Anna Chinn's blog

The annual Dunedin Fringe Festival starts today. As anyone involved will know, preparations can be exhilarating, exhausting, and other words starting with exh. This here's a diary of a week leading up to a Fringe event.

In Hokitika there lived a wild beehive. Uncle Doug, on whose farm the wild beehive lived, claimed it had been in that pine tree for 40 years. He was proud of it: he had attached a sign to the trunk of the tree with an arrow pointing upwards, saying, "Look at 40 year old bee's nest up in the tree."

I went away for the weekend. I hitchhiked for part of the journey and got a ride with a man whose name was not Alvin but let's call him that.

Giants have been in the news again.

In which a subeditor writes an email to the garden writer, and then decides to make a blog entry of it.

Dear Mrs Vine,

I write to blame you.

This comes from under a rainy tarpaulin that fills and spills into an enamel bowl here, plastic buckets there, halfway up a hill near Motueka.

It was night-time. A man stumbled halfway up the steps of the old chief post office and said, "Hey, wanna earn some money?"

"Hm, no thanks," I replied from the shadows.

"You sure?" he said.

"Yes, I am just here to tidy the library."

"So can we expect a Christmassy blog from you, full of festive cheer?" asked website deputy Blair.

First, you participate in a scientific study. You give the scientists a 24-hour urine sample which they will consult for its salt content, and in exchange they give you a $30 New World voucher. Also, paraphernalia: a plastic measuring jug, a plastic funnel, and two plastic bottles, all to be used in the collection of pee.

Hector's dolphins are political animals. Sort of. They themselves, you have to assume, are blithely unaware their death rate far exceeds their birth rate and this is the fault of people and the politics of protection.

There are what, 8000 of them remaining; in the 1970s there were what, 30,000.