Wellington

Donuts, Espressoholic Style

Friday night was The Veils at the stupidly-named San Francisco Bathhouse, but more of that later; first I come to praise the re-opened Espressoholic and their delicious parcels of deep-fried dough.

Many moons ago I used to spend plenty of evenings in the old Espressoholic, and then I started visiting it again; shortly thereafter, it closed in a rather public fashion after the landlord refused to renew their lease. The appearance of a new cafe with the same menu and some of the same kitchen staff was NOT AT ALL SUSPICIOUS, of course; I have been waiting to see the new ‘holic re-open in Cuba Street for some time, and finally got a chance to swing by. It is largely the same place; the food is mostly the same, the prices are the same. It’s all pretty good, really. There are even some improvements: the toilets are a great deal less terrifying, for example.

There’s one delicious addition: the donuts. They’re done kind of like churros; chunks of dough deep-fried and coated with deliciousness, and served with maple syrup and marscapone. The first time I tried them I got four small ones, and on Friday I got a pair that were, as I later estimated for the folks at the Southern Cross on Saturday, about a handful each.

Went to see Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years at the City Gallery, and came away appreciating it as the most child-thrilling art I’ve been to in the last nearly 3 years. Starting from the gallery being covered in guant multi-coloured spots (which led to quoting of Put Me In The Zoo) through to the Narcissus Garden full of mirror spheres, the firefly exhibit of mirrors, water, and handing lights, and the favourite of the trip, the mini-maze of convex mirrors which lead to a yellow room with black polka dots and inflatable sculpture at one end, and a black room with yellow polka dots at the other end, it was a smash hit.

The only bummer was that photography was, as typical for exhibits, verboten, which means I wasn’t able to get photos of Ada’s near-unrestrained joy as she trotted from inflatable sculpture to inflatable sculpture in the polka dot rooms.

We're All Go. Going to Ruins.

One of the downsides of market collapses is the scars on the city; this used to be the old Wellington market building; while it had faded from its hey-day, it was still worth nipping into. Predictably enough it was swept up by the wave of apartment madness, scheduled for demolition, to be converted into yet another pile of generic apartments.

Had the international financial and property markets collapsed 3 months earlier, that would be the end of the story; instead, they did so in time for the builders to demolish the building, leaving only the foodcourt mural as a remnant of what once existed, along with hopelessly optimistic claims of continued liquidity and activity.

When I moved to Wellington the most obvious mark of the '87 market crash was on Courtney Place, where a vast, gravelled wasteland interrupted the main strip, testimony to a failed development; when I started working at Wellington Newspapers I was next to an ugly carpark whose upper deck was sprinkled with thick concrete columns, a mute testimony to the failure of another building project—this time after the basement had been completed.

I'm assuming this rubble will become another of the scars left by this round of collapses.

Nectar

Spring has arrived early in Wellington; I saw the first magnolia blooms over a month ago, and daffodils are out on my lawn weeks ahead of last year; along with the early flowering has come the flight of young birds. When I saw these guys in my garden I initially called Maire out to look at them, since they were so tiny; smaller than sparrows, sleek, lean. At a distance I'd not noticed their eye markings and assumed they must be something unusual, perhaps from the Karori Sanctuary.

While I was a little disappointed to discover they were tiny, young, and decidedly common waxeyes they were most obliging subjects, both for my camera and for Ada to enjoy.

The idea of visitors from the Sanctuary, incidentally, doesn't seem so unreasonable; the Sanctuary seems to have been a huge success not only in terms of its own breeding programs but in terms of seeding surrounding areas with bird life. I had never seen a Kaka in Wellington until around two years ago when I saw a solitary bird in the Botanic Gardens while taking Ada for a walk; last month we were heading up to the Cable Car through the same area and saw three tumbling through the trees. All of them were skinny, young birds, and it was a delight to have them buzzing us.

Flight

Office view

My new office (as of a couple of months ago) has a number of drawbacks, not least of which is that, being on the port side of the railway station, it's miles away from most of the good bits of central Wellington when compared with my previous location on Willis Street.

On the other hand, there are some compensations. This is the view from the meeting room I spent the day in. It could be worse.

Danger! Danger! Do not touch the streams!

There's something about this sign that I love; I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it's that the language is less imperative than most signs of this sort. There's something about seeing the word "inadvisable" in a context where I would normally see "forbidden" or some more prosaic variation thereon that appeals to me.

It was the breaded turkey dinosaurs that finally did it. They were served to my two-year-old son Eddie by the cafe at a children’s farm in the Cotswolds and they were, in every way, disgusting: they had the texture of cardboard-covered sawdust, just less of the flavour. The only similarity they had to food was that, if eaten, they wouldn’t kill you, at least not immediately. Here we were, at a visitor attraction famed for its child friendliness.

Man, this all sounds so familiar. “Child-friendly” is so predictably a euphemism for “shit.” I’m wouldn’t necessarily go to the extent of heading for the most adventurous restaurant I can find by way of avoiding the problem, but I’ve certainly found that Ada is pretty consistently more willing to give non-stereotypically unchallenging food a go than one might be led to believe by “child-friendly” menus. Blue cheese, parmesan, dark chocolate, porter beer? Yum, yum!

(I hasten to add that the porter, unlike the others on that list, is not an especially common treat.)

There are actually heaps of restaurants (and, for that matter, cafes) in Wellington that are kid friendly and not shit. You have to avoid the stereotypically Anglo-Saxon establishments that seem to have picked up a snotty Victorian English “seen and not heard” view of the world, but Le Metropolitan on Cuba Street, Scopa, the Victoria Street Cafe, Manon in Newtown have all been excellent places to take Ada and have contributed greatly to her ability to eat out in a civilised fashion.

A child getting cancer sucks. It gets a little bit suckier for those of us down the bottom of the North Island, since it turns out the Wellington health board aren’t competent to run a cancer service. Going through 10 specialists in ten years does not, I’m sorry, indicate that the hospital doesn’t have a big enough catchment area. It indicates the organisation aren’t competent to manage specialists.

I was hoping not to have another run of funerals like the one I had last year. The start of the year is not lending me any confidence on that score.

It’s more than a little aggravating that this has been known about for a while.

It’s even more aggravating to think that for the a cost that will likely be a fraction of the cost of saving this one crash victim we could avoid the problem all together.

Now, I’m going to pull some numbers out of my arse, to a certain extent. I haven’t noodled around ACC or hospital data in any real way, so these are very off-the-cuff numbers, indeed, more indicative than anything else.

I’ve been told by people that fix broken people that a simple broken bone—simpler than my arm—costs the health system a good ten grand or so to fix; that’s the cost of medical salaries, ambulances, materials, physio, and so on. That’s for a simple case. More complex cases tend to cost more—my own arm would have been at least two to three times that (4 months in plaster, 9 months all up, including 5 months of therapy). That cost for my arm didn’t require surgical intervention—for a shattered pelvis, leg, and whatnot, we’re into the realms of very expensive orthopaedic surgeons, theatre staff, and anaesthetist, plus potentially significant amounts of highly skilled rehab work; a cost could easily escalate from tens of thousands into the realms of six figure sums.

That doesn’t cover the ACC cost for anyone out of a job for any length of time, or sickness benefit for someone who’s long term disabled. The former can run up to $60,000 pa (the amount it’s capped at); the latter runs to a rather more modest $15,000 pa, plus any accommodation costs, and any costs of ongoing healthcare. If you end up spending twenty years on a sickness benefit because you’re too badly injured to work, that’s a nice, fat $300,000, minimum, as a cost.

Before going any further, I should note that I’m not speculating on these costs because I begrudge them; quite the contrary, I’m very pleased to live in a country where we take at least some minimal care of one another, and I can only describe myself as bemused by the sorts of things I see out of the States, to provide a handy counter-example.

No, what incenses me is that this was a very avoidable situation: all it would require to have prevented this are a couple of robust gates. Now, I know civil engineering projects can cost a bit more than slapping something together in your back yard, but what do you reckon it would cost to put together a pair of metal gates that are closed by the last bus to run through every night. Ten grand? Twenty? Fifty, at the outside? If it had avoided this situation it would not only avoid a personal tragedy for EJ and his friends and family, but it would have paid for itself several times over.

A little money spent, a lot saved, and a bunch of heartache avoided. There’s no good reason not to.

Another point I’d make is what I loathe about proposals for CCTV cameras in the name of security and safety. Yes, it’s great if there are cameras that help identify offenders. But cameras aren’t going to fix the injury here; they are not a mechanism for crime prevention, in the way that, say, beat police officers are.

Oh, and to head off the inevitable smart-arse response: yes, by not walking down a non-pedestrian tunnel you are less likely to get run over. This is also true if drivers don’t belt through one illegally and manage to not notice a person walking through it, too[1], and if the ones who do hit you don’t leave you to die. If you wish to engineer for how the world ought to function then please, by all means, start in your own back yard; people ought to respect your home and possessions, so feel free to leave your doors and windows open when you leave the house.

[1] The lack of noticing such a thing leaves me with little confidence that the driver in question would notice equally obvious road hazards like, say, people using a pedestrian crossing.

The Lady Norwood Rose Garden is one of the nicer parts of Wellington, especially with a small child, who can run around, sniff flowers, and enjoy the ducks. One upgrade since last time I visited is the addition of some informative plaques—the most notable to me being that the gully in which the garden resides was carved out of the hill over the course of 3 years by a Great Depression-era public works program.