The idle pleasures of these days

Among the many themes with which I could clad this year’s experiences is Meeting People from the Internet. The Christmas presence, earlier this week, of Stephen and Kathy, completed a happy trifecta which began with meeting Jo and Lisa in Wellington in February, followed by Heather and of course Fran here, around the end of the first semester.

Bearing in mind Stephen’s history as a North Islander (and allowing for cultural changes wrought by Kathy’s transplanting from south to north for the last few years) I took the elevated approach to a night out. We wended our way along the Summit Road from Dyer’s Pass to Mount Pleasant, noodled out to Scarborough for a walk on the promenade at high tide, where the surfers were being thrown against the rocks like hydro-powered lemmings, then drove back into town for dinner at the Dux and a final rendezvous with the dogs at home (“what,” said Stephen, “if it’s pronounced Soh-burn?”, which has pricked my imagination ever since).

Despite my babbling for most of the evening directly out that strange sector of the mind from which unshaped prose comes, and the reversion therefore to my undergraduate habit of interrupting my guests, a lot, as the conversation got really interesting, I hope that a good time was had by all.

Señor Mojito and I were talking earlier in the morning about how the practice of meeting people from the internet has begun to change in the minds of the general population from a dubious practice akin to meeting people out of the personals section of the classifieds to something a bit less socially marginal. Indeed, my online friends now form a tangible group in my social world, much as, I imagine, penfriends might have for my epistolary forebears. With the rapidity of blog-borne communication, the process both of shaping ourselves editorially and engaging with the editorial self-shapings of others much speeds up our narrative interlinkings. The Facebook friend wheel is merely a symbol of a process that has already taken place through the words themselves.

That such face-to-face meetings often take place on holiday, when time spent with our other networks of family and offline friends also undergoes seasonal shaping and intensifying, only makes such meetings more pleasant. I hope in the coming year I can raise my coffee cup, or pint glass, to more of you.

Martha sent out a Christmas challenge to her readers to describe their Christmas dinners. The harvestparents, while not vegetarian as I am, eat fairly restricted diets, so we stick to the summer staples of salads (green, coleslaw, egg, macaroni, tomato, beetroot) and cold meats for our festival comestibles, with pavlova on Christmas Day and home-cooked Christmas Pudding (adapted from my late grandmother’s volume How to get the most out of your war rations) the next. Since the road trip Señor Mojito and I took in November threw us in the path of the Whitestone Cheese Factory, I also ordered one of their reasonably-priced and very delicious cheeseboards, which is still not finished even as the Christmas cake, cherries, fruit mince pies, grapes, cashews and chocolate have gone. This speaks to the quantity and variety of the cheese, and to the collective fear of cheese dreams.

We also had a variety of wines, thanks to the collection that harvestdad amasses during the year by way of his recording contracts (musicians, as we know, tend to give the gift that keeps on drinking to all who help them), and Christmas cocktails with which the señor and I experimented separate of our main dining, which I probably shan’t do again. The effects of brandy I can best class as evil, or perhaps wanton, in a slightly limited sense of that word.

This was, of course, the first Christmas I spent with the señor, who has recently made the acquaintance of the harvestparents. Happy love is a quiet learning curve for me. As a skills-based lifeform, I’ve long banked my self-esteem on the things I can do—the whole writing, talking, helping, charming, taking-care-of-people mélange. To be loved, outside of all these things, for the strange creature that I am, with that love not obliged by guilt or duty or family ties, is a new and at times destabilising experience. We clever girls are angry at heart, wounded and wilful and as defensive as an inky squid. The señor didn’t intend to be romantic when he said, “I’m not after your property”, but to a fortified household, it was the sweetest message in the world.

Harvestdad photographed the señor and I together on Boxing Day, in a series of images that the two of us thought looked nothing like ourselves, as photos tend to do. His eyes are barely visible beneath the full head of hair that tends, in the wrong humidity, to the condition known as “pouffy”, while I look paradoxically chubby and shapeless in a pale green blouse I rarely wear but put on that morning as a salute to the novelty of the season. We are proportionate to each other, in the standard heterosexual way: he taller and serious-faced, I smiling at his shoulder.

Later that evening he went to celebrate his sister’s birthday in the next neighbourhood over, and when I collected him at evening’s end we drove back into Sockburn under a waxing moon, not blood-red but definitely dark orange, looming like a local god over the panelbeaters and warehouses as we reached the top of the overbridge. Love throws such everyday phenomena into new relief, too: the previous morning I had listened to the dawn chorus at the señor’s house, where the trees grow against the windows, and thought it the newest thing in the world.

I am a pluralist; all those years of studying Shakespeare taught me to handle multiple meanings at once. My experiences are not yours, but there ought to be borrowable hope within them.

When we were young we were weary sometimes of our elders croaking about the necessity to love our fellows, etc., but in our turn we come to know that it is the only thing that lasts—if memory lasts too, of course—and the only thing that mitigates the inexplicable punishment, the endless wonder of being alive.

(Miles Franklin to Katherine Susannah Prichard, 5 November 1953, cited in Ferrier, As Good as a Yarn with You, p. 352)

A new year, and I wish you all the best in the world. I made some good resolutions: chief of which was to try to stand on my own feet, and let the rest of the world go by. We shall … keep on plugging, I know.

(Jean Devanny to Miles Franklin, 4 January 1954, op. cit., p.365)

Tagged as: bloggers, Christmas, friends, love, Moon, New Year, socialising, Sockburn