The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

 One of those posts that for some reason didn't make it online when it was first written. Just rediscovered it and thought it was worth adding here. It's a review of what turned out to be an unexpected marvel. I think I caught up on it some years after it was made, on a streaming service. 

The notion behind The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was always going to cause difficulties for the writer of this movie: firstly in the outworking of the idea that a man could be born old and gradually get younger – it has potential for disaster all along the line – and perhaps more importantly from a dramatic point of view, the loss of the main actor, the star, from the last ten minutes of the movie, at a time when he’s perhaps most needed to complete the thing.

 Surprisingly these two factors are, in general, overcome.  They still cause the movie to be less than it might have been, nevertheless Benjamin Button proved to be a much better movie than I expected. I think it’s too long; there’s an overindulgence in extraneous material. There are two framing stories rather than one (the backwards clock is interesting but essentially fluffery in terms of the movie itself, as is the hummingbird theme, there because hummingbirds can fly backwards). The affair with the spy’s wife in Russia, though superbly done, contributes nothing to the ongoing story. The red herring of the way in which a series of delays can cause someone to be in the wrong place at the wrong time is a great piece of filmmaking, full of detail, and yet it actually has nothing to do with the story. The summing-up piece at the end which points up the different gifts of various characters. Is it necessary? Nope, we’ve already seen these gifts throughout the movie. 

Take all these out and it would have been a much leaner movie, and maybe more effective.  Yet, perhaps to contradict what I’ve already said, all these ‘extras’ are actually very enjoyable, if you allow yourself just to take them as they come. They bring a kind of Dickensian flavour to the film in the sense that Dickens was never averse to adding in extraneous but rich material. (His book, The Pickwick Papers, has several short stories included in it, usually told by characters who have nothing to do with the main story. He avoided this technique in his later books, but never got over the use of including characters who wouldn’t be missed if they hadn’t been there. Another 19^th century writer, Victor Hugo, often stops the story in Les Miserables to write an essay on one of the aspects of his story, such as convents, or the Paris sewers.) 

In Benjamin Button there are also too many themes: missing fathers, loss of time, wasting time, the value of individual gifts, death in the midst of life. Yet within the context of this particular movie, the embarressment de riches somehow works, and keeps the viewer’s mind active. There’s no single straightforward path through this movie.  

Brad Pitt plays the innocent ‘old’ man as someone with eyes wide open to the extraordinary nature of the world, a man without guile. I think it’s a superb piece of characterization, perhaps one of the best things he’s ever done. Cate Blanchett always has a kind of severity about her, and yet this works well in the complex nature of her character as Button’s lifelong love. Curiously, his other passion, played by Tilda Swinton, looks so much like Blanchett at times, that for a while I thought it was the same actress playing both roles. There may be an intention behind this. The vast cast of other actors are all excellent in roles big and small.     

The photography by Claudio Miranda is superb, always at one with the tone of the movie.   Shot after shot uses colour to heighten the emotion of the scene. Yes, I know this isn’t unusual in movies, but it’s certainly done with great art here. Miranda has worked with both Brad Pitt and the director of this movie, David Fincher, before. (Fincher also directed the highly acclaimed, Social Network.)  There’s obviously a compatibility at work. 

And the special effects are seamless: it’s hard to know where Brad Pitt ends and one of the other actors who play his role begins – or vice versa. Several younger actors are credited with the role – though it’s obvious which ones play Button in the last stages of his life, it’s not so obvious in the early stages. 

 This is the sort of movie to take your time over. Don’t be put off by its length (some 166 minutes). Accept it as it is, and enjoy its trips down side alleys, and its delight in human beings. 

Interesting montage of the various stages 
of Button's life. 
Sorry, I've lost the address of the site it came from.

Remembering Nuns

First published in Column 8, date unknown, but some time in the 1990s.

 In the memory course I did a while ago I was supposed to learn how to remember where I'd put things years before, and how to recognize faces from the distant past. 

One face eludes me. Try as I might, I can't remember the face of the teacher, (a nun), who tied me to my desk with a belt because my childish exuberance was somewhat over the top! 

On the other hand, during a recent visit to a convent, (for a friend's Jubilee), I was amazed at the phenomenal memories nuns appear to have, particularly those who claimed they'd taught me at primary school, forty years ago.

 (None of the sisters took responsibility for tying me to the desk, however, and my memory failed to recognize any face that connected to my "traumatic" experience.) 

I don't think these ladies have done a memory course - it just seems to come naturally. If I was a teacher, I'd find pupils' faces blurring into one big Mr Blobby after a few years. 

For instance, the sister who greeted us at the door instantly knew me, and said she'd taught me. As usual I had to ask who she was, and still remembered her not at all. 

Perhaps it's because when I was a lad all the nuns wore long, black, person-enclosing garments that hid them almost entirely from view. The only identifiable parts were the hands and the face. 

I'm not good at remembering hands at the best of times - and faces that used to be tightly framed in black change out of all sight when viewed in ordinary everyday gear. 

But not all the nuns at the afternoon tea were unremembered. One I met again had had the misfortune to follow in the footsteps of my favourite music-teaching nun of all time, the one I adored, and for whom I actually wept when she said she was being transferred. 

This other lady, whose qualities and abilities, while different, were no doubt as excellent, suffered badly by comparison, through no fault of her own. 

Naturally, she remembered more about the past than I did. (Do they keep dossiers?)

She spoke of my poor practice record and the strain it had on my mother's nerves, as well as my embarrassment at bringing her flowers (perhaps as a peace offering). I apparently came half an hour early to escape the unwanted attention of my mates. 

I remember none of this - surely I used to practice perfectly? 

Embarrassed about bringing flowers? Never.

Later, as I was sitting down balancing my cup of tea in one hand and in the other one of those soft, fluffy cakes filled with mock cream and smattered with icing sugar, (the sort that sticks to your beard and can't be wiped off because you don't have a third hand), I was approached by a six foot vision from the past. Someone I could never forget. 

This nun, holding a tray in her hands and encouraging everyone to eat more cakes, turned out to be my first and favourite music-teacher of all time. And she was the only nun that day who didn't instantly recognise me.

(She soon made it clear that this was hardly surprising: when I was seven, I didn't have a beard.) Her delight was even greater than mine, and she greeted me with the warmth of someone to whom everyone is a long-standing friend.

She was as full of beans as ever, words high-tailing it off her tongue as though she had so much to say the day would be over before she'd finished. And she still had an enthusiasm for life that hasn't changed in forty years.

It's curious how we so easily forget the names and faces of some people who leave an unpleasant mark on our memories. This sister, however, had made music a delight to her pupils, opening up a world formerly unexplored. More than that, she filled life with laughter. How could anyone forget her?

Dinosaurs....are bores

 First published in Column 8 in 1993 (and later online under my Poems and Short Fiction blog in 2019). It relates to my surprise that the scientific world seems so obsessed with 'selling' dinosaurs to children. 

I’ve had enough of dinosaurs,

Especially Hadrosaurs.

Dinos must rank, I think, as the

All-time greatest bores.

Who cares about some fifty tonnes of

Hefty Brontosaurus

Shoving all his weight around and asking:

‘Don’t you adore us?’

Who wants to meet and greet some

Rampant Iguanodon,

Marketing his lizard look

Until I feel quite put upon.

Who gives a hoot about a coot called

Rex Tyrannosaurus,

And whether on his nastier days he’d

Gouge and rip and gore us?

Euparkeria, Hypsilophodon, your

Names trip off my tongue –

NOT!

Triceratops, Coelophysis, your

Praises they ain’t sung.

Compsognathus, Dimorphodon, you

Thought you ruled the land;

You missing links, you’re all extinct –  I

Wish you all were banned.

You poor deficient dinosaurs, you

Denizens long gone.

Scarce good it did you, lumpy brutes, being

Weighed up by the tonne.

Go back where you belonged, you lot, in your

Dim Cretaceous time,

And let me try and end this rot with a

Non-Jurassic rhyme.

My wife (on the right) and I disguised as dinosaurs
at a grandchild's themed party. 

De-bearded

First published in Column 8, Sept 1993.  

Fooled into thinking I was good-looking - even handsome - by photographs more than a quarter of a century old, my wife and family had long nagged me to shave off my beard. I resisted the conspiracy to tame this full-blooded feature of masculinity.

However, while my wife was away overseas, I decided (quite unaffected by outside pressures), to see if she would know me at the airport if I met her beardless.

The weekend before she came home, I took scissors, along with a borrowed razor, (fully intending to return to my hairy state within a week), and shaving cream. Breathing deep into my diaphragm, I proceeded to dispense with the facial hair.

Excitement welled up as I embarked on a voyage of rediscovery. I hacked away with the scissors: a reasonable-looking character emerged. Hmm, not too bad.

Then I completed the job. And all those movies where someone's face changes before your eyes - usually for the worse - came back to haunt me.

The youth of the 25 year-old photos was gone. Double-chinned, a bejowelled, bothered and bewildered stranger appeared, like Rip Van Winkle after his lengthy slumber.

I could never confront the world like this. The beard must resume its groundcover as soon as I'd faced my wife.

Sunday morning at church. Every reaction possible. People recognizing me instantly - and laughing! Complementary people: my smile now seen in its fullest glory. Uncomplementary people - like myself - who couldn't wait for my face to go into hiding again. People who knew me but thought I'd changed my hairstyle. And those who didn't know me at all...!

"Mr Crowl," one bearded friend said, "I feel betrayed."

Subsequent meetings with friends and acquaintances convince me that people recognize other people in very individual ways. What else would account for such varied reactions?

On Monday, a shopkeeper and a librarian, people who know me only as a walking beard, recognized me without difficulty. Others recognized the glasses and squeezed-up eyes, but didn't register the loss of the lower part of my face. I feel like someone in those children's books where the top halves of the faces can be matched up with all manner of lower halves.

People say I look twenty years younger. This is odd, since they used to say before that I never looked my age. I must have plummeted back into adolescence. (Some say I look older. Good grief!)

As soon as I move away from my normal context, many people totally fail to recognize me. Anonymous, I melt into the crowd. I'm the victim of beardist remarks, from both men and women, as people's deep anti-beard emotions come out of the closet. All this on top of skin irritations, nicks, rashes, and the sting of aftershave.

Tuesday, my wife returned to Dunedin. At the airport, she screamed, laughed and cried - but avoided hysteria. I've been bearded for 22 years; longer than we've been married.

"I hate it!" she said, which was a relief - so do I. But that was her first reaction. Later she began to enjoy the smoothness of the face - and the smell of the aftershave. It was like having a new husband - at least in part.

I told her I've got plenty of smooth bits on my body that don't need to be razored - the palms of my hands, for instance, or the backs of my ears. If necessary, I can always douse these with aftershave.

The photo above is, at present, a remembrance of things past. Don't despair, fellow bearded ones: negotiations currently underway are hopeful of my naked face returning to its former glory.

Inventive

First published in Column 8, date unknown, but sometime in the 1990s. 

Though only thirty years old, the discussions in this column seem like they come from a different century. Ah, wait! - they do.

Getting irritable with things that don’t do quite what’s expected of them has its advantages. We humans delight in setting to and improving the aforesaid irritable things, or else inventing something altogether new.

I know it sounds chauvinistic to say it, but usually it’s the men who do the improving or inventing. Perhaps this is because they have more of a tendency to tinker.

I’m not trying to be sexist here. I once began writing an article on women inventors but found very little information. There was one American book on the subject, but nothing on New Zealand women inventors. (If anyone can help, I’d still be interested.)

Back to Invention. I’m sure irritation has its place, but I suspect many inventors started out as children who took things apart to see how they were made and couldn’t put them together again.

I’m not an inventor – I can barely take something apart in the first place – but I do have ideas for improvements on things.

For instance, I’ve long wondered why Telecom doesn’t have some way of letting you know that Call Minder has recorded a call. As it works now you have to remember to pick up the phone after you’ve been using it in order to see whether you’ve had another call while you were chatting. Since this takes discipline, calls can sometimes be minded for quite a while.

This obviously irritated some other inventive mind and a company in the US has produced a little piece of equipment called VisuAlert* which notifies you that a call has been recorded, by lighting up its ‘smile.’ (The machine is little more than a white pad with a painted red smile connected to your phone.)

Simple enough, but why doesn’t Telecom just use the red light on telephones for the same purpose? Why buy a VisuAlert when there’s one virtually installed?

Another thing that puzzles me, and which I’m sure I’d do something about if I had the first clue where to start, is this. We hear a lot about water becoming a precious resource – we’re using it to such an extent that we may find it rationed in the next century.

Taking the salt out of the ocean is the obvious solution (desalinisation), but the problem with this idea is the expense. Yet one fishing town in north-west Mexico, Puerto Lobos,** has its own solar still. This produces 3000 litres of fresh water in the summer, and 1000 in the winter. Hardly big time, but a start all the same.

Now here’s a great invention, albeit at this point almost as costly as desalinisation ($899 in the US). A VCR that not only keeps track of the programmes you’ve recorded, their date, channel number and length, but also tells you which tape you’ve recorded them on. That beats flicking through endless tapes to find the one important bit.

I’m not convinced of the value of this next invention, however – a shower valve that ‘remembers’ the temperature you set for your last shower.

Now I know Jeeves always used to run Bertie Wooster’s bath at just the right temperature, and I think I’m right in saying that Bunter did the same for Lord Peter Wimsey, but do we really need the extravagance of a mechanical butler that can drip the water to the right degree?

Dandelion Bones
courtesy Sharon Mollerus

Perhaps more useful on the watering scene is the MoistureSmart Watering Gauge. It tells you exactly how much watering your garden needs. It knows how much water the plants are absorbing, the amount of rainfall and irrigation, and the amount of moisture stored in the soil.   Wow!

Buy one of these and the only other invention we’d need would be the Detect Smart Weed Gauge. This would run round the garden removing weeds from under rose bushes, pulling docks out by the roots, and separating wheat from the chaff. 

Sorry, I haven’t invented it yet.**

//////////////////////////////////

* VisualAlert now appears on the Net as a system invented in Australia, making much use of modern technology. 

**Since this was written the desalinisation process appears to be a much bigger system. 

***But since I wrote this, the idea seems to have taken off in a number of ways! Maybe I'm more of a genius than I thought. Check out Google for variations on the idea; this one, for example.

 

Goodbye to my little best mate

 Our lovely, warm-hearted little dog of immense personality was put to sleep today. At nearly fifteen 
years old he’d had a good innings (105 in dog years), but his back legs had gone phut to the degree that he couldn’t push up on them, making it almost impossible for him to get through the dog door. He’d surprise us sometimes by going out through it without difficulty, but then couldn’t get back in; there was a step on the other side making it a bigger jump. And he’d started to baulk at coming up the three back steps; I’d have to go out and rescue him. Or not. Sometimes he’d just do it, somehow. Even as recently as yesterday.

He was sleeping a lot more, and we’d had to start feeding him on kitten kibble because he’d lost some front teeth. I don’t know when this happened, but it must have been in the last few months. He was losing weight – I could feel bones in his back that I hadn’t noticed before, and even his fur didn’t seem to be growing as fast as usual. On top of all this, there was some constriction in his throat which meant he’d hoick like an old man, and not always get rid of what was there.

But it was still extremely hard to have him put down. Both my wife and I have struggled to make the decision over the last weeks and we’ve put it off more than once. Today was very emotional all round. He’s the first dog we’ve owned – we’d always had a cat or two when the kids were growing up.

He’s been my companion on endless walks, and until recently would walk as long as I was walking. Up till last year people we met still thought he was a puppy. Lately however, a breathlessness would creep in and even walking round the block was an issue. For a while I’d take him out in a pram to make sure he got some fresh air.

So, will we see him again? As Christians we believe we’ll see a lot of people we’ve known in Heaven* - but will we see our pets?

Peter Kreeft in his book, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven: But Never Dreamed of Asking has a brief section answering the question: Are there animals in Heaven? He writes:

The simplest answer is: Why not? How irrational is the prejudice that would allow plants (green fields and flowers) but not animals into Heaven! Much more reasonable is C. S. Lewis’ speculation that we will be “between the angels who are our elder brothers and the beasts who are our jesters, servants, and playfellows”. Scripture seems to confirm this: “thy judgments are like the great deep; man and beast thou savest, O Lord.” Animals belong in the “new earth” as much as trees.

C. S. Lewis supposes that animals are saved “in” their masters, as part of their extended family. Only tamed animals would be saved in this way. It would seem more likely that wild animals are in Heaven too, since wildness, otherness, not-mine-ness, is a proper pleasure for us. The very fact that the seagull takes no notice of me when it utters its remote, lonely call is part of its glory.

Would the same animals be in Heaven as on earth? “Is my dead cat in Heaven?” Again, why not? God can raise up the very grass; why not cats? Though the blessed have better things to do than play with pets, the better does not exclude the lesser. We were meant from the beginning to have stewardship over the animals; we have not fulfilled that divine plan yet on earth; therefore it seems likely that the right relationship with animals will be part of Heaven: proper “pet-ship”. And what better place to begin than with already petted pets?

From chapter 2 of Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Heaven: But Never Dreamed of Asking, by Peter Kreeft . Ignatius Press, 1990

()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()

*When I write ‘Heaven’ here, and Kreeft is the same, it’s necessary to keep in mind that we’re remembering that those who receive everlasting life through belief in Jesus will one day live in a New Earth, a place often known as Heaven, but in fact a wonderfully heightened version of earth as we know it now, a place utterly fit for human beings to dwell in.

Hard Truths

 My wife wanted to go and see Hard Truths at the movies yesterday. We'd seen the trailer, and it looked interesting, and it stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste who was the wonderfully serious daughter in Secrets and Lies way back in 1996. Both of us had enjoyed that film all those years ago and it had remained in our minds partly because of Brenda Blethyn’s constant, ‘Sweet-art’ (with a great slide down on the ‘art’ syllable, and because it was an enjoyable movie.

Hard Truths – another Mike Leigh film – is anything but enjoyable. Initially the endless anger that Jean-Baptiste’s character, Pansy, directs at everyone, familiar or stranger, is somewhat amusing and all seems to be leading up to some catharsis. But no, the movie drags on through scene after scene of the miserably-depressed Pansy undermining everything good and finally taking it out completely on her long-suffering husband, who’s long since given up trying to argue with anything Pansy says, as has his 22-year-old son, who retreats from her as soon as he can when he’s at home. The last scene is of Pansy finding out from her husband’s workmate that he’s sitting downstairs barely able to move because he’s put his back out at work. Pansy gets up, but then just sits there, incapable of dredging up even an ounce of sympathy, it appears, for the man. He sits in the kitchen, a tear running down his cheek, knowing that even this crisis won’t change her heart.

You realise about halfway through that Pansy isn’t going to change easily – it’s going take an earthquake to shift her. The earthquake never comes. Three-quarters of the way through she finally consents to go and visit her mother’s grave with her sister, a hairdresser who has her own business, an outlook on life that aims for the positive, and who is successful at what she does. Plus she has two lovely daughters in their early twenties bouncing with life and energy. 

At the graveside, it’s revealed that Pansy had to look after her sister when their mother was forced to go out to work, because her husband had left her. This has somehow contributed to destroying Pansy’s life, and underneath she still hates her mother. In fact she hates all humanity, pretty-much. Her sister, Chantelle, manages finally to get her to come home with her for a dinner with her daughters and Pansy’s husband and son. The son, supposedly never capable of doing anything for himself, has left flowers at home for his mother because it’s Mother’s Day. The dinner party turns to mush because Pansy won’t give an inch. (Did I mention she’s also afraid of insects, the outside world, dirt, other people’s ‘DNA’ on a sofa and so on.) And when she and her family are home again she accuses her husband of not saying anything about his awful mother (which is all we hear about the mother) and then proceeding to throw all his clothes out of their bedroom – surprisingly, they still sleep in the same bed up to that point.

The film has garnered awards from every side. Jean-Baptiste is brilliantly awful – in fact you wonder what it cost her personally to be so awful day after day working on the movie, and, during all the time when the characters were being built up bit by bit in the usual Mike Leigh way. 

And that Mike Leigh way, is I think the problem with this film. It has no real structure. Yes, there are some sequences, as opposed to scenes, but a lot of it consists of Pansy berating someone or other just for being there, basically. The fact that she does could have been told in a few short episodes; instead too many of these scenes just go on and on. They lead us to think that something worthwhile will come out of all this bile, that someone will finally speak the hard truths of the title. But they don’t. In real life that’s probably not unusual. People suffer from someone like this for years because there doesn’t seem any way to convey the truth that they’re unwell mentally and that their sheer aggressiveness to all and sundry is ultimately harming themselves even more than others. 

But this is a film, a story. It isn’t real life and there needs to be some breakthrough, even if, at worst, everybody decides to abandon her to herself.

My wife got completely fed up with it in the end; partly because the last section drags even more than other earlier scenes, partly because there just isn’t any outcome. I’d mostly enjoyed it, though I found the character very frustrating after a while, but even I was gobsmacked when it just ended. As a work of art it was unfinished. In fact it was also unfinished in the sense that it made the audience sit through scene after scene that should have been edited down to the essentials. It’s indulgent on Leigh’s part; he seems to think his audience will just tolerate long scenes of unpleasantness without anyone stepping in and dealing with it – including the main character. You don’t expect a sudden complete turnaround, but a hint of the possibility would have made the rest of the long trip worthwhile.

 

Ickle-Uckle

 Ickle-Uckle

First published in Column 8, date unknown, but some time in the 1990s

There are days when I wish I'd been an etymologist - that is, a person who chases after the meanings and derivations of words. (As opposed to an entomologist, a person who likes pulling legs off spiders and wings off flies.)

I'm always intrigued by the peculiarities of English, the way it interconnects with other languages, and the curious gaps we have in it.

A particular gappage problem struck me the other day when I realised how few words ending in -ck went on to become -ckle words. We have plenty of words of the lack, lick, lock, luck variety, (although very few in the leck area), but nowhere near as many in the lackle, lickle, lockle, luckle department. (-ng words that have no -ngle are another cause of concern.)

And even when we do have them, they have no logical link with each other. I mean, what do buck and buckle have in common? Nothing at all, and it appears that they're not even relatives. One comes from the Old English for a he-goat, bucca - so how did he get to be Billy? - and the other from Latin, buccula, a little cheek (of the facial type), which then became a cheek strap. Now you find these cheeky straps all over the place.

Tack and tackle are a slight improvement, both of them having some connection with sailing, but tick and tickle? Tick began life meaning to touch, but fled away from its teasing little friend, tickle, and turned corners into a sound, or a mark, or even motivation, as in "what makes her tick?" - it isn't a touch...!

Pick and pickle are not related at all. Pick comes from piken, meaning what it still does, but pickle comes from pekel. So when Peter Piper picked his peck of pickled peppers, he was making no-cousins into next-of-kin.

This is all very well, however. There seems to me to be a gold mine of words that we haven't even begun to use, let alone explore their possible meanings. Why do we make up new words when we have all these old ones available?

Where are duckle, luckle (winning $2 on Instant Kiwi?), puckle, and ruckle (a handy word for footballers)? And anyway, where's knuck if there's a knuckle?

What about backle, hackle, (heckling incompetent politicians), lackle, knackle, (a skill?), packle, quackle, (what ducklings do), rackle, sackle, and whackle (a gentle clip round the ear)?

Where are beckle, deckle, feckle, (and if it comes to that, where's feck, the opposite of feckless), neckle, peckle, and wreckle (just avoiding a dint in your car)?

What happened to dickle, hickle, lickle (a 50c icecream), mickle, nickle, (not nickel), quickle (a short trip out for morning tea), rickle, and wickle (after the candle's burnt out)?

Or dockle, hockle (junior hockey player), jockle (a junior jock), lockle, mockle, knockle (a hesitant tap on the door), pockle (a zit, or acne), rockle, sockle (what's left after the other one's lost in the wash), and tockle (the rest between tickles)?

Going in reverse is just as bad. When did we lose the ank in ankle, or the wrink in wrinkle, the dang in dangle, or the ming in mingle? Why do we lack the jing in jingle, and the wrang in wrangle?

We need to use these words!

When we slip on the stairs and give our foot a twinge, that's an ank. When wrinkles haven't quite made it they're only wrinks. Something that's about to dangle is only in the state of dang, and if we're the sort of person who doesn't like crowds, we'd probably prefer to ming.

Jing happens when one of the sleigh-bells has lost its dang, as in Jing Jing Bells, Jing Jing Bells, Jing Jing all the way. The husband in the TV ad who's about to throw the chair at his family and decides not to, is at the point of wrang.

We need to put the value back into feck. For example, he was a man full of feck - a much more straight-to-the-eyeball word than self-esteem.

And let knuck take its place as the word for knuckles when they're lying down flat.

Well, how else do you describe them?

Guess which one of these words is fictitious,
even though it appeared in an encyclopedia 

Large birds mangled with a weapon?

 Large birds mangled with a weapon?

First published in Column 8, date unknown at present, but some time in the 90s. Since this was written a few decades ago, some of these crosswords may have disappeared. The Otago Daily Times, my home town of Dunedin's daily paper, now has a cryptic that alternates between a stinker and one that might be solved. Both are more difficult than the cryptic they used to publish daily. 

 
As I've mentioned before, we have a tradition on holiday of doing the cryptic crossword in the Otago Daily Times. This year my wife, son and I gathered round the grid each day, bantering and arguing and tearing our hair until we'd finished it. The satisfaction was tantamount to putting a man on the moon.

Usually we have too little time to cope with it the rest of the year round, but we've become more adept at solving the clues, so we've carried on solving it this year, sneaking in answers between other daily tasks. Even the Aged Parent, who falsely claims no skill at doing cryptics, joins in.

She's good at the sudden illumination. My wife uses a set of Scrabble tiles to sift around the anagrams. I'm the analytical one, and like to know why the answer is right. Between us, and with the help of a dictionary and thesaurus (one has to have the right tools for the job) we usually manage to finish, even if it is last thing at night.

I don't know why crosswords are so tantalizing - perhaps it's part of human nature to delight in puzzles, and the completing of them. After all, so many legends and fairy stories are full of the equivalent of crosswords: strange riddles that only explain themselves when you solve them.

Crosswords began life as uncomplicated beasts - on the 21st December 1913 to be exact. They were called, then, Word-crosses. They'd had plenty of ancestors, of course. Acrostics (which are as old as the Bible), have always been around, often in utterly convoluted forms, such as double and triple. (The first letters of the poem might reveal a word opposite in meaning to the last letters, for instance.)

The Word Square goes back to the Romans, if not further, and later turned into the Magic Square - or triangle, in some cases. As a puzzle it was very popular with the Victorians before the arrival of the crossword. The most famous crossword of them all, the Times cryptic crossword, was a late starter. And amazingly enough it was first compiled by someone who'd never produced, or even solved a crossword, in his life. Adrian Bell had ten days to learn the job, then went on to produce crosswords for forty years.

The speed with which people have completed the crosswords in competitions held by the Times over the years is phenomenal. One contestant, John Sykes, was clocked in at an average of eight and a half minutes over four puzzles, in 1972. He claimed to have done one at home in three and a half minutes, but the official record for this is held by Roy Dean, who in December, 1970, completed one in just under that time. (On the other hand, in the year of Our Lord, 1966, one lady from Fiji finished a puzzle set in April 1932.)

If The Times' crossword is the most famous, The Observer's is reckoned to be the toughest - although some think The Listener's are worse. (The English Listener, that is.)  The Listener crosswords have appeared in the shape of a heart; as a chessboard, (with clues according to the chess pieces' positions); in a hexa-pentagonal shape; with clues in the form of mathematical equations; without any black squares at all.

There are many other variations on the theme, such as the Alphabet crossword, in which every letter of the alphabet is used only once. Then there is the crossword with no numbering, so that you have to figure out the place to put the answers.

There are puzzles with numbers instead of words; or puzzles with two identical grids, but no indication as to which set of answers fits which grid. There have even been puzzles in which the black squares, (or the marks between words in some cases) produced a picture - as in one by "Afrit", where two letter Qs are printed to form his eyes.

And there was the puzzle sent to The Times by Sir Max Beerbohm in 1940, which was full of red herrings. Only six clues out of nearly 50 actually had any answers at all!

If you want a good book to help you work out the difficulties of cryptic crosswords try Rewording the 
Brain by David Astle. It's a book not only about solving cryptics, but also the way the brain worksand dementia. Published Allen & Unwin, 2018. Available in paperback and ebook - though the latter isn't as satisfying a format as the paper version. 

On Vicars

 On Vicars

 First published in Column 8, some time in 1994

65 English clerics criticized the Bishop of Chichester recently when, while doing his job, he sacked a vicar who said he doesn't believe in God. And why did they criticize the Bishop? Because the clerics claimed the Church of England has a long-standing tradition of tolerating and valuing a wide range of views.

Somehow I believe the clerics are a little confused, though I know they're not alone in their thinking.

If I joined a Harley Davidson club, full of enthusiasts for that particular brand of bike, and insisted on my belief that Honda motor scooters were still the best thing on two wheels, I suspect they'd wrap the nearest spanner round my ear.

If I went to a Photography group and claimed that the taking of photos was an outmoded occupation, I doubt that they'd tolerate my liberal views. If I said to a gang of phonecard collectors that I wanted to have their fellowship but I believed phonecards should be cut in half and given to the dustmen, I think they'd use the scissors on some aspect of my physiognomy.

If you're going to be part of any group it stands to reason you must take up their basic tenets, even though outsiders may consider their views to be mere opinions. I can't see how belief in God is not basic to being a Christian. And last time I heard, Anglicans were still included in the Christian scene.

I can understand if the vicar in question, Anthony Freeman, (an interesting surname in the circumstances), is having a crisis of faith. Many believers do, in all sorts of religions. They may go into a state of total unbelief regarding things in which they formerly believed. It's not unusual, and not unreasonable, but it is personal.

Such a crisis time is hardly reconcilable, however, with continuing to lead a congregation which may not be having the same crisis of faith. A minister can't lead a group of people if he doesn't believe in the things he's telling them. That defiles his integrity not a little. Of course he can proclaim to the congregation that he doesn't believe in God. But any sane group of believers should then seriously question his ability to lead them. As the Bishop of Chichester also did.

Recently I've been reading a book called Coping with Controversy .  Its author, Gareth Jones, makes the point that some things are central to a Christian's belief: God's existence seems to be an obvious central aspect. Other aspects of our belief are more peripheral. They're areas we can disagree about without ceasing to be a believer.

To me the clerics in England have mistaken a central belief for a peripheral one. I don't see how a segment of Christian society can deny the very thing that's at the base of the religion and still call themselves Christians. At the very least, Anthony Freeman and his supporters should consider retiring from their ministry until they discover whether they are believers or not.

I don't think that means they need to withdraw from the church, which is full of people who are on different parts of their spiritual journey: some unshakeable in their beliefs, some at the opposite end of the spectrum like broken straws.

But just as we wouldn't want teachers in schools who thought it was a waste of time to teach kids facts as we know them, or policemen who thought that law and order was a thing of the past, or doctors who thought that health was irrelevant, I don't think the church can use people in leadership who can't accept what the church has always regarded as the truth.

Clothes

 Clothes

 First published in Column 8, date unknown, but some time in the 1990s

 Stress is a fact of my life: opening the lid of the rubbish bucket and being greeted by something alive. Hearing a piece of music in one ear that's a semitone different to, and out of kilter with, the music forced into the other ear. Putting milk into coffee and finding I'm drinking liquid Parmesan.

Finding that in spite of all my careful calculations, the cheque book still manages to sink into overdraft while I'm not looking. Wondering whether the cat will make it outside before it chokes on a furball, and trying to hasten its fat departure through the narrow cat door. Discovering that the first page of my article is printing on the last piece of paper in the box, that it's Sunday, and the deadline is 9am Monday.

These small inconveniences of life apart, one other matter I have to face every so often is more stressful than them all. Which is why I put off doing anything about it for as long as possible.

No, it isn't a visit to the dentist. I've only been fazed by a visit to the dentist twice in the last 18 years.

On one occasion the dentist plugged up a hole after draining it. By the time I'd walked from Frederick St to the Octagon, however, the fact that someone appeared to be driving a nail up through the roof of my mouth towards my sinus proved there was still plenty of gunk in it.

On the other occasion, a tooth had to go. What was left was barely visible below the gum. Somehow the dentist pried it loose, but I came home wondering if it was my tooth or my head he'd been trying to remove.

No, more stressful than any of these is shopping for clothes. When I was a youth, with money to spend, and no one to please but myself, purchasing clothes was a breeze. But nowadays another person has to have a say in the choice of clothes - apart from the Bank Manager. (Of course I also have to fend off the suggestions of my children, who, until they see what you've bought think that the only clothes I should wear are jeans, jeans and jeans - and the baggier the better.)

I girded up my loins recently and, along with the person mentioned above, sallied forth to deal with racks of clothes, all of which look to me to be quite unsuited to my flamboyant personality.

Why do men's trousers only come in three shades of black, and two shades of grey? (The other possibility is khaki.) And why do so many puff out in such a way as to look as though you're carrying six dirty handkerchieves and a pair of rolled-up socks in each pocket?*

Courtesy of Newtown Grafitti

Furthermore, the larger sizes, which I now have to wear, assume that the wider your girth, the longer your leg. The rationale is beyond me. In order to get trousers that are the right leg length I would have 
to lose a couple of stone. Those that fit my waist slop round my feet like Peter Pan's shadow.

To please the person accompanying me, (who wishes not to be named), I did try on a pair of jeans. I'm sure I heard one of the mirrors in the fitting room snigger, and that was before it thumped the back of my head while I was trying to remove a shirt two sizes too small for me.

Talking of the shirts: by the time I'd tried on half a dozen colours and designs, I was sweating to such a degree that if the shop assistant had noticed, I would have been forced to purchase them all.

Buying clothes invariably makes me come over all sweaty and foot-smelly. No wonder shop assistants keep their distance. (As did my accompanying person, who wafted off looking at other garments as soon as I got something on, and had to be hissed back to her place of inspection.)

And further stress is caused by never knowing who'll suddenly tear open the fitting room curtains and reveal me half in and out of some item of clothing, or struggling to hang a garment back on its coathanger the perfect way it was, or maybe even telling myself how good I look in something everyone else says is ghastly.

Do you see why I'd sooner go to the dentist?

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*I used to have a fairly regular customer in my bookshop who appeared to carry several half-used toilet rolls in his pockets. 

Tinā - mother

 Tinā may follow a lot of the tropes of the underdog makes good story, especially the one where a teacher takes on a bunch of kids and turns them into something spectacular (think one of Whoopi Goldberg's stints from the Sister Act series), but it's made considerably more effective by having a wonderful Samoan actress at its heart: Anapela Polataivao as Patricia. 

After her daughter is killed in the larger of the two Christchurch earthquakes, Patricia is hit hard by depression, goes solitary and fails to find work over the next three years. Partly because of her bolshie attitude (which happens to be very endearing to the film's audience even if it's not to some of the film's characters) she gets a job at an uppity Christchurch School, a Catholic one. Of course things are never easy, particularly in terms of the rather over-the-top headmaster, but she hangs on and eventually produces a top quality upper school choir which, at the end of the film, sings at the Big Sing regional competition.

To the film's credit we don't find out whether they get through the regionals (although based on their performance they probably should). It's more important that one of the students, played by Antonia Robinson, who has some unexplained trauma affecting her life, should rise to the challenge and lead the choir. 

The story isn't always coherent, and there seems to be something slightly awry in the last sequence as shown, but there are nevertheless two things that make the film eminently worth watching. Polataivao is the powerful and funny force at its centre, and even in her darkest moments we want to keep watching her. In her upbeat moments she's wonderfully alive: giving her choir members demerits whether it's school policy or not, or leading them in complex rehearsal warm-ups, or joyfully accompanying on the piano as they sing. 

The other great aspect of the movie is the music. There's no attempt to make the music suitable for young modern listeners - in fact after one of the pupils scoffs at the choice of an Eagles' classic she's seen not long after as part of the choir giving a vital performance of it. One of the best songs is a beautifully harmonized version of the 19th century hymn, It is Well With My Soul. The familiar Samoan song at the end is sung by a choir with no Samoans in it. 

Igelese Ete is the man behind the choir music and the singing is terrific throughout; even on two occasions when the choir members miss the boat trying to sing without getting the pitch right. 

Graphophobia

 Graphophobia

First published in Column 8, date unknown, but some time in the 1990s

As we grow older it's easy to develop irrational phobias, or fears of things that the majority of people have no fear of at all.

Fear, courtesy of Robbie Grubbs

Up until recently I had little fear that the subject matter of my column, if written up before the deadline, would turn up in someone else's column. However, now thatMiles Singe* has on at least two occasions unwittingly snaffled my ideas, I could easily become phobic about it.

I haven't come across the correct classification for this kind of phobia, but if it doesn't exist, no doubt some American University will soon make sure it does and give it a proper name. 

My newfound interest in phobias comes from a discovery I made in a reference book I have on my shelf which lists 150,000 facts.  Page 166 lists three closely printed columns of some 100 phobias, most of which I never guessed people would consider naming, let alone having. I suppose our modern world, with its constant "progress," is bound to bring out new fears.

For example, the fear of someone discovering one's hiding place must be something that the writer, Salman Rushdie, has to contend with. Until some Greek wordsmith finds a better choice for this situation we could adopt thanatophobia, the fear of death.

The fear of actually finding Elvis Presley alive and wondering what to do with yourself in such an event, must be something certain Elvis freaks suffer. Or when they finally realise he is dead, the fear of having nothing to live for, must be worse. Perhaps we could temporarily adopt phasmophobia, the fear of ghosts, for the first, and hormephobia, the fear of shock, for the second.

The fear of Bill Birch or Jenny Shipley returning to power could be classified under poinephobia, or the fear of punishment. In fact, the fear of the National party getting back in might be classed as homichlophobia, or fear of fog, or even worse, atephobia, the fear of ruin.

I'm amazed at some of the fears listed: the fear of sitting, (thaasophobia), the fear of standing, (stasiphobia), the fear of trembling (tremophobia) and the fear of blushing, (ereuthrophobia). Politicians, for the most part, plainly do not suffer from any of these phobias.

A religious person has the choice of a fear of hell, (stygiophobia), or the fear of heaven, (ouranophobia).  A person with a dislike of animals can take their choice of ailurophobia or cynophobia - cats and dogs. And talking of cats and dogs, while I can't find anything for the person who's afraid of heavy rain falling on the iron roof, such people might like to extend themselves into being brontophobic or astraphobic. The former has nothing to do with the fear of being endlessly assailed by Jurassic Park spinoffs, nor the latter by out-of-body experiences, but with being afraid of thunder and lightning.

I note that boys can be parthenophobic, (afraid of girls), but girls who can do anything can't be afraid of boys. A musician can be specific and afraid of flutes, (aulophobic), or go wholeheartedly either into musicophobia, or akousticophobia, both of which should self-explanatory.

Most writers, even when someone doesn't pinch their ideas, have periods of logophobia, but it takes some imagination to wonder who would be afraid of feathers, furs, snow, string and skin. And you'd have to be either fairly metaphysically inclined - or a spaceman - to get into the fear of duration, voids, stars or infinity. Enough frivolity - akin to hedonophobia, (the fear of pleasure). Any person worth their fearful self in these days of inclusiveness must subscribe to being pantophobic: having a fear of everything.

789789789789789789789789879

*Miles Singe was a long-standing columnist in both the Star Midweek and the Star Weekender.   He was there before I began writing a column, and continues to this day (3rd July, 97!)  An old soldier, he often wrote about the military; he also enjoyed pretending to be an old soak, as well as someone who maltreated his wife and (grown-up) children. He was likely to be neither.

Questions

 Questions

 First published in Column 8, date unknown at present, but some time in the 1990s

 Two things make a trip to the University Bookshop's* upstairs permanent sale worthwhile. Firstly, the array of books that appear to have no market. A book of dedications? A book of bits left out of other books?

Secondly, the way in which customers can discover minor gems, books in the Trivial Pursuit mode.

I came across just such a one in the holidays: volume 2 of Notes and Queries, a collection of questions 
and answers from the Guardian's column in which "readers seek enlightenment from each other on an astonishingly broad range of subjects."

In this book the questions are as intriguing as the answers. And quite contradictory answers arise, as mathematicians and scientists and philosophers each take up their own (unproven) point of view.

A newspaper column probably isn't the place to ask, "what is the meaning of life?" This question perhaps deserves some of the answers it got, including the one that says that asking such a question is about as meaningful as asking what is the meaning of lumbago.

The question "IS THIS a question?" initiates various obscure answers, including "All these cunning answers are actually irrelevant because Shakespeare told us that `that is the question.'" Or, "This sentence no verb. Who cares. This reader bored. Time to bring subject to a."

The answers to such questions as why there are so many Coldharbour lanes, or when was the first semi-detached house built, are rather more straightforward, even though the answers vary enormously.

Two answers to one question are in Latin, and three to a question on simplified spelling are in various versions of that spelling, including one that gets increasingly unreadable as the paragraph evolves.

Two novels which avoid using the letter "e", (one each in English and French) are discussed, and an unexpected dispute arises over the translation.

And there are answers that are just fun: "Is it true that goldfish have a memory span of only five seconds?" - The first answer is utterly complex; the second says, "For a fish with a good memory try a piranha. They have a megabyte."

The inventors of items, or their descendants, answer questions - only to be contradicted by someone else's descendent. One poet, (Julius Lipton), after living in obscurity for 55 years, pops up to explain what has happened to him since his one and only book was published.

The joy of such a column isn't the fact that you get real answers to real questions - although occasionally you do - but the way in which people's minds take up the challenge of answering an intriguing question in an entertaining way. How to measure the weight of your hand, for example. This may have been a genuine question, but it produces some very suspect answers.

Finally, what do you notice about the following poem:

I know a little man both ept and ert,
An intro? extro? No, he's just a vert.
Shevelled and couth and kempt, pecunious, ane.
His image trudes upon the ceptive brain.
When life turns sipid and the mind is traught,
The spirit soars as I would sist it ought.
Chalantly then, like any gainly goof, 
My digent self is sertive, choate, loof.

Or the following sentences? "Jump, dogs! Why vex Fritz Blank, Q.C.?" or "Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx."

(After all this, here's my question. Has anybody seen volume one of "Notes and Queries?")

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*The University Bookshop, in Dunedin, is the largest bookshop left in the city. Though by no means large compared to bookshops elsewhere, it sstill has an enormous range, and is aimed not merely at the Academic market, but at a huge variety of readers. Its permanent sale in the upstairs part of the shop used to be a treat for anyone with a few dollars and an hour to spare.