Up Front by Emma Hart

The stretch of State Highway One between Christchurch and Timaru is the back-bone of my childhood. Canterbury is my land, it's how a landscape should be. That's where I feel I stand strong, with the sun on my face, the sea on my right hand, and the mountains on my left. It's where my mother was born, and her father. In the hundred and fifty years my family have been living on these plains, they've somehow seeped into our ancestral bones.

Theres even a road named after our family. Rather metaphorically, it heads arrow-straight for the Temuka river, but can never quite be arsed getting there. My grandfather was somewhere up that road, about the same age as my son is now, the day Richard Pearse flew. He missed it, of course, but he might have been there, had everyone not thought the guy was crazy.

Of course it's boring country. It's dead flat, and that stretch of SH1 is so straight the biggest hazard is falling asleep and ploughing into an irrigation ditch. At this time of year, a scattering of flower- and tinsel-bedecked crosses is a better reminder of that than the brief stretch of rumble strip south of Dunsandel. Every year we play Cops vs Morons. The Morons usually win.

We've driven it several times a year since I was four, and yet when I picture it in my head, it's always summer. There's heat haze on the road, sere umber paddocks full of panting sheep, and indigo mountains velvet with distance. All the memories are of summer: family picnics at Peel Forest, night skinny-dipping behind the Pareora dam, picking strawberries in my good black dress after my uncle's funeral.

Many years ago, I took a trip with my then-mother-in-law from Invercargill to Queenstown. We'd driven for about an hour before I worked out why I felt so horribly claustrophobic. Everywhere was green: there were too many hills and way too many sheep in those paddocks. I had no line of sight, no obvious escape route. No sea on my right, no mountains on my left. I couldn't breathe.

Driving that backbone road through Canterbury this Christmas has made me melancholy. It's as if someone has photoshopped my land; colour-replaced my EE9A49 with 228B22, then cut and pasted cows all over my childhood. It doesn't look like home any more, and it smells different – obviously, given all the cows. There does seem to be more water in those braided rivers, but we won't be swimming in it.

My grandparents' old house at Orari is still standing. The big macrocarpa tree is still there, though the swing is long gone. My Nanna's famous hyacinth garden now grows the mouldering corpses of unloved cars. They've changed the Orari bridge since I was a kid, so the view of the spot where my great-uncle shot himself is different now.

Some things do stay the same. Those poplars north of the first Rangitata bridge are still there, the ones my Nanna told me Grandad planted. I still can't hold my breath all the way across the Rakaia bridge. (This is an astonishingly simple way to get twenty seconds blessed peace when travelling with children. It might also have explained my once-excellent lung capacity.)

We took the kids to swim at Maori Park Pool, where I used to swim as a teenager. It's an open-air pool where parents can lounge on the grass while, say, their daughter does lap-circuits of the hydro-slide and diving pool. It hadn't changed at all. I mentioned this to my brother, who said it's been declared uneconomic. It'll be roofed over, paved, and the pool at the other end of town (already closed in and paved) is being done away with.

My brother and his wife hosted Christmas dinner in excellent spirits. Their new neighbours are much quieter to live with than the old one, who moved on shortly after stabbing his girlfriend in the leg with a screwdriver. From their front porch you can see the looming bulk of the house we lived in when we first moved to Timaru. Looking at it still makes me sick. I know it's not a widely-held view, but Christchurch makes me feel safe.

Those cousins we used to Sunday-drive all over the plains to visit are all gone now. My mother is the last of her generation. This Christmas, I sat down with her and we went through old photos. So many faded black and white stories, tinged with sadness and old memory. A ridiculous number of our stories involve pointless moral cruelty, which might explain some things.

My daughter will remember this road just like I do, driven every summer of her life. But she'll never have to write a letter to her brother apologising for having sex, and she'll never be disowned by her family for marrying one of those damned Catholics. I can live with a little change.

Tomorrow I'm off down to my mother's, and I'll be AFK for a solid week. I'm supposed to be making chocolates and taking the kids swimming today, but before I do that, I thought I'd leave some presents for my other, more PA, family.

My plumber seemed particularly impressed by this documentary on the history of pornography from ABC radio. (I believe the show is always called Rear Vision, no matter what the subject matter.) I was listening to this loudly enough that I could potter about in the kitchen while it was on when said tradesman arrived, and his facial expression was priceless. It discusses changes in attitude to pornography over the centuries, and the relatively recent emergence of censorship to protect the proles:

The assumption always was that if you were well-educated, if you were upper class, you could consume erotica, consume pornography, with no ill effects, and there's a sort of built-in prejudice against what we assume to be sort of un-educated minds… The real problem was that what he [Anthony Comstock] called immature minds might stumble across material like this… the minds of children, the minds of immigrants… and women, who were thought to be weaker, so that they had to be protected.

Comstock was a lovely man, who would no doubt be delighted to discover the existence of the erotic documentary film company named after him. Their <a href="http://shop.comstockfilms.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=11&products_id=14
" target="_blank">Bill and Desiree would be my perfect gift for the Person Who Knows Everything. (These links don’t contain explicit material, but nonetheless may not make it through your work filter.)

Speaking of filters, our own branch of Watchdog has entered the debate across the Tasman in an attempt to ground the discussion in reality and counter the irrational fear-mongering:

The vendor supplying internet filtering software to the NZ Department of Internal Affairs says Australian ISPs and civil liberties lobbies are overstating the likely impact of filtering on the efficiency of website access

Auckland’s Watchdog International is working with some of the Australian ISPs who have applied to participate in the trial.

A modern filter need have no detectable effect on the passage of ordinary traffic, says Watchdog managing director Peter Mancer.

Mancer goes on to discuss at some length how easily their filtering technology operates without causing noticeable degradation – and if you’re a New Zealand TelstraClear customer you'd feel compelled to agree, because that filter is already running on your connection.

Still, it's odd he should feel okay to say the effect is undetectable, because that's not what happened in the trials. This Australian systems engineer has his doubts:

It may surprise you to read that Peter Mancer hasn't actually discovered a perpetual motion machine, an unlimited source of free clean energy or an Internet filter which has no performance impact whatsoever.

The Systems Administrators Guild of Australia (Guild? Srsly? Has somebody been playing a bit much WoW?) have their doubts too:

An application of Bayes' Theorem, shows that even for the most generous interpretation of the filters' accuracy, the chance of a randomly selected page actually containing unwanted material when it is blocked is only 55%

Anyway, enough of that. At Christmas, my thoughts always turn to those poor bastards working in the service industry, dealing with the stressed and short-tempered all day. If that's ever been you, you might appreciate my new favourite site, Not Always Right. Here's one of my personal favourites.

So for those of you who'll still be net-enabled this Christmas, what are your favourite sites for roaming around when the shopping and the eating get too much?

It seems timely to make a confession, one that's no doubt going to provide hours of interesting conversation at our family Christmas. Mum, you owe the Ministry of Education thousands of dollars. I was a chronic bunker.

It all started when I was nine. There was something – ironically I can't now remember what – that I didn't want to do at school. Eventually it occurred to me that if I wasn't there, I wouldn't have to do it. Shaking with apprehension, I took my first trembling steps off the school grounds, high-tailing it all the way to the empty fields near my mother's house. There I made grass huts in the sun until the time came for me to appear at home.

I got clean away with it. I'm sure this was because I was so quiet and well-behaved that nobody noticed I wasn't there. From then until about fifth form, I successfully led a double life. From my teachers' point of view, I was a sensible, smart, obedient kid who tested well. In my own special reality, I was an Evil Mastermind, manipulating stupid adults with my Jedi Mind Tricks and gaming the system like a pro.

Despite not being there a lot, I was still doing well in school. Mostly I hung out at home when I bunked, my mother being a good solo parent and working. I never committed a crime while I was supposed to be at school. (I had to have a good long think about this, but the only criminal acts I can remember carrying out during daylight hours have 'under-age' in front of them, so clearly don't count.) Once I took the day off school to make my mother a birthday cake, something she still remembers with exasperated fondness. ("No, I went to school, really. Pixies did it.")

It wasn't even that my school experience was particularly Haywoodian. It wasn't that school was so easy that it bored me. It did bore me, but I was much more likely to skip subjects I was bad at, like almost all of sixth form physics. I was there for every biology class – tricky, given physics and biology were consecutive and adjacent, but I was an Evil Mastermind. (I was such an Evil Mastermind that a simple bag search would often have turned up vodka, cigarettes and condoms. But this is not the contraband you're looking for.)

No, what disengaged me from school in the end was its inability to treat me as a person. The system was massively unjust, where you could be suspended on someone's word, and have no opportunity to defend yourself. The fact that I was guilty a lot of the time was largely irrelevant. I could bluff them out simply because they knew they had no proof.

Finally, my form teacher had some kind of conniption fit. I was absent. She phoned my house, but couldn't get an answer. She started dragging my friends out of class and interrogating them as to my whereabouts. "I know she's bunking", she said, several times.

Bit of a shitter, wasn't it Janet, that I turned out to have glandular fever. And then my mother went and publicly pwned you at Parent-Teacher Evening and said she wouldn't be writing any more absence notes, on the grounds that I was old enough to be working and wouldn't have to bring Notes From My Mum if I took a sick day.

I think Janet had some issues with me. She was HOD English, and I was gifted, lazy and insolent. I vividly remember the comment she put on my sixth form report that finally drove me over the edge:

I would like to see her develop her skills in original writing

Really? Really? My English teacher wants me to have some way to develop my writing? Oh, if only she had some ability to provide it herself. If only there was something she could have done. When I thought about it, the last time we'd been asked to do any free creative writing in school was a poem in fourth form.

There's no testing in fourth form.

I'm sure some of you have noticed the dishonesty in my opening paragraph. My mother was never fined for my truancy. Kids like me aren't the focus. Our chronic truancy is okay: we still pass the tests. It's almost as if it's not really attendance that’s the problem.

Now I'm a mother, with two school-aged children. My son loves school. He does well academically, sportingly and socially. He’s never skipped a day in his life. I do wonder if there’s something wrong with him…

It's not that I hate Christmas. I have no Christmas-related traumas; it doesn't often drive me to irrational atheistic ranting. It's just that Christmas can be trying. You can’'t hate your three year old no matter how much she whines and screams: she's just trying.

This year I've got Christmas down. I've finally discovered the perfect mental attitude that makes the trials of the Christmas lead-up as unthreatening as a fat labrador on a sunny doormat. This year, I'm playing Christmas as an RPG.

The first couple of levels were easy. The missions were things like 'go to thinkgeek.com and empty out your paypal account'. Pretty basic, and well worth chucking a few points into 'diminish shipping charges' and 'resist cuteness of cartoon monkey'.

You can tell when the learning curve starts to get a bit steeper though: the game starts playing Christmas music at you. I’ve been through all the menus and I can't find any way to turn it off. My character's pretty cute in a librarian sort of way and she has high resistance to Queuing and Crowds, but she seems particularly vulnerable to the effects of Mall Christmas Music. Eventually her mana decreases to the point where she can't even cast 'reveal original price tag', let alone 'detect perfect present for thirteen year old boy' and I have to pull her out and retreat to the Inn.

Knowing how close we were getting to the dreaded End of Year Function Run, I decided to do some serious grinding this weekend. An hour of mindless hack-and-slash Christmas card writing and I felt warmed up enough to have a go at the Make the Christmas Cake mission. This is a pretty strenuous work-out, but I was lucky enough to be able to suck in a lower-level character who was prepared to do a lot of the grunt-work for her share of the XP. We were pretty close to scoring a Perfect on that until we accidentally put the baking soda in with the orange juice instead of the water. I think that was an Arcane Ooze we constructed.

I'm going to have to watch that lower-level character: she's levelling up fast than I am these days. And you never, never turn your back on a Chaotic Neutral Rogue. She gave lessons on Christmas Tree Angel Making yesterday without once uttering the phrase 'you’re such a n00b, Dad'. She's peacefully accepted that we won't be running the Santa Claus module this year. Something's up.

Tomorrow I'm going to buckle down and do the first of the really tough missions: Christmas Post Office. I know this post office; so fiendishly poorly designed and under-staffed that it has queues out the door on a normal day. I'll be stocking up on Mana Potions, because I just know that when I finally battle my way through the doors, I'll be hit by the deceptively gentle strains of a +20 Mistletoe and Wine.

The End of Year Assembly mission looks like it'll be easier in this year's version than last: the new Principal is about the same level but missing the old End of Level Monster’s nasty 'overt religiosity' attack. That used to get right through the gap in my character's armour between the bottom of her steel bikini and the top of her thigh boots.

Then it's on to the heavy Trip Home for Family Christmas mission, fighting my way through hordes of Stoned Brothers to face the insanely powerful Queen Guilt Monster in the Kitchen of Doom. It's a pretty safe bet that the other members of my party are going to chicken out of that one and decide they pressingly need to level up in Pea Shelling. Bastards.

Still, I'm dragging them with me for the Bonus Boxing Day Sale level, because I know they want a share of the reward. The EA Games Swirling Vortex Crowd monster drops the best stuff.

There's always a period of let-down when you finish a big game like Christmas, where you wander around the house trying to work out what to do with yourself. Not this year, though: I'm going to kick Christmas's butt so hard that we unlock the New Year Expansion. I think I'm going to have to go dual class for that one.

Just a reminder that this Thursday is Christchurch's first Drinking Liberally: 6pm at Warner's, Guest Speaker Andrew Little of the EPMU. Get along if you can - it'd be pretty awful if we got out-Liberal-ed by Palmerston North. I'm intending to be there, depending on how much damage I take at my daughter's Kapa Haka performance.

I don't remember ever asking how my parents met. Personal questions were always discreetly discouraged, particularly ones involving my father. Maybe that's why I hadn't thought about what to say before my own daughter asked me that particular question.

And how to answer? "Well, honey, it was a couple of months before I was due to get married so that my boyfriend could get a student allowance, and Richard – you know, grown-up Richard – he brought home this friend. Who looked like Michael Praed. Let’s sit down with a Google Image Search so you understand the importance of that…"

I settled for 'we met at university', because she was still a bit young for the full explanation. Information can do strange things in children's minds. It breaks into chunks and randomly attaches to chunks of other, unrelated information. When she was planning her future family she said, "I’ll need a boy. I’ll probably get one of those at university". To which I could only reply, "Yeah, probably. They leave them lying round all over the place there". (I'm her mother: I'm going to cop the blame regardless. I may as well have some fun with it.)

When they're older, though, I'm going to have to find a way to tell them. It's a chunk of family history that shouldn't just disappear. Hopefully, the words to explain how much their parents love each other, how passion doesn't always turn up in sweet romantic circumstances that are easy for other people to identify with, will drop magically from the sky when I need them.

It was never supposed to work. I was faithless, he was inexpressive, we had nothing in common once we got out of bed and you can only avoid doing that for a couple of years. It was hopeless, impractical, stupid, and people whose judgement I trusted tried to talk me out of it.

Which I guess explains the surreal feeling I get today, sitting at my keyboard having accidentally left my rings in Featherston, knowing that we've been together for fifteen pretty much effortless years. The Michael Praed hair is long gone, but that selfless faith that's kept him with me through my long illness, the difficulties with our daughter, and my intrinsic unbearableness is still going strong.

I can't even properly explain what this is the anniversary of. The day I knew, I guess, that I wasn't just going to be walking away from this, that my life was going to change forever.

There's never been much fluffy romance. Our first date was about four months into our relationship, and we went to see Once Were Warriors. It was in a similar vein that, three years ago today, we snuck off without telling anyone, went down to the registrar's office, and got civilly unified. We had to wait while they rustled up some staff to be our witnesses, then sit with complete strangers until the celebrant was free. Because we hadn't told my mother, I wore my hair down, my feet bare, and my pentacle round my neck. There were no little girls sprinkling rose petals before me, no fussing over floral baskets, no bickering, and no brothers taking drunken relatives into town and losing them. Afterwards, we picked the kids up from school, went home, and had a normal day.

Our relationship has included a few incidents I can't explain, the sort of stories I wouldn't believe if I heard them from other people. We don't talk about it. We know, and that's enough. We don't need to say what we'd do for each other, what we'd sacrifice, because we've already done it.

Words may not be necessary, but words are all I'm good at. Happy Civil Universary, darling. I love you.

With my normal lightning response, I've done something about this request, and set up a Public Address group at Shelfari. This'll allow us to compare notes on books, and look at what other people in the group are reading and say 'dude, wtf?'. You can sign up direct on the site, or hit reply here, and I’ll email you an invite. This should in no way imply that we won't still be talking about books here.