The journey out

When I was an infant in Kowloon, a neighbourhood girl, Kit, used to come over to play. I suddenly thought about those days in the 1970s earlier today. When we left Hong Kong, we had not expected that our earlier residency application would be granted while we were on holiday in New Zealand. Some of […]

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Granddad’s war stories

On this day of remembrance, some thoughts about my paternal grandfather, the last member of my family to see active service (thank God). Like so many veterans, he did have PTSD after World War II. The eastern theatre took him around China and to Malaya and Singapore. He never talked much about his experiences but […]

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No one is an island, not even when on an island

With the dismantling of the US by Lone Skum and others, Mike Masnick wrote in Techdirt: ‘And now we’re watching Musk, Trump, and their allies destroy these foundations. They operate under the dangerous delusion of the “great man” theory of innovation—the false belief that revolutionary changes come solely from lone geniuses, rather than from the […]

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The beauty of not having something

I’ve told the story about not having Noelene Morris’s The Lettering Book as a child, because I knew the NZ$5 was outside my parents’ budget. Ultimately, this was a good thing and it led me to remember and create typeface designs, later becoming the first digital font designer in New Zealand. Another item came to […]

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Heritage

  I’m not sure why the history page about my ancestor, 甄舜河 (Gin Sun Hall), has disappeared from the family association’s page, but for others who are descended from him, here’s his pic from the Internet Archive. He lived in the late 13th century. Also from the Archive was this extract from a 1997 publication […]

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You never know where your interests will take you

A seven-year-old needs to figure this out: what would the Ford Escort Popular Plus be priced at if were assembled in Aotearoa?   Amanda and I were chatting about prodigies. Some young people are amazing, doing uni classes at intermediate or high-school age, or playing piano like Mozart, and while not all of us have […]

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A tribute to Richard Roundtree

With the passing of Richard Roundtree, I feel it only appropriate to repost photos of my childhood Shaft’s Big Score pencil case. My original post where these were featured is here, and today’s Mastodon post here.     I know Richard was also in Roots (remembered it, but way too young to have understood it […]

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When you lose one parent early

This is about as personal as you’re going to ever read on this blog. It’s written for whomever needs to read it now. I felt I had to put it out there. You know who you are. When you lose your mum to cancer at 22, you feel a lot of emotions. Grief, for one. […]

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The Lucire tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II

I wrote the below in Lucire—even though plenty of publications have covered our monarch’s passing, it still felt right to acknowledge it. After all, she had appeared in Lucire a few times.   With the passing of HM Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday UK time, it would be remiss of this magazine to not mark […]

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