Misinformation

Today I heard that Joe Cocker had died, and read that Richie Havens had. Rock stars' deaths have been coming so thick and fast lately that I duly noted both defunctions - then later thought, wait a minute, I'm sure I've written about Cocker's death, and didn't Havens die too? The answers are Yes (link here) and Yes (April 22, 2013). Follow the link within the link and you can enjoy k.d. lang's sublime rendition of A Case of You...  

Thriving

Sparrows - House Sparrows - are everywhere in Wellington, along with many other familiar English birds: Starlings, Blackbirds, Chaffinches, Goldfinches...  For a Londoner, being among an abundance of sparrows again is a joy. Central London has mysteriously lost almost all its sparrow population in the past couple of decades, for reasons no one has yet been able to figure. And London is not alone - Prague too has lost most of its sparrows, numbers are falling fast in Paris and Madrid, while in Berlin, oddly, sparrows are now largely confined to the East of the city (are they natural Communists?).
 One of the likeliest causes - though it can't be the only one - of sparrow decline is the sad loss of urban vegetation, as concrete, paving and decking take over (the insects that live on trees and shrubs are essential to the diet of growing sparrows). As Wellington is surely one of the lushest, greenest, most vegetation-rich cities in the world, the sparrows have nothing to fear on that score. Nor does Wellington have, as London does, a growing population of Sparrowhawks, raptors that live up to their name.
 Despite sparrows' abundance, their cheerful sociability and their apparently perfect adaptation to urban life (see this story, sent to me by the excellent Dave Lull), they are far more vulnerable than they might seem. Such is their intense gregariousness that once numbers fall below a certain level, colonies seem to collectively lose the will to live; they virtually cease breeding and decline into rapid colony collapse - hence the speed with which they disappear from once sparrow-rich areas. It's a sad story - but, by the look of things, one that's not going to happen in Wellington.

More to Like

One of the many things I like about this city of Wellington - and one of the most unexpected - is the wonderful variety of building styles, most of which have a distinctive charm and lightness about them. Away from the compact and (as such things go) architecturally inoffensive city centre, much of Wellington is built of wood - this is earthquake country - and spreads out across a range of almost impossibly steep hills. The oldest of the wooden buildings date back to the mid-19th century, but they are still being built today in essentially the same style - a wooden core, usually of one or two stories, with pitched roofs and gables topped with decorative finials, prettily detailed verandahs and balconies galore, usually painted white (the default colour of New Zealand cars too), often with very English sash windows and equally English stained-glass inserts, and luxuriant roses in the small front yards.

 Houses of this general style can be tiny cottages tucked between buildings on back streets, or grand seaside mansions, or anything in between (those in the picture above are towards the upmarket end); the style is infinitely adaptable and perfectly suited to Wellington.

These charming wooden houses give a curious Wild West feel to parts of the city, and that is enhanced by the covered sidewalks - verandahs supported by elegant decorative cast-iron columns - of many shopping streets. I've never been to San Francisco, but Wellington reminds many of that other steep, quake-prone city.
 Generally speaking, the grander buildings of the city don't become very interesting until the Twenties and Thirties, the Victorian and Edwardian efforts being provincial English in style - but with a happy lack of heavy and monumental buildings (the earthquake factor again).

With the discovery of Art Deco and its more frivolous sister Moderne, Wellington architecture came into its own, finding a light, cheerful, decorative and streamlined style that would adapt to everything from office buildings to cinemas, seaside apartments blocks to public buildings (e.g. the splendid Central Fire Station). Happily Wellington is aware of what it's got, and there is an official Art Deco heritage trail around the best of these delightful buildings.
 More recent developments have, predictably, been in the direction of International Bland modernism, but so much remains of Wellington's abundance of likeable, enjoyable buildings that the city retains its unique look and feel. Long may it do so.

Silvereye

Saw a couple of these little beauties in Wellington's Botanic Garden yesterday (where the Hydrangea dell is looking really spectacular just now). The bird is a New Zealand native, the Silvereye or Waxeye, or White-Eye, or Tauhou, and the pair dutifully appeared just yards from a notice telling visitors all about them. Perhaps they're on the payroll... I can report also that the museum in the garden's Carter Observatory, 'New Zealand's place for space', is excellent, the best of its kind I've seen, with explanatory interactive displays to please children and adults alike, lots of content - and, happily, plenty of attention given to Maori and other creation myths (which, of course, make far more sense than the science).

To England's Farthest-Flung Literary Shrine

Yesterday I made my way to the Wellington suburb of Thorndon to visit Katherine Mansfield House, the author's birthplace and childhood home. Who could resist the allure of a house described by Mansfield variously as 'that awful cubbyhole', 'the wretched letterbox in town' and 'that horrid little piggy house which was really dreadful'? She also described it as 'dark and crowded'. Dark it still is, and crowded it must have been: in the five years the family occupied it, three generations lived together in what is a modestly sized two-storey Victorian mini-villa - Katherine (née Kathleen Beauchamp) and her two sisters (more siblings were to come), her banker father, her mother, her maternal grandmother and two young aunts.
 The house, built all of New Zealand timbers, was restored in the 1980s and returned to its former layout, with original features preserved or faithfully reproduced and some Beauchamp furnishings reinstalled, along with family possessions, pictures, and a Katherine Mansfield archive. The result is an all too convincing re-creation of the kind of gloomy domestic setting the rebellious, self-dramatising and artistically inclined Katherine would have found intolerably oppressive - though, as she left this house at the age of five, she can hardly have formed any very strong opinion of it at the time.
 She did, however, remember the house quite vividly, and images from her early years there crop up in her short stories, especially the later ones where she returns to - and to some extent reconciles herself to - her New Zealand roots. It seems you could take the girl out of Wellington - or rather she could take herself out as soon as she was able, helped by a generous allowance from her father - but you couldn't take Wellington out of the girl. The early years, the home ground, can never be entirely escaped, are always in some way fertile soil, however contemptible the setting might have seemed at the time. In Katherine Mansfield's case, it was the death of her beloved brother Leslie in the Great War that proved the catalyst, turning her stricken mind and imagination back to scenes from her early years in Wellington and inspiring some of her finest writing (At the Bay, The Garden Party, Prelude, etc). In these she took a very European form of short story, transported it to the alien soil of New Zealand - and created some of the most brilliantly effective stories of the 20th century. Reluctant Kiwi and eager exile though she was, you could say that with her writings New Zealand first became a locus of world, rather than provincial, literature.
 Katherine was very fond of flowers - her writings are full of them - and the gardens of her childhood home have been restored and replanted, very pleasingly, with 1890s favourites. When I came out of the house I walked round to the small back garden - and there was a Monarch butterfly, feeding on a tall Viburnum, looking every bit as exotic and out of place in suburban Wellington as the young Katherine Mansfield must have done.

A Burning Question for Today

How many butterfly species occur in New Zealand? (Don't pretend you don't care, you know this matters...) My Butterflies of New Zealand (1970) lists a mere 17, and this seems to be the core species quotient, but figures vary - happily in an upward direction - and Wikipedia lists 26. Very much larger numbers of New Zealand moths have been identified, but lepidopterists agree that there are probably at least 200 more moth species yet to be described. What's more, the list of butterflies might eventually add up to something like 70 (more than the UK), including 25 new species of Copper - the research has yet to be done.
 The fact is that, across all of Nature and all of the world - even Britain - new species are being discovered all the time. This story from India illustrates one of the ways in which this happens. Estimates of the number of species on the planet vary so widely that it's safe to conclude that no one really has any idea, except that it's very, very big. Even today, there are great swathes of the most aboundingly biodiverse parts of the world where nobody has seriously looked. And the other side of the story is that species previously thought extinct also keep popping up again, alive alive oh. Here - also from India - is the latest. There is no real certainty about either the number of species or how many of them are extinct. The world is always infinitely more complex and much less known than we think.

Larkin's Girl

I've just noticed that a piece I wrote about Philip Larkin's remarkable novel A Girl in Winter is up on The Dabbler.