The intertidal zone

… is both a quotidien and a subtle experience. You don’t share with just anyone. You’re sipping from the same bombilla, after all. There’s a technique to it: filling the cup two-thirds full of the ‘tea’; jolting the woody bits to the top, trickling on the cold water, not too much and not too little; inserting the bombilla; having the hot water almost boiling but not quite and pouring it each time in the exact same spot; never moving the bombilla! — which is the metal straw with a wide, seive-like base. On a bad day the yerba tastes like straw chopped with a cigarette butt; other times it might be clover hay minced with a small joint, perhaps. More stimulant than sedative.

You drink it with family, with a partner, a friend, or an acquaintance who’s proving simpática.

It’s an eloquent moment when the little cup is slid to you across the table for the first time.

At Elena’s flat in Buenos Aires, we were taking an inordinately long time to clean our teeth, and we had three tubes of toothpaste — but all at the identical stage of oversqueeze. (Thanks for the charming photo, Elena.)

Is it worth cutting off the lids and scraping the aluminium lining? When is it time to buy a new tube? Should I stick with the tried and true or risk a new brand? Why not go without for a while (salt and water served the ancesters, and frayed sticks)? How about having them removed (the teeth)? Or making a whole new hybrid product: is the world ready yet for cybertoothpasta?

A few (more) of us lost jobs this week; yes, Longacre Press is moving north, to live on Random’s verandah. So, it’s Opportunity Time. I went off to ponder mine in Naseby, ‘2000 feet above worry level’. Polly was in dog heaven, sniffing and poking and rolling about wherever rabbits have been — which is everywhere. The air was clear and so was my head. I had an idea and it seemed like a good one.

Back home, it doesn’t look quite as simple but I’m toying with a sort of manuscript consultancy seguing into a kind of publishing mumble-mumble…

Watch this space — or send me your manuscript.

I’ve tried to translate what Elena wrote to me (with the photos — thanks, Elena) about this important day in Jujuy in the north of Argentina; this is the gist, anyway, of the bits I could manage:

… people don’t go to work because their dead are expecting them. As I live near a cemetery park, I find myself in the middle of the fiesta …The night before, in their houses, they set up a table with bread for an offering — bread that substitutes for whatever the dead loved in life; also they prepare their favourite food and drink. They leave the table set up when they go to sleep so that the souls can come at sit down at their leisure, eat and drink with gusto and without frightening anyone ….

Although I live in the country, in a very peaceful place, today the house is surrounded by cars, people have been coming to the cemetery since morning … to share lunch with their loved ones … They put coloured paper flowers on the graves and have a kind of picnic, they drink chicha and dance until they ‘drop dead’.

2 noviembre — pane y chicha por los muertos

The dead are allowed until midnight.

Pueblo de los muertos

In Argentina the dead are given the goods: their own miniature town with the best view in the neighbourhood, flowers galore, gossipy prayer sessions with the living, and food. On the annual ‘day of the dead’ families spread picnics on the graves including the dead one’s favourite dishes, tell stories, and celebrate their life and memory.

This year (in NZ) we lit candles one by one and wrote beside them the names of our remembered dead: grandparents, aunts and uncles, friends who died too young. I thought especially of Clare at sixteen — stroppy, funny and fiercely intelligent. She loved hockey, Latin and our pink VW, and appointed herself window cleaner when my flatmates and I moved house in her neighbourhood. The day before a bus knocked her from her bike, she bought flowers for her mother. After the funeral I was shown the tiny striped socks she’d just knitted for our new first baby. Clare was always as bracing as a tonic; just thinking of her straightens my spine…