Dumping dumpling-making

Arrowtown book buyer Miranda Spary continues her regular column about her recommendations for a good read and life as she sees it...

Things have been pretty wild around here with those big winds last week at the equinox - I get very nervous with the trees all flapping around and throwing their branches to the ground in a rage.

It must be infuriating for the birds, after all that work building their nests, to see them hurtling earthwards.

It sounds as if Murray Doyle got a taste of the wild life in Canada, too - not wildlife, just a wild wife who has told me that double kayaking up rapids in very cold water is not a recipe for a happy afternoon.

I have done the Funyaks up the Dart, and they do call those the "divorce boats" for a reason.

Who wants to go in a kayak with a man anyway? They always think they do things better than us smart ones.

At the Resort College, dumpling cooking course the other night, the nearly lovely chef from Blanket Bay showed us how to make beautiful little moneybag-type dumplings.

He then ruined everything by saying: "I'm showing you how we make these in a restaurant, but they are a bit too difficult for housewives".

It was fun watching him try to get the words back in his mouth but it was just too late.

Of course, I just had to prove him wrong by making some myself the next day, and it pains me to say he was right.

My dumplings were nasty little gluey heaps - I think I will be dumping the dumpling-making.

The rest of the course was terrific, though.

For someone who is such a hopeless cook, I certainly go on a lot of cooking courses.

If I wrote a book called What I Love about Cricket, you can bet it would be one word long and that word would start with "n".

Surprisingly enough, and as part of my effort to read books that don't fit my normal criteria ("no sport" is a big one) I absolutely loved it.

It's subtitle is One Man's Vain Attempt to Explain Cricket to a Teenager Who Couldn't Give a Toss.

The teenager in question is the slovenly, skateboarding oik who fancies, and is fancied by, author Sandy Balfour's daughter.

Sandy tries to get the oik communicating, and cricket eventually does the trick, but not without a lot of effort.

The book is really about Balfour's love for his daughter.

Somehow it cleverly avoids getting too sentimental, mainly because he has an acute eye for the absurd and makes fun of himself and everything around him constantly.

As I know exactly nothing about cricket, I had to look up some other reviews to see if the cricket bits were interesting or accurate ( I skipped all the descriptions of great and historic matches) and apparently they are sensational.

However, I did enjoy the bits where he describes the atmosphere and the "Lord's murmur" which is the genteel chitchat that goes on at Lord's.

And I was particularly taken with the old fart element of cricket where tradition always holds sway, even when it isn't very sensible any more.

It's the best test of great writing - if an author can write about something utterly pointless and boring and make it not just interesting, but wanting to know a little more, then that is great writing.

I still don't want to go and watch cricket, but I have picked up a little bit of cricket wisdom, and I am a tiny bit interested in a few small aspects now.

Thank you, Julie Orr for all those great suggestions, and I am looking forward to getting stuck into them.

Don't forget to keep me up to date with your latest and greatest reads.