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.