Personal Elsewhere

GRAHAM PATERSON REID (b. Melbourne 1913 – d. Auckland 1985): The big man with the quiet voice

22 Jul 2024 | 13 min read | 1

This piece first appeared in Metro magazine in 1985 under the title The Bach. The Beach was always “only an hour away” according to my father. And back in the early Sixties when we first started going regularly, it was. Thirty miles from our home in Mt Eden to the door of the bach at Stanmore Bay. And my father, always a careful driver, just “took it easy" and... > Read more

THE DAY SHIFT: Faces and names

8 Jul 2024 | 3 min read | 2

Big Mick was the size and shape of a steel door. As strong too. He had broken teeth – although he rarely spoke and never smiled – and one side of his forehead bore the scar of a deep wound from long ago. Someone said he was an ex-cop and had been bashed about the head a few too many times. Whatever had happened to him he was an imposing, silent presence in the factory... > Read more

YOU SAY IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY (2024): And the band begins to play

25 Jun 2024 | 3 min read | 1

Exactly 60 years ago to the day, the Beatles played in Auckland. It was my 13th birthday. I was a huge fan of course. I had their two albums Please Please Me and With the Beatles: the former a Christmas present from Brett Bensky, the later I bought for my Dad's birthday from The Loft record shop on Vulcan Lane. I had a big poster on my wall (I still have it) and I treasured my... > Read more

Happy Birthday

THE KING IS DEAD: Long live The King

21 Jun 2024 | 5 min read

The next time I see John Francis, I'll apologise and say to him, “You were right”. The likelihood that happening however is pretty remote. The last time I saw him was over 60 years ago at Normal Intermediate School. I don't remember much about primary school – just odd snapshots and moments – but intermediate was a bit different. I was put in a special class or... > Read more

Patch It Up (Elvis live, 1970)

ELSEWHERE, INTERVIEWED (2024): Talk, talk, talk . . .

3 May 2024 | <1 min read

In early March I was interviewed at considerable length by musician Danny McCrum for his podcast series Don't Give Up. What was, I thought, going to be a brief conversation about the Elsewhere website and maybe something about writing reviews ended up being all of that and quite a bit more besides. Danny and I just ended up having long conversations about all kinds of music related (and... > Read more

THE WRITE STUFF: Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift

15 Apr 2024 | 3 min read | 1

When I started at the Herald in 1987, Peter Scherer was the editor. Those were the days before titles like Editor-in-Chief or Editor-at-Large. Peter – who you could call by his first name – was simply the editor. Or more correctly The Editor. He was a remote figure to someone like me and I recall hearing little snippets about him: any aspiring journalist who wrote asking... > Read more

A HOME AWAY FROM HOME: Tony's, endangered

7 Apr 2024 | 3 min read

There’s a scene that has played out hundreds of times at Tony’s restaurant on Wellesley Street in central Auckland. I witnessed it frequently. A young person, possibly a student, asks if there’s any chance of waiting work. Often they are anxious and looking for their first paying job, maybe presenting what passes for a CV at their age. But time and again they... > Read more

CRYING IN THE NIGHT: Wide awake and wondering

25 Mar 2024 | 1 min read

The sound of a baby crying in the night is a terrifying thing. The screams go on and on, no one seems to be taking care of it, you look out your window into the darkness but cannot see where the cries are coming from. You feel helpless. My ryokan in Shin-Nakano, a suburb to the west of central Tokyo was perfect -- except at night when I heard the baby crying. Tokyo may be a... > Read more

MAKING THEM FRIGHTENED AND FEARFUL: My lecturing technique at university

11 Mar 2024 | 4 min read

By chance, I left university lecturing in much the same way as I'd arrived: by slipping out sideways. Some time in the late 2000s I was freelancing, had done a short and unhappy stint lecturing in journalism (which I felt was taking fees from students entering a dying industry) and every now and again I'd be invited by singer-songwriter Karen Hunter to come and talk to her uni music... > Read more

THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND, THIS LAND IS . . . : New Zealand in the eye of the beholder

25 Feb 2024 | 3 min read

Some many decades ago, after my dad and I had returned from an extended overseas trip, we were having dinner with some friends of my parents. At some point one of the guests – perhaps annoyed we had been banging on about some interesting places we'd been – spoke up for the beauties of Auckland and said, “In what other city in the world can you be swimming in the... > Read more

IN THE TIME OF STOPPED CLOCKS: A year after the flood

23 Feb 2024 | 6 min read

As I write this from my temporary office in the upstairs bedroom, workers outside in heavy fluorojackets and hard-hats are toiling under a sweating sun. There's noise from diggers and massive machinery, the scrabble of scoria pouring from metal buckets, weighty wheels crunching over rocks. And I'm enjoying it because, to me, it sounds like progress. We live beside the Western Line... > Read more

PASSING SHIPS: Mick Jagger and me

5 Feb 2024 | 4 min read | 3

It's a little known fact, but Mick Jagger and I are real tight. And that's not just me saying that. The last time I saw Jagger -- whom I call Mick, of course -- he shook my hand and said, "Graham, we're real tight." Of course there's a back-story here. Let me put this in the greater context. It was November 88 and Mick was in town with his own band. He and... > Read more

CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER: Home and away

22 Jan 2024 | 6 min read | 1

I've been lucky when I've travelled: I've never lost luggage, only once missed a flight (but salvaged a funny story out of it), have been held up at Customs frequently but again, funny stories. I've never been seriously confronted by a gun or a knife. Not that I didn't go to some dodgy places: I'd only walked a block in New Orleans when I realised I was the wrong colour in the wrong... > Read more

LIFE UNDER CANVAS: Squatting in our own home

8 Jan 2024 | 3 min read | 1

Just before Christmas 2005, we fell victim to the pandemic sweeping across Auckland. You know how it is: you always think it’ll affect someone else and you’ll be okay. So we were ill-prepared. We'd just carried on as if nothing would ever happen to us. And anyway, we are people who like to think of ourselves as survivors. We have lived through the Y2K scare, SARS... > Read more

THE LURE OF A LAIR: Pumpkin candy and Korean pirates

1 Jan 2024 | 5 min read

God knows what I was thinking when I went to Ullungdo. It certainly wasn't for the well-advertised local attractions which are, in no particular order, dried squid, dried seaweed and -- its special delicacy -- pumpkin candy. Ullungdo is a spectacular lump of rock a few hours off the east coast of the bickering Koreas. It rarely makes it onto maps, let alone anyone's travel plans.... > Read more

TO BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING: Hair, there and everywhere

25 Dec 2023 | 2 min read

Looking back, it seems the starting and finishing points in my separate careers have been a bit fraught. My first proper day at the Herald was inauspicious, my first day and final week at teachers' college equally problematic. And my first day as a proper teacher in a full-time position was . . . . Well, interesting. In the gap between the end of teachers' college and my first... > Read more

SEDUCED BY SOUND: The passion as the passport

18 Dec 2023 | 3 min read | 2

In his readable and funny Autobiography, Rod Stewart said when he was young his dad told him he needed three thing in life: a job, a sport and a hobby. Rod has singing, soccer and model railways: Done. When I read that I wondered what of them I had: None. As a freelancer writer there's no regular income, my idea of sport is seeing how fast I can go past it with the remote . .... > Read more

PRIDE OF THE SOUTH: Sometime in New York City

4 Dec 2023 | 2 min read | 2

He was at the south-west entrance to Central Park, sitting by himself with a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag on a cool September afternoon. Pride was his name, Pride Wilson from Louisiana but mostly Kentucky. Been in New York maybe five, maybe seven years. We walked into the park where yuppies in expensive workout gear would glide by on their in-line skates, and young lovers... > Read more

A YEAR THAT WAS: Building a house, a home and a family

27 Nov 2023 | 4 min read

It is only now as I remember and write that I've realised the events here occurred half a century ago. It was a busy and strange year 1973, but it was also about endings and beginnings. I was in my final year at North Shore Teachers College but only there for a few hours a day because I was knocking off another English paper at university. Paula and I with Julian, born in May the... > Read more

JUST FAMILY MATTERS: The boy and the godfather

6 Nov 2023 | 4 min read

Outside the family, I'm sure no one would believe this, but my godfather was Italian. Yes, improbable as it may seem for a boy born in Edinburgh, I had an Italian godfather. I don't tell you this as a warning, however. There was always a large Italian population in Edinburgh although I remember my mum telling me that during the war there was a terrible shortage of restaurant staff... > Read more