After a momentum-breaking four weeks off (for "What’s With That", that is, not me) a blank piece of paper is staring me down, one I have to fill with all sorts of wise and wonderful words.
Anyway, welcome back to "What’s With That". On behalf of the staff of this eminent column, I hope you had a wonderful holiday break and have returned (or remain, if you didn’t go anywhere) refreshed for another great year.
As you kindly ask, I was fortunate to have a family holiday and a breather from work for 10 days, including Christmas in Westport. The weather was sublime on the Coast — about two hours of torrential rain in the early hours of Boxing Day but other than that barely a cloud in the sky.
Wherever you went for your break, you were pretty much guaranteed to have a decent dollop of summer weather. Which reminds me — for those of you who before Christmas were following the discussion about the accuracy of longer-range forecasts, using the metvuw.com site to predict the weather on Christmas Day, didn’t they do well? The maps showing warm northwesterly winds giving way to rain during the day were spot on, from 10 days out. A most impressive effort.
Competition time
We have quite a bit of catching up to do over the next few days. It was great to see your emails and photographs kept rolling in after I’d pulled down the shutters on the WWT office and popped the cat and the milk bottles out. While I cogitate on the best way to address all this correspondence, I want to introduce your first big challenge from this column for 2018.
Yes, it’s the incredible, the breath-taking, the preposterous "What’s With That" summer photo competition.
Fed up with those happy shots of families around a barbecue beneath an impossibly blue sky? Those images of young and old frolicking in an icy river (never mind the cyanobacterial blooms)? The cheeky pictures of pets driving the ride-on mower? If so, this new competition is for you!
Over the next couple of weeks, I would like you to send me your worst summer holiday photographs. The best of the worst will be chosen by an independent panel of judges (me mostly) and published. It also gives me great pleasure to announce there will actually be a prize, supplied by the Otago Daily Times’ ever-resourceful illustrations editor, Stephen Jaquiery. Perhaps I should say, a prize "of sorts".
But here’s the catch. I’m not looking for blurry snaps of, say, the carpet, or black images because you left the lens cap on. It needs to be a photo that had a grain of a great idea about it, but that was inadvertently mucked up by circumstances beyond your control or by general incompetence. It could be something arty or avant-garde that you could not bear to delete. But it needs to be something that will not bring the good name of this column into disrepute.
I’ve included two examples showing my own photographic ineptitude today.
Good luck to you all.
Life of Sir Ian
I’ve had a letter from author Garry O’Connor in Oxfordshire, UK. He has been commissioned to write a book on the life of Sir Ian McKellen and needs help.
"I’m writing to ask if any of your readers might have any anecdotes, eye-witness accounts or comments on Sir Ian when he was filming The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in New Zealand. I would be extremely grateful for any replies," he says.
Mr O’Connor says older readers might know him for his book The Darlings of the Gods, the story of the Laurence Olivier-Vivien Leigh tour of New Zealand and Australia in 1948, which was also made into a television mini-series.
He asks if you could write to him at this address with your gems: The Court House, King’s Sutton, Oxfordshire, OX17 3RQ, United Kingdom.