More Medals for Martinborough

A few years back Amanda and Lindsey Goodman bought two goats to provide milk for their children, who were lactose-intolerant.   Now that’s grown to a herd of 250 on their farm south of Martinborough, where they produce Drunken Nanny milk and cheese.  If you are a fan you won’t be surprised to hear they’ve just won five medals at the 2020 New Zealand Specialist Cheese Association Awards.  They also won the Supreme Champion’s Award in the Boutique Cheese Producers section.

  Amanda says, “In the past these awards were dominated by Fonterra but new categories that recognise different style and size of operation have made it easier for producers like us whose goats live and are milked on the property and where the cheese is made in-house.  It is great to see goat cheeses are winning more and more prizes these days.”  … Continue Reading

News from First Church

Zooming through the Lock-down!   

From the time of the Corona Virus lock-down at level 4 at the end of March, all church services at the church were cancelled but First Church Martinborough was able to join up with members of Masterton XplorationNZ creating services together using the Zoom online link. 

Many enjoyed this novel experience and appreciated the efforts of our Ministers and team which helped them feel connected during the 10 week lock-down, and enabled us to celebrate Easter and Anzac Day in particular with thoughtful words and music.  … Continue Reading

Maree’s musings

CLUSTERS … GETTING TOGETHER

 Some time ago, which feels like in a former life now, my musings were focussed on how we all like to collect things together in groups. We have an innate desire to organise stuff and create collective names for the various conglomerations we have amassed.  Well, this went viral during the  long lockdown of days (there you go) with a resulting invention of a whole new language. Well, not quite, but it did create a gamut of unfamiliar terms becoming the words on everybody’s lips. Providing you could find someone to talk to, that is.

For starters, bubbles used to be blown up and burst; instead they were keeping us confined. Talking of clusters became the height of fashion. In past times, a flattening of curves involved going on a diet, instead it became about a crunching of numbers so our Ash, who became NZ’s current choice of poster boys, could organise the tracing of graphs; which also required a tracing of contacts and one’s journeys into the world beyond the bubble. The average mortal’s knowledge of algebra went exponential at the same time, it seems. The division of time, which was once B.C. and A.D., became B.C. followed by A.C. After Co-vid, that is. Bring it on!  … Continue Reading

Relativity

BY JOHN ANSELL

Though good’s now a relative construct

And bad’s much too hard to enforce,

Unchanged is the meaning of Ethics.*

*A county in England, of course.