Of Flamingoes & Castles
/Hello everyone! It’s been a mixed day. A very nice cheese company asked if they could share my Instagram post about cheese* and I became Instantly Very Impressed with myself and told the whole office** but then later on I drank a bug which was sitting on the rim of my beer, and unfortunately this was also in front of the whole office.
Mixed day.
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*and now I shall be adding ‘social media influencer’ to my linkedin profile because you can’t tell me what to do
**in hindsight, I believe they did not particularly care, but that is because they don’t understand the power of being a ‘social media influencer’.
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In more exciting news, last weekend I went to Oamaru!
Oamaru is a smallish South Island town (population 14,000) which has chosen to define itself by the two wildly differing items of ‘penguins’ and ‘steampunk.’
Its slogan is “Steampunk Capital of NZ” and there is a blue penguin colony 5 minutes from the city centre, which sounds great until you realise a) steampunk is an entertaining idea but a weird thing to base a town around and b) it costs $35 to perhaps see some penguin.
THIS IS THE CLOSEST I GOT AND I’M OK WITH IT
Oamaru is also quite fun because it is a town of two parts, but both in the same place; one one side of the street you have Kevin’s Tyres and Alignment (Servicing Waitaki District Since 1940, WOFs While You Wait) and opposite that you are suddenly in the Victorian Precinct and find yourself face-to-face with Dr Kano’s Fantastic Flight - Steampunk VR Experience! and a lady in a corset wanders out of the pub and toddles unsteadily back to the emporium she came from.
It’s also A Community Of Artists and some of them are more chill about it than others:
ITS NOT STUFF ITS ART” is the new subtitle of this blog
Personally I have never found ‘the customer can always pretty much get fucked’ to be a particularly successful business philosophy but what do I know, I’m not an artist.
Also I showed that photo to a friend and he said “Looks a lot like stuff to me”.
Anyway. I was not in Oamaru for the punk or the penguins or the passive-aggression, I was there for the House & Garden tour! For those of you who are not hip and youthful enough to have been on a House & Garden tour, the idea is that eight Private Houses (generally known to you and I as ‘houses’) are opened to the public, and you drive around them and wander through them and say things like “personally I find the mosaic in the third bathroom rather ostentatious” and “don’t you think feature walls are so 2000s, though?” and “oooh that’s not where I would have hung the Rothko”.
Normally it’s just a judgmental peek into fancy people’s lives but this Tour was particularly special as it featured a Castle. New Zealand doesn’t really have castles, so for us this is quite exciting. (I ask my large international following (hello you four!) to forgive us this naivete.)
Enter Dot Smith, creator and owner of Riverstone Castle.
As a child, Dot always wanted to live in a castle. So like most of us she grew up and she got married but, unlike most of us, she refused to confine her frankly fairly insane childhood dream to the Not Realistically Feasible Childhood Dreams Box Of Nostalgic Regret, and so she and her husband built a castle. It took a while because castles are expensive and every so often they ran out of money and had to put the whole castle thing on hold but EVENTUALLY THEY GOT THERE.
It has a moat, but it can’t have a drawbridge because of Health & Safety requirements.
Also the moat has inflatable flamingoes in it, because when you build a castle you can do whatever the fuck you want:
pictured: whatever the fuck
Dot spent years travelling around the world buying bits and pieces, here and there, for this pending castle. As a result the castle is filled to the brim with the most insane and eclectic arrangement of items and it is absolutely delightful to walk around because you can tell how much Dot loves it. It would drive me absolutely, completely insane to live in (“SJ, when did we last vacuum the orangery?”)
I saw, from memory, five suits of armour and I wasn’t even really keeping an eye out for them. There was a throne in the dining room. There was a whole sitting room just for chess. There enough taxidermied animals that you started to wonder if perhaps there was such a thing as too many taxidermied animals. There was a dungeon with a secret passage hidden behind a bookshelf, and the passage was painted with scenes of witches and made scary noises when you walked through it, and came out underneath the castle, on the shores of the flamingo-laden moat. Oh and you know that crockery where the plate looks like a cabbage leaf?
Whole corner of the kitchen DEDICATED to it.
YEP THAT’S THE FUCKEN ONE. ALSO THIS IS $85
The whole experience made me think perhaps I should give up on whatever my current ridiculous life goal is (on reflection, I have actually forgotten what it is, suggestions welcome) and build a castle. But then we went on to the next house which had a giant sculpture of a furious rabbit and that distracted me and now I probably won’t build a castle after all.
The rest of the tour was very nice but I shan’t tell you about it because a) we weren’t allowed to take photos inside the houses and I don’t know how much I can rely on your imagination and b) once you’ve seen the castle it’s very challenging for the rest of the tour to match that.
THIS CAME CLOSE THOUGH
However the entire House & Garden tour, castle included, was neatly eclipsed by a Decor Experience that we had on the way home.
We stopped in Winchester (population 265) for a cup of tea because, while it had not really been particularly long since we left Oamaru, my mother was there and without a cup of tea every 3 hours she is liable to deflate like a novelty balloon (unexpectedly and in a faintly humorous fashion), and my sister and I wanted to avoid this happening.
We stopped at a charming cafe, which was also the only cafe, and I ordered my coffee and my scone and I went to Use The Facilities and upon entering The Facilities I was confronted with the first of its kind, the Sitting-Room Toilet.
WHO ARE THE EXTRA CHAIRS FOR?
Initially I thought someone had made a terrible decor mistake (is very unnerving to do a wee in these surroundings, you keep looking at the chairs to make sure nobody has somehow come and sat on them) but then I thought perhaps there are applications, and I tried to imagine a scenario where this might be even vaguely appropriate, and I came up with:
You have imaginary friends, who accompany you everywhere and who you cannot bear to see uncomfortable;
You have no shame and many things to discuss;
You genuinely just think a toilet is an interesting sort of chair, and personally do all your wees in the garden;
You have two conjoined twins; you are joined to one at the arm, and they are joined to the third at the other arm;
You saw this once at an art exhibition in France and did not realise it was a Comment On Society and not a genuine bathroom setup;
You are an accomplished sideways urinator and like to put your feet up;
You bought too many chairs but were very clear with the salesperson that yes, you absolutely need this many, and now you have nowhere to put them but are too embarrassed to take them back.
And now it appears that I have come to the end of the post with no suitable end in mind, so in lieu of some sort of pithy comment that ties the whole post together I invite you to leave your own scenario where it is appropriate to have multiple plush toilet chairs in the comments.
(8. The toilet doesn’t actually go anywhere, you just moved your old toilet into the sitting room while you were remodelling the bathroom, and you have forgotten to put it back.)