“The Ultimate Book of Farting” is winner of the Failure of Nerve Award. The Award Committee found much to praise in the mechanism which produced a fart each time the book was opened. 

When we step off the ferry I experience a sudden sense of dislocation. It’s partly that the Boulder Bank has always been over there, and now it is Nelson that is over there. But it’s more than that. The place so obviously belongs to the birds. They are all around us, wheeling over our heads, perched on the driftwood that lies in piles like bleached bones, fossicking amongst the rocks.

The genius and alchemy of opp-shops: the places where the discarded is re-cycled, down-cycled, re-purposed and re-sold and turned into cash which, depending on the opp-shop, supports counselling services, social work, the care of the dying, even the prevention of cruelty to animals.

I've just staggered in from an afternoon at a speed dating event, exhausted but exhilarated. 
I made a last minute decision to attend and went in my usual Sunday Market attire: unwashed hair, an elderly pair of jeans, a merino and red clogs. Thankfully, some shred of sartorial instinct had prompted me to throw a beaded cardigan on at the last minute. I’m hoping that my suitors only noticed the sparkly bits. 

For the first time, I've got an inkling of how one could become a birdwatcher - a species I have hitherto thought of as the sad and obsessive, ornithological equivalent of the trainspotter: slightly eccentric loners who prefer birds to people, infamous for their anoraks, notebooks and binoculars. 

Each year thousands of pilgrims, or “People of the Book” as they are known, join the pilgrimage to  place called Founders Park,  where under the welcoming arms of a giant windmill, they come in search of books, relics of an almost bygone age. Some come hoping to find enlightenment, succour, and revelation within the relics. Others wish merely for some hints on growing roses or the autograph of an All Black scribbled on a flyleaf. 

Something had already changed at the dark end of Bridge Street. A couple of retailers chalked some  hopscotch squares on the pavement and dawdled outside their shops to watch what might happen. People on the street responded almost immediately. An elderly woman with a Zimmer-frame was making slow progress up the street. She wasn't able to hop but she steered her frame towards the hopscotch markings so that she could at least walk over the numbered squares on the footpath. 

David Engwicht