Bars have a lot to answer for
Diary of the last 24 hours
Last night, 7.43 pm
Taking pictures and sharing thoughts with people about whether this is just a spectacular sunset or the end of the world. At the end of the day, every day's end is the end of days.
Spoiler: I'm writing this the next day. You do wonder, though, if the end of days will have a glorious sunset. Be such a pity if it came to an end in rain, like some dismal test match.
Last night, 8.23 pm
Getting ready to watch what will turn out to be a dismal bit of Netflix - honestly you’ve set it in Paris how have you still failed to make it watchable? - when the Twitter captures my tiny attention span to bring me plague news: the Covid has gone for a drink in Greenhithe.
It keeps making you catch your breath. We’re all relying on the contact tracing being able to get out in front of the carriers. If only there were something we could all be doing to make it possible to reach all the affected people quickly oh wait there fucking well is. Each time we get to Level 1, the phones go back into the pocket and people sail past the QR codes on their way in and out of the shops and buildings and bars. How might we encourage people to do what you would have thought there was ample incentive to do already?
I take to Twitter.
People generally say yeah I like that. Some say isn't saving your life a prize enough? Yes, but exasperatingly it feels like some people need more.
There is also the question of whether a prize pool might act to encourage people to get too damn active, scanning all over the show. I wouldn't worry too much about that. It's not the walking around that's the hazard so much as people getting up in each other's faces. Like, in bars. Like, in Greenhithe. Sure hope they've located everyone who was there.
When Covid turns out to have paid a visit, we really, really want to be able to get everyone who was there isolated and tested.
So I reckon spot prizes. Encourage every brand-opportunity-seeker in the country to make their prize donation, like some huge Telethon. Hell calls on all other shit pizza manufacturers in the Auckland region to equal or better this offer.
Use the app, be in to win a prize. It’s like keeping your curtains closed at night in the blitz, only you get to keep walking around. And you don't even get watched by a warden. It’s not that much to ask, is it?
Today, 6.45am
Courtenay Place is the most dangerous place in the nation to go drinking - to slightly misquote the news report I’m hearing.
The memories come rolling back. I’m a student washing dishes at The Coachman, the fancy restaurant up the stairs in Courtenay Place. Out front, the lights are low, and prosperous Wellington comes to dine well and quietly. The last of them are generally gone by 10.3o or so and walking back up to Athol Crescent, past Pigeon Park and the Royal Oak hotel, my footfalls echo around an empty Courtenay Place.
Outside level 4 there is hardly an hour of the day you could do that now.
A few years later I moved to Auckland; back down to Wellington a few later. A new scene. At Paradiso, it would roar. Courtenay Place was turning into something more. Back again to Auckland, and then opening hours changed, the whole place became this phenomenon, and I missed most of it.
I did some writing once for John and Michael Chow. They described taking over their parents’ takeaway bar right there in the middle of Courtenay Place, right in the middle of the change to the drinking laws and opening hours and they were there every hour for the hungry drinkers. They were there after the other places closed, they were there all day and night turning out the food, ringing the till, and they made a whole lot of money, one burger at a time. They ended up with enough to buy the old ANZ building up the road. What they did with it is a story for another time. The point of today's is: boy that place changed from the one I knew as a student.
I only noticed gradually, on visits, what the place was becoming, but then there would be a large night and you’d get the full sound-surround experience.
I remember after an episode of Backbenchers doing my drinking in the usual way (which is to say: start fast and pick up speed). Pile into a cab and down to Courteney Place. There might have been Keith Ng and Ben Thomas and Damian Christie. There was Todd McClay and Aaron Gilmore. There was loudness and a procession of bars and rowdiness.
It was the first sight I’d had of either of those elected representatives of the people and my impressions were: where on earth had McClay acquired that middle European accent, and was Gilmore a bit under the weather or did he really need to have all the jokes explained to him, and whose round is it don't mind if I do
The drinks kept coming and every place was packed and the throngs were still there at 3 in the morning when we rolled across to a takeaway that was probably the Chow’s. We were swaying unsteadily and starving and next thing I remember we had in our hands a whole roasted chook, maybe two, maybe three of them and we’re just falling on this food and there’s flesh and grease flying. If all felt shambolically hilarious. To a sober eye it was probably just a shambles.
We weren't in any trouble just loud and boorish. It might be argued some of us were more of a hazard sober.
I'm writing all this now and thinking Christ I don't miss it much.
Years later when McClay was a minister of Her Majesty's New Zealand government and we were lined up to board a flight to Sydney, I greeted him along the lines of haven't seen you since we were eating a chook at 3 in the morning and I don't know, his smile seemed to fade off his face.
I wonder how he's getting on this week. Maybe he can take the new crew down there for a drink.
Is it intrinsically more dangerous there or it is possible that it's just a function of concentration: all the Wellington nightlife in one place? Is it possible that having it all concentrated like that gives it amplification, leading people to drink more and elevate the propensity to be bad?
The most crucial point I've read about it today is this.
Can't wait for the referendum result. Quoted it here the other day and I’ll quote it again: when young men get drunk they start a fight. When they get stoned, they start a band.
7.40am
Go on bFM to talk about free stuff and gradualism.
8.40am
Daughter sends a link to a Bike Auckland story she’s just posted, about death and inaction.
Yesterday I watched the familiar manoeuvre of a guy on a bike coming down the road toward the village. It's always full and busy, cars and vans and trucks bound for the ferry and the supermarket and the cafe, on a mission from God, and there is speed.
His body language spoke of all that, as he moved fast, darting a glance to the cars waiting to cross on his right, looking over his shoulder at vehicles pressing from behind.
It can be exhausting, being a person on a bike, at that sustained state of hypervigilance: braced, moving fast, because you make the smallest wrong move and you can be in a world of hurt.
The concept of sharing, on our roads, is a strained one.
10.25am
Related to yesterday's newsletter, and the Murdoch press and disagreeable people in the Murdoch press, Cindy Baxter writes some helpful background.
11.35am
Doing some scanning for reminiscing purposes. That’s me, aged 22 at the part that begins Party. The state it could put me in. Bars have a lot to answer for.
Re the covid app, for which I'm being a consistently good girl the way my Mum and Dad taught me, I reckon we need some kind of hip as hashtag for the interweb social things and we need influencer types taking selfies while scanning so as to make into A THING, because truly WTF is more important than helping to keep us all safe and free given the hellscape nearly everywhere else in the world and people can show off all the fab or not so fab places they go, in the same way that people like to post selfies with the meals they've cooked or eaten, although not me cos a bowl of steamed cauli with grated cheese isn't much to brag about, which is why I can't think of a good hashtag and won't be taking selfies but still will be scanning and wishing so hard that everyone else was too. Here's my feeble attempts - surely someone can do better than this? #selfiescantobeagoodegg #selfiescantostopcovid #scantosavelives
Re the covid app, for which I'm being as good a boy as my memory will allow, but I'm making every effort and also using the manual entry feature later on when I forget, I reckon what we don't need is civic authorities to throw open all the extra doors of their community facilities and declare that, because it's only level one and tracing isn't mandatory any more, that it's not their problem so they don't need to encourage people to use the app, as long as they've put a QR code by the door then they've done their bit and it's not their problem, and organisations that use their community facilities and want to encourage people to use the app will just have to deal with it because the extra doors have to stay open now, even if they're not staffed. True story. A certain big civic authority doesn't care if covid has been to visit, it's level one now, so everything beyond minimum effort is optional, and if someone comes in the side door and doesn't use the app, that's not going to create an issue at all. No, not at all, because scanning isn't mandatory any more, so we don't have to do anything about it. Yay