Martin De Ruyter/Stuff
âWhen I have security Iâm as happy as a pig in mud, says Mike, who is living in temporary housing in a Nelson motel.
In Mike’s motel room, there’s a box of carving tools, and shelves for his books. Most are about carving, art and geography, but the book on the table beside his bed is Ernest Hemingway’s
Islands in the Stream, a present from his father. “When I have security I’m as happy as a pig in mud,” Mike says. The small room is “five-star”; a far cry from life on the streets of Christchurch, he says. There, he slept in doorways on thick wedges of cardboard he foraged from skips. And he drank whatever he could get his hands on, sometimes methylated spirits.