Christchurch! How can anyone live there? How can anyone endure that continual, frightening shaking? Just before Christmas, we went to a dinner where I asked one of New Zealand's savviest and richest men whether, if he had a spare couple of hundred thousand in his back pocket, he would invest in Christchurch. His answer was immediately and emphatically no.
For us, though, this is the summer of the pair of grey-coloured herons which have taken up residence in a giant old plane tree near where I'm writing this. (I thought they were kotuku, but I see that the kotuku is white.) Their nest is about 15 or 20m up the tree. They've built a shallow bowl, just a platform really, of dry sticks. They nest in trees near lakes, I read. And indeed, in the two ponds nearby, there are many frogs and tadpoles. And eels, of course, but they seem to be the province of the monstrously ugly shag that comes visiting. I saw the shag fighting an eel one day. For a few seconds I was terrified. Big Black Greasy tearing Big Black Greasy to death.
We still can't tell if the heron couple have a chick up in their nest. I never see them fly out in the morning, but we see them coming back in the evening. They fly beautifully, slightly nose-down. Like the Concorde, which I used to watch coming into Heathrow from a friend's house at Twickenham. Long nose out the front, wings far to the back.
And despite their huge wingspan, they fly into a densely leafed tree. They shouldn't be able to do that. They should injure themselves, but they don't.
As for the reading so far this summer, a friend sent me a copy of a strange thing called The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern. What a remarkable book. It takes you into a strange, ethereal world of magic and leaves you there. Charles Cumming's The Trinity Six is a clever English thriller.
My Week with Marilyn, by Colin Clark, the story of the disastrous combination of Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier making The Prince and the Showgirl back in the mid 1950s, is extraordinary. Marilyn probably wasn't insane, but she might as well have been. The crew came to detest her.
But for some reason, I got hold of a copy of J.C. Beaglehole's vast and definitive The Life of Captain James Cook, which was published in 1972, and read it. I am probably the only person who read J.C. Beaglehole's James Cook this summer. Beaglehole studied Cook for 40 years, then wrote the entire book in 18 months. It must have poured out of him. He died before the proofs were corrected. His son Tim stepped in to finish the project.
Cook may have been the greatest explorer of them all. He made three great dips into the Antarctic circle and came within about 100km of the Antarctic land mass. If he hadn't turned left towards the Atlantic, instead of turning right, he would have come across what is now the Australian Antarctic Territory and would have been the first man to see the Southern Continent.
The curious thing about Cook, however - and even Beaglehole concedes this - is that despite our knowledge of what he did and despite the great volumes of journals he kept of his voyages, we don't really know a heck of a lot about what he was like as a bloke.
Certainly he was firm but diplomatic, at least until the last couple of hours of his life when he snapped and the Hawaiians did for him.
But he was shrewd. He liked the Maori very much, the "New Zealanders", he called them.
But he made this observation, after the massacre of a number of the crew of his companion ship the Adventure - an observation which modern New Zealanders might consider to have been very wise.
"I must however observe in favour of the New Zealanders that I have always found them of a Brave, Noble, Open and benevolent disposition, but they are a people that will never put up with an insult if they have an opportunity to resent it."
