Stinging slap
Following stunning disappointment comes cold analysis. After nine years around the cabinet table National’s failure to deliver its constantly promised, deeply yearned-for Southern Link is a blow striking deeply at its Nelson roots. To have been so wooed, so placated, so set-up like this is a stinging slap in the face of the electorate.
National had the time, the money, the mandate and the urgency to instruct NZTA to do as they’re told and get this project nailed-down well before the election. No other announcement could have been more positively received by so many. That National chose instead to play it like a card, dangling it in front of the electorate to bolster its party vote is the unspoken truth about its gamble, and Nelson’s loss. National dropped the ball badly for Nelson. If I were Labour, serious about seeing Nelson in red for years to come, I’d snatch it up now and build the Southern Link immediately. No announcement could be more politically fruitful. Opportunities never go begging, they simply get taken-up by someone else.
What is it about the acoustics in shopping malls? The doors slide open and suddenly a cacophony of jarring sound is bouncing around inside your skull. Then there’s the quality of the lighting.
Do mall lighting designers mean to turn shoppers into legions of grey-tinged zombies? If yes, they’ve succeeded brilliantly, going by the washed-out crowds I found myself amongst in Westfield’s Albany Mall last weekend.
This week I planned to write a cheerful Christmas themed column, but somehow that trip to Albany Mall keeps banging unhappily around in my brain.
I usually avoid shopping malls, especially the big city version, but I can remember when visiting a mall was a genuine thrill. I suppose it’s a generational thing.
As baby boomers, husband Steve and I grew up in the restricted retail world of the 1950’s and 60’s.
The strong ethic of ‘make do and mend’ inherited from our depression and war-era parents meant that it was important to look after your possessions.
There was no cheap and trendy replacement available at the local Warehouse or Kmart.
Furniture, clothing, linen, kitchen equipment et al were more often than not hand-me-downs. Socks were darned, chair seats were re-upholstered, clothes were altered to fit second, third and even fourth siblings and shoes were resoled.
A young married couple in the early 1970’s, we furnished our house with a cast-off sofa and chairs from Steve’s parents and a bed whose ends we’d rescued from a paddock where they were doing sterling duty as a gate on my parents’ farm.
Our kitchen was fitted out with pots and plates from my Great Aunt Jessie’s estate and left overs from a year of flatting. The only new items were our wedding present haul and an inner-sprung mattress for which we could not afford the base.
Then, the purpose of wedding presents was to fit out a household rather than fund a tropical island honeymoon trip.
We hoped we wouldn’t get five toasters but no blankets or sheets and we did well except for a double up on cutlery. around the gaudy ‘offerings’, the tedious sameness of retail display, the strangely synthetic yet alluring smell of the food court? Yes, it’s all these.
But behind these identifying features is the truth that malls are the ultimate expression of throwaway materialist culture, the culture that promises happiness but inevitably delivers the opposite in so many destructive ways.
And at this time of year, sucked into annual retail frenzy, the problems inherent in rampant materialism unencumbered by any kind of restraint, indeed, actively encouraged in western democracies, emerge in sharp focus all over society and the environment.
No wonder there’s a growing number deciding not to celebrate Christmas at all.
Untethered from its origin, Christmas can be very dangerous for the soul.
And staying out of shopping malls is at least one vital safety strategy.
And, while I believe this, I admit to complete hypocrisy.
Witness the search for and purchase of said Disney Princess costume, and a pile of other stuff sitting on the table in front of me waiting to be wrapped.
We can’t, and shouldn’t, go back to how we were – nostalgic reminiscence is a pleasant but impractical guide to useful action – but we really need to do something about our current state of ‘stuffocation’.