Jo's blog

I missed my bus home from work last night. One of those situations where you're waiting at the lights, you see your bus, and just before the pedestrian walk light goes green to cross, the bus pulls away. Because it was long past rush hour, it was half an hour for another bus, so what do you do? You cheer yourself up by taking a bit of a detour, knowing there's a good book in your bag to read (an excellent book on writing by Christopher Vogler and David McKenna called "Memo From the Story Department.") The detour is McDonalds for an ice-cream. While I was waiting I spotted Richard. He's an eccentric character, one of the streeties you see when you work in the city. I've chatted to him a lot before, about books and sports and anything really. He used to wear a jacket supporting the same rugby league team one of my kids supported. A team that at the time happened to be the bottom-of-the-table team, and had been for many years. The book could wait. So I t...

I've been away a bit of late, so got to read a bit more than usual. In particular, I was quite taken with several books, all found on my mum's bookshelf. Go, Mum! One was a thriller called The Dry by Australian author, Jane Harper. I just found it sitting on a shelf in the spare bedroom, I hadn't heard of it before, hadn't heard of the author, just picked up the book, read the first page and I was hooked. Had me gripped from the beginning and even more amazing, I didn't skip to the end to see who the perp was. Amazing. So the story goes... a man has killed his wife and son, then himself. His old school friend, Aaron, returns for the funeral, planning to leave asap. But at the pleading of the dead man's mother, Aaron (a cop) decides to give it a few days to investigate, then he'll leave. Except, it begins to get curious as the questions mount as to whether it really was a murder-suicide. The setting was a small town suffering a crippling drought. Very at...

I was down on the farm recently, when I spotted the most gorgeous sunset. You don't often get to marvel at such a sunset like this in the city, surrounded by buildings and trees, so I rushed outside with the phone, and took photos. I was wandering around snapping away, when I noticed people standing at the end of the drive, on the road. Being as it was about to get dark, and these people were just sort of standing there, doing nothing (it didn't look like they were changing a tyre or anything mechanical) suspicion set rapidly in. A while back, the farmer across the road had discovered the remains of some his sheep which had been butchered overnight. Hideous stuff, notwithstanding it was theft. I rushed inside to grab the binoculars, dashed upstairs to look out the window and admittedly it took an age to focus with the things and the people were blurry, but success. I had these potential perps in my sight. They stood on our side of the road but they didn't face our prop...

On a serious note, yesterday was Anzac Day in New Zealand, a day of remembering those who fought in wars, from the Second World War to Korea and Vietnam. I was staying out in the country, and in the afternoon, we headed into town to take a look at the wreathes placed around the clocktower in the Square, where the official service had been held that morning. I'd noticed the seats being set up the day before, temporary grandstands, and had wondered what they were for. Duh. The dawn service . We read the cards and I was particularly struck with the wreathe from the Korean War veterans. I'd been reading about Korea for some research the week earlier, and how for veterans it felt like the "forgotten" war. In this recently-published history, there had been an interview with a man who had been just 17 when he'd been to Korea on a navy frigate. Seventeen!!  Just a kid, and that was the problem. He was just a kid but he was fighting in a war, with all that cam...

I have taken up knitting because... why not? It is not something I have every tried to any great degree but there is something about sitting there, knitting away and being productive that has a lot of appeal. My mum always knitted, back in the day when my sister and I got to choose the wool for our cool ponchos and in our teens, our cool jerseys. I got to thinking about kniting a while back when some of my younger colleagues at work were talking about it and I thought, why not? A friend offered to teach me but we never seemed to be able to get together and so one day I stole borrowed needles from the knitting bag in mum's cupboard, surfed videos, but then decided to go old school, and borrowed a book from the library. It wasn't much chop, to be honest. Quite confusing. But then I had a mental image of how to cast on and knit, most likely from the last time I decided to learn how to knit when I was twenty or something, and surprisingly it worked. So I have finished my first a...

How cute is this church? I've written about it in my blog post here but to save you the trouble, it's a darling, mid-Victorian gothic-style church that was built in 1877 in the Manawatu, here in NZ. A few weeks back I ended up going to an open day they held to celebrate its 140th, and had a look around and was quite charmed by it. I'd been inside it once before but that had been a while ago, now, as in decades, so I couldn't really remember much about it. Inside it's made of totara wood - its one of those wedding churches, where it would, if were going for the traditional wedding, be the perfect place to have a wedding. All the wooden pews and stained glass windows, and even a pipe organ for the wedding march, or whatever it is one does when one weds traditionally. After the service to celebrate the birthday, everyone went to the hall next door for lunch and after there was a cake (oh my golly gosh, an utterly gorgeous fruit cake) that was ceremoniously cut a...

Several of my books are going free the weekend of October 20-24. Blue Creek Bachelor, Marrying Melinda, Finding Farrell and The Return of Gabe McLeod. Check them out here , grab a copy, and enjoy!!