| It was a cold and rainy day in mid January when I got the call. It had been looking like snow for a week and yet nothing fresh had fallen in nearly a fortnight, and New York just isn�t the same without the white powdery stuff. I�m talking about snow here ladies and gentlemen, not cocaine� Anyway, on this particular day I had returned to my apartment from brunch with friends and was reading a book on the pros and cons of communism for an up and coming piece on its spread in the south when the phone rang and jolted me out of my day dreams of Mother Russia and Mao Tse-tung. The call came from Celia, the big kahuna, the woman who runs the show, the ringleader of our now illustrious site. I was surprised to hear from her after our friendship had petered out so long before. We met in Europe in 1983 while I was working on a series of articles for the travel section of "Real Americans", a short lived weekly rag which probably went under because of my travel expenses. It was in a caf� on some side street in Rome that I actually met Celia, she was serving espressos to the general public and I, recognising her as a fellow foreigner decided to hit her up about the benefits of living and working in Italy. She was highly obliging and as it turned out she was about to leave Rome for Sicily to look for more work during the off-season. Sicily, by happy coincidence was to be my next port of call. So within the week we set off together to explore uncharted territories of the European life. We travelled together on and off for the next 3 years, meeting up when we could in Paris or Amsterdam, travelling around Greece or Wales in Morris Minors hired from dodgy men with accents thicker than my favourite eighties belts. By 1987 our meetings had become less and less frequent, and aside from the occasional letter we had little contact. Celia had settled in London and started a small catering business and was doing well. I would have visited her but I had then and still have today a certain fiery loathing of London deep in my heart. By 1989 I had found regular work writing columns in "The New York Tribune" and settled in the city I would call home for the next 12 years, changing jobs now and then, working as a bartender or part-time English teacher for the immigration department when not writing. The last time I heard from Celia before the phone call was in 1994 when she showed up at the launching of my first and only book, a nasty piece of work which never got off the shelves in discount bookstores across New Jersey. She showed up, had a drink and a smoke with me and was gone. Apparently she was supposed to be at a conference dinner� Something about llama rearing and care. I was quite drunk at the time and managed to glean little else. And so, there I was in my apartment, waiting for the snow and talking to Celia about a possible job in New Zealand, my birthplace, writing for a website she was starting. It sounded, and still does sound rather far-fetched, I tried to argue that surely I could write from New York and just submit things from there. But no, Celia wanted me there to work as a �team player" with my soon-to-be associate deLunTrash. And so within three weeks of Celia�s original call I was packed and ready to leave the Big Apple to return to Christchurch, a place I hadn�t seen in decades. I�ve been back in New Zealand since early February of this year, not long at all really. DeLunTrash and I have been set up in nice offices in town and we have a staff of 5 working with us on maintaining the site and fiddling with technological bits and pieces. The only other person in the office is Jen, our secretary and a younger sister of Celia; she makes a mean coffee and swings us invites to all the big events. And that�s the story so far. I�m just sorry it�s not something slightly more exciting, but I figured you crazy kids need something to keep you going. If this is still the case, try speed. -Pink Loose China |
| HOW IT ALL CAME TO BE (A trip down memory lane for PLC) |