Not in my backyard

Last evening, (Thursday, April 5), my wife andi attended a Blenheim Residents Association meeting with the proposed pyrolysis plant on the agenda.

The group were addressed by three speakers, on general information, scientific information and legal information. The meeting ran for more than two hours with a lot of questions and answers posed by all parties.

The primary concern seemed to be health and the siting of the plant in such close proximity to the Taylor Pass development.

I am currently building a new home which is within a kilometre of the proposed site so have concerns too. At no time during the process of buying the section was I informed by real estate agents or indeed the council that I would be living in the shadow of a toxic emission plant.

For the council to be happily selling sections on Taylor Pass whilst at the same time actually inviting this operator to Blenheim I find not only hard to believe, but appalling.

There were many and varied objections to this application heard at last night’s meeting and there will be many submissions made to the council I am sure. Most were not against the plant per se just the siting of it.

I am hopeful that the council will listen to their citizens and find a more suitable site.

If they choose not to, it seems this council will be hammering another nail into the coffin of ‘‘Clean Green New Zealand’’. ROD LOFTHOUSE

Blenheim, April 6. flights. Because a modern commercial aircraft such as a Boeing or Airbus has highly efficient swept back super-critical wings it can only be flown by a computer. In my days as a engineer I often had to test systems in flight sometimes deliberately switching off the autopilot. I never met a pilot who could fly an aircraft completely manually.

Fortunately modern autopilot computers are very reliable. An aircraft often has two or even three computers doing the same job in case one fails. And they do it better than any human. So when you next fly and it’s a lovely smooth flight and landing don’t applaud the human pilot; they probably had very little to do with it. It’ll be the same with cars. Bring it on.

EVAN ROBINSON

Blenheim, April 5. Belgium, which hosts that most tempting target for Russian espionage, NATO’S HQ, could only find one to expel (which it did with obvious reluctance and considerably later than Russia-bashing enthusiasts, such as Ukraine and the US).

Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me! The simplest explanation for New Zealand’s failure to follow the western flock is that our current prime minister is following Helen Clark’s sensible example.

Helen refused to swallow the UK’S dodgy dossier on Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. She thus avoided our troops being involved in the massive war-crime that was the invasion and destruction of Iraq.

Now Jacinda is refusing to swallow the dodgy dossier Theresa May’s government is busy cooking up. And starting with the ridiculous claim that Russia is the only country that has the know-how to manufacture Novichok, dodgy, it most certainly is.

The EU countries expelling diplomats are doing so in response to NATO pressure — not because they believe the truth of the affair is to be found in the western media, or in the mouth of Boris Johnson.

HUGH STEADMAN

Blenheim, April 3.

A decade later I was in the city of Quebec at Christmas. Rounding a corner I came across a small outdoor ice rink with a band playing in a rotunda and perhaps 200 Quebecois skating round and round in time to a Strauss waltz, at ease and chatting. It would be hard to imagine a prettier scene.

It was like the nice bits of a Brueghel come alive. Skate rental was free. I joined in.

The Quebecois could not have been kinder. That only made it worse. Little children helped me back to my feet. Pensioners offered limbs for me to cling to.

As soon as I let go I fell back down. The bruising was impressive, but it was the humiliation that drove me from the ice. And that’s the whole of my history with ice-skating, except for John Curry. And I’ve barely thought of him in 40 years.

John Curry was a British iceskater. When he started to win medals in the mid-1970s, the local media, as jingoistic then as now, made much of him.

Thus, just like everyone else, one day I saw him skate on television. And I was transfixed.

You needed to know nothing about skating. You needed only an aesthetic sense. What he did was of what I might find.

For there’s a purity to memory that it is sometimes better not to disturb. Time distils things to their essence. That essence may not be literal, but it is truer than literal.

I need not have worried. There on Youtube was Curry skating. The leaning arc of loveliness was not as long as I remembered it but it was every bit as easeful, every bit as glory-drenched, surrendrous to the sky and crucified.

To see it again was to feel, almost, what I had felt then. Set against it was the literal detail of John Curry’s life, as messy and disappointing as yours or mine or anyone’s.

As a boy he wanted to attend dance classes. His father forbade it as unmanly. But grudgingly he let his son skate. Fate is written by such pettiness.

Throughout his life Curry worried, as most of us do, about money and love. He died in 1994 of Aids. He was 44. Was it any consolation as he lay dying that he’d done what he’d done? It is presumptuous to wonder. But it was consolation to others.

So Mr Murray, if I was quiet on the phone, I’m sorry. I was elsewhere and elsewhen, with beauty.