Berhampore Bowling Club

This month I have been bowling every Monday.  Lawn bowls.  I quite enjoy it.  I think this is a good test of where you are in life.  If someone says “how about lawn bowls?” and you feel a slight flicker of interest instead of an uncontrollable urge to laugh out loud, then you’re probably middle aged.  Another sign is when you start shopping for kitchen gadgets: “honey? look, this takes all the hard work out of coring an apple.”

One of the best things about the lawn bowls is the club rooms.  Here’s why.

ONE: It has chairs like my Gran had

My Gran’s chairs had green covers, but they were exactly the same.  She had one special one with no arm rests for knitting.  Also of note is the classic coffee table and mold-culture pattern of the carpet.

TWO: It has bowling balls on the gate posts

THREE: It has the classic electric fireplace two bar heater with glow-y bits that attempt to simulate hot coals in order to make you pyschologically warm while you freeze your ass off.

This heater seems to have won a junior bowling competition, which really is an outstanding achievement for a heater.

FOUR: It has a portrait of the Queen

Lovely.

Sixty years on the throne this year, our Liz.  Which really is a long time to sit on anything.

The main room is large and all the walls are covered in photos of past presidents, and honours boards stretching back to the 1950s.  I love looking at old sporting photos.  The fellas and ladies in the portraits usually look quite cheerful; like they couldn’t imagine anything better than being photographed as president of the Berhampore Bowling Club in 1972. I think it’s a nice feeling for a club to have its old members looking down from the walls on the hijinx of its new members.

Downstairs are lockers and bowling ball bags, and ball polishers and ladies powder rooms (about three, which is a lot of powder).  Upstairs are long tables and a bar and beer coasters and a servery.  I love it.  It is splendidly out-moded and worn out.

Long may it live on in its quiet corner of Berhampore.

Milk and Graffiti

When I was a kid someone gave me a book called 101 Uses for a Dead Cat.  I thought it was pretty funny at the time.  Actually, it is still pretty funny.

Richard would probably appreciate this as a gift next Christmas.  Amazingly for a one idea book there were at least two follow up books, which seems to be taking things a bit far.  It means the author had to think of 303 uses for a dead cat.  And they say the West is decadent.

I think that this kind of book may have been killed off by the internet and blogging.  The book that is a collection of things on a similar theme.

In 1982 there was a pompous git touring New Zealand flogging off his latest book which was a collection of other people’s graffiti from around the world.

In fact his entire body of work, up until 1982 at least, seemed to be a way to make money out of other people’s creativity.

His latest collection featured some offerings from New Zealand,

Laura Norder anyone?

Zap is udder crap.  Ha!  I remember when Zap first came out.  It was the revolutionary idea of flavoured milk in a little tetra pak with a straw.  I can’t tell you how much I desired this drink when it first hit the market.  It was like they took milk and they added, wait for it, flavour to it, and then – there’s more? - they put it in a little packet just for you.  Man oh man was this cool.

But in the 1980s the milk industry was being marketed by some kind of advertising genius.

Peanut Gumbo you say?  I’m pretty sure this is not a gumbo.  In fact, if you skim the ingredients list you will find that this isn’t really anything except milk thickened with cornflour.  Yum.

The milk industry is currently running a campaign where they intend to provide a cup of milk to every primary school kid in New Zealand every day.  Whole generations of kids in New Zealand from the 1940s to the 1960s remember free school milk without much fondness.  It tended to be dropped off each morning at the school gate and by the time the children got it the milk was warm.  Not good.

Fonterra intends to get around this by making sure all the schools have refrigeration.  They were on the news the other day talking about starting the programme in Northland.  There are 14,000 kids in Northland we were told.  Which is 70,000 single serve cartons per week.  There are 40 school weeks in a year so I guess this is  2.8 million single serve cartons for Northland in one year.  Fonterra says that recycling is an important part of the plan.  I really hope so.

Anyway, back to the graffiti guy.

Nigel is annoying.  He talks about his fancy degree, and his serious career, and how most graffiti is crap.  They must have edited the bit out of the interview that said “and Mr. Rees is being forced to publish these stupid books that are beneath his dignity because a terrorist group have kidnapped his family.”  I assume this is the case, because otherwise he could, like, you know, stop publishing the books.

Because I am middle aged and walk to work tagging irritates me.  My walk to work is past acres of tagging.  It offends me because it is purely vanity.  People putting their names on things in some kind of status battle with other taggers.  It doesn’t mean anything else, and it wrecks buildings I like.

This dilapidated heap has been around a while.  I like it even though it is falling apart.  It is in a photo I have my suburb from 1905 and on the side it says that it was a Swiss Bakery.  Now on the side it says this:

SATG, whoever he or she is, would be the most prolific tagger in Wellington South.  SATG took the time to climb onto this wonky scaffolding and spend a good couple of hours doing this I would say.  Thanks.

Mind you, the old Tip Top building down the road got a much more thorough going over.

I was going to write a letter to the editor, but then I didn’t want to become a person who writes letters to the editor about graffiti.  It’s only one small step from there to letters about bad grammar and people not speaking properly.

Mind you, there is someone in Wellington doing cool stencils which I like.  I notice that the council anti-graffiti team also like them because they don’t paint over their work.  Probably my favourite from this person is his wolf.

Cool.

The Christchurch Earthquake in Wellington

One of the most surprising aftershocks of the Christchurch earthquake is how much damage it has done in Wellington.  The City Council and local school boards have suddenly become apprised of how risky some of the buildings in our city would be in a major earthquake, and have been forced to take action.  Unfortunately that action is to demolish buildings.  A surprising effect of this is sadness and disorientation.  Given the small scale of the destruction in Wellington I can only imagine what it must be like for people who have lived through an event that saw huge sections of their city flattened.  What it must be like in the centre of Christchurch now, or after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, or after the Blitz in London.  Buildings mean things to people, and losing them is sad.

Yesterday they began to tear down the school hall at South Wellington Intermediate School which is just down the road from my house. 

It was an earthquake risk.  It was also pretty old and one of those lovely old school halls with all wood floors, and a wooden stage.  We took Eleanor there for her first election. 

My second placement as a training teacher was at South Wellington Intermediate, and every morning the students trooped over to do aerobics  in the hall.  My efforts to aerobisize to Kung Fu Fighting provided 25 minutes of glee to the students in my class.  Who knows how many votes have been cast in the hall, how many school productions staged, how many Stage Challenge rehearsals.

On one of the ugliest streets in Newtown there is one old building with a little history. 

It has a red sticker on it now, and unlike schools which have to be fixed I imagine the poor sod who privately owns this building and bears all the costs will be looking to sell out to a property developer and a demolition crew. 

When I was in a band we performed in this building.  It went well.  In fact it was probably the most satisfying performance of my life because strangers danced, and a guy interviewed me on Access Radio (he’ll interview anyone about anything as it turns out, but hey, it was an exciting moment).  Now this old building, which must have hosted a few thousand drunken nights and a few hundred bands, is all locked up and covered in tagging, and smells of the wrecking crew.

I am quite a big fan of this building’s windows,

And some of its tagging,

Newtown School is putting prefabs up on its playground.  I go to the market there every Saturday.  The main block turns out be a death trap (only 6% of code), and so it must go.  Newtown School has been on that site for a very long time (since 1879), and the current school block is not the first one on that site.  In fact it is a school that has seen a lot of buildings come and go.  The current one will go.  Sadly for the thousands of kids who are now adults and remember sitting in those classrooms.

Wellington East Girls’ College will be losing its main block.  They will keep the facade and the “heritage features”.  Which may mean it looks fantastic in the future, or like a Disney version of an old building.  We’ll see.

Not that you can argue against it.  Probably the last place you want to be a high earthquake risk would be a school of any kind.  The tragedy that could unfold would be awful, but it reminds you how important buildings are to the identity of a place.  Even ugly old buildings that have been disused for decades.

Just recently a set of buildings came down to make way for a new road.  Nothing to do with the earthquake, and everything to do with cars.  The buildings weren’t much, but they have been there my whole life, and now they aren’t.

What is this post about?  Getting old?  Watching material things transformed into memories?  I think that this post belongs with the previous one. 

Everything must go.

Newtown

The post in Newtown

Since I started reading books about radio in the 1920s in New Zealand I have found an endless stream of possible tangents and diversions.  I am just back from pursuing one. 

One of my books about radio said that one of the first radio “stations” in Wellington started in somebody’s house in Newtown.  At that time all radio was regulated by the the Post Office (which controlled telegraph and, by extension, wireless).  One of the men who started up the radio station mentioned that he lived practically next door to the post office in Newtown, and I wondered where the post office in Newtown was in 1921.

This is what it looked like:

Which is rather fine.  Later photographs show it with a clock.

It was opened by the Premier, Richard Seddon.  The Evening Post gives generous coverage of the opening ceremony in August, 1900.  Richard brought his wife, and the Minister of Public Works, and at about 3 o’clock the Mayor of Wellington and his party began to speechify.  Local schools had been closed early and the Post reporter noted the high number of children in the audience.  They probably got very little fun out of the speeches, but the building was certainly nice, and Seddon was a real celebrity.

A Mr. Brightwell congratulated the government on erecting such a fine building, but also asked that Wellington South not be neglected, and put the case for the tram lines being extended to Island Bay.  Seddon responded, others pitched in (I sense the school children at the fringes growing restless), and then the official party retired for an hour,

I imagine that after such a jolly good round of toasting Mr Seddon was considerably more sociable by 4.30pm.

Having read all of this I wondered whatever became of the Newtown Post Office.  After all, I wanted to find the place where one of Wellington’s radio pioneers began his work, and to do that I needed to find the site of the old Post Office.  A little bit of hunting on line turned up another photo which put that building into a wider perspective.

The Post Office is the brick building on the far left, and the buildings in the centre are St. Thomas’ Church and Hall.  Apparently the Post Office was opposite a match factory, about where the Newtown Mall is now, and seeing as the match factory is no longer there a quite large part of me (the ironic part) hopes that it burnt down.

All of this translates, fairly grimly, into this scene in 2011,

I took Rosamund in her pushchair down to the site of the old Post Office and took these shots with our camera.  I took those pictures with mixed feelings (and a Canon Ixus 105).  I don’t think that it is snobbish to say that the architectural landscape has changed for the worse in this little bit of Newtown. 

On the other hand there was some kind of consolation to be had.  That consolation came first when I noticed that the church that was on the site of the old St. Thomas’ had a St. Thomas Centre in it, and my heart leapt when I saw this out the front of the ugly, modern, breeze block building that stands there now:

Stepping back I noticed a low wall made of similar stone (the garden littered with rubbish and beer cans),

Which is all that remains of a fine block of buildings.  A bit of a pillar, and a bit of wall.  Bits you can see the mum and kids walking past in the photo below (with some young loafer leaning on the post office behind them).

The church on the site now is the City Mission.  There are a lot of organisations around Newtown that seek to help the less fortunate.  Newtown has long been a Salvation Army area, but other groups have been equally active.  While I stood on the footpaths taking photos it was obviously the hour that the night shelters were clearing out for the day, as weary, worn out men and women in their mismatched, and discoloured clothes shuffled past me one by one.

Curiously this was also a consolation.  Not that suffering and isolation are still with us, but that the impulse to help, which was a powerful force in the Victorian era, is still in evidence in Newtown with all of its thrift shops, and soup kitchens, and programmes to help streetkids and refugees and the poor.  That this impulse has survived the last 100 years is probably more important than that the lovely old buildings have made way for a petrol station, and a video store and a McDonalds.

Still, it would be nice to have both the impulse and the buildings.