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.