Category: New Zealand

Things of 2021

Barns1 Comment

Front Page

At The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt

Time stretches and collapses. Some things fade as soon as they happen. Others burn themselves into our vision until we look at them again. Our post-pandemic future seems too far off to imagine, 2025 at least before we can say we’re through it. Three whole years! But our future of climate catastrophe is here, now, and threatening to make our lives unrecognisable by as soon as 2030, certainly by 2050. Then: someone clicks their fingers and it’s already been three months since the last phase of that work project, the one that was going to kick into gear again next quarter, so it’s time to review the plans for implementation. But then, I’ve felt every second of the six months since I last published a podcast episode, always aware that I wasn’t working on it, or on any of the dozen or so other projects I have on the go, including this post.

I’m cramming it in as I inch towards 40. But it all falls away in dutiful bliss whenever my family need me, which is most of the time. My salary goes up and we still struggle to save, but also in 2021, I came into a life-changing amount of money and spent it all immediately. As Aotearoa prepares to join the rest of the pandemic-ravaged world, every aspect of life seems less certain, less sacred, than ever, at the same time as needing to hang on to all of it as long as possible.

The hard part is not knowing what to do next. It was all so simple: they told us what to do, and it worked. Now we have to figure most of it out for ourselves. I suppose we always did, but not like this. Never so new and strange and unsettling, for so many millions.

Property

It was the year of selling and buying houses in New Zealand, and we too sold our house and bought a new one. Nine incredibly stressful months throughout which we didn’t know if we’d made the right decision, or if we would ever find the right place. In the end, we found the best place we’d seen in three years of open homes, and somehow we got it. Even better (for us), we seem to have sold at the height of a rising market and bought just after its peak.

You don’t need to hear about my crocodile tears for all those people struggling to pay the rent while I bank a ludicrous capital gain. Our experience fits almost perfectly with Bernard Hickey’s analysis indicating the New Zealand Government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic to date has seen one of the biggest transfers of wealth from workers to landowners in the history of New Zealand. Very little about it is fair.

What does this mean for us, day to day? There’s a budget and it’s fairly tight. We now live with my parents-in-law, wonderful people with whom we now have to share space, and that is never easy, no matter how wonderful anyone is. Most of all, we all have a home for the foreseeable future, as everyone should, and we have the luxury of thinking five, ten, twenty years ahead, with this roof over our heads at the heart of it.

Health

While trying to teach the kids how to pause and breathe deeply to come back from the brink of fury, Tara realised she was only coaching them at bad moments, immediately after the altercation. And I realised I was doing the same thing to myself — and barely doing it, once in ten lows if that — when I needed to be doing it a few times a day, regardless of mood, because every time I do, it helps. Like drinking water.

No, I’m still not doing it a few times a day. Nor am I meditating, of which I’ve known the extraordinary benefits and potential for otherworldly experiences for a full decade now. Or writing in a journal and getting all those thoughts out of my head, which I used to be really good at. As for going for a run… come on. At least I still drink loads of water.

*

Tara doesn’t want me to die, so she got quite exercised about getting me in for another skin check this year, which I knew I needed. A bunch of my moles were itchy for a couple of months before I finally agreed and booked in with retiring dermatologist Dr Jennifer Pilgrim. What a name! And my mother swears by her.

I disrobed and she looked carefully over my skin. “I see you’ve had a few removed already,” she said, looking at the enormous scars on my back from when I was 16, a memorably unpleasant experience of 160 injections and an hour on a half on a table while benign (though large) moles were removed. “I hope whoever did it has improved since they did these.”

Back at her desk, Dr Pilgrim said, “I don’t see anything I’m worried about. But you need to keep getting checked regularly, and I won’t be doing it.” She gave me the names of a couple of big skin clinics first and told me absolutely not to go to them. “The amount of moles of unusual appearance you have, they’d take one look at you and see the dollar signs and start hacking bits out of you.” Which is more or less what happened to me in my teens, though it was free butchering by the public health system in that case. She sent me away with a couple of names and wished me all the best.

On the way out, as a special treat, my mother was coincidentally in the waiting room, waiting for her skin check. We had a good yarn and I drove home. A few days later, histology confirmed she had a melanoma. So go and get your skin checked.

*

As for COVID-19, we are still only a little way into this thing. The “it’s just a bad flu” crowd seem to be winning and you can all get back to work. I still don’t know exactly how bad it might get in the long term and I don’t think anyone does, even if it’s likely industrialised countries have passed the peak. So let’s socialise outdoors where and when possible, keep wearing masks after we’re told we don’t have to, and normalise sharing vaccination status.

Politics

The absolute audacity of me, a well-meaning liberal with an asset in my name and a solid family network nearby, to think for a second that climate change is the only political issue that matters now. If your rent’s just gone up another hundred dollars a week, or your boss insists you come to work despite being immunocompromised, why should you be thinking about anything beyond survival, today?

Politicians have to constantly examine risk models and make decisions based on what would happen if they made a different one. It must be really hard, especially when anything mildly deviant from the status quo is likely to see them relegated to the opposition benches at the end of their three-year term. While I would like them to make sweeping changes to reframe the way our society works and where value is placed, I understand why they don’t.

All of which doesn’t change the fact that nature and science are indifferent to policies that “build permission”. Sorry to be writing so vaguely and gravely this year! It’s just the times. I’m too burnt out to have a laugh.

Books

Some classics at Pop and Nana Ange’s house

I read 55 books in 2021. 25 were written by women. 8 were written by people of colour. So I still don’t think I’m reading widely enough. Luckily, the remedy is simple.

But here’s what I find interesting: I thought those numbers were way higher, as if each book by a woman was worth 1.5 in my mind, or each book by a person of colour worth 2. I read ‘One of Them’ by Musa Okwonga AND ‘Raceless’ by Georgina Lawton, so I thought I was doing okay. It goes to show the extent to which white men are the default, invisible in their firm grip on the lectern. And it goes to show you can always try harder.

I also stuck almost exclusively to the last fifty years, reading only three books published pre-1971. A pity, because time travel is one of the main reasons I have a reading list. I did however read a lot of new books, despite being a curmudgeon, so it was nice to be up with the zeitgeist for a change.

Some lists and selected reviews from the books I read in 2021.

Loved

  • The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin (1971)
  • The Five Gates of Hell by Rupert Thomson (1991)
  • Embassytown by China Mieville (2011)

From my review of ‘Embassytown’ on Goodreads:

Ursula K. Le Guin gave this a glowing review in the Guardian, and even a few pages in, it’s easy to see this as a successor to THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS and Miéville foremost among her inheritors. And here I am, wondering why I’ve resisted him for so long. A novel about language, and ideas about language, and anthropology, and wrestling with change, and genuinely alien aliens, and thrilling and packed with ‘holy shit’ moments to boot? Like, you’re lucky if you get one such moment in a novel, but EMBASSYTOWN has at least five reveals that blew me away. The sentences are purposefully dense, such that I had to slow down and occasionally re-read to make sense of them, but in a manner that absolutely fits the material. And as I got closer to the end, I slowed down even more — because I didn’t want to find out what happens. I wanted to keep finding out what happens. For as long as possible.

At the most basic level, this is a novel about changing your mind — how that’s possible, though scary, and can be very much to your advantage. How information can bring the possibility of freedom, and how language is the conduit between your mind and that freedom. But it’s about so much more than that as well. I loved it.

One of many ‘holy shit’ moments in ‘Embassytown’

Liked

  • Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett (2001)
  • Guts by Raina Telgemeier (2019)
  • The Illustrated History of Football: Hall of Fame by David Squires (2016)
  • Footnotes: A Journey Round Britain in the Company of Great Writers by Peter Fiennes (2019)
  • Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh (2020)
  • Night Waking by Sarah Moss (2011)
  • We Run The Tides by Vendela Vida (2021)
  • Border Crossings by Andrea Karim (2021)
  • Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships by Robin Dunbar (2021)
  • Times Like These by Michelle Langstone (2021)
  • The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing by Sonia Faleiro (2021)
  • Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan (1971)
  • Meg by Maurice Gee (1981)
  • The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin (1971)
  • Everybody: A Book About Freedom by Olivia Laing (2021)
  • Barcelona Dreaming by Rupert Thomson (2021)

From my review of ‘The Good Girls’:

I was stunned by this book’s central revelation — one of those reading moments where images and ideas flash so quickly through your brain as they coalesce into a briefly coherent picture. I could see Katra, UP, India. I could see journalism and politics. I could see feminism and patriarchy, rich and poor. I could see abject hopelessness, even pitch darkness (if it weren’t for the light Faleiro shines). I could feel my distance from everything that happens in the book, things that could never have happened to me, and yet also feel a sense of connection to the girls and men at its centre. I saw everything and saw that I knew nothing. All of which comes on the shoulders of Faleiro’s astonishing feat of reporting, her clear and insightful prose, and the dots she joins to make some sense of it all. It’s her picture I’m seeing, and I’m glad of that, because as always, she has something compelling to say. But the picture fades; I play Nintendo with my wife and read other books and stop thinking about India, patriarchy, poverty. Until I read another exceptional book that excavates it all once more and makes me see, just for that brief moment. It goes without saying that you should read the blurb for this one and think twice before pressing ahead with it.

Hated

  • Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011)

From my review of ‘Ready Player One’:

The masturbatory fantasy of the dominant species in the gamer subculture-turned-overculture — i.e. the white male, fan of Kubrick and Tarantino and Kevin Smith and several other white male directors whose names you could easily guess, fearlessly definitive in his defence of the narrow Pantheon of arts and artists that define not just his personal taste but Taste itself, entirely uncomprehending of women, blind to all but the broadest strokes of identity, concerned in passing with notions of equality but lacking the complexity of thought to see any bumps in the road to utopia once the obstacles to his own wants are removed, ultimately just fine with the capitalist doctrine because money can and will solve everything.

I love how Cline sees the beloved genius at the centre of his story — a dead programmer who fashioned a globally significant game (and eventually a reality-defining quest) after his very favourite films, music, and games — as a benevolent Tastemaker rather than a fascist intent on narrowing all minds down to his level. […] because people like Cline take their taste so insufferably seriously, I also find it very funny. But then I think of Gamergate and the abuse of Kelly Marie Tran and remember that a belief system centred around pop culture worship is actually dangerous.

Here’s what I’m reading in 2022.

Music

Dancing to Orchestra Wellington and the Signature Choir playing ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ by Queen

My biggest habit change in 2021 was to listen to more new music, following the list of new releases on Metacritic and keeping an open mind. Perhaps I should focus habit formation on health and mindfulness! But I could argue the mental stimulation and sanity brought by wide listening, reading and watching promotes good health. (Couldn’t I?)

I managed to mostly keep up until about September, at which point the house hunt and attendant mental strain had me reaching for the gold I’d already discovered, or The Field’s back catalogue. Because that’s how all but the most carefully trained brains work with art, but especially music: to seek out that which is familiar and comfortable, maybe very slightly surprising, but not so much that you have to work to get into it. The catch-22 being, if you can’t get into something if it isn’t familiar, how do you get into anything? So, I’m proud of the effort I made for three-quarters of the year — and look at the gifts I received in return:

Album I listened to most

  • Fatigue by L’Rain

Top ten favourite albums, in order of release

  • Introducing… by Aaron Frazer
  • Yol by Altin Gün
  • Fir Wave by Hannah Peel
  • For Those I Love by For Those I Love
  • Frontera by Fly Pan Am
  • Fatigue by L’Rain
  • Animal by LUMP
  • If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power by Halsey
  • Screen Violence by CHVRCHES
  • HEY WHAT by Low

Top fifteen favourite songs

  • Ride With Me by Aaron Frazer
  • Yüce Dağ Başında by Altin Gün
  • Fir Wave by Hannah Peel
  • The Shape of Things by For Those I Love
  • Leafy by Dry Cleaning
  • Avalon by Rhiannon Giddens & Francesco Turrisi
  • Orion From the Street by Field Music
  • Pop Star by Tom Jones
  • Church Girl by Laura Mvula
  • Two Face by L’Rain
  • Gamma Ray by LUMP
  • Big Appetite by Liars
  • I am not a woman, I’m a god by Halsey
  • Lullabies by CHVRCHES
  • Battle by Andrew Hung
  • All Night by Low

Biggest discrepancy between Metacritic rating and my level of enjoyment

  • Dead Hand Control by Baio. Loved it.
  • Or Carnage Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. I think Skeleton Tree was enough Cave to last me a few years.

You may notice the lack of rap or other historically Black genres on there, and lack of metal or classical (or psytrance. Metacritic is limited, and I would love your suggestions for how to spread the net wider, but I think the biggest limitation with my habit change isn’t access to music (or lists of music) but in when I have time to listen to it — and that is when I’m at work, or when I’m in the kitchen. I want something to drive me on if I’m working or cooking, or something to luxuriate in, not something with quick wordplay or intricate drum fills. Mid-tempo, ideally, with indistinct lyrics (if any). That narrows the range down.

I try to take it easy on myself, though. You’re never going to listen to everything, or read everything. But if you make an effort to listen more widely than you usually do, you will be rewarded.

Follow along with my music discoveries in 2022:

Movies

Still from BO BURNHAM: INSIDE, which I watched in four? five? instalments

You all seem to have so much time to watch stuff. My brother visited the other day and went through his Plex account, rattling off dozens of titles he’d watched lately, including several multi-season series. Everyone else is bingeing Squid Game or Succession or whatever. Almost always, my response is the same: haven’t seen it. I am lost to books (and my children) now.

These are the new-to-NZ films and TV series I watched in 2021:

  • NOMADLAND (good)
  • WANDAVISION (sigh)
  • LUCA (wet)
  • BO BURNHAM: INSIDE (inauthentic)
  • VIVO (yawn)
  • IN THE HEIGHTS (long)
  • THE POWER OF THE DOG (mannered)
  • ENCANTO (trying)

None of them were very good, NOMADLAND aside. Sorry to Power of the Dog fans (the rest of my family + festival juries) and Lin Manuel-Miranda fans (my wife) in particular.

These are the new-to-me highlights I watched in 2021.

  • BABETTE’S FEAST (1987)
  • COLUMBUS (2017)
  • LITTLE WOMEN (2019)
  • VAI (2019)

I had plenty to say about COLUMBUS, a masterpiece of precisely drawn and observed connections between people and places, in my Letterboxd review. It’s right there on Kanopy for many library card holders to stream for free, but I am now a proud owner of it on Blu-Ray as I continue my campaign to raise awareness of a terrifying possibility: the streaming services may remove access to your favourite films and shows at any time, for any reason. So buy the disc or the file, store it safely, and enjoy it at your leisure with the smug superiority of one who knows they have directly supported the artists.

Sport

Cricket

Cricket

Travel

The Picturesque Garden at Hamilton Gardens

Early in our relationship, I told Tara of the wonders of Hamilton Gardens. She gave a sly, sideways grin, obviously disbelieving that anything with ‘Hamilton’ in front could never be wonderful, and said, “Sure.”

I mentioned it a few more times. Better than the Wellington Botanical Gardens. Better than any municipal gardens I’ve seen. Quite possibly the best free (for now) attraction in New Zealand. Tara would smile and nod, seeing a sweet country boy loyal to his origins, failing to hear the gospel in his faith.

Every summer since the kids were born, we go on a road trip holiday. A couple of times, we’ve skirted Hamilton, and I’ve tried to build in time to visit Hamilton Gardens. But we never managed it. “Next time eh, dear?” Tara would say, genuinely disappointed for me, but with a hint of that sly grin.

Finally, in 2021, we had a whole day to get between our shitty glamping tent in Raglan (it was next to a noisy carpark, a noisy water pump, and another tent full of three noisy drunkards) and my dad’s place in Auckland. Could it finally happen?

“I’ve deliberately avoided looking up photos,” said Tara.

“Good,” I said.

“I don’t want to spoil it for myself.”

“Good!”

We were cooking in the car as we drove up, fresh from another of the many miscommunications you have travelling with young kids. Hot, tired, frayed around the edges. I slathered everyone in sunscreen and in we went. Under the tension, I couldn’t wait to see the joy on their faces.

We started with my mum’s old favourite, the Japanese Garden of Contemplation, where one of the kids wet themselves. A good start. We moved slowly through the English Rose Garden and the Chinese Scholar’s Garden, separated at first, all trying in fits and starts to connect with the stunning flowers and ponds and sculptures, and to reconnect with each other. Nora and June cuddled the dragons at the entrance to the Chinese garden while Tara and I looked on with forced smiles.

The American Modernist Garden changed the mood. Tara and I stretched out on the sun-loungers while the kids took their shoes off and romped around in the pool their cousins used to splash in a decade and a half earlier. Everyone’s smile came back.

And then into the ones that are still new to me but almost twenty years old now: the Italian Renaissance Garden, the Indian Char Bagh Garden. The kids were gushing over the colour, the columns, the cherubs. And into the actually quite new Fantasy Collection, every one a winner. Delight at the enormous wheelbarrow in the Surrealist Garden. Freestyle singing on the stage at the Chinoiserie Garden. Thoughtful chin-stroking at the Concept Garden. Identifying all the items on the long afternoon tea tables in the Mansfield Garden. The Waikato River snaked along beside at all, every glimpse pointed out by the kids: “River! There’s the river again!”

I turned to Tara as we dragged ourselves back to the car three hours later with weary legs and full hearts.

“Well?”

An exhausted smile. “Amazing! Yes. Best gardens in New Zealand. Hands down.”

People

I posted a picture of one of my children on Instagram in late December. My brother in Dunedin commented, ‘Looks like you have a big kid on your hands!’

They are getting bigger, that’s for sure. Unique, increasingly independent, but strongest together. Full of words and always coming up with koans that make them seem a lot older and wiser than they are. Confidently tackling climbing frames at the playground that would have freaked the shit out of me at their age (and still do). Helping us assemble flat-pack furniture. Still keen for a cuddle most days, and sometimes all day.

I have been with Tara for eight years now, and we’re just past the point when more than half of that has been with kids. They are our life’s work — but so are we, also strongest together, and always trying to be a little bit better together. She is about to push herself outside her comfort zone in a new way, going back to school to study what she has always wanted to study, and I am very excited for her — and a bit proud of her for taking the leap.

Four years of the “four family”, as the kids put it. Now, with my parents-in-law on the other side of an internal wall, we’re six. It’s a new stage of life for all of us, with losses and gains that will in time be forgotten. We will endure and make the most of it together.

Together. Perhaps the biggest change we made this year — at least as big as moving house for the impact it’s had on our lives — was moving the kids back into our bedroom. It had been three years of trying to get them to sleep happily in a separate room, then their own rooms. Seemingly endless nights of sitting with them for an hour or more at bedtime while they slowly worked themselves into sleep. Letting them into our bed in the night when they inevitably cried out for us. We listened to the received wisdom that they have to learn to self-soothe, and as parents, we had to have our own space. Then we went on our summer holiday, and found ourselves all sleeping in the same room a lot, and it was so much easier. And we were like, why aren’t we doing this all the time?

Time — stretching, collapsing, intangible. Bringing the new, the strange, the unsettling. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away.

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

Barns

After the Prime Minister’s announcement of an imminent shift to COVID-19 alert level 4 (mandatory self-isolation and physical distancing, essential services only), I immediately went out and panic bought a slide.

I entered Kmart as at least three other parents exited with literal armloads of board games. A woman and I circled around the two last remaining slides — massive boxes that wouldn’t fit in our trolleys — until I finally pounced. She stood staring at the last one for a few more seconds before hauling it up.

I only learned at checkout that it cost $139. An insane amount of money, and completely out of character for me, but what if we need it? What if the country locks down even further? What if vigilante mobs sweep the streets in snarling, two-metre-spaced rows? What if the Defence Force is deployed to enforce a full curfew? These are the kinds of thoughts you have because no one knows what, exactly, is going to happen. No one in the country has ever lived through anything like this before. Even in wartime, you could still go out for a drink.

It was just me and the other parents, mostly, stocking up on games and arts and crafts. A minimum of four weeks at home with the children. We love them — they’re a blessing, a joy, we are so lucky to have them and all that — but can you see why we were panic buying playdough and poster paints?

There was also a guy in stubbies yelling into a cellphone, “Nah mate, I’m at Kmart. Yeah nah, it’s basically dead here.” Compared to queues out the door at the supermarket, most definitely.

We’d already been to the supermarket that day. Limit: two of any similar item per customer. I tried to buy a third bottle of milk for my friends in self-isolation (trim milk! As if I would drink that swill) but was quietly and awkwardly denied by the cashier and her supervisor.

When I jetted off to do the Kmart run and pick up those same friends’ dear little dog from the kennels, I forgot to take the trim milk. It’s still sitting in our fridge, unopened. Maybe I’ll end up drinking it after all.

Phantom Planet

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…

Here’s how this post was initially drafted to end:

So I cut the red AAC wristband, straightened my non-existent tie, and walked off on damp pavements to catch my bus.

When I wrote it, the wristband still encircled my radius, bright and crumpled. I didn’t think it mattered whether or not the words were true; they evoked letting go, a holiday beginning its transition from vivid recency into hazy past. I felt that the inclusion of an absent tie signalled my awareness of whatever lies I allowed into my account. I wondered whether the words written down here would eventually become truth in my memory.

But what actually happened ended up being more interesting than the lie.

…

The last big activity of this year’s summer holiday with the kids was a trip to Splash Planet. It used to be called Fantasyland, a crumbling, community-built theme park famous for the train that ran around it and the smell of urine in the big castle. There were no water slides or pools with slow-filling buckets that saturate you if you time it right, or wrong.

I think I was about five or six when we went as a family in my own childhood. I recall some bright colours and the thrilling, uncontrolled motion felt by a small child going down a large slide. Above all, I recall the joy of riding that train, possibly with a grudging (though smiling) parent or older brother on child-minding duty.

For months afterwards, possibly years, I would counter any mention of Rainbow’s End with the superiority of Fantasyland. Have you been to Rainbow’s End? they would say. No, but I have been to Fantasyland, which is AWESOME. None of my friends had, so I had the pleasure of smug exclusivity and their complete indifference, because nobody cares if they haven’t been themselves. It’s not so different when you tell fellow thirty-something friends about your travels to the backwaters of Alappuzha or the beaches of Asturias and Cantabria. They’re mildly pleased for you, but they will quickly move on to the boats of the Bosphorus or the golden sands of Bali.

…

You move around the world and colour in the parts you see. You flood your senses and your mind and try, sometimes desperately, to commit them to your memory. But you can never hold onto them as they were, because your memory is fallible and the world’s constant physical change is undeniable.

When I visited Christchurch at the height of its post-earthquake demolition in 2012, my brain couldn’t make sense of the absence of buildings I used to take for granted. They existed in my memory but were in the process of being crushed, snuffed out, by reality.

A drive past the Tokoroa house in which I grew up was even more disorienting, with the big filbert trees replaced by a high wooden fence. The current residents scowled at me as I drove away. In this case, I could maintain a strong image of the past because it was so familiar to me as a kid, but I’ll bet nobody outside my family can call it up if required. And it was impossible to lay that image over the shocking disparity in front of me.

And that image is also likely to be wrong in some way. We know this from study after study: the brain misremembers. Its truth is mine, and mine alone.

…

To my surprise, many of the elements that made Fantasyland so memorable for little me were intact. Large slides, though more dilapidated than before. The tiny town. (Or am I inserting that into my memories?) The train.

I had no sense of the physical details and how they had or hadn’t changed. I couldn’t tell you whether the grassy parklands were laid out as before, or whether the train followed the same path around the castle. But I knew this was the place I had been to and loved all those years ago. I felt a child’s uncomplicated delight at being there again. For me, it was easily the highlight of the trip.

Tara cut her wristband off before going to sleep that same day. I kept mine on, not just overnight but for days afterward, even through an entire workday. I liked the way it reminded me of the feeling of being at Splash Planet the way a watch used to remind you of time passing. I liked the way it peeked out garishly from under my cuff.

I also liked showing it to colleagues when they asked how my holiday was. Fortunately, there was nearly always a connection, because so many people have been to Fantasyland and Splash Planet over the years.

…

That night, we discovered our chest freezer had been switched off for days. Possibly by us, in our harried and sleep-deprived state, or possibly by a vendor who carried out some work on our house while we were gone.

Point is, hundreds of dollars and dozens of kitchen hours’ worth of uncooked meat and home-cooked meals — perfect for, say, a mandatory 14-day self-isolation period — had to be thrown out. I stacked thawed containers of dinner saw on top of the oven and carted them in batches of five to a dark corner of the back yard, where I hiffed their contents onto the lawn. A feast for neighbourhood cats.

After I’d washed out all the containers and left them to dry, I collapsed onto the couch next to Tara, who had buried herself exhausted and grieving in a puzzle. I felt the wristband tug at my skin so I looked at it. There was a small blob of refried beans on the palm side. Time to let this past go, too.

“The really good thing,” said Tara, sarcastic but sympathetic, “is the scissors are out in the shed.”

I stood and went to the laundry, where I spent a minute using a pair of garden shears to uselessly shave colour off the wristband.

Then I went to the kitchen and levered a blade under it. The circle was finally broken. Pop. Toot-toot. Wheeee.

…

I can still feel the bracelet. It’s like my brain wants it to be there. In twelve hours twenty-four hours forty-eight hours it’ll be gone for good, but in forty-eight days it (or its imperfect neurological echo) won’t be forgotten, because I wrote this.

Shayne P Carter

Barns2 Comments

I finished reading Shayne Carter’s autobiography Dead People I Have Known (Victoria University Press). It’s an excellent book: reflective, honest, occasionally moving, occasionally funny. It also contains the best descriptions of music since AMADEUS.

I saw Carter perform one time, a Dimmer farewell gig at Bodega in 2012. Bodega is now closed, its central, eyeline-spoiling pillar a collective sigh in the memory of Wellington’s gig-going faithful.

From my vantage point at the extreme right of the room, I gripped the bar on which my beer bottle rested while Carter ripped through one face-melting, feedback-laden guitar solo after another. He seemed in a mood to indulge his fingers more than his voice that day, and that was fine with me. I barely remember him speaking, let alone singing.

What I do remember is his body doubled over in submission to his guitar. His fringe hung down over his sharp-featured face. His lips pursed out in a demonic grin. He must have spent half the gig in that pose.

“The facial expressions,” my friend and I agreed over a beer a few months later when the subject of Shayne Carter live came up. “The facial expressions.”

Years later, she would edit his book. And I would borrow the book from another friend, whose photos are in the book. Just so you know how small New Zealand is.

And I say again, it is an excellent book, worth reading even if you couldn’t name a single one of his songs. It’s almost as good as his facial expressions.

Cheezy Weezys

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I was at Waikanae’s famous Fed Up Fast Foods fish ‘n’ chip shop with Stephen when I first encountered Cheezy Weezys.

I felt like they should have been advertised on an A4 printout in all-caps Arial Black, like all the other speciality items, but there they were on the big menu alongside hot dogs and spring rolls, as if they’d always been there.

We speculated as to what Cheezy Weezys might be. I suggested six or seven strips of mozzarella, battered and deep fried. Stephen proposed a scoop of chips with plasticky orange cheese squirted all over them from a bottle.

A subsequent image search proved Stephen right. Given they were called Cheezy Weezys, he was always going to be right.

But we didn’t order the Cheezy Weezys. I decided not to risk it, which is unlike me, because I usually try any old rubbish if it’s junky enough.

In the ensuing weeks, Cheezy Weezys seemed to be everywhere. I assure you, I’d never seen them on a fish ‘n’ chips menu before that rainy evening in Waikanae, and I’ve eaten a lot of fish ‘n’ chips. But there they were, again and again without fanfare, about $5.20 a pop.

Last weekend, when we went away to Foxton Beach, I cracked. Not only did Mr Grumpy’s have Cheezy Weezys, they also had Curry Chips, Cheese and Gravy Chips, and Blood ‘n’ Guts Chips. I ummed and aahed and eventually decided on Blood ‘n’ Guts Chips.

This is what they handed over:

That’s a scoop of chips, tomato sauce, sour cream, and grated cheese from one of those ready packets with loads of de-caking powder at the bottom.

Needless to say, my fascination with novelty hot chips is cured.

The call bell

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Ding goes the call bell.

I pressed the button fifteen minutes ago when Tara’s tramadol wore off, four hours since the previous dose. A big, angry wound in her abdomen is giving her acute pain. One of our twin infants dozes in my lap, the other in a cot. Tara lies in bed, brows knitted in pain and exhaustion.

It’s about 2am.

There’s a speaker right outside our room. Every couple of minutes, the call bell dings again.

We’re waiting on one of the two overnight duty midwives to come and assist us. After a few more dings, she arrives, and we ask for more pain relief. Of course, she says, and promptly leaves.

Another fifteen minutes pass. In one of the other two dozen rooms served by two midwives, someone else presses the call button. Ding.

Approximately thirty-five minutes after I initially hit the button, the midwife returns with the tramadol. Tara ingests it and waits for it to take effect. Eventually, after a full hour of agony, she gets some relief.

Ding goes the call bell, on through the night and day, summoning health professionals that don’t exist.

*

This is far from the most gruelling episode of our six-day hospital experience when the kids were born, but it’s one that stays with me. It’s symptomatic of a system that is desperately under-resourced.

You look back on times like that and think, well, we got through it. And people are more than willing to tell you it’s just something you have to get through. Some people, anyway.

But I’m sharing this tiny story today because a much worse case of maternity ward understaffing and negligence is being widely reported. A baby died after a labour and birth in which everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Individuals made mistakes but the system overall is accountable.

And if so many people are ringing the bell to say that the system is inadequately resourced, that midwives are constantly at breaking point, that having a baby outside business hours loads significant risk into an already risky process, that the trauma of their hospital birthing experience haunts them for years, why are we still talking? Is anyone listening?

Ding.

Louis Sergeant

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A variety of macarons in different flavours and colours

I saw Louis Sergeant at the vegetable market the other day. He was selling a variety of macarons, some croissants, some pains au chocolat.

Louis Sergeant used to have an inner-city patisserie where delicious dessert sculptures and pots of artisanal tea were conveyed to your table by bright-eyed women in black aprons. The cabinet presented at least a dozen options with shiny mousse spheres, gold flakes, and curved pieces of chocolate. I thought $14 was a rip-off until I tried one.

Then Louis Sergeant opened a second patisserie about two hundred metres away. They both closed within six months, and it seemed like that was that.

But here was Louis Sergeant himself, previously unglimpsed, peddling fine French pastries in a packed carpark alongside greengrocers from Levin.

“Got plans to open another shop soon?” I asked as he bagged a pastry.

“Yes,” he said, after some hesitation.

“My wife and I really miss your patisseries,” I said.

“Thank you,” he replied. “2019 was…” He grimaced and didn’t finish the sentence. I could only imagine the disastrous spreadsheets and red numbers flashing before his eyes.

“I hope 2020 is better,” I said.

“Yes, me too,” said Louis Sergeant.

War of the worlds

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Pōhutukawa stamens collected in gutter by road

It’s been cool and damp in Wellington today. Cue a dozen overheard conversations in the office about it being a typical Wellington summer, i.e. over in a flash and barely there to begin with.

In reality, the sun has shone bright in blue skies recently and will shine again soon. But in order to belong, you must sign up to the mass delusion.

Christmas time is however ending. I know this because everywhere I go, I see millions of brilliant red pōhutukawa stamens collected in drifts on the footpath, like the spreading alien tendrils in War of the Worlds.

The pōhutukawa is also known as the New Zealand Christmas tree because of its vague resemblance to holly and its seasonal blossoms. When the flowers die, their crimson threads fall to the ground in clumps, the blood of Tawhaki under our feet. They’re beautiful and then they’re gone. They are our hair that has fallen out.

You can be sure they’ll be back next spring, though, until we’ve burned it all down — back from the underworld, leaping for the heavens, caught in flight on evergreen branches.

The power of the megaphone, the call to prayer

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Flower tributes mosque Auckland New Zealand Christchurch shooting
Neighbours laying flowers at Imam Reza Mosque, New Lynn, Auckland the day after the massacre at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand (Image by Nick Thompson)

Above all, the people we should listen to after a terrorist attack are the victims. So, before I get into my mediocre white man reckons relating to the March 15 mosque shootings in Christchurch, here are a few examples of Muslims having their voices aired in NZ’s media:

One Family’s Story of Survival and Loss in New Zealand (The Daily podcast, The New York Times)
We warned you. We begged. We pleaded. And now we demand accountability (The Spinoff)
The people we lost (Stuff.co.nz)
Hear their words: Muslim voices on the Christchurch attacks (The Spinoff)

Our media have done very well to boost these voices. It’s been exciting, and a little sobering in retrospect (why is this not normal), to suddenly have so much easily available to read and listen to from groups of people who lack power in our society. For me, it’s prompted a lot of thinking about the intersection of power and speech: who has power, and how do they wield it in their words and actions? Who should have our attention right now, and what are those that do have our attention using it to say?

The Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, has gained an enormous amount of national and international attention for her response to the shootings: not just the quick mobilisation of her government to outlaw the kinds of weapons used in the attack, but the uncommon sensitivity and caring she has shown to the victims. This constant examining of her actions has led to plenty of debate. For example, her wearing of a headscarf, which some insist is a symbol of oppression, has been a hot topic for both the white New Zealanders and the Hindu Indians on my Twitter timeline.

Whether or not you agree with how the Prime Minister has conducted herself, she is the most powerful person in the country and the figurehead of our grief. It’s therefore right that her response has been subjected to such scrutiny. I was uneasy about how she was centered in the days after the attacks, particularly in the mass sharing and printing of photos in which she hugged strangers and displayed emotion. It seemed to me that those images should be of victims’ families, or of Muslim adherents left shattered by the targeting of their community. But it’s complex: they didn’t sign up to be part of anything like this, or to be relentlessly photographed, or to play a central role in a crisis. The Prime Minister did, opting into the front pages in the best and worst of times. It’d be strange if she wasn’t there now.

And I got another perspective a few days after the attacks. A Muslim friend in India sent me a one-line email expressing sympathy, and attached four of the more widely shared images of the Prime Minister with her headscarf proudly in place. If her symbolic representation of everyone else’s love and support meant something to a Muslim on the other side of the world, that’s good enough for me.

At the very least, the Prime Minister seems to be aware of her effect on the social landscape. She has led with a view to consciously establishing new norms that are inclusive and hopeful. Get behind me, she seems to say, and we’ll make things better together. That’s more than can be said for various commentators in the American political media, who of course have had plenty to say about Christchurch. Ben Shapiro, who hosts a very popular conservative news podcast, uses up a fair amount of oxygen sharing his views on everything from universities as liberal indoctrination centres, climate change belief as religion, and the anti-Semitism of anyone who supports the idea of Palestininan statehood. Naturally, he was quick to comment on Christchurch, particularly to rebut the idea that white supremacist violence has anything to do with prominent critics of Islam such as himself, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and indeed President Donald Trump.

Okay, but no. A cursory look at the repeated phrases used in comment threads and social media profiles – #MAGA and its derivatives, Trump Supporter, Not Politically Correct – reveal a collective that is very openly a collective. They just happen to speak the language of individualism. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It’s freedom of speech. Not my choice to get offended, buddy. Broader civic discourse has extended the reach of this type of language with phrases like ‘lone wolf’ – a phrase used often to describe the Christchurch attacker, who professed an admiration for Trump and Norwegian terrorist Anders Bering Breivik in his manifesto. The ideologues set the tone and establish communities, and every individual is then empowered to act alone against the Other. (You could say the exact same thing against fundamentalist Islam, which is to say that neither extremity lacks a coherent movement to back them up.)

But to Shapiro and his ilk, it is insane to suggest Trump’s forceful anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views have anything to do with the Christchurch shooter, let alone any of Shapiro’s own diatribes about Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar or Bill Maher’s panel discussions about the dangers of moderate Islam. Every event happens in isolation, in a Randian vacuum, caused only by the free will of the actors involved. It works the other way, too: if you want to stop climate change, give up meat and take the bus, never mind the staggering emissions from multinational corporates and the lack of political will to actually use power for change.

This is the thinking that dominates our society nowadays. The Christchurch massacre seems to have prompted a closer look at what we as individuals say and do, and how we can collectively mitigate the threat of extremism. If only the likes of Shapiro – and hey, Trump, as if that would ever happen – were able to reflect on the communities they have created; how their words are transformed from mere opinions into calls to action when expressed from a megaphone. That’s the kind of individual responsibility we need right now. And there’s a model for it in Jacinda Ardern.

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Things of 2018

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Front Page

Kapiti Island on a cloudy day over the Tasman SeaThe great rearrangement of 2017 is now firmly established. I am married with two kids, and my life revolves almost entirely around those facts, except for a long window every weekday during which I sit in an office and earn money. I watch in fascination as my now one-year-old children develop, especially when I look at photos from a month or more prior; you don’t see how they’ve grown until the evidence of their past limitations is in front of you.

What else can I tell you? I am a little less lazy but ache a lot more. I would like to own a home but am very happy in my current rental, which provides three bedrooms and a sunny, leafy backyard. I have a good, stable job. My short-term memory is suddenly appalling, a casualty of sleep deprivation. And I still have a need to write, but I’m less interested in writing about myself than ever. Now here are 3500 words all about me.

Health

Writers and podcasters have contributed a lot of morbid fodder to my resting state of mind this year. This is no doubt partly a function of getting a bit older, and of having kids, and of having a minor brush with my own mortality in 2017, but there’s certainly never been so much public discussion of The End in my lifetime. The main influencers into my brain have been Cariad Lloyd’s podcast Griefcast and Leigh Sales’ book Any Ordinary Day, but I feel like death is highlighted in plenty of other places, too. There’s also the spectre of climate change, too big and scary for me to sit and contemplate, a large-scale existential threat galloping over the horizon and into plain view.

Tara and I often joke about who will die first. The basic meaning is ‘I’m dying first because I don’t want to have to be the one to go on alone’. It isn’t really a joke, we both mean it. I am starting to think it’s a bit flippant, though, when so many people press on after the untimely death of someone they love, and when so many people would give anything to live a little bit longer. In December, I learned that a Twitter friend in their thirties had died, and wrote about how the broader availability of grief is a strange side effect of this age of conceded privacy. We have so much more information at our fingertips now, from details of the latest mass shooting to an online acquaintance’s taste in romance novels. It means that death and dying, like everything else, is that much more immediate in our lives, and that much more likely to appear on our radar.

But don’t worry! There are no signs of impending doom in this house. Even during these, ‘the tired years’, as my father-in-law put it, we are all healthy and mostly happy. Although I have often had to substitute calories and caffeine for sleep. The way I see it, that’s just part of the deal, something to iron out when I get a minute to breathe.

Music

I tended to return to old favourites in 2018, often long and repetitive electronic tracks (five hours’ sleep a night will have that effect). And to my good fortune, three of my most favourite favourites brought out new music during a two-week bonanza in September:

Aphex Twin — Collapse EP (good)
The Field — Infinite Moment (very good)
Orbital — Monsters Exist (not so good)

At this point, I can confidently call The Field (aka Axel Willner) my favourite musician. He’s so reliable. Every new release satisfies for many listens; I tend to have my initial favourites, then enjoy more and more of the album until I don’t really see any dead wood. It was a pity the new Orbital — after a long hiatus — only sparked intermittently, but I think they had their time in the 90s, and what a time that was. As for Aphex Twin, he’s still a genius who makes music no one else could even imagine.

There were a few other new records I found in 2018:

Sarah Blasko — Depth of Field — Blasko’s gone all out for hits here and nailed a few. I even heard one in the supermarket the other day. Very catchy tunes in her familiar soulful, whispery voice
Jonny Greenwood — Phantom Thread Original Soundtrack — just love this, listened on repeat for a good while, grand and romantic
Robyn — Honey — glittery, perfect pop with great lyrics and earworm melodies. Tracks seven and eight threaten to sabotage the whole thing but the rest of it is so damn good
Leon Vynehall — Nothing Is Still — what a discovery! The shimmery Brooklyn Bridge on the cover looks at first glance like trees parting in a forest, and that’s kind of what the music is like, shifting textures and moods from track to track. My favourite album of the year
Marlon Williams — Make Way For Love — he’s got ‘it’

I’ve chucked a track from each of these records into a ‘Barns Picks 2018’ playlist on Spotify. Bit less variety than previous years, so hopefully your tastes overlap exactly with mine.

https://open.spotify.com/embed/user/1230979649/playlist/3AfEtddCUjsh10w37msHSH

Politics

At this point in the devolution of our political discourse, is it more effective to debate with calm reason or to loudly insist your opponent fuck off? We all know by now that arguing politics (or just about anything, especially on the internet) only leaves both sides more entrenched than before, so surely it’s better, when faced with abhorrent racism, misogyny, homophobia, or greed, to drop a few choice insults and leave the situation?

I haven’t had the opportunity to test this choice in real life. People tend not to confront each other on the street, at least on the streets I walk. I spent a sizeable chunk of 2018 thinking about it, though, especially after recently seeing this unpleasant video, which takes only 23 seconds to summarise where we’re at.

I’ll describe so you don’t have to watch it. The scene is, I think, Palmerston North — it isn’t clear in 240p. A group of women cross the street holding placards and chanting slogans. They are protesting the then-National Government’s sale of government-owned assets. The man holding the camera forcefully tells them to “go back to the commune” and insults one in particular for her appearance. He says all this in much fewer words than I’ve used here. His tone is jocular, mocking; you can almost hear the smile on his face. He is relishing the opportunity to get stuck into such contemptible people.

Notice how the man’s response has nothing to do with what the group is protesting. Their argument does not interest him for a second. He has already dismissed it and moved straight to ad hominem attack. Almost all of the comments under the video on YouTube are positive, calling him a legend and wishing they had the presence of mind to be so profoundly and articulately rude to strangers.  The acquaintance of mine who shared the video on Facebook captioned it, simply, ‘classic’.

“This might be a dangerous time for politeness,” writes Rachel Cusk in her essay The Age of Rudeness. She gives a few examples of situations in which rude or overbearing behaviour is confronted, sometimes rudely, sometimes politely. Her sort-of conclusion is that politeness at least acts as a compass in navigating the world, allowing you to respond consistently to toxic acts and to let them bounce harmlessly away as you continue living your life. If someone is as rude to me as the man in the video, though, or as rude as the man I saw the other day yelling abuse at a fellow Coastlands Mall patron for their poor parking, I’d feel within my rights to take back some of the space they’d snatched with a few angry words of my own.

What does all this have to do with politics exactly? Well, we can tut at other Western democracies as they spiral into ugly, unstable, evidence-denying shitshows and say ‘it couldn’t happen here’. But it could.

Sport

Grandparent, mother, and babies playing soccer in the park

I finally got back into indoor football this year, joining a work team and playing at lunchtime every couple of weeks. Things learned during these fortnightly escapades:

  • I am not in my twenties any more and cannot expect my limbs to consistently execute skills as instructed by my brain
  • I am fortunate to maintain decent natural fitness despite limited concerted exercise and regular potato chip consumption
  • It’s more fun to lose alongside teammates who pass the ball than to win alongside teammates who don’t
  • There is always that one guy who takes it a little bit too seriously, even though it is mixed five-a-side and we are all on our lunch breaks

I lacked confidence to begin with, and struggled to trust my body to win one-on-ones or dribble past opponents — and with good reason. As the matches have totted up, though, I’ve reached a point where I think I’m a half-decent player. I commit at least one clanger per game, for sure, but all of us do.

A more pressing concern now is the broken lock on the shower door at work. No one else uses that shower, so I’m not at great risk of having to frantically hide behind my towel, but I do hope the building manager returns from annual leave soon and sorts it out.

Film

According to my Letterboxd log, I watched 91 films in 2018. My most watched actor was Edward James Olmos (probably because I saw both BLADE RUNNER films in November). My most watched director was Brad Bird (that’ll be TOMORROWLAND and INCREDIBLES 2). So I must have hopped around a fair bit.

It was my most prolific film-watching year since university days. The reason for this is the night feed. If I’m not sleeping, but the light has to be low, and I know I’m going to be up for at least an hour, what am I going to do? Simple: watch movies.

Because I love a project, and ways to whittle down the unmanageable gargantuan morass of films available to watch, I jumped the #52filmsbywomen bandwagon this year and cracked #55filmsbywomen in the end. Some things I learned:

  • It is not hard to find interesting films made by people who aren’t sex offenders, bullies, or otherwise problematic in their actions
  • Plenty of first-time female directors made mediocre films but weren’t given another chance easily, unlike their male counterparts
  • Women seem to me to have a broader appreciation of the breadth of human experience, possibly from empathy conditioned over millennia, and tend to present more complex characters as a result
  • Seeking out female directors led me to take more notice of who the writers, producers, and directors of photography were

And here are some standouts from the exercise:

  • THE HOUSE IS BLACK (1963) dir. Forough Farrokhzad
  • WANDA (1970) dir. Barbara Loden
  • A QUESTION OF SILENCE (1982) dir. Marleen Gorris
  • AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE (1990) dir. Jane Campion
  • POINT BREAK (1991) dir. Kathryn Bigelow
  • BANANA IN A NUTSHELL (2005) dir. Roseanne Liang
  • WHIP IT (2009) dir. Drew Barrymore
  • FISH TANK (2009) dir. Andrea Arnold
  • MEEK’S CUTOFF (2010) dir. Kelly Reichardt
  • WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (2011) dir. Lynne Ramsay
  • ARTHUR CHRISTMAS (2011) dir. Sarah Smith
  • ENOUGH SAID (2013) dir. Nicole Holofcener
  • 52 TUESDAYS (2013) dir. Sophie Hyde
  • ZERO MOTIVATION (2014) dir. Talya Lavie
  • THE RIDER (2017) dir. Chloe Zhao

Next up, I was going to do 52 films by ‘people of colour’ but that category is so general in a global cinematic context as to be worthless. Instead, I’ll try for 52 films by black directors — the definition of ‘black’ cinema is tricky but African and African-American movies will be good places to start.

Tech

Tech.jpgThanks largely to the beneficence of family, 2018 saw me get a new phone, two TVs, and a Blu-ray player. Of these, the Blu-ray player is both the most exciting and the least used. We just don’t get time to watch many movies. But it has been fun starting yet another collection of physical media about to lapse into obsolescence. How, in the all-digital age, will we display the books and movies that mean something to us? It’s so interesting to walk into someone’s house and cast an eye over their bookshelf and their DVDs, and these displays are such effective shorthand for saying ‘this is who I am’. Are we going to lose that, too, along with the bookstores and video shops?

As for the phone, I didn’t need a new one, but the old one was getting a bit old. It is nice to have a chosen app open as soon as I press the icon, or register a keypad press in real time. Of more concern now, though, is how we are going to raise our children to have a positive and active relationship with screen-based technology. It hasn’t been difficult to leave the phone in my pocket and focus on the kids once I get home from work, but as they get older and more aware of the myriad capabilities of these revolutionary devices, it would be nice for them to see them as objects of freedom and not limitation, and an augmentation to the physical world around them rather than a replacement for it. Keeping the kids away from such devices forever is not going to help with that.

The more pertinent issue may be that my attitude to technology is itself already becoming obsolete, so pushing that stance on my kids could be more damaging than I ever intend it to be. Many schools already demand most kids work on laptops or tablets; the future world of work is likely to require high-level computing facility, including the ability to code. I will do my best to pay attention to my growing kids and keep an open mind as technology advances (and hopefully doesn’t eat us all).

Books

Father with twins readingMy wife was shocked when I told her that if I had to choose between books and movies, forsaking the other for the rest of my days, I’d choose books.

“What! But you’re Barns! You’re the movie guy!”

Yes, that has been true for a long time. And I think I still understand movies better than books. But where movies are more fundamentally concrete — you can’t imagine different images or sounds than those presented on the screen — there is infinite possibility in a book: a world to disappear into, a character to examine closely, a story to carry you along, all projected in the cinema of the mind. Books are magic, books are philosophy, books are time travel. I’ll never be able to read everything I want to, even if I were to devote all my film-watching time to books. I find this thought comforting.

In 2018 I continued my reading programme, begun the previous year, of reading almost exclusively works written in years ending in the same numeral as the current one. That meant a master reading list of books from 1918, 1928, 1938, etc., all the way up to 2018, on which I tried to include a half-decent variety of voices.

My goal was to polish off 52 books — one a week. I managed 78. Pretty pleased with that, especially considering 51 were novels or non-fiction. You can view the entire list of 78 here.

Some highlights from my 2018 reading mission:

‘The Rehearsal‘ by Eleanor Catton (2008)
‘In Watermelon Sugar‘ by Richard Brautigan (1968)
‘A Wizard of Earthsea‘ by Ursula K. Le Guin (1968)
‘Rebecca‘ by Daphne du Maurier (1938)
‘Things Fall Apart‘ by Chinua Achebe (1958)
‘Dreamers: How Young Indians are Changing the World‘ by Snigdha Poonam (2018)
‘The Player of Games‘ by Iain M. Banks (1988)
‘The Fifth Child‘ by Doris Lessing (1988)
‘The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids‘ by Alexandra Lange (2018)
‘Plumb‘ by Maurice Gee (1978)
‘Never Anyone But You‘ by Rupert Thomson (2018)
‘Unaccustomed Earth‘ by Jhumpa Lahiri (2008)
‘Normal People‘ by Sally Rooney (2018)
‘Headlands: New Stories of Anxiety‘ edited by Naomi Arnold (2018)

And some disappointments:

‘Young Adolf‘ by Beryl Bainbridge (1978)
‘Finn Family Moomintroll‘ by Tove Jansson (1948)
‘Running Wild‘ by J. G. Ballard (1988)
‘The Public Image‘ by Muriel Spark (1968)
‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting‘ by Milan Kundera (1978)
‘Snap‘ by Belinda Bauer (2018)
‘Everything Under‘ by Daisy Johnson (2018)
‘The Alchemist‘ by Paulo Coelho (1988)

The ‘year ending in x’ rule is working well for me so far, so I’ve got a heaving 2019 reading list to keep me occupied. Happy reading to all the other readers out there, and put some recommendations in the comments — I’ve got plenty more lists to fill.

Travel

IMG_20181019_185423487Much of our 2018 was spent at home, wedded to routine. For most of the year, the closest we came to travel were two housesitting stints at my brother’s place in Wellington — more a transplantation of the routine than leaving it behind, but still exciting, especially our visits to Khandallah pool in summer, sun-dappled and frothy with kids.

In October, we undertook our biggest expedition with kids yet: a long weekend away in Taranaki to introduce them to Tara’s relatives. Granny — Tara’s mum — joined us to share the load. We anticipated carsickness, restless anger, wariness of so many unfamiliar faces, and no sleep at all; it turned out that a little less sleep than usual was the worst of our problems. They were equally tolerant of long rear-facing journeys and fussing relatives. The great Taranaki Maunga, which is to be made a legal personality, loomed watchfully over us, drawing our fascination whenever it appeared. “Wow! You can see Taranaki from the bathroom window!”

But don’t forget to appreciate the wonders where you live. When you come northbound over the hill at Pukerua Bay, either by car or on the train, and you round the final corner below the village’s pōhutukawa canopy, Kāpiti Island hoves into view — dark and magnificent in the Tasman Sea, its zigzag skyline dominating the vista. Depending on the weather, you might only see parts of it, or not see it at all. If we had had a Hokusai, I could imagine him painting thirty-six views of Kāpiti.

People

Family selfieI couldn’t count the number of people who told me that raising kids gets easier. True, the first couple of weeks of constant floundering through sleep-deprived fog were as intense as anything I’ve experienced. Once you have the basics of bottle sterilisation and nappy changing down, though, it’s just a stream of simple tasks. Relentless, but uncomplicated. Things have only gotten more complex — and, to my mind, much more challenging — as they’ve gotten older. The highs are higher and the lows lower. And still 10+ years before they become teenagers. It really is a rollercoaster!

The hardest part of all has been the maintenance of my marriage, and our mental health. Both recede into the background very quickly when you’re faced with two needy infants and only two pairs of hands. It’s lucky, then, that I’m married to Tara, in whom I have a firm ally dedicated to preserving what we have and improving what we lack. We are in it together, sometimes in battle with one another — usually over stupid shit like who’s less tired and therefore better placed to do the night feed (and not the way you’d expect; we are always fighting to keep the other person in bed) — and taking brief moments where we can to actually look at each other.

Maybe this is where it gets easier. Maybe we’ll get some time back for us, in increments, over many years. In the meantime, the blessing of young kids is their immediacy, how they force you to deal with what’s in front of you and not some imagined future catastrophe (not that this stops the terrible daymares descending in idle moments). And then, when they’re finally in bed, we talk to each other about the day and prepare to do it all again tomorrow, together.

(Together! Man. Who am I kidding? Tara is the one who is home with the kids. She does by far the hardest job; I come home and pitch in for a few hours before bedtime. I do wish we could switch places for a while. She’s so good, though, so conscientious in crafting the best possible childhood for our kids. I can only admire her work.)

We’ve had plenty of support along the way, but especially from Nana (my mum) and Granny (Tara’s mum), who have given up a day each week to come up the coast and help. The best indicator of how successful this has been is in the kids’ excitement whenever they show up, and the tears when they leave. They bloody love them. Our first year as parents wouldn’t have been nearly as fun and coherent without them.

What next? Another bum change. Another night feed. Another train commute. Adelante, as one of our hosts in Spain used to say whenever there was a moment of silence. Forward.