​Janine is a scholar and writer in Aotearoa New Zealand, who has always been fascinated by the stories of others and builds this passion into her research and writing. During lockdowns, she lives in her family bubble with a pack of furry babies and gets creative. She’s an avid crafter who loves trying anything new (at least once!).
 
There is an ominous shadow inside our gilded Covid cage. I call him Ed. He’s growing bold again.
I’m prone to dramatic overtures, as my friends will confess, but I’m not being dramatic in this moment. Neither about the cage, nor about Ed. Our little bubble of three joined lockdown with dogged determination last Tuesday.We’ve learnt from the past not to panic buy, that the shops stay open for at least one of us to escape for a moment each week, and we all (pups included) relish a daily neighbourhood walk, sometimes two.

Our bubble wholeheartedly supports the public health initiative to stay home. We can find happiness hiding away from (or protecting others from?) the tyranny of the Delta strain. But making the close contact list is a whole new Covid experience. Locked. Down. Inside our gilded cage. With Ed. It’s a comfortable cage, a privileged one, filled with resources to see us through. But a locked cage nonetheless. For the most part we have coped remarkably well. I’ve certainly never been happier to drive for my Covid test and see the world once more even when its masked or observed from my mobile bubble.

But you see, there’s Ed.

Over years and tears we have wrestled with Ed in our home. He arrived in our daughter’s back pocket quietly one dark night. To my shame and regret, I didn’t even notice him living with us until much later. She was feeding her shadow quietly in the corners, keeping him hidden away from us by her own despair and inner confusion. I only noticed Ed when I stumbled into her room unannounced one night and saw the ravages of Ed’s appetite. You see, to feed Ed, for him to grow, she must get smaller, her body physically shrinks, her light diminishes.
 
Then we fought. And we fought hard. I begged Ed to leave her alone, I begged her to kick him out. And we watched her shrink, fading smaller and smaller, while Ed the shadow grew. The light in our home was slowly being overtaken by his arrogant confidence that he was stronger than her, bigger than all of us. But Ed doesn’t know my girl the way I do. On the ropes, in the final round, she started fighting back. We consider ourselves deeply blessed that we could access and find a medical team, including an eating disorder specialist who helped her finally confront Ed, see him for what he is. It’s not a matter of if, they said, but when he wins then his shadow will eclipse the last corner of your light.

Then she fought. And she fought hard. Years later, she exists in a healthier state. I give thanks every day that she is thriving in a carefully managed state of recovering. For type As like ourselves the idea of recovering as a perpetual state, rather than recovered as a completed task has been a lot to process. It’s a journey, of mental, physical and emotional agility. Ed has been contained in a corner, kept in his place for the most part, although occasionally he gets a little cocky and tries to push the limits again.
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And then Covid came along and Ed’s arrogance grew alarmingly. I could see at the announcement of our first ever lockdown how she panicked. I was even more panicked when I saw her reach out, back towards him. No, I screamed on the inside, he’s not your comfort, don’t give him room to grow! It was a daily challenge, and we were constantly checking on Ed to make sure she was still able to keep him at bay, not letting his shadow overwhelm her again.

This past week of lockdown has been different. Locked in self-isolation, no one leaving the house, the vital outdoors, the fresh sunlight that we need to restrain Ed was harder to manage. All her coping strategies were severely limited, her anxieties heightened. Ed was growing bolder. A late night ping from a text and a negative result equals a positive outcome. A light switches on, Ed slinks back into place. Yet never fully evicted. So we sit inside our gilded cage as lockdown marches on, keeping a close eye on our ominous shadow. She’s won this round. But I worry, with a mother’s broken heart, about all the other shadows being fought or succumbed to all around our motu right now.  

​Megan Hutching is a freelance historian, specialising in oral history. Her research interests are women’s history and political activism. Megan works on commissioned projects as an oral historian, and works two days a week at the Museum of Transport & Technology (MOTAT) in Auckland, where she lives.
 
I think that I don’t mind lockdown. I suppose it’s because I work for myself most of the time and, for that, I work from home. Having just listened to the Prime Minister tell us that Auckland will be in lockdown for another two weeks, however, and looking out the window to the rain that has stopped me from having a walk today, I’m beginning to think that I DO mind lockdown after all.
 
It has its advantages for a procrastinator though. Part of my work is recording oral history interviews. In order to make the contents of the sometimes-long interviews available, I write what we call in the trade, an ‘abstract’ – a time-coded summary of the recording that encourages researchers to listen to the original recording. For while a transcript will tell you what has been said in the interview, how different that sounds when you listen to the sounds of a person speaking, along with the laughs, the pauses, sometimes the anger and tears.
 
Anyway – abstracting takes time and concentration and is very easy to put off when I can be out and about, recording more interviews. Being at home means I have time to write those abstracts. And so I am. Somewhat resentfully and only after finding myriad unnecessary jobs to do to put it off, but I am doing them. And it is, of course, marvellous to be able to put a line through and tick off the names on my list. (I like to do both.)
 
Deadheading the violas in the pots on my balcony is one of the tasks I do when putting off abstracting. The little flowers of deep purple and lilac and yellow give me such pleasure, especially the ones with ‘faces’ on them. At the moment, I also have hoop petticoat daffodils (Narcissus bulbocodium) out there, dancing on the wind. I was talking to friends on zoom last night about the joy that miniature flowers give me. My mother, whose name was Iris, had many different miniature irises and I’ve grown miniature daffodils. My sisters and I ‘stole’ some of Mum’s miniature iris rhizomes after her house was sold and I grew mine in my garden when I was living in Bayswater. When I unexpectedly had to move, I dug them up – again – and one of my sisters is looking after them till I have a garden of my own once more. When my friends and I were talking about the miniature flowers last night, we decided that it was the doll’s house effect that makes them so appealing. The tininess of them and that they are a perfect replica of their larger sisters.
 
It’s been a lovely time to go for lockdown walks. There are two cherry trees on the verge outside my flat which, until today’s wind, were smothered in soft pink flowers. Now the grass underneath them is scattered with petals. There is a hedge of jasmine further down the road, rioting along beside a stone wall, and freesias and jonquils scenting the air. The bare trees are beginning to get a down of pale green and the evergreens, like the huge pohutukawa along the road, are sending out new shoots and getting themselves ready to produce flowers. 
 
And so, for me, despite two more weeks in internal exile, it feels a hopeful time of the year.
 
 

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​Lora is grateful for her life. She dances for pleasure and writes for connection to herself and others.

Wednesday: the honeymoon phase. I feel my neck unclench and mind relax as I rediscover peace in having little to do but recalibrate. I do, however, have to buy supplies and my adult children have been on the phone, concerned about Coromandel’s hotspot status, making me promise not to go into the local Four Square. I had a dental appointment today in Whitianga and had let stocks ran low, depending on doing a big shop in the supermarket there. But it’s a do nothing day and all this is shoved aside.

Thursday I wake early and by six thirty am sitting up in bed with a coffee and my laptop, making an order for delivery from Countdown. It won’t arrive till Wednesday of next week, 3.30pm. There are only two things I need before then. One is butter for the sourdough loaf I made yesterday, the other is enough coffee.

Later, I contact my neighbour over the road. With her heart problem she doesn’t use much butter, but may have some in the freezer. I beg a small slice. Then, when in phone conversation with a friend in the next street I reveal my fears about the coffee situation, I am told not to worry. She recently ordered 2 kilos of coffee beans from Havana in Wellington. If I run out before Delivery Day, she can tide me through. Once again I send thanks to the universe for the fate which brought me to this friendly small town in my old age.

There is still some anxiety about fruit and veg, both a big part of my diet. The oranges are almost finished for the season and I often eat at least two a day, but I pick the rest and mentally ration them. There are greens in the garden, scant but enough, root vegetables in the cupboard and most of a bag of frozen edamame beans, bought one day on a whim. That night I make a stir fry with noodles and homemade sweet chili sauce. It is too late to take a photo when I decide that this will be a project, to create something from the random dry goods and the few cans in the cupboard and record it.
The next morning I find an unopened packet of black rice and cook it for breakfast Bali style with coconut cream from the freezer, a dash of maple syrup and feijoas from one of the small jars almost forgotten on a high shelf.   At night I recall a vegan recipe, made once for a gluten-free vegan, though I add some of my precious butter to the polenta this time and serve it for dinner with feijoa chutney. Tonight I intend to make black bean soup to share with my buddy in celebration of my negative test. By then I might just be ready to commit to writing the next part of my memoir, which has been simmering below the surface since the world shrunk and opened.

Jicca is a New Zealander who loves being home. She also enjoys ballet, photography, seeing family, watching birds, furniture restoration and has not yet fully topped up her annual quota of kiwi sweet treats after twenty  years of missing them while being away.

March 22nd 2021
One year on from arriving back here in New Zealand after many years away and I am in a journaling class. Fretting about not having recorded more of my first-year impressions after such a huge life change. But today is the official start of the second year and there is a balance of some sort in being here now. One year of experiencing what NZ is in reality, not just my impressions from short visits. And one year of emotional distance away from a traumatic personal exit from a UK battered by the cold winds of Brexit and Covid-19 and a harsh winter.

That first flight home London to Vancouver to Auckland, the sounds of border doors clanking shut all around me reminding me of the opening scene in the Get Smart tv series I watched as a kid. The agent steps through one metal door after another and they bang hard behind him, sealing off any opportunity to return.  I stood stock still at Heathrow airport terminal with my oversize bag holding twenty years of memories trimmed to the essentials. The Air Canada representative was saying I couldn’t transit Canada. (Air New Zealand had suddenly upped sticks and vacated their London base three days before) So I argued. I even pleaded.  She let me through. 

She had to.  I had needed to be home for some time, cried on leaving on each of my return trips home. I won’t return to the UK to live.  But this dissonance between the reality of my friends’ lives there and the safety of our lives here feels like a very jagged edge. Like the sharp spine of mountains we flew over on our way back from Fiordland last week. While we two are immersed in glorious adventuring, New Zealanders I love are trapped, anxious and very far away. Their trips home cancelled. Those of us that do make it home have increasing numbers of hurdles to traverse. When we finally touch down, like the migrating godwits who also flapped and flapped to get here, we are beyond exhausted, coming home to a land that does love but also fears us as potential carriers of the virus, at least for awhile.

Meanwhile we two do our own version of the Grand Tour —  Wanaka, Queenstown, Hawea, Te Anau and Manapouri, our eyes collecting a sunshine bouquet of lake vistas of blue, purple, silver and gold.  I can’t even process all the beauty of the last week. I am transformed like the European poets who first saw the Matterhorn and termed it the essence of sublime.
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Piopiotahi (Milford Sound) was the moment of my sublime. From the immense carved rock bowls, deep green waters and stepped glacier valleys, I turned towards a shining sea and saw where the Alpine Fault exits the land. Suddenly I was really here, touching the electrifying backbone of this land I love so much. Nothing about my love of Aotearoa is surface anymore. I would physically hug her everyday if I could. Nothing about living here is ordinary. It’s an extraordinary place. So I plant my feet firmly in Aotearoa, arms wide open, balanced on the edge, seeing both sides, feeling the trembling earth of a constantly shifting world.  Maybe I just wasn’t ready to write before now.  Now my journaling can begin.

​Catherine is part of a loving family and community. She is part of a caring profession. Over the past several years she has experienced significant grief and loss in these integral parts of her life. These challenges have left her exhausted and in pieces. Catherine writes to unpack and reframe this experience. She writes to be. She writes to return herself to a whole being, to being her whole self. Writing accompanies and supports her journey.
 
I wake in the garden, feet planted. Water trickles gently down my arm, drips from my elbow. Morning weighs heavy with sunrise - soft pink to the west, yellow with intent to the east. Bees vibrate Om in middle “C” in my ears as I wander; out from sleep, beyond perception, through imagination and past creativity to memory.

This garden and its house arrived in our lives during a time of need, a desperate need, for rest and replenishment.  It was delivered as expected, in a packed auction room, alighting on raised hands, ours, the successful bidders.

An opportunity to breathe again but not for long. Pandemic locks down, trapping us between two lives, unable to leave the pain of one or enter with hope into the other. 
Four, three, two, we level down, safe passage is confirmed.
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Time and space expand allowing us to rest and replenish. Earth turns a full rotation through the four seasons as we stretch out our tendrils toward each other in this place of hope and possibility.
Om in middle “C” echoes in my mind. Here in the garden, I am awakened to life and move to greet it, bathed in the warm yellow intent of each sunrise.

​Roger Horrocks is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Auckland. He has been a biographer, film-maker and poet and has helped to establish many media and arts organizations.

We are living through major historical changes. I want to focus on one aspect – how the media have changed. That is less important than the tragic human cost of the pandemic, but it is something that influences my working life. The pandemic has thrown us more deeply into the internet age. Celluloid film had already been eclipsed, and other media were under serious financial pressure, including printed newspapers, magazines and books, broadcast television and radio, etc. The lockdown condensed years of change into a few months. I know there have been exceptions – some renewed interest in printed books and broadcast news – but all analogue forms of culture have been battered by the combination of the lockdown and the accompanying recession. Writers have seen publishers go out of business. Music and theatre people have lost venues for live performance. At present, every arts organization and every individual artist I know has financial worries, more so than usual. There will need to be a major effort to rebuild (or rethink) much of our culture. That will involve the perennial struggle of our small, marginal country to deal with offshore owners and large corporations – the corporations in control of the digital world, which have been strengthened by the lockdown.
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Of course, the internet has many wonderful capabilities, and our society will innovate and adapt to this new age. But we need to remember that the technology also has problematic aspects, described by Shoshana Zuboff in her book Surveillance Capitalism and by documentaries such as The Social Dilemma. One of the strengths of the internet is its global scope, but we need to avoid being smothered by the flood of material from sources which seek to manipulate or profit from us. I grew up in the 1940s and ‘50s and remember the banal atmosphere of a New Zealand that was still colonial and other-directed.

I hope that our country’s remarkable experience in escaping the worst of the pandemic can help strengthen our desire to remain a unique, independent, diverse society. COVID-19 has emphasised our sense of community and reminded us we can do things differently from other countries. Not that we can’t also be citizens of the world, which will be crucial in dealing with the on-going crisis of climate change.

​Dr Cathie Koa Dunsford taught English Literature and Creative Writing at Auckland University for 25 years. She has 26 books in print/translation globally.
 
Covid 2020 continues to be a process of painful letting go. The death of my dear mother. Not being able to grieve or be hugged by whanau. Getting my partner here from Orkney, borders closing everywhere, car stranded. Eighteen airfares dropped. Deadline to get whanau home. Finally, Quatar. 3,600 one way. Strange sights at Heathrow. My partner wakes, surrounded by astronauts and beekeepers, passengers masked. Beginning of covid. We knew so little then. Our meeting masked up and in isolation.
 
I’ve been playing in five bands, riffing, solo concerts and gigs. One by one, our work gets cancelled. Musicians thrive on playing together. We try to meet on zoom. Not the same.
 
Twenty one years of touring Europe, USA, Canada as an author and performing with my translator, culminating in NZ as Guest at Frankfurt Book Fair. Then eight years of joint elder care in different countries. Culminating in Covid.
 
We isolate in my bay. Eat from our forest garden and support local veg stands. No supermarkets for us oldies! A brief time of celebration. Then clearing house. 21 years of book tours, disastrous tenants, leaky home lead to a massive clearing. As best as I can muster on joints waiting knee replacement. 13 months now. Delayed by Covid. Terrible pain, especially at night.
 
Then I am reminded to give thanks for life BC. Before Covid. For all those suffering  job losses, family disintegration, struggling to survive on  meagre or no wages; discrimination everywhere; trying to avoid conspiracy theories flying at us from all sides my mother would say, like the Dalai Lama, Never Give Up. And she did not. Until the very end. She loved the daily broadcasts. Reminded her of the war. And the vital need to work together.
 
When I consider this time, still feeling pain and loss, I am reminded. Never Give Up. No matter what is happening. Never Give Up. Covid is a time of letting go. Hold onto what matters, let go of the rest.
 
He aha te mea nui? What is most important in life?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. It is people, people, people.

​David Arrowsmith is a history teacher and writer who lives in Auckland. He is married to Hilary, a librarian, and they have three daughters: Charlotte in Manchester, Penny in Wellington, and Kim in Tamaki Makaurau. David has published one novel, Wesley Jones, a coming-of-age story set in rural South Auckland in the sixties. He is currently working on a memoir based on his father’s Kodachrome slides of life in a farming community in the 1960s.
 
In late February 2020, I accepted a full-time teaching offer at a South Auckland secondary school. I was already two years into semi-retirement when at the age of 67 a new teaching experience began. Little did I know then that my decision to return to teaching would be impacted by Covid-19.   I was in the process of getting to know staff and students and learning the system at my new school when, within a month and with minimal preparation, we were thrown into lockdown.
 
Suddenly I had to learn how to navigate ‘Google Meets’ with my classes — taking the roll and chasing up the other half of the class who'd become disengaged from learning. I was required to makes notes on every online communication on a spreadsheet, be they phone calls, emails, or text messages, with every student in each of my six classes. The Ministry of Education wanted the data to analyse the Covid-19 education experience. Tracking students and data entry began to supersede teaching.
 
On weekly online sessions on ‘Google Classroom’ I quickly learned how to scroll down documents and YouTube clips about Julius Caesar or Adolf Hitler to motivate the kids from a distance. I learnt to close my laptop 5pm Friday and not open it until 8am Monday knowing there would be umpteen emails from students with drafts of assessments to check, or asking for assistance. There’d be a Google Meet code for the principal's briefing with eighty staff at 8.30am. I'd ring disengaged students at two in the afternoon only to be told by their parent they were asleep. I'd email students who weren't producing any work on Google Classroom and learn that after a month of lockdown they were still waiting for the promised laptop from the Ministry. I'd discover students working full-time to help put food on the table for their family.
 
I tried to create a work/life balance at home. This meant daily bike rides or walks, meditation, reading great authors like Hilary Mantel or rereading classics like The Wind in the Willows. Keeping in touch with my daughters by social media became crucial. The 1pm 'Jacinda and Ashley Show' on TV One became a daily ritual with Hilary to learn the latest development in the virus crisis. I learnt to play the Gold Card game at the supermarket to avoid the queues until Countdown banned it and I had to shop at New World who still allowed the privilege. It meant the ongoing quest for engaging TV drama on Netflix and discovering great productions like The Crown.
 
One of the frustrating aspects of the new teaching load in the time of Covid-19 was its impact on a new writing project I’d started in January. With Deborah Shepard as mentor, I had started work on a memoir of my father based around his wonderful Kodachrome slides of 1960s rural South Auckland that he'd taken as a newly arrived English immigrant. As the themes from the photos emerged, and the writing became more focused, and the family research proved surprising and enthralling, the pressure from my teaching job increased. Students' NCEA assessments were pouring in. Marking was time-consuming. I was also required to write very detailed reports on students' progress for parents. By the end of a school term that effectively lasted from February to July, I was exhausted and in need of a break in Taupo. With Deborah's support, the memoir is still on track as we experience a second unexpected and unwanted lockdown for Auckland in August. Whoever would have thought my year would unfold in this way.