Columns

In my fourth and fifth years I lived in a flat on High Street, south of the Octagon. It was a beautiful place: roomy and sunny, with its close proximity to numerous halfway houses guaranteeing a steady supply of oddball passers-by. In fifth year, we bought a projector and turned the living room into a movie theatre. I missed a fair few lectures that year – although to be fair I was also studying law at the time, so my motivation was at an all-time low.

Unfortunately, the flat was well over 20 minutes’ walk from uni. I hate cooking at the best of times, but the thought of lugging groceries up a hill and preparing a healthy and nutritious meal after a day full of torts and cestui que and constructive notice would fill me with such an overwhelming feeling of can’t-be-fuckedness that any alternative seemed preferable. I would go hungry. I would eat Pringles for dinner. I would cook and freeze two months’ worth of beef stroganoff and chicken curry and decide two weeks later that I was going to be a vegetarian and then on-sell all my frozen meals to my flatmate at a loss.

More often, though, I would go to Tai Ping, the fish and chip shop on lower Rattray Street. Actually, I only fully registered that it was called Tai Ping last week. When I lived on High Street we called it Henry’s, after its owner. Others, who were acquainted with the store through its late hours and proximity to the Octagon, called it the chew & spew.

Henry’s was, I suppose, just a regular fish and chip shop. Slightly alarmingly, the fish and donuts and whatever else Henry peddled sat in a display cabinet. I never understood the point of this cabinet – unless the idea was to demonstrate the miracle that these pale, shrivelled, possibly fly-touched and in any case wholly unappetising lumps of batter could, by the mere act of immersing them in hot oil, become godly hunks of saliva-inducing heart failure. If you went at the wrong time, you often had to wait while Henry finished cooking “dinner” for his family, who lived in the back. I never understood how they all survived more than a year, let alone stayed so svelte.

The reason I only recently registered that Henry’s was actually called Tai Ping is that last week, the store made the news. By burning down. Henry left the deep-fryer on too long, and the resulting fire caused smoke alarms to go off several blocks away in Moray Place.

The area now looks like a typical Syrian street. Across from Henry’s burned-out shell there is the wreckage of the Dragon Café, whose roof partially collapsed in 2011. Only two businesses remain open on that stretch of Rattray Street, one of which is massage parlour Lucky Seven. The Crown Hotel on the corner, and Queen’s on the other side of Princes Street, are the only indications of what the area had once been.

Nigel Benson wrote an excellent piece for the Otago Daily Times tracing the demise of lower Rattray Street. A thriving nightlife hub in the sixties and seventies, there were hopes that the area – which had once housed the city’s opium dens – would become a fully-fledged Chinatown. While Benson doesn’t lay the blame for this decay on the City Council, it’s clear that poor city planning has played its part. Lower Rattray is now on the arse-end of a fugly casino, with the nearby Warehouse bringing plenty of plebs but no foot traffic.

The reason I’m telling you this is that over the years, a lot of bad decisions have been made about how to run this city. It’s not only North Dunedin nightlife that has suffered from this; students have every reason to regret the fact that lower Rattray Street never became a bustling Chinatown, or that the Exchange building was demolished, or that the city put all its eggs in the Octagon basket. Traditionally, though, students haven’t been bothered to have their say, and as a result our city is a lot less vibrant and fun than it could have been.

The local body elections are coming up, and there is no shortage of candidates willing to whore themselves out to the student vote, if only such a vote existed. The time is ripe: get enrolled, play the field and score yourself a sexier city.

Anyway, back to Critic. This issue houses our famous annual fish & chip review (p 26), so my tenuous attempts to weave a coherent narrative into this mess of an editorial might be getting somewhere. Then again, maybe not. Maybe it’s a lost cause. Maybe it’s actually 4am, and maybe I ran out of V hours ago and have no idea how to wrap this thing up.

Bye.

-Cordwainer Bird