(Still a bunch of emails to catch up on. This all takes far too long. But anyway.)
New Years in Wellington is, by tradition, rubbish. The city always goes quiet over the new years period as all the young and party-hearty up sticks for other locales, such as the big dance parties across the channel in Nelson, or something up north.
This year, D3vo and I hatched a cunning plan to ditch dub-town for a place of our own. Through the kind generosity of Ruth (of Not Usually About Penguins), we secured a very nice holiday house on the Kapiti Coast. It’s a place that I’ve been visiting for over a decade, again thanks to Ruth’s (and Damon’s!) continuing generosity, and it’s become quite important to me. The chance to share it with a bunch of good friends was tremendously appealing.
So, in haphazard fashion we put the word out, deliberately not over-planning it in order to ensure good karmic resonance or something. All came together well. We had twenty or so people in the house and in tents, and the reverie was splendid. Fun with the neighbours, midnight fireworks, downhill dune racing and of course lots of dancing were the order of the night, before everyone crashed out on all available surfaces. It was great.
Hence this post – a good New Years deserves commemoration, because they can be hard to come by. It isn’t complicated – get some good mates together and commit to one spot, and let the party roll. And yet it’s so easy to get distracted or to try too hard to make too much of the night and end up dissatisfied. Hard for us to really know what we want.
New Years doesn’t mean anything by itself. It’s a good marker, a good reminder. As numbers tick over it reminds us of time passing, and of change. It is a ready-to-wear symbolic engine, and it can give us power if we choose. I have more to write on that. Short version is just two words, describing something else I did on Hokio Beach at this little New Years party: got engaged.
Other accounts of the fun, with photos, can be found in the writings of Hottieperm, Off-Black, HebeHobo and MalcsTravelogue.