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.

Day Three - Day Three – Saturday 28 July – Outside the ANZ

Moved just round the corner onto Colombo St under the awning of the ANZ, not sure if the irony was completely clear to the TV cameras that came around today. Apparently it was on the 6pm news – doh I missed it – but man there was a lot of people! Knee deep in it you might say, and I certainly saw a lot of knees.



This is a guy I met called Richard – actually he brought me a beer, so how could I not like the guy. Well he was telling me about how a few years ago he had a conversation with a guy about how the cost of housing was about to go up and that he really should get into the market while it was hot. So he ended up getting into business with this guy and investing in loads of houses in Auckland. Apparently it all went pretty well because now he’s sitting pretty, in fact he’s just come back from a few months in the US (San Fran and LA) where he was hanging out going to parties and enjoying himself. So what’s he doing in Christchurch? I’m pretty sure he comes from here so it must be home to him. Hopefully he’ll come back so that I can get more of the story, but it is a story that I’ve heard a few times.

Later that night I met a guy called Steven (don’t have a photo of him cos we were talking in the Arts Festival Club Bar) who had a different story. He had a well paid job and managed to save ten thousand dollars so he teamed up with a couple of friends and moved into a house in Auckland together. It seemed like a pretty good thing to do until he realised that one of the girls in the house was impossible to live with. She tried to make him stay on but he was determined to get out. In the meantime (this was 1997 apparently) the housing market slumped and so the place was worth less than what they paid for it, so he cut his losses and lost the ten grand but gained his freedom. The next year he got an even higher paid job and went to live in Europe with an expensive girlfriend and even more expensive habits. He now lives in Auckland again, just working in Christchurch for a couple of months, and he seemed a pretty happy guy too. PS he didn’t buy me a beer.



This is a not that came through my window. It says ‘You must be some kind of King, to get strangers on their knees’
I reckon this has gotta be the best title for a book ever thought of. So whoever wrote it, I hope you don’t mind me using this title, thanks for passing it through.









This little girl was one of a family full of red heads.








'nuf said

Day Two- Fri 27 July

So this woman drops an ANZ flyer about home loans in my window, she thinks it’s funny. How ironic. I wish I’d been a bit faster witted to say something about cutting down trees for flyers like this. Too bad.

So two new developments.
1 Went to the Art Gallery where I’d left it set up last night. It looks so cool there, it’s such a weird space and so high. There is something not quite right about a little house sitting in the middle of the foyer and something even more not quite right about an object made with my bad carpentry sitting in an art gallery. I think this is what they call ‘when-will-they-realise-who-I-really-am-syndrome’

2 So anyway, here’s a picture. I like the guy on the left the way he thinks the letter box might magically explain it all. I think Art Galleries give you the impression that it’ll all make sense once someone tells you the secret. I think that’s why I like et al.’s work so much.


3 Comparative sculptural study 3. I like phone boxes. They make me feel like I’m somewhere.


Location location location


And the cutest mother daughter combo goes to…

Day One – Thurs 26 July – Christchurch

Weird day because I was sort of tucked up in a corner of the Square so most of the people who dropped by were stranded travellers trying to get into X-base (other than the bunch of guys playing football on my back lawn).
Had an interesting conversation with Sue from Littleton who reckons I should take a trip out there with the house. The only problem is that I’d need a trailer cos there is no way I’m gonna try taking this thing apart again


So this woman had met me before in Auckland apparently, not that I can remember. Show me your shoes again and I might recall. Anyhow, she now works here in this bar on the left and she brought me some biscuits just at the moment that I’d tagged with Milton who was holding the fort while I went to the loo, Bummer!


This is living proof that Wanganui really is the best town in the world to live in if your sole criteria is the level workmanship of the paving bricks. For the rest of the world, we gotta just suffer.

Comparative sculptural study




Officially the first ever person in Christchurch to come visit, you get the special prize of the $12 pizza. Actually judging by the lack of brown faces round here he’s probably from outta town.



Comparative sculptural study number 2. I bought this tea cup for 20c at the Salvation Army store in town. The guy at the photocopy shop laughed at me when I asked him for directions ‘why would I wanna know where Sally’s is?’ Well buddy, don’t bother looking for green-lipped tea cups for 20c anywhere else in town cos I got ‘em.

The note on the right is from a girl called Kirsty who drew this for me when I was in Auckland. She said she worked in a bar but she looked young enough to still need a baby sitter. Am I getting older? Funny how when you get down this low to the ground any uniform at all gives you a sense of authority. The article above is from NZ Herald all about how rich Aucklanders would like to live somewhere nicer and not have to pay so much.

Wed 25 July – Picton to Christchurch

The number of days I’ve gotten up this early to see the sun rise I could count on one hand, I kept running that saying my mother used to use through my head – red sky at night shepherds delight, red sky in morning shepherds warning – but I really can’t see the sense in it. What’s the difference exactly? Today was like the return of Autumn in Christchurch proving not only my mother wrong but also every one of my friends who insisted I take twenty jerseys with me. So I bailed out the jerseys, the hot water bottle, the sleeping bag, the leather jacket, the possum fur socks, and starting putting together Baby part III complete with new paint job and classy new aluminium corners.
Was working at the art gallery in Christchurch, they have some pretty flash carpenters working there so was feeling a little self conscious about my dodgy building work, splashing on plenty of paint to cover things up. Sure is a nice space though that gallery (at least the back of it is where the workshops are), pity there are so many locks around. These are some pictures I took with my camera on self timer so that I could pretend to be shot at work. Honk! That guy is posing.
Today I was thinking today about how many houses I’ve lived in. Well there was my folks house in Masterton for the first 18 years then a run of about thirty houses since. So apart from the fact that this is the first house I’ve owned, this is also the first house I’ve managed to hang on to. So I figure the idea of moving house but taking it with me isn’t such a bad idea. I mean, it does fit in a car after all. I will count them up for tomorrow and see if I can list every house I’ve lived in. I’m prepared to bet it’ll be greater than the number of girls I’ve slept with. Either way this is potentially a sad indictment of my inconsistent personality.