Did you hear about Fat Tuesday?

My mother would tell me there  is “nothing new under the sun” which is her way of telling me that nothing I do surprises her anymore! Oh dear. It  also tells us that everything has its own history and terms we all take for granted have a much richer context than we realise. A fantastic example of this is the term Mardi Gras. When I think of Mardi Gras I think of New Orleans and Jazz music but all is not as it seems.

According to Credo, Mardi Gras comes from the French for ‘Fat Tuesday’! This comes from  the custom of using up all the fat in the household before the beginning of Lent (which started on Wednesday 13February this year). It represented the last opportunity for playing up and  indulging in food and drink before the solemn season of fasting. Hence the carnivals (from the Latin ‘to take away meat’) in many parts of the world, including Italy, Brazil and of course New Orleans.

It seems in my ignorance I have been practicing ‘Fat Tuesdays’ and Lent for a while –  I am forever gorging myself on food and then entering a period of repentance. Unfortunately my motives are not derived from a need to seek forgiveness but to just get back into the same pants I was wearing this time last year. The sin of gluttony and vanity are upon me so perhaps I should concentrate less on the festival aspect of life and more on the denial of Lent!

Sex and climate change

It’s high time that climate change got sexed up. Off the top of my head, I can think of no more effective passion killer than those two words introduced in the heat of the moment (as it were).

Of course the library has heaps of tomes on climate change and you are at liberty to wade your way through them. But I’m talking about fiction that uses the theme of climate change to entertain us and, believe it or not, this unlikely coupling exists. Christchurch Libraries has no fewer than thirteen adult fiction books on this theme and two of them are by authors with serious literary clout:

• Solar – Ian McEwan
• Flight Behavior – Barbara Kingsolver (Yes, we’ve bought the American copy with the funny spelling)

Both these books do the seemingly impossible: they connect the reader to environmental problems through the sexual antics of the main characters. In Solar, Michael Beard is a short, bald, unattractive-looking academic with enormous sexual pull. Don’t say you haven’t met any men like this because I nearly married one, and I don’t believe I’m that unusual. He does the Ecological Conference Circuit presenting papers on his specialisation: wind turbines for domestic use. If you’ve read other McEwan books, prepare to be taken by surprise, as this book is very, very funny.

In Flight Behaviour, Dellarobia is Kingsolver’s main character. She is a feisty young woman who has sexual longings of great intensity for men other than her rather endearing husband. This is not a sexually explicit book, but the yearning, the longing is palpable. She describes her marriage this way:

It’s like I’m standing by the mailbox waiting all the time for a letter. Every day you come along and put something else in there. A socket wrench, or a milkshake. It’s not bad stuff. Just the wrong things for me.

Behind her home on a  Tennessee smallholding, a massive colony of butterflies makes an unexpected appearance. This event, and its effect on the small town and Dellarobia, is conveyed absolutely beautifully: God’s Will is given a long leash and then reined ever so subtly in, Science comes out of its corner pulling no punches, and relationships shift before our very eyes. But at heart, this book is a song of praise for education. Dellarobia needed it – desired it even, but her school, her community and her fertility all conspired against her.

So how do these two books differ? In Solar, you learn about Michael Beard through the subject of climate change. In Flight Behaviour, you learn a lot more about the subject of climate change through Dellarobia. I loved them both.

Christchurch – this week in history (25 February – 3 March)

Exterior view of the Theatre Royal, Christchurch, prior to opening [1907]

25 February 1908
Theatre Royal opens. This is the building which exists today, the third to bear the name:

The people of Christchurch, in seeing the need to establish a venue for the local music society to perform, constructed the Music Hall on the original site in 1863. Then a visiting American actor conceived the idea of a theatre. This met with the approval of the society and in 1863 after some structural alterations the venue was re-opened and re-named the Royal Princess Theatre. Productions staged until the building’s demolition in 1876 included Shakespeare’s Richard II, King Henry IV, The Merchant of Venice, and other classics like Don Giovanni. The second theatre was opened eighteen weeks after the closure. The present Theatre Royal, which stands opposite the original site in Gloucester Street, opened 25 Feb. 1908 with a performance of The Blue Moon”. – The Press:, 4 Oct. 1905, p. 7/ 8; The Press, 26 Feb. 1908, p. 7.

25 February 1978
New Brighton Mall opens.

26 February 1938
Summit Road opens. Read more about Harry Ell and the Summit Road.

27 February 1964
Lyttelton road tunnel opens, New Zealand’s longest.

28 February 1853
Provincial boundary defined by proclamation. Westland (then called West Canterbury) included as part of Canterbury.

February 1851
First Avon bridge built – a footbridge at Worcester Street. It was destroyed in the 1868 flood.

February 1986
Radio UFM (located at University of Canterbury) becomes first station in Canterbury to be granted an FM warrant on a long term basis.

1 March 1930
Majestic Theatre opens – the city’s first steel frame building.

2 March 1970
Amid mounting controversy, City Council begins construction of road deviation through Hagley Park. The work was stopped by March 7 for legal reasons, and the project was eventually scrapped.

3 March 1862
First meeting of the Christchurch Municipal Council, which became the Christchurch City Council in November. John Hall elected Chairman, G. Gordon first Town Clerk.

More February and March events in our Christchurch chronology.

Farewell Ralph.

Ralph Hotere – The Artist’s Studio, Port Chalmers 1979 by Marti Friedlander

Ralph Hotere, 1931 – 2013.