Pink Pāua Shell Sandwich
City-Watching Field Notes 22nd May 2023
Jeanette Winterson: “Art isn’t an escape from the real; art is a means towards the real.
Art isn’t imitation— it is a kind of energy-wrestle. We’re trying to make visible the invisible world.”
The oak trees opposite the mouth of Aro Street are brown with Autumn. They are a season-barometer. In early Spring I watch them attentively for the first flush of tender green.1 There are three oaks, and each has its own timing. One, then another, then another. This chronodiversity is more evident in the quick greening of Spring than the slow browning of Autumn.
On Lambton Quay the gingko leaves strewn on the pavement look like yellow-winged moths. All at once they fall— like pūriri moths who all hatch, breed and die in a single night, then lie scattered on the ground. Gingko are dinosaur trees, more or less unchanged since the Jurassic: their leaves are the fan-form leaves were before trees got the idea of a big vein up the middle of the leaf, with tributaries. They are dioecious— male and female— and the fruits the female trees bear smell like rotten cheese, or vomit.2
Through the huge plate-glass window of a downtown nail salon, a twinned pair of shaggy white terriers.3 One lies motionless on the floor. The standing one vigorously licks out the inside of the prone one’s ear.
Two young men at the bus stop, of the general type that in West Auckland in the 90s we would have called metallers. Black t-shirts over long-sleeved shirts with band names in white down the arms, and well-worn black jeans. Teenage skin. The footwear is different from the 90s— sneakers instead of boots— but the hair is the same, shoulder-length, lush.4
One pulls a tidy lunchbox from his scruffy backpack and takes out a sandwich wrapped in waxed cotton. The cotton is a quilting square,5 printed with pale pink and mauve pāua shells. Things are less clear cut these days. Boys wear pearls. One can’t entirely assume that his Mum packed his lunch.
(This reminds me of my friend Tomislav in high school— we would have been 16 or 17— opening his sandwich to see what his Mum had put in there, and critiquing the filling. He and the other Croatian boys wore the aforementioned metaller uniform: band t-shirt (Metallica,6 Pantera, Sepultura) with a flannel shirt open over the top; black skinny jeans; Doc Martens which were rated according to the number of eyelets (10-ups, 20-ups); and the hair, the hair. Undercuts. Straight was the ideal, middle-parted, falling like an ironed curtain.7
After some months I began to pick out words and phrases from the river of Serbo-Croat.
Innocently: “What’s jebo?”
”That means fuck.”
“What’s u pičku materinu?”
”Ha ha, go to your Mother’s cunt.”)
As I’m getting on the bus I catch a glimpse of pāua boy’s sandwich, which looks to be gluten-free.
Reading my library book, The Problem With Everything, I almost don’t notice that the bus has taken the normal route up Adelaide Road, until I glance up and there are the Police standing in clusters, there is Loafer’s Lodge front-on with the black char spilling upwards from the topmost windows. Smell of smoke.
Walking home round the Coast I run into a friend who (after a long talk, while the clouds turn slowly pinker and mauver over the mountains) tells me how she listened to a podcast on debunking cults, that had a guy on it dissing me. “I wasn’t going to tell you. Should I tell you?” As she described the podcast, and the man, I worked it out: “Hang on— was it the head of the Skeptics Society?”
Fair’s fair. I wrote about our meeting too. It was a dark and stormy night, the 2nd of December 2020…
Monday night's Full Moon (a blue Moon, second in a month, with a penumbral eclipse) delivered many twists and turns... Originally I planned to go hang out in the cemetery and drink with the Dead. Taking advice from a farmer concerning the imminent weather bomb, I decided to switch to indoor ritual-attendance up the line.8 But after a fairly long and moderately epic journey to Pukerua Bay, the massive volumes of water falling out of the sky and running over the ground caused that mission too to be aborted, for fear of getting trapped by floods. So after making my way back to town I found myself washed up like a slightly drowned rat in Wellington's oldest pub, the Thistle Inn, for a whisky, and... Riddle me this... Falling in with some members of the Skeptics Society, fresh from infiltrating the Rosicrucians.9
Now, Skepticism and Wizardry are by no means mutually exclusive, in my opinion. It's a noticeable trend that people who practice any kind of magick are more likely (than the general public) to be rationalists. I think this is because you have to have a robust connection with real Reality if you're going to meddle with far-out, mind-boggling shit...
(Tangentially, these kind of random happenings and connections are a thing I really love. It's notable that they tend to happen more under certain conditions: alone, with time to spare, and willingness to be flexible and enthusiastically open to whatever circumstance delivers. Call it magick, or call it coincidence... Depending on whether you're a Wizard, or a Skeptic. If you're both, Magicoincidence??? If you want to expedite randomness, it pays to follow your whims, and be willing to talk to complete strangers. I've made a lot of friends this way.)10
This morning I rescued an Art Oracle deck from the rubbish pile at Nautilus. (‘Change Your Life With Art! Consult the Oracles Today!’) After writing this post I opened the box, shuffled the deck for the first time, and flipped a card. I swear to Gods:
Viridis!
My guess is that only male gingkos are used in landscaping.
West Highland terriers?
It charms me, long hair on young men— something about the variety of colours and textures, varied as animal pelts. Maybe I find it endearing because it’s a signifier of youth. Collective manetenance is a thing possible only for teenage boys, when all of them still have all their hair.
I believe the technical term is a fat quarter.
Or as my friend Jack used to call them, in a Cockney accent, “Me’al-Lickah”
Our friend Dejan had an auburn ringlet-cloud, that rose like dough.
At the Woolshed.
I struck up conversation by asking them if they were Rosicrucians, because of the Rosicrucian literature spread out all over the table. LOL, they said. (After a while I recognised one of them. I’d read Tarot for her, at the Witches Market. I remember the reading: my mild bafflement at her unforthcomingness.)
Afterwards I had some online conversation with the head of the Skeptics, who tried to friend me, and a few weeks later I tried to go to their meeting, but by mistake I went to the wrong bar… Which seemed like an omen not to proceed further.
Although Skepticism is a philosophy I agree with, personally I find pure logic-brain thinking to be both boring and frustrating. I can do it if I have to, but I don’t find it fun. I think of logic-sparring as talk that closes down, rather than the far more interesting talk that opens up.
All that Skeptic biz was a scene-setting digression. The actual subject of this post was the pub we were in, Wellington’s oldest pub, the Thistle Inn.
So here's the timeline: (I wrote)
22nd January 1840: [First settler ship] Aurora arrives in Petone.
6th February 1840: Treaty of Waitangi signed.
Early 1840: Whaler Richard 'Dicky' Barrett turns prefabricated wooden building meant as a schoolroom into a Hotel ie. pub, on Lambton Quay. (Colonists immediately needing a stiff drink decide pub more important than school.)
July 1840: first Hotel ie. pub licenses issued.
5th October 1840: Thistle Inn, built by Scottish carpenter William Couper, who is also the proprietor, opens.
By the 10th of October 1840, there are 12 licensed hotels in Wellington, as well as numerous whare / tent grogshops.
…
Unfortunately, the modern incarnation [of the Thistle] is kind of boring. Where's the grog, the fights, the hellfire? It seems to me that Wellington has a distinct lack of proper pubs. Quite why this is I don't know. Let me know if you know of any good ones. I mean pubs, not bars, here.
Possibly it is proximity to the heart of the bureaucracy— that big bosom of the State, the Beehive— that makes the current Thistle so square and boujee. I don't normally go downtown. Or maybe I was there on a bad day. To be fair, it was a Monday. The barman was not super friendly. A good barkeep is meant to be jovial and not too young IMHO. They seem fairly focussed on fancy food rather than their core historical purpose, grog. [What in England they call a gastropub.] There is a weird glass panel in the floor which looks down on a historicalish cellar [with rubber rats], and they do have a cabinet of old bottles and stuff, and cool images on the walls. But the [hearth]fire is not real (the one in [actual oldest pub in NZ] The Moutere Inn is, with real wood).
They have an OK selection of whisky, which they serve in a pleasingly enormous tumbler with cut-glassish patterns, fake vintage but a nice touch. There's a lot of wood, it's quite pretty, and apparently when it was refitted in 2004 it was also fortuitously earthquake-strengthened. They were playing good-quality old blues and soul. It's not bad. But I wish I could step back in time to the 1840s for a night. Maybe in drag because I don't know if girls were allowed in the pub back then.
Magical thinking and logical thinking are related. Just think about Physics -totally mind blowing ideas about how the universe is.
I haven't seen Tomislav and his friends for years. Good to hear they still exist in the universe
Nice reading, many touches to entice the furrows.