OPINION
Timaru is the possible answer to the question that haunts my days and sleepless nights, “Where will I live when I am too old and unemployable to continue living in the louche and affluent style I have become accustomed to in Auckland?” I flew to Timaru last week. U3A invited me to make a speech. They put me up at a hotel on the main highway with views of the harbour and port, and I sat on the balcony with a cup of Moccona medium roast instant coffee, looked at the pale blue South Canterbury sky, and thought, “Maybe here.”
Timaru has its obvious and immediate charms, first and foremost Caroline Bay, that Victorian ideal of seaside England with its wide, tree-lined paths leading to the beach, glittering like a bracelet on an outstretched arm. It was 17 degrees last week, swimming weather; strange, though, to see people swimming right beside the port, with its cranes and its stacks of Maersk containers. Trucks roared hither and yon along the highway, to and from the port - I sipped at my coffee and marvelled at a truck that advertised it was transporting a quantity of molasses.
Timaru has one of the great coastal walks of New Zealand. One way leads to a lighthouse. I went the other way, because it leads to a far more important monument, vital to the New Zealand way of life, crucial to the economic health and well-being of Timaru – the meatworks. Smithfields Alliance meatworks may well lay claim as the most scenic meatworks in New Zealand, with its clear views of the sea to the east, and the snowcapped Alps to the west. I got talking with a man walking the coastal track. He said he worked at Smithfields for 33 years and that it currently employed 400 people. It looked pretty quiet at the works so I asked what was happening at this time of year, and he replied, “I don’t think they’re killing at the moment.” I savoured that sentence as I drank the Moccona and gazed at the pale blue skies.