Just at the time I was looking for a flat my friend Isaac was moving out of his home and looking for flatmates to move in. As his home is very near the University and a very nice home I figured moving in would be a great opportunity. I'm in charge of looking after the garden and Isaac's cats. I'm flatting with Karen and Jeff, and Matt. It's a small world really 'cause I meet Jeff at the first funtime comic workshops about 10 years ago, and Matt is a Funtime comics person as well. Karen I haven't meet before, but I did flat with another Karen in my first flat.

On the down side the place smelled of cat pee, the bathroom was basic, and the carpet in the hall and one bedroom was yucky.

Outdoors there was nice but not perfect for gardening. Out the back door there was a concrete path between the house and fence, along with some small garden areas that were full of convolvulus and the occasional clump of oxalis. All in all a bit of a disaster really. I had to be content to keep this bit clear of weeds without doing much in the way of plantings.

At the very back of the flat was a long (20 Meters) narrow (6 meters) area which was split between a strip of messy lawn/weeds and a weedy garden area. It didn't get that much sun so I didn't expect much of this garden, but I was surprised to find that potatoes did quite well, and some self seeding cherry tomatoes grew in a sunny spot each year. I tidied up the weedy lawn and cleared off the concrete paths. In the weeds I found lots of beer cans, a sprinkler, some garden shears and a golf ball. Not bad for a days work. My first attack of the large back garden plot involved sticking some pea seeds into the ground, planting some rows of radish, red onions and cabbage. As I was doing this a crazy looking cat came along and started digging up the peas. I gave him/her a strong talking to which must of upset the cat, 'cause it went off and starting throwing up. Cats were so sensitive to negative thoughts. I should be more careful about that.

In the south east corner of the garden I made a few more exciting discoveries: two plastic compost bins full of quite nice looking compost. Looked to have been there for quite a while by the state of it. One even had a little spade in it to get the compost out! I used up most of one building up the small flower-bed in the front of the flat. The empty bin gave me somewhere to throw my vegetable scraps! There was also a little coal bin sort of thing full of plastic containers, buckets etc. There must have been a keen gardener here once. I thank you, mystery gardener and tried and do your efforts justice by pruning the trees so the sun could get through to the clothes lines and shifting the piles of rubbish into one spot. I always hoped the landlords would take the hint and get rid of those. They did some wrk around the place when I first moved in, but soon disappeared.

Beside the carport was a huge walnut tree. It was quite a messy tree, dropping lots of leaves and walnuts, which have a nasty rotting skin to them. It was quite scary the first night here; every so often there would be a large BANG! It took me a while to figure out it was walnuts falling onto the roof. Cleaning up the leaves was a regular job, and the guttering was a leaf filled mess for most of the first summer and autumn. While the landlord was painting the front flats they took down their spouting, so I 'borrowed' all the gutter guard they had and transplanted it into my guttering. All the walnuts I collected made up for the work required. I have already given lots to friends and family, and when I left there were several large trays full of them. The fact that walnut leaves are highly poisonous to plants and completely unsuitable for composting made them a bit of a disposal problem, so I just heaped them up on weeds.

The other residents of the flats on the property were mostly harmless, with most of us keeping to ourselves. My immediate neighbour was more friendly than the rest of us and would always say hello and happy to chat if you walked past her door. Occasionally she would host parties that annoyed the other neighbours, but because of the concrete block wall between our flats I could usually sleep right through all the fuss.

I had been planning to move out at the end of 2005, but when the landlord raised the rental by $20 I decided the move was overdue. I figured it would be good to move into a flat with other people to keep the cost down and to be a bit more sociable.

Over the time I was there I made a reasonable attempt to get the garden in working order, laying down pea-straw in the flower beds and planting petunias, gladioli and other flowers with varied levels of success. The best results were with nasturtiums which were growing here already, I just spread the seeds around the front fence line and they have taken over. The vegetable garden did okay with potatoes and carrots. I even had some success with artichokes, though I was not sure what to do with them. I was a bit lax on the weeding and watering so results were not as good as they should have been.

A good feature of home was that it had a garage which I could keep my carin which is something my previous flat lacked, to the horror of my mum.

Papanui the suburb we lived in is about 1 hours walk from the central city. It was an okay suburb to live in, close to lots of shops with a mall 5 minutes walk away. At the end of the street there is the Sanitarium factory. They make Weetbix and Marmite, so on alternate days we either had an overwhelming smell of popcorn or a hyper concentrated Marmite odor. Neither of these was actually unpleasant but they can be a bit harsh on the untrained nostril. There is also a Firestone tyre factory a block away, so occasionally burnt rubber was smell of the day.

Papanui: Literal meaning
papa:flat; nui:large. Another meaning, equally applicable to the district, in the early days, is a stage set in the branches of a tree to accommodate a bird-spearer; but there are many other possible meanings.
From Place names of New Zealand, A.W. Reed (1975).

Brief History:
While most of the Canterbury plains in the South Island of New Zealand were deforested by either the Maori or the so call Moa Hunters in the mid 1300's, Papanui Bush was one of the few stands of pine and totara left in the Canterbury region at the time of European colonization. As such it was a site of early settlement in the area, as milling of the timber for construction and fire wood occurred. By the early 1850's the area boasted a hotel, store, blacksmiths, clothing shop, butchers, chemist, dispensers and market gardening on the cleared land. A school room appeared in 1853.
As clearing occurred settlement sprung up along what would become the main road out of Christchurch to North Canterbury. This route was to became known as Papanui Road. By 1857 the last of the trees were felled in the area and market gardening and orchards flourish. As settlement of Christchurch continued new settlers arrived to transform the area into a suburb, and it became part of Christchurch city in 1923.

What some of it looked like when I was there:

Not many trees to be seen!

We started off with 6 people in the place and the turn over was quite high. I will never ever move into such a large place again because keeping enough people to pay the rent was a real pain, especially if they left at the end of the University year because no one wants to take over a flat for summer. To make things worse the usual pattern would be that two people would move out at the same time.

I've forgotten some of the people's names, probably in an attempt to blot out some of the bad experiences. Pizza Delivery Girl was the flatmate from hell, all her friends would visit every dole day (Thursday) to consume a keg of cheap beer, party until 3 am and arrange drug deals in the hallway. I finally got so sick of things that I arranged to move out and Murray escaped with me. We shifted around the corner to Hambledon Courts, carrying most of the bigger things around by hand as it was only 200 meters away. Saul moved into the flat with us while Jason and Beryl had an apartment downstairs.

That said, I really enjoyed the garden at 396. Keeping it in order got me hooked on the habit. I also made some good friendships there that are still going strong today. One of these friends is Tim. I tried to get him to shift out with me and Murray but he liked the place too much to leave. Read the continuing saga of Durham street.

News Update: I was shocked to see that the Durham Street house is no more. Developers have torn it down along with the old home next door and built expensive inner city flats that only the rich and employed will ever be able to afford. R.I.P. Dero.

It was a bit of a hole...

396 Durham Street, Christchurch, New Zealand: So this is where I used to live. One of my flatmates from back then, Darren, has a page about it - and we've decided I should have a page describing my time there too. It's interesting to compare what I write below with what Darren's written on his Durham Street page . Two fairly different perspectives. But we both cared about the place.

Me, I spent two years at Durham Street: 1995 and 1996. The nickname of the house, Dero Street (as if our house was some sort of street-identifier - which I suppose it was and still is), pretty much sums it up.

When I moved in, my flatmates were Darren, Murray, Peet and Justine. Peet, Justine and I moved in at almost the same time - but they, being just a little ahead of me, got the decent rooms. I got stuck with the Purple Room. Damn.

Soon Darren and Murray decided to move out. (Something to do with noise pollution, I understand.) So we got new people in: Flynn, Bish, Mel, Josh and Kim. During the shuffle I managed to score Murray's old room. ("Joy", basically. Much bigger, much lighter, much warmer.)

Flynn brought along his psychotic bull terrier, Hogan, who added an interesting variable to the flat dynamics: I love you all. But I might forget any second. And if I forget, I'm going to tear your throats out. By the way, anyone up for a tickle-fight?

Bish lived "outside" in the wood-shed - which must've been damn cold in winter, but on hot summer nights it was a brilliant place to be. Just big enough for 3 or 4 people to hang out and have a drink (or several) by candlelight. And Bish was useful. If we ran out of food, he'd go into the back yard (which was something like a jungle without Darren and Murray to care for it) and find... "things". Which he'd turn into soup.

Most weeks we'd have a party. Somehow it just became a regular event: people would arrive on Thursday afternoons (Thursday being dole day), each with a few dollars, and we'd pool it for a keg. A couple of times it was a bit more organised - we'd advertise with posters around town and have a band in the back yard. Of course, the live entertainment - bands like Drool, Molested Entrails (Flynn's band) and Eviscerate - didn't much please the hospital over the fence - and the Noise Control Officer was never far away.

So yeah, in a lot of ways it was a fun place to be. I'll never regret being there. But - no surprise - it was also (and equally) a total shit of a place to be. With so many people around, and a house that was always "open", there were huge problems: aggro, stealing, addictions, weird politics, noise when quiet would have been decent. General drama. Constantly.

Peet, Josh, Kim and I decided to move out and start a new flat at 27 Geraldine Street. Geraldine Street worked out pretty well. Strange move though - I've never been so torn between "staying and going". I think we all felt the same. We didn't so much want to leave... we just knew we had to - as Darren describes it - escape. (The place was a trap. Not many people know this, but the donkey plot in Pinochio was actually based on life at 396 Durham Street).

Darren's Durham Street page has a list of the people who lived there while he did. Here's my own list, covering the time I lived there:

The sun room was once just that - until the broken windows were boarded up. The Aardvark room owes its name to the fact that someone (a cubist, if I'm not mistaken) drew (what might have been) a large aardvark on one wall - in crayon - way back before recorded history. The shed, as you'd expect, is a shed - out the back. The tent, also as you'd expect, was a tent. As for the spare room, it had that name whether it was spare or not. Flat logic.
Page last modified: 2001-08-14
Timothy Musson,

Much of interest went on in this block of flats. There was an friendly old guy living in the house at the front of the section that used to chat with anyone he could find, and if he went fishing he used to bring back fresh muscles in the shell for us to cook up.

The flat next to Martin's and mine was empty most of the time, but every so often a man would arrive in a BMW and then a woman would turn up separately in a little sports car. They would only stay the night. Martin's flat was closer to this unit so he and Ruth have lots of interesting tales to tell about these two mysterious visitors.

Living in the center of town was quite entertaining, and as I was on my own in the flat people used to come and visit quite a lot, I guess because they knew I was a captive audience. A regular visitor was Jason, in fact he was such a regular visitor that people started to talk. They must have talked even more when I moved into another flat with him.

On the evening I went to inspect the place Debra's sister Ruth and her partner Martin were there. They had been living in the flat but were in the process of moving out. After a while the decision was made that we should get another flatmate to help reduce the rent so Michael, a friend of mine, moved in. I lived there for about two years and then moved on to a place on my own, though Martin (and occasionally Ruth) was a neighbour so it wasn't too isolated.