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Andrew Laking, 46, and Claire Mabey, 35, live in Southgate, Wellington, with their 2-year-old son, Charlie. They run Verb Wellington, a writers and literary festival. Andrew is also a musician.
ANDREW: I was working as a musician, based in Ireland, I lived there for a little over 10 years, and Claire was working at the Tauranga Arts Festival. I organized a band to come play there and that’s how we met, by email.
I know Claire thought, from the way I wrote the emails, that I was about 30 years older than me. I have no idea what he was writing, it must have been quite formal.
When we both lived in Wellington I really wanted to start some kind of festival so we started chatting about it and Claire was really interested in something called LitCrawl which we started working on together. That was the initial impulse to hang out.
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ROSA WOODS / Things
The couple juggle their multiple commitments in the arts to parenting 2-year-old Charlie.
We spent a lot of time together and being together was the next part of that story. It was quite natural. There was definitely a time when we realized there was more than just working together.
To be honest, balancing work and family life is pretty out of hand. Working in the arts, you have to work so many overtime anyway, we have to set our own limits, so we somehow separate work life and home life. Try not to have business meetings at 9pm. M. After dinner, but we have a 2 year old so sometimes the only time we have is when he is in bed.
Charlie was six weeks premature. At the time we were working on a winter festival and we thought the baby would arrive and that we would have about four weeks until the festival started. But it came literally 10 days before the festival started. There was no time to stress, it was completely manic. The NICU became the festival’s operating room. It was unreal.
Our company is called Pirate and Queen, and a friend made us a logo because they were sick of looking at our Microsoft Paint logo. In the logo, there’s a crazy octopus juggling 10 different things, and that sums up Claire, in a way. She is good at remembering everything, while I am the opposite, unless she writes it down. However, neither of them is a pirate or queen.
What I appreciate the most about being together is that we like to hang out. We get along really good. We always have things to talk about, but we are different enough. And we like to plan things together, I suppose that has been the central foundation of our relationship.
ROSA WOODS / Things
Claire grew up thinking that she would like to be a nun. The idea of a community life still appeals, he says.
CLAIRE: We have been together since 2014. We were talking via email for months and he was very good dealing with him. I remember thinking he was an old man, for some reason. When I met him we were instant friends and I guess that’s why we kept in touch and dated.
I was still quite nomadic, moving to work at festivals. He was also a nomad, because he had been on tour as a musician. But we ended up abroad at the same time and found ourselves in Germany. We had a blast traveling and then ended up back in Wellington at the same time. That’s when we decided to launch our business and our festival. We got together as a couple very quickly after that.
Do you know when people tell you, when you’re single, “you’ll just know”? I used to get really mad when people said it, but with Andy, I knew it. At the time it was pretty obvious that it was more than friendship. We spend a lot of time together and I think we faced it one night at dinner. Maybe I was the one who brought it up, probably, very likely. I am not a very patient person.
ROSA WOODS / Things
Claire and Andrew were living quite nomadic existences before they got together.
Andrew is very creative. He is hardworking, friendly and loyal. When I first met him, he was doing The empire city, which was his album as a book; all letters with paintings by Bob Kerr. We have one of the paintings in our house and that reminds me of our relationship.
When I was very little, I thought that if you became a nun, you didn’t have to get married or do anything that you didn’t want to do. I thought you could be your own woman. So, I had this vision of myself, as a nun, living with a horse, because I wanted it so bad.
I still have a real interest in that community life. I have lived in a monastery in Greece. It was incredible. What attracts me is being totally outside of a capitalist system. I am not religious at all, but I am interested in those communities that live outside the dominant system, and their main values are the social good. The nuns she lived with, her main purpose in life was to help people.
Verb Wellington runs from November 5-8.
