I Once Felt I Had Everything I Could Possibly Want – Dave Branton

I Once Felt I Had Everything I Could Possibly Want Dave Branton

And Kindness Lay All About

Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes

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Glenn Busch

Dave Branton

After it stopped there was silence. Then you heard the sound of car

alarms going off across the city. Like most people I had been fast asleep.

The next moment I was halfway out of my bed, one arm supporting myself on the floor next to a creaking wardrobe. Quite extraordinary.

I rang Julia immediately and she answered pretty quickly. I asked

her if she was okay and she said she was. ‘Because if you hadn’t been,’ I said, I’d have come over straight away.’

‘Why don’t you come over anyway,’ she said.

We had been going through what you might call a difficult time

in our relationship and I had been living close by in a little flat on Stanmore Road.

I had a scooter at the time and off I went on that. There were people

all over the the street in dressing gowns and pajamas, they just seemed

to be standing there looking somewhat dazed and everywhere there was water. It really was the most extraordinary thing.

The intersection of Linwood Avenue and Avonside Drive was quite

badly damaged, with water pouring across the street and a little whiff of sewage rising up from the cracks that obviously extended down into

the pipes. Coming from England, where the ground is pretty solid

and has been for thousands of years, it was all very strange to me.

Quite unnerving, but at the same time, nobody died, and perhaps as a

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consequence of that there was also a touch of excitement. I slept the rest of that night in the room with my boys because they had been

quite frightened. Unnerved, I think, because in the middle of the night the lights no longer worked. The next day, like most people, we

went for a walk around the area. It was cold but of course everyone was out on the streets wanting to see what had happened.

The river was quite different, strange. The water swirling, and it

remained like that, turbulent, for hours afterwards. I took a photo and you could see these strange eddies and the bubbles of sand—it

had definitely changed. The riverbed had come up and the sides fallen in. River Road was cleaved down the middle and half of it

slumped into the river. This extraordinary landscape had appeared

overnight and to be honest there was a little bit of… what… strangely, an almost festive feeling. Like nothing really serious seemed to have happened. Nobody was really considering what you would do the

day after or the day after that or how we were going to repair it.

Well, we were in a reasonably safe sort of country and we’ve got insurance—everything will be okay. I think our water and power

were off, but that evening people went around to each other’s houses and had barbeques.

I wonder if that happens pretty much everywhere? A disaster

creates a temporary community, which then doesn’t seem to last for too long afterwards. We are still very good friends with Nancy across the road, her little girl still comes over and plays a lot, but we were

already doing that before. Whereas the neighbours on the other side

here—who we saw a little bit of after the earthquake—we are back

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to the same sort of relationship with them, which is that we really hardly know them. It’s kind of interesting how it doesn’t actually last, or rather, slowly evaporates.

You know, it’s kind of hard to remember exactly what happened

in September because it was so overshadowed by what happened in

February. I think back and I can remember the day clearly enough, I can remember that night and I can remember the day after, but I

can’t really recall many days after that. I know it must have been a

while before the power came back on, but I don’t think it was that long. I also have memories of a water tanker in the street, but was that September or was that February?

I know there was a good lot of liquefaction in the back garden

that took a little bit of getting rid of. There was a change in the level

of the house, you can see that in the kitchen bench for instance but it wasn’t really that bad then. Most of these cracks were only small and

I just thought, well, it’s going to get repaired, so it will be fine—no

problem—it’ll be okay and so you carry on. Your family’s okay, your kids are kind of excited by it, the school’s closed for a while, our

work has stopped for a while, and we are together. Like I was saying, Julia and I had had this difficulty and now we were in a position that I took as an opportunity. Suddenly there is a bit of a disaster and I am definitely needed here. It was an opportune moment to come back into the family life and really start to repair what was going

on. I was thinking much more about that at the time than I was thinking about the house or anything of that sort. So, September for me—for us—yes, in that way it was a good thing.

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As with any earthquake we had the little shakes, the aftershocks,

that were still kind of exciting, and then, yes… then it changed. It

changed quite dramatically. I was at work that day, in Riccarton, and we were used to the shakes by then but this one was different.

This one didn’t stop. It built and built and then everything began

to crash. The monitors collapsed off the benches and one of my colleagues jumped under her desk and I ran to the doorway which was the first time I had ever done anything apart from sit there and try to be cool. I was like, yeah, okay, now is the time to stand in the doorway. After it stopped I went outside with a friend of mine

and lit a cigarette, and that’s when the second one hit. That was different. Buildings are man-made structures and so if a building

decides to shake you can blame its materials. Blame its structure.

But when you standing on the earth and that begins to shake and move, that’s a whole different thing. We had some difficulty just remaining upright.

At that time the company I work for had two buildings. One

was an older tilt slab construction, and as we watched the entire

structure bowed from side to side, the concrete panels flexing in and out, far further than you might ever expect concrete to flex. It was pretty scary. But again, because of where we were in Riccarton, there

was no liquefaction and after it had stopped everything seemed just

fine. We were ready to go back into the building, stand our monitors

up, and carry on. But then the office manager came out and said ‘No, you all need to go home.’ As he said this someone else came

walking around the corner on their cellphone and said, ‘There’s

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been deaths in the city.’ That’s when we started to think, okay, this is more serious than we realised but we still really had no idea.

I got hold of Julia on the phone—I managed to reach her at her

mum’s house. She was there with the kids but our youngest, Oliver, wasn’t with her. He was at pre-school. By himself without Julia or his

brothers, but again I wasn’t really concerned because at that point it didn’t look too bad. I had only just started on my way home. There

were a few things that had fallen off the walls, but that was expected, right. Then as I biked towards Hagley Park there was a collapsed

building on the corner of Riccarton Road. But I had passed it often before and knew it to be an empty building; I thought the landlord’s

probably going to be happy about that. Then, crossing the road, I walked into Hagley Park and there were huge patches of sand

everywhere, and the footpath between the small lake and the large one was maybe a foot deep in water. The smaller lake had obviously

lifted and the large one dropped because it was pouring out of one and draining across the footpath into the other. And that’s where I first started to see the people who were streaming out of town.

They had that look on their faces and dust on their clothes.

People streaming through, some with their shoes in their hands, nobody was concerned about getting their feet wet and then I went across the bridge into town and that… that was the moment when I saw the absolute chaos in the city. The collapsed scaffolding, the damaged buildings, the throngs of people heading out; there was

a church in which I think the organ was being repaired, it had

collapsed and four people were carrying out a bloodied and dust-

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covered body. I don’t know whether the person was alive or not, I don’t know.

At that point I was heading toward the centre of the city, I could

see down the street and it looked okay but then I saw a friend of mine, Simon, who is a musician, ‘You don’t want to go through town,’ he

said. So I didn’t, I took a detour and still there was water everywhere, it was just gushing out of holes in the ground that made for treacherous

biking. With quite a few inches of sandy water all over the ground, you had no idea where the cracks were. Finally, I decided to get off and push my bike. By now people were passing me with such terror on their faces—just real fear—and no cars, just people streaming out of

the city, hundreds of them. The sand in the street I was then walking

in—the liquefaction—had risen to the tops of the wheels of the cars.

It’s terrible stuff. When it first comes it’s very soft, almost like jelly. You

can’t walk through it; you would simply sink into it and lose your shoes.

At that same moment Julia was in the car trying to get across town

to Oliver at his pre-school. There was a moment when I let myself go—let myself think—is the place a pile of rubble and Oliver beneath

it? But, you can’t… as a parent you just can’t go there. You have to say to yourself, okay, Julia’s on her way to get him, there is nothing I

can do at this moment—he is probably fine. And so it was. The preschool, with Oliver in it, turns out to be rock-solid, a substantial old

wooden building. And what’s more he’d been a tower of strength for

his little friends. He dived to the floor with his hands over the back of his head and then, once the shaking subsided, he jumped up and was comforting all the terrified little girls. Afterwards though, of all our

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boys, he was probably the most affected at night. For a time it was back to sleeping in his bedroom at night.

Once I had got out of the city and headed towards Avonside the

roads seemed safe to ride on again, but everywhere there was chaos.

And what was I thinking by then? I knew it was serious, I suppose I

was wondering if our home was broken and half full of sand. But apart

from that moment thinking of Oliver, I wasn’t particularly worried. I

take the view that if you’re in any sort of emergency situation, worry is not going to get you anywhere. My task at that time was to simply get

home. Once I’m home there will be another task at hand, is the power on, where are we going to get food from? What are the other things we’ve got to deal with?

By the time I did get there the power was very definitely off and of

course the water was gone as well. I turned the switch off at the board and turned the water main off at the street. Then I went out the back

onto the deck and the entire garden had completely filled with sand to a depth of probably a foot and a half at the deepest point and it was

still coming. There was a big fissure running through the sand and as yet another shock hit you could see the water and sand rise inexorably

through this crack, not fast, but relentlessly. You find yourself standing

there looking at it, hoping like hell it doesn’t get high enough to come in the house. There wasn’t much else I could do then, except to dig a little hole for a toilet and wait for the family to arrive.

The house itself is now rather twisted. Everything rolls off everything

else, including the kitchen sink. The children’s marbles—anything

that’s circular—end up in that corner of the lounge. But again, while

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this time there were deaths, I was absolutely grateful that nobody, not a single person that I knew—or even knew of—was injured. My children

were fine, and they were not overly frightened by it all. Okay there were times when they didn’t much like going to bed by themselves but

I went to Bunnings and bought them a little torch each with hooks and

hung them by their beds—I think they’ve lost them all now—but at the time that seemed to help a lot.

We stayed here that night and the next day we put everything in

the freezer into a chilly-bin and went to Julia’s mum’s house, which was absolutely fine. It was like another world, the roads—everything

fine. Getting across town was a bit of a mission because they were busy erecting the cordon at that point and there were huge holes in the road with cars in them. A lot of what you could only call chaos. I

think we stayed there for two or possibly three weeks. I watched a lot

of TV, watched a lot of disaster journalism. I even wrote an email to my parents describing what had happened that ended up being read out on a radio station in the UK. They asked me to write something else

but my second email disappointed and that was the end of my budding journalism career.

Basically, we were just waiting for the power and water to come back

on. I still really thought our home was going to be repaired, repaired or rebuilt. Well, fine, fantastic, double-glazing—don’t have to worry

about my rotten window frames anymore. That will be great. I knew it would take a long time and I knew there would be a point at which

we would have to move out and stay somewhere else and it would be a big headache and all the rest of it, but I saw that as being a temporary

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thing. When we finally got back in our house it would be better, or at least as good as it was before.

I have a lot of faith in institutions which is still fairly undented as

faith goes. I still believe in the idea that there are people—institutions— to deal with these kinds of situations and I don’t expect everything to be perfect. This is a big deal, but at least we don’t live in San Francisco

where you don’t get earthquake insurance at all. Then that disaster in

Japan came along very shortly after February and demonstrated how

bad it can really get. That was horrendous and to complain about our own lot after seeing whole villages and towns washed away, so many dead, that would be churlish. So again, I was pretty optimistic. I’m

still pretty optimistic now. I still have my little family. I’ve got my family back. Julia and our three happy boys. Everything that is really important to me.

Once the power came back on, we came back. We still had to get

water from the street but it was no longer necessary to impose on Julia’s mum, she doesn’t have a lot of space in her house and three boys can

be a handful. So back we came. I mean if you have electricity you can cook, your fridge works, your lights work, and when the water finally did come back, you could boil it. We had a long-drop toilet that we’ve

still got in the back garden. We even eventually managed to score a portaloo, so essentially, we had what we needed. Actually, our own

flush toilet showed signs of working as well but in September we had put the washing machine on and it started gushing into the neighbours

back garden. After that experience we were a little worried the toilet might erupt in the same way.

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The power and water lasted until June. For some reason those

particular quakes, two in one day, reaped more havoc on our house

than any of the others. It threw everything off the shelves. Stuff flew

out of the pantry. All our clothes were now sprawled on the floor.

Somehow most of the pictures were still hanging in there but no, not the power and water, once again they were gone. I was on my way

home when Julia got through to me on the phone. She was getting pretty tired of it at that point. We had more sand in the back garden

although not a huge amount, and by that time at least the city was

ready. The following day people were walking up and down the streets with wheelbarrows and shovels and we had two girls who lived up

the road come in and make very short work of the small amounts we had. Once again the neighbours—that sort of brief community—

reappeared. We had our friend from across the road, her little girl, another couple of neighbours, and then there was the woman walking up the street with eggs and bacon and no way of cooking them. She

was like, ‘Can I cook this?’ So we got the barbeque going and she had her bacon and eggs, that bit was still kind of fun.

We eventually put everything back in the pantry and the clothes

back on the hangers and then there was another earthquake during

the night and the books all fell off the bookshelf but we didn’t even

get out of bed. The house didn’t seem to have much more damage.

Perhaps it was leaning slightly more. Julia, as I said, was getting pretty tired of them by then. They were starting to get a little bit depressing but at the same time you’ve got to pick your battles and

you can’t really argue with seismic energy. I knew they were going

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to keep coming and I sort of prepared myself for about two years’ worth of aftershocks. I mean even if the house did fall to pieces, we were always going to have somewhere to sleep that night. We would

be okay. Or if we really, really had to, we could flee to England. Go

and stay with my family there. And physically we were fine; us, and everybody we knew, were fine. And in due course the power comes back on and things settle down once more and I start to thinking

everything is okay again. Then a month or so ago the zonings came out.

Looking back on it… to be stuck in the orange zone for such a

long time was hard to deal with but at the same time when you’ve got

three children to look after and a job, you’ve got plenty to get on with.

I’d also just been promoted. So yeah, I had plenty to do. You move on and try not to speculate about what was going to happen. But

in truth—in retrospect—what I had really been doing was thinking

that we were going to go green. Yeah, if I’m honest with myself, that is what I believed would happen—or perhaps wanted to happen. At

the time I was telling myself, no, I’m not going to think about it. It’s

going to be whatever it’s going to be, and that will be fine. That was my thinking out loud. But in reality, I believed it to be green. It would

be green because this street doesn’t look so bad. Really it doesn’t. And because they demolished the girls’ school just over there but look

now, they’re putting in the portacabins and the girls are coming back and going to school again and the powers back on, the waters on, and

the drains are working. Yes, okay, you only have to walk ten minutes

around Avonside Drive to see some bad stuff, see the way the lands

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dropped and how the difference in the level between one side of the river and the other is quite astonishing. But no, we will be okay.

Now I’m not sure how they knew, but we got an email from

the Residents Association saying there was going to be a zoning

announcement the next morning at 10 o’clock. So yes, we knew it

was going to happen, and no, we didn’t talk about it. Perhaps Julia said something like, ‘We’ll probably just stay orange.’ And off she

went taking the kids to school and I’m going to work. It’s a normal

day, fine, everything’s good. Then it came and it was unequivocal—a shock—a definite shock.

It came from behind. A friend of mine in the desk behind me.

‘Oh, Dave,’ he said, ‘you’re red, you’ve gone red.’ I went online then

myself and I looked it up. And he was right, there it was, a real

jolt to the heart. A shift, a sudden change of direction and those green plans just instantly gone, disappeared. Even today I can’t really comprehend the alternative. I hate moving house. As child I grew

up moving house quite a few times and it was always a wrench. Plus, I’ve done a lot of work on this house. This room we are sitting in now—that wall there used to be the back of the house—this is an extension we built maybe four years ago. I put the cork floor down

myself. We’ve put a lot of work into it and you really don’t want to leave all that behind. You tell yourself; I’m not attached to the objects that surround me. I can live beyond those things, rise above

them, but of course the reality is you move amongst them every day and they form a big part of how you live, of who you are, of what you do from day to day. The kids have grown up here and we want it to

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be the way it has always been. But that, you now know, is not going to happen. Everything is about to change.

And then, of course, all that actually happens is that you wait

again. You have waited for the zoning, and then you wait while you are orange. Then they tell you you’re going red and there’s a couple

of days of panic until you realise what you are going to have to do, which is to wait some more. The insurance company says, ‘Wait for

the assessor to turn up.’ The EQC send you a letter, at the end of which it basically says, ‘After you reply to this letter you are going to have to wait.’ Long periods of minor tedium interspersed with

moments of serious worry. And that is what we’re still doing today.

Waiting for the insurance company to come back with an offer and

the Government to come back with an offer. We’re looking at houses and we’ve accepted that this is what’s going to happen, that we’re

going to be living somewhere else, and in truth I really don’t know how that’s going to work out for us. Our home was not massive but

we were not planning on moving. We would have been happy here.

Okay, with three boys, once they started to get a bit bigger, it might have gotten a bit full, but you know, my parents got bigger and

bigger houses as we grew older and then once we finally left, they

found themselves rattling around in this ridiculously huge house.

Julia’s parents did the opposite, they had one house for her entire childhood and though her father very sadly passed away a few years ago, her mother lives there still. It’s a really nice comfortable home

and that’s what we would have liked too. Not to really go anywhere, we would have been happy here. We were happy here.

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It’s interesting when you start to think about it. Why are we attached

to the homes we live in. I suppose most places, unless you actually build

your own home, are a fairly generic box that we put our own little

touches to. I’m actually quite attached to the stuff that I have and what

it means to me. It makes me think of that film, An American in Paris.

Gene Kelly I think it was. Anyway, he lived in a tiny little apartment

in Paris, basically just one room, and in that sense, it was a generic box

but he had contributed all these little touches to it. He pulls a lever and a little bed comes down from the wall, or the breakfast bar comes out, that kind thing. To me, those words, our home, it means all those

little touches we have brought to it, the drawers that I made and the

marks on the walls that the children have made. There’s a hole in the wall behind that couch that was made with a skateboard that shouldn’t

have been inside but was, and that’s part of it too. Before the September

earthquake happened, when I was living in that little flat, it never felt like home. This place always did.

I think a lot of people got quite upset again in December, feeling

it was unfair to be hit by yet another large earthquake, especially just

before Christmas. Personally, I don’t expect fairness when it comes to earthquakes. And Christmas was still a happy time. I think the power

was off for a short period but it came on for Christmas Day and we all concentrated on having a good time. We had lots of presents to wrap

and lots of happy little boys on Christmas Day. The impact on the house

a few days before had been minor. I don’t think anything really fell over.

I think we might have broken a favourite mug or bottle of sauce or

something—whatever it was, it was minor and not to be worried about.

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I suppose we’ve been fortunate in that respect. There are a few

things I’m really attached to, my guitar, my computer, the art I’ve

bought over the years, I would have been pretty upset if any of that had succumbed. Yes, perhaps if that had happened I might feel quite

differently about the whole thing. But a bottle of sauce, no problem.

Later in the day we went around to Julia’s sister’s house and spent Christmas afternoon there. It’s one of the things I love about being

here. I grew up quite isolated from my extended family, we were very much a nuclear family… we saw our grandparents occasionally but

they were quite a long way away. Here in Christchurch we have Julia’s

mother, two sisters, an aunt, multiple cousins—the boys have cousins they play with all the time and they positively love it. It’s why we will absolutely keep living in Christchurch.

It’s not only that. I mean I have friends here and a job and I have

connections with the arts community I’ve built up over ten years and I really don’t want to go and start somewhere else again. I know what

that’s like. I’ve started again many times. When I left school and went

to university, I started again. When I left university to go to a job, I

started again. I came here, and I started again and I don’t want to start again somewhere else. This is the longest I have been in one place and

kept one group of friends and family, this is my home. New Zealand is my home and Christchurch is my place. Why people want to leave… I suppose there are many reasons, but I think it’s a shame.

My dad’s a civil engineer and my mum is a teacher. We tended to

follow my dad’s job around a bit. They even did some voluntary service overseas, which is how come they went to Africa. They did quite well

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out of it I expect. My dad’s job is also how they ended up in a small

town in the north of England. I don’t think it’s the kind of place my

mother really wanted to be. Her sister lived in London and her other sister moved to Melbourne. Brig, where my parents ended up, is a very small place in a not particularly pretty part of the country. It’s quite

flat in Lincolnshire, there are not a lot of hills to look at or climb. Not even dramatic moors you could be impressed by. Christchurch, even as it is now, has so much more to offer than a place like that. When I left

there, I went to university in Birmingham and I didn’t really go back.

During the summer holidays I would stay in Birmingham for as long as I could, staying in the halls of residence with nobody else around. At the time I quite enjoyed it.

Math’s and computer science is what I studied. I always knew,

right from a young age, I was going to be a computer programmer. I don’t really know why. I used to draw a computer on a piece of paper

and kind of pretended until my grandparents gave me one. Quite a generous present at the time. I used to get this magazine and type up the programmes that came with it. I loved the way you could give

the computer little sequences of instructions and make it do things, completely different from human beings which at that time I found to

be much more difficult. So, while other kids were out on their BMX, riding over piles of dirt and learning how to be friends with each other

and all that entails, I was in my room with my computer reading about algorithms.

It wasn’t until later on, when I went to university, that I learned about

people. At first I used to sit and listen to other people’s conversations,

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trying to get the hang of it. I would actually sit in the bar and listen and there would be a conversation. I still do that to some extent today, listen

to what people are saying to each other, which is how I discovered that it wasn’t actually terribly hard. When you’re at school, children can be very cruel with each other, and I didn’t need too much of that to

knock me back. But once you’ve grown up a bit and gone to university, people start to be nice to each other and that’s when I discovered that people were basically decent. It’s an opinion I’ve stuck with, that we are all basically decent. That in most cases, nobody is really out to rip you off. Occasionally that might be untrue, but you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t consider that positive point of view as much as possible.

So yeah, I went to university, studied not very hard, discovered

other people, discovered music, discovered drugs, discovered alcohol,

discovered girls, discovered a lot of things that weren’t on the curriculum.

All the important things you go to university for. Afterwards I could have gone and worked in finance or databases or games and done very

well. I know people who did just that but I would have had to work

really hard and all I wanted to do was work just hard enough. I was young and I wanted the opposite of hard work, I wanted to hang out with friends, play some music, and just relax. It was a lot of fun. Then I went to Amsterdam.

I had a friend at the time who had just split up with his girlfriend

and he was like ‘Okay, I want to take some drugs.’

‘Brilliant,’ I said, excellent idea, do you the world of good, let’s go to

Amsterdam and do it properly.’

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So, off we flew and we had a great time. On the way over on the

plane, we were like, ‘We are just going to get wasted,’ there’s not going to be any girls involved, okay, because it will only get complicated and

we won’t be able to hang-out or whatever.’ And that’s where I met Julia.

I woke up in a little dorm room with bunk beds and there was like

four or five girls in there and Julia was amongst them. It was quite

sudden. It was like, this person is different, special somehow. She was

living in Edinburgh at the time and I was in Birmingham and we’d go

back and forth, see each other every couple of weeks. Then her visa was running out and somehow it was the easiest decision in the world to

come here with her. I mean I’d heard of New Zealand I suppose, but until then I’d never thought about the place at all. Even so, I didn’t have to think about it for a moment, didn’t hesitate, I knew exactly it was

what I wanted to do. And it turned out to be a really good decision, earthquakes notwithstanding.

It felt like I’d come home, it really did. Julia’s sister was going out

with a guy at the time who I got on really well with. He’s became a very good friend of mine. He was working—or perhaps he might have still been studying—as a graphic designer and his friends were artists and there were gallery openings every Tuesday with free wine and a community that I slotted into it straight away. I still know all these

people today, some of whom are now reasonably successful. It was all very different from what was happening in Birmingham. There were

art galleries and I would often go along because I was very interested, but there was no connection to it. There it was very much a distant, elite kind of a thing. I don’t know, perhaps here I just happened to

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meet the right people. Maybe it might be a kiwi thing, or just the fact that Christchurch is so small and that there are fewer of these people

around—in other words we are all closer to one another. Maybe. Mostly

I think it was just good fortune. I could easily have arrived here and not

met those people and then it would have been quite a different story.

As it is, it worked out well. I feel very fortunate.

Then Elliot was born. I don’t think I’d ever so much as held a baby

before so it was a bit of a shock. Certainly, it took a long time for me

to get used to it, to get any good at it really. In the beginning I was… what, a bit dysfunctional. Now, after all that has happened, I think I’m

quite good at it but it’s an immense shift and you cannot tell someone

that doesn’t have children just how immense that shift is going to be.

Or tell them how it continues to be an immense shift every year—that it constantly changes. But here we all are and what I love about this house is the way we all live together, that it is a shared house. When I

was growing up my parents’ room was kind of a no go. You were not to go in there. We had a big house with two lounges, but one of them was

to be kept pristine at all times. That’s not the way we work in our house, this is a shared home. In our place, everything’s everywhere. This room

here is our lounge but really it isn’t…it’s a toy cupboard, that’s what it is. Really, they own the house and yes, sometimes I find that a tiny bit annoying but mostly I like it, yeah, mostly I love it.

When I think back to my time in England I realise my life could

have turned out quite differently… a very different world. My parents are reasonably right wing but I’m not at all. I’m certainly not a fan of the

current National Government for a lot of reasons. I think it’s a travesty

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the way that Brendon Burns, the local MP was voted out. After all the work he did following the earthquakes it was an absolute travesty. I

cannot begin to understand it. He was always around, always visible

and ready to do what he could to help. When he lost the election, yeah, it was a total shock. At least to me. I find this country’s shift towards

the National Party hard to understand. I hear a lot of things spoken about by people—whom I assume are reasonably intelligent—that I

just cannot believe is coming out of their mouths. There seems to be this temptation by some to take a section of the population and to think of them as a little bit less than human. In which case it becomes

that little bit easier to push the problems you are seeing all around you, onto them. When this happens, you know you have to fight against

it. I don’t wish to sound too theatrical but I believe that is exactly the

seed that ideas like fascism begin to grow from. I’m not saying that is happening here and now of course, but it’s the kind of thinking

you have to be careful about—guard against. You have to remember that everybody out there, no matter what their situation, is basically a

human being who is not really very much different from you. Like I

say, I am very fortunate to be here and to live the life that I have—it’s something I never forget.

As much as I dislike John Key for his policies and for many of the

things they have instigated since they came to power, what they’ve

done with the Christchurch earthquake has probably been okay.

While the land zoning has caused people a lot of pain, I think it is

actually quite a realistic thing to do. It’s probably the best you can do considering the foolish decisions in the first place to build so many

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houses on sand. Some of the announcements could have been quicker

but I don’t believe for a moment that there was political motivation between this bit of land being red or green or whatever. I think it is

the science that is actually driving that. I could be wrong, but that’s my

feeling. They are doing the best that they can, but I’m not sure they’re

in a position to provide the vision for the city, which is what it needs, and to be honest I don’t think that’s their role. That should be the role of local government and it’s not happening.

It is not those in power who have done the great work so far, it’s

the efforts of regular people, civil defense, the people in the trenches, that’s who’s made it all happen. The mayor, Bob Parker, simply rode the

publicity of the earthquake and the sterling efforts of all these people

to victory. Had all this not occurred, he would not have won the last election. And the news recently that the Christchurch Cathedral is

going to be brought down to a level of a couple of metres, well that’s just the first step in completely destroying it. There is no question in my mind that they are just trying to sweeten the pill and it will eventually

be gone. I’m not a religious man but when people get together and

build these buildings—irrespective of what religion it is—they do so as part of a sense of being something beyond themselves. I mean one

can blame many things on religion, but because of it there is a lot of beautiful architecture in the world. A consequence of the notion perhaps that we might build to show what we can be, rather than what

we can do. Religious or not, our churches are beautiful buildings, and

one of our great achievements. It is a tragedy that there is so little pushback against this destruction from Government or the City

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Council. It really is a terrible shame for which I think we will pay in the future.

As much as I complain about the lack of an architectural vision

for the central city, I believe there were things happening before the

earthquakes that will now continue to happen. There are still people who are committed to living in Christchurch and working to make

Christchurch what it was fast becoming before all this happened.

Pre-earthquakes, things in this town were getting really good. Music

and art and food, attitudes have changed over the ten years that I have lived here and it really was turning into a wonderful place to live before it was all taken away. But look, those attitudes haven’t

changed; they are still with us, still around, and once the buildings

come back, those things will recover quickly too. It’s not like we’ve disappeared back into the Stone Age or anything like that.

So yes, I for one am still pretty optimistic. I have my family, they

are all still here. Our three little boys are happy boys, they go to

school, they fight, they play, they break things, make a lot of noise, but they don’t wake up fearful in the night. The aftershocks come

along and they don’t flinch. I’m grateful for that. If I was to wish

for anything… I don’t know… I could wish for a million dollars I suppose, or the ability to play guitar like that guy who sold his soul at the crossroads, what’s his name, Robert Johnson, but it wouldn’t be right. I could wish away all the unhappy things that have happened to me, to my family, but I don’t think that would be right either. They

are now part of who we are. The tragedies we have lived through, as much as the triumphs that we experience, they all form a part of

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what or who we are. So yeah, despite the cracks in my house, I don’t feel I have anything to wish for. I once felt I had everything I could possibly want. Today, I still do.

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