I’ve been meaning to try this for a while, and it turns out to be surprisingly easy to make things out of duct tape. I now have a new wallet that’s slightly larger and much lighter than my old one. It lacks a coin pocket, but I’ll see about that next time.

I am giving serious consideration to a scheme for transferring large quantities of heavy metals to the tops of mountains, thereby slowing the rotation of the Earth and increasing the number of hours in the day.

If this doesn’t work it may be necessary to revisit an earlier and less humane plan, whereby a posse is organised to capture the Sun in a net and wound it repeatedly with taiaha until it can’t move across the sky so fast.

In all my time in Auckland, I didn’t once go to the theatre. I meant to, but I never got around to it, unless you count Sing-along-a-Sound of Music. Move to Christchurch, however, and you get cast in a play. It’s not something you get to choose: a role is allotted to you as you pass within the city limits.

In my case, it is a small role as a Chancellor in an as-yet unnamed play by David Allen. It will be my task to try and get the young queen married to a suitable chap, and to generally disapprove of her ladies in waiting. This should prove relatively easy.

I have left it rather late to say anything about the actual process of moving to Christchurch. It doesn’t seem particularly topical any more, but there was a lot of bad weather, our ferry crossing was cancelled, and there was a good deal of confusion about more or less everything to do with ferries. At one point we even managed to drive on to the wrong ferry entirely, where we got out of the van and wandered around looking confused until a helpful sailor assisted us in accounting for the discrepancy between basic common sense notions of ticketing and load management and the instructions I had been given at the terminal.

In any case, the ten-hour delay meant that we ended up travelling from Picton to Christchurch overnight, instead of through the day. So thanks to Dad for all the driving.

A couple of weeks ago I disassembled my bed, in anticipation of needing to fit it into a van. As I wasn’t ready to put everything straight into a van at the time (largely on account of not having a van), I stacked the bed parts in the corner of the room, and put the mattress back down where the bed had been. Shortly afterwards my cats arrived on the scene, and were utterly flabbergasted. On-top-of-the-bed was where it had always been, but under-the-bed had vanished! They poked their noses around the bottom of the mattress looking for the trick, but I don’t think they ever figured it out.

Today I have put under-the-bed back where it goes, but they don’t seem all that impressed. Perhaps it doesn’t seem so significant a development in the tactical landscape of their endless games of territory control, for they have many other matters to contend with: new doors, stairs, rooms, sofas, and a backyard that overlaps with the territories of other neighbourhood cats. Fortunately, they know the new playing field rather well, as it was their home ground up until about a year ago.