Apropos nothing, other than rummaging through some old files from long-dead computers, I present this memento from 2003 celebrating my achievement at catapulting my Geocities website (“Web Site”) to the top of Google’s search results for my own name:
Take that, Dominic Pettman and your self-replicators
Nothing nearly so momentous has occurred in the past few weeks. Following the primary voting schedule is a bit like peeling back the doors of a particularly slipshod advent calendar: some days nothing comes out at all (unless you count Marco Rubio’s “landslide victory in Puerto Rico” – kudos to Rubio for ensuring his official podcasting team don’t exceed the bounds of plausible upbeat narratives and end up just looking embarrassing now) and then on other days a whole Super Tuesday’s worth of states come tumbling out. To mix metaphors, it’s The Archers Omnibus Edition of primaries, and I watched the continuing rise of our new jackbooted overlord Trump in the fine company of Randi, AJ and some Mexican food. Think of it as a political statement.
No one was a great fan of Trump at Kevin’s (temporary) leaving party, either. Which is damned odd, because there were a bunch of people there. So since none of my twenty and thirtysomething urbanite friends have a good word to say about Donald Drumpf, I’ll conclude that it’s all a mirage and move on to my sedate theatre review section:
- Trip the Light Fantastic: The Making of SuperStrip – after winning free tickets to a show at the Harris Theater [sic] for Music and Dance, I scoured their programme to find the least dancey thing in the schedule… or at least, the least exclusively dancey thing. Trip the Light Fantastic, a light-hearted skewering of buzzword-soaked organisations through the ineffectual committee meetings of a group of (somewhat rubbish) aspiring superheroes, fit the bill nicely. One of the biggest laughs of the night came from a joke about the uselessness of a Masters in the arts: you know this sort of crowd.
- Interrogation – the first half of this play is an intense murder-mystery, building up the tension through a skilled cast of misfits and potential sociopaths. Unfortunately, I don’t know how any of this resolves in the second half, because it proved slightly too intense and I wasn’t confident of making it through without losing all vision (this happens to me…) and adding some unnecessary extra drama of my own. But it’s really annoying, because this is the first time that I’ve actually really liked what I was walking out of, and I want to know what happens next…
- Othello at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater [sic, again] – I fucking love Othello. Partly because I studied it enough that I don’t have to work to understand everything that’s being said, partly because Randi mistakenly prefers Hamlet and I don’t want to give ground, but mostly because Iago is the greatest villain ever created. My one complaint with the play is that he gets his comeuppance at the end, because I like to imagine that he spends his life drifting from place to place, worming his way into the lives of noble people and then blowing them apart just to sit back and watch the fire burn. Plus, whenever Roderigo appears, I hear Mr. Buchanan booming “THICK! THICK! THICK!” in my head. I realise that I’m reviewing Shakespeare here, which is not really necessary at this point, but it was a good adaptation (even Randi agreed with this) which did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for this eternally relevant play.
We need to talk about St. Louis. It’s one of the oddest cities I’ve ever visited. It’s quite possible to completely fill a weekend, as I just did with Jason and Randi, with some really good food and decent tourist spots – including one place, the City Museum, which is truly phenomenal and must surely be world-leading. At the same time, it’s impossible to ignore how empty St. Louis feels. A city which, at its height, was home to over 850,000 people is now below 320,000. The urban landscape sprawls over big blocks and wide roads because that’s just how car-mad American cities were built, but barely any traffic passes through. There isn’t really any skyline to speak of, apart from the arch. Everyone we met was friendly, though, and it wasn’t uncomfortable to walk around… just odd. You really notice what the clouds do.
Suburbanisation is not like shifting tectonic plates or the weathering of sea cliffs – not some natural process which inexorably changes the land. It’s a human decision. If you want great cities, you need to live in them.
Anyhow, after a long evening journey through Illinois – which included hash browns at Waffle House! – we checked into The Cheshire. (Everyone pronounces this chesh-ire, to rhyme with fire, but obviously my readers know better.) I’d booked this the weekend before by scrolling through the few remaining places in St. Louis on my phone and picking the one which looked ‘nice’ without much further thought. It quickly transpired that the signals my brain processes as ‘nice’ are that of a full-on British-themed hotel, complete with Queen’s Guard figurines outside and rooms named after British authors and poets. (Disappointingly, we stayed in James Hilton.) In my defence, it was also very close to Forest Park, so a good base for a wander through this giant and lovely mix of woods and lawns.
Waffle House: another American icon checked off my list
In Forest Park, which is “larger than Central Park” (as you will be frequently told)
One unexpectedly awesome thing in St. Louis is the World Chess Hall of Fame, which had a special exhibition about women in chess (Ladies’ Knight – yes, very clever) and included lots of cool chess-themed artwork. And I don’t even play chess. I don’t really drink Budweiser, either, but St. Louis is the headquarters of brewer Anheuser-Busch and they do offer free tours with free samples, so we also did that.
One of my favourite artworks from the World Chess Hall of Fame
On the Budweiser tour. Extensive Budweiser packaging left intact.
Stroking a Clydesdale
But the absolute best thing about St. Louis is the misleadingly-named City Museum. It’s not a museum, not really, but in fact a giant playground – indoor and outdoor – for adults and children alike. And it’s amazing. Made mostly from reused architectural and industrial products, an entrance fee of $12 buys unlimited exploration around a dense network of tunnels, caves, slides, trains, wire frames, ball pits, fish tanks, castles and even two small planes suspended in the sky. And along the way you might stumble across a café, sweetshop or a bar too. If anyone reading this remembers Kidstop, then it’s sorta like that, only if Kidstop were designed by benevolent crazy artists and played jazz music in the background.
The most wonderful thing about City Museum is the way adults and children interact. It’s a shared, peaceful coexistence: the adults aren’t just there as parents, it’s also crazy fun for them too. But for once, it’s a world built on children’s terms – they have genuinely more competence and skill, being able to run up, climb over and crawl under any obstacle quicker and more nimbly than a big person can. It’s hard to crawl on your knees or squeeze through holes in the floor if you’re old and lame and 26. One little boy even offered up directions when we looked helpless and lost. If I ever have children, I’m taking them to St. Louis so they can feel a smug joy at being children.
Up inside the City Museum’s outdoor section
Impossible to capture in photos, but here’s one attempt
I fly planes now
I feel compelled to offer at least one photo of the arch, so here’s a photo of the arch
Flip-flopping
Even without Katie’s help we still managed to conjure up a decent batch of pancakes this year, before settling down with Catherine and AJ to watch the New Hampshire primary. This included the first of what looks likely to be a long-running tradition of Donald Trump victory speeches, notable for their free-wheeling lack of structure or syntax, spontaneous walk-on parts for audience members, and helpful choruses of “USA!” at random intervals which serve as a useful reminder of the country you’re in. I am seriously starting to weigh up, in the still-unlikely event of a Trump presidency, the wisdom of an early getaway versus the historical opportunity to witness such a thing first-hand.
One place where Trump is likely to do well is Byhalia, Mississippi – but true to my bourgeois roots, I’m linking to an excellent play of the same name which we saw that weekend instead. After a brief affair with an African-American man, a newly-married white woman gives birth to a mixed-race child, and her husband must come to terms with the fact that her son is ‘not his’. The couple’s relationship is at the core of the play, and the storytelling perfectly balances this focus with the other obvious issues raised. Everything just came together really well, and it’s now one of my favourite things I’ve seen in Chicago.
Note the appropriate t-shirt
Another of my favourite Chicago sights is the sun, which made a rare appearance last weekend to coincide with Randi’s mum visiting. We went to see Van Gogh’s Bedrooms at the Art Institute, which means I’ve finally spent a respectable amount of time there. Good old Vincent painted three versions of the same famous painting, y’see, and so the gallery has licence to gather them all together and put on a glorified game of spot-the-difference. (We also very neatly timed our Doctor Who watching so Randi finally saw ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ just beforehand.) That night Jason took us to eat very fulsomely at Avec – tapas for people with appetites – and we were suitably stuffed and happy.
I rounded off the weekend by going to Grace’s ATC Fundraiser in Andersonville. It’s the kind of ‘fundraiser’ where all you have to do is order drinks from a bar, but I turned up so late I was close to failing at even this, so I quickly bought a few raffle tickets to even things out. Lo and behold, I promptly won tickets worth much more than my solitary contributory cocktail. Everyone else left soon afterwards – either in protest at my Machiavellian tactics or because they’d been diligently drinking for hours – and I was left to celebrate my success with two affable drunk men at the bar. Sadly I can’t remember their names, or I’d be tempted to track them down to continue our increasingly surreal arguments about marriage, but maybe I should just hang out in more bars in Andersonville.
Tangent: last night I performed the deceptively-productive (but actually entirely time-wasting) task of cleaning out my blog subscriptions, and I was made quite nostalgic and sad by all the voices who have gone silent. Especially those whose last post, written sometime around the George W Bush era, was an earnest promise to blog more. I miss you all.
Explanation: today’s title is a tribute to the terrible headlines at Vox, an otherwise fine news source to which I have grown increasingly addicted. And don’t even get me started on their podcast, The Weeds… that moment when someone else at work starts quoting lines from a political policy podcast is confirmation, if more were needed, of the lovely bubble in which I live.
I’m a terrible European. Unlike my parents, I only speak English, and have never lived in any European country outside of the UK. The world around me is overwhelmingly British and American: friends, TV programmes, films, books, social networks, news, politics, all of it. Years ago, when I visited Robert in California, he said that living in the US had made him discover his hidden ‘European’ identity: the things we have in common as opposed to the Americans. I really wish I could say the same for me, but it’s just not true.
I can think of lots of nice things to say about ‘Europe’ – the place, its people – but they are vague generalisations, and I lack any confidence that they apply in Hamburg as in Bucharest as in Rhodes or wherever. Yes, all national myths are fantasies: but my British fantasies are instinctive. I ‘know’ that Britain is a country like this, with a people like that, even if these assertions break down under serious scrutiny. It doesn’t matter. It’s about the identity, and the sense of belonging, not the facts.
It’s not even my mug
I’m thinking about this, obviously, because the date of the UK’s referendum on its membership of the European Union has been announced. As it happens, I should be in London on 23 June, so I will be able to vote in person. And while I do plan to think about it, and listen to the arguments, it’s very hard to imagine I won’t vote to stay. But I am surprised at how sad I feel about it – how obvious the hole is where my heartfelt sense of European identity should be.
And I don’t think this is just a British problem. Yes, of course it is true that Britain – the island nation – is uniquely detached from its neighbours. Of course those European countries who speak each other’s languages, and share borders, and still remember how easily armies marched across them, are driven to shared institutions with greater inevitability and less fuss. But I have yet to meet a French person who didn’t feel French, or a German who didn’t feel German. Maybe I am imposing my categories onto them, but Europe’s failure to respond to the great moral test of our time – the migration crisis – in anything like a coordinated fashion suggests that at the end of the day, the nation state still rules everything.
The campaign to remain in the EU likes to describe leaving as a jump in the dark for the UK. It would be, and I think it is motivated largely (though not entirely) by bad instincts and silly conceits. But in truth, a vote to stay is also a leap in the dark. Because we can’t go on like this. For the European Union to avoid paralysis whenever anything difficult comes up, there has to be some meaningful sense of European identity, some patriotic glue which holds people together in something more than a trade pact. I don’t think this means a United States of Europe, or that national identities are about to disappear, and any bureaucratic attempt to engineer a common culture will surely fail. Honestly, I find it hard to even imagine what the EU should look like. But I hope that a vote to remain gives us longer to figure it out.
I’ve wanted to visit New Zealand for a long time, but it always seemed so far away. (I mean, strictly speaking, it was so far away.) But it was going to be considerably closer to me from Sydney, and so in the same way that Americans travel to ‘Europe’ in a single trip – because why not? – I decided to spend my second week travelling around this country.
Wellington
It’s Jen!
My first stop was Wellington to stay with Jen. It was so exciting to see her again: we first met back at Abbi’s drunken Christmas party in 2008 and have only seen each other episodically since, but it always feels like we’ve spent a lot more time together than we actually have. She was a wonderful, wonderful host, and from the first boardgame-playing night with her boyfriend, John, I was obviously going to have a great time here. (We played ‘Tiny Epic Galaxies’, for the record. This set a great tone for the nerdiness to follow.)
Wellington is filled with these slightly odd, slightly arty sights
On Saturday I took a (free!) tour around New Zealand’s Parliament, which is pleasingly Westminster-like although with some fascinating differences (especially in its voting system) which are, of course, only fascinating if you are the type of person to tour a parliament in the first place. Later I rode the cable car up to the city’s botanical gardens and visited the national Te Papa museum, of which the most interesting part was the historical background on the Treaty of Waitangi between the British and the Māori. It’s the kind of treaty which was unhelpfully translated rather differently in English and Māori, and as such remains an active issue in New Zealand politics today.
Outside the Weta Workshop
The next day Jen drove me around on a loosely-themed Lord of the Rings day out, kicking off with the summit of Mount Victoria before moving on to the famous Weta Workshop. Their workshop tour was superb, and was delivered by an actual employee of the (surprisingly small) company who was obviously passionate about what they do and excellent at demonstrating the huge amount of work which goes into prop-making for TV and film. It’s sorta mind boggling. Plus they have trolls outside.
We also went to The Roxy Cinema, Peter Jackson’s beautiful art deco building which is filled with models in the lobby and I’m pretty confident would be beloved by Todd if he ever visited. I was particularly a fan of their gooey lemon cake, which would make it worthwhile to go see even a bad film. Afterwards, we walked by the sea at the Taputeranga scenic reserve, talked about blogging enough to distract me from getting sunburnt, and admired the seals chilling on the rocks.
There’s just LOTR stuff everywhere here
That evening, Jen took me to the finals of the rugby sevens. My last interaction with rugby was refusing to play it at school, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that sevens is designed for people like me: everyone’s in fancy dress, nobody’s taking it too seriously, and – best of all – a game is made up of two seven-minute halves. If only all sports could follow this lead! And unlike American football, it was fast and fluid to watch. England satisfied my default expectations by losing horribly to Fiji, and then we watched New Zealand turn it around at the last moment to triumph over South Africa in the final. Which was the right moment to be in a New Zealand rugby crowd, obviously.
Special props to the guys who all came dressed as Donald Trump, with photos on their labels and ‘Make America Great Again’ scrawled amateurishly on the back of their baseball caps. (It’s worth noting that almost everyone I met on my trip volunteered the subject of Donald Trump as soon as they learnt that I lived in the US.)
At the rugby. Nobody begrudged me ketchup here.
Christchurch
I then flew to Christchurch, which is on the east coast of the South Island. It’s a city which is still very obviously devastated by the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011: everywhere you look there are buildings in ruins, in the process of demolition, or under construction. 185 Chairs is a moving memorial to the victims, and I also went to the Quake City exhibition which goes into the earthquakes in more detail.
Moving memorial to the earthquake victims
And for a single moment, I was Nolan Finn
Feeling earthquaked-out, I spent the afternoon down by Hagley Park and the river which has a distinctly Oxbridge feel. Not only are there punts meandering up and down, but at one point ‘Oxford Terrace’ faces off against ‘Cambridge Terrace’ on the other side. After discovering that a hour’s kayak hire was a mere $12 (and that’s New Zealand dollars!) I opted for that, doubly delighted that they didn’t ask for any ID, deposit or liability waivers. It was almost as if I had discovered a country chilled-out enough to just… trust people.
After kayaking, I stared nervously at the bike hire for a long time. I haven’t ridden in years, but my stated reason is always fear of cars, and here I was next to a large, bicycle-friendly park with no one I knew to watch me fall off. So I did it, and though I wasn’t the most confident cyclist on the planet, I hope it keeps my abilities fresh enough until the next time this urge arises.
Kayaking down the river
TranzAlpine
The real reason I had come to Chirstchurch was for the TranzAlpine scenic train, which travels across the middle of the South Island to Greymouth on the west coast. It’s very much a tourist thing – there’s an audio commentary and a viewing car where you can take photos in the open air – but it’s still magical, and I don’t think any further explanation is required.
You wouldn’t complain if this was your commute, would you?
View from the train
Another view from the train. I could go on.
Hokitika
Not far south of the railway terminal in Greymouth is Hokitika, a “cool little town” (their words) by the beach. I swam a few times on this trip, but this was the place with the best waves. Other highlights of Hokitika include a beach-based sculpture competition, a chance to watch a beautiful sunset while worrying about being stood on an exposed strip of sand surrounded on either side by the sea, a night-time glow worm dell (pleasingly impossible to take good photos of, not that people were put off from trying) and what I consider to be an enchanted tree. (If you look closely below, you’ll see little magical people running up the left-hand side.)
Sunset in Hokitika
At night I found what is clearly a magical, enchanted tree
Auckland
For the final leg of my trip, I flew up to Auckland, where a third of New Zealanders actually live. Now I don’t want to be mean about this, but unlike the rest of the country, Auckland is… well, it’s a disaster. Everything about the city is set up to be nice: it has wonderful parks, good weather, cool things to do etc. And then somebody decided to plant motorway after motorway right through it, on top of which – and I can only assume malicious intent here – it takes forever to cross any road because the green light for pedestrians lasts only a few seconds. Plus they frequently fail to put in a crossing where you need one, so you have to make three crossings around an intersection just to get to the other side of the road. It’s exhausting, and sucks away the joy from what should be a lovely city to walk around. I realise that nobody reading this expects me to like cars, but I can’t remember a city this bad for road layout. It may even be worse than LA.
Tiritiri Matangi Island
Thankfully, I spent almost none of my time in Auckland actually in Auckland. My first excursion was to Tiritiri Matangi Island – as recommend by Maria – a wildlife sanctuary which is only accessible via a daily ferry. (You have to take your own lunch, but they do offer free tea and coffee.) Despite the offer of guided tours to see the birds, I quickly decided I would rather get as far away from all other human beings as possible, and opted for the trek around the whole island. At some points I felt very much like a character in the closing stages of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (it helps to have just watched the latest BBC adaptation).
The island was not quite as secluded as one young couple were hoping for, however, and it took all the powers of British reserve to stare determinedly in the other direction as I walked past them in an advanced state of undress. I was awkwardly close when they finally saw me and scrambled off the path. It was very funny, and I wish I could have telepathically reassured them that I wasn’t scandalised.
On my final day in New Zealand, I succumbed to the inevitable and went on the tour of the Shire. And even though I spent most of the day on a coach to get there and get back, and even though they herd bus loads of tourists around like sheep, and even though everybody is obviously posing for the same photos, it was still magical. It’s large and hilly enough that you don’t really notice the other groups most of the time, and everything is beautifully decorated, and at the end you’re led into the Green Dragon pub for a surprisingly decent free drink. Hobbits are so great.
The Shire!
Inside my Hobbit hole, wearing my Hobbit t-shirt
So there you go, my whistlestop tour of New Zealand. It’s a long way away, for sure, but it’s perversely easier to fly for a whole day – with a decent opportunity for sleep – rather than a shorter but more bodyclock-destroying journey. So if you ever feel a deep urge to commune with JRR Tolkien, this is the place to be.
Beth E . Dubowe-Lawrence on China, Part 3: Chongqing & Chengdu: “Again an awesome adventure to share this with you” Apr 21, 19:13
