The Lower Hutt Stroke Club's year began with a welcome back to all our regulars and a very warm welcome to those new members who were just joining. After the welcomes we had a very interesting talk by an representative from Sigma, an assessment and provision of home care organisation. Our members found this very interesting and they asked many pertinent questions pertaining to their particular situation.

Two weeks later a well known television reporter of sports events, Keith Quinn, gave us a very interesting account of his experiences of broadcasting events at the Athens Olympic Games. He speaks to us every year and he is very entertaining. This time he told us the very good, if not cramped, conditions he and the rest of the TV team were accommodated in and how the commentaries were sent back to us in New Zealand. How different from the early days of radio and TV when it was some days before we received the reports on our athletes.

Earlier in February Enid and I travelled to the South Island for two reasons - one to see our niece and her husband who were making their two yearly trip to New Zealand (they live in Edinburgh) and the other to travel on the Taieri George Railway. This railway was originally built though the very steep gorge from the city of Dunedin to Middlemarch, Ranfurly, Omakau and Alexandra to Cromwell. The route was cosen through the Taieri Gorge. Nowadays the train ride is a wonderful tourist attraction to Middlemarch. The original railway was demolished from Middlemarch but the route still remains and is used by mountain cyclists and trampers.

Enid and I boarded the ancient at 9.30am on a beautiful sunny day. It is a very old but comfortable train which we boarded at Dunedin and it wasn't long before we entered the gorge. To say that the views were magnificent is an understatement. Even the many photographs we took do not do justice to what we saw. The route went over a few very deep gorges and at one of these the train stopped to allow passengers to walk across and take photographs. We arrived at Middlemarch about 12 noon and we stopped their for 1 hour to allow a small amount of time for sightseeing. We also were able to enjoy a sausage sizzle provided by the Lions Club. We returned to Dunedin having had a most enjoyable day.

As we returned north through my old birth town of Timaru to Christchurch it began to rain very hard, so hard in fact that the road was flooded in places and in fact was closed after we had passed - but that is another story. The upshot of the story is that I do not let being a stroke survivor stop me from enjoying life in New Zealand.