Save the Cathedral

cleaning up...

For all of you fashionable people who might have seen my Sure to Rise teatowel in the hunger-&-envy producing FQ Entertaining magazine, my teatowel can be purchased online from DUSK or in real life from UBS Bookshop at Canterbury University, DUSK gallery+store in Hanmer Springs, Little River Gallery, Lava Gallery in Akaroa, and Red Fish Blue Fish in Sumner.

If you fancy buying a bit of sculpture at the same time, go to Sculpture on the Peninsula in the wonderful setting of Loudon Farm, Banks Peninsula. It's the South Island's largest outdoor sculpture exhibition November 4, 5 & 6 - my tea towels will be rubbing shoulders, so to speak, with work by artists such as Bill Hammond, Mark Whyte and Llew Summers.

no room with a view

The portico is being strengthened and saved, so now we have a very grand entranceway to a great view if nothing else! Also able to be saved is what's left of the basement (floors, windows, stairs, fittings and some walls destroyed) and the cloisters. Soon the diggers will be out and we'll be allowed back in to put some attention (and new plants) back into the garden.

in every dream home, a heartache...

Portico still standing, now with a view.

Digger at work demolishing our bedroom; in foreground is our shipping container which we bought when feeling optimistic about how much could be salvaged.

Beautiful timber floors reduced to matchsticks.

Still some books in the library.

My 5 year old son's room full of books, toys, clothes, bed and drumkit - all unsalvageable.

Telephone box saved! Washing machine good for scrap only apparently.

Purple dining room (painted in one day when my husband was away).

Our much loved home has been cordoned off for the past few weeks, so there's been no more sneaking into the garden to pick lemons and daffodils. Now even the lemon tree, the most magnificent and huge tree that was always full of fruit throughout the year, has been destroyed. 

It has been hard to watch at a distance men in diggers tearing down our rooms still full of things we spent decades carefully collecting. Demolition workers are a mixed bunch but there were a few good ones here who rescued my husband's grand piano and a set of red painted drawers that belonged to my mother. There's other stories not so good, but I've had enough of being angry and am looking forward to when the building is all down and cleared and we are allowed back into our garden to start again. Maybe there'll even be some late blooming daffodils left.

the beginning and the end

I grew up in a junk shop, got my education after school from piles of dog-eared comics in the corner of my mother's shop, learned the psychology of selling on my mother's knee. She'd figure out what something was worth then add a bit on, to be knocked off later so the customer felt like they were getting a bargain. If my mother had no real idea what something was worth she'd charge either 35c or $3.50, or if it were really unusual or particularly ugly, $35. Often too, my mother would abruptly withdraw items from sale, much to the frustration of customers. Sometimes she'd figure that if someone was so interested in something, it must be worth more than she had on it, and it would go home to be packed away in the garage indefinitely. Or sometimes she'd refuse to sell purely because she took a dislike to the customer.

At fairs and garage sales I was my mother's apprentice, some would say accomplice. "Go ask that man how much it is, he'll give it cheaper to a cute little girl," she'd say. Without fail we would be at the head of the queue at every church fair - the art of getting to the front via careful elbow positioning and waves to invisible friends further ahead was a useful skill which later held me in good stead at concerts and band gigs. We would head to different ends of the white elephant stall once in. Divide and conquer was the rule, as well as grab first, decide later.

Getting first into garage sales was important too, but the story that my mother once ran over a man who kept getting to garage sales before us is exaggerated. She merely nudged him gently with her car as he tried to dash past and he tripped over entirely of his own accord, and not without a certain dramatic flourish.

After the viciousness of garage sales, I preferred auctions - they just seemed more straightforward. My mother loved them too as the scope of items for sale was so wide. On one occasion she bought over 40 mannequins and a lifesize fibreglass donkey, and at another auction about 20 telephone boxes. Auctioneers loved my mother, if she wanted anything, she just kept on bidding to the bitter end. "Swings and roundabouts'" she'd say, if she paid over the odds. The odds were usually in her favour anyway as she picked up things that no one else wanted such as the cartons of replica coinsets she got from a fire sale auction in the 1970s. I think she must have bought the entire world production of them -  thirty years later she was still steadily selling them to the children and grandchildren of the original purchasers. When my mother died we found more mouldering cartons of them in the back of the garage; my sisters tried to sneak them into the rubbish skip but I furiously dug them out and continued to sell them.

When I decided to open a shop of my own, my mother and I went to a Smiths auction where we bought two old wooden display counters from Ballantynes. I put them in my shop in High Street (Red Fish Blue Fish next to the iconic Galaxy Records). One counter was from the haberdashery department and had a brass rule along the top. In the other counter we discovered a drawerful of very expensive chocolates which we ate and replaced with spud guns and fake moustaches. When I closed the High Street store, the counters sat in my garage until my mother died and left me her shop. At the Village Junk Shop my counters got a new lease of life displaying souvenir spoons and rusty tobacco tins, broken watches and postcards from holidays past.

Later I moved them over to Lyttelton for God Save the Queen!, a Village Junk Shop/Red Fish Blue Fish hybrid. The haberdashery counter held all the treasures of past lives including Victorian photos (aka instant ancestors), thimble collections, and rose patterned tea cups, while the other had whoopee cushions, stretchy aliens and clockwork mice.

That all came crashing to an end last Saturday. The haberdashery counter along with the remaining stock (including the last few boxes of coinsets) was smashed to pieces. The other counter was rescued in the nick of time (ask no questions as to how) and now sits in my hallway patiently awaiting its next customer.

 goodbye God Save the Queen! and all that went before...

recovery operation

It was a pretty black Monday, the 13th of June. First, a pretty major 5.7 quake and just as we were recovering from that, its mean big brother roared in, cutting power, crashing down walls, breaking spirits.  From my verandah I looked down the road to see the dust rising from the front wall of my shop now smashed to the ground.
The convent was in similar state. The walls of the chapel now almost completely down, the beautiful stained glass windows  twisted and smashed amongst the rubble. Two pairs were still standing and appear to be holding up the walls.

We rescued the ones lying broken on the ground (one window still missing in action) - now the tea towel money will go towards their repair not salvage. Harder to fix will be that fragile sense of optimism and normality that was just starting to appear...

On the wall just behind the ice cream van, you can see a bit of the faded graffiti that was a deciding factor in buying the convent - God Save the Queen. Elsewhere there was another piece which read Punk's not dead - a sentiment which appealed to my husband's '70s punk rocker past.

This is the kitchen of the chapel, formerly a sacristy, which has been completely destroyed. To the right of that is my 5 year old's store (he's following in his mother's shopkeeper footsteps) which looks like it may also be red-stickered.

going, going, gone...

The shop after the June 13 earthquakes.