I like dancing – who doesn’t? So, one day after feeling as if I could become footloose on the dance floor again, I enrolled for a ballroom dancing class at the local grammar.A legacy of the Fifties and Sixties was that all of us could rock and roll – and even today if you listen to the original of Honky Tonk, your feel an irresistible urge to do it all over again.
First, an early morning recollection from the day before: a friend describing a short story which captured the pitiful cries of whale calves separated from their beached mothers.
Then this: on a country road where the occasional car usually dawdled, most now zipped along at highway speeds.
Waitangi weekend again – and a man was close to tears. Nothing unusual there. It’s what the place does to some. What was different this year was that the man was Pakeha – no let’s pass over that pejorative for another description: he was white.
Wonder who this could possibly be…
“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.”
– John Bright
We bought our diaries the other day. (I know – riveting – but stay with me!) The ‘other day’ was unfashionably late, nearing the end of the first week of the New Year. Just a few days earlier, crowds all over the world had gathered to celebrate the arrival of 2017. Like most of us they made their resolutions – and like most of us, probably forgot them the next day.
Old friends should never be treated like this: interned in sunless corners, jammed upright until their spines crumble; bandaged, but with half their pages inexplicably missing.My books were freed recently by the arrival of our exuberant Westie wallpaperer and so ended up in piles all over the house. But in them we found reunions everywhere.
We are in the great hall of Auckland Grammar, tip-toeing up the stairs to the balcony overlooking the stage and the ground floor. In the belly of the domed hall, some 2,000 students wriggle in tightly organised rows, their collective chatter sounding like some human beehive.
The other day some friends talked about Auckland’s homeless and how awful the conditions must be sleeping rough. Auckland’s Spring was having an identity crisis, reverting to the chills and rain of Winter, dallying briefly with its sunnier self – then plunging into yet another sodden bout of seasonal recidivism. So these comfortably housed friends were right – how ghastly it must be to live day after day on the streets or crammed in the hothouses of cars at night.
How did we get to this point at which homelessness is so overwhelming, but at the same time beginning to slip down the news agenda? How could it be fixed they asked? They shook their heads sadly, but history has some answers…
Woke up this morning not to our plaintive Tui, who seems to have lost his song, but to a whacking great WHUMP! It shook the house, made the windows chatter in their frames like teeth in a shiver.
Damn developers we thought, making six dwellings where two once stood. But no.