Well, I'm here to tell you, it's summer. Springtime has been and gone and today the boys have taken off their shirts and are jogging barechested along Oriental Parade. A little more modestly I am sitting in the window at cafe scopa, a lemon ginger honey drink at my ready and feeling the heat of the sun's rays. Perhaps it's just that the hole in the ozone layer that makes eighteen degrees feel like thirty. Wellington in the meantime, is rejoicing in a quiet sober Kiwi way, the great success of their literary daughter Eleanor Catton, who just carried off the Man Booker Prize, at the youngest of all ages of twenty eight years. And it seems like she was a blow-in for the prize. She's back here next year for the writers' festival and may make a few lines in the Dominion Post. But she is nearly $100 grand richer and her career has taken off. Probably due to the fantastic creative writing course established at Victoria Campus quite a few years ago, of which she was a graduate. Again, New Zealand punching well above its weight.
But here am I still reading the Irish Colm Toibin books. Did he win the Man Booker, or Booker as it was called then? He probably did, or certainly deserved to, as his writing I find is perfect. His understanding and description of character is faultless and he reaches into the depths of the psyche without so much as a soft breath. I am enjoying his 'Blackwater Lightship' novel at the moment, can't actually put it down, so I have it here at scopa before I'm off to my mentoring group at NZAF in half an hour. Then the choir, and on it goes.
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