to avoid a slide into irrelevance. (I loved that the Pope modeled this over Easter.)

And here's the thing; you couldn't keep me away from a church that was interested in helping me and everyone else to become better at this Christian thing. Not better Anglicans or Catholics, not better Baptists or Pentecostals, nor better Methodists or Adventists (the list goes on) - just better Christians, lovers of God and our fellow human beings. Religious dogma doesn't fix social injustice, it doesn't heal the sick nor bind up the broken hearted. I need to know how to pick up my cross and carry it as Christ said I should. Where is the church that's more interested in those things than the state of its roof, the sex of its ministers or whether the weekly tithe will cover the bills? Take me to that church.

Raise a glass to the new Google Calendar

It had largely slipped under my radar, but Google calendar for Android and iOS has matured into a very capable calendar app. Although I had been using the Google cloud to look after my calendar and to-do list for several years, I found their mobile calendar app to be lacking in features. Consequently, our family had been using 'Sunrise' to grab and share our Google data. Now, with Sunrise about to be abandoned by Microsoft, we needed an alternative and, during my searching, I looked again at Google Calendar. Has it changed or what!

The new Google Calendar has a clean and uncluttered design that some people may think looks a bit basic. The widget (shown here), for example, has no settings, it's simply a list of coloured cards - one for each calendar or reminder entry. This simplicity is carried through to the design of the main app which supports views for month, week, 3 day and day views. In addition, there is a 'schedule' view, which is basically a continuous list of event and reminder cards with day and date markers (similar to the widget). I find myself working in schedule view most of the time. A neat feature  of all the views (on a phone) is the transition from holding the phone in portrait to landscape mode - whatever view you happen to be in in portrait, it switches to a week view in landscape - a nice quick way of getting to the week view.

A huge improvement is the integration of 'reminders' into the calendar. Reminders are not the same as the to-do items in Google's desktop calendar and won't appear in that list. Google has obviously decided to focus on a more generic reminder system that operates across platforms, devices and other apps. For example, you can set a reminder on a note in Google Keep, or an email in Inbox on your tablet, and it will magically appear as a reminder in Google Calendar on your phone. Neat. In fact, reminders are always in your face - they appear in Calendar, Inbox, and Google Now - no more forgetting! Google promises that reminders will also be coming to the desktop app soon, and I look forward to that.

Of course, all the normal settings for repeats on both events and reminders are available and new entries are made by touching the '+' badge that floats in the bottom right of the Calendar screen. All up, it's pretty obvious how things work and the app just gets out of the way and lets you get on with organising your life; something some of the other available calendar tools could well take note of.

So, if you need an excuse to have a drink, the new Google Calendar could be it. Cheers.

Flagging the flag

It's time New Zealand had a new flag but ...

Flags are important; you don't get to change them every five minutes. So, when we do change our flag, for most of us it will be our 'forever' flag. The single flag on offer next month (above left) is nice, but is it a lasting design? Will we be looking at it in 20 years time and wondering who on earth thought that was a good idea? Will our kids find it an embarrassment? It looks to me like a flag that's trying too hard.

The process we went through to get here could have worked, but the Flag Consideration Panel didn't do a good job. Of the four options they gave us (out of the long list below) three were based on the silver fern and one had a koru design. The one koru design offered, was a bland black and white version - by no means the best of the many koru designs offered to the panel. The panel should have offered us the best four flags presented to them but they didn't. One doesn't need to be a cynic to think that the deck was being stacked in favour of a fern. Perhaps the subsequent furore, and inclusion, of the red peak flag, was tacit recognition of the Panel's bias.

Given the limited, carefully chosen choices, available in the first referendum, it was hardly a surprise that a fern came out in front, and hardly surprising it was a Karl Lockwood design (they were indeed the best of the ferns, in my opinion). At the end of the day, the main choice was between a red or black top left colour. Black won.

So here we are at a choice, to keep the current flag or adopt the black, blue and white fern. The fern is OK, but does anyone really think it's the best we can do, or even the best in the panel's long list (below)? If so, then by all means vote for it. As for me, I think we deserve better. I think we have been denied better and, if we can't have the best, then I'll be voting to stick with our existing flag. That way we might get another chance in maybe five years to choose our forever flag - one we can be truly proud of.

Is that you, Pastor?

When I got a Facebook message from our Pastor, I was a little surprised. When he said that he was in the Ukraine, I was even more surprised. When he started asking for money, the cerebral alarm bells became deafening. This is how it panned out ...

Next time I won't request verification so quickly, after giving me a totally fictitious address, the scammer blocked me before I could tell him that he needed to get on his knees and repent :-)

Bringing it home

When I bring home a photograph, I bring home something that has accurately mapped the shapes, colours and light that I saw earlier - arrangements of photons, stored up and measured out with a mathematical precision that has its own corpse-like beauty.

Lying on the mortuary slab of the computer screen, the photograph looks like the scene I saw before, but it has no life - it sits there silent and still; life reduced to numbers.

It's the work of a taxidermist to bring apparent life to dead creatures: It's the work of a photographer to bring the appearance of life to the maths of dead photons.

Back inside

Today we went to visit the reopened Christchurch Art Gallery. This is one of those buildings I love as a building; the art adds an extra dimension but the building itself is somewhere I just love to be. I think it has something to do with the ribbed facade; it's like being inside the body of something alive, looking out on the rest of the world. And alive it is with people young and old scuttling about enjoying the space.

There were some interesting exhibits, including this sweet landscape made from coloured sugar (the picture shows only a small part).

And the yellow room which provides a transition space or just a place to sit if you need to recover from sensory overload.

But, as I said at the beginning, whatever the exhibition it's the building that always attracts me and, after five years of being closed for repairs, it was good to get back inside.

The pie transporter

So, there I was today, sitting in Oxford's "Sheffield Pie Shop" and tucking into to one of their, rather tasty, apricot pies when I had one of those strange flashbacks to the mid-1960s. In the wink of an eye, I traversed 50 years of apricot pie eating to arrive at the classic apricot pie - Lyons Individual Apricot Pies.

These are the pies that started a 50-year addiction to apricot pies. These pies were so special that each one came wrapped in its own cardboard box and, despite the advertisement, cost 6d each, by the time I discovered them. The cunningly shaped corners ensured you never got one with broken pastry and the tangy filling was always discoverable on the very first bite.  There were other flavours, of course, including apple and strawberry, which sometimes substituted when the apricot pies were all sold out. But the apricot pie was the best - until they were discontinued in 1968. They were replaced by a round pie, the Harvest pie, which was only a 6/10 pie, unworthy to succeed the octagonal beauty of the original.

In case you doubt my claims on behalf of this pie, just type "Lyons individual fruit pies" into Google. This search will yield over 300,000 hits - 47 years after the last one was sold! These pies, which pre-date Google, the internet and even solid state computers are still being discussed in awe-filled terms, in 2015.

If you ever ate a Lyons apricot pie, then visit the Sheffield pie shop and be transported back in time ...