(painting Sarah Platt)
As I smoothly float my bubbleshaped baby-boomer Peugot 206 into Havelock North village, it really does seem to rise up to meet you like in this crappy painting, evoking the insiginificant but steady workings of a model railroad or the twee completeness of a dollshouse with electrical lights that really work.
Recently it has been intensely re-developed with a perfectly (/over)-designed village centre, which spreads out from this central roundabout and is backdropped by Te Mata peak.
It was the perfect town to grow up unsatisfied and frustrated in. I would get 50c worth of sour coke bottles at the Roundabout Dairy (talk about legibility) then dawdle up to meet Mum 100m up the road at the community library after school. Years later I would parade along the streets arrowing out from the roundabout with a gang of insecure girls with piercings and cutoff opshop clothes past the boys at the skatebowl until twilight when we would get a lift home with someone's parent.
Ten years later Hetz and I began a slightly different expedition into this charming country town - puttering into town in our borrowed wheels to buy a box of beer at the New World then meet up with her brother for some illicit-ish activities in Lipscombe Cres. We then patronised the so-exquisitely named BJ's cafe and lounge (commonly coined Fellatio Cafe by visiting ex-pats) for lunch then to Arizona (the seedy bar attached to the Tav) for a $10 "super"-jug. Which was actually just a litre. [.... Bristol 1: Tav 0].
(the entrance to the Arizona gaming lounge can be seen behind this avante garde sculpture)
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