Deciding to be positive and the things Denise Irvine liked this month

Denise Irvine is a freelance journalist and food writer in Hamilton and a regular contributor to the Waikato Times.

Sandi Toksvig was on the radio last Saturday morning, a voice of warmth and cheerfulness in the house as she spoke to Radio New Zealand presenter Kim Hill on an otherwise gloomy and wintry day.

The multi-talented Toksvig is a Danish-British writer, comedian and presenter who is known, among other things, for hosting the BBC television quiz show QI and as a former co-presenter of The Great British Bake Off. She also leads The Great Tiny Design Challenge, now showing on TVNZ 1, and is politically active in Britain as a co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party. In December, she will be touring New Zealand in a play she has written called Next Slide Please. The show will apparently be exploring reasons to be cheerful after months of Covid pandemic gloom.

Toksvig and Hill scoured several topics on Saturday, including Toksvig’s recovery from a recent Covid attack, the meanness of misogyny, the disorder at number 10 Downing Stthe American disaster of Roe v Wade is destroyed, The reprehensible treatment of asylum seekers in Britainand the benefits of knitting with dog hair. Hill confessed that she had always wanted to knit a cardigan from her dog.

READ MORE:
* The Antidote: Five Fun Things to Read About Today, July 27
* ‘I cried every day’: a German hiker’s ‘life-changing’ journey on the Te Araroa Trail
* Hamilton section of Waikato Expressway open to traffic

The highlight — dog hair knitting revelations aside — was Toksvig’s optimistic view of this currently besieged world. She said curtly that she remained an optimist. “You should decides to be positiveshe said. “I believe there are great people and the next generation is great and full of great activists. We have to deal with that, we have to be positive.”

I loved her tolerance and good humor and based on this I made an inventory of things I liked this month. Not an unexpected exercise, I think, for someone often labeled as relentlessly optimistic, but it’s always worth doing.

First up was a social media post from Lisa Quarrie, co-owner of Hayes Common Eatery, who had issued an SOS for help in the kitchen of her Hamilton restaurant as Covid and other illnesses continue to bite into staff rosters. Quarrie’s post praised the power of community connections. She said just when they didn’t know how to get through, some former employees jumped on board, everyone was putting in huge hours, and some were doing extra shifts in addition to their day job.

“You build great relationships in the hospo community,” she said, “these guys are superstars and this support makes everyone happy. We are so grateful.”

Great acts of kindness are important, and so are small acts. Recently I found a bag of fragrant, juicy limes on my doorstep. It took me a while to figure out who left them there, and they brighten up a lot of meals now. There’s also a treat on my back door right now, the Hamilton East version of Warbirds of Wanaka as squads of the ostentatious air shows between the kahikatea, rata, and kauri.

Credit to here the Hamilton Halo projectlaunched in 2007 by Waikato Regional Council, which aims to make the city a more attractive and welcoming place for native birds to reside, feed and breed.

From where I sit it works brilliantly.

July is an important birthday in our family and the two notables were a 99th (uncle) and a 21st (grandniece). The uncle, who lives independently, was in good shape for a four-generation lunch, and he’s now looking forward to a message from Queen Elizabeth before his 100th birthday. The 21st was a bigger event, with beautiful young women and men, and speeches and gifts and a few stories and tears. And family at the heart of both celebrations.

I drove home from Cambridge after the 21st the new Hamilton section of the Waikato Expressway and it was an adventure to decide which of the new city corridors to take. Same on the Auckland trip for the 99th. the highway is another great thing to like this month.

So did our family’s beach construction team, which suffered a mini-flood and internal bleeding. I’ve never seen the “invisible older woman” phenomenon of these construction workers looking over my shoulder when they talk to me, as if they’re waiting for the man of the house miraculously to appear and take over. I’ve had quite a few of these over the years. The bach builders look me in the eye and solve problems seamlessly. I like them.

Staying in the bach right now is like sleeping in a fridge. The best advice I had on this was to buy a hot water bottle ($12) from Countdown, and it ranks high on the positive index. For $12, you even get a fluffy cover. I had forgotten how effective this low-tech device can be; and wholeheartedly recommend sitting down with a HWB.

And a good book: Sandi Toksvig spoke about the comfort of books in her interview with Kim Hill. She said if you’re in doubt about things, “sit down with a book and you’ll feel better”.

So I’ll pass on a few titles, Australian author Lisa Behrendt’s gripping and powerful After Story, and Bonnie Garmus’ revenge comedy Lessons in Chemistry. Both are guaranteed to take you to another time and place.

By my count, that’s eight things to love: the hospitality, limes, tūī, family birthdays, the new section of the highway, non-age builders, hot water bottles, and a good book. Let’s make those nine, with Toksvig and Hill’s delightful interview (available online). I’m definitely thinking a 10th.