Pornography

 First published in Column 8, on 23^rd October, 1991

Jenny Shipley can’t be anyone’s favourite person these days, but she reduced her demerits slightly in a recent speech to the National Council of Women.

Fed up with the soft approach to pornography, she said, ‘I make no apologies to those who believe they should be free to choose for themselves what they would view and read.’

She wants to put a Bill through Parliament that legally defines pornography, and freely admits she’s advocating legislative censorship.

Quite honestly, though I know something has to be done, I don’t know where she’ll start. The country is saturated with pornography, and it’s become so insidious we take it for granted.

When my uncle owned a dairy some years ago, he got himself into strife with the distributors because he wouldn’t sell any magazine flaunting naked bodies. How many shopkeepers would make a stand like that now? I only have to walk outside my house to the grocer’s next door to find advertisements of naked women adorning the pavement.

Is it coincidental that two of the most popular New Zealand plays of the last decade have contained frequent scenes of nudity? (Male, just for a change.)

Once it was uncommon to go to the movies and see nudity (apart from foreign movies, which spiced up their plots with naked bodies, whether they had anything to do with the story or not.) Now it’s the norm in almost anything we see not only at the movies but at home on TV.

Even on the news. Apart from the Nightline episode of lovers coupling, which at least took place after 10 pm, there was the report on the young women stripping at a pub in Wellington. This was shown during the tea hour in our house.

Worse than the young women’s behaviour was the bestial shouting by the male spectators, and the casual indifference of the pub owner. For him it was a way to make money. Lots of it.

That doesn’t bother you? Then perhaps the fact that videos with pornographic content are available in nearly all video outlets, and are often taken home and shown to children concerns you more.

Or maybe it doesn’t. It certainly didn’t concern somebody in charge at Washdyke, when children were freely able to watch pornographic videos stored on the school premises, without a single teacher being aware.

I think we’re so corrupted by pornography we barely fuss when it slaps us in the face. Things sexual corrode us, seeping into every area of our lives. It’s a form of idolatry, and some people can’t stop worshipping.

No wonder so many crimes in this country have a sexual content. Virtually every magazine we open has some article in it on the subject that was once taboo.

We’d like to think it’s because we’re more broadminded now, that we’re balancing out a time when people never talked about sex – supposedly.

We’d like to convince ourselves that it’s not psychologically good for us to be modest about the matter. Fat chance of being modest, in this day and age.

Humanity is notorious for swinging from one extreme to the other. Maybe Jenny Shipley’s aggressive attack on pornography heralds a return to some semblance of balance in the whole matter.

Maybe not. Either way, she’s got an uphill battle.

Jenny Shipley in 2013

 One of the plays mentioned above was probably Foreskin’s Lament. I don’t know now what the other would have been, unless it was Equus.

The Washdyke incident should have been a surprise, but since then any number of schools have been found to have pornographic material available, often on the computers the children can access. It makes the news, but doesn’t change the mentality of those in charge. And each morning, as I open the newspaper, I’m faced with yet another case of some male – including well-known ones – hoarding child pornography on their computer, often on their work computer.

Shipley’s legislative aim found some ground in the 1993 ‘Films, Videos and Publications Classification Bill.’  But of course, classifying material leaves it still freely available to those want to see it, whether they’re of a proper age or  not. And even though most streaming material these days shows classifications, it offers no way for children and younger people to avoid what is shown within the movie or TV series.

There were several letters written in response to this article. I’ve slightly edited the format of the originals for more readability online. 

10.11.91

Sir, I would like to pay tribute to Mike Crowl for his column concerning pornography published in the October 23 Midweek. I have five children whom my husband and I strive to bring up with healthy attitudes and codes of behaviour. The support we receive from society is being undermined by the insidious entry of adult videos into our local dairies and video stores. In find it an affront as a woman and an insult as a parent to take my children to places where explicit sexual poses are portrayed on video covers, magazines and other media. Our society is being complacent to this dangerous material being exposed to our young people. Any form of material which belittles, abuses or devalues people’s standing in society is damaging and this constant hard-sell of women as sexual objects is endangering the safety of women and their children in New Zealand.

Am I the only woman, the only parent, who is concerned that my children grow up without being subjected to pornographic material, the glorification of violence and force to solve problems in Dunedin? If not why is it when I am offended at the display of explicit videos or magazines I am answered with, ‘Oh, no one else has complained.’ Come on Dunedin shopowners and parents. Children cannot be fed a diet of ‘Do as I say,  not as I do,’ and not become confused and angry at our weak and morally sick society. 

Mary Guthrie

 

17.11.91

Sir, I couldn’t have agreed more with Mike Crowl (Midweek 23.10.91), and Mary Guthrie (Weekender 10.11.91) on the availability of pornography and its effect particularly on the young. The evidence is everywhere, with elderly women being raped and killed by teenagers, something that would have never entered the minds of the youth of earlier generations. Greedy depraved people who sell this filthy for profit should be heavily penalised; they are the instigators of our new crime – the young, weak-minded and those with sick disturbed minds after viewing pornographic material, sexually aroused, go out and copy acts recently seen.

The old argument that parents should ensure their children do not have this material available comes unstuck when we remember the recent occurrence of children watching adult, depraved videos which had been kept in a cupboard in a school library, by a teacher. Libertarians who argue that people have the right to view whatever they want to, cannot be related to what is now available for viewing, violent deviant sex and bestiality. The civil liberties groups are becoming a sick joke when they continually put the rights of the criminals before those of the victims. I agree with Mary Guthrie that we live in a morally sick society, and children cannot be fed a diet of ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ Parents should combine to foce those who sell adult videos out of business, if the law doesn’t.

Mary Buchanan

 

17.11.91

Sir, I like Mary Guthrie, agree with the remarks made by Mike Crowl, concerning pornography in Column Eight of Midweek, October 23. The remarks made by Mary Guthrie, herself, in Weekender, November 10, are all correct, too, and I would like to congratulate her on writing a letter bringing such matters before parents and public in general.

Concerned Pollie

 

17.11.91

Sir, It was with extreme interest I read Mary Guthrie’s letter to the Weekender (10.11.91). An extremely worried mum taking up the fight against society’s long-standing enemies – sex and pornography. This good mother is taking a strong stand in defence of our country’s children and teenagers, concerned at the complacency of the adult world who seemingly accept the over-emphasis of this mindless soul-destroying problem that is part of the permissive society.

Consider the results concerning the Washdyke Primary School when a large number of pupils had access to a number of pornographic video tapes left in a cupboard in, of all places, the school’s library, the ensuing anger and frustration on parents, pupils and staff bringing the good name of the school into bad repute. Time alone will prove the damage caused to the children, parents and staff but one can be sure this will be a lesson well learned to all and sundry. The Bible tells us ‘Our children are the heritage of the Lord,’ and all are accountable to Him. We must all take heed as there is no doubt that the high moral standards of yesteryear are fast being eroded away. Given most parents treat their children with loving care, we must beware – it is a wicked world out there.

Hazel D Knox

 

20.11.91 [in The Weekender]

Sir, I agree with Marie Guthrie’s tribute (Weekender 10.11.91) to Mike Crowl’s article concerning pornography, also Penman’s concern in the same issue regarding Television 1, Channel 2, and TV3, all showing sexual intercourse about 9.30 on Monday night.[Penman was another columnist who wrote in the Weekender] Parents certainly face an uphill battle these days. I am tired of hearing the deprecating remark ‘we are adult surely’ or similar after expressing my dismay at pornography on television, radio, video or in magazines. Does being ‘adult’ mean the acceptance and condoning of such pornography as the norm? If so, the message our young people are receiving is that anything is acceptable as long as they use condoms (which are not guaranteed even by the manufacturers).

In Uganda the government, on the insistence of Muslims and Christians, has banned the advertising of condoms because their use has encouraged promiscuity in young people, and now Uganda has the highest incidence of AIDs in the world. Safer sex indeed! Pope John Paul II has also stated his concern in these matters. Congratulations to Weekender and Midweek for not advertising ‘massage parlours’ and ‘escort services.’ Perhaps one day, if space is available, we may see the Ten Commandments in print. Long time no see – anywhere!

Gran

 

20.11.91

Sir, Thank you Mary Guthrie and Sorrel Bovett for your very good letters. I share your concern and so do thousands of other decent people who deplore the disastrous moral state of the country. the country is being managed by hypocritical people who seem to want ti this way. I can tell by all the letters of complaints I have written to them and been given the same negative reply. All pornographic exposure is bad but the worst, I think, is television because it invades our homes and places where there is no escape. The intrusion of television’s destructive sex education on the mind is an insidious liberalisation of freedom out of control.

Conservationists protect plant and animal life so generously against destruction, yet our human life is given very little respect or protection from elements which are both body and soul-destroying. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a Government who really cared! I say to others who feel lost in the wilderness out there, come forward and let yourselves be heard.

Julia

 

20.11.91

Sir, Regards pornography. I’ve often been amazed at the elderly folk who seem to accept these blatant, disgusting posters stuck on the corner dairy window as if they are of no account. I see respectable, elderly shopkeepers selling filthy books for a few dollars. It’s beyond my comprehension how good-living people can advertise and sell these evil magazines and videos without a conscience. The elderly are quick enough to demand attention as regards money, but care nothing about the filth in our shops.

Visually Abused

 

20.11.91

Sir, All these people parading their extremely one-sided, restrictive, uneducated views in your paper these past weeks, including Mary Buchanan, Hazel D Knox and Mike Crowl, do not know what they are talking about. There is not, and never has been, any correlation proven between rape, child abuse, or any sexual crime, and pornographic material. Show me any unequivocal conclusive proof between the two, and I shall seriously alter my views on the subject.

Pornography, in its present form, has been around for maybe 30 to 40 years. Erotica has been around for approximately 100,000 years, probably longer. There appears to be a slight contradiction in these statistics. I think you’ll find that if there has been any increase in reported rapes or sex abuse cases, it could quite easily be attribute to increase in world population, the more open views promoted in such cases encouraging people to speak out rather than keep hidden, or even more efficiency in collating statistics.

Yes, a lot of sex abusers will possess pornographic material, but they also will possess bicycles, drink milk, own a dog, or play tennis. Do we confiscate bikes, ban milk, destroy dogs, or license tennis rackets?

I think you are still thinking of rapists as being dirty men in raincoats who slobber and slink through gardens at night, when in truth absolutely anybody in the entire world, from judges, to chefs, to animal rights activists, could be, and sometimes are, sex offenders.

Children, as we know, will very often do exactly what they are told not to do, simply because they are curious about the unknown, as are we all. That’s how we learn. If we restrict children from the ways of sex and all its (if you’ll excuse the expression) ins and outs, then by hook or by crook, they will want to know why, and what all the mystery is about. End result, they get a hold of some form of so-called pornographic material, usually nothing more tame than your average men’s magazine and think of sex as being a dirty disgusting act. Which it is not.

I think you’ll find that true pornography, that which is injurious to the public good, i.e. violent or abusive, underage, bestiality or even slightly ‘deviant’ sexual acts, are not freely available on newsagent shelves at all. They are almost always very much underground, and illegally [sic] in the country. We have strict laws already about such material, so you should not be concerned. Your moral attitudes to people’s lives should be commended, of course, but you are restricting people’s freedom! There are millions upon millions of people who find adult material merely entertaining and educational! You can not be so restrictive about so many people’s personal preferences just for the sake of the occasional weirdo who would commit any sex crime at all whether there was pornography available to him or not (or her).

Just think. If pornography or adult material wasn’t available think how many sex offenders there’d be then, what with no other way to gain sexual release for many.

Definitely Not A Rapist.

 

Penman himself joined in on the subject in his own column in the same paper as the above:

To Anon – I found the sex scenes I spoke of neither particularly obscene nor immoral. I was making the observation that anyone wanting to watch something on television other than sex at that moment was out of luck on all three channels, and questioned whether this should be so. It would be hard to deny that each of the three scenes being screened adhered to the dictionary definition of pornography: ‘designed to stimulate sexual excitement.’ Therefore this example of prevalence supported the claims made in the letter to the Editor – that pornography is rife.

 

1.12.91

Sir, In response to the letters in the Weekender, a group of concerned women have formed ‘Family against Pornography and Violence.’ The unprecedented decline in our society’s values and the horrific crimes that are being committed cannot continue if we are to remain a free society. The society’s aim is to reduce the level of pornography and violence that our children are subjected to, from exposure to television and displays of pornographic material in video shops and other retailers.

Would any individual or organisation interested in helping please contact 454-2336. Also write to Jenny Shipley, c/- Parliament Building, Wellington (postage free) and express the urgent need to change the law.

Mary Guthrie, Valerie Alexander

[I don’t know what happened with this group as there doesn’t seem to be any information on line. Perhaps it was absorbed into the great NZ efforts regarding the problem at the time.]

Sounds alive

First published in Column 8 on 16^th October, 1991

Even given the trend in newer movies to overlap speech and add all manner of extra noise, I’d been puzzled for a while as to why, when these same films appeared on television, I found the dialogue increasingly difficult to pick up.

Since I can be woken at night by one of my kids rustling the blankets three rooms away, I knew the problem wasn’t deafness.

Recently we went and watched the video version of My Left Foot at a friend’s house. Between telephone calls, children getting bored, and my youngest son re-enacting World War II behind the couch, hearing the dialogue was difficult.

But that wasn’t all. Many of the words seemed to get washed away in a muddy flood. Extreme concentration was required, and not only because the main character’s speech was so impeded.

Frustration finally forced us to invention: after reading about the fact that much of our television – including the videos we play – is actually being transmitted in stereo, my son and I decided to do a bit of electrical engineering.

We stuck a stereo cassette player that had seen better days on our television, wired it to the video via the connection we’d purchased for copying my brother-in-law’s trip-to-NZ videos, screwed the speakers to the wall and hey presto, instant stereo.

And if you’ve never tired it, have a go. (Of course you can have a go more ‘professionally’ than we did.) As they say in the ads, you’ll be amazed at the difference.

Sounds that never get a chance to be heard above the general racket of the average living room now make their presence felt, coming across crisp and clear.

Contrast our viewing of My Left Foot with the first film we saw after introducing stereo – Mississippi Burning, with Gene Hackman. We’d watched it with normal television sound; later we played the recording back in stereo.

Now thunder rumbled in the background – there’d been no hint of it before – in fact, you wondered why the sky was often overcast. As Hackman and Willem Dafoe crunched across the grass, every blade could be heard bending and crying out for mercy. When one of the baddies came home and (yuk!) beat up his wife, the smashing and crashing nearly splintered the set – the television set, I mean.

The experience took me back to those marvellous days when cinemas were first fitted with wide wide screens and stereophonic sound. In the Regent Theatre, with its sound system hidden amongst the Arabian Nights decorations, I remember watching Lawrence of Arabia while magical Maurice Jarre melodies swept across every seat in the cinema.

Every booming bass note, every tinkle of Siamese cymbals was audible in The King and I, along with Deborah Kerr’s heavy breathing after Shall We Dance. The opening sequence of West Side Story brought strange whistling noises out of each quarter of the auditorium as the camera floated eerily above the deserted streets.

Now I know my living room will never quite equal the magic of a spacious 1500-seat cinema with its ceiling full of twinkling stars. Nevertheless a vastly improved kind of sound these days accompanies our television viewing.

Even Marlon Brando, method-acting mumbling in his Godfather role, would have his every word heard.

Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia

I’m interested to read about this amateur method of stereophonic sound that we ‘installed.’ I have no memory of it now, and it seems most unlikely that I had much to do with its invention, being a bear of little brains when it comes to such things. I imagine my number one son (who would have been eleven at the time) was the ‘inventor.’

These days, of course, things have got much worse rather than better. You’d think that modern televisions would have vastly better sound than they used to, but in fact the sound seems worse, and we’ve resorted to using a round boom speaker that (mostly) clarifies what’s being said on-screen. But better still is the presentation of movies and TV series (on Netflix at least) with sub-titles. We watch practically everything that way, and it’s only occasionally annoying.

In Retrospect

First published in Column 8 on the 9^th October, 1991

Today is something of an anniversary. I don’t suppose it will go down in history as being equivalent to Caesar crossing the Rubicon or Hannibal the Alps, but I thought I might make a little note of it.

Today marks the anniversary of the first Column 8. Forty-seven columns later (I had time off for good behaviour), I’m still surprised at how many usable ideas there are in the world. Or to put it another way, I’m surprised how an idea can be teased out to fill up the space allotted.

Because it’s an anniversary, I need to apologise for some errors. These are the ones I know about.

Early this year an elderly ex-serviceman rang up to say that I’d turned the name of the leader of the Iraqi nation back to front. I’d called him Mr Hussein, when, of course, he’s Mr Saddam. The same person went off on to a tangent to inform me that daylight saving isn’t the same as it used to be, and since daylight saving has just arrived, I’ll tell you what I learned.

New Zealand was originally only 11½ hours ahead of UK time. In 1926 we extended this to 12½ hours and then a couple of years later brought in summer time, which for some months of the year made us exactly 12 hours ahead. Still with me?

However, what was officially only daylight saving time became normal time in 1945 after four years of being emergency daylight saving. (Nature’s contribution to the war effort,  no doubt.)

Finally in 1974 (while I was out of the country) we had another change. We gained an extra hour in the summer, making us 13 hours ahead of GMT. (I tell my wife every year that rising an hour earlier affects me adversely for weeks, but in her inimitable fashion she scoffs.)

The other major mistake of my year was to confuse Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Someone sent me a letter via the Midweek on this, and I lost it two minutes after I read it. My apologies to the writer for not answering personally. Everyone knows that Art Garfunkel sang Bridge Over Troubled Water – don’t they?

I’ve had some interesting phone calls over the time I’ve been writing this column. One very nice lady rang to ask my advice about her rhododendrons – I must have appeared more knowledgeable than I am.

I tried to say in a later column that it’s necessary to read what I’ve said, not what you think I’ve said. Anyway, Column 8 is a not too subtle mix of fact and fiction. Supposedly in article writing these days that’s the trend.

After another column my wife received a phone call when I was out. An elderly lady was very concerned about the things I’d written on the English language, when I’d said there were words lacking in our vocabulary.

She said English was already difficult enough for foreigners to learn without adding yet more words.

Not everybody agrees, but I think English is not the world’s most difficult language to learn, or to spell.

Most European languages, for instance, have at least as many messy verbs. And long ago the English wisely rid themselves of all the cases – many nations still suffer from these, needing to know whether cats or dogs or wart hogs are masculine, feminine or neutered. If you can’t get that right, all your adjectives and verbs and various other grammatical bits go astray.

Mark Twain once translated the following directly from a German textbook:

Gretchen: Where is the turnip?

Wilhelm: She has gone to the kitchen.

Gretchen: Where is the accomplished and beautiful maiden?

Wilhelm: It has gone to the opera.

(Here’s to another year.)

see below

This piece goes to show how accessible I was as a columnist. Of course there were plenty of people who read the column who already knew where I lived, or knew my telephone number. But getting direct mail, or phone calls (perhaps they got the number from the phone book, which in those days was still a highly accurate publication) is something that probably wouldn’t happen any longer. People did occasionally write directly to the Midweek, but others obviously thought it more appropriate to approach me directly.

As for English spelling, I might have exaggerated a bit, but the language itself is a piece of cake compared to many in the world, which is presumably why it’s been so successful at exporting itself.

I don’t appear to have a copy of the column in which I discussed daylight saving, though I did rant on it elsewhere on my blog some years later. The photo attached above, however, has an interesting history, as shown below (inaccurately?) - courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Archives New Zealand.

A chorus of opinion from “eminent men” on the subject of daylight saving was in the spotlight on this day 24 October 1912.

When the S S Ruepehu set sail to New Zealand it was carrying 12 pamphlets on the English Daylight Saving Bill from the London High Commission. One of the intended recipients was MP T K Sidey who was introducing a similar bill into the New Zealand Parliament. The pamphlet, which set out the case for daylight saving, includes comments from everyone from the King of England to a Piccadilly shopkeeper. “Sunshine destroys germs and raises the vitality,” declared the Earl of Meath who was also chairman of the London Metropolitan Gardens. A London businessman had this to say of one of his book keepers, “a capable fellow” who had been “wasting away” with an undiagnosed illness: “Poor fellow his life has been lived without sunshine. We buried him five months later in the Highlands of Scotland!”

Despite this call to action New Zealand’s reaction to the pamphlet was muted. Daylight saving was not introduced here until 1927.

Shown here is the pamphlet from London

Memory

 First Published in Column 8, 2^nd October, 1991

Every so often I have a burst of enthusiasm about improving my memory.

Especially when someone named Andrew walks into my shop, someone I know reasonably well, and I call him Grahame.

To sidetrack for a moment. There must be something mystical about the name Grahame. When I worked at the DCC a few years ago, two staff members confidently called me Grahame at every meeting. Do I look like a Grahame? Perhaps. I have the sort of face that prevents me being called by my right name, since two other acquaintances call me David.

Enough of other people’s problems with memory, and back to my own.

I’ve several times got enthusiastic about those books that teach you how to remember peoples’ names by associating their faces with something absurd. I once read a Reader’s Digest which had condensed a whole book about memorisation into a three-page article. This snippet inspired me, though on inquiring at the library for a copy of the book, I was surprised to discover that some former borrower had ‘forgotten’ to bring it back.

Not to worry, there were plenty of other books available on the subject. Most agree that the basis for remembering people’s names is, as I said, to link a feature of their face with something absurd.

This is all very well. The difficulty is trying to manage this in the company of someone new. Conversing with a stranger is often difficult enough without simultaneously performing the mental juggling act of trying to find some oddity about their face.

Suppose you meet a Mrs Burton. You may note that her furrowed brow resembles Richard Burton in his later days. This may connect up in your brain cells to Welsh mountains or coalminer’s lanterned hats or How Green Was My Valley.

While you’re doing all this thinking, Mrs Burton is likely to suspect you’re either a rather distant conversationalist who hasn’t quite got it altogether – or that perhaps you’re on medication.

And six weeks later you may wonder why she looks started when you greet her as Mrs Green – or even Mrs Taylor.

Suppose when you meet Mr Brown he hasn’t a single outstanding feature about him? What will he think when you worriedly scan his features while failing to answer his questions? Or Mrs Schweigenhauser, whose name is not even re-pronounceable and produces a mental blank.

When you meet someone briefly at a gathering it can be well nigh impossible, unless you have the quick wit of a Goon Show scriptwriter, to pinpoint some feature quickly enough to help you out.

You know how it is: the host introduces you to someone, throws in a word or two about them, and then drags you off to meet someone else. Or else you’re introduced to a roomful of faces and the host says, ‘I’ll tell you all these people’s names.’ Then he helpfully adds, ‘Though you’ll forget them all, anyway.’

That’s really encouraging. Since people often don’t even introduce others by their first and last names any more, how do you hang hooks on to a succession of Georges, Bills and Freds, or even Angelas, Mays and Marys?

I know the system works, but my brain doesn’t seem fast enough to make it work when I need it. I know it works on memorising other things, because I’ve used it successfully. (I think I’ve used it successful...?)

Perhaps I’ll have to concentrate on the technique that was tried out on me recently. We met a new couple at church and the husband threw my name into every phrase he spoke.

However, I hope he’s better at this game than I am, and next time we meet he doesn’t say, ‘Hello, Grahame.’

 

Courtesy Predatorix

In recent years I’ve abandoned this involved technique and have spent a moment or two jotting down a new name in a specific list on my phone, with some short note about them. Sometimes I tell them what I’m doing. If I missed remembering the name straight off, I just ask them again. What’s the problem? They often fail to catch my name either, but at least one of us is trying to ensure that the next time we meet, their name is intact. And for the most part it works. And people respond well when they’re addressed by name. So many of us don’t bother once the initial meeting is over.  

Obsession!

 First published on Column 8 on 25^th Sept, 1991 

I spent the better part of a wet Saturday afternoon last weekend at the Computer Expo being held in the chandelier-lit Southern Cross Hotel.

Computers intrigue me, though not to the extent that I’ll discuss them from dawn to dusk. But there was a particular Point of Sale set-up on display which impressed me as being of possible value for my shop. In fact, so impressed was I that I lay awake till 2 am thinking about the possibilities.

Computers have this tendency to make me become obsessive.

(I might have been awake till two anyway. We had three extra boys in the house because of a birthday party, and it was only in the wee small hours that I finally managed to command them to stop talking, whispering, giggling and occasionally exploding in the room next to mine.)

The first computer I owned, a little hand-holdable PB100, bought for the budget-wrecking sum of $199, had the capacity to keep me awake until the stars packed it in and went back to bed. Especially when we went on holiday one Christmas.

In those days, after long hours at the beach, the kids were asleep by nine. I had ‘a little time’ to become better acquainted with my new toy.

The LCD screen was so small it could only display one line, and in that line there were only about 12 characters visible. By the early hours of the morning, I felt as though I had as many eyes as the average housefly.

The miniature keyboard was worse: after a session on it I had less use of my fingers than the Incredible Hulk would have had picking up a split tin of pins out of a shaggy pile carpet. You couldn’t type on it – put more than two fingers near it and you rendered it invisible.

But I couldn’t leave the computer alone. Only sheer exhaustion made me drop into bed, and even then my mind continued to solve problems set in motion, with frazzled brain cells wearing themselves out before their time and sending manic messages flickering across the cerebellum.

I can understand how inventors feel when they’ve stumbled across something undiscovered. The obsession with getting the thing right takes precedence over all social concerns and bodily needs, so that to the rest of the human race it seems as though they hardly belong on the planet.

Three years ago we bought a decent-sized computer, with a normal screen and keyboard. One of the first games we had was Emerald Mine, and in the month or so that it survived before the disk collapsed from almost permanent use, normal life ceased.

Everyone had their own score registered and an unofficial competition began to see who could get through the 90-odd (!) levels first. Meals were delayed, home-work undone, patterns of sleep disrupted.

My wife was one of the worst. The determined streak that comes with her side of the family carried her through countless obstacles and setbacks. Every so often (usually while I was getting the tea), there would be a heart-stopping cry of triumph as another level was conquered. There were more cries of anguish, however, as the computer conquered the player.

These days we’re wiser. We tackle games that don’t insist we die seventy times seven before we learn how to stay alive.

In our household obsession with things computerised is fortunately not a permanent problem. What might be is the loss of a large number of brain cells when, burning the midnight 30/40, my upper storey goes into overdrive.

PB100 - courtesy Tourdion

As for obsession with computers, my older son became so focused on the desktop model that he would type entire programmes into it from a library book, and would have to go back through pages if it turned out he’d made a mistake in the input. When the Internet arrived in its earliest stages, he would sit for up to an hour trying to get online while the modem wheezed and gurgled as it tried to connect. Usually this would be first thing in the morning before we were awake – and the computer was in our bedroom.

His brain cells didn’t collapse or disintegrate: instead he grew up to be a software developer with considerable skills.

The PB100 was very frustrating: if you made a mistake on it, you had to start all over from the beginning. Admittedly there were only a very limited number of bytes available on it – a piece of history on the Net says: ‘For programming, the built-in memory of 1 kB leaves 544 programming steps and 26 memories.’ Apparently you could by a pack that gave you an extra kilobyte of memory!

The 30/40 (actually 30w/40) referred to at the end is a make of engine oil produced in the 1990s.

 

Auctions

First published in Column 8 on the 11^th Sept 1991

If you want some free entertainment in these recessive days, leave your credit cards, cheque book and cash at home and go to an auction.

I recommend it to anyone who wants to relax and let the world go by, to keep the blood flowing at an even pace, and to avoid cluttering his/her brain with excess thoughts.

You’ll probably even be able to sit down and enjoy the show – until they sell the chair from underneath you.

I enjoy auctions for all sort of reasons – not least because I don’t have to buy anything, and no pushy salesman tries to make me.

But there’s far more to it than just being able to leave your worldly wealth at home.

The people who frequent auctions are a treat in themselves. Yes, you’ll get ordinary people, because those sort of people will sneak in anywhere, but for the most part, auction-going people are in a class of their own. And the classes are different at different sorts of auctions.

Some sample specimens.

You’ll always get the bargain hunters, who want lots of the items going, but who aren’t prepared to part out more than a little of their life savings. The result of these people participating must delight most auctioneers.

They’re always first in at the bidding, which immediately hikes up the price, and for a bit they’ll nod or flick their finger or wave their numbered bat. Then suddenly they’ll give up. They’ve reached their own personal reserve, you see, and the person bidding against them is left to pay far more than they thought the lot was really worth.

Occasionally the bargain-hunter will actually purchase something, and occasionally they’ll get caught with something they only half had their heart set on. Otherwise they’re merely in it for the thrill.

You’ll also see the dealers. It’s a bit like a social gathering for them.

They’re so well known to the auctioneers that they don’t even have to give their names: they just raise their eyebrows a little and the auctioneers know exactly what they mean.

Most of the time the dealers feign indifference to the whole proceedings, as though they’d sooner be back at the shop dusting off the stuff they haven’t been able to sell since 1965.

In another class are the collectors (you’ll find more of them at the antique auctions.) They’ll pretend that they’re not in the least interested in anything in the room, in case someone decides to bid against them.

As collectors they’re prepared to pay the earth for all manner of things that to you and me seem trivia, but naturally they don’t want to pay the earth.

When they’re eyes aren’t flickering over possible purchases, the collectors have a faraway look as though they were thinking about anything but where they’re at. In fact they’re considering whether the credit card can possible be squeezed a little further, or whether the increasingly less friendly bank manager will extend the overdraft.

And finally the auctioneer, that man of craft, who knows just when a bid can extend another $2 and when it can go $200. He’ll make an occasional joke, but not many, and he’ll never try to ‘sell’ anything.

But when two determined people bid against each other for the same lot, and raise its value far above what either of them would ever pay under any other circumstance, watch out for the twinkle in his eye.

Science fiction auction in Stockholm
courtesy Johan Jönsson (Julle)

 

 

Crime

First published in Column 8 on the 4^th September, 1991

 When armed robbery took place last week at our local pharmacy my family was at home only a block away. One of the robbers made his escape down a street only one away from where my kids were at school. I became rather unnerved at my wife’s phone calls to me at work relaying the latest news reports. Was it possible someone with a shotgun was still wandering the streets?

We found out later that the robbers must have left the area pretty smartly – and I guess in their shoes I would have done the same. All power, then, to the police for picking them up in Timaru – of all places – only a couple of days later. The police did a great job.

We’re constantly told that an abstract body, ‘the community,’ is not doing enough to stamp out crime. That irritates me. How exactly is the average suburbanite supposed to stop armed robberies?

And if the ‘community’ is to blame for the lack of concern when it comes to crime, what makes the television programme Crimewatch so effective? Isn’t that the community at work?

Anyway, the community shouldn’t be the prime fighter against crime – most of us haven’t the resources or skills or know-how to make a lot of difference. Surely policemen are still the best ones to do the job.

When the current Government promised 900 more policepersons I felt like cheering, because at this time in our history we are absolutely desperate for them.

But even 900 more bobbies are going to have a massive job. There’s more at work than just an increase in the number of criminals. Part of the matter is that hectic social forces contribute considerably to our problems. We aren’t the community we once were.

Unemployment and drugs have increased out of all proportion in the last few years, and are seedbeds for crime.

Major changes in our attitudes to life are also a problem. For better or worse, the fact that men and women’s rules are now so differently defined from the traditional bring tensions and violence in marriage. We may eventually work through this transition time (and be the better for it) but for the present, overworked women’s refuges prove families are suffering dreadfully from its onslaught.

There’s more. Things that used to be considered criminal by the vast majority have been taken on board as the ‘norm.’ Governments have elected to make them legal. Abortion, de facto marriages, adultery; and the way in which a criminal can be considered as a victim in the very crime he has initiated.

With such turned-around views we can never have our former more stable society.

Lastly, we’ve thrown religion out the window. I know New Zealand was never quite the Christian country it claimed to be, but the civilising effects of Christian attitudes kept many evil forces in check, for decades.

Now we’re so secular we think religion – especially Christianity – doesn’t matter. We don’t want to believe that it does.

The vast changes in the communist world are a lesson to us. Average people, we’re told, committed very few crimes during the communist years. That’s hardly surprising when just being alive could be crime enough to have you thrown in jail – or a mental institution. And anyway, the bosses committed such despicable horrors themselves that crime was virtually respectable.

Now a strange thing is taking place. With communism gasping its last breaths, untold number of people are returning to something communism could never quite destroy – their religion. Poland, Romania, and now Russia itself have shown there is an undeniable hunger for spiritual things.

I wonder how long New Zealand will have to suffer the strife of daily major crime before it, too, realises that throwing out God, and opting instead for a selfish, secular, uncompassionate and ultimately hopeless society is a major cause of our woes.

NZ Police Car, 2025

 

This was written over thirty years ago and there are no signs of crime decreasing. Nor is there much sign of the secular society realising that a community that makes man and woman its centre has little hope of improving. Without God, we are hopelessly stuck in our problems.

Adaptability

First published in Column 8 on the 21^st August, 1991

 [One of the few Columns to get an introduction from the editor: ‘If you are looking for a piano player, Mike Crowl is your man. Experienced with a variety of keyboards, he tells why he is so adaptable…on page 2.’ ]

 If you want an adaptable person, find a pianist.

Pianists acquire adaptability far more than any other kind of musicians because they work with a major disadvantage: they play an instrument that isn’t portable.

Yes, I know in these electronic days you can lug a piece of equipment round that when you plug it in pretends it’s a piano, but it ain’t. And I guess the day may come when musicians will arrive on your doorstep calling themselves pianists, while asking for a power-point.

Now that I’m on the subject of electronic pianos, I once performed at a country Gospel music festival in Cromwell. When we got there, after finding we were to play out in the open on the back of a couple of trucks – in a 30deg heatwave – they brought forth the piano. It had the distinction of being elderly.

When the bass player tuned to a bass note [on his instrument], he found he was in a different key to the saxophonist, who’d tuned to an octave above. (This may not have mattered. One country singer had each string on his guitar tuned to a different key. We decided not to accompany him.)

Anyway we had to abandon the piano, and I was offered a choice (choice?) of one of two assertive-looking synthesizers, both of which could supposedly produce a piano-like noise.

I had to play standing up – only Donny Osmond does that well – and my wrists were bent at right angles to my hands.

At first I thumped away with the rest of the Gospel crew and wondered why I couldn’t hear anything resembling a piano. Seems the sound man hadn’t plugged me in. Later in the day, just as we were about to start another bracket, the owner of the synth appeared and dismantled it while I was still trying to play.

I ask you: does a Steinway need plugging in, or is it likely someone will dismantle your Bechstein mid-performance?

You can see I don’t have much time for pretend pianos. But back to adaptability.

What other musician is expected to sit down at an instrument he’s never touched before and produce his best? More often that not, a pianist will find that the bass is heaver than he expects, or the treble more shrill, or the pedals too high, and he’ll have to spend most of the performance compensating.

That’s on the better instruments. I’ve played on ones that refused to give an inch. Each key was so sluggish it felt as though there was a lead weight strung on the hammer. Your fingers finished up stiff from the effort.

Some give more than an inch: in Milton, one piano decided it didn’t like the shape of my thumb and slammed the lid down on it. Like a real trouper I said to myself the show must go, but my smile was a little forced.

I’ve played on pianos where there was one note which refused to sound: usually right where you most needed it. At such times you sense the composer is in cahoots with the piano because he’s written the most effective part of the melody for that missing note. You scramble around trying to take the melody up or down an octave, hoping that nobody will notice what a hash you’re making of it all.

I once played in Ross, on the West Coast. We were supposed to go somewhere else [a few miles away], but they’d forgotten we were coming, so all 400 residents of Ross turned out to hear our travelling troupe perform the opera La bohème with eight soloists, no chorus, and a pianist.

The Ross piano had not just one note missing but several. And to add to my joys, a family of wasps danced to the jiggering of my piano-light. I spent the entire performance frantically substituting notes the piano could play for those it couldn’t, and trying to persuade the wasps not to sit on my pages and/or various visible parts of my anatomy.

Now do you see why I say, if you want an adaptable person, find a pianist?

The author playing for a rehearsal of Don Giovanni in 2016

The performance in Ross was part of a ‘piano tour’ put on by the New Zealand Opera Company. It was a much cut-down version of the opera, of course, and one or two people played more than one role. Still, all the big arias were there, along with some of the ensembles, and the cast were fully professional opera singers. We travelled around the South Island of New Zealand in a bus (which also carried our scenery) with a permanent bus driver, visiting a wide variety of smaller towns that would never see an opera performed live normally. And the stage manager did everything backstage: lighting, setting up the scenery (along with some help from the male singers – it often had to adapted to the size of the stage), and making sure everything kept going when something went wrong.

Once we’d finished our South Island tour, we worked our way through the North Island.

Incapacitated!

First published in Column 8 on the 28^th August, 1991

The Central Intelligence System is under attack!

The main air ducts to the outside world resound with continuous explosions. The two large video screens steam with condensation. And, if they’re not already in this state, it’s likely in the near future that the two loudspeakers will crackle and splutter until their sound ceases altogether. At present all noise is interrupted by a static-like coughing and choking.

Yes folks, it’s time for the Annual Cold.

For weeks I’ve worn the unmentionable long johns and weather the withering looks of my with-it kids – and kept their colds at bay. And mentioning the kids, for weeks I’ve avoided their germ-laden, cold-filled kisses and cuddles, all the while trying to maintain my normal fatherly relationship with them.

For weeks I’ve slid down the hill on unmelting ice in the vehicle that replaced my old Holden – in which I would have felt, if not actually been, safer – and avoided running into other traffic and into any colds.

Finally last week my resistance gave up the ghost and laid me flat on my back. For everything from the neck down it was work as usual. Only the section that keeps everything else in order – the head – was out of action.

(In fact, the glare from my word processor was too much to cope with. Thus this column is a first: dictated from my sickbed to my 10-year-old typist.)

Talking of heads, having a cold always brings to a head a point of contention in the battle of the sexes that my wife and I epitomise. She always asserts, in line with other wives to their equally beleaguered husbands, that I make a terrible fuss about having a cold. She says that when women have colds they have to grin and bear it. Women, she says, don’t have time to stop for colds. They certainly don’t have time to go to bed for a day and a half. She then proves her point by carrying on regardless when hit by the bug.

I maintain, along with the aforesaid beleaguered husbands, that men suffer far more than women when they have a cold. It’s a well known fact that men’s skins are thinner; surely that gives us less protection. Consequently we’re more afflicted when a cold strikes us.

This cuts no ice with my wife. Once I have a cold, she follows her normal policy of maintaining a polite distance and ignoring my cries for aid. I lie upon my sick bed. If I am not at death’s door, then I am in view of it.

I have found it to be a strange phenomenon that women always accuse men of making a fuss about being sick. Yet we gentlemen would seldom dare tell a woman who is sick that she’s not.

I have to say ‘seldom,’ otherwise my wife would point out that on one historic occasion I didn’t believe she was ill until she proved it by winding up in hospital.  

I was up in Hamilton recently, and spent time with a couple who have two teenage daughters. When the husband questions his health, as he has had good reason do so lately, the three females in his establishment tell him not to fuss so much. He hasn’t even got a son to back him up.

Perhaps all we men are looking for is a little sympathy, a little mollycoddling in our state of ill repose. Perhaps we  hope for a little more understanding from women, that in one area at least they’ll realise we’re the weaker sex.

As for the idea that men’s skin is thinner than women’s, it appears I was misinformed. In general, men’s skin is approximately 20% thicker than women’s, is tougher in texture, and though its thickness declines with age, it does so at a more even rate than women’s. On the other hand, women have a tendency to be more immune to common illnesses. ‘Women generally mount a more robust, innate and adaptive immune response against viral, bacterial, fungal, and parasitic infections,’ says Google’s AI, quoting, or paraphrasing some study on the Net. (We hope.)

It’s slightly puzzling to me why I referred to the machine I typed on as a word processor, both here and in two other columns: here and here. It was a computer; we’d debated about getting a word processor, when such things existed, and thankfully decided against what would have proved to be its limitations. (Thanks to my wife’s insistence, mostly.)

 

 

Phraseology

 First published in Column 8 on the 14^th August, 1991

 Back in 1981, a marvellous phrase was sprung on the nation by one Peter Thomas Mahon. He said, amongst other things, that some of the Erebus evidence was ‘an orchestrated litany of lies.’

Because the phrase so hit the mark, it perhaps had the seeds of self-destruction inherent in it. In fact, now that every writer and his brother uses it to describe all manner of things from a schoolboy fib to a prisoner’s plea, its value has plummeted further and further.

By rehashing a well-chosen phrase, those who abuse it merely emphasise their own poverty of expression. Isn’t it a pity some phrases that are so identified with a particular event can’t retain their individuality?

Mahon’s phrase isn’t the only case in point.

The as-yet-undefeated Saddam Hussein, (whom I managed to call Mr Hussein on a previous occasion when he is, as I was smartly informed, Mr Saddam), used a fearsome expression to describe the war that he’d decided he’d win. It was to be ‘the mother of all battles.’

Didn’t that send a shiver up and down your spine? Why it should, anymore than ‘an orchestrated litany of lies’ should have contained such forcefulness, is beyond the realms of explanation and off into the metaphysical.

(Run that by me again, Stanton?)

Now a curious thing evolved. After the battle, Mr Saddam’s phrases turned around and mocked him. Instead of the ‘mother of all battles’ that he intended, he received a sound thrashing – though not sound enough to knock him right off his pedestal. After that the phrase no longer chilled the bone; it merely made you laugh.

What on earth am I trying to get at here? Just this: before the budget (which I recently so succinctly discussed), dear Ruthie adapted the same chilling phrase to her own creation; only she initially used it tongue-in-cheek. (A fact which seems to have bypassed those critics who didn’t hear her saying the words on the telly.)

Unfortunately for Ruth, this now belittled phrase picked itself up again, and gave its new user a push in the moosh. This budget was in no way the mother of anything, unless mothers have become harsh creatures who don’t care about their kids.

Heinemann’s Dictionary of NZ Quotations has a couple of sentences from a man called William Yate, a chiropractic who wrote in 1835, ‘It is not true, as represented in a recent publication, that New Zealand mothers eat their own children. This is too horrible, even for them!’

Mr Yate my have been playing the ironic a little strongly here, but perhaps if he were alive today, he might adjust his words and say, ‘It is true that New Zealand mothers eat their own children. One has just done so!’

I didn’t intend to write about the wretched budget; it just kind of snuck in. But now that it’s here, let me add a little light matter to all this weightier stuff.

My budget-weary eyes brightened when I noticed in the Otago Daily Times business pages, the aptly named New York credit agency Standard and Poor giving its state-side opinion on our budget. (What is a credit agency anyway?)

The name Standard and Poor (who were they?) so tickled my fancy I’d like to suggest we adopt it to cover New Zealand’s up-and-coming non-rich classes. It’ll be appropriate, after all, because soon the only way most of us will have a hope of surviving will be on credit.

Judge Peter Mahon

 A typical Crowl piece that starts off with one idea and winds up somewhere else altogether.

 

 

God takes notice...

 In one of the Psalms that King David wrote, he asks God: What’s so important about human beings that You take notice of them?

Why does God take notice of us? 

Each one of us is barely an atom in our own solar system. And our solar system itself, when compared to the vastness of the Milky Way, is like a blade of grass on the continent of Africa. 

When it comes to the Universe you’d think we’d count for nothing. So when we think of the immensity of God’s Being compared to us, why does He take any notice of us? 

We’re talking about the Creator of everything we know and a great deal more besides. How can a Being with a mind so vast as to create the Universe care in the least little bit for us? 

And yet His Word in the Bible says He does. He doesn’t just see us as nine billion bodies on a tiddly planet, each one indistinguishable from the other. He knows each of us personally. 

In Psalm 139 we’re told that God knows:

When we sit down or get up,

What we’re thinking about at any given time,

What we do in our daily lives. 

He knows what we’re going to say before we say it.

He knew us before we were born, while we were being formed in the womb.

He knows down to the micro-second how many days we will live on the earth.

He has so many thoughts about us that they vastly outnumber the sand. 

In other words, He cares enormously about each and every one of us. 

God, who is the centre of all things, cares about every moment of our lives. Let’s keep this in mind today, and thank Him for His great care and concern.

Courtesy Jamie MacPherson, Wikicommons 

 

Libraries

 First published in Column 8, on the 7^th August, 1991. This version is slightly altered from the original.

 During the recent Dunedin Competitions I sat in a large room I hadn’t been inside for years. I ran my eye over a quiet corner where I’d spent half my childhood reading books on film until I could tell you everyone who directed this and everyone who acted in that. The shelves from which I’d taken the books were still there, but their worn brown boards are now bare, apart from a couple of bland pot plants.

The room used to be part of the old library. Now I know I’m always going on about libraries, but I’ve got to talk about something in this column, and who wants to mention rugby league ever again?

Sitting there I recalled the days when I was a shining, morning-faced schoolboy, creeping up the stairs and into the room so that the harridan of a librarian wouldn’t see me. Not only did she insist on silence from schoolboys, we also had to remove our caps in her presence.

The New Zealand room ran off the main area. It was years before I summoned up the courage to sneak a look inside. When I was little, several of us nosey altar-boys snuck upstairs in the parish priest’s presbytery – and got caught. I had something of the same feeling about venturing amongst the New Zealand books.

In due course I came to know every nook and cranny in the larger room. One nook was the little listening cupboard under the stairs, where there wasn’t enough space to swing your satchel. When I became a working man I used to spend untold hours eating my lunch in that close little cockpit while discovering the library’s vast resources of recorded music.

No doubt the harridan would have bailed me out for dropping crumbs in her inner sanctum, but she well retired by then.

Every inch of the old library was utilised: on the landing outside the chief librarian’s office were housed the theatre magazines, including Plays and Players, which in those days used to contain complete playscripts. I can remember standing there, (cap in hand), shifting my weight from foot to foot, soaking up A Man for All Seasons.

Down on the next landing, which extended over the main entrance then, were what was viewable of the books A H Reed had collected. Because the area was so small, these treasures were squashed up into glass cases, hardly able to be seen properly.

The library had a summer feel about it. One impression is of sunlight pouring into the large back room on the ground floor. (The children’s library, on the other hand, which I discarded after I’d considered I’d read everything of interest, always seemed to be like the land of Narnia, in a permanent state of winter.)

Incidentally, that sense of sunlight is lacking in the new library, which has been designed under the quite reasonable philosophy that books and light don’t go together. Somehow they survived in the old place, including those in the harridan’s upper room with its vast skylight.

The old library had warmth too. The polished wood surroundings and staircases gleamed, and perhaps because the reading public and the books were all squashed together, everything seemed cosier.

Now I’m not saying anything against the new library. In fact, I remember its opening as if it were yesterday.

I worked then in the Civic Centre right next door, and could hardly contain myself waiting for ten o’clock. My ten minute tea break stretched to half an hour while I raced up and down the stairs – including those that proved to be off-limits – taking in the immense sense of space, exploring everything I could lay my eyes on, trying to identify old friends (books, that is). In fact I was amazed there were enough books to go round. Where had they all been hiding in the old place?

I appreciate the new library for its roominess. But when occasionally I dream of libraries, the books, like cats on windowsills, purr in the sun, my sandwiches revolve at 33.3 rpm and the harridan smiles.

 

Mary Ronnie and Ada Fache - two of the Chief Librarians
I remember from my youth and childhood. 

I’m very unfair in this column to the librarian I refer to here as ‘the harridan.’ Libraries were quiet places in her time, and schoolboys were known to be noisy – especially en masse. I think the lady in question would have been Ada Fache, but I’m not one hundred percent sure, and from the photo above she doesn't appear in the least to be a harridan. It may not have been the City Librarian anyway, but some other staff member.

The Children’s Library was in a separate building about three minutes’ walk away. It was housed in a two-storey terrace house, and if the main library was short of space, the Children’s Library had no idea what space was. There were books in every conceivable place, like an old secondhand bookshop that’s sold a good deal less than it’s acquired. And it was dark.

 

 

 

In my hands

 The longest Psalm in the Bible, Psalm 119, has 176 lines. In one verse after another it focuses on the way in which we should live, that is, according to the commandments and instructions of our Father God. 

But every so often there’s a line in this Psalm which seems puzzling, almost out of place. One such line is, My life is continually in my hands. 

In whose hands? You’d expect the writer to say my life is in God’s hands. But no, he writes: in my hands. 

How can that be? Surely one of the consistent statements of the Bible is that we should give our lives into God’s hands, not try and run our lives our own way. 

Even though God does allow us to live as though we had control of our lives, He doesn’t recommend it. Back in one of the first five books of the Bible, when the people of Israel were about to enter the Promised Land, their leader Joshua warned them about not going off in their own way, doing their own thing.

After explaining what will happen to them - both if they didn’t live according to God’s laws, and if they did - he says, Choose you this day whom you will serve.

Even though God brought them out of slavery in Egypt, they were still given a choice as to whether to follow Him. Their lives were in their hands.

It’s a decision we all have to make, on a daily basis. Are we going to do what we want – or what God wants? 

However, the line back in Psalm 119, doesn’t just consist of my life is continually in my hands. There’s a second line, a kind of answer to the first, which says, But I do not forget Your law. That is, of course, God’s law. 

So we might say My life is continually under my control, but I need to choose who I’m going to serve. Is it me and things I idolise, or is it the one true God?

A verse from Psalm 119

The budget

Unusually, the Editor of the Star Midweek gave me a little promo on the front page of the paper – or else he had a little gap to fill - and decided to introduce my column thus:

Mike Crowl in his Column 8 today writes about the budget; well, sort of writes about the budget; well, would you believe almost writes about the budge on…Page 2.

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

The budget

A friend asked me if I was writing about the budget. (I hadn’t thought about it.) Without waiting for a reply, he answered his own question: Well, I don’t suppose it’s all that funny, anyway.

So I’m half-heartedly writing about the budget which, funny or not, by the time you read this will have already banged or whimpered into our lives.

Firstly, I’m pleased to see from the Listener’s alternative budget that I’m not classed in the wealthy bracket anymore (in spite of the untold millions I earn from writing this column each week).

In fact, our size of family doesn’t even make it on to their charts. And it’s not because we have seventeen kids either.

I’d better explain. After my wife and I had our first child it became a standing joke between us that when anyone asked how many kids in total we were having, we’d say, seventeen. Even our Catholic friends turned pale.

We didn’t make it. Blame it on a lack of stamina, or too much writing of Columns Eight, or the high-chair falling apart, or running out of nappies - when it comes to a large family we hardly hit the mark.

There’s something to be said for a large family, though. (I haven’t been able to find out what it is, so I’ll carry on.) Older moviegoers will remember Clifton Webb as the indomitable father in the film, Cheaper by the Dozen. He claimed it was more economical to have a dozen kids and proved it time and again by fronting up to bemused shop-keepers and asking for discounts.

I didn’t see the film, but I did read the book. Practically all I can recall about it now was that the father, a time and motion study man, insisted it was speedier to do up his shirt buttons from the bottom, instead of the top. He would have made a successful politician, I think.

Oh, well, back to the budget. I see one of the economists in the Listener thinks we need more people in the country to make the economy work. I’ve held this same despised theory for years – although, like any economist worth his salt, I won’t be cornered about the details (and now Mr Birch is even coming round to my way of thinking).

Surely if more people come into the country (preferably with some ready cash) then there’ll be a need for more facilities and goods, and, in spite of what pessimists would say, more employment. New Zealand’s present immigration policy seems to be like a person who digs a moat round his castle then pulls up the drawbridge – and wonders why he feels cut off. No doubt some bureaucrats would say of the immigration policy that it’s all right here, but I can’t agree.

There’s probably an optimum figure at which things cease to work well, but at three and a half million I don’t think we’ve reached it. We’re already suffering in the South Island from an exodus north – why not open up some of our endless acres to the bodies standing shoulder to shoulder overseas? They’d be glad to have some personal space.

Oh well, back to the budget.

More people, more pollution, some would say. One scientist writes that because of pollution and jammed roads and motorway costs, bigger cities are now forcing drivers to leave their cars at home. People have to use public transport. It’ll come here, no doubt.

And built into that carless age we have a solution to unemployment. Everyone who’s anyone will have to take a bus, or a train – remember trains? Believe it or not, there’ll be buses going everywhere you want to go, instead of just where they think it’s economical.

Won’t that make the bus drivers glad? (They might celebrate by turning the lights back on in the buses so that when we’re travelling we can read again.)

I was going to get back to the budget, but unfortunately, having fewer pages to work with than our Ruthie, I seem to have run out of room.

 

Clifton Webb with some of his dozen children

This column probably shows why it was a good idea I never took up the role of an economist. Not that anyone asked me to. Since 1991 New Zealand’s population has increased to over five million, still no large number, since many cities in the world have the same population. And while we have a lot more cars, our roads are hardly jam-packed.

Unfortunately there has been a change in thinking about immigration, but not, I feel, a wise change. Instead of inviting people who had some money behind them, we’ve taken in a number of people who have nothing and who also bring their families with them – who have nothing – and we find them houses (somehow, even though houses are in short supply) – and we maintain them until they get on their feet. In spite of this, many immigrants prove to be practical and entrepreneurial citizens; a number do not, unfortunately.

As for stopping people bringing cars into cities, the powers that be eventually came up with a seemingly credible reason why we shouldn’t: climate change, and the damage cars’ emissions  was doing to the planet. So parking spaces are increasingly removed in cities, replaced by cycle lanes. Some cities are amenable to cycles, since their mostly flat. The city I lived in when this column was written was built on seven hills (supposedly) and cycling was only of value to people who stayed in the flat parts of the city, or who were excessively energetic.