Since 1998, UK-born Ian Brackenbury has been paid a stable $16,000 NZD (roughly 11,300 USD) per 12 months to be the official wizard for the town of Christchurch in New Zealand. Now after barely greater than twenty years on the town’s payroll, authorities are formally chopping ties with Brackenbury in an try and modernize the town.

The idea of a “city wizard” is a bit wild, however it principally boils all the way down to Brackenbury performing as kind of a dwelling vacationer attraction, albeit one which’s wizard-themed. The Guardian says that the Christchurch metropolis council had contracted Brackenbury to advertise their metropolis by “acts of wizardry and other wizard-like services,” after Brackenbury was seen performing his wizard shtick in public areas all through the ‘70s and ‘80s.

When the city council tried stopping him, the public protested (because, let’s be actual, who doesn’t love a very good magic man) and New Zealand’s prime minister lastly relented in 1990, asking Brackenbury if he’d contemplate being New Zealand’s official Wizard.

“I am concerned that your wizardry is not at the disposal of the entire nation,” Moore wrote on the time “I suggest therefore that you should urgently consider my suggestion that you become the Wizard of New Zealand, Antarctica and relevant offshore areas […]”

“No doubt there will be implications in the area of spells, blessings, curses, and other supernatural matters that are beyond the competence of mere Prime Ministers,” Moore added.

Brackenbury graciously accepted, and the remaining, as they are saying, is historical past. While The Wiz spent most of his time in Christchurch’s important sq. wearing his full Wiz garb—pointy black hat, black robes, workers and all—he’s been known as out to the farther reaches of New Zealand and Africa to uh, “rain dance” and “ward off dry spirits” in the course of the bouts of excessive drought these areas are inclined to undergo. In no less than one case, these dances apparently labored! The New York Times wrote in 1988 in regards to the South Island getting buckets of rain about half an hour considered one of The Wizard’s performances.

‘’I stay in my very own universe,’’ he advised The Times, including that he had “no need” for a driver’s license, checking account, or social safety quantity as a result of he was a “fictional character.”

Of course, actuality catches up with us all. In current years, Brackenbury has come round to realizing that his Wizard persona isn’t sufficient to chase away parking tickets, old age, and the tip of his contract with the town that’s employed him for the previous 23 years. A Christchurch council spokesperson advised the Guardian that it wasn’t something private—it was simply that, nicely, wizards weren’t that cool anymore, and weren’t part of the “vibrant, diverse, modern city” picture that Christchurch wished to advertise to vacationers and residents.

Brackenbury advised the Guardian that he’d nonetheless be maintaining his standard wizardry over within the Christchurch Arts Centre for anybody that got here by, even when he wasn’t on the town’s payroll anymore. Canceling the contract, he stated, “implies that I am boring and old, but there is nobody else anything like me in Christchurch.” Frankly, we’re inclined to agree.