There's something so sweet about finally being able to work next to an open window again ...

It's 1am and the motorway a few kilometres away sounds more like the surf at St Kilda beach in Dunedin; the way that it sounds from my sister's house, and Jacques Brel is a good companion, quietly singing in French.

My day ended well and was full of good people. Ms Baker reminded me that "every delay has its benefit in disguise" ... a quote translated from Arabic, and I do know it's true, the last year has proved it, even if I have the occasional day of forgetting.

I had pulled out a photo of Grandad and propped it up near my laptop, the Grandad who keeps popping up in my posts ... George Gideon Murray of the Otago Mounted Rifles; the man who fought in Gallipoli and then in here in Flanders ... French Flanders perhaps.

I wish he was around now. I have so much to ask him, although he still might not answer. He was cute when I knew him ... short and shuffling, so old and supposedly as deaf as a post. My grandmother was shorter, a little bundle of mischief who suited him. She would confide 'I have to shout before he hears what I say', and Grandad would turn and wink at us kids from someplace behind her back. She suspected he turned off his hearing aids ... I imagine he did.

He was born too early and I was born too late.