A Bonnetful of Bees

We paid a long over due return visit to this circuit today.  I have long recommended that you do not do a full circuit, and that you begin at Mountain Rd Carpark, not the Scenic Drive one.  Take the Old Coach Rd track to just past the ranger’s house, then hang a left onto Goodfellow track.  (The prolonged and steepish walk up a rough Old Coach Rd track is probably the least attractive part of the expedition, but that out of the way, the rest is paradise.)

The Goodfellow track has to be one of my favourite Waitakere tracks.  It has had a major facelift in recent years and apart from a slight trickiness on the second stream crossing, is mostly motorway.

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We turn off SH 16 at Restall Rd, just south of Woodhill School, and drive in to the crossroads, then right down Boundary Rd a kilometre or so to the bikes carpark.

“I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree” – Ogden Nash

Nature Valley. Hmmmmmmmm.

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I’ve written a heap about Woodhill and Rimmers over the years, about my disillusion with the inaction and neglect of those nominally maintaining the walking tracks and so on.  I’m consigning that to a linked history section and revisiting the walks for an up-to-date assessment.

There are two official walking tracks at Woodhill, the Short Loop Track and the Long Loop Track.

I’m going to add a couple more: the Short Short Loop Track and the Long Short Loop Track.

In fact, depending on the use you make of the myriad horse tracks and quad bike tracks and forestry roads, there’s no limit to the routes you can devise. The BMX tracks, though, are totally off limits. Bikes, being silent, ridden by complete lunatics, and considerably faster than pedestrians are bloody dangerous to be around.

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One of the main reasons that this section of the website exists is to draw attention to the utter stupidity of the “one-size-fits-all” attitude that has characterised the thinking, or lack of it, behind the construction of certain areas of New Zealand social policy. Everything from a wolf-whistle to a pack rape has been characterised and dealt to as “sexual abuse”, and everything from a raised eyebrow to bloody murder has been characterised as “family violence”.

For the sake of further economy of thought, the villain has in both cases been characterised as a male in close relationship.

Procrustes the bandit had an iron bed on which his victims were invited to sleep.  Those too tall he cut to size, and those too short he stretched until they fit.  Our Procrustean therapists have had nearly thirty years of fitting people to their pc beds and we need to rethink.

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It’s that time of the year again when meals are determined not by well-thumbed recipe books but by selecting from the flood of vegetables pouring in from the vege garden, and finding ways of making them work together.

What I’ve got at present are Hungarian banana chillies — low-medium heat — Ponsonby Red and Baxters Early Cherry tomatoes — both huge croppers — cutting celery — a strong-flavoured wild version that has been feeding me solidly for about three months now from half a dozen plants, dwarf Purple Tepee beans, and basil bushes growing luxuriantly in the double tyre.

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In the early days of this website it was often hard to find substantive material on the subject of genetic engineering.  Very often it seemed that on both sides, the original reason for the “debate” had been swiftly forgotten and that the fight itself was the main reason for engaging.  PR companies lined up against lifestyle (and lifelong) protestors. Now, the first casualty in any war is generally accurate information. So, we believed we had a part to play in providing information.

In recent years as the public have become more aware and information sites with much better prima facie qualifications than mine have proliferated, I have not written so much, and I have redrawn my website to address simply the major concerns:  What are the advantages and what are the potential dangers in this new area of “science”?

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