Suburban life: It’s not so bad
The suburbs have been muchmaligned as people move towards inner city living, but Stephen Lacey reckons there’s plenty to celebrate.
It’s been almost seven years since I moved from the suburbs to the inner city. And initially I couldn’t wait to escape suburbia’s insular claws. I swore blue murder I would never return, and in all honesty, I probably won’t.
As a freelance writer who relies on contacts and networking, the city is the right place for me. But that’s no excuse for the way I dismissed suburbia and all who lived there.
Week after week, I’d sit there in one of my smug, inner-city cafes, drinking cold-pressed coffee and bagging out the place where I spent the majority of my life.
The suburbs were some limbo-land between country and city, without the charm of either. The inhabitants wallowed in mediocrity, named their children Breeyana and Aydyn, and celebrated the V8 Supercars, jet skis, mainstream FM radio, and concrete stencilled driveways.
Yeah, I know, what a shallow, elitist, dickhead. But I’m not the only one. The suburbs have been much maligned in popular culture for years. That’s why we have Kath & Kim and Dame Edna Everage.
It’s why, apart from a handful of exceptions such as Reg Mombassa, artists have largely ignored suburbia.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe the suburbs weren’t such a bad place to live after all. Maybe that’s why I’m getting the seven-year itch and starting to have dreams about cul-de-sacs and council verges of bottle-brush trees.
Here’s the seven things I miss about the suburbs:
Wheelie bin cricket
There’s nothing like using your own street as a cricket pitch, with a wheelie bin as the wicket. Hit the tennis ball into the rear of the neighbour’s Holden ute on the full, and it’s six and out. There’s nothing like using your own street as a cricket pitch.
Washing my own car
In the city, due to lack of room and apartment living, you tend to use a car wash and pay upwards of $40 to get your ride sparkling. In the burbs, everyone washes their own car, in the driveway, with a bucket and a hose. It’s quite a Zen thing to do, especially if the Test cricket is playing on the car radio while you work. And an old bloke will always wander past and say: ‘‘You can wash mine when you’re finished.’’ And you always politely laugh as though it’s the first time you’ve ever heard it.
Affordable hamburgers
Living in the city for seven years, I came to believe that it’s normal for a hamburger to cost $19 and be served on a slab of iron bark with chat potatoes and aioli on the side. It’s only when you get back to the burbs that you realise that a
It’s only when you get back to the burbs that you realise that a burger should cost around $6 and always have tinned beetroot on it.
burger should cost around $6 and always have tinned beetroot on it. If you must order sides, they should be a can of Coke, and hot chips with gravy.
Doing stuff yourself
In the inner-city, you tend to outsource your life. You pay people to drive you places, walk your dog, deliver your meals, put together your flat-packed furniture. But everyone in the suburbs is adept at doing their own plumbing, gyprocking and electrical work. That’s why there are old XD Falcons up on bricks in front yards; because women called Brenda are handy with a shifting spanner.
Backyard chooks
Some inner-city folks make a futile attempt at animal husbandry. It never ends well. The last thing you need is for the body corporate to complain about the goat on the balcony. Generally, the day-to-day care, selective breeding, and raising of livestock is best left to the suburbs. Same goes for productive gardens.
Serenity
The biggest change I’ve had to get used to after moving to the inner city is aircraft noise. Planes fly so low over my house that I can wave to the passengers and have them wave back. In the suburb where I lived there were no aircraft (there were no buses either, but that’s beside the point). Fact is, the suburbs are pretty damn quiet, making it possible to actually ponder the meaning of life without the answer being a 747. The only exceptions to suburban solitude are the sounds of Saturday morning lawnmowers, whipper snippers, leaf blowers, and Khe Sanh playing at every 50th birthday party.
Real dogs
The inner-city is a giant kennel of designer dogs. My own family bought something called a pugalier, a stupid concoction that manages to combine the worst attributes of a pug and a cavalier. Everyone else owns a French bulldog or a cavoodle, just to be different. In the suburbs, dogs are dogs; brown mongrels of things that bark at you furiously from behind the fence.
Pine nuts are the edible seeds of various types of pine trees. There are around 20 species of pinus that produce kernels large enough to bother extracting but the one most commonly grown in New Zealand is the European stone pine, or
They are easy to propagate from seed, don’t require much in the way of pruning and are basically untroubled by pests and diseases.
grows best in areas with hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters but are coldhardy down to -22 degrees Celsius. They take five to six years to start producing cones. They don’t reach full productivity for about 40 years, but a mature tree should yield about 5-15kg of kernels a year.
One reason for growing your own pine nuts is that they’re expensive to buy. But the major problem with growing your own pine nuts is the difficulty in extracting the edible kernels from the cones.
The first step is relatively easy: the scales of the pine cones naturally open in the sun, allowing the stone in each one (the seeds in their hard seed coats) to be released. But getting the edible kernel out of the seed coat is not quite so simple.
Commercial pine nut grower Lee Paterson, general manager of Pinoli in Marlborough, says extracting kernels from the hard seed is no simple task.
The extraction method used in their factory has about 50 separate steps from cone to kernel. The process takes place in a fully food-safe environment and would be impractical to try and emulate on a small scale. For small-scale home harvests, Lee explains the basics of the age-old Greek and Roman method.
Pick the green cones from June 1 onwards. Have picking finished before November when the cones start opening on the tree.
Store the cones in a ventilated area. Warm is better but really any shed or room with a door or window open will do. Wait until the hottest, driest time of the year, put the cones in the sun and let them open (full sun is important). This will take anywhere from one day to one week. Sweep and roll them around and even stamp on them if you like to get the seed out of the cones. Sweep the seed apart from the cones and then sprinkle the cones well with water on the next hot day. This will cause them to close rapidly, then open again quickly, which releases a good percentage of the remaining seed.
Clean the seeds by putting them in a sack or cloth bag and rolling it around so the seeds rub against each other. Then on a hot day, tip the seeds into a bucket of water. The dead seeds and cone waste will float and the live seeds will sink. Skim off the debris and tip the clean, live seeds onto the concrete in the sun to dry properly. It is important that they dry properly before being soaked in the next step.
Soak for 10-12 hours in water, then put them in super-hot sunshine. When a hot day is predicted, start soaking the night before. Lay them out on some black plastic or some other clean dark surface and leave them in the sun. This will cause the seed to split like a pistachio seed. Roll them with the palms of your hands on the concrete or some other hard surface and the seed shell will split, releasing the kernel.
Use 70 per cent warm or even hot water in a bucket and dissolve 30 per cent salt. This will allow you to float off the kernels and the shells will sink. Rinse and dry. The need for drying at this point is dependent on how much water they take up in the salt separation process. If you are quick about floating them off and rinsing, they shouldn’t need much drying. Try flexing a kernel; if it bends it could do with some more drying, if it breaks easily it’s dry.