Wellington

Office view

My new office (as of a couple of months ago) has a number of drawbacks, not least of which is that, being on the port side of the railway station, it's miles away from most of the good bits of central Wellington when compared with my previous location on Willis Street.

On the other hand, there are some compensations. This is the view from the meeting room I spent the day in. It could be worse.

Danger! Danger! Do not touch the streams!

There's something about this sign that I love; I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it's that the language is less imperative than most signs of this sort. There's something about seeing the word "inadvisable" in a context where I would normally see "forbidden" or some more prosaic variation thereon that appeals to me.

It was the breaded turkey dinosaurs that finally did it. They were served to my two-year-old son Eddie by the cafe at a children’s farm in the Cotswolds and they were, in every way, disgusting: they had the texture of cardboard-covered sawdust, just less of the flavour. The only similarity they had to food was that, if eaten, they wouldn’t kill you, at least not immediately. Here we were, at a visitor attraction famed for its child friendliness.

Man, this all sounds so familiar. “Child-friendly” is so predictably a euphemism for “shit.” I’m wouldn’t necessarily go to the extent of heading for the most adventurous restaurant I can find by way of avoiding the problem, but I’ve certainly found that Ada is pretty consistently more willing to give non-stereotypically unchallenging food a go than one might be led to believe by “child-friendly” menus. Blue cheese, parmesan, dark chocolate, porter beer? Yum, yum!

(I hasten to add that the porter, unlike the others on that list, is not an especially common treat.)

There are actually heaps of restaurants (and, for that matter, cafes) in Wellington that are kid friendly and not shit. You have to avoid the stereotypically Anglo-Saxon establishments that seem to have picked up a snotty Victorian English “seen and not heard” view of the world, but Le Metropolitan on Cuba Street, Scopa, the Victoria Street Cafe, Manon in Newtown have all been excellent places to take Ada and have contributed greatly to her ability to eat out in a civilised fashion.

A child getting cancer sucks. It gets a little bit suckier for those of us down the bottom of the North Island, since it turns out the Wellington health board aren’t competent to run a cancer service. Going through 10 specialists in ten years does not, I’m sorry, indicate that the hospital doesn’t have a big enough catchment area. It indicates the organisation aren’t competent to manage specialists.

I was hoping not to have another run of funerals like the one I had last year. The start of the year is not lending me any confidence on that score.

It’s more than a little aggravating that this has been known about for a while.

It’s even more aggravating to think that for the a cost that will likely be a fraction of the cost of saving this one crash victim we could avoid the problem all together.

Now, I’m going to pull some numbers out of my arse, to a certain extent. I haven’t noodled around ACC or hospital data in any real way, so these are very off-the-cuff numbers, indeed, more indicative than anything else.

I’ve been told by people that fix broken people that a simple broken bone—simpler than my arm—costs the health system a good ten grand or so to fix; that’s the cost of medical salaries, ambulances, materials, physio, and so on. That’s for a simple case. More complex cases tend to cost more—my own arm would have been at least two to three times that (4 months in plaster, 9 months all up, including 5 months of therapy). That cost for my arm didn’t require surgical intervention—for a shattered pelvis, leg, and whatnot, we’re into the realms of very expensive orthopaedic surgeons, theatre staff, and anaesthetist, plus potentially significant amounts of highly skilled rehab work; a cost could easily escalate from tens of thousands into the realms of six figure sums.

That doesn’t cover the ACC cost for anyone out of a job for any length of time, or sickness benefit for someone who’s long term disabled. The former can run up to $60,000 pa (the amount it’s capped at); the latter runs to a rather more modest $15,000 pa, plus any accommodation costs, and any costs of ongoing healthcare. If you end up spending twenty years on a sickness benefit because you’re too badly injured to work, that’s a nice, fat $300,000, minimum, as a cost.

Before going any further, I should note that I’m not speculating on these costs because I begrudge them; quite the contrary, I’m very pleased to live in a country where we take at least some minimal care of one another, and I can only describe myself as bemused by the sorts of things I see out of the States, to provide a handy counter-example.

No, what incenses me is that this was a very avoidable situation: all it would require to have prevented this are a couple of robust gates. Now, I know civil engineering projects can cost a bit more than slapping something together in your back yard, but what do you reckon it would cost to put together a pair of metal gates that are closed by the last bus to run through every night. Ten grand? Twenty? Fifty, at the outside? If it had avoided this situation it would not only avoid a personal tragedy for EJ and his friends and family, but it would have paid for itself several times over.

A little money spent, a lot saved, and a bunch of heartache avoided. There’s no good reason not to.

Another point I’d make is what I loathe about proposals for CCTV cameras in the name of security and safety. Yes, it’s great if there are cameras that help identify offenders. But cameras aren’t going to fix the injury here; they are not a mechanism for crime prevention, in the way that, say, beat police officers are.

Oh, and to head off the inevitable smart-arse response: yes, by not walking down a non-pedestrian tunnel you are less likely to get run over. This is also true if drivers don’t belt through one illegally and manage to not notice a person walking through it, too[1], and if the ones who do hit you don’t leave you to die. If you wish to engineer for how the world ought to function then please, by all means, start in your own back yard; people ought to respect your home and possessions, so feel free to leave your doors and windows open when you leave the house.

[1] The lack of noticing such a thing leaves me with little confidence that the driver in question would notice equally obvious road hazards like, say, people using a pedestrian crossing.

The Lady Norwood Rose Garden is one of the nicer parts of Wellington, especially with a small child, who can run around, sniff flowers, and enjoy the ducks. One upgrade since last time I visited is the addition of some informative plaques—the most notable to me being that the gully in which the garden resides was carved out of the hill over the course of 3 years by a Great Depression-era public works program.

It’s funny how different people can have such different experiences with a place. Wellingtonista are bitching about Esspresoholic; not in the normal fashion I encounter since I moved here 15 years ago because you get cool points for emphasising that you stopped going there when they moved from Willis Street to Courtney Place, but because, apparently, the service sucked for someone.

I will tempt fate by saying this is something I’ve never hit there. In fact, I’ve been rediscovering the place with some joy; a dozen or so years ago I’d hang out there at 3 or 4 in the morning when it was one of the few places still open, or go in during the evening for the delicious-but-pricey food.

Fast forward to now and the food is still delicious (mmmmmm, nachos), still arives in great mounds I struggle to finish (mmmmm, cheesecake), but since their prices don’t seem to have altered in the intervening decade they’ve moved from expensive-but-good to reasonable-but-good. Seriously, when “toast and spreads” in most of Wellington gets you a couple of hunks of bread, a gruding amount of butter, and one flavour of spreadable goo for your $4-$5, it’s nice to get half a dozen spreads and a pile of toast. And, like I say, best. cafe. nachos. ever. And their ever-delicious desserts.

And, most importantly, bonus points for being one of the select few cafes where the staff actually pay attention when I order a fluffy for my daughter, and grasp that an 18 month old does not have the abaility to drink them safely if the person behind the counter heats them to the point they’d blister skin. This is, sadly, an attribute that’s rarer than you’d think. Pointing out the unsuitability of scalding milk for toddlers and suggesting warm would be a better alternative produces annoying sulking at more than a few places.

I still love Esspressoholic even if the cool kids don’t.

I used to take the bus from my house in Hataitai to Willis Street for work, back in the first year I lived here. I eventually quit in frustration.

Now Ada’s in a creche by the Basin Reserve, and I’m still working on Willis Street, I’ve been taking long lunch breaks to trundle down and see her at lunch time. I thought I’d cut down on the time by grabbing a bus. Now I remember why I quit using them to commute.

• Walking is just as fast as taking a bus. If I walk from the northern end of Willis Street to the southern end of Kent Terrace it’s 20—30 minutes. If I take the bus, well, it take about the same time. And costs money.
• Most of this time is spent sitting in a goddamn bus shelter. I always used to end up walking 80% of the way home because the alternative was spending the same amount of time waiting for a bus.
• The whole thing of being in a vehicle with no seat belts and lots of bare metal surfaces that want to meet my face if we hit something gives me the shits. Especially when…
• Wellington bus drivers are a pack of wankers. Specifically:
  • All those dents on the buses. Ever think there’s some sort of correlation between the dents appearing and your habit of roaring along too-narrow streets at inappropriate speeds?
  • You know, the reason those people are waiting for your mostly empty bus is because it’s raining. Driving past is perhaps not what you’re being paid to do.
  • If you then ignore the next driver bellowing at you to stop over your bus-to-bus radio you don’t get bonus points. Not from the would-be customers.
  • Red lights are not optional.
  • Nor pedestrian crossings.

Buses are a fine idea. But, I submit, as implemented, they are a piss-poor way of getting around town.

I took Ada out for a walk around Mount Vic this morning and managed a few interesting photos on the way:

(Gadget bit: All shot with a Canon 350D and a Canon 55-200mm lens.)

We took Ada to the zoo for the first time, for which she was predictably uninterested; however there was a highlight: the zoo’s three Serval kittens are being walked around the zoo on leashes.