The Good Life: Palmerston North - a place that shaped me
An anti-authoritarian in the making: Greg Dixon during his younger years at Palmerston North Boys' High School. Photo / Dixon family collection
Palmerston North. City of contrasts. Not really. Palmerston North is as flat as a roadkill possum, as handsome as a roadkill possum and as lively as a roadkill possum. It is my kind of town.
I have long held an affection for the place, particularly after I got the hell out of it in 1988.
Palmerston North wasn’t where I was born, nor where I lived a great deal of my life. But it is a place that shaped me, and I like to visit it now and then. So what better thing to do on a grey, late-autumn Saturday at Lush Places, with no lawns to mow and no leaves to blow, than drive to flat, ugly, boring old Palmy for something to do?
Michele took convincing. She’s been there before and wasn’t much taken with it. So I billed the day trip as a chance to see a road, and not just any road.
We would arrive in Palmy in style, I said, by eschewing the Pahiatua Track and taking Te Ahu a Turanga, the new $824 million Manawatū Tararua Highway between Woodville and Ashhurst, which opened for business last year and replaced the hairy Manawatū Gorge road closed by landslides in 2017.
If that wasn’t exciting enough for her, I raved, we could also pop into the secondhand shops in Woodville and, once in Palmy, have lunch at an excellent Vietnamese place on Princess St I visited some years back.
There was some humming and much hawing. What sealed it was Michele realising that the city has a store that sells her particular brand of vaping contraption, so the trip was on: we were going to Palmy to see a new road, scoff some Vietnamese and buy her some drugs.
But not before stopping in Woodville, which we almost instantly regretted. Like Ashhurst, Woodville suffered after the closing of the gorge road and has had its fortunes revived after the opening of Te Ahu a Turanga. But its public bogs stink, we were almost bowled over on a footpath by some bastard on a bike and we ordered, but could not drink, the coffee at one of its cafes.
Even the secondhand junk joints were unfriendly, boring disappointments until we visited The Viking’s Haul, a huge shop in the old Women’s Institute building run by an undeniably agreeable chap with a most impressive Norseman’s beard.
Among his swag I discovered, with what I can only call amazing serendipity given our destination, a second-hand copy of a history book about the Palmy institution that shaped me most of all.