Beaut Commute

Guest Ross: An Oceanic Commute

It’s 07:30 and the Nautical Almanac says the tide turned a quarter of an hour ago, if I don’t catch the first of the ebb within 15 minutes my yacht will be stuck on the sand-bar that guards this estuary!

The seas are steep over the entrance, as the outgoing current meets the ocean swells, but I’m in the channel and it’s only a few minutes before the diesel’s switched off and the genoa is sheeted home.  The yacht heals over as it catches the gusty warm nor’wester that blows off Canterbury’s plains. “The wind on the Island” a poem by Naruda, is a sailors song to recite in the cockpit.

Wellington lies 165 sea miles to the north - a long way in a slow boat, 40 hours most likely. Not quite a commute in the normal sense, but I am going to work (managing a friends bookshop while he’s in the U.S.A.), and it’s how I like to travel, also my personal effects can come along for the voyage. With over 200 books on board it’s good to know I’ll not be lost for words.

Usually I have five or six titles on the go at any-time,  a bit like web-surfing before the web, some poems, a novel, bio’, history and a cookbook at least.

Set the self-steering, check the horizon and it’s time to refresh my memory of the various rocks and reefs that might sink an unwary sailor. The NZ Pilot flops open at the usual place, namely Cook Strait and I start to re-read the passages that warn mariners to take EXTREME CAUTION.

A fresh, chill, southerly blow should kick in behind this hot foehn wind, it’ll drive me through the Strait. At least I hope so, as the memories of bashing away the hours struggling into head-on northerly gales are not pleasant. One book I’ve got open is Reed’s “Treasury of Maori Folklore”, the pages on the Taniwha’s of Raukawa  (Cook Strait) are particularly interesting; one named Tuhirangi is apparently quite friendly. I’ll drink to him and Tangaroa and maybe the wind will be in my favour.

After the sea serpents some of James Boswell’s “London Journal” is good post meridian entertainment. He acquaints me with the bawdy sexual mores of 1760’s England. 2010 seems quite tame and discrete in comparison. But thank God (really Fleming) for penicillin!

So much to read so little time, after all there’s only 36 hours to go.

Captain Blacksmith is a husband, father, sailor, antiquarian book dealer and water colourist.

Guest Candy: Bitchin commute

Beaut's guest Candy La Coque (Angela Meyer) is a mother, dancer, artist, sailor and blogger - read her adventures as she sails halfway round the world here. 

As a newish mama, I think it would be fair to say my commute involves walking down the hallway to the lounge, from the laundry to the washing line and on a good day from the front door to the letter box. Gone are the days of long bus and train journeys when I could get stuck into a book or listen to an album.

With only three and a half minutes at my disposal (I have small feet and a long hall) I have loaded my iPod with the genius that is the 80’s pop song. This little gem of synthesized goodness fits perfectly into these commute times.

My love of 80’s music has been long, it has been there since the 80s.

It was only natural then that in  2005 a friend and I decided that it was time to mix Dirty Dancing meets Flashdancemeets Footloose meets The Solid Gold Dancers meets you in your lounge when you were 11 and so The Real Hot Bitches was born. We love dance routines, have a real fondness for legwarmers and sweat bands, Lycra G Strings, and have no training as dancers but what we lack in technique, boy do we make up for in PASSION!

Fast forward five years and not only do I have a bitchin soundtrack to my life,  I have kickarse routines to bust out at playgroup. Each Saturday I commute to Island Bay Surf Club ( No 1 bus)  to join the other bitches in a homage to all things 80’s.

On my play list are these hit songs. They make putting the washing out fun.

Poison by Alice Cooper. The is my all time favorite routine.  It speaks to me.  Think snakes, arse slapping and death by  poison. We first learnt this routine in the Palmerston North Deerstalkers Hall.

Edge of 17 by Stevie Nicks, a beautiful song about a cougar stalking a her prey. It involves flapping of wings, pretending to walk down stairs, a canon ( that is a dance term) and it is quite long so it is a good work out.

Shot Through the Heart by Bon Jovi.  We broke the world record for the largest synchronized dance routine dancing to this.

Pour some Sugar by Def Leopard.  A classic. One of the first routines we ever did.   Great chorus to sing along too.

Doves Cry by Prince.  How satisfied is your mother eh?

Push it by Salt ‘n’ Pepa. The day we first learnt this, David Lange died. We also performed if for the Lithuanian president. This is where the bitches get political.

So if this sounds like you check out www.real-hot-bitches.co.nz  for more info and as luck would have it there is aMelbourne chapter.

Our next hit show The Fierceness opens at Downstage in Wellington in August.

Bitch out

Candy xx

 

Guest Imogen: Staff Benda Bilili - Tres Tres Fort

I live in deepest Africa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. My adopted home Goma is a chaotic dusty town on the shores of the magnificent sparkling Lake Kivu, half buried in lava and teeming with life and noise. Goma is in the troubled eastern Congo, but its more a Wild West kind of town. Due to a variety of contributing factors, not least the lack of a functioning State, Goma does without a few things that we take for granted; things like a reliable water and electricity supply, telephones, a postal system, metal roads, police and public transport. Just to name a few.   

Most locals get around on foot. Only if they are very well off do they take a moto (motorbike taxi). Goma also has a special kind of commuter indigenous to our town – the chukudu driver. Chukudus are huge scooters made from wood. They are used to transport heavy goods to the market, to the port and around town and they can carry up to 500kgs – that’s half a ton!  

 

I don’t really commute as such. I get around town on foot (only in some areas and only during daylight hours), by moto or by large white NGO 4x4. My office is really close to my house and I usually walk which takes about five minutes. Five minutes of scrabbling over lava, inhaling dust, shaking kids hands, dodging motos, and saying ‘bonjour’. Past the palatial grounds of the International Red Cross, and the men sitting across from their gates each morning hoping to earn a few francs as a day worker. Past the dilapidated, weed- eaten building that houses Goma’s High Court. Past the little roadside shacks selling mobile phone cards, the mamas with babies on their backs and huge tubs of pineapples balanced on their heads, the man who sits under a pock-holed umbrella repairing shoes, and the soldiers sitting guard outside the home of the Army General. Past all that I find the office of the international NGO where I work, and the gates are opened to me by the smiling guards. ‘Jambo mama’ they say. Nope, not much room for books, podcasts or crosswords on my commute.  

But if I were able to take the bus or tram or train to work in Congo, I would be listening to the amazing Congolese band, Staff Benda Bilili. Staff Benda Bilili are a group of paraplegic musicians living on the streets of Congo’s capital, Kinshasa. This is how they are described on the back of their album Trés Trés Fort: "Four senior singer/guitarists on makeshift wheelchairs are supported by a young, all-acoustic rhythm section and a 17-year old prodigy performing infectious guitar-like solos on a one-string electric lute he designed and built himself out of a tin can."

‘Benda Bilili’ means ‘look beyond appearances’. Their music is at once melancholic, funky and playful. Their songs talk about Congolese life – being a street kid, the need to vaccinate your kids against polio, and the importance of family and African pride. My favourite song is called ‘Tonkara’ (Cardboard): 

I once slept on cardboard

Good luck hit me, I bought myself a mattress

It can happen to you, to him, to them

A man is never finished

Chance can hit you without warning

It’s never too late in life

Someday I’ll make it too 

Staff Benda Bilili on My Space

Imogen Prickett is an aid worker, communicator, writer, blogger & photographer living in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Guest Gemma: Fill in the blanks

 

Mary asked me to write for Beaut Commute and I thought ‘Yay!’.

Then I thought ‘Hmmm… I don’t really commute in a useful way for this blog’, given that the offices I’ve generally spent the most time in down in Wellington are either my own living room, or a two-block walk away. I’m a contractor; whoever gets me, gets the benefit of my commute.

Last year, I did have an office in Auckland that was a little further from home, and, Auckland being Auckland, it would have involved two inconvenient buses to get there. Instead, I shared rides with my production manager, editors, fellow producer, sometimes our presenter, all of whom were guaranteed to have a great story to tell to pass the time.  Car-pooling rules.

Then I thought further. Carbon footprint guilt aside, I’ve flown an awful lot in the past two years. Mainly domestically, for work and for gigs, but several times internationally, for love. Though the international travel will hopefully slim down in the future as I settle into a new life in a big old city with a real train service (and the real New Yorker), for now, domestic flights are still a fact of life for my various careers.

In New Zealand, the longest single flight (Auckland to Dunedin) takes 1 hour and 50 minutes. Most of the rest fall somewhere between 35 mins (Wellington to Nelson) and an hour (Wellington to Auckland). It’s not really long enough to do much. By the time you’ve waited for the seatbelt light to go off, the turbulence to settle down and the cuppa and biscuit, you’ll have run out of time to do much more than scan a short script, write half a set-list or listen to Act One of This American Life.  

All of which are fine pursuits.

However. After years of experimentation with these journeys, I’ve figured out the single best use of time on a domestic New Zealand flight.

Crosswords.

Cryptic crosswords, preferably.

There’s really nothing as satisfying as sitting above the clouds, chewing the end of a pen, wondering which letters in a clue have been muddled, mixed, cooked, chewed, unsettled or organised into an anagram.

It’s especially satisfying when the crossword is in a recycled newspaper that you’ve rescued from the large bins that sit in the air-bridge just before boarding. And this, ladies and gents, is my special secret tip. Across the country, every morning, there are people with lounge privileges who sweep through, grab their free paper, read half a section of it before falling asleep over the Cabinet papers they were supposed to be reading on the way to Parliament or wherever, only to chuck the entire newspaper in the bin at the end of the journey.

Don’t let them go to waste! Get in there, rifle around until you find the sections you need, and you’re away laughing and $1.80 richer.

My favourites are the NZ Herald Cryptic and Code Cracker, and the Dominion Post’s 9-Letter, which appeals to the anagrammist within me. (Is there such a thing as anagrammist? Ooh, how about anagramazon?)

I’m not a Sudoku gal, so I tend to share that page with somebody who is (there’s always somebody who is, so be generous). But I loooove the Code Cracker, when the Cryptic is just getting a little hard, or stupid. (Yup, cryptic crosswords do have stupid, unchallenging clues from time to time.) Filling in the Code Cracker blanks has an appeal on a par with getting a really, really wrinkly shirt into shape with a deliciously hot iron.

Recently, something happened that I’m not sure I like the idea of. The NZ Herald’s puzzles turned up online. I went online to have a crack at them, and I’m not convinced. For starters, the Code Cracker already had the first two letters filled out across the puzzle. There goes the pleasure of that little job. The Crossword, on the other hand, was a breeze. I can never seem to do the straight ‘synonym’ crosswords on paper, but online it took me less than five minutes to finish one. But this is partly because the squares change colour as you go (yellow if the letter is wrong, blue if it’s right). This all seems a bit cheat-y.

But not quite as cheat-y as the Dominon Post, which provides the answers to its daily (synonym) crossword online,on the day the crossword comes out!

Call me old-fashioned (go on!), but I reckon if you can call up the answers on the day of the puzzle, there’s no fun in it for anyone.

Which is why doing crosswords on airplanes is great, because even with your fancy-pants iPhones and Blackberries, you have to switch to ‘flight mode’, making the answers inaccessible. So you might as well get your hand in that recycle bin, ask the air steward for a pen, and do it the old-fashioned way.

And thankfully, neither the Herald nor the DomPost’s cryptic crosswords are online yet. So you’re going to have to reach for the pen anyway.

Gemma G 

Gemma Gracewood is a writer, film and television producer, musician with the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra and anagramazon.