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Apr. 21st, 2022 07:36 pmLovely lunch with my friend Alexander out on the Kapiti Coast today. I don't know if I've stopped in the township of Paekakariki before, it's on a very narrow bit of land between tall flaxy hills and the sea, on what's just ceased to be the main road after the (glory, halleluiah, hosanna in excelsis) completion of Transmission Gully.*
I liked Paekak (are non-locals allowed to call it that? unsure), its details seemed slightly weirder than usual. The first cafe we went into had cabinets full of delicious looking food, but their coffee and eftpos machines were both broken; I regret that we didn't go get cash out, because the pie at the cafe next door was not at all interesting. Outside the village hall, five minutes walk from the train station, signs saying 'north' and 'south' pointed almost at right angles to each other. Five minutes from there was the sea – we walked along a path over a steep slope of boulders, with the spray kicking up into distant mistiness. A set of steps whose railings were all odd curves went sharply down into the water. Two men were throwing driftwood for a terrier to chase, and as we came up behind, one of them turned around without knowing we were there, fashionable and sharp-cheekboned, and had to stop himself throwing the driftwood at one of our faces. A little road going up between the houses above us had a sign: 'Sand Path. No exit.'
At the nearby bookshop I found a lot of Margaret Mahy I'd forgotten existed – very good children's section, writers I expect to find in ones and twos were there in fives and tens – and also The Book of the Pearl: its History, Art, Science, and Industry. I know this is the kind of book I acquire in enthusiasm as a result of how oddly specific it is, and then don't read because it's actually long and boring, and I've mostly gotten better at leaving those on the shelf, but what the hell, it was cheap, and what if one day I wanted to open it up at random and learn a new technical term for 'strawberry-shaped'?**
I hadn't noticed at that point that the book had first been published in 1908. It is written by two men who have spent many years accumulating all the pearl-related information they can find, and refer to themselves in the introduction as 'the senior author' and 'the junior author'. Their acknowledgements begin with the Queen of Italy, go on for two pages citing diplomats and museum curators and the princes of states which no longer exist, and end with the collected officials of the British Colonial Service. I boggled. I'm not sure how long I'll go on boggling before I get rid of it again. Savage peoples are referenced within the first paragraph – and apparently when they want to adorn themselves with pearls it's a characteristic trait of savagery, but when English people do it the impulse, though analagous, is entirely different. That'll teach me to buy a book based on random samples from the middle.
*A road through the hills first proposed a century ago and now built at only a couple of hundred million over budget.
**Answer: I would almost immediately forget what it was, as well as the page number.
I liked Paekak (are non-locals allowed to call it that? unsure), its details seemed slightly weirder than usual. The first cafe we went into had cabinets full of delicious looking food, but their coffee and eftpos machines were both broken; I regret that we didn't go get cash out, because the pie at the cafe next door was not at all interesting. Outside the village hall, five minutes walk from the train station, signs saying 'north' and 'south' pointed almost at right angles to each other. Five minutes from there was the sea – we walked along a path over a steep slope of boulders, with the spray kicking up into distant mistiness. A set of steps whose railings were all odd curves went sharply down into the water. Two men were throwing driftwood for a terrier to chase, and as we came up behind, one of them turned around without knowing we were there, fashionable and sharp-cheekboned, and had to stop himself throwing the driftwood at one of our faces. A little road going up between the houses above us had a sign: 'Sand Path. No exit.'
At the nearby bookshop I found a lot of Margaret Mahy I'd forgotten existed – very good children's section, writers I expect to find in ones and twos were there in fives and tens – and also The Book of the Pearl: its History, Art, Science, and Industry. I know this is the kind of book I acquire in enthusiasm as a result of how oddly specific it is, and then don't read because it's actually long and boring, and I've mostly gotten better at leaving those on the shelf, but what the hell, it was cheap, and what if one day I wanted to open it up at random and learn a new technical term for 'strawberry-shaped'?**
I hadn't noticed at that point that the book had first been published in 1908. It is written by two men who have spent many years accumulating all the pearl-related information they can find, and refer to themselves in the introduction as 'the senior author' and 'the junior author'. Their acknowledgements begin with the Queen of Italy, go on for two pages citing diplomats and museum curators and the princes of states which no longer exist, and end with the collected officials of the British Colonial Service. I boggled. I'm not sure how long I'll go on boggling before I get rid of it again. Savage peoples are referenced within the first paragraph – and apparently when they want to adorn themselves with pearls it's a characteristic trait of savagery, but when English people do it the impulse, though analagous, is entirely different. That'll teach me to buy a book based on random samples from the middle.
*A road through the hills first proposed a century ago and now built at only a couple of hundred million over budget.
**Answer: I would almost immediately forget what it was, as well as the page number.
