Afloat

On Saturday I went sailing on my dad’s 30-foot yacht. I made the boat sink, but I can’t remember why. The half-submerged sails continued powering the boat forward, and as the last of the rig slipped beneath the surface, I somehow remained standing on something solid, yet I knew I eventually had to jump off. Before I leapt, the water seeping through my trouser pocket to my iPhone, I dunked my head and looked through my expensive sunglasses for sharks. Sure enough, one was waiting below near the hull. This morning, drifting back into consciousness, I felt disappointed that my iPhone was ruined.

I do everything in my dreams except see a shrink to get my reality interpreted.

The new 40

I remember being so excited about getting a new digital watch for my 10th birthday that during school class that day I skipped out to the toilet just to adore and polish my snazzy new piece of technology. 30 years on and I'm feeling a bit the same way about the new analogue watch my brother and his wife gave me last week for my 40th birthday - except I can polish it whenever I like. It feels good to wear a watch again, especially one that I was given as a birthday gift. In some ways I don't feel much different at 40 to how I did when I was 10 - I'm the same person now as I was then; it's all been in there since day dot. I'm able to feel things just as much, I've hung on to my childlike sense of humour, and I haven't deadened my sensitivity.

I considered not having a 40th party - I'm not usually the party-throwing type - but I'm glad I stepped up and threw one, and that my wife did such a good job of making it happen. Turning 40 is an achievement, and should be marked with a celebration. Having survived your tumultuous twenties and thirties you've well and truly made it to middle age. Victor Hugo said that "forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age", which would suggest that between 40 and 50 is a sort of no-man's-land (it's most definitely a no-adolescent's-land!), in which I think I'll enjoy being stuck for a decade. Who wants to fit in anyway?

Hooligans

Standing on Queen Street today I heard behind me a loud, cheerful commotion. Turning to look I was surprised to see an army of about 200 school children in navy blue uniform marching up behind me. Mildly relieved, I received the all clear to cross the road, and as I began to do so the children broke into song, momentarily transforming the pavement outside Smith & Caugheys into a Wembley football stadium stand. I continued diagonally across the road, safely out of the way of this giant busking ensemble, glancing back over my shoulder to take in the whole experience. Overtaken with the excitement of a buzzer command, and abandoning their orderly chant for lively yelps and squeals, the children began running across the road, breaking ahead of the pack like water spilling over rapids. Predictably, from across the road a bystander was busy reducing it onto his one-inch movie screen.

Poems

Mornings

I love mornings, everything is fresh and brand new
The cool air is latent and filled with possibility
Sunlight pierces the shivering particles
It’s the same old sun that’s been going around for ever
But a brand new sunrise for today
Not like reheated leftovers – although they have a magic all their own
But like an old pair of jeans that have shrunk in the wash and have to be broken in all over again

Fire

I made a fire
In the house
In the fireplace
The place of fire

I built a fire
Out of building wood
Wasn’t sure if I built the fire
Before or after I lit the match

I made a fire
In the fireplace
Out of wood
My house is made of wood so I call it my tree hut
And I call my tree hut my large bird box
It's where I keep my moa.

Printing

I have seen the printing press come and go
All the while I’ve been writing in pen
The pen and the printing press both use ink
I am a printer
At school I was taught printing
Then running writing
Reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic
Alliterate Always
- Two different sounding A's
Followed by a different number of l’s
All as in ‘always’, not as in ‘alliterate’
I never stopped learning English.

Untamed

It may as well have been a family holiday to outer space. The winding metal road definitely seemed galactic in length – signaling the increasing distance from civilisation as we knew it. But arriving at the final frontier was worth it. Just beyond the diminutive kaikoura grass carpark, a wild scrub and scorching black sand path led out to a lunar landscape: to the left, a short walk to the small, coarse-sand beach, dirt cliffs sinking to jagged rock pools; to the right, the long, distant, shimmering beach meeting the charcoal horizon. Base camp had its own unchanging vista: the timeless, brown painted fence and chipped walls standing constant against the changing seasons and fashions.

Despite the grandeur of the landscape, two memories from our holiday at Whatipu beach really stand out for me. The first was a frog hiding at the tube-like base of a flax bush in the garden just outside one of the cabins. One of the other kids must have heard the frog and we all gathered around to try and find it. Was it really there? Did frogs actually exist outside of Beatrice Potter books? Shunning the common garden path, it maintained an air of intrigue, (so as to segue smoothly out of our picture-book imaginations and into reality) by choosing the flax-tube portal to another world. We peered into the tube, into a timeless place so accessible to boys and girls short on years but rich in imagination.

The second was an older boy – tall, gangly, with fair hair and skin, wearing a horizontal red-and-white-striped T shirt – who broke his arm. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Older boys were tough and invincible. He was what they called a teenager, but to me he was as good as a grown man – sure, slightly younger than my father – but certainly as commanding, perhaps with an added mystery due to the extraterrestrial setting. With his older-boy broken voice he let out the most heart-wrenching older-boy screams. I’d never seen someone in so much pain before. He appeared to me, at once, both brave and broken, and I felt for him a strange, raw mix of pity and admiration.

Whenever I go back to Whatipu I scan the brown camp to see if it is as I left it, and imagine the frog still hiding in the flax portal, intriguing a new generation of space travelers. I wonder where the boy with the broken arm is now; what he looks like as an older man, whether he still remembers Whatipu, or if he shut it out to make his home in another galaxy. On one of our early dates I took my now wife to Whatipu, where we climbed the not very galactic dirt cliff and sat shivering and exposed, politely enjoying ourselves.

My entry for the 2012 North & South magazine essay writing comp.

Boarding school

On Saturday I went snowboarding for the first time in about 15 years. I was expecting to see some revolutionary new shape of snowboard, or at least a throwback to a retro design – a bit like how the latest skateboards look like the long, thin, downhill boards of old. But unlike skateboarding, snowboarding doesn’t really have much of a history to throw back to. On hearing that I virtually hadn’t snowboarded since the invention of (the) sport, my helpful bro-in-law John brought me up to speed on a few skiing essentials, including that you are now in the minority if you don't wear a helmet. My first thought was, “what, even including snowboarders?”, because, you see, I’d always thought that snowboarding was the cool thing to do on the mountain, while skiing was just for conformists. But that all changed when I asked John, “are your skis wider than normal skis”, to which he replied, “it depends how you define normal skis – anything goes these days.” …Okay, I’ll just be over here twirling my 90s dreadlocks. After hiring my boots, board and helmet, and figuring out how to do up my boots, put on my complimentary wristguards (they go on the outside of the gloves) and lock my front foot into the bindings, it was time to join John, my twin five-year-old nieces and eight-year-old nephew in plopping backwards into the chairlift for the tranquil, scenic ascent to the point of uncertainty. As soon as the top of the chairlift came into view I got some slight jitters about the all important slide with your chairlift chums down to where you are well clear of the turning chair. Adding to the pressure was the fact that I only had one foot in the bindings, but I found some spare plank on which to put my back foot and made it down ok. It was such a beautiful day (it felt more like a day at the beach than on icy snow), I was determined not to ruin it on my first run with a stinging face plant or dislocated shoulder, so, after making the whole party wait while I clumsily secured my back foot, I gently began my descent, stopping every metre or two to look in awe at my already tiny relatives disappearing ahead of me. I was happy to find that after such a long hiatus, snowboarding is like riding a bicycle, except you face sideways, and you don't hold onto anything... so maybe skiing is more like riding a bicycle than snowboarding. I digest. Next day my nephew and I went skateboarding and I discovered I can still ollie - there is now probably some cooler word for it - so I must say I'm tempted to get back into skateboarding... I'm just not that excited by having to get my old job back at the chicken hatchery to pay for it.

Breakneck

Ollie back to 1989, when I was saving for a new skateboard. I already owned a Santa Cruz Tom Grosso(?) mini that I bought off a guy at school with one blue and one green eye who loved to talk about skateboarding, and who once instructed me to find out for myself a bit more about one particular aspect of skateboarding, to which I replied, "I'll do that for homework." His nickname for me was "runner boy", because I was doing a lot of distance running at the time. I needed $340 to buy a new deck, trucks, wheels, bearings and accessories from Cheapskates in Henderson, and the obvious pathway to my dreams lay in sacrificing my two-week school holiday for a job breaking necks at the Waitakere Chicken Hatchery, where my sister had worked before me. She had the unenviable task of sorting the reject chicks from the good ones, then breaking their necks using a special thumb technique. I wasn't given that job, and instead ended up on forgettable tasks like cleaning and stacking plastic trays and hosing out tanks etc. I saved my $340 and proceeded to Henderson to get me some wheels etc. The skateboard deck I picked had graphics depicting death, eg skulls and/or demons, which didn't impress my dad, a church pastor, so he gave me the choice of either returning the deck to the shop or scraping off the graphics using a brick. I took the deck back and swapped it for a Santa Cruz Jeff Grosso 'toybox', featuring a picture of a toybox.