Hanging with the suits
22nd August 2009
In the movie Apollo 13 there is a moment when Tom Hanks’ companions, their ruptured sardine can disintegrating around them, urge him to turn for earth. “No,” declares Hanks with authority, “the only way back is to go forward, to encircle the moon, use its gravity to slingshot us back to earth.”
Whether or not this idea is scientific it is a beautiful image: the crippled spacecraft spiralling like a cue ball towards the vortex, only to ricochet off the cushion.
Other large objects demonstrate the same astrophysical properties as the moon. Like Wellington for example. Wellington is a crouching black hole at the centre of our small kiwiverse. On any day of the working week it drags hundreds nay, thousands, of small black objects into its maw, swirls them through the gravitational field and slingshots them back to their points of origin. These small objects are suits – men and women of business and public service - the penitents and lackeys, the voluptuaries and petitioners, flung like fistfuls of stardust down the gullet of the great cosmos.
Lately I find myself in the company of the suits – suit myself, in fact. A professional entanglement has me travelling regularly to Wellington; rising in darkness, driving in darkness, flying in darkness to arrive over Wellington’s shiny surfaces about the same time as dawn.
Like any neophyte striving to assimilate I am a keen observer of the ways of the suits. I have learned to take a complementary newspaper in the departure lounge to create a small cone of silence around myself while awaiting the boarding call. I have discovered how to detach from the indignity of security checks to the point where the time and space from ticketing to gangway are a small repressed memory.
I notice how a day in Wellington affects the demeanour and appearance of the suits. At dawn, as we disgorge from the Boeing into Wellington airport’s carpeted thoroughfare, we are crisp and purposeful. Conversation, such as may be, is pitched to the purpose of the day. Our minds move forward. We are tall and steely-eyed.
Returning to the airport at 5.00pm we are crumpled, darkened and diminished. We have been cut down to size by Wellington’s unrelentingly vertical landscapes, starved of natural light and oxygen in a thousand windowless offices, over-starched on catered lunches and a million cardboard coffee cups.
We gather like Peter Jackson’s Ringwraiths around the airport bar. We are almost all men here, black and flapping. Our armpits reek, shoulders sag. If anybody has clinched a deal today or saved the planet they’re not letting on. There is fatigue, but also nervous, repressed energy, fuelled by happy hour, strip lighting and an edgy PA announcer ticking off latecomers.
Into this scene walk a pair of young women, red and blond splashes of colour among the monochrome suits. They buy drinks and perch like birds of paradise at a high riser. The blonde raises her Corona to her lips, baring her throat. Thirty men pretend not to notice. Tension rises like a wave.
The man opposite me really does not notice. He is a big fat slob, spilling out of his chair. He has an open book in one hand while the other wrestles with a plastic-wrapped sandwich the size of a fire log, one of those industrial nourishments that is impossible to tell where the packaging ends and the food begins. He fidgets, twitches, jaws his sandwich, sprays food, adjusts his spectacles – filthy spectacles.
I flee for the departure lounge. In the concourse I have a celebrity moment. Coming towards me is somebody who used to be famous, and whom I knew before that. I seize his hand. “Michael Cullen! It’s Peter Verstappen. I was in your history class at Otago in 1978.”
He recoils. “I am not Michael Cullen.”
Oops! I think quickly, people are staring. “Actually, I’m not Peter Verstappen either, but golly don’t we look like them.”
Down the glide towards the koru club I see another familiar face, Mid-Canterbury’s own Don McLeod. At least I think it is, but I’m wary now. The Don catches my eye, grins and greets me. Phew! It seems I am Peter Verstappen after all.
I edge my way into my seat on the Boeing, the undesirable middle seat. A very large suit hulks by the window but the aisle seat is free. I adopt the pose of maximum privacy, elbows close, head in a book. Other suits settle around me like crows to their perches. At the last moment the big fat slob pours himself into the aisle seat, spraying mayonnaise and dandruff. It dawns on me that the 737 is so named for its seating configuration. I am a very small 3 between two large 7s.
We rumble down the tarmac and Wellington’s slingshot projects us into the darkness. The sea rolls below.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
No recession for Bumpy
8th August 2009
Researchers in England claim that a cat manipulates its owner to feed it by miaowing in the same register and tone as a newborn baby. The argument is that the cat appeals to our deepest mothering instincts, compelling us to reach for the Whiskas.
This is rubbish. As any cat owner knows, we feed our cats because if we didn’t they would make life hell for us. What they have in common with babies is a talent for persistent aggravation and an unerring faith that their needs will be met. I know this because I live with Bumpy.
Bumpy (real name Felix) appears to base his worth and status within our household on the old legal maxim that possession is nine tenths of the law. He possesses our property more ardently than any other member of the household, spending at least 20 hours of every day asleep on the sofa in the living room, and the remaining 4 riding shotgun on a fence rail outside the laundry window, which is permanently ajar as his drawbridge and portcullis.
I warm slowly to dogs but have always lost my heart to cats. Bumpy is neither the most intelligent nor useful cat I have ever owned. Owned? I should say ‘butlered’, for we are mere servants to our cats.
The cat of my childhood, Tiger, was a swashbuckling tyrant. One-eyed and ragged-eared he ruled every other living thing on the property – human and creature. Tiger could snap a rat’s spine with a casual toss of his head. He could reduce a henhouse to a nervous twitter just by peering around the doorjamb and I once saw him render a full grown possum into carpet in a matter of minutes.
Bumpy’s talents lie elsewhere, just beyond the reach of human understanding. He neither hunts nor fights. He does not breed (but that’s not his fault) or bristle. He is paunchy and so tremendously flat-footed that when he gallops down the hallway it sounds like the cavalry, a trait that earned him his nickname.
Despite these failings he maintains the insouciantly casual genius of an idiot savant – minus the savant.
To his credit Bumpy is neither neurotic nor evil-tempered, both of which can be failings in cats. I once shared a student hovel in Leith Street, Dunedin with a pumpkin-coloured cat named Demolition who was so terrified of the world he spent his days hiding in the mailbox. He died of a heart attack one morning when the postman delivered the power bill.
Bumpy’s single expression of ill will is towards the venus fly trap that occupies a windowsill next to his favourite sofa. He and the fly trap are food chain rivals, and evidence proves the fly trap is rather better than Bumpy at catching flies. Bumpy retaliates by raiding the water dish in which the fly trap’s plant pot resides. He appears to understand that the fly trap, being of swamp origin, will suffer if the dish is dry. Standing on his hind legs Bumpy can just reach the windowsill to lap the water in the dish. If caught in the act he will desist and gallop from the scene, grinning.
Bumpy’s sole talent and saving grace is the charm, unique to cats, of relaxation. With the unerring persistence of a heat-seeking missile he pursues me through the house until I sit. In seconds he has settled into my lap, his head stretched up towards my chest, his gaze somewhere between condescension and rapture, willing me to stroke him.
Perhaps the English researchers were referring to a cat’s purr, for who can resist stroking the softly purring head of a cat? It touches something very deep. It calms and soothes and shoulders away the cares of the world.
We live in difficult times, pitched upon the seas of economic recession, social disorder and environmental decay. Our lives are filled with uncertainty. But there is no recession for Bumpy and each time I recline in my armchair he will be there to continue educating me in life’s true lessons.
8th August 2009
Researchers in England claim that a cat manipulates its owner to feed it by miaowing in the same register and tone as a newborn baby. The argument is that the cat appeals to our deepest mothering instincts, compelling us to reach for the Whiskas.
This is rubbish. As any cat owner knows, we feed our cats because if we didn’t they would make life hell for us. What they have in common with babies is a talent for persistent aggravation and an unerring faith that their needs will be met. I know this because I live with Bumpy.
Bumpy (real name Felix) appears to base his worth and status within our household on the old legal maxim that possession is nine tenths of the law. He possesses our property more ardently than any other member of the household, spending at least 20 hours of every day asleep on the sofa in the living room, and the remaining 4 riding shotgun on a fence rail outside the laundry window, which is permanently ajar as his drawbridge and portcullis.
I warm slowly to dogs but have always lost my heart to cats. Bumpy is neither the most intelligent nor useful cat I have ever owned. Owned? I should say ‘butlered’, for we are mere servants to our cats.
The cat of my childhood, Tiger, was a swashbuckling tyrant. One-eyed and ragged-eared he ruled every other living thing on the property – human and creature. Tiger could snap a rat’s spine with a casual toss of his head. He could reduce a henhouse to a nervous twitter just by peering around the doorjamb and I once saw him render a full grown possum into carpet in a matter of minutes.
Bumpy’s talents lie elsewhere, just beyond the reach of human understanding. He neither hunts nor fights. He does not breed (but that’s not his fault) or bristle. He is paunchy and so tremendously flat-footed that when he gallops down the hallway it sounds like the cavalry, a trait that earned him his nickname.
Despite these failings he maintains the insouciantly casual genius of an idiot savant – minus the savant.
To his credit Bumpy is neither neurotic nor evil-tempered, both of which can be failings in cats. I once shared a student hovel in Leith Street, Dunedin with a pumpkin-coloured cat named Demolition who was so terrified of the world he spent his days hiding in the mailbox. He died of a heart attack one morning when the postman delivered the power bill.
Bumpy’s single expression of ill will is towards the venus fly trap that occupies a windowsill next to his favourite sofa. He and the fly trap are food chain rivals, and evidence proves the fly trap is rather better than Bumpy at catching flies. Bumpy retaliates by raiding the water dish in which the fly trap’s plant pot resides. He appears to understand that the fly trap, being of swamp origin, will suffer if the dish is dry. Standing on his hind legs Bumpy can just reach the windowsill to lap the water in the dish. If caught in the act he will desist and gallop from the scene, grinning.
Bumpy’s sole talent and saving grace is the charm, unique to cats, of relaxation. With the unerring persistence of a heat-seeking missile he pursues me through the house until I sit. In seconds he has settled into my lap, his head stretched up towards my chest, his gaze somewhere between condescension and rapture, willing me to stroke him.
Perhaps the English researchers were referring to a cat’s purr, for who can resist stroking the softly purring head of a cat? It touches something very deep. It calms and soothes and shoulders away the cares of the world.
We live in difficult times, pitched upon the seas of economic recession, social disorder and environmental decay. Our lives are filled with uncertainty. But there is no recession for Bumpy and each time I recline in my armchair he will be there to continue educating me in life’s true lessons.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)