Light shines through cracks
REGULARS 8 10
Deals and five things Expat tales, Ask an expert Smugshot Check in Puzzles
11 16 20-21 Beauty spots:
Exquisite places travel writers love.
Foodie’s roadtrip:
We explore the Marlborough region, Culinary Destination of the Year as voted by UK’s Luxury Travel Guide.
Spiritual path:
Mother and daughter do the 800km trek across Spain.
22-23 Our stories:
Seventy-five years of the National Film Unit.
DBC Pierre:
His latest book covers his journey from lying, indebted addict to literary sensation.
eSports:
The new sporting legends.
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Film and music reviews Books Appointment Viewing Grant Smithies
Cover:
Burano, an island on the Venetian Lagoon, Venice. iStock
Photo:
I’m not a superstitious person. I’ve never thrown salt over my left shoulder or thought twice about walking under a ladder or in front of a black cat. And while I’ve stepped on countless cracks without ever marrying a rat, this week I’ve had romance and rodents on my mind.
In 75 days, I’m opening my garden for the Franklin Hospice Garden Ramble. What’s that got to do with it, you might ask? Nothing, except it means there’s only 75 days left to conquer the weeds, which was exactly what I was doing when I stepped backwards into a rat hole of Waterview tunnel proportions in my echinacea border. I lost my footing, then my balance, then my dignity as I toppled over the drystone rock wall, only breaking my fall when I landed on a beloved wedding gift.
When I got married, my colleagues pitched in to buy me a pair of metre-high clay vessels by Nelson artist Katie Gold. With their vintage floral patterns and hourglass figures, they’re the sort of elegant objets d’art that common sense suggests should be stored safely indoors on a shelf.
‘‘Art is not what you see, but what you make others see,’’ said French impressionist Edgar Degas. I’m quoting him out of context, of course, but when I first saw Katie’s sculptures, I knew I wanted to make others see them too, so I positioned them on concrete block plinths in my garden, using broken bricks for ballast.
It wasn’t, in hindsight, my smartest move. ‘‘I told you so,’’ said my husband as I hobbled indoors, sobbing over the shattered remains of our sculpture.
‘‘Chuck it in the trash,’’ he said, but I couldn’t. It was a wedding gift, I reminded him. A symbol of our love, of the joy and care and shiny-faced delusion of signing a death-do-us-part contract in front of everyone we knew. And now I’d smashed it.
I went on a mercy mission to Mitre10 then spent my evenings with a tube of super-strength solvent adhesive, trying to piece together a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle without all the bits. I did the best I could; if I stand well back and squint, I can barely see the cracks.
In Japan, there’s a wonderful tradition known as kintsugi or kintsukuroi, which means to ‘‘repair with gold’’. Since the 15th century, it has been an art form to fix busted bits of pottery with golden glue that, rather than trying to hide it, celebrates the item’s flawed history as an aesthetic virtue.
Leonard Cohen had the same idea in Anthem, surely the most optimistically melancholic song in history: ‘‘Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.’’
Wrecking something precious through clumsy stupidity is frustrating, but some things are better off broken, like pernickety council bylaws, Olympic records, free-range eggs, umbilical cords and the chains of patriarchal tyranny. I’m not convinced a broken heart is one of those things, though being dumped by a lover teaches us resilience and the art of stalking on social media. ‘‘Hearts will never be practical until they are made unbreakable,’’ said the Wizard of Oz to the Tinman, but I prefer the 1960s cynicism of New York columnist Phyllis Battelle, who wrote that ‘‘a broken heart is what makes life so wonderful five years later, when you see the guy in an elevator and he is fat and smoking a cigar and saying ‘long-time-no-see’.’’
Five years ago, I stood on our lawn – then perfect, now riddled with creeping buttercup, dandelions and three-leafed clover – and promised to be open, honest and faithful to my new husband. I’ve kept those vows – indeed some weekends on this page I’m a little too open and honest for his liking – but I confess to breaking another of my oaths.
On our wedding day, I promised my husband three sons. I delivered two, then went back on the pill. Unlike Olympic gold medallist Caster Semenya, I’ve found that there’s a limit to how much testosterone I can tolerate without reaching breaking point.
'Wrecking something precious through clumsy stupidity is frustrating, but some things are better off broken, like pernickety council bylaws, Olympic records, free-range eggs, umbilical cords and the chains of patriarchal tyranny.'