Port

Emeline, Max and I are excited to report that we are landowners (or at least homeowners). We've taken the leap of buying a little house for our little family. A home is an important place for a child, and a rented house just doesn't cut it. My own childhood home was filled with its own mythologies, the hidden corners of the back garden, the closets converted into cramped afternoon dens. It had its own character. I knew the noises it made as it settled into the ground. Part of me will always be there. We wanted to give Max a place like that. So, we bought a house.

It's over there, in the photo, on the other side of the water. In Port Chalmers.

On March 23rd, 1848, a ship called the John Wickliffe docked at Port Chalmers, carrying settlers from England, some of whom had been on the ship since it left Gravesend the previous November. A couple of decades later, gold was discovered in central Otago and Port Chalmers became a busy port, a new world, a frontier, a dreamscape.

Port Chalmers -- or simply Port to those who live there: its steep thin streets, haunted by the tired ghosts of prospectors and pirates. Little box houses, with dusty model ships standing sadly in the windows. Fog rolling in off the Pacific.

For Max.