Apologies for the break

My apologies for the lack of action on this blog over the past couple of days. As some patrons of the frightening phenomenon known as facebook will already know, Skyler broke her arm on the weekend whilst mountaineering.*

*The word 'mountaineering' sounds impressive, doesn't it? Am I allowed, though, to refer to a gentle stroll around the rim of Mount Mangere, the long-extinct volcano that rises a few hundred feet above South Auckland, as 'mountaineering'? I remember Janet Frame talking in her novel State of Siege about how ridiculous Aucklanders and other notherners make themselves, in the eyes of their southern compatriots, when they call small green hills 'mountains'.

But I'm not alone in trying to aggrandise Mount Mangere: on the day of the break we were walking the mountain with Hamish Dewe and his wife Sabrina, and when Sabrina had hesitated, during one of more precipitous parts of the crater rim track, Hamish bellowed something like 'Where's your Kiwi mountaineering spirit? Where's the spirit of Sir Ed Hillary?'**

We'd made it down the steep sections of the track, which some kindly soul had laid with bitumen, and were almost back to the car, when Skyler slid on a small piece of mud, and instinctively threw out her left arm to break her fall. She broke the arm as well as the fall, and since then I've been rushing about bringing her pillows and cups of tea and painkillers...


**In a typically laconic comment deposited under this post, Hamish staunchly denies this attribution. I am not sure, though, whether he wishes to distance himself from Sir Edmund Hillary in a general sense...