‘Darkest day’ thanks

May I sincerely thank all the people and organizations involved with last weekends activities highlighting the 100th anniversary of ‘‘New Zealands Darkest Day’’. Reminding us all about the local men who partook and suffered so badly during the 4th -12th October, 1917 in Belgium.

The RSA for Saturday morning’s service, Histrionics Theatre, Nelson Historical Society and Founders Memorial wall, Nelson Mail articles , musicians and all the numerous other individuals involved in the planning and presentation

A moving night service was also held at their resting place in Tyne Cote Cemetery Zonnebeke Belgium and can be viewed at www.focus-wtv.be/nieuws/ herbekijk-silent-city-meets-livingcity

Alcohol, ‘‘synthetic cannabis’’, meth and opioids are the drugs causing huge harm.

In the same paper that we read about medicinal cannabis campaigner Rose Renton facing criminal charges, there is an article revealing the massive pharmaceutical opioid addiction epidemic in America.

Last year over 64,000 American deaths were attributed to opioids overdoses - none from cannabis.

As confirmed by the US Attorney General, cannabis is not addictive.

Cannabis is not responsible for any deaths from overdose, yet New Zealand is stuck with this outdated law that punishes those already suffering with health issues or the people who are helping them.

It is a human right to have access to the cannabis plant, which is undeniably effective for many ailments.

The only legal cannabis medicine available here is imported and costs over $1000/month.

New Zealand is way behind global efforts to re-legalize this safe and useful plant.

The courts now have a part to play to rationalise what needs to be illegal and what does not.

Iwrote my last column from the clammy depths of jet-lag after a month’s travel in Ireland. I wailed about cramped aircraft seats, the glittering banality of international airports and venal or incompetent travel services. I also complained about the coachloads of other tourists who threatened to clutter up my holiday snaps.

Now that I feel almost normal again, I’d like to correct the impression given by my hopelessly jet-lagged self that I did not also enjoy my holiday enormously. It was stressful and hard work, but it was also instructional, entertaining and moving. Just what travel’s supposed to be.

Writer Pico Ayer, who was born in England of Indian parents, raised in California and lives in Japan, writes wonderfully on the peculiar pleasures and challenges of travel, pointing out that travel and travail have the same linguistic root (trepallium – an instrument of torture).

He quotes George Sanayana who says we choose to travel specifically in order to ‘‘sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment’’.

To which Ayer adds that travel also demonstrates ‘‘how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them.’’

That’s why there are no blessings to be found in Dublin souvenir shops (preceding difficulty absolutely zero) although they stock plastic shamrocks, Guinness t-shirts and condoms with ‘‘rub me for luck’’ printed on their green foil wrappers.

But it doesn’t quite explain why statues of the Virgin Mary, just as ubiquitous, do.

In her blue and white robes, arms outstretched in supplication and benison, she’s everywhere: at crossroads dripping in the rain; in graveyards, her features worn by time; protected in glassed-in niches and rock-walled grottoes; beside mass graves of nameless famine victims.

Not that she’s absent from souvenir shops: her alleged appearance in the village of Knock, County Mayo in 1879 is commemorated by a huge modern basilica – and a street of souvenir shops selling her image on nailclippers, key-rings and glow-in-the dark posters – plus holy water by the litre.

I stooped to the occasion and bought three gold plastic saint’s medals: St Christopher, for obvious reasons, St Anthony (the patron saint of lost things) and St Jude (hopeless causes). And who’s to say that their presence on the dashboard of our rental car for the rest of the trip didn’t vouchsafe our return home without a single claim on our travel insurance?

Once you abandon the idea of travel as ‘‘a strategy for accumulating photographs’’ (Susan Sontag), accept that when travelling ‘‘all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless’’ (John Steinbeck) you are more likely to appreciate the fleeting, unexpected, low-key, serendipitous experiences along the way.

The moments when, Irish Traces of long-abandoned potato beds on barren-looking hillsides. Newly cut peat, stacked neatly beside seeping bogs.

Stony, utterly desolate landscapes, trees hunched permanently against fierce winds. Lush, rolling, emerald-green slopes divided into fields by hedges and stone walls. Evidence of hatred and enmity in the Loyalist and IRA murals and fluttering flags of Belfast and Derry.

Buying a bar of lemon-scented soap from Sweny’s Pharmacy in Dublin, just like James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom.

A pheasant gliding in front of our car like a long-tailed arrow. A dead fox on the road. Picking blackberries from graveyard hedgerows.

The TV weather presenter finding endlessly inventive ways to forecast rain again tomorrow. Listening to music in a pub in Dingle where the conversation flowed seamlessly from Gaelic to English and back again and the songs were jaunty and sorrowful and angry.

Tiny tumble-down cottages with weeds and brambles climbing through their roofs half-standing next to rows of giant long-armed turbines turning lazily in the wind.

Moments that helped me understand that perhaps the Irish propensity for music and drink and storytelling might have more than a little to do with the weather, a hard history, and sheltering together in small houses with tiny windows.

The endpoint of my journey – the family home of my daughter’s Irish partner – was like a warm embrace. The craic was 90 per cent and the noise was serious. Read more at www.greyurbanist.com