Palmerston North: Your Tagline Here.

It’s important to have a sense of identity. It gives you a framework from which to present yourself to the world and helps you decide whether those shoes are really ‘you’. Things that can disrupt your sense of identity are based around loss; of job/relationship/family member/faith. Leaving behind an adored hometown of 15 years to try and put down roots in Palmerston North has shaken my sense of identity and I feel the aftershocks almost daily. But what I really want to write about is Palmerston North’s sense of identity. Let’s not get carried away, I’m not going to personifiy the town to the point of sentient self awareness - which raises the question, if a town can have no awareness of its ‘identity’, what’s the tag line about?

You know – the tagline, so popular with Block Buster Amercian movies and self help books (Believing in Yourself - A practical guide to building Self-confidence; Asserting Yourself: How to Feel Confident about Getting More from Life; Naming your book: Just How Much do you Need to put into the Title, Hasn’t your Editor told you about Writing the First Chapter as an Introduction?).

The latest incarnation of a tagline for PN is 'Palmerston North: Student City'. For reasons of brevity, I’m going to leave the presumption inherent in the word ‘City’ alone, in order to deal with the broader concept. Let’s play word association. I’ll say "Student" then you say whatever comes to mind..................I thought so – binge drinking, slovenly habits, squalid living conditions, the smell of unwashed hair and cheap black jeans. And that’s just the chicks.

And if the town has no sense of these connotations then what we are identifying here isn’t Palmerston North, it’s us – he tangata, he tangata, he tangata. If that’s the image the people of Palmerston North want to cultivate in front of the world then they have begun the best way possible with the blunt instrument that is the tagline ‘Student City’.

Obviously, there are alternatives and I don’t see why I shouldn’t claim the right to create the tag line that fits my vision for the PN I want to live in (maybe initially this is regardless of the reality to be found being holed up by the Armed Offenders Squad outside my Roslyn window on a Sunday night, but I’m a firm believer in the transforming power of the noun).
In light of that, here goes........

1.Palmerston North: The thinking woman’s backwater.
2.Palmerston North: Not better or worse, just different.
3.Palmerston North: We don’t know nothing about a good time.

Let’s throw this open to other locals. A recent informal, liquored up survey resulted in:

4.Palmerston North: Take it and like it.
5.Palmerston North: Let’s get laid........back.
6.Palmerston North: You’ll touch yourself.

(So maybe alcohol isn’t next to Godliness, but at least that proves #3).

Of course in an ideal world, we would keep ‘Student City’, drop three letters and live happily ever after.

When You Get Caught Between the Moon and Palmerston North.

So you move from a bigger town to a smaller town.

Now what?

Now you are living on a need to know basis. Some things in life are flexible, negotiable, and full of the potential for compromise. And some things just aren’t (like food, drink, music, movies – fill in the bourgeois blanks). But you are resourceful and tenacious. These are good things.

So you email people you know in the area, meet up for coffee with people you know in the area, talk on the phone with, go for walks with, accost in corridors people you know in the area and two things happen.
Firstly, you lose a lot of people you know in the area - people who, faced with resourceful tenacity, see relentless pretension*. (Poor fools, they won’t be invited to one of my 4 course thematic dinner parties. Suffer.) Secondly, you walk straight into a wall of hopelessness (if I were the sort to extend a metaphor I would add, mortared with ineptitude*).
No, people, I think you misunderstand me. When I say “Who cuts a quality ‘mullet with irony’ in this town?” you don’t say “Who cares/Who gives/Who associates fish with irony?” Work with me.

So you go online and browse for blogging locals who might be able to give you a heads up about the where, when, how and hey there now watch out for. But ‘cept there is nothing out there (and by nothing, I mean so so few and none that do the business).

Looks like I’m going to have to little-red-hen-it and do it myself.

One Man’s Offensive Object with No Discernable Purpose is Another Man’s Treasure.

There is a lot to be said for the ‘so ugly it’s beautiful’ aesthetic. (To which anyone who has been witness to the Crotchety Nana Throws A Tea Party In A 70’s Bachelor Pad styles found at my place can attest). Inspired by the ‘so wrong it’s right’ school of thought, this philosophy of decorating is accessible to anyone, provided they have a robust sense of humour and are prepared to defend their lounge room at short notice.
(Phrases useful for such defence include: “Don’t fight it – you know it works”, “I asked myself, What would Buck Rogers do?”, “Well I didn’t invite you over because I thought you had vision” and “Stop laughing, you’re spraying soda stream on my shag pile”.)

In one of those mystical acts of alignment, I have discovered Palmerston North to be home to the sort of deliciously dodgy second hand objects that a connoisseur of fugly lives to possess. Favourite sources include Roslyn Trading Post on Russell Street, The Red Cross Store on Pioneer Highway and Arohanui Hospice Shop on Ngata Street, 3 of about 10 worth browsing.

To fully embrace this panache you have to take it beyond the breakfast nook and onto your person. Alladin’s Cave on George Street is a stone cold God send. It’s an experience beyond the printed word; a narrow and dated interior, saturated with stock and making no apologies for it’s ‘quantity > quality’ world view. (Don’t take a large bag/umbrella/lapdog and attempt to turn around. You jangle the bejesus out of it, you bought it.)

My theory on the appeal of mustard yellow formica, textured wallpaper and squat, orange salt pigs is that it’s an attempt to recapture the environment in which you were happiest as a child. The strange thing is I don’t remember living in Bruce Forsyth’s conversation pit the first time around.