Nobody seemed particularly worried that we appeared to be in the middle of a scene from The Prisoner. This may have had some influence on our decision to start dinner with cake 🙂 After the belly dancers, an aerobics session (complete with Jane Fonda workout tape), and the crowd starts to join in: Not long…
As promised, a few photos from yesterday:
uite apart from the whole winning an award thing, yesterday was really interesting. For a start, I got to go and visit (and even better, take some photographs of) the Canterbury Cultural Collections Recovery Centre. The CCCRC is an amazing place – it’s a giant climate-controlled hangar that stores all the material from the various…
arvestbird, the miniest mini-Harvestbird and I had planned to go to Dorothy’s this afternoon for tea and scones and cucumber sandwiches, but alas when we got to Cranmer Square there was no sign of the little green caravan. So we went to the Coffee House instead, in anticipation of cake. Unfortunately, in their reinvention they’ve…
eading back through my blog posts today to pick out the earthquake-related ones was more affecting than I expected. Even though I spending my working days looking at photographs and reading peoples’ memories from the quakes, I’d forgotten just how scary they were. I think because I wasn’t hugely affected by them in any material…
ot as big a deal as 22 February, but 4 September is still a significant date for Christchurch – the day of the 2010 earthquake that was the start of all the chaos and horror to come (GeoNet announced this morning that they’ve recorded 14859 earthquakes in Canterbury since that first one, 4558 of them…
This is what central Christchurch looks like these days – still a mass of cordon fences, road works, half-demolished buildings, and vast open spaces that can feel pretty desolate: On the plus side, there’s cool artwork (official and unofficial), and a lot of the empty demolition sites have been grassed over, which makes some parts…
y potential cold remains at bay, so I decided to use my day off to attend a few writers’ festival events. The first was a talk by psychologist Michael Corballis about his new pop-psychology book The Wandering Mind. It’s based on the idea that letting your mind wander is actually a good thing, because that’s…
oday was almost entirely filled with meetings. One was a very interesting meeting though – we were visited by a researcher from Tokyo, who is studying the experiences of disabled people in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, so has come to Christchurch to compare our situation with Tohoku’s. The Tohoku earthquake was only a…
oming up to four years since the first big earthquake, and progress seems so slow in so many parts of the city that there are understandably a lot of frayed nerves around the place. One simple but strangely effective antidote to this has been the All Right? campaign (or rather, series of campaigns), a mental…