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Sport 36: Winter 2008
David Beach
David Beach
Te Aro 2
The Epic café's patrons were a heathen
lot and not one had been enjoying a
pre-service repast or felt a call to
spiritual sustenance at the bells of
St Peter's ringing out. Breakfast in the
sunshine on the deck indeed looked an
elegant proposition, the question
as much, the vicar and his entourage
marching up Willis Street to the church
in their candy robes, whether the pageant
might be swayed, a snap decision to
undertake missionary work, leaving
the congregation to a quiet time of
meditation to strengthen their faith.
Te Aro 8
The Bucket Fountain was at its windy day
rambunctious best, no wishing well able
to compete with the amount of wishing
to remain dry on the part of those
happening through the Mall. That much of
the water was taking an atmospheric
route rather than via the buckets didn't
though deter a woman pushing a pram
from halting within the danger zone. She
poked her head inside the pram's plastic
canopy, conferred for a little
while with the occupant, then stood up
to gaze upon the sculpture's domino
antics or into whatever heavy seas.
Te Aro 15
The figure of the great moa outside the
Met Shop, Upper Cuba Street, is freely
imagined, or even a travesty, though
the most sober realisation would have
to contend with some doubt about what
exactly such fowl looked like. And a
whimsical version perhaps best conveys
the gulf between the present and the
bird world. Since the avian citadel was
stormed rather more than a bypass has gone
through the area and to think one can
see past this human contribution might
be the real fantasy, not a 'Moana'
apparently versed in matters weather.
Te Aro 20
The Left Bank makes a stab at Parisian
intellectual ferment but on wet days
it is rather rivers generally which
are evoked, the hotchpotch of shops
and cafés seeming more than ever
provisional, ambiguous and the two
police officers striding through the pools
and shadows of the loading zone could have
been supposed from some metaphysical
task force charged with maintaining reality,
if themselves looking a little too much
a piece of theatre, their gait liable to
become corrupted into Singin' in
the Rain-style hoofing at any lamp post.