Up Front: Feeling Like Death
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Yay Emma, well done on the Metro thing!
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I've just started taking "Tru2U Tart Cherry Juice" which a friend who was imsomniac rates very well - calls it the sleepy juice. It has natural melatonin in it, which sounds like it may be of help to you. Take a glass before bedtime of juice (before brushing your teeth - it is, as labelled quite tart). Can be bought in concentrate form online from a Chirstchurch outfit via their website.
I grew up near Waikumete and like the old cemeteries for the sketching potential too - usually no-one around and some neat combinations of forms and lighting and overgrown wilderness. Shame you have to watch out for the needles these days.
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Dr Anna Wirz-Justice was a kiwi girl (Christchurch?) and she went on to study Seasonal Affective Disorder.
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is that a torch in your trousers?
it can now be revealed that shining light on "the-place-with-no-name" (the back of the knee) does not adjust mammalian circadian clocksbut hearing words like this
(just on the RNZ news):
"a solar powered space yacht
has just set sail for Venus"
sure does spark up the spirit! -
3410,
"the-place-with-no-name"??
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Popliteal Fossa!
Nooooo.... and the bums don't follow ya round the room either I suppose - I'll never trust Peter Cook & Dudley Moore again...
Sadly all I know comes from either them or Carl Barks Disney comics and Tintin... -
It has natural melatonin in it, which sounds like it may be of help to you.
Hey Hannah. For a while I was taking a melatonin supplement to deal with my Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, and it was really helpful - with mood too, because I woke up feeling awake.
And thank you all for your kind wishes re: the new gig. I am feeling kind of daunted.
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Feel jaunted & vaunted-
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Not too haunted... metro goes up a serious notch, IMHO. Congratulations!
Cemeteries: very life-affirming. The Akaroa cemetary is lovely on a summer's evening. Some of the other Peninsula cemeteries are lovely too: St Cuthbert's in Ohinetahi; the little cemetery by the wee stone church up Kaituna valley. None of these have the sheer vastness and delapidated grandeur of Linwood, though.
When I was about 11 we spent a year in Salem, Connecticut (about 42 degrees N to Christchurch's 42 S :). There was a walk we sometimes took: down a lane, alonside a stone wall; over a stile, and then down a path through a forest. Coming out of the trees, there was a huge field of tall, waving grass, burnt brown in the sun, and emerging from this, a pair of stone lions.
Beyond the lions was, I would swear, a mythical graveyard. It was very old, very big, quite abandoned. There were no houses or church nearby, just another crumbling stone wall, and more forest.
If you left from that direction, you emerged from the forest to find some cottages along a riverbank. The geography was impossible, somehow- the river twisted and turned; the paths through the woods entered my dreams, and became entangled in turn.
I looked for it just recently, on google earth. It's still there- a field laid out in the middle of woods, the geography laid out flat and bare. But the satellite was not able to make sense of my memories- how did we get there; where did we come out?
Life has too few of such mysteries, I now feel. -
Popliteal Fossa!
The very spot where the hapless rugby-playing John Bull, of Will Self's Bull: A Farce, mysteriously develops a vagina, which excites the passions of the doctor from whom he seeks help.
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Joe, of course I then misread your location line as "Down in the barn, behind my knees".
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the winter days are brutally shorter in Christchurch than Ithaca.
So you can multiply your Ithaca SAD by about 102 per cent to reach how lousy poor Emma is feeling...
Ouch. That is indeed brutal. (Also, dude: epic retroactive fail on persuading us that it would have been a good idea to move back to Chch, had that particular situation panned out! ).
Perversely, or is it just that youth offers some inoculation against such things (or is it just that I was coming from damp drizzly grizzly Auckland), I recall my Chch winters as exhilarating. The sky was enormous and mostly blue, and the air was dry and thus, miraculously, so was I. And the sublime poisonous miasma of woodsmoke in the air, lending the whole city the feel of a Victorian gentleman's club... Like I said, perverse.
I wish I could send you all some of our sunshine today, so unbelievably welcome after 6 months of grey New England winter.
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Belatedly: Emma, you magnificent badass!
I am pro-cemetery. One of my favourites contains the remains of a few relatives and is here. Windy and gorgeous (if the sun's out).
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I recall my Chch winters as exhilarating. The sky was enormous and mostly blue, and the air was dry and thus, miraculously, so was I.
And that's how it should be, how it is in my mind when I think about Canterbury winters, and surely how it usually is. Cold, yes, but sharply, almost painfully clear. And that's fine, I don't mind the kind of bright cold you can feel on your eyeballs. This year we haven't even had a frost yet, and the cold is the kind I associate with further south: grey and dripping and dismal.
I'll admit to a perverse fondness for Christchurch's orange-skied chewy winter nights, too.
One of my favourites contains the remains of a few relatives and is here. Windy and gorgeous (if the sun's out).
Hey, I've been there! (My ex-MIL is a Southland Girl.)
Rob? Your comment is pure magic, it sounds wonderful.
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+1 on the congratulations, Emma.
And, in your piece, I loved this:
On a rise (possibly a lesson learned about dead bodies and high water tables from the Barbadoes St cemetery), it's just huge crumbling gothic headstones to the horizon in every direction. Marble columns thicker than my thighs lie on the ground snapped clear in half. Plinths on alarming leans show why the headstones have toppled and smashed as the ground has subsided. Time is erasing expensively-engraved Biblical sentiment. On a nasty grey Christchurch nearly-winter's day, it's the perfect place to be. The total absence of moody art photographers and black-draped teenage girls was kind of surprising.
I'd had a minor adjustment to smoke before i read it last night and it really touched me. I tried responding then, but for some reason couldn't get teh cut&paste to work for the quote.
I don't seem to have the same connection with the past - no idea where other than immediate forebears have had their ashes scattered or bodies interred, and no real itch to find out.
Have a pleasant memory of sharing a joint in the cemetary in Union St, Aberdeen but that's about it for me & graveyards. -
Tomb it may concern...
When I was about 11 we spent a year in Salem, Connecticut (about 42 degrees N to Christchurch's 42 S :). There was a walk we sometimes took: down a lane, alonside a stone wall; over a stile, and then down a path through a forest. Coming out of the trees, there was a huge field of tall, waving grass, burnt brown in the sun, and emerging from this, a pair of stone lions.
Beyond the lions was, I would swear, a mythical graveyard. It was very old, very big, quite abandoned. There were no houses or church nearby, just another crumbling stone wall, and more forest.
If you left from that direction, you emerged from the forest to find some cottages along a riverbank. The geography was impossible, somehow- the river twisted and turned; the paths through the woods entered my dreams, and became entangled in turn.Rob, as Thomas Gray* said"
"Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep."Salem Connecticut, home to Hiram Bingham III
rediscoverer of Machu Picchu...
and this sorta cottage?sounds like H. P. Lovecraft territory...
or Emily Dickinson...
but wrong Salem/wrong State...
magickal anyway - don't ever lose it
maybe we need another Google Earth overlay
- Gogol Earth so we can perceive the
fantastical that coexists...*Gray's "Elegy written in a country church-yard" would never have happened if he had suffered
from coimetrophobia -
another Google Earth overlay
- Gogol Earth so we can perceive the
fantastical that coexists...Or we could call it Orbis Tertius :)
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Rob, as Thomas Gray* said"
"Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep."A passing similarity there to Smif-n-Wessun's
Bucktown :Another murderer, just another prankster
Rude boy dead 'cause he thought he was a gangsta
Tried ta live da life of a hood from the streets
Test da wrong dread, now I'm in eternal sleep -
Rob, I'm really tempted to go and see if I can find your mythical cemetery in person. But virtually speaking, do you think it might be this one?
Also, am wondering what took you to Salem CT... it's an out-of-the-way sort of place. The sort of place where pirates hide treasure:
Captain Kidd was believed to have buried treasure in the woods of Salem.
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Entering this graveyard in Deiniolen where I used to live was in its own way like confronting war graves, row upon row of grey slate faces sacrificed in the battle for a living. It says a lot about the present state of the slate mines in the region that there appears to be one or two marble headstones appearing now.
When I moved to Sheffield one of my guilty pleasures was to ride through the old general cemetery on my way to and from work. Beauty, decay and neglect it is one of life’s great installations. A real winter Sunday place, with all the relief that comes with it.
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I don't seem to have the same connection with the past - no idea where other than immediate forebears have had their ashes scattered or bodies interred, and no real itch to find out.
Oddly, I was born hundreds of miles from my family's traditional territory, but since then our habitual wanderings after jobs and education and houses have brought me to a point where I now live three blocks from the house where my great-grandfather lived 160 years ago, which is now the Holy Smoke restaurant in Ferry Road. I suppose because of the tendency to heritage-wank in Chch I've been quite resistent to the attraction of that past, but it does exist, it's weird being able to look at that building and picture Fred living there as a young man, when the road was dirt and all about the importance of the actual ferry.
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Oddly, I was born hundreds of miles from my family's traditional territory, but since then our habitual wanderings after jobs and education and houses have brought me to a point where I now live three blocks from the house where my great-grandfather lived 160 years ago . . .
That's my story too, pretty much. Not native to these parts, but Bromley, Linwood & Ruru cemeteries are riddled with my forebears. My great-great-granny lived in Ferry Road (not at the Holy Smoke address), and married her second husband in a civil ceremony in the front parlour in 1862. Until a couple I years ago I had no idea who fitted where, and didn't care. Now I do.
If you're ever possessed by a hankering to find these things out, best to do it while those who recall the vital clues are still on deck. There are a heap of things I now wish I knew that are lost under the sandy soil of east Chch.
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I do a bit of cemetery tourism. An aim of my OE was to see Marx's grave in London's Highgate Cemetery. I don't pass by Waimate without dropping by to say hello to Norm Kirk, and my mother's family plot near by. Ancestor Richard Davis has a handsome old grave in Waimate North. I'm not a genealogist, but that's a group that understands the fascination of cemeteries.
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My great-great-granny lived in Ferry Road (not at the Holy Smoke address), and married her second husband in a civil ceremony in the front parlour in 1862.
She wasn't Caroline Webb née Adams, was she? Because that would be weird.
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