It's time, Wellington

Paris, Milan, Oslo, Karori

I’ve lived in Wellington more than twenty years. I’ve been to the Old Bank shopping arcade approximately a squillion times. I’ve marvelled at its tiled floors, scalloped masonry and polished Edwardian woodwork, and scoffed at the price of its French soaps, designer clothes and linen bedsheets. I’ve used the ladies’ bathroom on more occasions than I can number, each time with satisfaction and relief.

But until yesterday I had NO IDEA that every hour, on the hour, French horns sound and this happens.

I mean, WHAT?

I was standing outside Smith the Grocer, the cafe you can see from this angle, waiting for a coffee meeting. It happened to turn 9am and the pendulous bulb of the hanging clock started to throb purple. I don’t know about you, but I prefer a bit of a warm-up before something like this happens.

Then its leaves began to open - unevenly, I have to tell you - and a heavenly narrator began the story of colonial Wellington. I couldn’t see much but could tell there was a revolving frieze of scenes up there, obscured by the hanging flaps. I looked around to see if anyone else was as startled as I was, and asked a woman pushing a buggy, “Has this always been here?”

“I’m not from Wellington,” she said. Her tone was sour, as if she wished she were. Who WOULDN’T want to live here, when such riches are available to us?

She didn’t stay to listen to the story of the wharf or this building - I mean, if we’re honest, most of the shoppers in this video don’t seem to give a fat rat’s either, about how settlers wrested control of the harbour, fashioning a national capital in the image of a country most distant to us on this earth. Perhaps these shoppers, like me, had pressing business.

I marched into the cafe and straight up to the young woman behind the counter, who was honestly completely dazzling, with silver-rimmed eyes and swishy hair.

“Has that clock ALWAYS done that?” I asked, jabbing at it. “I’ve literally never seen it before.”

“Yup, it’s always been there and always done that,” she said. “People even come to watch it from up on the viewing balcony.”

I was astounded by this and shouted, “WHAT?” This stirred some of her patrons to look over but not the blue-suited man strongly resembling our Minister of Health, who was at a tiny table nearby. He was having a business meeting and seemed entirely without expression which, considering the shambles of his portfolio, was a remarkable feat of self-control. I gave him a hard stare.

“There are pictures and stuff,” I said, stupidly.

“There’s like moving parts and everything,” she agreed.

“Fuck off,” I said.

“I won’t,” she said.

Just then, the Health Minister did fuck off and my friend arrived. I was now sitting in view of the golden, hanging clock - an idiotic folly, out of step with the times and possibly fanciful in its treatment of historical detail. I mean, yes, Harold Beauchamp was a burgher of Edwardian Wellington and indeed, his daughter was Katherine Mansfield. But did she honestly, as pictured, pay him a visit at the Old Bank back when it was a bank, and quite new?

Considering Mansfield got the hell out of Karori as soon as she could (relatable) and spent the rest of her distant, expatriate career socially embarrassed by her colonial childhood while artistically inspired by it, I’m not sure she should be trapped up there in a scene. She was a genuine bohemian, and it would probably annoy her no end, monument as the Old Bank now is to bourgeois materialism. (There’s a lovely pair of double-strap patent Mary Janes in the window of I Love Paris right now. Just saying.)

Why have none of my Wellington friends ever mentioned the damned clock? They’re chatty, city types, usually all up in Wellington’s business. My mate Jane even owns a NEWSPAPER. I asked my husband this morning if he was aware of the hanging, talking, revolving, trumpeting clock, and he was not.

“We should be telling the cruise ships,” he said.

(He and I do think cruise ship passengers are hard done by, when they get to Wellington. For one thing, straining to listen to their tour guide high on Mt Victoria with a southerly howling in their ears can’t be easy. Also, is it really still true to tell them Wellington has more cafes per capita than any major city, excepting New York?

Well, at least until our present-day conservative government brutalised the public service, the heavenly narrator might say, back at the Old Bank. Now everyone’s drinking at home and using their teabags twice. Please spend lavishly during your stay. We need the foreign exchange.)

I feel like I’m at the point in our relationship where I’m taking Wellington for granted. Discovering the clock felt like I’d woken from a coma, with blind spots in my cognition. And this is the Old Bank clock, a nurse might be telling me, encouragingly. You must remember the clock? It’s dinged every hour for the twenty years you’ve lived here?

I’d remember a dong that big, wouldn’t I?

It makes me feel a stranger in my own city. Cities always rewrite themselves; they require people like me to keep up as the lines materialise on the paper and the pages ruffle and turn on their own. I’m chapters behind this city, chapters and chapters. It’s written me out of the story.

There are bars and restaurants that have come and gone, buildings that have shuttered, apartment blocks built, shops opened and closed during all the years I’ve been living in the suburbs, confined to barracks, raising children and minding house and working, piecemeal, from home. And now, it seems, I didn’t entirely know it in the first place, iterations ago.

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After my coffee I didn’t linger in the shopping mecca of Lambton Quay, spiritual home of the chain store. This isn’t because I don’t need new clothes, shoes and underpants. I do. It’s because I find shopping for myself completely depressing and avoid it at all costs.

I wear things until they fall apart and for years, nobody has noticed or minded. For example, here’s my only pair of trainers. The split toes are getting ridiculous. Every time I walk the dog, I collect grasses.

And my handbag. It was an old satchel of my mum’s, but it’s become so worn that small things like lip balms and ballpoint pens are slipping out of it.

Of course, what eventually happens is that you run out of respectable clothes and wind up as I am today, wearing one of your husband’s shirts and a nasty pair of all-purpose denim shorts that wedge right up in your crack.

I’m not trying to win points for being a slob or for making do. I’ll just do anything I can to avoid clothes shopping. This is because, whenever I go to the city or into a mall, I tend not to like anything. It all looks exactly the same. Trends don’t seem to work for me - the billowing dresses and tiered skirts and sun-frocks with keyhole backs that almost everyone turned to this summer.

Then, if I do try anything on, invariably it fits poorly, which puts me in a nasty mood. Things have to get as bad as they are now (admittedly, quite bad) before I put myself through it again.

Seeing as clothes shopping is existentially painful for me, the fact I’ve just had a THRILLING shopping experience has absolutely blown my mind. There’s a European brand aimed at, I’d suggest, women over 40 - with lovely, tailored designs but eyewatering prices that if I were better groomed, I’d want to wear all the time. They finally ship internationally, but their prices are challenging. I mean, you might not think anything of dropping $300 on a top, but it would certainly give me night sweats.

I’m not shilling for them, so I won’t mention the brand, but they lean heavily into the sort of fashion photography where a woman, thinner and probably younger and certainly with glossier hair than you, crosses a cobbled street with urgency, holding a paper cone of roses in one hand and a clutch purse in the other. She’s hurrying to meet Francois or Mario or Bjorn for une tasse de cafe or una tazza di caffe or en kopp kaffe and she just happened to throw this look together back in her second-floor balcony apartment, overlooking a major European river.

I want to be her. She is living MY LIFE.

I decided to take the plunge on a patterned shirt with a price point I couldn’t justify. It was the first thing I’d liked in weeks. I’d spent actual weeks clicking on it, and just looking at it. I finally accepted the need to pay up. I vowed to then find a period of paid employment to neutralise my reckless spending.

I didn’t appreciate until after I’d clicked BUY that I’d been mistaken in thinking it was listed in NZ dollars. It was not. The price was in American greenbacks, which meant I could add a cool two hundred to the imaginary sum I’d paid.

It’s a strange thing to spend the next ten days deep-breathing into a brown paper bag. I couldn’t believe how stupid I was or how terrible my personal finance. But I forgave myself for being so wanton when the parcel arrived.

Instead of the usual baggy plastic bladder full of jumble, this was a heavily detailed slim box with a beautifully lettered message inside the lid. MERCI: THE FRENCH WAY TO SAY THANK YOU, it read. And, stuck to the tissue wrapped around my shirt, a direction to BREATHE DEEPLY. THE SCENT YOU’RE ENJOYING IS OUR SIGNATURE PERFUME.

Good grief, they had me at bonjour.

Can you imagine anything more chic, more chichi, more elegant than this? I practically stuffed that tissue paper up my nose. I now had FRIENDS in PARIS. Yes, I’d basically spent $450 on a box, but WHAT A BOX.

Eventually I shook out the shirt, held it to my face and huffed it, smoothed it over a few times, and hung it in my thinly-populated wardrobe. I haven’t actually tried it on, just in case it was a horrible mistake and I look awful in it. I haven’t even taken off the tag. Would YOU take off a tag that says in French,

I’m not an ordinary tag…If you remove me, you won’t be able to return your piece anymore.

How European, how chic, to remind me of my rights as a consumer! The message is a little infantilising and the English kind of clunky but tant pis! Someone called Delphine probably dreamed this up while eating a Madeleine on the Left Bank.

The problem now is I’ve glimpsed what life is like for people who can generally afford to live like this, dress like this. Approcher. Respirer. I want to breathe in deeply whenever I make a purchase and not get asphyxiated by the formaldehyde in cheap clothes. Why can’t all transactions be as elevated and sensuous as this? All goods as charming? I feel somehow denied now I’ve experienced what’s possible as a shopper, how I might be routinely treated if I was somebody else.

I can’t afford to shop there again, but nor can I flatten and dispose of the box. It would represent the giving up of something, or the giving in. I, too, can buy a cone of flowers and cross a cobbled street. Not in Karori, admittedly, although you won’t find better scented lilies than at the Karori Mall greengrocery.

Somebody out there in an arrondisement of Paris has my address and squirted a cloud of perfume in my face on purpose. I feel, somehow, back in the game, ready to play, looking to win.

Fuck off, says Wellington, disbelievingly.

I won’t.

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