Day eight – Worcester Bridge

No prizes for guessing where we are now. You gotta love that tram, even if it does only travel at 20km per hour. Not bad for right outside your back door. Great view of the city though.















This Jane, she does a great side-line career as coffee and cake delivery gal. Thanks to John in Auckland who sent her out to look for me.










Smile of the day award







So these guys are from Hagley High. Funny how teenagers get a bad rap for everything, then you meet a bunch like this and realise how interesting and straight up they are too.

Day Seven – one week down – Corner of Armagh and Colombo

Man, Woman, Little House. Prime retail, wheels up and stranded. What are you gonna do? How can such prime retail go standing with no interest? Great outlook, high visibility, all new frontage, go on take a look. Forget about that old place, there’s not enough sun, it’s old fashioned, the kitchen is practically falling down. Take a look for yourself.

Day Six – The City Mall near Bridge of Remembrance

View from the balcony of the Art Gallery into the foyer. What is it that kids get about art? I reckon they just like things with no rules, who wouldn’t. Every day there are kids who stick their faces into my window and ask me what I’m doing. I tell them something obscure of obtuse, they give me a look of disbelief and then they get on with it. Why must there be something to get, after all? Why should there be a specific point? Why



Someone left their glasses. Come get them off me at the house.


This is a kind of screwed-up panorama, but I like the fact that it’s not quite right. It is taken on my phone camera after all.




Did we really evolve from English people? How did that happen? Who was responsible?




This is Mandy. She’s a shop manager in the square, she filled my water bottle and offered a place to expel it too.


Damn, can’t remember the name, she’s a med student in her 4th year, passing by from Christchurch hospital. She is officially the first person I’ve ever met who doesn’t drink tea. Apparently it’s a taste thing, same with coffee. What about the drug thing? Doesn’t that count for something, you don’t have to be a med student to work that one out.


Christchurch lads.

Day Five – Near the Bus station on Litchfield St

Officially the noisiest spot in Christchurch. Well, if you add the fact that I was outside a store that is being renovated and there are concrete floor polishers inside with the doors wide open for fumes and noise, plus the buses coming and going, plus the fact that it’s a busy corner for traffic, you’ve got a fair bit of noise.

In fact they had three of those machines going. It was a lot calmer inside the house, but not a great day for conversations.



With the notable exception of Bev. She is the mother of my ex-girlfriend and came looking for me, apparently I was supposed to be in the square again today… what is it about squares though, seems to me they’re the worst place in the universe to actually meet people. And on the most part when you see art in a public place like a square you always feel like its been sanitised somehow. Anyway, that’s my excuse for being in an obscure and noisy corner of Christchurch.






I reckon I’ll put this one in my scrap book. I dunno why, I just love it.
























Leaders of the SPCSU
(Society for the protection of school girls against ugly clothing)
What is it about winter uniforms – I mean would anyone in their right mind be wearing a skirt like that if they weren’t forced into it. As a school kid I always resented having to do dumb things that I knew very well had no sense, well costumes like that just don’t make sense mums and dads, and maybe you think it’s character building to force your kids into wearing ugly clothes, it really doesn’t help anyone in the long run.

Day Four – Glochester St near the square

The Scrabble set is out. This is Holly and Amber, making a mockery of my spelling skills. Luckily I have a few years on these guys and so have picked up a few extra words to my vocab, thereby saving my dignity. Yeah I know this is the cheesey-est photo alive, I know they're gonna kill me when they see this, so I'm spelling out the irony just in light of my bad spelling all round.







Panorama view from the inside of cottage central.



Few friends of mine here, Minnie is from Auckland (she had the red cape thing on, over on the right). She lives in an apartment in Freemans bay and part of the reason she’s in Christchurch is that she’s getting some building work done at home. Get this though, she can get a loan for the work done on the house put onto her mortgage IF the house is greater than 45m square. So a few weekends ago we spent the morning measuring the rooms to try and figure out how to squeeze an extra 70 square centremetres.

Kneeling down with his back to the camera is Milton. He works in a café in town is seen here getting his arse whipped in Scrabble by another friend of mine, Lucette who you can’t see from here because she’s inside the house. Both of them live in Lyttelton in a big old house that is apparently pretty run down but wonderful. Haven’t seen it yet.




This is the Art Gallery where the house sits every night and morning waiting for me to collect it the next day. What a great building. Yesterday there was a Kapa Haka group doing a performance right in front of the house. If you know anyone who got a photo of that performance, I’d love love love to get a copy of it.