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Comment: At the Robert Lord cottage

At the Robert Lord cottage

Novelist and memoirist Elspeth Sandys reflects on her recent residency

I am a cottage-phile. The very word cottage starts bells chiming in my head, church bells probably, since the words that come to me are Robert Browning’s “God’s in his heaven! –/ All’s right with the world”. The cottage I see in my mind has wisteria trailing over the walls, shutters on the windows, a cosy living-room with an open fireplace, a generous kitchen with an aga, a small courtyard garden, a dog, a cat … . When I think of this place, and put myself in it, I feel nothing can go wrong in my life. I am living simply, in harmony with Nature. I can pay the bills, look the neighbours in the eye, even feel a slight sense of superiority because of my total lack of interest in acquiring anything larger. Castles, palaces, manor houses, the mansions of the wealthy – these are for visiting as a tourist, or gawping at as a stunned observer, not for living in.

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Lordania revisited, Laurie Atkinson

Three Plays  Robert Lord (Phillip Mann ed) Playmarket, $30.00, ISBN 9780908607464 The playwright Robert Lord died in Dunedin on January 7th, 1992. His last play, Joyful and Triumphant, was premiered seven weeks later at Circa Theatre on February 20th as

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Staging the past, Phillip Mann

Passing Through and other Plays Mervyn Thompson, Hazard Press, Christchurch, $29.95 Daughters of Heaven Michelanne Forster, New Zealand Playscripts, Victoria University Press 1992, $12.95 Joyful and Triumphant Robert Lord, New Zealand Playscripts, Victoria University Press, $14.95 In a recent book

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