Have been in New Zealand a couple of days now – blue skies and winter frost: strange to step from summer to what seems like a very mild winter to me. It is winter, for the rose bushes have the odd flower and almost no leaves. Some trees are bare, too. But it looks like summer a little, too, for all the native trees here keep their foliage all year around. Lots of cute ferns around, also  plants I grow in containers back home run riot here.

Today I’m going to give left-hand-side-of-the-road driving a shot. To up the stakes, I hired a car with manual gears, and to prepare for that I’ve been visualising the situation in my mind – manualising it, really:  making my left hand use imaginary gears. Which exercise was horribly confusing and not at all confidence-building. Fortunately, traffic isn’t very heavvy in the Hamilton area, so I may survive.

Am thinking about a ‘what if … ‘ text to crayon here. Have something in mind, but will wait to see if something better pops up. Need to think about the right place to write it, too. Art can be so rewarding ……