Life is busy and heavy with both utility and novelty, but in a manner that borrows all the time and energy that was used, before February, for what seems now to have been easy leisure and creativity. The pleasures of the old life have been marginalised by the duller demands of getting through each day in a city that is itself all margins, no centre.
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Unlike most of the rest of the time, when it comes to earthquakes and being in them I have left little desire to make windows into [wo]men’s souls. We were neither killed nor injured, nor was our home destroyed or damaged, nor did our animals run away, nor did our amenities fail. The massive ground accelerations of which you have heard in the city and the eastern suburbs were no more than a tenth of that size at Ilam, where I was at work at the university. A colleague and I clung to two facing doorways, and I thought as our eyes locked of that zoom shot at the end of Bonnie and Clyde, when the gaze of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty similarly meets, in their case, for the last time.
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As a person from the internet, I am prone to falling down those twin holes of Wikipedia and YouTube, following loosely associated links and passing more time than I intended.
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My father came to Christchurch in the middle 1960s from his home province of Southland, cheerful and friendly but with a lack of social power and mobility that was the general lot of young, single people in this country at that time. As was also the convention of the time, he was befriended by a handful of older colleagues and acquaintances who took an interest in him and made it their business to see that he was getting out and about and not spending too much time alone. One of these was a work colleague whose expression of interest in learning bellringing at the Cathedral, where she went to church, had been declined due to her being a woman. In a forthright manner befitting her heritage and education as an Old Cantabrian, she suggested my father take up the hobby in her stead.
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This baby in a bonnet at a wedding is but tangentially connected to the substance of this post.
The day the baby was six months old, the day on which we headed north to Nelson for a wedding, was also the day on which, seven years earlier, I started these pages. The first posts were a mix of specificity and citations from poetry and pop music. I was living a life that was physically simpler but emotionally a lot more complicated, and I spent the first six months online hashing out that curious mixture of pride, worry and regret that was my slow slide towards thirty. The narratives were peopled by my local friends and I gave them all allusive and largely arch pseudonyms, few of which referred to anything much except the associative linkings of my own whims. Poor Dangermouse particularly disliked his; a random archival tweet this week reminded me that as recently as four years ago he was still demanding I change it (in that case, to a Castilian Ignacio), but I was stubborn, and would not.
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Posterous
On not grumbling
15 May, 2011
in at home,commentatrix,in Aotearoa,teaching & learning,we are family
Life is busy and heavy with both utility and novelty, but in a manner that borrows all the time and energy that was used, before February, for what seems now to have been easy leisure and creativity. The pleasures of the old life have been marginalised by the duller demands of getting through each day in a city that is itself all margins, no centre.
[click to continue…]
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