The less said about my excessive speaking of it, the better.
I love reading it.
I love how reading can be a distraction from other things.
Saturday was a case in point.
In the midst of wrestling a climbing rose in its death throes out of its pot beside the deck to replace it with a live one, I paused for a cuppa.
The whole muddy mess I had created made me a bit miserable, not just because trying to remove a stubbornly stuck root from the bottom of the pot required brute force I lacked.
The plant had been so desperate for some love and attention it had burrowed into the edge of the concrete.
The rose, with its small creamy blooms, had survived more than 25 years despite my sporadic attention/neglect.
In its best years it flowered profusely throughout summer, although it never had the fragrance I had hoped for.
Because it had been a present from my late husband, I felt sad and a tad guilty about its demise so near the anniversary of his death.
The tea break was a good opportunity to whizz through the final 100 pages of a Donal Ryan novel.
Satisfied with an ending which was more hopeful than I might have expected, I returned to the mud pile with renewed vigour.
My love of reading means I foist books on other people, sometimes the same book more than once. Embarrassing.
My sons have endured gifts of books I think they would like.
I suspect often they remain unread.
I am not always brave enough to ask.
Last week I gave an early birthday present to one of them — A Marriage At Sea by Sophie Elmhirst.
It retells the story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, an English couple who wanted to break free of the strictures of 1960s city living by sailing to a new life in New Zealand.
They set off in 1972.
However, they never got as far as New Zealand because in March 1973 a sperm whale struck their boat and they had to abandon ship for a life raft and a dinghy.
They spent 118 days adrift in the Pacific Ocean before being rescued.
The book is a fascinating account both of their survival and an unusual marriage.
As Elmhirst puts it, "for what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?".
I have told my son not to Google anything about the couple until he has finished the book.
I want him to revel in the reading.
Whether he will follow such advice any more than my other missives is anybody’s guess.
My attempts to nudge family members towards poetry have not been successful.
To me it is odd that people turn to poetry for comfort or insight at funerals or weddings but see no value in it in day-to-day life, often saying they don’t get it.
I don’t always get it either, but when I find a poem that speaks to me, I savour it and return to it.
Sometimes, lines stick in my head.
Because I love writing English, the only language I am almost fluent in (not counting Teeline shorthand), sometimes I am guilty of envy of other people’s lines.
And so it was last week when someone online described New Zealand First leader Winston Peters as "going full pizza cutter; all edge and no point".
So apt. Last week he wasted the time of Parliament with a worthless Bill to make the English language an official language of New Zealand.
Unlike our two languages conferred official status, New Zealand sign and te reo Māori, English has not been under threat in this country.
Nor, as far as I know, has any child been punished for merely using it.
This Bill is part of his party’s coalition agreement with National — another dim-witted concession from the major party.
Did nobody grasp it would be an excuse for more Māori language bashing from Mr Peters who continued his ranting against the use of the word Aotearoa in the House last week, when the Speaker had ruled on this nonsense last March.
Mr Peters would have us believe many people are wandering about the countryside dangerously lost and confused by any use of te reo Māori.
He certainly sounded confused in his rambling speech in the House, which included calling an opposition member a pinko and a communist and something incomprehensible about chandeliers and President Khrushchev.
I would like to think if I develop such tendencies, the offspring will not hesitate to tell me when I have gone full pizza cutter.
Doing a Winston, I will remind those virtue-signalling wokesters I always cut pizzas with scissors.
It won’t help.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
