#82 🥃 Must be something in the WATER 💧

Journal 📖

For a time, I lived in one of the greatest nexus flats in Wellington. It was a weatherboard-clad home on Adelaide Road in Newtown, with wide hallways and two categories of bedroom: delightfully massive and comfortably medium. Friends and friends of friends had occupied it for over a decade, to the extent that our extended friend empire could probably claim collective ownership. It was interwoven with the threads of a thousand relationships.

Five of us lived there. Newtown Rocksteady used to practise there in the biggest room, which was partly set up as a recording studio, often at the same time as another band across the hall. My room was in the middle, and to actually be inside the making of music was wonderful, even if the beat or genre didn’t always coalesce in harmony.

I met my wife Vic there. She lived in a room down the hall. Vic was an entrenched night owl who started getting up early just to walk to work with me, and it went from there. The Adelaide Road flat was a place where you might notice the sun peeking in through the curtain gaps and only then realise you had neglected to sleep. It was a place where people created high-calibre clothing, art, and music quite casually, like an afterthought. It was a place where I learned what quinoa was, and how to pronounce it, and what an Ayurvedic diet is (and that if I followed one, I would become so skinny so as almost to disappear).

It was a place where stories all but wrote themselves.

I loved nearly all of it.