Andrew Dubber     

Henry and Jake – together again

After the jazz show, Jake and I had arranged to go and see Henry, who had been Jake’s best friend for years up to the time when we left New Zealand. Henry doesn’t do email, and so he and Jake had been pretty much completely out of touch for three years.

I know Jake had changed a fair bit during that time, and so I wondered (and worried a little) as to how much Henry might have changed, and whether they’d even get on after so long.

We had organised for a post-4pm visit and arrived around half past — but Henry had made other plans that had somehow not fully filtered through to command central. Apparently he’d also called us on the mobile phone that had previously been dropped down the air vent of my mother’s car, so we missed that message.

We arranged to come back at 7pm, and Henry’s dad assured us that he would be able to retrieve him by that time.

So we had time to kill. We started by heading to the chocolate shop at the top of Parnell Rise. We bought three different kinds of feijoa-flavoured lollies (that’s ‘sweets’ to UK readers), large bags of pink smokers, milk bottles, and some honeycomb. Then it was off to Burger Fuel – not specifically to eat (though Jake and I split a V-Twin vege burger), but because we knew they had a tabletop Galaga arcade game machine (vintage 1981).

Back when we lived in Grafton, this was a traditional weekend must-visit for us.

Note the Phoenix Feijoa drink and the cardboard doofers.

I kicked butt at Galaga. I made it to the high score board twice, managed to do the ‘get captured and retrieve my ship to get the double-firing capability’ thing a few times, and just missed a perfect score on the Challenge Level. I absolutely rocked, and beat Jake consistently by a factor of ten. Not by ten points, mind you, but ten times his score.

I feel that particular point deserved bold type.

Jake felt that the classic arcade game was too simple for his more sophisticated gaming experience (what’s wrong with ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘shoot’?) but the fact remains that his 40 year-old dad beat him at computer games. All right.

Jake strolls in the drizzle

We then headed down to Judges Bay for a bit of a stroll outside. It was raining, but Jake’s determined to get as much beach time as he can while we’re down here, so he braved the weather while I stayed in the car — only poking my head out occasionally to take photographs.

This was the beach we used to come down to with the metal detector and find all sorts of treasures ranging from bent and rusted bottlecaps right through to new and shiny bottlecaps. Once we found a whole fork.

This time, without electronic assistance, Jake found a vaguely interesting shell that was broken in an odd shape. He brought it back to me and showed me before throwing it over his shoulder, getting in the car and suggesting we go and have a coffee somewhere instead.

We popped into Paper Plus to pick up a Metro (the glossy Auckland lifestyle magazine, not the free newsprint throwaway British public transport brain-deadener), because the issue with the Best Of’s of the year is out. Best Fish and Chip shop in Auckland — that sort of thing. Then we sat and had a cuppa before heading to see Henry.

Henry was in, and he and Jake chatted awkwardly for a bit, so I decided to just leave them to it and go and sit somewhere for an hour or two. I went off to Starbucks, wrote the previous blog post about the jazz show, and returned to find them getting on really well.

They’d discussed movies, history of warfare, school, games, engineering (ideas to make trains work better on snowy tracks)… the usual sort of thing. It worked out well.

Henry standing on a book to compensate for the fact that I had shoes

Henry’s tall. Taller than Jake, in fact. As tall as me — possibly taller. But somehow, he’s exactly the same as he ever was.

He was still doing Kendo until last month (now he’s joined a gym), a sport that Jake gave up pretty much the moment we left New Zealand. He’s still got a fair bit of Lord of the Rings memorabilia. He’s dead smart, but doesn’t quite play the education game the way his teachers would like him to (his recent 10-minute class presentation about Mathematics was a recitation of Pi to 1,000 decimal places). He’s still funny and interesting, and despite a few communication quirks (answer your emails!), a really very cool young man.

Despite the delay, it was a good visit, and I’m glad we persevered with it. Particularly because of the Galaga thing. Did I mention I beat Jake at that?

Having a wonderful and nostalgic time – wish you were here.

Tagged: New Zealand, Personal, Travel