“There are very few things I can say about my work that are better than saying nothing.”

– Ralph Hotere

I breakfast at a vibrant bakery that also does café service. A dome of scrambled eggs , sausage patty , confit mushrooms and glazed ham all spiked with Szechuan crispy chilli oil.

A family dressed like it’s 1983 walk along Lower Stuart Street. They are animatedly discussing the city’s wifi service. They head into one of the city’s ‘Scottish shops’ .

I feel like some salt air so I book an uber to St Clair. I walk the promenade. Surfers bob up and down in the swell , two teen girls run into the sea in bikinis , they last all of 30seconds in the vibrantly fresh southern ocean. Dogs chase seaweed. They yelp and wrestle and run.
St Clair always reminds me of Wellington’s South Coast but with the poshness of Oriental Bay. I use the public toilet. It is definitely more South Coast than Oriental Bay.  

I wait by a wee roundabout for an uber back north. I sit on a park bench made out of a replica surf board. We live in an age of theming . I think it started with pubs. A pub could no longer just be a pub, it had to be Irish, or sports , Spanish , Belgian or in far flung lands Australian with an honourary side serving of ‘Kiwi’ on ANZAC Day. Some years ago we even had a ‘Kiwi Bach’ themed pub in Wellington. Christ knows why. Down here it would be a ‘Kiwi Crib’ themed pub.
Well now suburbs are themed. St Clair is a surf spot so St Clair gets surf board bench seats. Its harmless and its twee and its horrible. But I am thankful for the seat my knee is hurting.

I return to the hotel and freshen up. I then head across Queens Gardens to The Duke of Wellington pub. The place is a gin palace of a pub that imports its own kegs of English beer. I settle down with a Theakston’s Best . Along the bar a middle aged pilot is holding court with a pint of Murphy’s Stout. A much younger man from Hong Kong is in attendance. I am drawn into conversation in the way things go in the best pubs. He was an airline pilot who used to work with the man from Hong Kong. Our conversation winds through the future of my local airport , the nature of Wellington , the crime of Auckland , my theory of how geography impacts social cohesion. The pilot is unreconstructed. I’m sure he would say if asked anti-pc. He sports faded blue jeans, a bulky woolen jersey of the sort commonly worn by all New Zealanders in the early 90s but now rare without the cachet of being ‘retro’. He has a 5 o clock shadow and at times seems to turn in on himself almost as if he is addressing his armpit rather than the rest of us. He cycles through anger, affection, annoyance, beaming optimism, and bewildered incredulity as we talk. Overall there is something vulnerable about him. He praises Asian immigration but is positively racist about immigrants from the Pacific. “we got it all wrong in the 70’s letting all the coconuts in”. He snarls when I use the word iwi. But he is also strangely charismatic and shows sincere concern for the man from Hong Kong’s girlfriend who is overdue from visiting an art gallery. He is not the sort of person I often interact with, I mainly disagree with his view of the world but I am the better for having heard him.  

I head to Careys Bay. The historic hotel was once the local of the artist Ralph Hotere. He lived directly behind the pub. His studio was perched up on Observation Point , a steep Bluff that overlooks the port.

I first came here years ago with Bob and a character named Father. We eat seafood and drank beer in the sun outside. I was back last year to run a training session with the staff. One of the staff had a mullet and handlebar mustache that would have looked perfectly at home in 1981. He would have been 20 years unborn.
I have a pint and a whisky and muse on what Ralph would have made of me in his local. Not much I conclude. I set off towards Port Chalmers. I romantically associate Carey’s Bay and Port Chalmers with Hotere . When I visit I see geometry and I see fire, I see iron and I drink whisky. The constant thump of containers dropping from the cranes at the port is somehow appropriate. Dunedin makes stuff and Port Otago sends it away.

I wander round to Port Chalmers past the yards of containers being shuffled around by Stevedores sat up in the heavens in the cabs of their crane units. I meet Mel at Portsider the wonderful pub/restaurant run by Pip and Hanz. I first met Pip when she worked at Emersons. She left to run Portsider with Hanz her Dutch partner. Hanz is classically trained chef and the food at Portsider is invariably a refreshing blast of traditional European cookery. It is miles away from the Wellington trend of putting everything in a bun and calling it a burger.
Mel and I chat over Pork Rillet and Bitterballen and Venison and Steak. When we are done and leave, the sky has put on a show in the dying light. The sky is imitating oil paints. Variegated shades of blue fill the dusk sky, the last rays of the sun illuminate a few artistically choreographed clouds. They sparkle gold up above us for this fleeting moment in time.  It’s more Salvador Dali than Hotere to my eye but it’s pretty special.