For this I blame the lingering sedative effect of a holiday in Nelson, where my wife and I spent 10 days in our caravan with two teenage grandsons.
Nelson has never been an ideal vantage point from which to assess the state of the world. It’s relatively isolated, barricaded as it is by sea and hills. My family and I spent four very happy years there during the 1980s and I know from experience that it’s easy to retreat behind those barriers and forget that the rest of the world exists.
Like Gisborne, another charming provincial city, Nelson isn’t a place you drive through to get somewhere else. Socially and culturally, it’s a cul-de-sac. Such towns tend to develop their own distinctive character, uncontaminated by outside influences (a point of difference magnified, in Gisborne’s case, by the fact that the population is 50 percent Maori).
When I lived in Nelson I likened it to living in a warm bath; so comfortably soothing that you don’t want to get out. There’s an insularity and sense of other-worldliness about the place that becomes even more accentuated if you head over the Takaka Hill into Golden Bay.
