Achieving goals one kick at a time
the Khandallah round robin competition in Wellington.
Logan came first in sparring and then again in the under-18s series, where he also gained a first in patterns.
He did well at the nationals too, picking up gold for sparring and patterns and winning the best overall competitor in the yellow belt category.
He seems to take it all in his stride but admits to nerves before he competes.
‘‘I am quite competitive and I can be pretty annoying when I am nervous before a competition. I won’t shut up and I eat lots of lollies.’’
Logan started taekwondo with his dad, and while he has overtaken him now, he says it’s cool that they can do something together.
He rates his coach Michael Onland too, who he considers to be ‘‘pretty awesome’’.
‘‘He is the best instructor in the area and he’s just really cool, we have a special handshake and everything. I’d like to be as good as him one day.’’
Becoming a ninth black belt is the big goal and Logan knows it will take him a long time but he is prepared to put the work in.
‘‘I’ll probably be as old as Dad before I get there but that’s OK.’’ At some point in our adult lives, we all face the deaths of our parents. Campion Decent’s play Unholy Ghosts, directed by Conrad Newport, which opened on Saturday at Palmerston North’s Centrepoint Theatre, contains some thought-provoking material about this.
Yet it also veers into wry humour, exasperation, anger and tenderness as a son plays gobetween and attendant to his divorced mother and father, both dying but still warring with each other. These characters are named only as Mother, Father, and Son, with an unseen character, the son’s sister.
Three powerful performances anchor this plot, played out in vignettes against a clever set design of revolving panels.
As the Son, Alex Greig is constantly on stage, the narrator/ imaginer of a life story featuring two desperately imperfect parents who can’t seem to break from each other, even in absentia.
Stuart Devenie inhabits to perfection the cantankerous persona of Father – described as a cruel penny-pincher and much worse by his ex-wife. He in turn describes his ex as a hysterical drama queen. As this hard-drinking, chainsmoking former ‘‘star of stage and radio’’, Ginette McDonald, in her Centrepoint debut, is a force of nature with a rich, Dench-like voice.
At one point, the mostly-patient Son muses on how our parents not only teach us how to live – or how not to – but how to die; and comes to understand, on his own parents’ final journey, a new meaning of love and family.