My clothesline is a semaphore where signals pegged onto it connect me to friends and family—here in New Zealand, and in London, St Petersburg and Porto. The line flies up into another sphere where clothes flap in the breeze on a good drying day for friendship, life and death. New Zealand, in the nineteen fifties.…
I’ve been watching writer John Green’s YouTube channel The Vlog Brothers, where he and his brother Hank post videos to each other. They’ve been doing this for seventeen years. One of John’s recent vlogs was about how nothing makes him a liar quite like the future. He says, ‘Hank, one of my many problems is…
Dedicated to the Shekera family, my brave Ukrainian friends, who conduct their lives under a hail of Russian missiles. In the years preceding the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, two significant private libraries were established in Northland: the Anglican mission libraries of Kerikeri and Waimate North. I was three-and-a-half years old when my family…
‘How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks’ — Dorothy L Sayers, Gaudy Night Writers never ask one another questions like ‘where do you get your ideas’ because we all know the answer will be useless. Every writer’s process is personal and not very replicable. Lots of normal people do…
I studied the map of the London Underground hanging on the wall. Multi-coloured lines sprawled outwards, branching off from one another with no apparent logic. The whole thing was more like a diagram of an electric circuit than a map of a transport system. A thick, light-blue line made its way, in a jagged fashion,…
Urinating on my bedroom carpet as a child some thirty years ago had been intentional, though not malicious. I’d been going through a curious phase and discovered rather quickly that the bodily process responsible for urination was indeed voluntary. When I told my mother about it she barely stole her weary gaze away from the…
When I was eleven years old, my mother took me for Kaffee und Kuchen | coffee and cake at the Café Landtmann in Vienna. We sat in an elegant room with high ceilings, under severely beautiful lamps. We were tourists, like several other customers, but there were a handful of old Austrian men, too, wearing…
I recently bought a Pink Sugar perfume dupe online. The bottle has a white label with looping writing across its front, nauseatingly pink cotton candy liquid sloshing inside. I wear it almost every day, as some return to my 10-year-old self: bright red hair extensions, shimmery lips from dollar-store lip gloss, Hello Kitty keychain dangling…
“What about me seems Dutch?” I asked my husband, thinking he’d say something like ‘you’re a hard worker’ or ‘fairness is important to you’ or ‘you’re an innovator’. He thought for a moment. “Well, you’re quite tall,” he said. Another thought came to him. “And you like cheese.” * I have an indistinct memory of a…