Breakwater

Thank you so much for the supportive and empathetic comments yesterday. Blippers are a wonderfully kind, gentle community of folk.

I went into town for a second time this week to pick up fuel for the lawnmower and to post a wee package to my niece.

She will be 30 in four weeks time. How on earth did that happen? Time passes too fast. She lives in Lund, Sweden, where she is working on a PhD in the impacts of the climate crisis on indigenous forest communities…a fascinating topic.

My siblings and I have done an excellent job of not adding too many more souls to the overpopulation of Earth. The four of us have produced just two children. Brothers #1 and #3 would happily have had more children than the one that each of them had, but circumstances prevented it. Brother #2 and I both made the environmental decision in our 20s - quite independently of each other - to do the sensible thing and to remain childless.

That one of the next generation (TNG) is a committed climate crisis researcher and campaigner does my heart good.

Consequently she gets extra-special gifts, which are carefully thought out and given with an enormous amount of love. This year I have sent her a beautiful necklace which was originally my great-grandmother’s. She wore it much of the time. It was inherited by one of her sons, my great-uncle, who also wore it all the time beneath his shirt and tie. He sent it to me as a christening gift, when I was six weeks old.

I hope my niece will make it part of her daily garb in the spirit of her forebears.

The blip shows the Oamaru breakwater. The photo taken from Cape Wanbrow as we romped down and up, down and up for 40 minutes in spring sunshine and a brisk easterly breeze.