I’ve been thinking about Before and After, because that is the topic for our first poetry group meeting next year. For those of us who live in Otautahi Christchurch time is often measured by whether it’s BQ, before earthquake, or AQ, after earthquake. The quakes that shook our city also shook up our lives, and much has changed since. Some people have had new houses built, others have moved to different areas. So much dates to BQ or AQ. Those who’ve moved here AQ don’t have the same experience or understanding.
The tangible remains of earthquake disruption are slowly growing fainter. The uninspiring official memorial remains, as do the poignant 185 white chairs on the site of St Luke’s Church. Now the 10th anniversary has passed ceremonies will become fewer, but the date of 22 February 2011 will never be forgotten.
Time is relative, and some events remain fresh in our memories while others fade. As another calendar year draws to an end I wonder if our perception of time may be changing.
I wonder whether in future we’ll come to think of BC, before Covid, and AC, after Covid. Will there ever be an AC?
It’s close to two years since Covid entered our consciousness, and it seems life may never return to the way it was before. After Covid, if it ever comes, will be different from before Covid, as AQ is different from BQ.
Is there a poem I could write
to show the fore and after sight?
Ruth's Reflections 
I was just thinking the same thing Ruth so it is interesting to read your post. Those of us in Canterbury have had 2 major disruptions in recent times.
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Yes, and that’s without considering the disruption caused by the mosque massacre. I considered that too, but it didn’t affect me quite the same because we were in Australia when it happened.
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I agree with this. I catch myself thinking and saying ‘before the earthquakes’ and ‘after the earthquakes’. I think of it as being like the Berlin wall – one city but two completely separate worlds. I can clearly rememer my parents speaking in the same way about World War II. Their lives were carved in two so that things were categorised as before the war or after the war. As a young child I used to wonder what it would feel like to view the world in such terms, and now I know. It’s funny how the big wheel keeps on turning.
Re the mosque shootings, I work at Christchurch Hospital and at the time it happened worked in an office directly off the main foyer. That meant my colleagues and I were just down the road from it all, and had front row seats to the aftermath as it unfolded. I’m really pleased you were away at that time as it was a truly dreadful experience. I remember when the big February earthquake struck I thought the city looked as though it was being bombed – I felt as though I was on the set of a World War II movie about the London blitz. I can clearly remember feeling a sense of gratitude for the fact that the horrors were being unleashed by a dispassionate earth and not by other human beings just like ourselves.
I’ve read back through most of your prior entries, and have enjoyed them all. I have loved your cottage for as long as I can remember – it stands there on Barbadoes Street as a pretty little island of sanity in an increasingly dehumanised world. I walk my dogs around the Avon Loop walkway most weekends and often walk past and admire the roses and hollyhocks.
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Great to hear from you SP. Thank you for your comments.
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yes i often refer to the Earthquake as a marker in time.. like ” it was not long after the Earthquake” or ‘it was ages before the Earthquake” etc The Earthquake has certainly changed Christchurch my drive to New Brighton around the river through the redzone is so pleasant now whereas pre earthquake that area was covered in suburbia.. I know its not nice for the people who lost their homes there.
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Just before midnight last night Stephen felt an earthquake, and this morning I learnt it was 5.8 in Taranaki. We are definitely still the shaky isles.
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