The news here will soon be full of how winter is starting next Tuesday (June 1) – we do like our official datelines. Nevertheless, there is a distinctly wintry storm about, giving the South Island a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ battering. That’s this year’s ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ battering, you understand, or, at least, the first of the sequence. And there was I thinking people were living longer.
OK, so I forgot the eclipse. The change in weather is the more noticeable because a few days earlier we had been out in the garden late at night watching the ‘blood supermoon’ (I think that’s what it was called to stir the sluggish brains of newspaper readers). The observing conditions were almost perfect – a beautiful clear sky, the moon at the zenith, nestling against the Milky Way, and your eyes dark-adjusted because you were out watching the earth’s shadow creep across the moon’s disc. Today if you went out and looked up, you’d have to mop your face with a cloth.
It hasn’t stopped our garden from producing stuff. We spent today gathering the last lot of feijoas – just as we did last week, and the week before… The fact that we accumulated 30 or so today suggests that there’s still a few to come. And they aren’t all small – our youngest tree has a habit of fruiting late, and producing the biggest crop. These three are all from the last fortnight, sitting next to the teaspoon we will use to eviscerate them:
Not record-breakers by any means, but the largest we’ve had to date.
To crosswords: today’s puzzle is a BBC Music Magazine puzzle from 2011. Next time around will be a special Independent daily puzzle from about ten years ago, in time to point up a June landmark.
Before that, there will be a Telegraph Toughie from Kcit on Thursday 3 June. If that deters you and you run to The Times – hard luck, I’m there as well, in the 15×15 slot. The smaller Times Quick Cryptic sees me appear on Friday June 11.
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