Comedian Penny Ashton writes on the necessity of the arts, especially during lockdown.

On March 22, everyone’s favourite fiscal bloodhounds, the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union, sent out a tweet in response to Creative New Zealand’s announcement that it will dedicate an emergency response package to helping New Zealand’s artists, in the face of all our work disappearing like specials from the Countdown website.

I could go on about the words “taxpayers’ money” being two of the most useless words put together, just ahead of “ratepayers’ money”. That in fact they are all just synonyms for the operational expenditure that keeps New Zealand in hospitals, schools and America’s Cup bases. That isn’t it funny that supporting solo mothers is “taxpayers’ money” whereas the Covid-19 response is a “government-backed wage subsidy”.

I could even go on about how in the face of a global pandemic, capitalism is about as useful as a crocheted face mask, whereas socialism, also known as taxpayers’ money, is literally saving lives by paying for everyday essentials. (But not from The Warehouse.)

But I shan’t do that. I shall rise above.

Instead, with the whole nation in isolation – which I assume the TPU is doing too, as, you know, I don’t think they’re an essential service – I shall pose a question. A provocation if you will, because I am an art wanker after all.

Imagine these next few weeks in lockdown without the arts.

Terrifying, isn’t it?

You wake up in your bedroom that is painted the colour of boredom. No jaunty hues designed by Karen Walker, just the colour of dirt mixed with lint. Your duvet cover was once the same colour, but it is now the colour of urine from repeated washing.

There are no uplifting artworks on your walls, just framed A3 posters written in comic sans with sayings like “Personal responsibility is my boyfriend” and “Bootstraps are the lever to happiness”.

You pour your cereal from a cardboard box that simply says “carbohydrate of limited sustenance with excessive added sugar” and brew yourself a coffee as you contemplate just what the fuck you are going to do today.

You get dressed into your day pyjamas.

You flick through the NZ Herald, which is just a sea of bullet points. Endless facts and figures punctuated by columns braying about petrol taxes, bludgers and someone called Cindy.

You walk over to your bookshelf. No books are able to be judged as none have covers. They all just have their names written on their spines and are an array of self-help books, and one pile of utter bilge called The Art of the Deal.

You look at your CD collection, which is just all audio books of The Art of the Deal read by TikTokers.

Spotify is now all just podcasts. So many fucking podcasts called Hey Hey Hey, I’m Recording This in a Toilet, Comedy Guy has Opinions and Millennials! We’re Old Now!

You flick on the television and it’s just four wild-eyed presenters who have been locked in isolation. They have no make-up, their regrowth is appalling and they are all wearing bedsheets the colour of boredom/urine. They take turns desperately reading lists of “essential services” over and over and over again and cut to videos of Dr Ashley Bloomfield and Dr Siouxsie Wiles repeating the answers to the same questions over and over and over again.

Netflix, Lightbox, Amazon, Neon and Disney Plus have all been replaced with a live stream of Parliament TV. Which is adjourned, in isolated Zoom calls.

You run wildly to your Playstation controller, but the only game available is a silent black and white version of Pac-Man where the ghosts are all the shape of a Covid-19 virus and the magic pill doesn’t exist.

As a last resort, you dash to your DVD shelf then remember that you sold them all for $10 at your garage sale because they’re obsolete technology!

And then you wake.

Phew.

Happily, this nightmarish hellscape doesn’t exist because this government has put measures in place to keep its artists alive. Using money that was already allocated to the arts to keep the practitioners afloat.  Because arts aren’t just nice to have. They are as intrinsically entwined into everyday life as breathing.

From the moment you wake up you are surrounded by art, be it in the form of interior design, advertising copy, the clothes you wear, the songs your kid butchers on a recorder, the hilarious memoir you read at lunchtime or the terrible jokes your co-worker tells you by the photocopier. Art is not just opera, ballet or experimental sound poetry. It is woven through the fabric of society and turned into a nice jumper that looks good on everyone.

It simultaneously uplifts, entertains, inspires, bores, provokes, enriches, delights, enrages and moves us. Some of it is good. Some of it is shit. But without it, everything is shit.

So in these Covidious times let’s remember: our vocations are not in a competition. We have a government with empathy at its core that is not afraid to reveal its beating socialist heart to protect us all. Whatever job you do, whatever industry you’re in, you’re ALL important. Including libertarian lawyers and pollsters.

Creative New Zealand and NZ On Air invests in all levels of the arts in Aotearoa and it pays dividends. From giant free events in the Auckland Festival, to funding fringe festivals where some of our great names on the world stage began. Without grassroots, no tall Taikas can grow.

And right now we all need watering to keep us alive.

How do you hold a funeral service with the country in lockdown? Where there’s a will – and a tech-savvy uncle – there’s a way, Erin Kavanagh-Hall discovered.

I was floating somewhere in the Cook Strait when I heard my grandfather’s funeral had been cancelled.

I should elaborate. It was a Monday, and my mum, stepdad Bill and I had not long boarded the Bluebridge, the car in the decks below, headed for Picton. Grandad had died the Thursday before, after a four-month-long battle with cancer. His funeral was scheduled for Tuesday, March 24 (exactly a month after his 86th birthday – his last on the planet), in Rangiora, north of Christchurch, where he and Grandma had lived for the past two decades.

With cases of Covid-19 rearing their heads all over the country, Mum had booked us a passage down south via ferry – easier (or so we thought) to keep our distance from people than on a plane or at an airport. When, on the Saturday before we were due to leave, the government announced New Zealand was stepping up to alert level two, I found myself agonising over what seemed like a Sophie’s Choice: do I attend the funeral, knowing a case of Covid-19 had been confirmed in Wairarapa, where I live, and that I stood a slim chance of causing a community outbreak in North Canterbury? Or opt out, and break my grandmother’s heart? Both were equally terrifying.

Mum was similarly anxious, but decided to take the risk. How do you say no to your own father’s funeral? Still, she took precautions: packing us a lunch of cheese and relish sandwiches for the ferry trip, loading up the chilly bin and the thermos for a roadside picnic and making sure we each had a pair of disposable gloves for the handrails.

Monday rolled around, and we boarded the ferry without incident. We set sail at 1.30pm, the same time Jacinda Ardern was due to make her next Covid-19 update. We were barely 10 minutes out of Wellington harbour when the prime minister went live, joining us from Mum’s iPad screen.

And there it was. New Zealand had stepped up to level three. Level four, and lockdown, within 48 hours. All non-essential businesses to shut their doors. Schools to close. All indoor and outdoor events to cease.

Five minutes later, a text from Rangiora. Grandad’s funeral was cancelled.

Monday, November 4, 2019, has gone down in family history as Black Monday. Grandad had been in Christchurch Hospital since the previous evening, having complained of severe stomach pain. Grandma drove in to see him, but had to park several blocks away. While walking past Hagley Park, her foot caught in a dip in the grass. Down she went, rolling her ankle. No one stopped to help. She picked herself up, dusted herself off, and hobbled down to the hospital.

There, she and Grandad got the news: bowel and liver cancer, terminal, a matter of weeks. “Your best option, Mr Alford, is to go home, and we’ll arrange on-call palliative care, and the district nurses will come and check on you.” Grandma limped back to the car, in shock, her foot black and swollen. At my aunt’s insistence, she made a doctor’s appointment the next day. She had a Jones fracture – four weeks in a moon boot.

Grandad was philosophical – he’d had 85 years, 62 of them married to “the most amazing woman”. Yet, he was determined to leave this earth on his own terms. He made it to Christmas. And saw in the New Year. And, in February, celebrated his and Grandma’s birthdays. Two weeks before his birthday, he even managed to fight off a grave lung infection, which landed him back in hospital and right at death’s door.

He bounced back, and blessed us with another six weeks. Grandma was by his side the whole time: getting him out of bed and dressed every morning; making tea, toast and her famous desserts; making sure he was able to potter around the house, read The Press from cover to cover, and check his email as, well, normal.

I got to spend his birthday with him in Rangiora – I told him how strong and brave he was. “We make them tough in this family,” I smiled. “I don’t know about that, my darling,” he replied. “But we look after each other. And if I didn’t have your grandma looking after me, I’d be long gone.”

Flash forward to the next Black Monday – March 23, 2020. No funeral, and my parents and I were stuck between two islands. I’ll admit that based on my earlier fears (unwittingly catching and passing on Covid-19 to a chapel full of people), I was initially relieved.

Then the despair set in. My darling grandad wouldn’t get the send-off he deserved. Our whānau were cheated out of the chance to say our final goodbyes. My 81-year-old grandma, grieving for the man she loved since she was 17, cheated out of closure. We found out later she couldn’t even see him in his coffin – after the PM’s announcement, the funeral home wouldn’t let her in the building. She got a fleeting glimpse of the casket through the glass before it headed to the crematorium. She and my uncle had painted the casket themselves: ivory, with stained wooden handles.

For Mum, the priority was getting home. We briefly discussed the possibility of driving down to at least pay Grandma a visit. But, there was talk of road blocks, which would leave us stranded, and me separated from my husband back home in Masterton, for four weeks. Mum and Bill went online to get us an earlier sailing back to Wellington, but the Bluebridge site was swamped. I was having panic attacks – silently, not to worry my folks. The rhythm of the boat, coursing over the water, helped. Mum kept it together, but I could tell she was crushed. “I can’t even say goodbye to my dad”, I heard her mutter to Bill.

We disembarked just after 5pm, and headed to the Bluebridge terminal – my parents had to yell their booking number across the room, attempting to keep a two metre distance. Fully booked, they were told. Our only option was the original plan: sail back to Wellington at 2pm on Wednesday, and hope like hell I could catch the last train back home before the lockdown. Until then, as Bill put it, we just had to sit tight and “enjoy the delights of Picton”.

Mum managed to book us into a hotel. We got a suite with three bedrooms and a glorious view of the harbour; the Bluebridge and Interislander coming and going. We were lucky. We saw other families sleeping in their cars. In the lounge room, we ate snacks from the chilly bin, drank wine and beer from the Bottle-O across the road (before it closed down) and chatted about times gone by. Later, in the privacy of my own room, I allowed myself to break down.

The next morning, we awoke to a gorgeous day in Picton, and news from Rangiora. There would be a service for Grandad after all.

There had been some discussion of the celebrant coming over to do a small family service in my grandparents’ garden, but she was strongly advised to stay home, so that idea was scrapped. Our plans changed yet again. My uncle, a school technology teacher, suggested we do what the 21st century does best: use the internet. The Rangiora whānau would gather at Grandma’s; we in Picton would join them via FaceTime; and the celebrant would phone in and do the service via Skype. A send-off, social distancing style.

After a few teething problems, we got FaceTime working on Mum’s phone and we could see everyone (Grandma, my aunt, two cousins, and my uncle, in his best suit) in my grandparents’ lounge room. Uncle Howard had set up two laptops – one for FaceTime and one for Skype, cast to the TV. The celebrant (and my grandparents’ neighbour for several years), a soft-spoken Englishwoman, smiled at us from the screen; my grandparents smiled from their Golden Wedding portrait, hung directly above. Grandma had arranged the flowers intended for the coffin (white lilies, red roses and gerberas) on a side table. Mum propped up her phone against the chilly bin handle, so we could watch hands-free.

As originally planned, we kicked off at 11am. The celebrant conducted the service sitting in her library. She read the eulogy the whānau had prepared – sharing Grandad’s love for cricket, skiing on Aoraki/Mount Cook and ballroom dance, for which he won medals in his youth. When he first met Grandma, he lived in Bryndwr, and she on the other side of town in New Brighton, so he caught two busses to visit her. He was a keen golfer, made home-brew beer in the garage, and was most chuffed with his veggie garden – especially his cherry tomatoes, potatoes and onions. He was very proud of his “girls”, the six women in his life – Grandma, their two daughters, and three granddaughters.

As planned, I read a poem I wrote for Grandad’s birthday. So many memories. Sneaking us a peppermint from his lolly jar after dinner. His famous hugs (“big squeezes”) before bedtime. Teaching me the Cockney alphabet and introducing me to Pink Floyd. The year he and Grandma came to visit Mum, Dad and I while we were living in England, punting on the Cam River, listening to the King’s College choir. Him and I sharing a waltz at my year 13 leavers’ ball. Him reading every article and column I wrote when I became a community newspaper editor. He said my writing reminded me of his dad (Grandad Erle – the great-grandfather I never met), a gifted wordsmith who wrote letters home while stationed in the Pacific during World War 2.

We even sang the hymns Grandma and Grandad had chosen (Abide With Me and Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer), with Howard playing the backing tracks from Spotify. It was perfect. I didn’t cry during the service; I felt guilty at the time. Looking back on it, my strongest emotion was gratitude. Overwhelming, giddy gratitude. Thanks to some quick thinking, and the beauty of technology, we got to say goodbye. As Grandma often said of things that were homemade: “better than a bought one”.

Wednesday arrived, and we were headed home. Our sailing was delayed by an hour, so I missed the train. Calm and collected, my parents drove me over the Remutaka Hill back to Masterton and back into my husband’s arms. I hope our marriage is as long and loving as my grandparents’. They set the gold standard.

For our whānau, this was a lesson in improvisation and resourcefulness. And resilience. Something I believe Grandad personified. He didn’t have the easiest upbringing. At age nine, he lost his eye after an accident with a barbed wire fence. In his later years, his health suffered from severe asthma and complications from a hip replacement. He and Grandma lived through the Canterbury earthquakes. And his final illness, which he faced with courage and dignity.

Mum said Grandad would tell her, throughout her teenage doubt and frustration, “no matter what, always do your best”. In our hour of darkness, we did our best. We did what we could, used what we had and, at different ends of the South Island, had a funeral for a good man in the midst of a global pandemic and an impending quarantine. And for that, I think Grandad would be proud.

Rest easy, Grandad. I’ll remember you, and your impromptu, long-distance funeral, for the rest of my days. Shine on, you crazy diamond.