A slow dance

Late this afternoon I went to Grey Lynn Park with my camera. Soon after entering the park, I spotted a number of discarded alcohol cans, and other rubbish thrown beneath medium sized trees lining the edge of the park; rather like a hedge. Brings to mind the lucrative bottle collecting my brother and I did when I was 12 years old. Our father worked as a farm labourer a couple of weeks at a time for all the farmers who had joined up to the scheme. The house provided by the scheme was a couple of hundred metres from the local War Memorial Hall. Saturday dance nights were well attended by young men who drank beer from quart bottles. When empty, the bottles were thrown into or under the macrocarpa hedge on the other side of the road. Every bottle was worth threepence. As nobody had collected the bottles for years, we made a lot of money the first time we gathered them up.

Today, I lacked anything to carry this recyclable (and non recyclable) rubbish. I'll go back one time with the boys.

Passing the recently refurbished children's playground (which even Young L is too old for at 10), I saw a sign warning against aggressive magpies which are nesting at present "in this area". A little further on I saw a pair of magpie doing a slow dance to help decide if they will mate. After they had led each other a merry (if slow) dance, a third magpie flew in and chased one off. The other remained on a fallen tree trunk. As I was leaving the park some minutes later, there were two magpie involved in a rather more energetic interaction on another slope. Which (if any) of the three were there, I could not tell.