An urban N.Z. baby-boomer and a Jack Russell terrier
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A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

29/11/2019

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When insomnia strikes, I listen to audio-books, avoiding thrillers which, if they do induce sleep, also tend to induce nightmares.

If you are looking for audiobooks to fall asleep to, you can’t do better than listen to stories written and read by Garrison Keillor about his (fictional) hometown of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota where nothing overtly dramatic ever happens.

Keillor, who has an unhurried delivery, begins and ends his stories with phrases which I’m now so familiar with I could … well … recite them in my sleep. “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown” he says as begins another story about decent and hard-working folk and of small-town happenings which are both funny and full of pathos. “That’s all the news from my home town” he intones at the close of each tale, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." 

Actually, the citizens of Lake Wobegon are lugubrious folks of Norwegian extraction and Lutheran beliefs who are suspicious of happiness and overt expressions of emotion. Minnesota’s long, harsh winters only exacerbates this disinclination to light-heartedness: they gather for coffee and delicious homemade rhubarb pie in the town’s Chatterbox Cafe but they definitely don’t chatter.   

I thought of Lake Wobegon and the Chatterbox Cafe last week as I sat in a Westport cafe with a friend after a couple of days staying at a bach near Punakaiki, with a roaring fire and a view of the sea crashing spectacularly below. 


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IN SEARCH OF THE AUTHENTIC TRAVEL EXPERIENCE

15/12/2014

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The National Cafe (est. 1928) was a dimly-lit narrow room with exhausted red carpeting, Formica tables and vinyl-upholstered chrome-legged chairs. A row of cylindrical glass lampshades dangled from the high ceiling, vinegar and Worcester sauce bottles stood in cruet sets on each table. The waiter was 89 years old. The menu offered steak and chips, egg and chips, sausages and chips, fish and chips and baked beans on toast. I ordered steak and chips.  
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Last week I spent time in Napier and Hastings, the places where I grew up. My mother is buried in Hastings; I am now exactly the same age as she was when she died, and so it was something of a pilgrimage. I had not anticipated sharing my journey into the past with thousands of others. 

In Napier, on the first day of my visit, 2000 passengers from the cruise ship “Dawn Princess” garbed in cruise-wear and dangling cameras wandered down the main street, or succumbed to the blandishments of touts dressed in striped blazers and boaters keen to sell them “an authentic Art Deco experience”. This seemed mostly to involve rides in open-top vintage cars or traipsing behind a tour guide like a gaggle of school children on a not very interesting field trip. 


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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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