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.