Happy St Pat’s.

Caed Mide Failche!

The top o’ the mornin’ to you all. Here’s a toast to many fond memories and to absent friends. I shall be thinking of you all. Just as well I have a big head, because that’s a lot of thinks.

One Year On.

To Cathryn and Louise and Anne and Fi and Hazel and Jockey and Smurf and Chris and Spike and everyone else who sent me birthday wishes; thank you. I had a lovely day doing very little. I spent much of it doing nothing, sitting under the walnut tree in the back garden, which is something that I do very well. My friend Bentley, who is also expert at doing nothing, and, indeed, does it with much more style and aplomb than I can muster, joined me and sat on my lap. We sat together for a long time, companionably doing nothing in our own individual ways. Then I went to the pub, and later Ruth and I had a marvellous dinner at Tiffany’s courtesy of Louise. It was indeed a most happy birthday.

Meanwhile, back in the jungle, the natives are restless. A large demonstration had been planned for today outside the Christchurch City Council offices to protest, ostensibly, at the pay rise given to the Town Clerk, Tony Marriot. Many of the good citizens of Christchurch feel aggrieved that Mr Marriot has received a very large increase in pay at a time when may of said citizens are without homes, living in rented accommodation that they cannot afford, or in Aunt Mary’s garage. Many point out that Mr Marriot’s rise of $K65 [give or take] is more that most people earn in a year and he does not even live in Christchurch [he lives in Hamilton and commutes]. Mr Marriot has offered to return the sum, provided that the Council toe the line, but many have said that this is unacceptable as the servant does not hold the master to ransom, and it is too late for that anyway.

Protesters outside the City Council, Hereford Street.

They are right, of course. As far as the matter of being too late is concerned, anyway, because the demonstration that was held today was not really about Mr Marriot’s rise. That had become a catalyst, a last straw, if you like, in a litany of woes that would take thousands of words to fully catalogue.

It has been, in short, a shit of a year. Homes have been destroyed, jobs have disappeared, businesses have vanished, many people have been ruined financially. There is a lot of anger, frustration, and bitterness in the air, and people want someone to string up from a lamp-post. Mr Marriot is a convenient butt for this concerted anger, but anger is misleading guide and a terrible master. Angry people do not think clearly, and I would bet money that many of the people demonstrating today would have trouble fully and clearly articulating their reasons for demonstrating, let alone forming those reasons into any sort of manifesto. They want new elections, they want to run the Town Clerk out of town on rail. As if that would make any difference.

But they are barking up the wrong tree. The concerns that most people have are not with the Council at all, but with insurance companies, the Earthquake Commission, and a central government that quite clearly has an agenda of reducing the powers of local governments. Local politicians have made some wrong calls, and there have been some appalling public relations blunders, but what of that? We all make mistakes, particularly in difficult situations such as that in which we have found ourselves. Arrogance and muddle-headedness are reprehensible but they should not be hanging offences.

I had grave doubts about going into the City today. I avoid demonstrations like the plague, because as Town Crier I cannot be seen to be partisan in any way, and I did not want to get mixed up in this confrontation. I went in anyway, to see what I could see from a safe distance, and indeed to see if there was anything to see. Everyone has been predicting a large turnout, but knowing the weight of societal inertia as I do I would not have been much surprised if no-body turned up. As it happened, there were lots of people in town when I arrived. By about 1030 there was a steady little stream of people working their was from wherever along Oxford Terrace an over the Hereford Street Bridge. Numbers started to accumulate.

Mostly, the people gathering were middle aged and elderly, not the sort who usually go to demonstrations. There were younger ones, of course, and a few placards, but everyone was pleasant. It was, withal, a lovely day, warm with a pleasant breeze, an excellent day for a stroll through the town.

The numbers continued to swell and by midday the police had closed Hereford Street to vehicular traffic. There was a large crowd outside the Council offices, completely blocking the road and jamming the empty site of St Elmo’s Courts just to the west of the municipal building. There was a lot of good-natured-sounding noise and the occasional burst of applause, so obviously someone was saying something that people liked, but I approached no closer that Oxford Terrace. The last thing I need is a TV news shot of the Christchurch Town Crier at a protest march.

If nothing else the demonstration managed to severely disrupt traffic in the central City, as I found

Protesters in Montreal Street.

as soon as I sought to drive home. The Police had closed Hereford Street between Cambridge Terrace and Montreal Street, and Montreal Street between Cashel Street and Gloucester Street, which meant that traffic quickly locked up and what is normally a journey of less than ten minutes took almost half an hour. But that is a small price to pay if something is achieved, and I think something will have been achieved, even if it is only the letting off of steam.

No, more than that. The elected members of the Council have been given a message that they will ignore at the peril of their public careers. The people who came to the demonstration are not wild-eyed fanatics, nor a rent-a-mob, nor are they the often fuzzy-edged young rebels of the Occupy movement. Mostly, they are older people, many of them retired professionals, people who know what they are looking at and can understand what they are hearing, people with very deep and very immediate grievances.

The people of Canterbury are, in my experience, very generous, and very forgiving. But they have very long memories.

Christchurch Resurgent [10]

31^st December 2011.

It is almost finished. I am writing this at 2:25 p.m. so we have only another nine hours and thirty-five minutes to go and 2011 will be over forever. What with earthquakes, snow and a heart valve replacement operation, this has been one of the most unpleasant years in my lifetime and, I daresay, in that of many others. The City of Christchurch as we knew it has gone, never to return. What will come to replace it no-body knows. We will cross that bridge as we come to it. Here in Canterbury we are getting very good at waiting, largely because there is nothing else we can do in the face of the glacial speed of the progress that we are making.

That progress, so painfully and slowly achieved, can be demolished in an instant. At the back of everyone’s mind is the niggling awareness that another Big One could strike at any moment. This is not a matter of paranoia. This is fact, but we tend to forget it. We all know intellectually that another major quake can hit at any time, but it is only human nature to become complacent. We had a seriously big one in June, then nothing for six months except for minor tremors. We began to suspect that it was all over and we could look forward to a bright new year. Then the day before Christmas Eve we were hit again with a quake that registered 7 on the Mercalli scale. And they have come thick and fast ever since. Less than an hour ago, at 1.44 p.m. we had a number 5. Less than a 7, perhaps, but significant, enough to set the kitchen floor to rocking, the pots and pans to clattering and to force me to grab the table for support. It was the 7,932^nd quake to hit us since September last year. There had been three more previously today, and fourteen yesterday, of various strengths.

So the reminders that all is not over continue, and I no longer wish people a Happy New Year. On the face of it, that sounds a little too unlikely. Instead, I have taken to wishing people a boring New Year, an uneventful New Year in which nothing remarkable happens – no emergencies, no crises, no surprises – a year that is mundane from beginning to end, in which each day is calm, and serene and the same, a year in which people run out of things to say because nothing remarkable has happened.

And a very Boring New Year to you all!

Christchurch Resurgent [9]

24 December 2011.

So what lies ahead for the City of Christchurch? Buildings are going down all over the place at an ever-increasing rate. We are fast approaching a point in the road at which a decision on the shape of things to come must be made. We are now at a stage where an overall plan must be presented, but despite the Herculean efforts of many, all we have are vague pronouncements and piecemeal draughts of assorted visions that look very pretty on paper but that is as far as they go. None, so far, have the stamp of consensus. All are shallow, the work of technicians, not visionaries.

Christchurch’s beginnings lie clearly and firmly within a fully enunciated and finely detailed ideology. The Victorians were dedicated to imposing imperial order on the benighted chaos of Terra Nullia. Within that order, everything had to have meaning, and a meaning that was blindingly apparent to all [of that era] who saw it. That meaning was the divinely mandated mission of the Empire to bring the glory of Christian enlightenment and English law to the very ends of the earth. The builders of Christchurch were doing God’s Work, building a British Utopia in this, the farthest reach of Empire.

Were they right or wrong? I have absolutely no idea. To judge the purposes of imperial ideology in the light of post-modern political correctness is both vain and meaningless – not to mention quite beside the point here. I do know that the Victorians had a unified vision of what their bright new City should look like, how it would operate, and what symbols it would present to an admiring world. They argued fiercely amongst themselves about ways and means, but they were totally unified in their understanding of the underlying ideology, and in the ultimate source and inspiration of that ideology, lending a fine sense of eurhythmy to the emergent City.

We have two huge barriers to a repeat performance of such unanimity, the first being that the City is now wholly owned by a very large and disparate number of title-holders, many of them not Christchurch or even New Zealand residents, and all of whom have their own ideas about what should be built on their land, and how to go about building it. They will get about their rebuilding in their own good time, in their own individual ways, according to their own visions, needs and finances, and bugger eurhythmy.

Secondly, this firmly secular and staunchly individualistic society no longer has such a universally recognised ideology. In its place we have a hodgepodge of visions, mostly conflicting, the result of that religion of individualism that has undermined any earlier sense of cohesion. Pervading this is the barely bridled capitalism that is the outgrowth of unadulterated materialism, a capitalist ethic that demands that maximum profits be extracted from the minimum outlay in the shortest possible time. Much as I would love to see a new City of high quality and coherent planning, a City that will be a foundation for the next five hundred years, grow out of the rubble, I fear that weak and divided leadership and ad hoc, unco-ordinated decision-making shall leave us with a shambles and dreams of what might have been.

I believe that the new City of Christchurch shall in time emerge as a tourist precinct, not as a commercial centre.

The solicitors, the chartered accountants, the architects, the stockbrokers and the rest shall stay in their suburban communities. The City – what is left of it – shall draw in around Cathedral Square. It is noteworthy that of all the high-rise inner City buildings that are likely to remain are hotels: Ridges, the Millennium, the Heritage, Novotel, the Quest and the Marque. Close to four thousand beds lie within a couple of hundred metres of the Christ Church Cathedral.

I can see a much smaller City Centre evolving into a tourist hub, with bars and cafés, souvenir shops and ‘craft’ markets springing up to service a core made up of the main hotels. There shall be banks and Bureaux de Change, but these shall be branches rather than primary sites, and there shall be little commercial activity beyond that required to cater to the day to day needs of the tourist industry. The primary banks shall establish themselves outside the City proper, alongside the other financial houses. The once-burgeoning English-language trade will resurface in time, but it will probably be centred on Riccarton with its large shopping mall, and Ilam, where it can bask in the reflected academic glow of the University. Most of the land in the central City, particularly in the south-east quadrant, the area between Manchester Street and Fitzgerald Avenue, and north of Peterborough Street, will be given over to warehousing or bulk barns like Briscoe’s and Bunnings’.

What was the City could well become a back-water for tourists, with its restaurant-lined river, its botanic gardens, Museum and Art Gallery. Small shops in low-rise buildings would gradually open, with most development taking place along the route of a restored tramline. Gardens, lawns and flower-beds would be planted to cover a much wider riverine reserve extending from the heart of the City right along to New Brighton.

As visions go, maybe that is not such a bad one after all.

Christchurch Resurgent [8].

Thursday 22 December 2011.

Activity continues relentlessly inside the Red Zone cordon, some of it constructive but most of it destructive, to judge from what can be seen from the barriers at the end of Cashel Street. A pile of rubble is building up across from Colombo Street, where Kivers Lane used to be. The grand old DIC building is rapidly being reduced to a series of truck-loads of rubbish. I can only hope that the fine stained glass windows that used to adorn the stairwells have been saved. Looted or salvaged, it hardly matters so long as they have been removed unharmed and are in a safe place. I imagine that they might appear soon on E-bay; a very large quantity of ‘salvaged’ items has been put up for sale on the internet. In this way items do not have to be put on public display and no-one but the ‘salvors’ need see the piles of loot, which are kept from the prying eyes of the rightful owners.

At ninety degrees to that said sad site, on the south-west corner of the Colombo Street – Hereford Street intersection, there is further destruction. There was a camera shop on that corner, with Dimitri’s Souvlaki shop on the Colombo Street side and the optician’s on the Hereford Street side. Upstairs there was a jeweller’s shop where Ruth got bits and pieces repaired from time to time. No more.

Diametrically opposite that corner lies the monolithic bulk of the Bank of New Zealand, whose demolition began a few days ago. Cera [the Christchurch Earthquake Remediation Authority] had permitted people to enter the Square for the past few weekends to allow them to view the ruination, but, ominously, signs at the entry point advise that this is not public space but ‘Cera Space’, a firm reminder that Cera is not answerable to anyone, and all things now are done only by grace of the Authority. Nowhere does the word ‘please’ appear on the notices; autocracy does not request, it requires. The signs warn those who would enter that it is Very Dangerous, and in the event of an earthquake they might be Seriously Injured, or even that they Might Not Survive. Wear stout shoes, and carry identification, presumably to save Cera the trouble and expense of having to carry out tedious and time-consuming identification from dental records. The wording has that slightly hysterical undertone that is so common in official pronouncements these days. People are terrified that if something goes wrong they Might Get the Blame, so instead of trying to manage risk they attempt the impossible task of eliminating it entirely.

The culture of risk aversion runs deep and strong, and it is strangling recovery. The Cordon, that most visible manifestation of the risk aversion syndrome, is the garrotte that is strangling the life out of the City. “Ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant”, said Tacitus. He was writing about the destruction wrought on native societies by Roman imperialism, but the words might well sit under Cera’s escutcheon; “Where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

By denying access to the central City, Cera is destroying the heart of the community. The longer it maintains that exclusion, the more certain the destruction, but Cera seems to be unaware that a City is more than a collection of buildings, more than the sum of its parts, and it needs to have people in it. But no-one permitted inside the City and Cera will not admit anyone except the demolition crews. Ergo, all the businesses that employed tens of thousands, that were the City’s lifeblood, have gone; bankrupted, working from garages at home, relocated to the malls and the suburbs.

All these people have set themselves up at Riccarton or Hornby or Northlands. The airport end of Waimairi Road, around the intersection of Roydvale Avenue, is humming with activity. In this process business houses and professional people have set up shop, signing five and ten year leases, and spending a lot of money getting the new premises up to scratch. As time goes on they will become more and more entrenched. Their clients will become accustomed to the new positions, all of which will be thankfully low-rise and have ample free parking. Service providers, retailers, cafés and bars will spring up around them, new communities will coalesce. In five or ten years time, when the leases are up for renewal and expensive premises again become available in the City, will they pull up stakes and head back to Cathedral square?

I don’t think so.

 

Where were you when the big one hit?

Where were you when the big one hit?

Is the talk of the town – what’s left of it.

Everyone has a story to tell,

A tale of their own brief glimspe of hell.

*

“The lifts were out like the signs all said.

For a minute there, I thought we were dead!

We had no choice but to head for the stair,

But when we arrived, the stair wasn’t there!”

*

“The road was rippling like waves on the sea!

The like of it you never did see!

Scared? ‘Course I was: you’d get flustered

If the ground beneath you turned to custard!’

*

“Stuff was falling and it missed us, just.

We couldn’t see ‘cause the air was all dust.

But, Christ! You could hear it, all around,

That terrible, horrible rumbling sound!”

*

Everyone who was there that day

In February has something to say.

The tales will be told, again and again,

Tales of heartache, tales of pain,

Laced with a laugh and a bit of a grin

To remind us all that the trouble we’re in

Is not insurmountable; we’ll beat it together,

And whatever happened has changed us forever.

*

Disasters don’t break us, they just make us stronger.

And as time goes by, longer and longer,

We’ll each tell our stories, others will hear them,

Each one unique, each one a gem,

Combining together until they become

The story of all, the glorious sum,

The myth of our time, the articulation

Of the defining event of a generation.

Christchurch Resurgent [7].

Friday 9^th December 2011.

Well, that was a new experience: 0920am this morning saw me waiting at the bus stop to catch a bus to take me on my way to the first part of the day’s business. I have not done that since I left school nearly half a century ago.

Luckily I do not have to go very far to reach the bus stop. The bus company has had to do some reorganising of routes perforce, one result of which is that a bus now runs along Barbadoes Street. And not one bus but two! Number 45 and 46 now pass right by our house every half hour. Even better, we now have a bus stop almost outside the front door. It sprang up a week or so ago at about where the side door of the Star and Garter used to be, which means that all I had to do was don my attire, lock up and toddle across the road to await my chariot.

The bus arrived in good time, and the ride itself was a pleasant enough experience. I sat at the front, overlooking the front door well, and watched the unfolding scenery from an entirely new perspective. We travelled down Barbadoes Street to St Asaph Street, to Montreal Street, to Cambridge Terrace, arriving at the bus exchange – sorry, Central Station – after about ten minutes of smooth riding. I alighted no more than a hundred metres from the back door of Ballantyne’s.

If anything positive has arisen out of the debris of the City it must be the new bus exchange. Only eighteen months ago the City Council was planning to build a new one on this site to replace the old one across the road, which was becoming too difficult, but the plan was to dig a huge hole and build it underground. The cost would have run into hundreds of millions of dollars, on top of the millions [tens of millions?] already paid out for the land. Now, for the cost of a bit of tarseal, some kerbing and signage, plus a series of portacoms for a ticket office, waiting rooms and a toilet, we have an excellently simple and outstandingly efficient bus exchange. Perhaps our City Planners would benefit from a course of instruction in basic economics.

Whilst the bus ride was an enjoyable novelty, and it was interesting to look at things from a different angle, the journey sparked in me a more sombre thread of thought as the journey to and from the City is – was, rather – a most important part of the day. One of the most enjoyable parts of the job of being Town Crier was that I was able to walk to and from Cathedral Square which was, for want of a better word, my office. I could leave home, walk past Piko’s Wholefoods and the Oxford Terrace Baptist Church, then follow the river Avon along Poplar Crescent. From there I would turn into Manchester Street then into Armagh Street, along New Regent Street and Gloucester Street, then through Press Lane or Colonial Lane to the Square.

If I hurried, the expedition might take ten minutes or so, but there was  very rarely any need of urgency. Almost always I would meet people along the way, individuals, couples or little groups, mostly tourists coming from or going to the Holiday Inn in the Avon Loop. Many were Americans, walking towards the Fire Station to look at the Firefighters’ Memorial. We would talk, they would take photos and I would show them where to go on one of the maps that I hand out, and we would go our separate ways. Or I might stop for a minute of two and gaze at the majestic poplars along the river, and the various water fowl swimming or diving in the water, or waddling along the banks. It was a great pleasure and one of the highlights of my day.

No more.

Piko’s is broken in half, and the half that survives is a shell. The Baptist Church with its stately columns and classical Ionic façade has vanished. Where once the faithful sang praises to the Lord, sunflowers are bursting into bloom. The walls of the Holiday Inn lean drunkenly, surrounded by security fences, awaiting the Wreckers. The poplars are still there, as are the ducks and the eels, but what lies beyond the Madras Street bridge I do not know of at first hand, as I have not walked that way since the 22^nd of February. Ruin and desolation lays there, I fear, and I shall not walk that way for a long time yet.

Christchurch Resurgent [6]

Wednesday 7^th December 2011.

The journey into the City is still fraught with difficulty, even in light traffic. The roads are wavy in some places, bumpy in others and holes have a way of suddenly appearing in previously smooth surfaces. Open lanes become closed, signs re-direct you this way or that, and every now and again a broad stretch of road becomes constricted as cones are set out in the middle of it, forming an area where bronzed young men in hard hats and reflective jackets stand around staring down into something below ground level. Every trip out is different, every day a new and uncertain adventure, but I am starting to get the hang of things and something like a routine is forming.

I like routines. I need routines. Routines are my way of coming to terms with a chaotic world that will not stop jumping about in unexpected directions. Most days, I manage to bag the same parking spot under the wattle tree at the back of the car park on the corner of Oxford Terrace and Cashel Mall. I have even managed to establish a working relationship with the parking meter, an eccentric and temperamental device that requires patience and diplomacy to operate. A small victory, you may think, but a significant one. In this way I am regaining some small measure of control over my days.

Wednesday was cold and wet and thoroughly miserable, and I was most interested to find out what, if anything, was happening in Cashel Village, and how its denizens might be coping with such changes as the weather might bring.

Cashel Village, or, to give it its official and very uninspired name, the Restart Retail Centre, is evolving and changing. A pop-up Westpac Bank has appeared on the wide tar-sealed space by the stage. Opposite that, Samsung appliances have set up shop in container premises, and the food caravans are operating a little further back. Barbecue tables have been provided – by whom, I have no idea – and they are much appreciated, although there was no-one sitting there on Wednesday. No-one was there – period, sitting or otherwise. Or so it seemed at first, but further investigation gave that impression the lie.

There were people around, although perhaps not as visible as they might have been. The problem with the Cashel Village [I much prefer that name to Retail Restart et cetera] is that it is set up as a fine weather venue. In the City as it was there was a lot of shelter on wet, dreary days. There were lots of verandahs, and places like the Shades Arcade and the Guthrey Centre to which to retreat. And, of course, the Cathedral, Our City, and the Provincial Council Chambers all provided ample and sociable space. We have none of that in the Cashel Village, so where do people go when the weather bares its teeth?

Answer: Ballantyne’s, where it is warm and busy and a café is operating.

They have verandahs on the Cashel Mall and Colombo Street frontages, and, God bless them, they have the Christmas Windows up and running in all their splendour. Pinocchio, Gepetto and the Blue Fairy have a window to themselves, while Peter Pan, Wendy, Captain Hook, Smee, the Alligator and all the rest of the Neverland team soar, sneer, and snarl in their own. Elsewhere the Three Little Pigs, Red Riding Hood, and other story book characters have their own widows while a nativity scene has pride of place on the corner. The windows are smudged from the pressing of little noses and hands, and there is much jumping up and down, squealing and pointing from the target audience. And Santa Claus is in attendance inside. Had it not been for Ballantyne’s, I doubt that Cashel Village would have happened.

Outside, lined up along the fence that keeps us out of the rest of the City, many people gather to look into the devastation. They come from all over the place, locals and visitors, people from the North Island or from Britain, from Australia and Singapore, from France and from India. They look out through the plastic screens in the fences, talking in the hushed tones of people attending a funeral. And they all want to talk. And they all want to hear about how it happened.

There is very little for a Town Crier to shout about, but there is a lot to talk about, and no shortage of people to listen, whatever the weather.

Christchurch Resurgent [5].

Sunday 6^th November 2011.

Friday was a typical Canterbury spring day, warm and sunny at first then half an hour later a bitterly cold southerly would sweep icy rain across the City, leaving folk wondering if winter had suddenly returned. This after weather forecasts had predicted clear skies and 16-18°C all day. When I grow up, I am going to become a meteorologist, that being the only job that I can think of where you can get it wrong every time and they still do not sack you!

The Arts Centre Clocktower - a long way to go yet.

I had a walk beyond the Mall this time, looking at a rather wider field than just the newly opened-up part of town, and the news is good and bad. The Botanical Gardens are at their floribundent finest right now, as you would expect. The Caterpillar, the little green buggy with all the seats that chugs tourists and visitors around the gardens is running, every hour on the hour. The chap who drives it and gives a commentary is as cheerful and engaging as his little machine is green. Little groups of tourists drifted past the front of the museum, which is also open and fully operational, and into and out of the gardens. Most seem to want to take photographs of the Great Hall of the Arts Centre, with its fallen gable-ends, and bracing, and its turret sitting carefully placed on the ground, or the ruinous Clocktower.

The Arts Centre market was two stalls in their new position on the north side of the Worcester Boulevard, and its Heart of the City Market rival was half a dozen stalls outside the YMCA in Hereford Street. By the time I reached the latter icy rain was driving even those plucky few back into their vans. I walked back down the road, past the sad expanse that used to be the elegant St Elmo’s Courts, now a gravel parking area, to the City Mall.

The problem is that, attractive as the Mall is now on a warm and sunny day, in the cold and the wet

The Artisans' Market opposite Old Boys' High - the determined few.

it is truly miserable. Once upon a time there were verandahs, as well as places like the Shades and Guthrey Arcades, and the Cathedral, where people could shelter. Now there are only the occasional overhanging upper containers, and the insides of pop-up shops. Walking around them and watching the little rivulets running streaming down the fronts and the sides, one cannot but reflect on the basic engineering fact that roofs have slopes and eaves for a purpose other than simple decoration.

Luckily the rain did not last for long, perhaps half an hour at most. Then the clouds blew away, brilliant sunshine flooded down, and smiling crowds began to reappear. Soon Cashel Village was bustling once more, people walking, people dawdling, people standing around, people sitting. Trucks and commercial vehicles huffling and snuffling up and down did not appear to disturb the shoppers, who good-naturedly made way for them without breaking stride. Little gaggles of slack-jawed labourers sat together on benches, ogling the passing women, giggling and nudging each other, flicking their cigarette butts into the flowers in the planter boxes, but nobody seemed to mind them, or even notice them particularly. Everyone seemed cheerful.

There was something invigoratingly symbolic in the day; the forces of nature drove people away, and when they abated people returned, busy, smiling, positive, determined to get on with the never-ending business of getting on. No matter how hard it rains, the sun will come out eventually.

Christchurch Resurgent [4]

Wednesday 2^nd November 2011.

The traffic was difficult along St Asaph Street, most of its length between Madras and Montreal Streets reduced to one lane. But all streets, it seems, are difficult to negotiate these days, sometimes wide open, sometimes down to one or two lanes, sometimes closed entirely, and changing from day to day. Salisbury Street, which is now the main west-east route, has been like a slalom course these last couple of weeks, and Edgeware Road is still closed at the Barbadoes Street end. I managed to get a car park in the Wilson’s park on the corner of Cashel Mall and Oxford Terrace, despite the streams of traffic. This was because I was there by 1000am. Another half an hour and it was full up.

Simply New Zealand's pop-up shop, Cashel Mall.

Looking around, I tried to work out where I was parked; I think that I was over what had been the toilets of The Bog, the very popular Irish Bar at the bottom of Cashel Mall. What sort of an idiot would call his pub The Bog, I ask you? “I’m going for a couple of pints at The Bog” is like saying “I’m off for beer in The Kharzi”, or “I’m off for a drink in The Dunny.” It did not seem to put people off, however. People must be getting more and more desensitised to the finer feelings.

Not that people were being put of from coming to the Mall, it seems, despite the weather. After several days of warm spring sunshine and balmy breezes we had rain over night, with more impending, and a cold southerly breeze was blowing by the time I got to the Mall. Not only that, according to the Press, the conditions were right for a tornado! A tornado, if you please! Earthquakes! Snow storms! Now a tornado! Whatever next? Do you ever get the feeling that Someone is pissed off with you? Not that it happened, of course, the weather man being wrong again, as usual, and the weather picked up as midday approached. It was not that busy when I arrived, and people were walking purposefully, not dawdling, but by noon it was warm and sunny, people were thronging in and it was smiles all round. The shops were busy, the cafes doing a roaring trade.

Lavender plants enjoying the sun.

Even the plants seemed to be cheerful. The Horticultural Society had organised planter boxes up and down the Mall, and along Oxford and Cambridge Terraces, bring colour to a once-drab area. The lavender is looking particularly healthy, and the bedding plants that a couple of days ago were lying down, collapsing in the heat, had stiffened up, leaves firm and happily absorbing the warm sun. Thanks to the overnight rain, the new flower beds were well soaked. These have been dug out at a number of spots around what we now think of as Cashel Village, and there is something deeply symbolic in the sprouting of little plants in such sere and forgotten soil.

Cashel Street was the first City street in Christchurch to be fully built-up. By 1860, its course from the River to Tattersall’s Hotel [about where the Cashel Street Car Park building is now] being completely covered with shops, offices, pubs and the like. The flowers now springing up in beds on ground once occupied by Whitcoulls [formerly Whitcombe and Tombs] on one side and the Guthrey Centre on the other are in soil that has not seen the sun for over one and a half centuries. Life returns anew, despite everything outside forces do to suppress it. Everything seems positive and dynamic, and wandering around the Village, one’s spirits lift into the warm spring sunshine. But at the ends, things are still as they were; debris and destruction, and long stretches of eerie nothingness.

Visions of solid progress and returning vitality are inspiring, but the occasional glance beyond the

Manchester Street looking north from St Asaph Street.

ever-present barrier fences serves to remind us that we have a very long way to go yet. Gloucester Street, Hereford Street, Armagh Street, Litchfield Street, all visible along their stretches from the Mall or Cambridge Terrace, extend into the distance, devoid of any life except the occasional figure in reflective jacket and yellow hat, and the grinding and grumpling of the machines that devour the carcases of the buildings on either side. Whatever is coming, it is going to be a very long time before it arrives, but one virtue that Cantabrians are cultivating is that of patience.