By morning I’m interrupted, the sound of boom, boom, boom!
The chill it smacks my every cell, just like that hand-skinned drum,
Medicine wheel but just by name,
Mere cold, wet flowers and smudge
Soon third eye leads to shut-eye,
in this damp and make-shift lodge.

The honest beauty of dew-drenched greens, then reality: it kicks in,
Socks on in a freezing bath, or a condom used again,
I crawl into this sacred space,
the soil becomes my mirror,
Contemplation into complacency,
my muddy, little hollow.

Twenty four hours, countless seconds, no food, just water for me,
A fashioned stake creates a clothes hanger, a troweled hole for pee,
My wind up light, I can use it now,
At last, its time to shine,
Being present gives way to snoozing,
The made-up sense of time.

Where is my spirit animal, that beaver, where was it?
The badger, dog and butterfly, that wild and crazy cat?
The bumps were there, they never let me down,
The ones stuck in my back,
In this crazy cave, full of expect,
where stillness leads to nap.

Reaching for the trowel, not happy with the ground,
Planing, stabbing Mother Earth, mushing, fisting down,
Not through anger or to aggress,
I make my hole a home,
A place where one becomes another,
This earthy, gritty tomb.

Then the Goddess came to me – what had taken her so long?
I plunged my tongue deep into her, this nameless, willing one,
Tempted by my earthly call,
Yet resisted with all my soul,
Where visions lead to outright sleep,
in this dark and wetted hole.

I plan on where I’d find her: my one, my truth, my mate,
This girl whose taste and smell is love,
It’s soon but hard to wait,
Meditate, I think in vain, and slip into the theme,
Of meditation into full-on sleep,
in this dark and wishful dream.

My birthstone, I remember you, my one my only friend,
One side so smooth, and like a child, in awe I stare and tend,
Grabbing crystal tightly,
I surrender to the crave,
The attitude that brought me here,
my unforgiving grave.

Let go now, and the feelings change – purples, blacks, they meld
Shapes and patterns, a foetus, a witch, the next thing is withheld,
But don’t hold on, force it to stay,
As then it chooses to go,
In this crazy mind as it rotates,
to concept from pure flow.

Pulling back my yoga mat, my bag and pink pillow,
Where creepers creep and scuttlers scuttle, and burrowers; they burrow,
I say to them, “Keep to your mud,
your dirt and grime and stench,”
“And I’ll stay in my sleeping bag,”
in this home-sweet, grave-like trench.

It’s over now, I’m with my Dad, New York or somewhere new,
Chicken burger, fries, a Coke – I’m starving, I’ll take two!
“Buried alive, Dad” I said,
Then ‘boom’ it’s time to leave
With mud to fill my one-time home,
This so-called ‘Earth Womb’ grave.

At 12:44 on February 22 2011 I was sitting in my office in Sumner and tweeted the 3 words “Movement and timing“. I had felt uneasy all day. Sometimes you just feel like something is wrong and you can’t put your finger on it. Was I hungry? Not enough sleep? I just felt uneasy.

At 12:51, just 6 minutes later, an earthquake hit the city of Christchurch, with its epicentre in Lytleton, which lies around 6 kilometres from Sumner.

Movement and timing, tweeted at 12:44pm

Simon and I were discussing how to best display Flash within SimpleCMS before the page has fully loaded – you know, a really meaningful conversation about something that really matters – all of a sudden the building started violently shaking. What felt like a split second and at the same time a lifetime, we were both clambering onto and over each other, running out of the door as office furniture came crashing down around us. Running is normally quite an easy thing to do, but if you’ve ever tried to run on a bouncy castle you’ll know how much harder it is when the stuff you’re trying to run on doesn’t want to play along nicely.

We managed to get outside and witness large pieces of metal falling down from the roof above our office – without hesitation (or rational thought) I did the only thing anyone would do in a situation like that: I called my Mum.

There are two reasons why I called my Mum: one being that it’s sort of thing that we all tend to do; the whole ‘chicken soup’ thing. Mum’s are traditionally the person we run to when things go wrong. Mums make things better. The second reason being that I know how much of a worrier my Mum is. “If she’s watching the news“, I think to myself “and she sees that there’s been an earthquake in the place where her son lives, she’s going to be really worried“.

Turns out that she knew nothing about it! Not surprising really, why would she when it had literally happened about 1 minute before I called her? That would be some fast reporting right there. From Christchurch to Hull (sorry, Mum, Beverley!) via the medium of television in around a minute – that’s closer to magick than news reporting.

Anyway, I re-assured her that I was ok and she needn’t worry about me. Which worried her even more than if I hadn’t have bothered calling at all. Looking back, I remember a large piece of roof falling 5 metres away from where I was standing at the time of the call, and being quite close to where there were giant rocks falling down from the cliffs. So to say everything was ok at that moment in time wasn’t really telling the whole truth.

The village Sumner was blanketed in what Simon and I originally assumed was smoke from a fire somewhere. Again, when you actually think about it, no fire could have started that quickly for it to produce that amount of smoke, but our heads weren’t thinking rationally at the time. As we now know, it was actually red dust from a section of cliff face that fell onto the Returned Servicemen Association building (RSA), killing two men.

The remains of the RSA in Sumner

We ran around the corner to see what was going on – along with us, people were running everywhere looking bemused. I pulled out my phone and shot a short video of the rocks during which time an aftershock hit.

Movement and timing.

Having a 3G connection and being a budding film-maker/geek, I uploaded it to Youtube and tweeted the link to my modest amount of followers (who numbered around 120 if I remember correctly). Somehow it got picked up by the Twitter account @BreakingNews and as a result became one of the most viewed pieces of footage around the world that week.

Shown on the BBC, CNN and Sky News, on TV from Australia to God-knows-where-istan. My out-of-breath, half-generic-northern-half-Hull accent narrated the experience for the rest of the world to see. Simon making a cameo appearance toward the end with a well-timed ‘fuck‘ for all the children watching.

We decided it was time to move; given that the normally distant sea had edged towards us and that a lot of people were tweeting to me about an impending tsunami. We needed to find Amy; Simon’s fiancee, who worked at Redcliffs School as a support teacher.

We managed to bust the door down on the office and grab the car keys off my desk. Simon pointed out that whilst his side of the room looked like a bomb had hit it, with monitors and printers everywhere, my side was just as I had left it – a mess as usual.

My desk arrangment finally looked like Simon’s!

It was an eery drive from Sumner to Redcliffs. One of the most striking things for me was that the iconic and instantly recognisable Shag Rock on the beach into Sumner had almost disappeared. Something that had been a noticeable feature of the area for Millennia had crumbled to nothing. You know it’s bad when even nature looks different, not just the man-made structures of the last century or so.

A car on our drive up the Sumner hills

Even with the lack of traffic, the drive was a slow one; swerving around the many gaping wounds that the earth had recently acquired. A Posthaste van was sitting underneath the cliffs with its windscreen smashed and the offending boulder still sitting there – the unlucky, yet at the same time lucky, driver of the van was standing on the side of the road typing away on his mobile.

We arrived in Redcliffs to find a lot of worried parents picking their children up from the school. We picked our little one up and headed off for higher ground as people kept advising us to do. As it turns out, with the epicentre being in Lytleton, any tsunami that may have hit would have reached us almost instantly – that is of course if it was willing to climb the kilometre high hills to get to us. Being there, right there, at the time, we didn’t know what was going on so we did what we felt was the right thing to do – we headed up the hill.

When we arrived at my house the full extent of the thing hit. Whereas the previous earthquake had knocked our neighbour’s vase over because “these houses are built on solid volcanic rock” as I was often told. This cookie had taken out most of the houses down our street. There were a few bloodied people standing around with young children who seemed blissfully unaware that this was anything more than a new adventure. Amy did a great job of looking after some of the children whose parents were nowhere to be seen and at the same time playing with a worried-looking dog.

I went up the hill to survey the house. I was told by my neighbours that my little Piaggio Apé had been pushed over by the force of the impact so I knew before I saw the place that it wasn’t going to be pretty. That and the fact that the house below us (which had been bought only weeks before) looked like it was about to collapse at any time.

My little Piaggio Apé

My fears were confirmed. The place I called home was a mess. I’d made an extra effort to tidy the place that morning before heading off to work too – trying to get that welded-on egg off the pan was my biggest waste of time that day.

Because of the non-stop aftershocks which kept coming and coming, I knew for a fact that I wasn’t willing to stay anywhere with anything solid above me; you know, ceilings that sort of thing.

I gabbed a couple of photographs, tents and my wind-up radio that Rachel bought me for my birthday and went back down the driveway to meet Simon and Amy. We drove up to the top of the hill, until we could go no further, and pulled into a place called ‘Gethsemene Gardens‘ – your guess as to what this place is now is as good as our guess was then. Whatever your guess was, I bet you it was wrong. What we found at Gethsemene Gardens was no less than an Ark.

Yep, as if the earth moving beneath us and the talked about impending floods weren’t enough – things just got a lot more biblical.

The Ark

Now this wasn’t a boat, nor was it simply a building that vaguely looked like an Ark – it was a giant monster of an Ark that very much resembled something Noah would have been proud to have knocked about in. Complete with life-size brass animals, 2 of each kind. The view from the place was spectacular – eerily quite but amazing nonetheless. We could clearly make out the bellowing smoke rising from the centre of Christchurch and although we couldn’t turn on the TV due to the electricity being off, we knew that this was a big event. And we were part of it.

Bev and Ken were the proud owners of the Ark and the beautiful gardens adjacent to it, built by hand by her brother John over a number of years, this was a place where this old Christian couple hosted weddings. Inside was a chapel and even a bar. If we were lucky to escape the full wrath of the earthquake, we were even luckier to find an Noah’s Ark, at the top of a hill… with a bar.

The lovely couple offered us their caravan to stay in for the night and we gladly accepted their kind offer. It was raining by now and starting to get dark. We were all very tired so to have somewhere to stay that was solid enough to keep us warm but was not made of bricks was just what we needed.

As if they had earthquakes every day, Bev and Ken were prepared with candles and a toasty log fire and with my wind-up radio it all made for a real wartime experience.

She popped open a bottle of red wine and we all felt so safe in their living room which was essentially a large wooden shed with colourful sheets draped across the ceiling to keep the heat inside. She cooked us a meal of potatoes and cream with sweetcorn and beef. It all had to be eaten now that the fridge was without electricity. Every time an aftershock hit, depending on its force, we would either glance over, smile nervously and say something like “Did you feel that?” or if it was less of a rumbling build-up and more of a whack, we would all let out a collective “Woooooooaaahh” accompanied by some serious chair-clinging.

Listening to the radio brought home the severity of the event. People had died this time and we felt lucky to be where we were. That night the three of us, Simon, Amy and myself went to our little caravan and tried to get some rest. Turned out that I found this easier than the pair of them did. From my perspective, I was alive, I was safe and I had checked there was nothing above me that could be shaken enough to fall on me whilst sleeping. That and the day’s experience was enough to get me to sleep and snoring enough to ensure that Simon and Amy couldn’t. Sorry guys!

The view of Christchurch, from Sumner

The aftershocks continued all night apparently. I say ‘apparently‘ because I only found this out when I was told about them in the morning. Whilst I had only woken momentarily to a large shudder, only to fall back asleep again, it turned out that Simon and Amy had enjoyed no more than an hour’s sleep.

The next day was spent helping to clean up in the Ark. In the dark. The Ark in the dark. Hulking giant brass camels around for the old couple was the least we could do for them. The pews were everywhere too and there was a good amount of glass around so we stuck on some gloves and got to work.

We ended up staying at the Ark with Bev and Ken for 4 nights in total, until we heard that the bridge which connected the village of Sumner to Christchurch city was open again. Simon and Amy wanted to find the quickest way to England and I didn’t blame them.

We drove across the city which resembled a war zone. Liquefaction distorting and warping my beautiful newly adopted city.

The army were out in force, patrolling the city and enforcing a curfew on its residents. Around 4 hours later, we made it to the other side – it was literally a tale of two cities, the West side having seemingly suffered no damage at all. A complete contrast to the September 2010 earthquake which really hammered this area.

We stayed the night with friends of mine, Mike and Susan, whom I had met through my Mum – he had lectured on Social Care in Hull a few months before and after Mum had told him that I was also living in Christchurch we made contact. They were both very warm and welcoming and after surviving on over-filled kettle water and melted ice for the past 5 days, having clean running water was something I will never take for granted again.

It was shower time and I was dirty!

But they had more than just compassion and running water; they had electricity and internet! “Internet, my old friend, you don’t know how much I’ve missed you.”

Watching the television for the first time was shocking. The true devastation of the city centre was heartbreaking. What was undoubtedly the finest city in New Zealand had become rubble and the landmarks which defined it and its heritage were devastated.

Simon and Amy left on a flight for London just 3 days ago and already I’m missing them. I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m going to stay, but I don’t know where. Life moves on and I’m lucky to be alive. God bless all those who are not as lucky as we are.

As is customary, I walked straight past him. Something compelled me to go back however and ask him why he was there. It turns out that this man was from Sri Lanka and the photos were of him and his wife. She was beautiful and they both looked very happy in the photos he was to proudly showing me.

A far cry from the yellow-brown sadness his eyes now held. He was holding back tears as he explained how he was once a fighter for the Tamil Tigers and was escaping certain death in his own country, should he return.

As this is not a political entry I don’t want to discuss the stance of the Tigers as freedom fighters versus terrorists. We may not agree with some of the things our government are doing but the worst that can happen to a European is that we are incarcerated if we fight for what we believe in. This is about a man with no options, with nothing and nobody to help him, in a place so far removed from where his life started.

He told me how he used to work in the restaurant trade when he was in Sri Lanka and how all he wants now is to get a job to be able to afford a roof over his head and bide his time until he is safe to go back to his own country and be re-united with his wife.

All I could do is give him my time and a small amount of money. Thankfully, Estelle is a social worker and an advocate for people with nobody to turn to and she agreed that she will try to help him.

We hear about the multitude of online communities, but when was the last time anyone from these online communities took out your bins out on a Sunday night or collected a parcel for you when you were out for the day?

When I was growing up, everyone knew pretty much everyone else in the place where we lived. This wasn’t the Home Counties in the 1950s where I can imagine old men tipping their hats was a regular occurrence. No, this was the 1980s and this was a village-cum-council estate outside Hull. But there was a community of sorts and it was a nice place to grow up.

A few months ago I had 750+ friends on Facebook. I had met every single one of these people face-to-face at one time or another in my life. Old friends from school (I say friends, I didn’t have that many so in reality they tended to be people I just shared a classroom with), friends from my travels around the many countries I have visited, friends from university and more recently the friends that I have made whilst living in New Zealand.

I made a decision over Christmas to have a cull. I had come to the conclusion that, quite frankly, if Lee Wilkinson (it could be anyone, Lee, if by odd chance you’re reading this) were to wander over to me in the street and offer me the opportunity to spend ten minutes looking at photos of him and his mates paint balling somewhere in South Yorkshire, or his third child’s Christening at a Church in Aldbrough, I would almost definitely decline his offer, if I even recognised this man in the first place.

So why do I find myself spending hours and hours doing exactly that, only to momentarily wake from this Facebook-induced zombie-like state wondering where the last hour of my life has gone to, never to be seen or heard from again? I decided to get rid of all these people who, to be quite frank, I don’t give a shit about.

But this got me thinking about all the people that I do give a shit about: there’s me thinking that sites like Facebook have given me the opportunity to keep in touch with all these people who I do value in my life and who I would happily sit down with over a cup of tea to look at their holiday snaps. I realised that these people are not connecting with me at all, and the likelihood is that I’m not connecting with them either.

These online communities, even the ones containing real people who would take out your bins given the opportunity, are not communities connecting real people. They’re communities alright, but they only connect our facias together. They connect our egos; ‘Cool Gav’ to ‘Successful Dave’ – they keep you up to date with ‘Fun Gav, who never has a bad day and when he does it’s almost surely going to be lived and laughed at in an ironic way’.

We’re all a part of our own reality TV show and to say we’re more connected now is just not true. We’re certainly more contactable, but contactable is not the same as connected. Right, I’m off to take Gill’s bins out!