Merrily on high
Ding dong, people, the festive season has arrived! The cherry-sellers are back! December is tomorrow!
You can’t move in supermarkets for heaving displays of Stollen and fig paste, pavlovas and puddings, flan cases and meringue nests, and mince pies of variable quality — though get in fast for brandy snaps, which ran out last year at the Crofton Downs Woolworths with a week until Christmas. It was a lesson to us all.
Our tree isn’t up yet but the corporates already have theirs, richly trimmed and mighty, twinkling in the foyers of Wellington’s office buildings. Councils have hoisted their lamp-post banners, fluttering with bland festive designs, somehow deadening the holiday atmosphere. When the council gets involved, it feels less of a party and more of a ponderous civic exercise but still, who am I to get in the way of a lukewarm good time? Why not tick a box for Jesus, if the budget is available? Peace and goodwill to all men!
There are blooming hanging baskets in Marsden Village, blowsy roses in remembrance gardens, and hollyhocks waving along the paths on Te Ahumairangi hill. You’ll find deep-green drifts of wild fennel up there, airy as tulle, and star-like flowers tangled in the grass. Dogs have ribboned through the overgrowth, because this is where the professional walkers like to come and let their charges off the lead. Tis the season to round any corner and smack into five poodle-mixes, four mini-schnauzers, three little pugs, two fat Labs and a bearded collie barking up a tree.
Life, life spilling over everywhere! It’s spring at her most abundant, giving way to the slow hum of summer.
Speaking of goodwill, there’s plenty, bucketsful, to go around. Only this week I turned into Karori Road in a useful gap in traffic, as I’ve done hundreds of times in the ten years I’ve lived here, only to notice a man in a tiny hatchback looming in my mirrors with urgent news to pass on. He’d come out of nowhere — his car was dinky, like something from a Sylvanian Families boxed set — but I pulled to one side to let him pass, intrigued by what he needed to say.
It turns out that he’d wanted to maintain a higher speed than the one my arrival had afforded him. He had hoped, if you like, to drive it like he stole it along the long and lazy stretch of Karori Road. I had frustrated this ambition and must be humiliated.
His language was fruitier than a New World mince pie. His mood, on the Richter scale, was moderate to severe. His opinion of me seemed low, probably unrecoverable. He had a military haircut, an angry Adam’s apple and undescended testicles.
I was not about to be intimidated by such a man. I was now driving behind him so rolled down my window, stuck a middle finger high in the air and kept it there for half a block, even past the playground of Karori Normal School. Everyone saw, including the blameless children. Even from the back of his head I could tell he was apoplectic in his little Noddy car. I have to tell you, it felt fantastic. Absolutely anything could’ve happened next, though this being Karori, nothing did.
I love being 53. You appear benign, suburban, the kind of person who polishes the leaves of her houseplants. But really, you’re an agent of chaos, in extra-cushiony shoes.
George came home from Scout camp tired and mucky, full of excellent stories. “There was one guy,” he said wistfully, “Who bet he could eat a whole cake. He nearly did it but vomited up rainbow.”
This is the generation set to take care of us when we’re old.
Camp! It signals the beginning of the end, ushering in a crunch fortnight of office drinkies and parties, school trips and theme-days, fundraisers and final assemblies. I’ve no colleagues and nothing in the calendar but even I got togged up and went out on Friday night, meeting friends at a book launch in town. I treated it like a Christmas function, digging out a dress and going overboard with the hot tongs. I had more ringlets than the Spanish Infanta.
“We’re old; we’re in our fifties,” the writer said dolefully in the bar afterwards. I’d last seen him in the late 1990s but our group — solidly Gen X, with shared memories of Otago University, didn’t look much worse for wear. We were peaking. Some of us were senior public servants.
Admittedly I’ve a couple more chins than I did then, and tend towards pronation, but that’s nothing good arch support can’t fix.
“I don’t think I can stand for the whole thing,” I’d told my mates Hamish and Jane earlier, at the bookshop. I’d just spent two days in bed with dehydration, and it was a miracle I was upright at all.
“You could sit on a pile of Zadie Smiths,” said Hamish, and I considered it. But we were in a progressive stronghold (Unity Books, if you must know; beloved of people in graphic T-shirts and statement spectacles) and I didn’t trust the optics.
In the end I was offered a plastic chair and took it, seated among a smattering of older patrons to listen to the author interview. Here I was among smart and thoughtful people, in the heart of the most bookish of New Zealand’s cities, looking like a dressage pony among scholars, critics, readers and lovers, poised between seasons, light from the shop spilling into the street, a cultural historian talking earnestly to a music journalist, respooling and revising the story of our lives; in a room with friends who remember each other from when we were young, and all the summer before us.
‘an agent of chaos in extra-cushiony shoes’ - will have me laughing all day - thank you!!
Laughing so much I almost fell off the swivel chair.
You are a true agent of chaos and now the scourge of those with small cars and unfallen testicles - perhaps the largest segment of some bizarre Venn diagram