Friday December 11--a David brief posting

This picture shows the side of our apartment building and the small, wooden Anglican church of St. Barnabas that stands beside it. We drive down between the church and the building to park the car and go up to the apartment. The apartment building was put up in the 'sixties and certainly has no claim to architectural merit. Indeed, viewed from afar, I regard it as something of an eyesore on this promontory.

The church was built in 1899. It is wooden, with what seems like a corrugated iron roof, although so much of that form of roofing is used here in New Zealand that I expect that what was originally corrugated iron has since been replaced by corrugated aluminium. The interior is very attractive, and the church--unlike many British churches--stands open and unattended all day.

(keep scrolloing down--there is more)

This is another view of the church. (Actually, on my final run through, I now think it is the same as the first picture, but it is too late to put the other one in--we have to eat and go to the theatre)

Our apartment overlooks a school--Roseneath school; and as the following picture shows, it has been there since before the First World War. From our perspective now, the inscription is very sad: they fought for "God, King, and Country." A whole social history could be formulated around those words. What on earth prompted people to believe they were fighting for God? 'King' is slightly more understandable--though would you ever hear a soldier in Afghanistan these days claim he (or indeed she) was fighting for the Queen? And even 'country' is odd--after all, Kaiser Wilhelm never represented the slightest threat to these antipodean islands

And the next picture shows a list of those who "Died On the Field of Honour." That is hardly the way we think now about the ghastly battlefields of the First World War, or the total cock-up that was Gallipoli, which might well have accounted for the deaths of these men.

My brief post is over--I am still not at all at ease with placing the pictures where I want them.