Through another looking glass- another new normal.

This is living in the science fiction novels and stories. We’re akin to Blade Runner and in a similar feel to Soilent Green, the village of the Damned and War of the Worlds.  We’re there.  We’re in that fabled point where things have changed forever.  #ClimateBreakdown
-@SamNZed 5 January 2020

When you’ve had one new Normal, you don’t expect a second.

Earthquakes. 13,000 of them and then we found the emergence of an overgrown rural town where grudges were served cold through the city, and the predominant new money/ Two lounges /SUV/huge heat pump set held the line against any change to how they think things were done in a mythical history-less past.

Many worked from home.  It saved money and for most it was healthier. There were many agencies which just tried to work harder so they felt important.

But with the old city gone, and even though polls showed Don&Doreen Chch wanted parks and leisure spaces the Council developers and the Govt wanted to take things as close to 1980 as they could and replace the failed deserted central city that no one local wanted to visit, with a tilt slab concrete 2010 central city.  That is retail spaces, offices, council SuperTeam drop in kiosks and other economic suicide measures.

As a sort of Eastern Euro Communist tribute-city  - Christchurch is punching above its weight.

So part of the ‘resilience’ weirdness the idea was to create things that while they didn’t work then they will now if they’re in concrete caves with big bits of glass at the front.

So we build offices and make all public servants work in them. We cajole and annoy lawyers and other office dwellers back into the central white elephant ignoring the growing pungent smells of stale misplaced smugness.

The most exciting things after the quakes started was working from home, finding new shops, and the gap filler art work installations. And the locally produced You Tube videos!  You can’t forget The pallet pavilion of stacked wood like a castle where you could buy food, read, sometimes see a performance or art exhibition.

And the food in caravans popping up!  Coffee, different types of food.
Container shops!

There were some exciting things in Christchurch.

But here’s the thing-  much of the new Exciting stuff was totally destroyed in an unseemly push back to the past.  Christchurch - You loved the gap filler but it’s over, you liked the exiting food proliferating but we’d rather capture any money here and close this down.

And that silly idea of flexible work styles.....

And now pandemic.

Most of the digital gains as our economy shifts, the leg ups we can get from our earthquake and now our lockdown days revealed are being reversed as fast as possible.

We learnt a lot over the COVID lockdown about office work.  Working at home was, for many efficient. It was cheaper.  It was safer.

We’re already pretty much back where we were.  We’re in Wellington central to feed the already probably doomed retailers. They are great people doing their best, but I think it’s terminal.

As an aside -  Who’d have thought sending people to town to spend their money would be believed to be strong enough to counter the fourth industrial revolution, recently hastened by COVID lockdown? We can wait and see if the Canute strategy has enough No8 wire to succeed.

The only way to have the nirvana central city the Wellington and Auckland councils want is to start converting Central retail into accommodation, and assisting businesses into a comfortable back paddock to die. Auckland has already been doing a great job here.

We’ll click our heels and wake up in 2019.

But we’re on our own.

And here’s the thing.

Two years.

The time taken to test and commercialise a vaccine, the inability of the USA to govern themselves and the poverty of the large, emerging economies, peppered with border chaos in Africa mean this may go on till EITHER NZ is bullied into bursting our bubble and sacrificing 20% of our population before we have a cure, OR it will take two years.  Of course there may be another pandemic on the shoulders of the other.
Snow is a fantastic opportunity to not run to the past.  To say ... do we all need to work in shops or offices? Full time?  8 till 6?

Say goodbye to Wellington

Goodbye and yeah nah to you Wellington. 

Now away across a friendly northern shore, I don’t miss the wind, the self importance we co-possessed, the noise and the queues to be noticed. 

Or your smug, rank manufactured smell of relevance. 

The odour that always blows out to sea, 

And is lost forever, except in anecdotes, and replaced instead by still bigger egos and new currency, for now and trading upward.

But then there were the smells of the coffee and arty boho corners, the favourite spots for lunch or Java …. the theatre opportunities, the possibilities of strangers…. The young hospo staff: our smart future, educated with potential and hope and minimum wages.

Wellington you promised so much, but delivered only fleeting notes of the soundtrack I chased.

Were you just a young triers’ waiting room, where we struggled earnestly until we were sorted and spat out?  

Were a few of us, was I, really not in synch, not the right grade, or was never really able to play the game?

Is your Capital - which longs for imagined good days which allow you not to be beaten, they say, - just a place where your dreams can realise themselves grotesquely on the CV, and smear your ever so important personal brand? 

Or is it really the true heart of what was Godzone - noble, fair, conquering, governing, misplaced, and where locals are strangers?

But Goodbye and seeya - Wellington you’ve shown me all your warm balmy scripts, from politics oozing through the slate, cruising in Cuba, pinball 3 am, parties where we strove and tried hard to have fun, no matter how apart we felt.  ….and then, later parties where no one even cared anymore, just being there and seen, the liaisons, rumours, personal disasters, the wins.  

The ache of irrelevance.

We’d need all the editing in China, the splicing of transcendent moments where it did all come together spectacularly and beautifully, and we did touch the stars and a few people saw me touch the light briefly. But then I fell, my light unwanted.

 

It’s over.  And there were Too few moments in a town where the artistically gifted, watch the children play.  

And however warm, windy, tantilising, I wasn’t for you, not you for me, fun but not my sickly breakfast condiment, but an ex home which is pining for the fjords, as the poets said.

Yeah nah.