“I’m going to reinvent myself as a miniaturist.”
The direction of Ruth’s new hobby took an interesting turn when her dinosaur-obsessed six-year-old daughter got involved.
When I was a little child in Invercargill, there was a gorgeous public library in a Gothic stone building, and someone there liked little things. In a glass case was perhaps the most incongruous diorama ever to grace a children’s library: a bare field with a few brooding pine trees in the corners, through which a tiny brass band marched endlessly in rectangular formation. Red coats, tall bearskin hats, legs striding forward. To where? Towards an audience? Or, with a kindness and mercy usually unknown to brass bands, away from an audience?
It was melancholy and slightly threatening in a way that all children’s content was in the…
