I got kidnapped ... it was great

So I was planning to let off a borer bomb and had to leave the house. Wondering what I would do, there wasa knock on the door and Dr L is there. I make hima cup of Jasmine tea as he asks polite whether he was interrupting anything .... Well technically I hadn't quite opened the books and started annotating but I shall say that he was my person of porlock anyway. So I released the fumes at least I think I did, there doesn't seem to be a fumy smell s ... ut I am hoping and jumped int he car. Taking the back roads we drove to Wanganui, small river city where there is an elevator that goes up the middle of a hill ... inside the hill ... don't ask me why ... and Dr L wanted to do that ... again don't ask me why.

On the Mt Biggs road, where there is not even a whiff of elevation we stopped at a memorial to the first settlers of 1840 ... this area was not settled till the 1850s as they had to chop down a lot of trees to get here. Below the centennial monument to these imagined settlers was another momunent which turned out to be a monument to the monument erected fifty yeards after the initial one. Why celebrate a monument with a monument? Actually I can answer that one. In 1990 the country celebrated the sequicentennial .... the 150th anniversiary of its founding. Incidently the same year that I left the country, if I was paranoid I might imagine they were celebrating ... we will not entertain that thought any longer ....

This stop turned out to be a ... and I know it has a fancy name when the entire point? meaning? technique of the novel is revealed in the opening sentence .... though of course you don't know it at the time ... anyway one of those things. We ended up looking at a great number of memorial and historical items. We noticed however settlers not withstanding the middle of the 20c saw a change in method of memorialising the dead. The dead of the first world war you know, the great war, the war to end all wars, were lest we forgetted in phallic marble and concrete rising from the ground where we could imagine they were buried. Those remembered from WWII however ushered in a whole new practical way of remembering of the dead in the building of memorial halls up and down the country. Every village, every hamlet has a hall falling forgotten like the heroes and heroines they strive to remind us of. The Ohakea war memorial hall within coo-ee of the country's biggest airforce base, seems on the verge ofsubsiding into the cornfields it backs on to.

So on we go and on we go as the scenery begins to nclude the rolling hills of the rangitikei and we are almost there at Wanga-Vegas when we see the sign for Ratana Pa. Dr L had not been there before and as he is a lecturer in the history of our country with a special interest in its religious history we decided to rectify the situation.

Ratana Pa was the site of the last great religious movement of the Maori, when Ratana, in the nineteen twenties discovered that he had become the mouthpiece of God and a healer who would restore justice and mana to, and the treaty (see above) /rights of his people. He founded his own religion and the numbers of adherents at its heydey was around 40 000. Like any good religion they developed a their architectural asthetic and sets of symbols. The temple is still used and loving looked after by the followers who live at Ratana pa. Nearby is whaty appears to be the pa's town hall with the same twin dome motif with paintings and photos of Ratana and his sons. In front of them on the porch roof are 5 models ships. 3 are founders canoes said in Maori history to have brought the MAori here from their homeland Hawaiiki and the Endeavour Capt Cook's ship, and the Heemkerk, Abel Tasman's ship.
It was amazing to be there.

Oh my god I am being kidnapped again for another driving lesson ... more later