The dog streaks past, his eyes wild with triumph. When you catch him and prise his jaws open, you’ll find a manky Scout woggle stuck to his tongue.
It should be okay after a hot wash. Besides, who’ll ever know?
An evening zip across town to your son’s drama class, and from there to a distant supermarket. You’ve the aisles almost to yourself except near the chillers, where a toddler trips and lands on his tummy. A perfect pink circle of luncheon sausage slaps to the floor beside him. You expect him to scream his head off but he’s more concerned about the meat, which he peels from the filthy lino and stuffs in his mouth.
This child will go on to great things.
You’ve succumbed to the Next Great Smeg Promotion at the supermarket and have begun collecting the stickers. Each represents a $20 spend. After collecting rows and rows of them, New World will reward you with a paring knife. It’s an anaemic deal but it’s Smeg, so we’re all losing our minds.
You’ve a reasonably full trolley this evening, so suggest to the man behind you that he goes ahead. It’s no great act of generosity, really, as he’s holding only a few items and didn’t bother with a basket. But you can tell he’s surprised by the gesture.
As he pays for his things, he offers his stickers to you. Now you’re the one who’s knocked sideways.
Rubbish Day in Karori. You and the dog weave around the green crates set out for glass recycling.
It’s interesting to see what your neighbours have been eating and drinking; mainly drinking, if you’re honest. Wine bottles piled to the brim on Duthie Street. Long-necked beer on Raine and Friend. Vodka, somewhere. Olive jars. Your own crate revealing a lazy reliance on Barker’s meal sauces.
You wonder if anyone else feels vaguely ashamed when they bring out their trash each week. You find the bagged rubbish most embarrassing, your nasty leavings offering passersby a dirty timestamp of your week. ‘On this evening, she used a blister-pack of gravy. Somebody needed an aspirin. She couldn’t be bothered to cross the lawn to the compost, so biffed coffee grinds and eggshells in the bin.’
Evidence of your slatternly ways is everywhere, when you think about it. Your ancient make-up, jumbled in the bathroom cabinet — when did you last wash your sponge? The sticky bit on the bedside table where a sample-sized bottle of serum fell over. Hair caught in the brush. Crumbs in the keys of your laptop. Ink stains on your handbag lining. All this useful to investigators, should you ever go missing.
Sometimes you drive the car into the local carwash just for a break from your life. You close your eyes as high-powered jets thunder overhead, scouring the dusty windows and panels with thick suds and water. Cleverly concealed disco lights tinge the foam into marshmallow pink, mauve and yellow, like a children’s party. It fizzes against the windscreen and streaks dirtily down the sides.
There’s nothing more soothing than the patter of surface protectant, gently misting your paintwork at the end of an automated wash. After eight minutes’ respite and attention, hidden from view on three sides, you’re ready to face the rest of your life, glittering as you are, now, with beads of water.
You restart the engine and drive slowly off the pad as a robotic voice orders you to EXIT, EXIT, EXIT, feeling somehow baptised.
The Irish musician Glen Hansard has crashed his motorcycle and died, coming home from a pub after a night of traditional Irish music-making. This feels impossibly sad, for who didn’t love the movie Once and his disbelieving Oscar-winning speech that year in a rumpled, tieless suit?
You and your husband used to thrash The Frames in the car and went to see his band The Swell Season play in Wellington, early in your relationship.
You’ll suggest that your kids watch Once with you. They’ve just slogged through Lawrence of Arabia, so could probably use a change of pace.
Bono writes a lovely tribute, acknowledging Hansard’s years of busking and near-poverty: For me, he will always be everywhere I see a coin spinning into an open guitar case. Online, there are mixed and darker opinions.
He was only 56. That’s no age.
You’re booked to see Hamlet, performed entirely by Eddie Izzard. You’d planned to take your son, but he’s overtired and flakes at the last minute, incensed that only one actor is taking on all the roles.
“You mean to tell me that it’s going to be THIS,” he says, assuming an exaggerated, actorly profile, “And a bunch of THIS?”. He switches sides and pretends to talk to his opposite self.
Turns out, that wasn’t too far off.
You’re in the fourth row next to a young couple who leave at interval. This means your son’s empty seat is no longer as conspicuous, and you’re somehow relieved. The rest of theatre is packed, mainly with over-fifties in trendy glasses. This, sadly, is a demographic less inclined to thank you when they elbow past your seat, a plastic wine glass in each hand. Damn your eyes, you think of a bearded man in dungarees. And, get thee to a nunnery, to a woman in a sleeveless tank and tatts, who barely smiles as you stand for her.
Eddie Izzard (also Suzy, answers to both), whose entrée offers the audience a wonderful sort of whiplash, is pure charisma. You’re briefly disbelieving. This tends to happen whenever somebody world-famous appears in Wellington: there’s always a cognitive dissonance. Eddie is wearing PVC trousers, block-heeled boots, a cinched blazer ending in a ruffle, long red nails and thick make-up, in a gender-bending star turn worthy of Shakespeare.
The words crash over the audience in surge after tidal surge. There are ripples of recognition at the famous bits (“Alas, poor Yorick!”) and delighted laughter at the few comic moments — the gormless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern represented by Eddie’s hands is a nice idea. Izzard shines best as Ophelia.
There’s something flattening about one person performing every role, having to spin in a circle to suggest a new character, and to swordfight with themselves. There are no props, sound effects, smoke or mirrors. There could have been some clever work done with light and shadow. At times it feels relentless but it’s a feat of memory and ambition, and at the end you get to your feet and clap wildly with everyone else, fiercely pleased.
Feeding your ticket into the pay parking machine, you wonder if tonight was worth a night at the theatre, alone? Would you have enjoyed it more in company? Or did being by yourself better help you absorb the rhythm and language of the play? Your ticket jams for some reason, and in the end, you need a security guard to help you escape the barrier arm. He waves you through without payment and you decide that yes, the evening was very much good value and after all, the play’s the thing.
A shorter than usual newsletter this week, for the reason that my teenager has entered this weekend’s 48 Hour Film competition (make a sub-five-minute film in the space of a weekend, with the genre assigned by the contest at the last available minute, and various conditions thrown in). It begins at the boys’ school this evening and goes full throttle until Sunday night.
I’m on Catering, Driving and Props alongside other long-suffering parents who may also be extras, gaffers, Holding the Boom, and possibly Relationship Counselling by the time the films are submitted (7pm on Sunday). I can’t think of a finer experience for a bunch of movie-loving 13-year-olds but equally, pray for us.
Thank you to the subscribers who let me know they bought a five-buck berry lip balm after my recommendation last week! As I’ve no influence in my life (seriously, nobody listens to me, not even the cat), it was startling and really nice, honestly, to be taken at my word. I hope it brings you a simple kind of pleasure but at the same time, let’s not give in to Big Lip and remember our mouths look just as lovely without it. 💋
In next week’s Listener I air my dirty linen in public, with a piece on laundromats.
Your beautiful laundrette is on the suburban main road, between a kebab shop and a place selling mowers and chainsaws. It rejects this description by calling itself a LAUNDROMAT and truthfully, there’s nothing attractive about it: rows of machines under harsh strip-lighting and a central length of metal table, evoking autopsy.
It’s out on Monday, fellow New Zealanders.
Using no-frills, self-service laundries can save time and money but can be such bleak environments, can’t they? They operate on slim margins with hefty energy and water costs, so I can’t imagine it makes financial sense to add touches that would make them appealing and sociable places: somewhere pleasant to sit. Something hot to drink, even from a machine. Metal trolleys on wheels, like they have in old-timey New York. Cheerful painted squares on the floor. A hatch for drop-offs and pick-ups. An attendant, selling detergents and offering a folding service. Customers happy to linger and talk. Laundromats can smell wonderful and offer the redemptive satisfaction of warm, clean clothes at the end of it all.
But we must worship our great god, Convenience, above all else. So, touch-pad payment it is, and another missed chance for our parallel lives to cross.
A lovely thing about writing for a magazine is correspondence with a sub-editor. Their ranks have been decimated, but some still remain in the wild.
There’s nothing nicer than being sent a page layout of your piece and then exchanging friendly fire over the placement of a semi-colon. I recently had a toe-to-toe over an exclamation mark, and it was the highlight of my day. I managed to argue it back in (‘What I’m trying to evoke is the hysteria of the trend-following householder’ I think I wrote, pompously). Sometimes a sub rewrites a phrase because it’s all feeling and no argument, sharpening it for you; or they might take the wind out of a sentence entirely. Sometimes I’m too worn thin by life (walking the dog; making the tea) to object to changes I don’t like. I remind myself it doesn’t have to be ideal. Columns are meant to be a little bit rough, like a dirty martini.
You must keep your sub-editor happy, and your powder dry.
The latest issue of The Local newspaper is hitting mailboxes in Karori, and the stand-out article is about our famous Mall cat, Zee. She walks the block from home to the shops to sit on the warm bonnets of cars or to curl up in her very own chair at the Salvation Army’s charity shop. People are forever posting worried Facebook messages about her (Do You Know This Cat?) but she prefers the mean streets and doesn’t need rescuing.
My mate Lee-Anne interviewed her owner, and the piece is a mighty example of community news at its finest. Pick up a free copy outside Marsden Books, at the Karori Community Centre or in the Mall, outside Rosina’s cafe.
I’ve been short of adult company this week, so was THRILLED BEYOND MEASURE when Vanessa sent me a link to Devon Poole, who reenacts vintage American TV clips. Here he is doing what appears to be a 1970s line-up of Rockettes dancers and I laughed so hard I nearly coughed up a tonsil.
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With love and my every best wish,
Leah
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