Mangaokewa closed for lambing

Traffic noise kept me awake in Te Kuiti last night so, not much fancying Marcel's company and being handy to a power point, I turned to Facebook for distraction. Lifetime first. And lucky too because I saw an alert that today's planned section included a bridge under reconstruction. Read a bit further and realised the whole Mangaokewa track is still closed for lambing. Whoops.

Switch to plan B. Ring another sister (thank you Mother and Father) and invite myself to her place at Marotiri. 

She came to fetch me and we visited yesterday's railway house where we admired this old quilt. 

Replacement boots are on the way here (thank you NOH), and while I wait my somewhat swollen right foot has time to deflate, I can go visit my mother, do a supermarket run for the Timber Trail section, and wait for the rain to come past this weekend. Then the family will return me to Pureora to walk on. 

Marcel's unnamed narrator has been playing mind games with me. There I was, under a tree in Waitomo on a hot evening, reading about a boy under a tree at Combray, reading. My irritating facility for associating random stuff immediately had me imagining the boy pictured carrying a tin of biscuits on those old Bycroft's tins. 

(image found online, ignore the chutney) 


Anyway, Marcel's unnamed narrator was discovering an author named Bergotte, loving the elaborate embroidery of the author's prose. Another infinite regress of ideas... an author guilty of verbal diarrohoea creates a character who writes that way himself. Rabbit hole. 

And that's when it hit me. Proust was inventing Henry James!