​I’ve been walking around this week with two and a half thousand dollars tucked behind each ear and no one’s noticed except me. Which is something of a relief: I’ve been trialling a pair of hearing aids. Their invisibility has made it easier for the vain and foolish part of to accept that I am wearing these twin badges of age and disability. 
​
Naturally, I’d much rather be wearing diamonds as big as the Ritz in my ears. Or if I must wear expensive hi-tech gadgetry, I’d prefer that it was something way cooler and more youthful - the latest Apple Watch perhaps - than a hearing aid. Self-conscious idiocy aside, the effect of wearing hearing aids has been more positive, and more radical than I could have imagined. 

Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet and songwriter, died in Los Angeles on the 7th of November.
​On the  following day, Donald Trump was elected President of the Dis-United States. ​

“Everybody knows that the boat is leaking / Everybody knows that the captain lied / Everybody got this broken feeling / Like their father or their dog just died …”  

​Cohen wrote about hate as well as love, war as well as peace, of the profane as well as the sacred, the agony as well as the ecstasy of life. For this he was often mocked as a gloom merchant: a depressive who wrote songs to slash your wrists by. But after months of relentlessly cruel and ugly politicking in the U.S. presidential campaign, and the election of an ignorant, racist, intellectual pygmy to the presidency, we need a songwriter like Cohen even more. There is some strange solace to be found in the way Cohen wrestles so lyrically in his songs with the best and the worst of human nature.

​Dear Bookshop, 

I love you.
I love you because you are full of words and people who love words.
I love you because I always feel at home in you.
I love you for the company you offer.
I love you because you contain multitudes.
I love you because you've got room for everybody.
I love you because you are a time capsule, a storehouse and a treasure chest. I love you because you are a mirror and a window.
I love you because you are a magnifying glass, a microscope and a telescope.
I love you because you contain maps and guidebooks and sign-posts.
I love you because you contain prayer and poetry.
​I love you because you contain much that is strange and fabulous and yet you remain so familiar.
I love you because you are full of questions. I love you because you are full of answers.
I love you because you are full of voices. I love you because you are full of listeners.  
I love you because you harbour surprises, and jokes, and silliness and general foolishness.  
I love you because bookshops have survived book-burnings and censorship, war and economic upheaval, and
​might survive digital technologies too.

I hope so.

Yours very faithfully

Ro

​A couple of years ago I wrote a profile of Hone Ma Heke AKA Lewis Stanton in this blog and in my Nelson Mail column.  He'd been a controversial figure for so long I was curious to find out more about him. At the time, he was camping with his Horse in Neale Park and so was actually a neighbour. 

Clive now camps out on Nelson's main street (minus horse and cart) and has become the subject of renewed controversy during the lead up to the City Council elections. This republished profile is my contribution to the debate.

​City dwellers like me do a lot of our living and working in cafes these days. They are neutral places to conduct business and provide a home away from home that is (in my case at least) far less cluttered and messy. They also have better coffee and magazines and someone else does the cooking and the dishes. 

​​I was thinking these thoughts on a brisk Nelson morning at the Red Gallery Cafe as I sat at a little Formica-topped table tucked into a corner next to a gently simmering oil-heater. On my table was my laptop, a celadon-blue plate bearing a perfect cheese scone and a coffee mug of the same delicate blue-green, sitting on a bright red saucer. There was a glazed turquoise jug of flowers on a neighbouring table, a patch of urban sky just visible through the window beside me. On the window ledge there was a pile of magazines and a clutch of colouring pencils jammed into a jar. Colour me happy - in my little cafe with still life. 

​This announcement today from the press office of U.S. president-elect, Donald Trump ends months of speculation. Trump began construction of a 20-metre-high wall around the White House grounds as soon as a tearful Hilary Clinton conceded defeat in the elections in November. The wall was erected in record-breaking time with Trump defending his use of under-paid and undocumented Mexican labourers. “I’m doing them a favour” he said “how else are they going to learn to build that 2000-mile wall we’ve got planned for the US-Mexico border?”
 
Ever since the wall went up Washington has been plagued by the din and dust of 24-hour demolition and construction on the 7.3-hectare White House site and the roads have been clogged with cavalcades of Trump trucks and delivery vans. The exact nature of the work going on behind the wall has been shrouded in secrecy. Consequently, the site is under siege by hordes of reporters, supporters, protesters and tourists. Outbreaks of anti—Democrat violence in the area have been blamed on the NRA Hospitality Tent which has been supplying free Trump Vodka to pro-Trump gun lobbyists in the crowd. However, Trump’s Militia, distinguished by their unusual comb-over hair style and gold-braided uniforms claim that all shootings have been “justified” and that the victims were “asking for it”.