Dreams...

Last night was a night of dreams I'd rather I didn't have, but there is always something to learn from them.   Forgetting, losing, recovering....I need to be more careful. It was only an i-phone, but.....!

Wonderful front page pic on the Dom Post of a lonely and angry man...

Again something that may happen only here, a well-meaning bequest but leaving somone stranded when modern bureaucracy comes in the door...

More fatalities, but is it the roads or the alcohol?

Fascism raising its ugly head in the US with Trump and below.....in Austria, would you believe?

More kiwi sports gods leaving for more money overseas...

Tonght I hope to see at the Cuba Lighthouse 'Notes To Eternity', a doco film of today's big thinkers from the US, including Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk. The trailers were tantalising so I should come away with more food for thought...also made by a young Kiwi woman to boot!

Arrived on this cold rainy night at the Lighthouse Cuba cinema and it was dark and empty. What gives, I thought, and then immediately discovered I had erroneously booked for tomorrow night and not tonight, which seemed to make sense of all the other cinemas playing that particular doco on Wednesday. Tuesday is traditionally the last night of the cinema week anyway, so luckily, being in Cinema City, I looked up my directory and discovered Helen Mirren's latest movie is on at the Paramount, another favourite cinema of mine so that's where this desolate photo is taken, me with a hot chocolate waiting for the 'Eye in the Sky', a modern spy drama with Helen as the chief. It is fitting really, as today I took from the library her excellent autobigraphy in pictures amd writing, called 'In the Frame' and I have been enjoyng it all day. 

Helen Mirren has always been a favourite and I used to be mystified with her very American husband Taylor Hackford, but on reading her own words, I see that with him she has met the love of her life, having had quite a few lovers on the way I must say. But she is a great actress, deserved her Oscar gong, and also deserves another Academy in the marriage stakes, as no doubt her move to live in LA with Taylor was a great sacrifice for a girl born and bred in London, albeit of Russian middle class descent. Her father was a butcher nevertheless and she knew what it was like to be poor as a young girl.

The heavy rain tonight has perced the fragile armour of this old building and the buckets are allaround catching the leaks. Sitting here,  it occurred to me perhaps this is the real reason I like living in this windy city.  I have always like to be with people or places, once grand, but now needing a bit of TLC. This is certainly the case with Paramount, and possibly New Zealand as well. Who knows, perhaps it the thing I have to get out of my system, as now I have decided to move on I am looking forward very much to the return home to Gosford.  There I will pick up on old friendships, and make new ones, retake old skills, and put into effect new ones I have learned since I left eight or nine years ago. I am quite resigned to the fact that it is time for my return, which is, co-incidentally, the name of my speech next week at Toast Masters, 'It's Time!'