How Men Do Shopping Malls
15th December 2007
For the last thousand years or so our urban landscape has been dominated by cathedrals. Today our dominant architectural form is the shopping mall.
There are many similarities between the mall and the cathedral. Both capture the prevailing values of their age – religion or consumerism; both are market places of a sort, their halls filled with celestial music and their display cases rich with icons.
But there is one crucial difference. The cathedral was an overwhelmingly male environment. The shopping mall is not.
Almost every man I know dreads going to a shopping mall. Males possess a deep, instinctive aversion to these glass and concrete celebrations of consumer joy. The men one sees in shopping malls are desperate creatures: huddled forlornly over cardboard coffee cups in the food court or trailing disconsolately behind revved up wives and girlfriends. The mall reduces the male to chauffeur, shopping trolley and cash cow.
Many of us come up with pretty good avoidance strategies, golf being the most common. Christmas, however, usually defeats us.
After years of careful study I’ve come up with a foolproof way for men to do shopping malls, so tune in guys and I’ll talk you through it.
Let’s start with the universal law of men and Christmas shopping. Despite having an entire year to carefully plan a shopping list the male never has a clue what he is going to buy. You must never enter a shopping mall in this state. Give yourself some time to think about gifts before you are confronted by the dread of all male shoppers – choice.
What I do is park half a block from the mall. The few minutes walk is plenty of time to get my ideas sorted.
It also gives me time to scout the fringes. There are always a few shops on the outer perimeter of a mall that are accessible without being sucked into the vortex. These can be a godsend for males.
If you can combine fringe shops with high speed purchasing – the natural reflex of the male – you are well on the way to success. I’ll give you an example. Last Saturday I conducted my annual visit to a mall. Through accidents of history I always go to The Palms in Christchurch. I arrived without a thought in my head of what to buy for whom. I parked and walked – still no inspiration. I rounded a corner of the building and there was my perfect fringe shop – Dick Smith.
As I passed its doors the vision of the perfect gift for Sylvia lit up in my head. I weighed it up, made my decision and entered the shop. This took about three nanoseconds. Inside the shop I wasted no time trying to find the product myself. A nice young man took me directly to it. We discussed the various models and options, I selected the one I wanted, paid for it and was back on the street within three minutes.
A problem with malls is that they never stay the same. I am sure The Palms has been rebuilt annually for the past ten years. The landmarks I relied on last Christmas have vanished this year. The exits have been moved, entire corridors have been added. There was always a sports shop (another high-value location for male gift shopping) just to the right of the main entrance. Now there is a clothing boutique (low value!).
In this confused state last Saturday I made a tactical error. I headed for the landmark big box retailer, in this case K-Mart. Every mall is anchored by one or two of these monstrosities. They squat like gargoyles at the most prominent places in the mall, highly visible and almost always a disaster for male shoppers.
They are staffed by dull youths dressed in ill-fitting corporate polo shirts earning $3.00 an hour. These kids are locked away in dark cupboards each night so they possess the complexion of three day old rice pudding and the mental acuity of a vacuum cleaner. They know absolutely nothing about anything in the shop, and furthermore they don’t care. Ask them a question, they shrug their shoulders, say you should “talk to John” and vanish.
On Saturday I was looking for a badminton set. I searched haplessly through K-Mart for 15 minutes, finding neither John nor badminton. I left empty-handed, to the disdain of the young man on security watch at the front entrance.
As well as failing to master the geography of malls I have never developed a resistance to the sensory bombardment of these places. I become hyperactive and over-excited. They should install Ritalin vending machines for people like me, but that’s the last thing they want to do - hyperactive people spend more money.
In this condition it’s vital for the male shopper to know when to cut his losses. On Saturday I stumbled across Rebel Sports, secured the badminton set, flashed through Whitcoulls and was back on the pavement without suffering permanent damage. A Salvation Army Band was playing at the exit. I put $10.00 in their bucket, sent up a small prayer of thanks and thought of cathedrals.
Happy Christmas.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Thursday, December 06, 2007
One Good Tern Deserves a Plover
I have endured some good-natured teasing from friends and acquaintances this week over a photograph of myself and Sylvia that appeared in Tuesday’s Guardian. If you did not see it – and I hope you didn’t – it shows us ankle-deep in the Ashburton River, dressed in gaiters, tramping shorts and (in my case) my daughter’s wide-brimmed school sunhat. Sylvia is peering through binoculars at an imagined point of focus somewhere off to the right, while I gesture wildly with out-flung arm, like Michelangelo’s Adam straining towards God.
A nineteenth century portrait artist would have painted out the river and invested the pose with a heroic Byronesque quality. In reality it was more like one of those satirical greeting cards. I imagine the caption: “after being lost for weeks in the wilderness Sylvia and Peter were astonished to see the same costume-hire shop they’d started from.”
Let me say that the photograph had a more serious purpose than simply to display us as objects of ridicule. We were on the Ashburton river to help with the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society’s annual bird count. I must also add that the photograph is completely fraudulent. At that time our involvement with Forest and Bird had been all of five minutes. We turned up to help with the bird count purely on a whim only to find ourselves hustled into the limelight by Ashburton’s merciless paparazzi.
Neither are we ornithological by nature. Any interest I had in birds was extinguished by a childhood in poultry. My father kept hundreds of hens, to whom I was enslaved as egg-collector, muck-raker and slaughterer; an experience that scarred me for life. Sylvia, growing up in the shadow of Liverpool’s docks, believed wildlife existed only in picture books until she came to New Zealand.
But we are fond of the outdoors and we joined the bird count mainly for the pleasure of spending a day strolling down the river. My expectations of actually counting birds were very low. Years of tramping have taught me that there are few birds in New Zealand’s great outdoors. There is a gulf between the iconic image of New Zealand as a country teeming with exotic bird life and the reality of bush and mountain landscapes where nothing moves or twitters except the occasional wood pigeon or fantail.
Like many who enjoy the mountains and bush my imagination has been captured at times by stories from early settlers in New Zealand describing vast flocks of wildfowl, forests shaking with birdlife and the deafening peal of the dawn chorus. A childhood hero was Richard Henry, New Zealand’s first genuine wildlife ranger, who fought the rising tide of rats and stoats in a doomed effort to save the kakapo of Dusky Sound.
For years I foolishly allowed myself to believe that the decimation of our native birdlife was firmly in the past. The publicity attached to heroic “snatched from the jaws of extinction” stories of the takahe, the kakapo and the Chatham Islands Robin suckered me into believing our wildlife’s darkest days were over.
Only recently, when I realised it has been years since I saw tui on Banks Peninsula, did I discover that life for our native bird populations is as bad as it has ever been – and often worse.
And we – humans – are the problem. We’re not always the immediate cause of birdlife decline - I believe the tuis of Banks Peninsula were devastated by the big snow of ’92 – but our activities, especially the destruction of habitat and food sources, are behind all the disasters.
Nowhere is this more true than in Canterbury where only tiny scraps of indigenous habitat remain and native birds eke out a poor existence on the fringes of highly modified environments. Efforts to revive and extend native ecosystems, creating ‘islands’ of bush and wetland that enable remnant populations of birds to connect, are taking shape and need urgent support.
With all this in mind we were delighted to find that the Ashburton River bed, while not exactly teeming with birdlife, is home to more varieties of birds than I imagined. By the end of the day I had recorded 19 species of birds, some in quite large numbers.
I enjoyed myself. I can now tell a tern from a plover, a stilt from an oystercatcher. I know that blue herons are really called white-faced herons and that a dotterel is not a thrush.
I discovered too that on a fine spring day, with wildflowers abundant and the sound of birdsong in the air, the Ashburton River bed possesses greater charm than I imagined. It will never become a tourist attraction but it’s a fine place to spend a little time, even in a silly hat and gaiters.
I have endured some good-natured teasing from friends and acquaintances this week over a photograph of myself and Sylvia that appeared in Tuesday’s Guardian. If you did not see it – and I hope you didn’t – it shows us ankle-deep in the Ashburton River, dressed in gaiters, tramping shorts and (in my case) my daughter’s wide-brimmed school sunhat. Sylvia is peering through binoculars at an imagined point of focus somewhere off to the right, while I gesture wildly with out-flung arm, like Michelangelo’s Adam straining towards God.
A nineteenth century portrait artist would have painted out the river and invested the pose with a heroic Byronesque quality. In reality it was more like one of those satirical greeting cards. I imagine the caption: “after being lost for weeks in the wilderness Sylvia and Peter were astonished to see the same costume-hire shop they’d started from.”
Let me say that the photograph had a more serious purpose than simply to display us as objects of ridicule. We were on the Ashburton river to help with the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society’s annual bird count. I must also add that the photograph is completely fraudulent. At that time our involvement with Forest and Bird had been all of five minutes. We turned up to help with the bird count purely on a whim only to find ourselves hustled into the limelight by Ashburton’s merciless paparazzi.
Neither are we ornithological by nature. Any interest I had in birds was extinguished by a childhood in poultry. My father kept hundreds of hens, to whom I was enslaved as egg-collector, muck-raker and slaughterer; an experience that scarred me for life. Sylvia, growing up in the shadow of Liverpool’s docks, believed wildlife existed only in picture books until she came to New Zealand.
But we are fond of the outdoors and we joined the bird count mainly for the pleasure of spending a day strolling down the river. My expectations of actually counting birds were very low. Years of tramping have taught me that there are few birds in New Zealand’s great outdoors. There is a gulf between the iconic image of New Zealand as a country teeming with exotic bird life and the reality of bush and mountain landscapes where nothing moves or twitters except the occasional wood pigeon or fantail.
Like many who enjoy the mountains and bush my imagination has been captured at times by stories from early settlers in New Zealand describing vast flocks of wildfowl, forests shaking with birdlife and the deafening peal of the dawn chorus. A childhood hero was Richard Henry, New Zealand’s first genuine wildlife ranger, who fought the rising tide of rats and stoats in a doomed effort to save the kakapo of Dusky Sound.
For years I foolishly allowed myself to believe that the decimation of our native birdlife was firmly in the past. The publicity attached to heroic “snatched from the jaws of extinction” stories of the takahe, the kakapo and the Chatham Islands Robin suckered me into believing our wildlife’s darkest days were over.
Only recently, when I realised it has been years since I saw tui on Banks Peninsula, did I discover that life for our native bird populations is as bad as it has ever been – and often worse.
And we – humans – are the problem. We’re not always the immediate cause of birdlife decline - I believe the tuis of Banks Peninsula were devastated by the big snow of ’92 – but our activities, especially the destruction of habitat and food sources, are behind all the disasters.
Nowhere is this more true than in Canterbury where only tiny scraps of indigenous habitat remain and native birds eke out a poor existence on the fringes of highly modified environments. Efforts to revive and extend native ecosystems, creating ‘islands’ of bush and wetland that enable remnant populations of birds to connect, are taking shape and need urgent support.
With all this in mind we were delighted to find that the Ashburton River bed, while not exactly teeming with birdlife, is home to more varieties of birds than I imagined. By the end of the day I had recorded 19 species of birds, some in quite large numbers.
I enjoyed myself. I can now tell a tern from a plover, a stilt from an oystercatcher. I know that blue herons are really called white-faced herons and that a dotterel is not a thrush.
I discovered too that on a fine spring day, with wildflowers abundant and the sound of birdsong in the air, the Ashburton River bed possesses greater charm than I imagined. It will never become a tourist attraction but it’s a fine place to spend a little time, even in a silly hat and gaiters.
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