Diary: Ted Reynolds

Too hard to come to terms with city life

By TED REYNOLDS

Walking to the supermarket yesterday, I noticed a wood pigeon perched on a power line. It looked as casual and unconcerned as a sparrow.

On the way back, two more pigeons had joined it.

Wood pigeons are famously torpid. They cram their crops with fuchsia berries and grow goofy with overeating.

January is too early for fuchsia berries, but these wood pigeons seemed confident that no one would harm them. The closer I got the more friendly they held their eyelids closed.

I began to imagine how easy it would be, if only I had a long kereru spear, to get a barbed tip up close, and then how simple to give a sharp shove and to bring down an impaled bird, blood and feathers flying, and the air curdled with squawking protest.

But this is north Dunedin, where bush and city intermingle and we humans are a bit up ourselves. We keep our hedges neat, we keep our gardens orderly.

We do not kill things here. The wood pigeons are as safe as the ducks that clamber out of the Water of Leith and promenade along the footpath.

When I bought a house in north Dunedin the land agent said how smart I was; all my neighbours would be doctors or professors.

Certainly the university has put its stamp on the neighbourhood. In term time we old dears gaze in dread as kids wearing rugby shorts, T-shirts and dreadlocks whizz down terrible slopes on their skateboards, risking death at every corner.

And at the end of every year students clutter the footpaths with seasonal squalor as the essentials of study are chucked out for dustmen to cart away: clapped-out double beds, washing machines, TVs, fridges and crates of Speight's empties.

Now that the first semester is about to begin, the front windows of every student flat bears a notice: "Taken for Y2K," or "Flat Available."

Dunedin is rising from its vacation slumber - and I am fleeing Dunedin.

After about nine years on a 20ha vineyard, a tiny garden appealed.

So that's what I bought - barely a metre between the walls and the fence - and I hate the constraint. I hate the maples and beeches that block the sun. (Sun? What sun?) I cannot abide the order and restraint of the city.

So I'm shifting out to the Otago Peninsula, to 0.6ha at Macandrew Bay, where hills deflect wind from the South Pole and the land lies in a bubble of heat.

I threaten to grow lemons there and a woodlot of kanuka; I skite of the garden I shall create, finishing off the breaking-in that a great-great-grandfather started there.

The work and the distance will make university study harder. But I'm committed to a course of study and if I don't complete it I shall never be able to finish a book about events in the 1870s which are so shameful and violent that we seem deliberately to have forgotten them.

So, to make more time, this is the last column. It is time to say goodbye and thanks.