Witters from Down Under
Created | Updated Apr 1, 2009
Having moved from Scotland to Australia in 2005 to find out if she had fallen in love with the country as well as her husband a decade ago, she decided that the answer was 'yes' and intended to stay.
However life has always had a marvellous way of changing her best-laid plans. And it happened again. An unexpected work opportunity presented itself in mid-2008: one too good to miss.
As a result the Witter from Down Under is now coming from the land of the long white cloud - New Zealand.
Please join us and read Frenchbean’s commentary on a new country, a new city, a new job and new friends.
Saving the planet is not so easy...
 |  |
Earth Hour took place last Saturday evening. I trust that you turned off all non-essential appliances in your house from 8.30 to 9.30 on Saturday night. Or, if you weren't at home, that you followed a similar rule of thumb wherever you found yourself.
Chchch takes the credit for being the first Kiwi city to embrace Earth Hour two years ago and the Council's Sustainability Advisor spent the few weeks running up to 28th March in an increasingly dizzy spiral of activity, organising people, places, TV crews, artists, seating, t-shirts, telly and radio interviews and general fun.
For some reason (probably my brazenness) he gave me a lovely t-shirt with a whopping great 60 on the front, to wear all week. I was a walking billboard, spending unusual amounts of time wandering around the city centre at lunchtime encouraging people to stare at my chest.
National telly broadcast from the bus exchange all morning as heaps of people signed a big banner, which was then transferred to Cathedral Square for the evening’s Unplugged Concert.
Sadly I wasn't there to join in, as the last bus left at 9:05pm. I could hardly drive myself into town and back when the message is about reducing our impact on the planet! So I sat at home with a beeswax candle or two and read my book; occasionally glancing out of the window to check the neighbours.
Talking of carbon emissions: the long-anticipated two cords of firewood arrived on the drive a couple of weekends ago. There followed a busy few hours of stacking. I am no expert at piling logs, in fact I’ve never done it for myself before, and whilst it’s not rocket science, I did discover as time passed that there is a definite knack to preventing logalanches every few minutes. Anyway, the result can be admired in the attached photograph.
How many chunks of firewood are there, I hear you cry?
There are five 'walls'; two are 3m long, three are 2.5m. Each wall is 1.1m high. Per metre horizontally there is an average of seven logs. Per vertical metre there are approximately ten logs. This gives a total of 1040 pieces of wood. If I estimate that a fire will be required 180 times over the winter, that provides me with around 5.8 logs per evening.
I lit the fire on Saturday and Sunday and burnt four and five bits of wood respectively. That's without having quite mastered the burning speed. The wood burner has hardly the most sensitive controls and it vacillated between burning furiously and barely at all. Practice will improve my technique.
Winter is shaping up to be a little less daunting now that I have the means to keep warm, come what may. Layering is an important method of clothing oneself against the cold here. Autumn and winter fashion in Chchch is dictated by such considerations, and I have been acquiring more long-sleeved layers to wear beneath existing long-sleeved layers. Mind you, most of mine has come from the Opp Shops and is not exactly the epitome of high fashion.
Thus when I get to the office I can undress without the risk of shocking anybody. However, it also means that when I am squished into the bus on the way home (at which time the temperatures are around the daytime high and the heating beneath my legs is on full blast) I am smothered in a pile of discarded layers.
Rather against the trend of trying to reduce my carbon footprint, I flew to Wellington recently for a workshop on... Oh, I really shan't bore you with the details. More important than the work was the fact that I was able to see a wonderful exhibition at The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa.
Monet and The Impressionists is on tour from Boston, visiting Wellington and Sydney whilst its usual home is refurbished. We are fortunate indeed to have it. 50-odd paintings hung on the walls; mostly Monet with a few others such as Sisley, Manet, Degas and Cezanne.
It was breathtaking. Prints, photographs and telly images of Monet’s paintings do not do them justice: they are pale imitations.
As I stood a mere arm's length from the pictures I could distinguish every stroke of the artist's laden brush and even sense the air, the light and the colours that must have surrounded him as he worked. I was enthralled. His use of colour to is still surprising today, over 100 years later. His creation of light is magical and pulled me into the pictures as I gazed at them.
It was a relatively quiet evening at the exhibition, although there was one guided party purposefully promenading from one series of paintings to the next, flocking behind their microphone-wielding expert. They departed half an hour after I arrived, thank goodness. Then I was able to dawdle, wander and be quietly enchanted.
Two elderly ladies were chatting whilst inspecting a pair of pink coastal landscape paintings alongside me:
"He was very brave with his colours wasn't he?"
"Oh yes, he was really out there was Claude"
Rather less endearing were the number of women who completely ignored the fact that people were standing in rapt scrutiny of paintings, on the lines on the floor in front of each picture, beyond which we could not venture for fear of being arrested. They were so intent on their destination that they walked directly in front of the gazers, thereby breaking a little of the magic that Monet weaves.
One girl disrupted my contemplation four times; the last of which elicited a brusque request from me that she think before she do it again. There were nods and muttered agreement from those around me… and she didn't do it again.
The lack of awareness of female exhibition-goers reminded me that earlier in the week I witnessed another instance of people being unaware of their surroundings. It was as I debussed from the Number 90 at the Chchch Bus Exchange. The couple who disembarked in front of me stepped onto the pavement and stopped dead. I cannoned into the back of them as they debated the direction of their shop. I squeezed around them, glaring and was entirely ignored.
People stopping in entrances and exits is something that really bugs me. Why don't people think about where they are going before they get to a doorway, or the top/bottom of the escalator? I now resort to 'Please don’t stop there' as people halt in front of me.
One day I will have said it to everybody in Chchch. And then Christmas will be upon us, when all manners are forgotten in the rush for presents and I'll have to start again.
Witters from Down Under Archive
