KEY POINTS:
Are you going away?" It's a long weekend and I am reminded of my limitations every time that question finds its way into my daily exchanges while I'm buying vegetables or pizza, or shoes on Ponsonby Rd.
It's always a casual query, usually essayed by people who don't necessarily care what I'm up to on a bank holiday, or any other day for that matter, but it's asked with regularity and my answer always disappoints me. Because I am never going away.
I don't go anywhere over the holidays. Any holidays. While the rest of New Zealand packs up the house and embarks merrily on jaunts to Golden Bay, or Russell or Coromandel, I always stay boringly, firmly, put.
It's always been thus. When I moved here initially five years ago, the city was enough of a novelty in itself to keep me in the one place. A pretty encampment, built on hills sloping down to the sea, what wasn't to like?
Auckland made me want to ride a bicycle, seek out every picturesque nook and cranny. That madness didn't last thankfully, and I remained resolutely pedestrian. but my love affair was such that it never occurred to me to leave it.
Also I had no friends. Well, none with baches anyway. So it eventuated, my first New Zealand Christmases were spent in the heart of the CBD. Sweltering holidays now remembered in a haze of heat shimmer. I never really questioned why it felt like the city had emptied out, I just put on sandals and marched down Queen St feeling like I owned it.
There's a funny solidarity among people left in town during holidays. It may be a shared moment on the Link bus, or a look that passes in a (smaller than usual) queue. It's the glance that acknowledges the shared fate of the somehow-left-behind, the lunatics running the asylum. There's a tacit understanding that in the absence of the regular hordes, anything can happen.
Much has already been written about the joys of Not Going Away on public holidays. Often by people who just don't get it, for going on holidays is as Kiwi is moreporks. As Kiwi as Watties and yard glasses and Postie Plus.
I am genuinely fascinated as to what it is in the national character here that draws people away from their cities every chance they get. The French do it too, I know, decamping en masse every summer, even the English give it a go, heading to some cloud-covered coastline for a miserable old time. But there is something unique and strange about the veneration in which getting away is held over here.
An amateur sociologist would probably extrapolate it as having something to do with how the country was first settled. Perhaps there's something in New Zealanders that genuinely can't leave lonely places, undiscovered frontiers alone? Maybe it's the sense of being free, of walking along the beach, not combing one's hair, the slap of jandals on bare heels? Maybe it's the Kiwi nature to fight the constraints of cities, kick against the idea of the metropolitan automaton and indulge your non-conformist inner child every chance you get? Perhaps the quintessential Kiwi is happiest at one with nature wherever she is found, whether on lonely beaches or the campsites of yore? Or maybe you all just hate wearing shoes?
It takes on an almost religious significance, going away. Talk of decamping to Pauanui is met with cries of delight and affirmation. In the days leading up to a holiday, announcing your decision to go to the beach for the weekend has the same import as saying you're about to start a family. Lovely! Fabulous! Well done you!
Conversely, those of us condemned to stay in our metropolitan centres are relegated to the status of bridesmaid, doomed to a week-long pantomime of nodding and agreeing with the wisdom of everyone who's decided to get out of town.
I'll be soaking up my city this weekend, swinging down abandoned boulevards in the manner of The Cat Who Walks Alone.
Many of you reading this presently will be indulging in your own private slice of heaven somewhere far away from the CBD. On behalf of everyone who can't bear, or can't afford to, get away from the noise and haste, I salute you. Thank you for giving me my city back. Thank you for getting out of town.
