Wairoa Tearooms

Here are the Wairoa tearooms on a Sunday afternoon at the end of summer.

Beside the counter there is a board with a bright green background and bird-eye pictures of meals on it. The meals are yellow and brown and reliably greasy. Sellotaped to the counter, and wafting around in the wind, is a piece of white A4 with a list of drinks prices on it. The word “Drinks” is a standard piece of WordArt, the kind of thing filled with un-special effects that you see on mediocre science fair projects: letters warped into an arc, with a shadow dropped back, letters filled in with colour that grades from bright red to bright green.

The furnishings have a thrown-together look, as if they only just moved in and don’t expect to stay for long. The wallpaper looks like it has been done incrementally, each new owner adding another band of colour without much thought to what was already there. The top third of the walls is a faded bright green. The next third is a dull yellow, and the bottom third is an anonymous black-and-green dapple. There are square pillars protruding out of the walls at regular intervals, and on each of these pillars there is, inexplicably, a number. The numbers do not seem to correspond to the tables, and they are gold-coloured on little metal plates, like the numbers on letterboxes.

There has been some attempt to give the shop a theme, and the artwork on the walls is half-heartedly maritime. There are three framed paintings of ships in storms, very conventional paintings that are the ocean-going equivalent of those pastoral paintings of the Sussex Downs that you get on table mats. On the side walls there are three stylised drawings of fish in primary colours. On the front wall, above the entrance, there is a another fish painting, this time a giant painting that looks like it was done by a promising third-form student at the local school. In a recess above the entrance there is a tangle of fishing lines and cray-fish nets. All of these things are about the sea, but they are too widely spaced to really give the shop a theme. Trying to appreciate the theme is like trying to appreciate a melody wherein there is a long delay between each note. Above the entrance there is a green sign saying “Exit”. It is a large sign and it dominates the entrance, as if it is meant as an artistic centre-piece.

At one table, four elderly people sit around and talk about sandflies and the weather. “They’ll get you in the end if they want to, they will,” says one. “They’re right bastards, you’re not wrong there,” says another. One of them, a New Zealander, orders fish-and-chips. This amuses the English couple, who say “Fush and chups! Fush and chups! Are they like fash and chaps? Fush and chups!” They all laugh. The English couple leaves, the fish and chips arrive, and the NZ man tips salt on to his meal and absentmindedly goes through a few practice rounds: “fush end cheeps,” he says. “Fesh and chups. Fosh und chapes.”

At another table there is a young male in his late teens, a Maori-looking lad with a tight t-shirt whose hem is clasped around his upper arm like a bracelet. He eats a packet of fish and chips on his own. He has fat white shoes and his left foot jigs rapidly up and down, as if he needs to go to the toilet.

A little Maori child runs in the shop and hops and waddles around the tables, completely naked. “You’re mum’s out the back, boy,” says the girl at the counter, and the child runs out the back with her fingers all tangled up behind her back.

I have come here to recharge my phone in the wall-socket, and I feel obliged to buy something while I am there. I choose a can of Orange and Lime fizzy drink. The can proudly announces that it’s contents is “5% Real Fruit.” When I’ve finished the can, overwhelmed by real fruityness, I watch a group of young girls arrive at the tearooms. One of them goes to buy a coke. The others sit down on a bench. Someone hands out straws, and they sit there bristling with straws, straws in the mouth, straws in the hand, straws as chopsticks, straws as smokes, straws as drumsticks, as backrubbers. Outside, the sun makes ballbearings of light on a green bike rack, on the frame of a bike, on the grille of a car. A Radiohead song comes on the radio. The girl returns with the coke and her friends pass it around, drinking through their straws like beaks. The finish the bottle and sit around doing little. This, I suppose, is what people do when they “hang out.” I know it is deeply uncool to put “hanging out” in quote-marks, almost as uncool as putting “cool” in quote marks, but I’ve never quite understood the appeal of just hanging out. I wonder if I am hanging out when I sit at a table and watch people move around. I decide that I’m not really hanging out, since I do actually have a practical purpose in coming here. I check my cellphone to prove that I’m not really hanging out.

There are three bars on my phone. While the next bar is under construction I watch a fly do mysterious, random circuits of a chair. It lands on the top of the chair and does its scuttling, hesitant fly-walk, darting along on whirring legs for a few moments and then stopping and scuttling on the spot, getting its bearings, then moving on again and going through the same routine. After a while it goes away, and so do the girls.

The sweaty smell of fish and chips comes from behind the counter and stiffens the air around the tables. A speaker squeezes out “Crazy,” the inescapable song by someoneorother, and competes with the rough hum of a generator, and the sounds of cutlery in the hands of busy people.


Beside the counter there is a board with a bright green background and bird-eye pictures of meals on it. The meals are yellow and brown and reliably greasy. Sellotaped to the counter, and wafting around in the wind, is a piece of white A4 with a list of drinks prices on it. The word “Drinks” is a standard piece of WordArt, the kind of thing filled with un-special effects that you see on mediocre science fair projects: letters warped into an arc, with a shadow dropped back, letters filled in with colour that grades from bright red to bright green.

The furnishings have a thrown-together look, as if they only just moved in and don’t expect to stay for long. The wallpaper looks like it has been done incrementally, each new owner adding another band of colour without much thought to what was already there. The top third of the walls is a faded bright green. The next third is a dull yellow, and the bottom third is an anonymous black-and-green dapple. There are square pillars protruding out of the walls at regular intervals, and on each of these pillars there is, inexplicably, a number. The numbers do not seem to correspond to the tables, and they are gold-coloured on little metal plates, like the numbers on letterboxes.

There has been some attempt to give the shop a theme, and the artwork on the walls is half-heartedly maritime. There are three framed paintings of ships in storms, very conventional paintings that are the ocean-going equivalent of those pastoral paintings of the Sussex Downs that you get on table mats. On the side walls there are three stylised drawings of fish in primary colours. On the front wall, above the entrance, there is a another fish painting, this time a giant painting that looks like it was done by a promising third-form student at the local school. In a recess above the entrance there is a tangle of fishing lines and cray-fish nets. All of these things are about the sea, but they are too widely spaced to really give the shop a theme. Trying to appreciate the theme is like trying to appreciate a melody wherein there is a long delay between each note. Above the entrance there is a green sign saying “Exit”. It is a large sign and it dominates the entrance, as if it is meant as an artistic centre-piece.

At one table, four elderly people sit around and talk about sandflies and the weather. “They’ll get you in the end if they want to, they will,” says one. “They’re right bastards, you’re not wrong there,” says another. One of them, a New Zealander, orders fish-and-chips. This amuses the English couple, who say “Fush and chups! Fush and chups! Are they like fash and chaps? Fush and chups!” They all laugh. The English couple leaves, the fish and chips arrive, and the NZ man tips salt on to his meal and absentmindedly goes through a few practice rounds: “fush end cheeps,” he says. “Fesh and chups. Fosh und chapes.”

At another table there is a young male in his late teens, a Maori-looking lad with a tight t-shirt whose hem is clasped around his upper arm like a bracelet. He eats a packet of fish and chips on his own. He has fat white shoes and his left foot jigs rapidly up and down, as if he needs to go to the toilet.

A little Maori child runs in the shop and hops and waddles around the tables, completely naked. “You’re mum’s out the back, boy,” says the girl at the counter, and the child runs out the back with her fingers all tangled up behind her back.

I have come here to recharge my phone in the wall-socket, and I feel obliged to buy something while I am there. I choose a can of Orange and Lime fizzy drink. The can proudly announces that it’s contents is “5% Real Fruit.” When I’ve finished the can, overwhelmed by real fruityness, I watch a group of young girls arrive at the tearooms. One of them goes to buy a coke. The others sit down on a bench. Someone hands out straws, and they sit there bristling with straws, straws in the mouth, straws in the hand, straws as chopsticks, straws as smokes, straws as drumsticks, as backrubbers. Outside, the sun makes ballbearings of light on a green bike rack, on the frame of a bike, on the grille of a car. A Radiohead song comes on the radio. The girl returns with the coke and her friends pass it around, drinking through their straws like beaks. The finish the bottle and sit around doing little. This, I suppose, is what people do when they “hang out.” I know it is deeply uncool to put “hanging out” in quote-marks, almost as uncool as putting “cool” in quote marks, but I’ve never quite understood the appeal of just hanging out. I wonder if I am hanging out when I sit at a table and watch people move around. I decide that I’m not really hanging out, since I do actually have a practical purpose in coming here. I check my cellphone to prove that I’m not really hanging out.

There are three bars on my phone. While the next bar is under construction I watch a fly do mysterious, random circuits of a chair. It lands on the top of the chair and does its scuttling, hesitant fly-walk, darting along on whirring legs for a few moments and then stopping and scuttling on the spot, getting its bearings, then moving on again and going through the same routine. After a while it goes away, and so do the girls.

The sweaty smell of fish and chips comes from behind the counter and stiffens the air around the tables. A speaker squeezes out “Crazy,” the inescapable song by someoneorother, and competes with the rough hum of a generator, and the sounds of cutlery in the hands of busy people.