An urban N.Z. baby-boomer and a Jack Russell terrier
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WELLINGTON - ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY GRUNGY

26/2/2013

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Downtown Wellington is fabulously grungy and grubby, daubed in graffiti and pigeon droppings. It’s also heaven for the urban wanderer who enjoys street life and street art. 
In a dingy arcade made lively by a crammed pavement eatery and emporia bursting with second-hand junk, I meet a woman with a tame parrot tethered to a necklace around her neck. 
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In a back street I discover a “boutique” in a tiny caravan hand-painted in pink and green and blue. 
I have to stoop to fit through the door. 

I am the only shopper and even though the owner is tucked in a corner poring over her iPad, the place feels crammed. 

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Children play around the bucket sculpture fountain screaming delight as the brightly coloured buckets fill and flip, over and over again. There’s something perennially hilarious and surprising about the tipping buckets and their occasional delinquent cascades of water. 

Piped music spills from the shops in Cuba Mall and blends with the sounds of a busker playing Flamenco, Morris dancers with ribbons at knee and diners chatting in pavement cafes. 

A man in dreadlocks  sits patiently too, offering fortunes told with “I Ching, runes, tarot, Celtic oracle and Russian gypsy cards”. Elegant Somali women thread through the crowd alongside plump-thighed girls in short skirts. 

One restaurant has chicken wire tacked over its windows to keep out marauding pigeons. Two diners stare out from behind the mesh like inmates of some brutal third-world prison. 

The back alleys are full of graffitti and dilapidated signs

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THE BLACK DOG. AND THE BLACK CAT.

12/2/2013

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No one can see the Black Dog except you. Depression and anxiety are like that . Invisible. Which is why it feels so lonely. If you have a cough or a limp, someone will notice and commiserate . But if you are depressed - and you’re not sitting in a corner sucking your thumb or plucking the fluff off your jumper - no one notices. 
If you are anxious you can look pretty normal - unless you've staggered into A & E with full-blown symptoms of a heart attack. 
PictureImage from I Had a Black Dog by Matthew Johnstone
 I've been living with two unpleasant animals this week. In fact I've been sharing a kennel with them and having rather a bad time of it. 
The Black Dog, which has been nipping at my heels for quite a while, suddenly took me in his jaws and dragged me into his kennel. It’s a great slavering lunk of a thing, all drool and droopy blood-shot eyes. His kennel is full of half-gnawed bones and is very dark: the dog’s lugubrious bulk blocks any light that might otherwise shine in through the door.   
And if that’s not enough, there’s a Black Cat in here too. It’s a skinny, malevolent-looking creature and it has insinuated itself around my neck, resting its desiccated muzzle with the yellow eyes on one of my shoulders, and dangling its paws and tail over the other. 
My grandmother had a fox-fur stole just like it, but at least it was dead. This cat is very much alive. It emits a constant sinister purr and sheds so much fur it’s difficult to breathe. No one can see the Dog or the Cat except me.


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    THE GREY URBANIST
    Ro Cambridge, is a freelance writer, 
    arts worker & columnist Here she reports on the oddities & serendipities of  urban life.  She roams Nelson city , NZ 
    with a tan & white Jack Russell. (Her original canine side-kick, Pete, who features in many of these posts died in 2015.

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