[See all Notional Significance posts] The stream is now fully canalised, a tame channel running arrow-straight towards the harbour, as subtle as an engineer’s ruler. It once meandered across the broadening valley, softly folding into the estuarine flats. On its left bank, the colonial forces built Elliot’s Stockade to oversee the new road, but the […]
[See all Notional Significance posts] Another bend; another ending. I cross into Tawa, which was a separate borough until 1989, when in the words of a former Mayor it was “just tacked on” to Wellington. Topographically, and perhaps in sentiment, it still leans more towards Porirua than to Lambton Harbour. But as the old track […]
So you happen to live out west in the faulted hill-folds. One day a kākā lands on your deck railing and winningly bounces along and back. It is looking at you. It is looking for food. Its head bobs up and down. It knows you have some. Do you: A) put out a saucer of […]
Tonight we went to the opening of the Nespresso “boutique” on Lambton Quay, because frankly, we’d go to the opening of envelopes if they involved Louis Roederer champagne(1) (although a number of people we know turned down the invitation, sent us links to a Buzzfeed article about disposable pods and then commissioned haikus) and it was […]
Wellington is having a bit of weather at the moment, sure we get weather 24/7 but this weather, it’s Spectacular Southerly Weather! I’m not sure what would justify all caps weather but here’s a little trip around the south coast to show you how things roll into Wellington when we have Weather if you are […]
Rotary Forum has a question to ask. We have a rare opportunity: Wellington is what we make it and you can be part of shaping it. Now in its second successful year, this highly topical community forum asks; what kind of city and region do we want? How should community views be expressed in local […]
Via Dave on Twitter (and a few others including, we now see, the Dom Post) comes this lovely Wellington time-lapse video from local film maker Jared Gray: If only all those cars were that small in real life!
Over Easter, the weather suddenly went all settled and warm. This is perhaps not unusual for autumn, but given the crap summer most parts of the country have had for the past few months it was somewhat unexpected. In fact the forecast for Easter was so dire that it played a reasonable part in us […]
[See all Notional Significance posts] My narrative has been marooned in Johnsonville for over eight months, a fate that, if not actually worse than death, is perilously close to it. In fact, it is exactly a year since I walked this section of road, and last week’s remembrance was the spur I needed to get […]
Conscious Consumers is organising New Zealand’s first Carrotmob.The basic idea of a Carrotmob is to organise consumers to shop at a particular business, if that business pledges to use the money to adopt more environmentally and socially responsible practices. The business that wins the ‘mob’ of consumers is the one that pledges to use the […]