Daily Archives: February 8, 2009

A weekend in the muntryside

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The warm night air blew down Victoria Street. As I crossed the road, I saw a giant penis waddling down Manners Mall, testicles jauntily lurching from side to side. It was Wellington Sevens weekend. I ducked down a side street and fled to the safety of my flat.

All I knew about the Wellington Sevens was that it was some sort of rugby tournament and spectators wore costumes to the games. Indeed, I hadn’t really given it much thought until a few weeks before when people started asking me if I was going to the Sevens. “Uh, no. Should I?” I’d ask. “Oh my God! It’s so much fun! This year we’re all dressing up as sexy pirates!”

Nothing could quite persuade me to go, but I thought I’d check out what life was like on the streets of Wellington around Sevens weekend.

Over at the Wellingtonista, the Masked Barfly had given fair warning of the munter component that Sevens attracts, with his/her Waitangi Weekend Venn Diagram, but I just didn’t realise how extremely muntery it would turn out to be.

Friday was the first day of the Sevens, so I went for a stroll along Cuba Street. Already I spotted Afro wigs and women in slutty dresses. Oh, hang on – let’s paraphrase that quote from “Mean Girls” about Halloween costumes:

Sevens is the one time of year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.

So Cuba Mall was full of Sevens-goers in their costumes. There was also a group performing a bit from a Fringe Festival play. Someone dressed as a road cone walked up to the performers and sat down, attempting to bring some hilariousness to the performance. When the performers acknowledged the road cone and started to incorporate it into their stuff, the road cone seemed to freak out and rapidly waddled away.

“Hey bro, hey bro. That place has $3 tequilas, so we should go there later.” – Papa Smurf (or at least someone wearing a lot of blue paint).

I took a walk along the waterfront and witnessed the following:

  • Guantánamo Bay prisoners (orange overalls and – oh dear – a teatowel on the head
  • A Buddhist monk peeing in a bush, while having his photo taken by a Buddhist monkette.
  • A man in a white lycra tights who had adjusted his crotch so much that the green paint on his hands had left marks all around his groin.
  • Sexy pirates, sexy Marmite jars, sexy beer cans and sexy Taranaki residents.
  • A man wearing only shoes, socks and an Afro wig, who’d just jumped into the harbour. Something about the water being quite cold.

As I looked around all the costume-wearing Sevens fans, I started to realise something. While people were wearing fancy dress costumes, they weren’t wearing costumes as individuals; they were wearing costumes as part of a group.

It seems that there’s some sort of unwritten rule of Sevens that you have to wear exactly the same costume as your whole group of friends. So it’s not just one woman dressed as a sexy pirate, but a dozen sexy pirates, all wearing the exactly the same tartan skirt, the same billowy shirt and the same sexy pirate cutlass.

So there are all these groups of people where everyone is wearing exactly the same thing. Just like school, just like the armed forces.

I tried to figure out why this is, and I came up with a theory. New Zealanders have a slight aversion to standing out. So the group costume lets you dress up but not stand out. A bloke can dress as a fairy princess, but because all his mates are also wearing exactly the same fluffy pink tutus, no one will pay any attention to how he is dressed as an individual. It’s like, I am Spartacus, and so are my nine other mates who ordered these hilarious Roman slave costumes off the internet.

By Saturday, the clones were starting to freak me out a little. I walked around a corner and found myself in the middle of a group of blonde beauty queens, yet their blondeness and sameness reminded me more of “Village of the Damned”. Oh, I had to get away from it all!

I headed to the train station, fighting my way through Tangy Fruits, SWAT team cops and sexy nurses, and took the train to Porirua. Sweet Porirua. I visited Pataka – the local art museum – and went for a walk along the harbour. It was nice to be out of the city.

Back in Wellington in the early evening, I realised the neighbourhood was soon going to be swamped with boozed-up munters. So I hunkered down in my bedroom, while the sounds of drunken people (“Nrrrrrgh! Fuuuuck! Maaaaaaangh! Fuuuuck!”) and a Led Zeppelin covers band echoed throughout the city.

This morning I found broken glass everywhere, a street sign bent at a 45 degree angle and a hearty puddle of spew – and that was just down my street.

Next year, I swear, I’m going to leave town during Sevens weekend.

25 things

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It’s that “25 things about me” list. Back in the olden days, the days of LiveJournal, these used to go around all the time and I’d never do them. But now it’s on Facebook, which is social media and cool, etc, so I’ll do it too.

Incidentally, this has taken me over six hours to write.

1. I can write backwards almost as well as I can forwards. I taught myself how to do it when I was 20, after seeing “The Last Seduction” and being impressed that the main character could do it (among other things).

2. Auckland suburbs I lived in, in chronological order: Parnell, Grey Lynn, Mt Eden, Newton, Mt Eden, St Mary’s Bay, before finally settling (ha!) in Mt Eden. All are within 5km of the city centre. I like to be within walking distance of the city and not reliant on a car.

3. My mother’s mother’s side of the family was dead posh Devonport stock, but my morphine addict great-grandpappy ended up drinking away the family fortune.

4. The first boy I had a crush on was Adam Ant, circa “Goody Two Shoes“. Sadly it didn’t work out – I was 8, he was 20 years older than me, lived in England and didn’t know I existed. I grew up disappointed at most men’s refusal to wear eyeliner.

5. I don’t like beaches. This probably makes me a bad New Zealander. It’s mainly the sand, but also the wind. Sand is, as a wise man once said, just dirt with better PR.

6. I grew up in a rural area on a “lifestyle” section. I don’t know what kind of lifestyle it was supposed to be – all I remember was feeling oppressed by its emptiness, and having an eternal longing to live in a city. I didn’t want a pony; I wanted concrete and public transport and people.

7. I’ve always like the culture of writing and photography around surfer and skater culture, even though I’m a complete outsider to surfing and skating. Dude.

8. I’ve never really had a nickname, possibly because Robyn is itself a diminutive of Robert (ugh!). But someone once called me Bob Marley, which was funny in a not-actually-funny kind of way.

9. If I travel overseas, I want to explore. I could never be satisfied relaxing by a hotel pool.

10. I received news of the 9/11 attacks on 11 September as I was in Melbourne. I was in bed, reading David Sedaris’s book “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, and was actually more interested in reading that than hearing about, woteva, some guy who’d flown a plane into a building.

11. I am a published poet, though under a pseudonym. I have also performed poetry in Newcastle, Australia, and spoken word in Melbourne. I am evidently depriving New Zealand audiences of my talent.

12. I really like living in Wellington. It feels like I am actively living here, rather than it just being where I happen to reside. I should also note that my 11 years in Auckland were splendid, but in a different way.

13. I’m a bit superstitious, which annoys me.

14. Best present – the Walkman I got for my 11th birthday. Suddenly music became more complex, lyrics clearer and so much more enjoyable. I eventually moved on to a CD Walkman, then an iPod. It’s portable pleasure.

15. The first building that thrilled me was the Beehive. On a family holiday in Paraparaumu in 1983, we got the train to Wellington. Straight out of the train station, I looked up and saw the Beehive and I got chills – moderne classical brutalist chills.

16. I left Hamilton in 1997 after I realised I just didn’t want to live there any longer. The last straw was when I was walking home along Clyde Street and someone in a car threw the slushy remains of a McDonald’s Coke at me. That did it.

17. I have Trinity College London’s level eight certificate in choral speaking. This consisted of performing an abridged version of Janet Frame’s short story “The Reservoir” (without the bit about condoms) and Keith Thorsen’s poem “Chit Chat“… for what good it did me.

18. I once lived on Karangahape Road. One night when I was walking home, a crusty old drunk asked me if I’d have sex with him for money. I got a bit depressed, thinking “Is that really the kind of clientele I’d attract if I were a ho?” Cos, you know, I’d always envisioned myself as one of those high-class prostitute types.

19. I’ve been thanked in the acknowledgements for a book that won a Montana Book Award, after lending the author my MC OJ and the Rhythm Slave CD. Though the book I was thanked in wasn’t the book I helped with, because the author forgot.

20. When I was in Paris, I chose to visit Disneyland over Notre Dame. I threw a euro coin into Skull Rock Cove and wished for a messy, complicated love.

21. Growing up in Hamilton in the ’80s, my two favourite weekend outings were visiting the Building Centre – especially for the fountain of taps, the insulation demonstration and the Fanta machine – and going to the liquor store with Dad. Again, I stress “Hamilton” and “’80s”.

22. Someone once described me as screwball. Initially I resisted the label, but then I realised I wouldn’t be resisting it if it wasn’t true.

23. I’ve only wanted to be married at one point in my life: in 1998 I decided it would be good to be married so if a fellow hit on me, I could get all outraged and say, “Excuse me, but I am a happily married woman!” Otherwise, (conventional) marriage doesn’t appeal because it would involve me being a wife.

24. I’ve been to one polytech and two universities, but I never got around to completing any degrees. I have, however, had some of my writing used as course reading for a first-year English paper at the University of Auckland. I’m going to hold out for an honorary degree.

25. I’m a great believer in self-mythology and the ability to alter the past, present or future simply by writing down how you remember your story.