Joanne McNeill: Storm brought us back to the basics

The storm gave us all a bit of cabin fever.

Collections - whether of coins, stamps, Japanese fans or in a friend's case square bread-and-butter plates wallpapering an entire room - are marvellous because of the infinite variety possible within strict parameters.

I collect Jokers from card packs. The first one - the Joker carrying a cartoon bomb with a lighted fuse - turned up under the cell mattress on the only night (in the distant past) I spent locked up (long story spared). It was the sole visual/intellectual solace in that barren scary space besides the heartbreaking graffiti.

The Joker seemed ruefully apt in the circumstances. After debating whether to leave it for the next miserable prisoner, I decided it was meant for me and took it as a souvenir.

Now the Joker collection numbers in the hundreds, within which sub-categories can identified. For instance musicians, trick cyclists, jugglers, animals and downright idiots feature prominently. Their uniform size, shape and function makes laying the cards out in orderly groups very satisfying - each a unique image yet contained within a standard form.

The Great Plate Exhibition, currently at the Yvonne Rust Gallery at Whangarei's Arts Quarry, does a similar thing.

The show is an annual fundraiser in which the Quarry commissions a bulk order of plates from veteran Maungakaramea potter David Huffman, one of the few potters still throwing and firing clay since cheap imported domestic ware all but killed the New Zealand studio pottery movement which sparked the Quarry's early enterprises. The unadorned plates are then farmed out to artists in the Quarry community with which to have their wicked artistic ways.

It makes for a great display on the gallery walls because the elegant uniformity of the basic plates holds the individually inventive decorators' diverse aesthetics together in the room.

Surprisingly, a big crowd turned out for the show's opening last week part way through the terrible nameless storm.

My theory is they were stir crazy, driven out by cabin fever due to huddling indoors in power cuts hoping windows and roofs held fast through fierce battering by epic winds and biblical rain.

For a long, hard, days-long, sleepless night, Tawhirimatea mounted an operatic performance of virtuoso roaring overhead.

It trumped every named storm for years in sustained intensity and yet went incognito.

It deserves a name.

Cyclone Django - after the vessel whose crew was valiantly rescued in high seas by a navy swimmer would work. It was great to see one of our military forces deployed in a local emergency. More use could be made of our well-equipped and trained, taxpayer-funded armed forces for civil defence and disaster relief in locally embattled communities such as Moerewa. Better that than playing global war games.

Hurricane Kayak (palindromes are always welcome) - for the atavistic kayaker rescued after spending months attempting to row a stretch of water which can be crossed in a couple of hours by plane - would work too because it brought us all back to basics.

Technically though, it was neither cyclone nor hurricane (names for the same things in different locations), merely an anonymous sub-tropical low which no one wanted to collect.