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Roger Rabbits with |
It’s damned confusing. The seasonal body clock’s all to hell, all out of sync. Has spring already sprung or is it still tightly coiled, but about to ‘sproing’?
I am taking my cue from a blackbird, who, with his bright orange beak and yellow eye rings, is leaping up and down excitedly on my deck trying to tell me the seasonal change is done.
Spring HAS sprung.
Persephone, I call him, for the Goddess of Spring.
And it’s hard to argue with his shrill rising ‘squees’ and ‘readle-eaks’ like a rusty gate. Blackbird seems to sense something – perhaps some mating, some ‘lerv’, nesting, a family.
He senses spring.
Meteorologically, the seasons are compartmentalised into tidy three-month blocks. So spring started September 1.
The astronomical way means the vernal equinox is two weeks tomorrow. I am sure some Dan Corbett-type will tell me that’s all wrong.
I will go with the blackbird. And the daffodil patch, beneath the arching trees, on the edge of a sprawling traffic island on Chapel St.
One day there’s nothing there, it’s been mown flat. The next day, a brilliant burst of colour, the colour of spring.
“She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,
She wore her greenest gown,
She turned to the south wind,
And curtsied up and down.”
JM Barrie captured it.
“She turned to the sunlight,
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbour,
Winter is dead.”
New growth
Winter is dead, the gloom has lifted, there’s new growth, lots of new growth.
Not just daffodils but bricks and mortar. Tauranga is blossoming.
There’s a construction crane on the CBD skyline, a foundation drilling rig towering above the building site hoardings on The Strand. There are hard hats everywhere. Spring has brought growth on many levels.
Stuff is happening. And the Commissioners must gaze down from HQ on Cameron Rd and feel deservedly smug.
At 6.02 this morning, a big rig laden with huge laminated timber sections pulled up to 90 Devonport Rd – the skeleton of
NZ’s largest mass timber office building.
It’s an artwork in progress.
Just down the road, the $50 million redevelopment of 2 Devonport Rd – 14,000m2 and 10 levels of retail, office and high-end apartments. Things are going up, and one is coming down.
In Harington St, the inglorious ‘transport hub’ – a monument to a previous council’s folly, is being picked apart without a car ever parking there.
We’ll feel better when that blight’s gone. A pop-up art gallery has sprouted from all the dead wood at the bottom of Devonport Rd. I spied it while cycling one Sunday morning. The curator that morning, an effervescent Brazilian woman, threw open the doors and beckoned the lycra, helmet and sweat in to see some Peata Larkin and Alexis Neal works.
So a Brazilian, an old ‘honky’ and Maori art – a full, unexpected, bacon and beans, cultural Sunday breakfast. Suddenly the CBD is exciting.
I questioned the need for a basketball court downtown on Dive Crescent. But the constant ‘thwunk’ of a ball rebounding off the ring reminds me I was very, very wrong. Young people and basketballs gravitate from nowhere at the oddest of times.
Tidal steps? Who would come to the centre of town for a swim? I was wrong again. It was an inspirational call.
But it was the Commission signing off on its greatest ‘gift’ to the city – Te Manawatakiu o Te Papa, the heartbeat of Te Papa, that got this heart thumping – $306.3 million worth of grand new civic precinct rising from the dark hole where nasty, creeping, toxic black mould spores sent council staff scuttling for safe ground on Cameron Rd.
It will be entertainment in itself watching this edifice rise from the ashes – new library, new museum, new community hub and new civic whare – and upgrades to the art gallery and Baycourt. Soon we’ll start looking and feeling like the country’s fifth biggest city.
6000 people
And while you’re beating off all the critics – please Commissioners, put the rooftop restaurant back on the agenda.
For a few extra ‘mil’ we could be sucking on elegant Pisco Sours, snacking on elegant baked crab and avocado dip hors-d’œuvres, while listening to deep funky mood music and taking in a Caribbean-type sunset over Tauranga Harbour from our new rooftop restaurant.
It’s projected 6000 people a day will visit the new civic precinct and many will want more than sausage rolls and club sandwiches.
Let’s give them a new high-end Tauranga experience, wring the visitor dollars out of them and send them home with wonderful promotional stories about a wonderful city.
Perhaps that’s what blackbird’s all chirpy about. Let’s called the rooftop restaurant Persephone.
