Recycling days

Wednesday 12 th October Wheelie Bin 

Wednesday 19 th October Glass

Thursday 27 th October Wheelie Bin

Martinborough Business Association

We all love the Martinborough community and know it is a great place to settle, live and work. .But what happens when you are trying to attract a workforce to come and enjoy all of the benefits we do? Well, there’s an almost insurmountable challenge of finding suitable and affordable accommodation either transitional or permanent.

This is not a new problem, but it has resurfaced again with the lifting of many of the Covid-19 measures, borders opening up, the resultant increase in visitor traffic, and the high season.

With the shortage of a work-ready local labour force some of our members have or have attempted to recruit staff from further afield but then run into accommodation availability and affordability problems.

We know Martinborough has a high number of rentals in the weekend rental market ( Air BnB and the like). Some business owners have taken theirs out of this market and made those available for staff rentals. There is a reluctance by owners to go into the longer-term rental market for many (and valid) reasons. … Continue Reading

Maree’s Musings

to COIN a PHRASE …

Being both a writer and a fan of a decent chinwag, I suppose it’s not surprising that I take much delight in the many ways we have of expressing ourselves. When you think about it, turns of phrase frequently slip off one’s tongue like water off a duck’s back, yet people can usually suss out what you’re rabbiting on about. And of course effective communication only works when your listener (read reader – you, in this case) cottons on. I also hope that when it comes to the crunch, that despite not being mindblowing, my musings are right up your alley. Fingers crossed!

I confess, when push comes to shove, writing sometimes resembles heavy lifting. But occasionally there’s those lightbulb moments when putting pen to paper produces the finished article, give or take, in two shakes of a dead lamb’s tail. This centuries old expression bugged me. Live lambs do wag their tails after all, but dead ones? However, there’s a sequel. During the 1940s’ Manhattan Project designed to produce nuclear weapons, scientists involved needed to define tiny units of time for reaction sequences. One chap, maybe a bit of a wag himself, chose ‘shake’ to refer to ten billionths of a second. Golly! That’s considerably faster than the blink of an eye, and totally unlike watching paint dry, which makes  your eyes glaze over. 

It may be a Kiwi thing, but sheep are big news in the metaphor metaverse. It’s not good to pull the wool over someone’s eyes, for example; as then they can’t see the wood for the trees. And what about ‘a bit of a dag’? In fact, this may have been pinched from our Aussie mates, but fair cop. There’s pavlova, togs etc, after all. … Continue Reading

 Inner Wheel South Wairarapa

At Our August dinner meeting at the Offering our guest speaker was

My husband Brent, who spoke about his two trips to Vietnam. The first trip, all expenses paid by the NZ Government, was in December 1968 as part of a reinforcement group to 161 battery. Brent pointed out that all NZ soldiers who fought in Vietnam were volunteers, we did not have conscription like Australia or America.

He spoke about a soldiers life in Vietnam, such things as cigarettes being issued in the rations, and how cheap beer was when they were back in base. He identified that our relationship with the Australians varied but they got on very well with the Americans.

In April 2019 Brent returned to Vietnam. On the way he spent two nights in Singapore. He stayed in a very luxurious establishment, the “Hotel Fort Canning” which it transpired was on the same location as the former British Army HQ where Brent spent ten days on leave before returning home from Vietnam in 1969.

He arrived in Hanoi where the locals were found to be very friendly. They seemed to have a great love of small dogs, which some might have been Corgi’s way back. … Continue Reading