Book of the day: Sweet As by Garth Cartwright
Snow has not stopped falling for several weeks now. Just off the Old Kent Road this is not the constant, heavy snowfall that turns mountainous regions into calendar material. The London snow arrives in drifts, piles up on car roofs, dusts black polythene trash bags white, turns to ice, melts into slush and leaves horrible grey puddles. Then more snow falls, building bigger banks of greasy snow and turning the slush puddles into slippery ice. When it first started to snow in mid-December there was an outbreak of that quality so rare in British life: joy. Joy because London stopped receiving anything but the lightest snowfall decades ago. I’ve spent almost twenty winters in this city and have never seen anything quite like this snowfall. I watch it fall: lovely white drifts quickly discoloured by this most urban of environs. Winter is always tough here, often seeming to stretch from late-October until Glastonbury Festival at the end of June, but this year the snow lends glamour to my surroundings. It’s as if Angelina Jolie shifted into the neighbourhood, an alluring beauty shimmering around us. The snow also lends an element of slapstick comedy as Londoners slip and cars slide.
Cover blurb
‘I come from Mt Roskill. Somebody has to.’ So says Garth Cartwright of growing up in New Zealand’s largest suburb. It had acres of rugby fields and more churches than anywhere else in the country - but there were no cinemas, music venues or pubs. In search of a little more culture, a young Garth up and moved to London. Twenty years after leaving he returned to revel in a Kiwi summer.
That summer was spent travelling the country from top to bottom and observing New Zealand and its citizens in all their eccentric glory. Taking to State Highway 1, he met old friends, cult rockers, aspiring politicians, potters, bikers, visionary artists, hunters, undercover cops and all manner of other Kiwi characters. Surfing, hitching, driving, sailing and tramping across New Zealand allowed him to reflect on how much New Zealand has changed in the last twenty years - and how much it hasn’t.
