An urban N.Z. baby-boomer and a Jack Russell terrier
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IN PRAISE OF MEN

18/6/2013

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There have been men at work everywhere this week. On frigid mornings, on wet and miserable days, they’ve been out there, in hi-viz jackets and hard hats, shifting mounds of sodden earth with diggers and bulldozers, clambering into water-filled trenches, setting up road cones and directing traffic to keep the rest of us safe.
PictureMud-spattered road worker in Auckland
I have just helped friends move house. The fact that they were only shifting to the house next door only seemed to make the task more difficult. There was no loading of household goods onto a truck and simply driving them to the new house. Instead, everything had to be moved by hand up the road and pathway to their new home. 

We women worked, ferrying the lighter items - chairs, pictures, domestic appliances, mats, and books - while the men portered the heavy and awkward items. 

Most remarkably, they moved a beautiful but hulking Indian cabinet over two metres high. It took the combined strength, ingenuity, and teamwork of four of them to coax and nudge and drag the thing through one doorway, down a set of steps, up the road for a hundred metres, then up another set of steps and through two more doorways before restoring it to an upright position in its new home. 


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FOUNDER'S BOOK FAIR 2013 - THE PILGRIMMAGE

4/6/2013

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Each year thousands of pilgrims, or “People of the Book” as they are known, join the pilgrimage to  place called Founders Park,  where under the welcoming arms of a giant windmill, they come in search of books, relics of an almost bygone age. Some come hoping to find enlightenment, succour, and revelation within the relics. Others wish merely for some hints on growing roses or the autograph of an All Black scribbled on a flyleaf. 
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Nelson’s famous annual pilgrimage has begun. Every year, during the cold, bitter days which mark the birth of Queen Elizabeth II of England, thousands of pilgrims, young and old, abandon the comfort of home and hearth to walk the Peregrinatio Ad Libros.  

Clad simply and modestly in warm jackets, woolly hats, and sturdy footwear they come from all points of the compass, holding in gloved hands the empty bag which is the symbol of the pilgrimage. The Peregrinatio Ad Libros, a sort of Antipodean Camino Way, dates from the last quarter of the 20th century, a time when e-books and digital content were completely unknown. Words then, were printed on sheets of paper which were bound together to make “books” and “magazine” and “newspapers”. 


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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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