The elaborate silver tray seemed wrong in Botany despite the attempt to make the garden setting more like Remuera ( Rem waa rah ) with a ceramic dwarf and piss boy fountain beside the pool.
The crowds of wannabe nouveau riche, looked at each other in small clusters as the last club sandwich travelled past them on it's way - on the tray - to the lady of the day.
The rhyme was deliberate and so were her biceps after years of being surrounded by beige, alone in a taste free desert, while Christopher was often away.
Now the cracks in the plaster, and the lines on the faces, with talons in places, were barely concealed by the grotesque fakeness of everything in this place.
This was new money daarling and all attempts at mimicking class just reminded one of the Pakuranga Plaza and the lack of character there now - amongst the plastic spoons and tired faces who still remembered 1965 when this place was way out in the sticks.
Botany was just a cow paddock then - where Howick Pakuranga harriers jumped over fences in their Adidas shorts and side stepped cow pats, but look at this ugly suburb now.
Oh the smarmy real estate deals all in a row, the columns on the front porch, the square edges, and the succulent trenches now covered the forest floor where children once played.
The last farm house, a condemned relic, surrounded by motorways and neon signs while carbon emissions filled the air, and faceless strangers did not care.
On their way.
Amanda was playing Nickelback after telling us all what it is like to be the Prime Minister's wife and faces fell as they realised they had paid $110 to hear pure dribble from a hollow insular life.
The holidays in Hawaii every July, the barking orders at tradesmen clipping the hedges, the joy of wearing the same Pyjamas and posing for magazine spreads. It was all deeply shallow, horribly wonderful, disturbingly empty, shrill and harsh and sharp on the ear.
The hollow sound of the hungry ghosts clothed in financial security - screamed like insanity and a hidden river of hate wriggled in a black line across the bottom of the pool.
And now even the cucumber wilted inside the last club sandwich as it approached the final cut ...and some multi millionaire's wife from Christchurch was being buttered up - and the flattery spilt over onto the Gucci shoes like unadulterated insecurity - and the Queens of bling, did their thing.
The private gardens of those who hoped they never broke down in Otara, the ones who don't visit a marae, and maintain a blue rinse in their one eye, are just another form of white trash in a colonial settler state and something deep down cried out for more.
Something beautiful and authentic like the warmth of sun on the aging skin and hairs that stick up and shiver down your back.
And briefly a reflection of Summers long gone and something sparkling in Jacinda's smile - made the rise of Maya Angelou well up inside and tears filled eyes ...at this sad, sad demise.
Where once we dreamed of this future
Now we find this putrid
And she popped the sandwich in her mouth and I turned away to carry that tray out.
Satire - Amanda's Club Sandwich
G
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