I'm going to be writing an opinion column for Metro magazine.

Fantastic! Congratulations.

I went for a walk and I felt better

Well yes ... but it was 4 years after the walk. After my father died I walked over a significant chunk of central Auckland ... it wasn't the solution but I got a bit fitter.

I'm one of those people who loves cemeteries. I used to skip the Morning Whiskey at my in-law's place

Oh yes, cemeteries. Lovely pla....wait, what?

Fantastic! Congratulations.

Very much what she said.

For what it's worth, when going through a particularly bad period of seasonal self-loathing, social networking is not always the best medicine. It also requires?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPmbT5XC-q0

Jolisa wrote:

... when I lived in Ithaca, New York, where the... daylight is brutally short.

It takes an amateur astronomer to know this, but actually the absolute latitude of Ithaca is lower than?

I was reminded of this tremendous painting. The online version hardly does justice to the huge original in which you can practically see the wind blowing through the long grass.

...apparently inspired by the Mortuary Chapel* in the Barbadoes Street Cemetery in Chch – Sutton Rulez!

*no longer there...

Most weirdly of all, loofahs were said to be the secret weapon against seasonal depression. A vigorous scrub all over in a hot bath spiked with baby oil was the prescription

Curious, I looked up the winter bathing section of my American-published Book of the Bath:

It is a good?

Yes, I understand the draw of cemeteries. The last one I had a good wander around was where my father was buried, we?

Raymond A. Francis – not wrong ("if anyone still thinks the rural life is idyllic..."): I've never quite understood why anyone would. It *can* be immensely satsifying – but an idyll?

And, I guess it wasnt Uncle Gordon who died?

I'm going to be writing an opinion column for Metro magazine.

Good old Auckland Necro. Trust some of that cemetery ambience will permeate your piece.

Heh! Depends on the day- sometimes those coasts are the livliest places on earth-

And Emma – good to know you have a column in a significant publication (y'know, bit less than PAS, bit more than the SW Community Contact) but it?

but hearing words like this
(just on the RNZ news):
"a solar powered space yacht
has just set sail for Venus"
sure?

Popliteal Fossa!

Popliteal Fossa!

Nooooo.... and the bums don't follow ya round the room either I suppose – I'll never trust Peter Cook & Dudley Moore again...
Sadly all I know comes from either them or Carl Barks Disney comics and Tintin...

It has natural melatonin in it, which sounds like it may be of help to you.

Hey Hannah. For a while I was taking a melatonin supplement to deal with my Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, and it was really helpful – with mood too, because I woke up feeling awake.?

Popliteal Fossa!

The very spot where the hapless rugby-playing John Bull, of Will Self's Bull: A Farce, mysteriously develops a vagina, which excites the passions of the doctor from whom he seeks help.

the winter days are brutally shorter in Christchurch than Ithaca.

So you can multiply your Ithaca SAD by about 102 per cent to reach how lousy poor Emma is feeling...

Ouch. That is indeed brutal. (Also, dude: epic retroactive fail on persuading us that it would have been a good?

I am pro-cemetery. One of my favourites contains the remains of a few relatives and is here. Windy and gorgeous (if the sun's out).

I recall my Chch winters as exhilarating. The sky was enormous and mostly blue, and the air was dry and thus, miraculously, so was I.

And that's how it should be, how it is in my mind when I think about Canterbury winters, and surely how it usually is. Cold,?

And, in your piece, I loved this:

On a rise (possibly a lesson learned about dead bodies and high water tables from the Barbadoes St cemetery), it's just huge crumbling gothic headstones to the horizon in every direction. Marble columns thicker than my thighs lie?

When I was about 11 we spent a year in Salem, Connecticut (about 42 degrees N to Christchurch's 42 S :). There was a walk we sometimes took: down a lane, alonside a stone wall; over a stile, and then down a path through a forest.?

another Google Earth overlay
– Gogol Earth so we can perceive the
fantastical that coexists...

Or we could call it Orbis Tertius :)

Rob, as Thomas Gray* said"
"Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep."

A passing similarity there to Smif-n-Wessun's
Bucktown :

__Another murderer, just another prankster
Rude?

Also, am wondering what took you to Salem CT... it's an out-of-the-way sort of place. The sort of place where [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem,_Connecticut|pirates hide?

I don't seem to have the same connection with the past – no idea where other than immediate forebears have had their ashes scattered or bodies interred, and no real itch to find out.

Oddly, I was born hundreds of miles from my family's traditional territory, but since then our?

Oddly, I was born hundreds of miles from my family's traditional territory, but since then our habitual wanderings after jobs and education and houses have brought me to a point where I now live three blocks from the house where my great-grandfather lived 160 years ago . . .

That's?

My great-great-granny lived in Ferry Road (not at the Holy Smoke address), and married her second husband in a civil ceremony in the front parlour in 1862.

She wasn't Caroline Webb née Adams, was she? Because that would be weird.

I'm not a genealogist, but that's a group that understands the fascination of cemeteries.

In that respect, the cemetery in Waipu is quite fascinating – it's both a graveyard and a genealogical map.

...where my great-grandfather lived 160 years ago, which is now the Holy Smoke restaurant in Ferry Road.

I had lunch there last sunday
and it was very good...

She wasn't Caroline Webb née Adams, was she? Because that would be weird.

Elizabeth Overend, later Moss, née Smith, as it happens. Disappointingly her headstone's vanished from Woolston cemetery. I take some comfort from Ferry Road being long enough, and Christchurch large enough, for a whole heap of things to?

And that's how it should be, how it is in my mind when I think about Canterbury winters, and surely how it usually is. Cold, yes, but sharply, almost painfully clear. And that's fine, I don't mind the kind of bright cold you can feel on your eyeballs.

After a?

The Smiths . . .

Not your average genealogist's favorite band. Like the Joneses, Taylors, and, I'm sorry to say, the Browns, you can get stuck forever sorting who is and who isn't who.

These days, I pretty much only go to Ashvegas to visit the dead relatives.

Heh, so we were driving down the road a bit back, and Karl was puzzled as to why there were so many cars outside the crematorium. I said, "Because it's Mothers' Day." He was even more?

I know I have?

It takes an amateur astronomer to know this, but actually the absolute latitude of Ithaca is lower than Christchurch.

In other words, the winter days are brutally shorter in Christchurch than Ithaca.

So you can multiply your Ithaca SAD by about 102 per cent to reach how lousy poor Emma?