A taste of Kiwi, just for a day
Want a true Waitangi Day? Head to London, says Josh Martin.
Long have the talkback radio phone lines and letters to the newspaper editors been full of patriotic, if slightly ignorant, people lamenting the fact that nobody really celebrates Waitangi Day in New Zealand.
Unlike America’s Fourth of July, there are no stereotypical costumes of national pride. Unlike Australia Day, there is no daytime binge session under the guise of paying homage to Straya. And unlike France’s Bastille Day, there is minimal dancing in Aotearoa. Waitangi Day, they moan, is rather lacking. That is, unless you’re one of the rowdy hundreds of sheep, Four Square grocery men, Shortland Street doctors or wannabe Suzie Catos pub-crawling their way around London’s inner-west on the closest Saturday to February 6.
You’ve probably seen it before, particularly the embarrassing attempts of the inebriated to perform a haka in Parliament Square – even the statues of Churchill and Mandela wince.
The bobbies look on to ensure no Fred Dagg look-alikes are hit by a black cab and pose happily for photos with a posse of humans dressed as Marmite tubs or packs of Pineapple Lumps.
Rightly or wrongly (and in the case of the drunken haka, it is always wrongly), I feel far more patriotic nostalgia for little old Nu Zild in Notting Hill Gate than I ever would in New Plymouth or Ngatea.
And it’s not because I think Waitangi Day in New Zealand has been ‘‘hijacked’’ or ‘‘ruined’’ by protests and politics. I love it for the one-day organised enclave of Kiwi culture injokes, mangled vowels, upward inflections and quotes from Flight of the Conchords and Boy.
A care package in performance art form, a taste of home when you’re in the depths of a British winter is a vital pick-me-up – even if you’re a little worse for wear the next day.
So, although Christmas may be the obvious peak of homesickness and New Year’s Eve is spent on a freezing European street waiting for fireworks and 99 Luftballoons to be blasted on repeat, ruing the Kiwis bronzing themselves in the Coromandel,