heaven - sandflies = old man mountain

No postings for a while as we've been overcome spiritually by rural bliss and metaphorically by convulvulous (sp? gardeners?) and sandflies. We're currently living at Two Rivers Cotttage down the lane from the Yellow House at Old Man Mountain in the South Island. All sounds v story book and it's certainly a place where a Good Life fantasy can take hold. We've moved out of Nadia's house after a lovely week of hanging out with the family and cats and the random people that often turn up magically around teatime.(Nadia is Dan's v good friend and surrogate NZ mother. She is an amazing cook and a homeopath and is a bit of a magnet to anyone within reach with an empty belly or an ailment or emotional trauma).

We've moved to the hut that Dan stayed in when he first came to New Zealand in the 90s. It sits on the bank of the Buller River at the point where it joins the Maruia with old man mountain visible in the distance - the rock formation that gives this place its name. It's the kind of place you can spend a day doing not much, a little gazing around you, a little gentle consideration of your circumstances, a little dozing. Dan made the bed that we're sleeping in and you can see little bits of him here and there in the wall carvings or doodles that decorate the kitchen.

We wake after nine and have tea and homemade granola which gives us the energy to climb the steep hill to the neighbours house and back again. After the walk, Dan wanders off to hammer nails, dig holes or some other manly pursuit and I go back to the hut to write short stories about South London teenagers and The Paris Book (now capitalised, as still troublesome). Some afternoons I help Dan pick fruit so we can earn our keep. We're also painting Nadia's wagon. These activities are punctuated by a series of short breaks for tea and cake and a bit of a chat with whoever has dropped in. Last week we met the oddest American who had come to NZ to meet the trees and was hitching through the Buller Gorge. He'd met some cool trees up north, and was trying to find some wise Maori dudes to talk herbs. He had a push me pull me effect on us - tired hippy expressions, his head full of fetid dredlocks but the bluest eyes. Dinner is at Nadia's and after a film or a fire we stumble down the lane again in the dark to the hut.

One word of caution or complaint, one little blot on this bucolic landscape: sandflies. I have been bitten in every corner of my body, in every place you can be bitten and in places that you surely should not be bitten too. Mosquitos are nothing to these tiny black evil jaws with wings. They like it in the morning before you've had time to find your socks or in the gloom of the evening, they like it just before it rains and just after, they like it by the river, they like it on a farm that's slightly overgrown with convulvolous (sp?), they like foreigners' blood. Cook called them sandfies, although they are really some sort of other nasty fly. His men took one look at the swarms and having forgotten their deet, scarpered from somewhere or other round here, they just got on the boat and went somewhere else. But we're here all the same. They are the reason we will probably not stay here forever, the reason we'll probably come home in July.