The weekend after getting the nice letter giving us six weeks' notice we were being booted out we went to have a look at a couple of places. We quite liked the one in Khandallah, so we put in an appo. Rose had seen this other place out in Camborne advertised and went to see it the following Monday (or perhaps Tuesday, I forget). She and the kids were blown away, and so after much humming and hawing she put in an appo for that as well. We reckoned both of them would say fuck off the dog, but instead both accepted us. Even though I hadn't seen it, Rose decided on Camborne. We moved on Tuesday.
The first thing I thought when I saw it was that it was very ostentatious and crass. It is the Alatini's house after all (the kids knew who they were, but I had to google them, and so will you). It's just the primo location though. Every room has amazing views over the Pauatahunui Inlet, and the dining area and all the bedrooms have balconies off them. There's a path that feeds into the Camborne Walkway right next to us, which I walk along to catch the train each morning and take the dog down to in the evening. Rose has one picture up, but I think there'll be more coming.
One reason for the inordinate haste in shifting (which was nightmarish) was the old Film Fest, which opened last night with Hero - a lavish Hong Kong epic set in China over 2000 years ago. My favourite bit was probably the fight scene in the middle of the lake with them all flying about and bouncing off the water. It'd probably help knowing a bit more about Chinese colour symbolism as well - though it wasn't exactly subtle.
Tonight we went to Super Size Me, which no doubt - being a well-informed imaginary reader - you've already heard of. It was pretty bloody good. After we had the New Right revolution of the mid-80s, you'd get all these people arguing that the free market was the best way of organising every aspect of society because it was taken as given that that which made the most profit doing something was doing that thing in the most efficient way. I thought at the time that the food industry was the perfect example of why this was a load of shit. The way to make the most profit is not to provide good cheap nutritious food, but to make cheap (and preferably addictive) crap and hook as many people, and especially kids, into it. This film makes the case pretty bloody well. I might not eat meat, but I do eat a lot of crap - both convenience and fast food.
We had enough time to self-consciously grab some nice vegan food before The Motorcycle Diaries - Che's road trip around South America with his mate. It was this that deflected him from becoming a doctor specialising in leprosy. There was a scene where his mate asks him what he's going to do with his life and I half expected him to answer that he's planning on becoming a world famous revolutionary and twentieth century icon. The best bit was the photos from the actual 1952 trip in the end credits, though the film itself was bloody good as well.
And finally, the last word goes to a picture Matt sent back from LA:
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