Home.

I spent this week back home in Christchurch, NZ.

There's been a lot happening in my life so far this year.  Big changes.  Heavy, life-altering stuff.  It was wonderful to simply be able to walk away from it all, even if just for a week.  I have family down there, family whom I love very much and see far less often than I should.  So to be down there, surrounded by those closest to me...it was fantastic.

But, Christchurch.
If you know anything of New Zealand (anything not directly related to an ongoing cinematic franchise set in a  fantastical universe, that is) you will know Christchurch was struck by a series of devastating earthquakes.  The land down there is mostly stilled once more, although the occasional rattle does still stir in its bones, but it has been utterly and irrevocably altered by those events.  It is not the first time I have returned there since the quakes, but it is the first time that I have had a blog to write about the experience.

It was a screamingly-hot day when my parents took me in to the centre of the city, to the place where the arbitrary violence of nature is most strikingly evident.  The cathedral is a sagging husk of churned stone.  Many of the walls are still standing but they have been gnawed open and the spire (perhaps the most striking feature of the Christchurch Cathedral) is long gone leaving just a blasted hole in its place.  A friend of mine used to ring the bell in that spire, I believe the term is 'campanologist'.  The mayor has proposed encasing the whole structure in a sort of colossal glass museum case, after fortifying the remaining walls so that it can still be used by worshippers.  It is an idea not without precedent.  It will certainly be a peculiar sight if he can get the backing for it.

The central city itself is now more negative space than anything else: checked across with empty lots that are pebbled like riverbeds and serve mostly as parking spaces.  There is a heck of a lot of parking space in Christchurch.  It's strange to walk through it and see an area that I used to pass through frequently, fenced off and rioted across with cracks, gutted by weeds.  Everywhere there are huge piles of rubble, snarls of tangled metal, and the sort of homogeneous dusty gravel that it seems pretty much everything can be reduced to.  Most anywhere you go you can hear the industrial grinding of earth-moving machines picking through the debris.  There are security fences and traffic cones everywhere.  Above it all the sky was blue and blazing.

Some very clever things have been done with all this new emptiness: a start-up mall built of shipping containers has sprung up in what used to be one of my favourite areas for browsing, a soccer field of glistening astro-turf has been laid out in another empty lot, still elsewhere there is a memorial to those that died during the quake - a white chair set out for each person lost.

A couple of days later - on a day that was overcast and much cooler (something of a relief to me as I have become kind of used to Wellington's more consistently chilly weather) - we drove out to the East side of the city.  It's not one you hear much about and there's a pretty good reason for that.
It's basically gone.
We passed a series of abandoned suburbs.  The houses empty and dead, windows gone or boarded over, brickwork cracked and snarled across with graffiti.  The gardens were all overgrown and the driveways empty.  Beneath the wheels of the car you could feel all the broken places in the road shuddering through the suspension.

The plan is to tear everything in those neighbourhoods down.  Plant trees.  These suburbs follow the river and in the absence of all the houses there can be a snaking series of parks and recreational areas.  It will be beautiful.  That's actually the thing I took away the most from my trip through these ruined areas: whatever Christchurch will be once it has been built again, will be beautiful.  And it will also be utterly and fundamentally different from what it has been.  It's as if a knife has been drawn across the history of the city - utterly severing its past from its future.

Once Christchurch was a sort of mini England-away-from-England: the Garden City.  Unfortunately it also had a still active class-system (something the bulk of New Zealand originally sought to break away from, though time has brought it back in again).  It was a sort of running gag that if anyone found out you were originally from Christchurch they would immediately ask which school you went to - the idea that a lot about your familial wealth and status could be inferred from the answer (which is, to say, that you really should have gone to one of the fancy private schools, preferably one named after a largely forgotten saint or something).

Now it has a much looser vibe, almost bohemian.  Another friend has said it would be a fantastic city to be student in right now.  It's a city caught in perpetual change and from here its future could be anything.  Most of my own past is there, in those broken streets.  But its altered now, buried in gravel pits and mangled concrete, and all my old haunts are long gone.  As a man newly single for the first time in over a decade this feels oddly appropriate to me.  And so it is that ultimately I want to leave Wellington and move back there - to be a part of that strange, uncertain future.  It's exciting, y'know.  Also, but most importantly, my family are there still.

Now I can't stop thinking of the one line in William S. Burrough's novel Naked Lunch (which I have not read since I was about fifteen or sixteen and, truth be told, it might not even be Naked Lunch but another of his novels - I've read quite a few) that always haunted me for no apparent reason:

'They are rebuilding the city'.

And that's it, blog post number two and not even a little bit about music.  Oh well, it did however feature a few references to actual, literal architecture so I think Frank Zappa would probably be amused.