Breaking it down

The señor and I have returned from a few days’ break in Wellington, following which we are fairly broke, quite sleepy and not too hungover. Fusing two styles of taking a holiday is quite a social experiment, whose results have left us reasonably satisfied, although I suspect the señor would match my contention that we could have cast our net wider with the assertion that we ate too much and didn’t drink enough. His wilfully calm amity is brake to my frenetic, nervy planning, and the two seem to hold each other in civilised check. Hurrah for us, then.

Gender Confusion

The señor likes to wear a Hawaiian shirt with a black suit a few times a week, a distinctive, if not entirely unique, combination that seemed to throw the whole of Wellington into gender confusion. The shuttle driver at the airport greeted us with “hello ladies; where would you like to go today?” and the cocktail waiter at Juniper similarly asked the hypothetical ladies what they would like to drink. Now the señor is not a particularly diminutive gentleman, and is blessed, I should add, with an absence of man-boobs, so we could only assume that his shirt, suit and shaggy-haired combination together conformed to the service industries’ Imaginary Lesbian Anima. This was, as you can imagine, good for a laugh, and not, the señor told me, the first time it’s happened

What I minded further, however, was the continual smirking at us as we went about our business: it seems that, upon thinking it sees a lesbian couple, the general public must smirk its heterosexual face off. This was just a taste, I imagine, of what my lesbian friends put up with each day, and even if one gets used to it that doesn’t mean it’s okay. One doesn’t smirk at other less common social pairings, so why this one? The answers I can posit, I do not like.

Aniwaniwa

We had time to see the City Gallery exhibitions, among which I particularly liked Aniwaniwa by Brett Graham and Rachael Rakena, “a collection of wakahuia with internal projections and sound components suspended from the ceiling; large carved sculptures holding memories of a place now submerged underwater”, according to the exhibition notes. To see the images of fire, foundation and twentieth-century whanau swimming through the past, we lay on our backs on the mats provided, a different kind of sensory submersion. The elegiac layering of things past under the waters of Lake Karapiro lapped over what is for me a primary image, the self floating beneath the waters’ surface, sometimes visible, sometimes submerged. In this exhibition, it was a collective, family self:

[Graham's] father’s childhood village of Horahora had been flooded with the creation of the hydroelectric power station at Karapiro in 1947. Significantly, many of the waahi tapu, or sacred sites of Ngati Koroki Kahukura were also lost at that time. (exhibition notes)

In the Wairarapa

Our visit gave us time to catch up with Betty’s family, whom I’d last seen at the end of 2005 when her husband moved north to Greytown after her death. We drove over the hill in our rental car (which was got, hassle-free, from this establishment whose Wellington manager is new) and spent an hour or so wandering around Greytown, strange jewel of the southern Wairarapa, with its shops for knicknacks and antiques, its historic tree and a takeway shop whose title—Pronto—was partly obscured by a cabbage tree, leading us to make up an alternative history for its imaginary owner, Ronald To. Our transplanted host, now ninety years old, did not disappoint in his detailed narrative of life, war and work between 1937 and 1953, a reconstruction of the war- and post-war British Cabinet seen from within the Civil Service. Some of his professional actions put the Atomic Energy in place for which Bob Marley could later enjoin us to have no fear.

From Greytown we travelled in convoy with our second host for the day, Betty’s daughter, via Martinborough and across to the lake shore not far from the cape, where we spent a lovely evening in their beautiful family home-on-the-hill, in company of hosts, dog and cat. Buck the dog is Arthur’s father, now twelve-and-a-half and stately with it, but king of all he surveys as ever. There was much for all people present to talk about in the course of the evening, and a reminder for me of the worth of getting out of town and off the internet once in a while: talk of politics and government mediated through different channels than these are refreshing and even restorative.

Sanctuary

Another fruitful outing was with Stephen and Hannah, to the wildlife sanctuary at Karori. Our twofold hopes for sightings were rewarded. We saw tuatara as Deborah described them in an earlier comment, “hanging around and being”, with the distinction that it is mating season, so that the males’ crests unfurled down their necks and backs (much as the tuis, above us, fluffed up their feathers in combative masculinity). Each tuatara had further decoration on its neck: the coloured beads by which it is identified. On Stephens Island in the 1970s, explained one of the staff, the main means of identification had been to lop off a selected toe, but this has thankfully been discontinued. The age of Henry was also called into question by the staff member, who explained that it was previously thought that a tuatara’s age could be told by its size, but that this is no longer current thinking. Since Henry was only found in 1978, he may not be the impressive triple-digits in years that his press gives him.

Our second, Stephen-led sighting was even more exciting: kakas in the trees, coming into the feeding stations to dine. Their dun colouring when their wings were folded belied the flare of red revealed by wings suddenly opening, and only the most stern-minded zoologist would be able to resist inferring a cheeky look in their eyes. Beneath two separate feeding stations waited a parasitic duck, who took up the crumbs and caught the droplets that the kakas’ feeding dislodged. When idle, it nipped at visitors’ toes with existential annoyance: why were we not made of cake? Our party could not decide if we had seen the same duck in two different locations, or two of a freeloading posse.

Stephen and Kathy graciously had us for dinner at their particular home-on-a-hill, where we watched the planes arriving and leaving below us and enjoyed the novelty of being other than on the flat. We were fed a faultless meal, assembled on the spot, including home-made bread. Hannah lasted a long while alongside the interstices of grown-up conversation, reminding me much of my own efforts at her age to stay abreast of current adult thought. How strange, in the interim, to have changed sides, but there it is.

Passing Muster

One of the activities that slides along the fun-stressful axis in a relationship is meeting each other’s friends. It seems a more highly-concentrated version of the process of meeting anyone’s friends, in which the potential payoffs are high but so are the emotional stakes more generally. Señor Mojito has stayed a patient course in making my friends his acquaintances, and this week the reverse was my turn. We spent Friday evening with one whom I might best call Harvest Golightly, synthesising the señor’s nickname for her with the fact we share the same name. Sweet, smart and funny, she was good company with whom to consume beer at Southern Cross and later led us to the narrow cavern of Mighty Mighty. There was a minor queue at the door, at which the young men behind us declared the bar to have turned mainstream and vowed never to return. Inside there was the full range of faces one finds in a noisy bar: the lively friends, the reflective patrons, the heartbroken brooders. It was, as ever, a place, a happening, and yet the company of the señor insulated me from the worst of the mood swings taking place beyond our table.

On Saturday we saw the second of our mini-binge on movies at the Embassy, whose grand spaces and tender refurbishments gave me the rare opportunity of seeing a film without feeling nauseated, not by the content but by the onslaught of sound and light in a more typically small space. I reflected, too late, that I could happily have passed a whole week in the theatre, watching movies good, bad and indifferent without complaint. There was just time before flying home to enjoy a coffee with Faith, whose dramatic but not limb-threatening injury while on a recent tramping jag has healed okay, and to measure the university life against life in the public service once more. I do not know of any in the public sector who takes work easily: those straw bureaucrats whom the present opposition currently loves to tear down are outside my network, if indeed they exist. (Simon Bidwell has an analysis of the bureaucratic slur that I think more people should read.)

Back in Harness

A week’s leave means I am a week behind with my work, and in truth I do not quite know how I am going to catch up on my marking. I have four more weeks of brain-bending intensity with which to contend, although I think I am rather better equipped to handle them than the previous four now that I know my students and things are more perceptibly a-swing. I am blessed with a large, lively and dedicated literary studies class which I hope will stay the course, along with a focused, savvy cohort of Japanese exchange students and my usual panoply (or pot-pourri if you prefer) of international students doing preparation for arts. Of my Wisconsonians I will reserve narrative until my tenure with them is over; suffice to say it was foolish to take on a new programme, with new students and new lectures, during my busiest time of year.

A break has brought me back to myself and to the señor by extension, who has seen me variously stressed and disconsolate by day’s end this last month or two. I am going to experiment with taking more Paroxetine, with my GP’s blessing, to offset the possibility of unhappy return. There is a general deadening of the senses’ extent to pay for with this, but it suggests itself, at present, as a reasonable sort of price to pay for the core settling, the mind’s silence, that comes with it. I don’t doubt that this effect is a placebo in part, but I am not one to sneer at a good placebo. (A bad placebo, on the other hand, deserves all the ridicule it can get, as with Stephen’s definition of homeopathic bioterrorism: pour orange juice into the reservoirs and give everyone scurvy.)

Tagged as: depression, dogs, holiday, wairarapa, wellington