Dialogue: Transport of delight pushes back the curtains of routine

It's a Morris 1100 which is warranted and registered but it struggles up hills. The owners never lock it, not because it is too bad a car for anyone to bother to steal, but because it is too strange. Its bodywork is encrusted with plastic toys.

On the bonnet stand several ponies, a shark and a miniature Prince Charles in a bed of silver shells. The radiator grill is a gallery of masks. The roof's a forest of Elvis Presleys. The back window holds a beach scene of smurfs and barbie dolls. In the boot stands a silver shoe from which an alien kiwi peeps out at an army of toy soldiers. The gearstick is a plastic duck.

The kids from Hornby High School, in Christchurch, who decorated the car have likened it to a clown's head, because when you are inside it everyone stares, not at you but at the thing you are in. From the inside you cannot see what they are seeing. Like a clown you see only an abundance of smiles.

Children straightaway laugh and point. If the car is going slowly, they run beside it. Tourists dive for their cameras as if only a photograph could validate so strange a sight. A man I took to be Japanese ran after us along Colombo St, his video camera to his eye, catching up with us at three consecutive sets of traffic lights. We waved to him but he did not wave back.

A vast Pacific Island youth talking on a cellphone bellowed, "Oh my God," and ran out into the road with his friends to laugh and stare.

The middle-aged have varied reactions. Some glance up, show no reaction, walk on, then have to turn despite themselves and look again. And when they look, they smile.

I have never known anything that gave such spontaneous pleasure. When we parked in Cathedral Square, a crowd gathered, led by the children. They felt drawn by the car and they felt no barrier to being drawn. They touched the car, tugging lightly at the ornaments, smiling.

The adults stood further off, but still engaged, intrigued, unselfconsciously staring, circling. A tall man with bare feet and an armful of library books grinned as widely as a man can grin, announced that this was the coolest thing he'd ever seen, then told me all about his plans to build a car with a clockwork motor. With modern materials, he said, it would do 80 km/h and would need winding only once a day. A crippled infant in a wheelchair gurgled with delight. And so did her mother.

All this on a workaday Tuesday, a nondescript mid-afternoon, and all of it caused by a car. Cars are humdrum, efficient and square but here was one built out of play. And that sense of the possibilities of play pushed back the curtains of routine. It rinsed the eyes and startled the minds of the people who saw it and they felt happy. Happy with surprise. Happy with invention. Only a car festooned with junk, but it brought out the sweetest in people, teased up the corners of mouths and made the world better, better than when Rob Waddell won gold, or when Labour won the election, or when anyone won Lotto.

Everywhere we went the reaction was the same. Astonishment followed by genial delight. Just as when you twitch a string a cat cannot resist the urge to pounce, so when they saw this car people could not suppress the surge of pleasure.

Is the car art? The question means nothing, but certainly the car does what art is supposed to do. It tickles the fancy and widens the world. It opens the shutters and lets in the sun. And for each of the people who saw the car today, those who stood on the corner of the street to gawp or those who carried on walking as they stared then pulled up by some sort of intuition just before they hit a lamppost, or those who found themselves standing beside the car and talking to someone they shared a city with but had never met before, or those who stopped and forgot for the moment an urgent business errand, or those who merely smiled and waved, this car did more, I suspect, than any canvas in any art gallery has done.

I saw only one man who resented it. He wore rollerblades and carried ski sticks and doubtless saw himself as an eccentric street performer in the epic of his own mind. He scowled because he did not like to be upstaged by a crazy car assembled by a bunch of children broadcasting pleasure.