The Christchurch mission

When me and my mates all left school and started getting jobs and money, but hadn't yet moved out of home or really fallen into the full-time party mindset of high youth, we would spend our money on weekend shopping and movie trips to Christchurch, and we got it down to a fine art.

Christchurch was just up the road from where we grew up, and was the closest proper big city, with a population of about 300,000. More importantly, it was the closest place for decent comic shops, and record parlours, and book stores. It was the only chance to see a lot of movies that never made it to our neck of the woods, and for a couple of years, we were heading up SH1 at least once a month to go check them all out. 

It was the freedom of the thing, we all had our driving licences and access to cars, and we had properly disposable income for the first time in our lives, before we had to worry about rent and bills. It only lasted a couple of years, because then there were all the booze and drugs in the world to sample, and general life expenses, but there was this brief window of complete and utter nerdom.  

We'd head off at 8am in the morning, because it was a two-hour drive, and then always parked in the same parking building in the same place, and its highest we called it point zenith, because that's the sort of thing you do when you grow up in a town where nothing is taller than two stories.

We'd always hit Comics Compulsion first and load up on Hellblazer and Love and Rockets comics, before heading to Echo Records on High Street for a tape to play in the car on the way home (this is where many of my movie soundtracks came from), then this little bookstore owned by this grumpy old dude named David, who had by far the best back issue selection in town and I could get a first printing Killing Joke for $20, and then Scorpio Books for something pretty.

I would spend hunderds of dollars on this crap every visit. I would come back with a back seat covered in John Byrne Alpha flight and Giffen/Demaatties Justce League comics, and I still own a lot of those comics - I still got the JLI, I got the Hellblazers and the L&R. I still got the Killing Joke. 

After that, we'd get some food, usually from a central city supermarket or just the KFC on the corner in the middle of town - even being let loose in supermarkets to buy anything we wanted was mind-blowing freedom - and would sit down for picnic on the Avon.

Afternoons would be a round of half a dozen second hand bookstores around town - there used to be so many, it would take hours, and you'd always miss a couple - and maybe a run along the beach out at New Brighton to get rid of the energy, 

Then hit the movies, or go to a show, and when the films were things like Reservoir Dogs or Once Were Warriors, you could catch one at the late screening, and would drive back at two in the morning, because you can do that when you're 18. The route between Temuka and Christchurch literally has about 20 bends in 200 kilometres, and is mostly a long, straight line. Sometimes on those long drives home, it would be hard to stay awake, and all you could do was wind down the windows, turn the music up loud and howl at the moon. Sometimes I think I'm still on that long drive at 3am on a Sunday morning, in the darkness near Rakaia, trapped on long straight roads with dark woods on either side.

We didn't have much to do in small town life, there were no bands coming through, and no big shows, but we had the Christchurch mission.

Needless to say, it's almost all gone. The devastating earthquakes that hit the city in 2011 destroyed so much, Comics Compulsion moved out of town before slowly fading away, almost every single one of the old bookstores had to move out of their grotty premises, and even David's Bookstore has shut up shop. There is no Echo, no KFC on the corner, and even the huge movie theatres crumbled into rubble.

It's becoming a new city, very slowly. The middle of town has filled with interesting architecture, some actually wonderful art installations, and almost no interesting little shops, and if it's the same stuff you can get at the mall, why bother? 

Scorpio Books is still there, I still go there to get something pretty. And the few remaining second hand shops have some excellent selections. But that's it in town. I'm not on that mission anymore.