Education

First published in Column 8 on the 24^th February, 1993

I was interested in the Voice of Television’s reaction to the spate of attempted suicides following a recent Shortland Street episode depicting just such an attempt.

The Voice of TV proclaimed that they’d discussed the proposed storyline with those who know, and that it had all been done in the best possible way.

The Voice of Television always claims they have the best of intentions, and because they keep on claiming it they seem to think they can never be wrong.

Certainly, the producers of Shortland Street couldn’t know that several people would attempt suicide in consequence of a story on their programme. Certainly it cannot be said that they caused those people to attempt suicide.

What bugs me is the way they exonerate themselves time after time, especially when they imply that television has no effect on people’s lives whatsoever.

Yet all the advertising on television is intended to do exactly that: affect our lives.

You can’t have it both ways. If 10 to 15 seconds of top-notch advertising is expected to change the way we think, how much more effect must powerful or violent or emotionally charged programmes have?

If music hath the power to soothe or rage, and if paintings can arouse violence, and if the written word can bring about revolutions, then it only stands to reason that all encompassing media such as movies and television must affect our inner beings.

The cinematic media is by far the most impacting of all the arts. It can’t help but be; so much of it is real and involving.

When television was still a twinkle in the eye of its creators, they considered that this medium could be the finest educational tool ever invented. And it still could be. Unfortunately what is thrown at us night after night on the public box is for the most part educational in quite the wrong way.

The world presented on television is one in which morality has been largely thrown aside; in which it is immaterial whether evil or good triumph; in which religion is either mocked or treated with high disdain; in which those in authority are seldom treated objectively, but rather as though the interviewers had some hidden agenda intended to drag them down.

And in spite of complaints, the Voice of Television seldom appears to come out in the wrong. Few voices can compete with its power.

How long have people complained about the amount of violence spewing out of the box each day? Yet the Voice of Television says there is no corollary between what appears on the box and what happens in real life.

John Kennedy reports in an article in the ODT that pornography is pouring into Britain via cable, at the same time as the British wonder how to control sexual violence stalking the land. How different is New Zealand?

When our television automatically switched on to a programme the other night after we’d finished watching a video, we were straightway thrust into a scene of sexual violence on a subway train. Those few moments of graphic horror immediately imprinted on the brain.

Unless I’m vastly different from everyone else, I find such images churn around in my head, as countless others continue to do that I wish I’d never exposed my mind to.

What then do they imprint on the mind of someone who delights to dwell on them?

Sir James Shelley, one-time director of broadcasting, is quoted as saying, ‘There was once a wicked lady called Circe, who was reputed to turn human beings into swine. The object of broadcasting should be the exact opposite.’

Can the Voice of Television sincerely agree?

Cartoon by Ed Gamble

Perspectives

First published in Column Eight on the 14^th Feb, 1993

I was disappointed to read that the distributors, Everard Films, had taken off the short film accompanying Strictly Ballroom, because of complaints.

Put together excellently, with the right amount of aplomb, this little piece of fantasy, The Singing Trophy, (about a hunter who can’t find the right sound amongst his chorus of singing heads), was a nonsense idea taken as far as it could go and no more. The makers expected their audience would see it for what it was: an extended joke.

Why there should have been complaints I can’t quite understand. Surely it wasn’t because animals were treated only as trophies? If that was the case, someone had lost their sense of humour.

The film in no way said it’s a worthwhile hobby to go out and kill animals just to tack their heads up on the wall. The hunter had no one to impress with his trophies except his taciturn father, and was in fact shown to be a fool, evidenced by the way in which he rather mysteriously wound up on the wall himself.

I hope we’re not becoming a humourless nation, which can’t see a joke when it’s right under its nose. With so many people crying about their rights, we’re in danger of losing our perspective. We all have room for improvement in our attitudes towards our neighbours, but losing our sense of humour in the process won’t help.

I’m reminded of a curious article I read a while ago on the film, Hook.

Someone in the UK claimed that the character of Captain Hook was disablist. In other words, because the villain was a disabled person this merely reinforced the idea that disabled people were different and in some mysterious way, evil.

Anyone who saw the film will recognise that the last thing you thought about with Captain Hook was his disability. If anything he proved the case for disabled people: they can do anything! Hook’s motivation in the story isn’t his disability, although he’s out for vengeance. Hook desires to rule.

The desire to rule twists the mind, not the body, and is an evil any person, able-bodied or disabled, is capable of indulging in.

Incidentally, I have made two errors of language in the above paragraph: one is supposed to say, ‘people with disabilities,’ or ‘differently abled,’ instead of disabled people, and ‘non-disabled,’ instead of able-bodied.

I understand the political desire that goes on behind such forced change of the language, but sometimes it’s the same as the approach taken to films like The Singing Trophy: dragging the howitzer out of the cupboard to swat the fly.

Real changes in the language come from the imaginative side of life, not from the propagandist.

*  *  *

Well, I’ve strayed a little from my subject, so I’ll stray a little further. I was pleased to read that Jennie Kjelgaard, the dancing teacher, has been made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Dancing. I was disturbed, however, to hear that this ball of energy was nearly 70!

I worked with Jennie many moons ago when I played for the Gilbert and Sullivan Society’s production rehearsals. Along with Waric Slyfield, Jennie revolutionised the approach to producing these operettas. She even introduced a ballet into The Mikado. Inconceivable! And perhaps even more unheard of, she convinced a herd of left-footed male chorus members to dance.

For years the chorus had ‘danced’ two steps forward, two to the side, two steps back and two to home base. Jennie’s sparkling and witty choreography brought life to the Gilbert and Sullivan productions which, through too great an adherence to tradition, had become stale.

Good on yer, Jennie.

Sadly, I can find very little about Jennie Kjelgaard online – only brief mentions, or an obituary that doesn’t tell us anything about her career and personality. The same goes for Waric Slyfield, who brought great brilliance to the Dunedin theatre scene for a few short years. I had a brief connection with both of them in the mid-sixties, from memory, but neither of them stayed long in the city. 

Holidays

First published in Column 8 on the 27^th January, 1993

I have now realised I’m no longer cut out for marriage, parenting, friendships, and holidays – and any combination of the above.

I’m beginning to think all our efforts to prepare for holidays (and live through them) are a waste of time. Our mental health might actually improve if we carried on working. Not only would we avoid the stress of trying to fit 52 weeks into 49 or less, but the productivity of the country might actually go up.

People often quote at me, ‘A change is as good as a holiday.’ I’m now wondering if it’s somehow possible to have the change without the holiday.

Why all this fuss? Telling you in detail would be too emotionally draining at present. I may need some months to internalise the trauma of the last couple of weeks.

Part of the problem with holidays is that I’ve finally realised parents and children work to very different agendas. When parents want to relax and doze in the sun the kids want to make sandcastles and throw buckets of seawater over them. When parents become older and wiser and want to go for long peaceful walks in the native bush, the kids want to bury their heads in the stereo they snuck on board, and deafen themselves on Guns N’ Roses.

While the children are small, holidays down by the beach seem wondrous – until you realise what a mountain of clothing you must take in order to compensate for each fall in the mud or each fully-dressed swim. And it always rains a lot more on holidays: washing machines appear to follow the ‘change is as good’ maxim and become inconveniently absent.

We stayed at a beach crib one year. Each of the children in turn managed to pick up some bug that caused them to vomit up a spectacular reddish mixture – all over the crib carpet. Fortunately we weren’t far from town and were able to drive home for clean-ups and fresh supplies – three days in a row.

Living under a real roof at least is marginally like home. Foolishly we joined the rugged tent brigade for a period. Our tent was an amazing construction that had two rooms, several windows, and extra doors; it also kept out the worst downpour I’ve ever experienced. But by the time a week had finished, there were nappies in our bed – clean or dirty, who could tell? – dozens of little wet garments wondering why they being allowed to go mouldy, and bits of food residing happily under every footfall.

As well, we understood why progress had left tents behind as housing material. One night, about two in the morning, some hoons drove into the domain. Headlights blazing and tyres digging mini-hangi pits all round the ground, they spent a half hour racing up to the tent flaps, missing them only at the last moment. A piece of canvas doesn’t seem much protection against a roaring mass of metal.

Masses of metal are another cause of holiday stress. I have only just begun to feel confident that my current vehicle will get us there and back without conking out on some isolated unsealed road.

One year, after packing up the car to come home, we stepped inside the crib for a last minute check. The car decided it wouldn’t wait any longer. It rolled cheerfully down the slope until a stubborn church building signalled stop!

Another year we borrowed a van and trailer. (Never borrow anything mechanical or electrical.) On the way home over the northern motorway the van selfishly drank all the radiator water and strangulated the motor.

What’s the solution?

Next year I may send my wife off floundering with her friends. The kids can go and stereo-blast the birds off the trees somewhere while sitting wrapped up inside pretending they’re at home.

I’ll just loll about at work and do nothing, enjoying the fact that everyone else is away – suffering.

Don’t ask me why Guns N’ Roses has an apostrophe after the N. Pak’nSave, which appears as one word, has it before the N, which makes slightly more sense, but not much.

 

History

First published in Column 8 on the 20^th January, 1993

With all my New Year resolutions behind me – January’s nearly over after all – I can put aside any nonsense about discipline and talk about something nearer to my heart.

The current crop of genealogists, those collectors of historic minutiae, must be wondering if this will be the last generation able to gather real information about the details of past people’s lives.

Human beings used to be able to recite the list of their ancestors, going way back; the present generation is lucky if it knows who its great-grandparents were. Worse still, the day-to-day accumulation of information about our lives is no longer recorded on paper: the universal telephone has made the jotting down of notes and the writing of letters almost obsolete.

During the holidays I read A N Wilson’s biography of C S Lewis; without the vast amount of source material available in the form of correspondence, most of the book would have been impossible.

Like Dickens and Voltaire, whose volumes of letters I came across while prowling around the University Library (almost deserted but for workmen upgrading the place), Lewis wrote constantly and at length. These guys didn’t just write the odd note; Dickens would be writing letters even while working on drafts of his novels. But more important for us: their recipients retained them.

Today things are different. We know from moment to moment what the latest misdemeanour in the Royal household is, or what the present most popular pop-star had for breakfast, because the media keeps us up to the mark.

But the small-scale doings of Joe Bloggs will be forgotten in a few years because Joe has stopped writing letters – or at least his wife has. Taking advantage of the most recent discount in the telephone price war, he will have rung his relatives; the exciting things he did, and the unexciting, will be lost forever.

Why is all this of interest to me at the moment?

During the holidays I embarked upon a process of transcription. Having rediscovered dozens of rubber-band-bound letters I had written to my family twenty-five years ago, I began making a typed copy of them. These letters cover one of the more interesting periods of my life, and one day there may be grandchildren who will find I was more than a dull old dotard. (My children, of course, are too close to find me of any novelty value.)

Why spend time copying old letters? One reason is purely selfish: I rediscovered myself as I’d been at an earlier time, the way I thought, the way I didn’t, the way I was before certain circumstances came along to change me forever – like getting married.

I relived events that were important for me then and remembered again how I felt. The letters covered my touring round the country with the NZ Opera Co, my tripping off to Oz to suss out the music scene, my flying to London to study for a year amongst a group of Kiwi-inhibiting ex-Oxford students – as well as coaching our Kiri before she was known to anyone but us local yokels.

I’ve been keeping a journal now since early 1989, since the night my daughter woke up to throw a rat headfirst down the toilet. Even reading that fairly recent history again has shown us how quickly we forget the details of our lives.

I’d like to encourage people this year to ignore the ads encouraging us to make longer and longer toll calls. Let’s write letters – they’re cheaper. Let’s make records of our lives, before we all become quite anonymous to our children’s children.

The journal started in 1989 continues to this day. There have been occasional gaps of a few days or even a few weeks, but overall I’ve persisted in keeping it. It started out as pages printed out from various computers we owned. It was fortunate that I printed them, as the original digital versions were deleted as we upgraded computers. The journal at that point amounted to 700 printed pages, and later I had then all copied, so that at least there was a paper back-up. Finally I retyped them all back into digital form - roughly 420,000 words – a project that took a number of years. Since then I’ve also retyped all those letters as well as the hundreds I wrote to my mother while I was overseas, and various other odds and ends. But there are still more to go.

Currently, as any regular reader of this Blog will know, I’m turning my old Column 8 columns into blog posts, with some additional notes (like these) and with links. At present many of them only exist as newspaper clippings.

At the time I wrote this column toll calls - that is, calls to any part of the country outside of your own town, or overseas - were expensive, though as I note, the price was coming down. It's ironic to think that now it costs somewhere around $4.00 to send a letter while virtually all calls, worldwide, are free. 

Kneeling

First published in Column 8 on the 22^nd December, 1992

Welcome to Christmas 1992!

Squabbling city councillors, silly-walking Parliamentarians squeezing through last minute legislation. Endless ignorable junk-mail (sorry, direct marketing promotions); loot and lotto-buying foot-sore shoppers; harassed retailers, credit-card consuming, even greed-encouraging.

Welcome to Arkwright-like shops open at all hours – even unto the hour of midnight thereof. Only Christmas Day remains as an oasis of peace in the middle of the restless seas of retailing. Restless, and desiring even to eat up Christmas Day itself.

Soup-kitchens galore for the poor. Deadline-meeting columnists. Welcome to Christmas 1992!

Finnish women’s organisations say children may find Mother Christmas less scary than Santa Claus. They believe Santa should have a female companion who could take his sleigh and reindeer around the world delivering presents. ‘That would be really equality,’ Ms Leena Ruusuvuori said.

Mother Christmas? I bet there’ll be no climbing down chimneys for her – she’ll just want to drive the sleigh. (Anyway, the only chimney now left in our house is a flue, so no roly-poly Mother or Father Christmas is going to make their way down that.)

And no thumping down on the roof for Mother Christmas, with reindeer hooves scratching the paint work. She’ll drive her vehicle up the road at a respectable hour (while the kids are still up), and they’ll be able to come and grab their goodies straight off the sleigh. Forget all that masculine mystery and excitement. Trouble is, Mother Christmas sounds like a door-to-door saleswoman, to me.

Welcome to Christmas 1992!

Let’s forget all the bustle and hassle and do a bit of contemplating, in keeping with the reason for the season.

We used to have a picture on our living-room wall which hung there, not just at Christmas, but all year round. It was a very simple picture of the aforesaid Father Christmas, and put him perfectly in place.

In the picture he was kneeling at the foot of a cradle. The cradle contained the Christ child, and Father Christmas was kneeling in adoration, a smile full of wonder on his face. He was worshipping the greatest Christmas gift of all: Jesus Christ.

You’ll have noticed in the rush and confusion described above that there wasn’t a lot of kneeling going on (unless one happens to be a shoe salesperson). Yet in the Christmas story kneeling is kept in focus.

First there was a group of smelly shepherds, straight from the fields and from sleeping right amongst the sheep, dags ground into their woolly jackets and breeches, and without a deodorant to roll between them.

They’d heard the message from a rather unusual source, and came and found the baby lying in the animals’ feeding trough. And they knelt in adoration. For one thing, this child was the son of their shepherd King, David. But the angels had told them more: this child was the Son of God, and was His gift to a pain-filled world.

And at some later point, wise men from the East appeared (we don’t even know what made them ‘wise’), with gifts for this ordinary-looking baby. They were foreigners, aliens, non-Jews, despised Gentiles – just like you and me. And they too knelt in adoration.

This Christmas, as we kneel beside the pine-smelling tree, putting presents under it; or maybe as we kneel beside an excited child opening a precious package; or maybe as we kneel to clean leftovers off the floor, we could let our knees remind us, hopefully for more than a moment, why we celebrate Christmas at all.

There are now dozens of versions of Santa kneeling before Jesus. Many of them get it just right; some go overboard. None that I’ve seen so far are quite like the picture I was talking about, but I’ve included one above that fits the bill - sorry, can't tell you who the artist is.

Retrospect

First published on the 16^th December, 1992 in Column Eight. 

During December the media tends to review the events of the last twelve months, so, not wanting to be behind the times, I now offer my own personal retrospective.

This was the year in which my children once again insisted on their right to grow, and now all but one of them look me straight in the eye – or eyebrow.

This was the year in which, for the first time ever, I completed a correspondence course. Early next year I may give you the details, but as yet I’m still too close to the event to speak of it without emotion.

This was the year in which my body said; ‘If life began at forty, I’m out of here!’ Nearing the completion of my fifth decade on this planet, my body and I have lately had some disagreement over the value of life as we know it, Jim.

For example, when compensating recently for the soreness following a minor op, I put my back out, got it in again, then put it out again – (rather like a dance step, this.) After which the body pretended it had some virus, and my lower limbs ached. I put the body to bed for a bit of rest, but it responded with a stiff neck.

The ‘thing’ travelled down and made the back of my left knee sore, then wound up putting both my thumb joints out of action.

However, I’m still breathing. A lot of other people aren’t as a result of 1992.

We have this illusion that all of us are due for three score and ten years, but as C. S. Lewis points out in The Screwtape Letters (which I read again this year): ‘The majority of the human race dies in infancy; of the survivors, a good many die in youth.’ The trouble with reviewing the year just gone is you release that the chances of your staying around much longer are getting slimmer.

This was the year in which AIDs took a back seat to Abuse. Who needs mandatory reporting of the subject? We have so many people claiming abuse now that no one can keep up with it. The court cases of the land seem to deal with little else. Only murder, which started off the year in great style, takes precedence, and it has become so commonplace we barely notice its frequent grim reaping.

Abuse is like a cancer that’s been eating away at the nation, underground. This year it’s really come out in the open. As a nation we need to acknowledge our shame that this evil has gone unchecked for so long, and somehow deal it a death blow.

This was the year in which thousands of New Zealanders for the first time stood silently on the streets proclaiming that thousands of their fellow human beings had never seen the light of day. They were spat at, and cursed at. So was Jesus.

This was the year in which the trickle down approach to economics has begun to lose ground, internationally. Hopefully a different kind of trickle down in politics and economics will begin to make progress here, with people put before policies, however cost effective those policies may be.

This was the year in which millions of readers of tabloids and magazines encouraged the shameful actions of so-called journalists and aided them in destroying a family. That the family had made mistakes wasn’t the point – every family does. That the family suffered more and more intrusions on its privacy is a shameful indictment on the people who continue to buy garbage instead of boycotting it.

That hardly begins to sum up the year. Sorry – small columnists can only make small contributions.

I assume the family I mention towards the end was the Royal Family. In 1992 three couples split up: Princess Anne divorced Mark Phillips, Prince Andrew separated from Sarah Ferguson and Charles and Diana formally separated. On top of that, Windsor Castle was badly damaged in a huge fire, and the Queen summed up the year as her ‘annus horribilis.’

 As for the correspondence course I finished, I no longer have any idea what it was. 

 

Fences

First published in Column Eight on the 9^th December, 1992

All of us as children, while out walking, will have spent time teetering along boundary lines, balancing on a wall or wide-topped fence. Of course, as we grow older, fences don’t take much of a front place in our interest. Anyway we become too self-conscious to clamber up on one, and would probably break something important if we did.

Consequently, when out walking, I usually ignore boundaries. But while strolling recently, I took some notice of the ways in which sections are bounded, and was surprised at the variety and ingenuity of construction I encountered.

We get so used to what’s around we never notice it. Only when I checked did I realise the diverse fencing on our own property. Palings along the front (with an almost imperceptible curve out towards the footpath). Two different styles of fencing on the left: one a combination of wire and corrugated iron on wood, the other foursquare wooden palings.

Our back fence is the most solid – part of the way – and the newest piece. The only problem is that when we assisted our former neighbours to erect it, someone in the party wasn’t good at uprights, and they all tipsily lean to the left – visible on our side, of course. The uprights on the right hand fence are worse: having plainly partaken to a greater degree, they lean further still. Finally a hedge with ideas above its station completes our perimeters.

Hedges used to be the mainstay of suburban fences – until they became unfashionable. I can remember the enormous prickly affair that protected my childhood house from passersby – and from much of the sun, too. Now you won’t find hedges in such profusion at all: soft, unprickly, tidy, pale or shiny green leaves are the mostly likely to be visible. Only one hedge I met with on my walk leant menacingly out into the road, claiming I was encroaching on its personal space.

Fences and walls are what divide the front of most properties from belligerent strollers. They range from solid constructions that allow no one to see through, to those consisting of a few tiddly rocks on the ground: barely an apology for a barrier. (Lack of fencing in a state housing area seems almost to be a tradition.)

Some fences go with the flow, by following the incline of the road, and some step up in the world. One construction I found had horizontal bricks leaning downhill, like people in bed with their feet on the pillow. On top of these were more bricks standing on end, barely holding themselves upright – only a muscular column at the end prevented them from spilling, lemming-like, onto the path.

Fences, like me, have a problem with age: they tend to bulge out in the middle a little. This gives the impression that they want to snuggle up to anyone concerned enough to care. (That’s not the impression I want to give, mind.)

Interesting fences stand in stark contrast to the bare bones fence typically erected by the City Council: one long white square piece clamped onto one upright by one metal plate and one bolt. A fence to keep no one in or out nor stop them from falling. Fencing without inspiration.

Decorations occur on wooden fences, but far more so on brick and concrete. Here the artists go crazy, with round holes and triangular spaces. Bricks doing circus balancing acts stand alongside bricks pretending to be hot-cross buns or organ pipes. Some concrete blocks hide their bland appearance by masquerading as pavlovas, covered with cream. Only the strawberries are missing.

At the opposite extreme, one wall I met consisted of recycled bricks: no longer breathing fumes of smoke, the naked bricks rejoice in the open air – in spite of still having chips on their shoulders.

When strolling, it pays to take time and explore: even the most mundane can unmuddle the mind.

An intrepid snail on our holly hedge

I remember this rather weak excuse for a column being the result of desperately looking for a subject. It could have been better: the constant use of the word fence for what was plainly a wall or a hedge when described; the idea that you could balance on a wide-topped fence (whatever that was); the ‘ignoring’ of boundaries – no idea what I meant, as I don’t remember walking all over people’s properties randomly. And the idea that you no longer found hedges. No idea where I got that from.

Reading it now, more than thirty years later, it looks very like a column that wasn’t quite finished, wasn’t really re-read and tidied up. And I failed to mention that the section of hedge on our property was a pain: nasty sharp-edged leaves, and a delight in growing upwards and outwards. One of our former neighbours used to trim it for us, and later we had to do it ourselves. Very painful. 

Anyway, it is what it is.

Obsessive housekeeping

First published in Column 8 on the 2^nd December, 1992 

Jenny has been in the news rather a lot lately. In fact one day last week she made the headlines three times.

Her by now infamous statements on how to budget have received considerable comment – indeed, Jenny herself had the foresight to say: ‘No doubt I will have my head shot off my shoulders.’ Unfortunately a Minister of Parliament in New Zealand is unlikely to receive such just desserts – only in a country known for revolutionary proceedings would she be literally right.

I have a suspicion that Jenny’s got a bad case of the Obsessive Housekeeper disease. This obsession makes the person see housekeeping as the be all and end all – at considerable cost to those around her (and him, in some cases).

The Obsessive Housekeeper never allows dust to remain for a moment. In fact, the dust doesn’t often get a chance to settle, but is caught in mid-flight.

In the house of the Obsessive Housekeeper the windows will be washed and polished every day; there will never be a speck of flour in the floor after baking; rings round the bathtub, if they managed to get a head start, would bring such wrath upon the culprit, that he or she would have to wash outside in a tub – in cold water – for six weeks.

Magazines on the coffee table are there for decoration; neither are they to be removed, or altered from their artistic arrangement. They must never be placed anywhere where it’s convenient to read them.

Woe betide those who live in such a house: their lives will be misery in at least two ways. First, they will never be allowed to leave anything out of its assigned place, from dirty clothes to newspapers to plates. Secondly, if they do manage to commit such a mortal sin, they will never be allowed to forget it. Unlike God, who delights to forget our mistakes, the Obsessive Housekeeper takes pride in remembering the minutest details of our human failings.

So why call Jenny the Obsessive Housekeeper? I get the impression she sees New Zealand as a large sprawling mansion and can’t cope with all that untidiness. And of course the most untidy people are those who are on a benefit; they haven’t learned how to behave in the house of the Obsessive Housekeeper.

Not only can’t they budget their benefit to pay for mortgages and rents, for food and clothing, and perhaps electricity, they argue that they should be allowed to have one or two pleasures in life. These pleasures might consist of salt in their gruel; toilet paper; enough hot water to fill a hottie (which water they will naturally recycle for washing next morning). They might wish for a board (from the demolition yard) down the middle of the bed to avoid any likelihood of producing more disorganised New Zealanders.

You see they haven’t been educated in life skills. If only they could be, and quickly, there would be no more problems. They would then quite happily live without the lights on in the evening; televisions and telephones would be things of their bourgeois past; a car would be something people who managed their well-paid budgets would drive – in fact the beneficiaries would wave to the occupants out of respect. And going barefoot would become a sign of self-esteem.

I think Jenny believed her benefit cuts would make everyone good and righteous – and tidy. I think she believed people would implicitly understand she had written an eleventh commandment: Thou shalt grind down the poor until they no longer cry for mercy.

Unfortunately for our Obsessive Housekeeper Jenny, her commandment stands in stark contrast to everything the writer of the other ten ever said.

AI reminds me of the history of this period:

In 1992, Shipley was forcing through incredibly unpopular cuts to the welfare state and restructuring the public health system. As a result, she faced intense public anger, weekly protests, and literal death threats.

When she spoke to journalists outside the debating chamber or during press conferences that year, she frequently used blunt, battlefield language to justify why she was marching ahead with the reforms despite the backlash.

The specific line you quoted from the news was her frequent warning to reporters (and to fellow National MPs who were getting cold feet):

"If you stick your head above the parapet, you have to expect to get your head shot off."

Because she repeated this specific metaphor to the media throughout 1992 to describe her political survival, the press heavily associated her with the imagery of ‘getting her head shot off.’

It appears that I ‘distilled’ (as AI tells me) her famous 1992 news media phrase into the slightly more dramatic, direct quote I used at the beginning of this column.

 

Honour

First published in Column 8 on the 25^th November, 1992

One recent balmy Friday evening I spent part of my tea-break taking a turn round the Queen’s Gardens, imbibing a little late afternoon Vitamin D while sheltering from the Harbour breeze on the leeward side of the statuary. The stroll caused me to consider how little and how short-lived is the honour we give to people these days.

There are three monuments in these Gardens: one enormous pole honouring the Glorious Dead of the century’s two major wars, and two more than life-sized statues of figures who were notable in their time. Both statues were put up within a few years of the deaths of those they portray, which gives some indication of our forebears’ respect for them.

Who would we honour with a statue today? We’re more prone to raze statues, in line with the communists, than raise them. And along with razing statues we raze the characters of people to whom we once might have considered giving honour.

The statues in the Gardens are of Queen Victoria, (accompanied by two somewhat sorrowful ladies), and of Dr Donald MacNaughtonStuart, D.D. While the Queen stands stolid and sure, Dr Stuart sits comfortable and relaxed in his study chair, legs crossed, the sole of his shoe swinging high above your head.

I was told an interesting anecdote about the Stuart statue. It was the first to be erected, in 1898, four years after the venerable doctor had died. Originally he faced the Exchange, perhaps casting a quizzical eye at Jacob’s Corner. But when the Queen arrived about 1904, with her ladies-in-waiting, it was felt not fit that the doctor should have his back to her, and with considerable effort he was turned around 180 degrees. However, I suppose it as a bit late then to get him to stand.

I’m reminded of all this honouring of past figures today – and Dr Stuart was noteworthy enough to have a bust of him placed in the KnoxChurch grounds as well – when I read about the fire at Windsor Castle. The present Queen is said to be devastated.

The fire is just one more thing for her to be devastated about. I don’t think we should necessarily go back to the days when school holidays were declared if a royal figure toured (though it was a more reasonable excuse than sending school pupils onto the street to sell raffles), but I do think we need to ponder the destructive tone we’ve taken towards the Royal Family.

And I say ‘we’ because all of us are involved in this destructiveness. We’re involved when we read the latest piece of media gossip, much of it totally false. We’re involved when we watch a satirical television programme that uses real film of royal personages but adds new dialogue, making a mockery of their every move and expression. In each and every case we’re guilty of shameful behaviour.

The Queen’s life this last year must have been hellish, to say the least. She may be a distinctive and experienced public figure, but she’s still human, a mother and a grandmother.

To see her sons and their wives reviled at every turn, to see photographs that pinpoint their folly displayed for all the world to see, to hear of tapes that purport to record unwise relationships, and to read of books that threaten to ‘tell all’ would be enough to destroy the best of families.

What’s changed our attitudes? We prefer to read and watch garbage about this family’s life than to give them honour. Ultimately our merciless criticism of them – and other public figures – must rebound on us as a society.

 

Queen Victoria and the Cenotaph

 
Dr Stuart

he ‘enormous pole’ is called the Cenotaph. The Queen’s Gardens (the Queen being Victoria) were once a proper single garden but due to a gradual increase in traffic a road was cut through the Gardens, isolating Dr Stuart from Victoria. The shop I managed at the time this was written was literally across the road from them. 

Jacob’s Corner was the corner of High St and Princes St, a famous meeting place in my youth for the young people of the city on a Friday night (in the days when shops were open on Friday nights, rather than on Saturday mornings). It was named after Jacob’s tobacconists, and although that particular shop was occupied by other businesses over the years, the Jacob name attached itself well and truly to the corner.  

Spurious

First published in Column 8 on the 18^th November, 1992

What little I know about the logical use of words has been somewhat casually acquired over the years through books like Straight and Crooked Thinking. The need to step cautiously through the minefields of words is a lesson more could learn.

For instance, some of the arguments against the reintroduction of corporal punishment have a kind of spurious logic. (Spurious – false, not genuine – is a word I learnt many years ago under the tutelage of one W S Gilbert; he introduced umpteen words into my vocabular. I didn’t always know what they meant at that time, but I used them anyway.)

Because corporal punishment is violent in the eyes of some people they claim that re-introducing it would increase violence in our society. Just a minute. The enormous increase in violence has come in the period since corporal punishment was removed from our schools. Our society was actually less murderous and less aggressive when corporal punishment was the norm.

It doesn’t follow that c.p. had anything to do with keeping violence under control, but neither does it follow that re-introduction would increase violence. Spurious logic.

We’re often victims of similar logic. In fact, the whole school of thought that says things are now better because we have less censorship, less restrictive laws and much greater freedom of expression uses such spurious logic continually.

Look at many of the arguments in favour of sex education. The theory goes that in the past people never knew enough, and therefore they got themselves into all sorts of spots (and in some cases came out in all sorts of spots).

To compensate, sex education has been given free rein in our society. Both those who (probably) sincere educators, and those who are sexual exploiters, express themselves freely. How is it then that sex education is so ineffective now we’ve had so much more of it? The results of two or three decades of sex education aren’t stable marriages, less adultery, less promiscuity and a decrease in venereal diseases. Quite the opposite. Why do the educators continue to insist that more knowledge means fewer problems? Spurious logic of the moral sort.

Finally, we have a prime case of spurious logic on the part of that innovative gentleman, Mr William Birch. (Actually if anyone should be in favour of re-introducing corporal punishment, it should be him.)

Mr Birch last week proclaimed to any Australian who would listen, that the Employment Contracts Act is working. He 74% of employees are satisfied with it; they have increases in wages; strikes and stoppages have decreased dramatically.

Spurious logic of the parliamentary kind.

A closer look at Mr Birch’s own quoted figures show only 42% of people had increases. And naturally strikes and stoppages have decreased. In a society where there is now little or no protection for many workers, no one can afford to go on strike anymore. If they do, hundreds of others will be willing to do the job for less.

Furthermore, Mr Birch failed to mention one small fact to the Aussies: so many people are out of work, any wage figure looks good.

How ironic that two newspaper reports below the one on Mr Birch tell us first that over a 1,000 cases await decisions from the Employment Tribunal, and second that Auckland bus workers have agreed to average weekly pay cut of $100.

 

The Employment Contracts Act didn’t work and lasted barely a decade. Whether it’s replacement – the Employment Relations Act 2000 – was, or is, any better is a moot point.

The removal of Corporal Punishment from schools eventually led to it being illegal to physically punish one’s own children. And of course, sex education (so-called), has devolved into a myriad other areas relating to sex and gender and become a knot round the world’s neck.

Parking

First published in Column 8 on the 11^th November, 1992

I see another watershed in the long running saga of Dunedin’s parking meters has been reached.

A few years ago our city’s traffic control tried to release us from the coin-in-the-slot approach to parking that had been the norm since the 1950s. Are you familiar with the parking coupons that required the driver to punch out the year, the month, the date, the hour and the minute? Did you ever experience one?

Those coupons were not user-friendly. For a start, on a windy day you wound up with punched out pieces scattered throughout the car. As if cleaning the car wasn’t awkward enough at the  best of times.

Then you had to hang the coupon in the window. This was when the wind really came into its own. Just as you got the thing stuck in place along came a gust, and with one phoof took off with it. Down the street went the cash coupon, and with it all the fiddly amount of time involved.

If shoving a coin in a meter was a 100 metre dash, sorting out a coupon was marathonic. And, if you were minus a watch and couldn’t remember the date, you’d had it.

The coupons went on sale in a large number of Dunedin stores. I’d say there are still vast unsold quantities of them lying in drawers or in the basements of shops; space-takers, and possibly even cashflow drainers.

Then the next stage in the saga arrived: we were to have coupons that changed colour as your/their time ran out. The APM, the automatic parking meter, was enthusiastically heralded as the saviour of meter persons.

That wasn’t to be their only claim to fame. They were supposed to bring to an end the sight of ugly meters cluttering up our streets. But what happened? They themselves died a quiet and unmemorable death, while the parking meters continued cannibalising coins by the tonne.

Streets without parking meters – who can imagine it? What a barren wilderness; how little upon which to hang one’s proverbial hat, or to lean one’s person and bike upon while chatting up a young lady outside the place of fitness. Parking-meterless streets – a wonder to behold. But not just yet.

Now comes stage three. Dunedin is to get the new improved computer approach to meters. We have to move with the times. Let’s hope these babies fare better than three expensive space-age meters Auckland tried out a couple of years ago – and found wanting.

The Auckland models were to be solar-powered – and all-knowing. They were supposed to be able to inform parking officers when a car took over time left on a meter which had been paid for by another driver. They were supposed to be able to tell the same officers how long a recalcitrant driver overstayed his welcome. And they were supposed to reject foreign objects.

They couldn’t, they couldn’t and they didn’t. The windows through which all this information should have appeared fogged up. The wide open mouth of the meter took on the status of a trash can and accepted anything put into it, including washers and foreign coins.

But Dunedin’s three thousand dollars a throw computer whizz kids come with the typical razzamatazz of all new gadgets. Not for them ignominious failure – after all, this isn’t Auckland.

What I like about the meter-maidettes (or traffic officer error-reducing automatons) is their ability to produce tickets faster. This means the human parking officers will have more time to chase people. (O frabjous day!) Instead of puttering around the streets on their little bikes, they’ll be whizzing.

Whizzing. Hopefully in their hour of speed they won’t themselves wind up on the receiving end of a ticket.

 

My comment about ‘stage three’ may be an error. I think it should have been ‘stage four.’

From what I can gather the new machines that were installed were the central ‘pay and display’ ticket machines. Instead of single-space meters beside every parking space, the machines were ‘central,’ meaning drivers had to find a machine and pay for a coupon which was then placed on their dashboard.

Most recently the City has installed ‘Pay by Plate’ machines: you enter your licence plate number directly into the machine or a mobile app, and no tickets are printed. In Oamaru, where I now live, a similar system was installed virtually overnight: one day we had an older system, the next new electronic machines were scattered around the streets. But to make sure motorists are kept on their toes, there are two or three different models. You can’t guarantee you can use each one in the same way (!)

The column received a response from the then Parking Services Manager, Trevor Lewis, whom I knew slightly from him having been around the building when I worked at the Dunedin City Council.

15.11.92

May I take this opportunity to comment on the matters raised in Mike Crowl’s article on November 11. Parking coupons in which you punch out the month, date and time are still in use in Dunedin as well as Timaru and Christchurch. Council is currently considering the Automatic Parking Coupon which is a revolutionary concept and ideally suited as a parking management tool. It is extremely user friend, doing away with the problem encountered with the present punch out programmable coupon. The concept is, to say the least, ingenious and although development has been complicated, the coupon looks simple. Consequently, it needs good credible support particularly in relation to performance. It has up to now suffered because of premature presentations which which exposed manufacturing and design problems which I am told as recently as last Monday, November 9, have been resolved. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research reports that the APC has the potential to operate satisfactorily within the specification and parameters as laid down to meet any legal requirements. As the coupon is currently undergoing optimum performance tests, the first of these coupons could be here by December.

Having been involved with coupons since their introduction, I have observed a very rough prototype of the APC develop into a very sophisticated, well-designed and presentable article, which has a very easy and excellent method of activation. Consequently, providing the APC is conveniently and attractively packaged and readily available, it should prove most popular even to the most ardent mechanical parking meter user.

Mr Crowl also reported on ‘space-age parking meters’ while he reports that Auckland rejected them, a fact I can’t confirm. I would report that in June this year we installed in Hanover St outside the Baptist Church two fully electronic parking meters. Both our meter technicians have provided rave reviews on the operation of these meters. Wellington, Invercargill, Lower Hutt cities have already replaced their old meters with these new electronic ones.

On a good day

First published in Column Eight on the 4^th of November, 1992

Dunedin on a good day – what can beat it?

By the time you read this we may be back to dour days again. Let’s  hope not. But even if you read this in the midst of cold day troughs, let’s keep remembering and celebrating the city on one of its father-son sitting together staring at the horizon orange-chocolate-chip icecreams days.

I’m writing this (lacking a laptop, in longhand) while sitting in the TownAce, on the St Clair Esplanade, with the bluest of skies, and the sun spread out like glistening gladwrap from one end of the visible world to the other, sparkling off car mirrors, wristwatches and hair gel, off surfers’ iridescent wetsuits and totem-painted boards.

A sockless-look lover strolls past with his girl, her blonde hair hairdresser-crinkled into such a dishevelled style, she might almost have got out of bed like that. Another couple sit eating hamburgers, knee to knee and playing footsie, all white T-shirts and bleached jeans. Everywhere the sloppy loose-fitting shorts and shirts – the uniform of the surfie and skateboarder alike.

The surround-sound of the sea like music from Taizé, endlessly repeating patterns until the mind slows down to a pulse slower than heartbeats, and chooses to relax, even if only for three-quarters of an hour.

Dogs! Freed from the city restraints, full of excitements, beach-crazy tails barely keeping up with the cantering, side-stepping, sand-covered swerving, the barking, leaping, bound and skidding into the waves. Fur a-dripping, sudden-shaking-splashing over sandwiches, toddlers and towels.

Dogs, lolloping after swooping and screaming seagulls, or barking at bumptious birds balancing one-legged on a post. The seagull pecking order in full force – the most irritable one arching from pole to pole in a series of violin phrase marks, deposing less aggressive brothers like toppling rows of dominoes.

The rubbish tins are unfinished papier-mâché. Old sun-bleached advertisements peel off: Dr Mobile Cycle Service, the Crown Thursday, September 3, ‘not a national joke (hopefully)’ beneath the bearded face of an optimistic local Government candidate.

The barely-walking baby with brand new yellow bucket and matching spade, fearless in his father’s hand until he reaches that great child-eating monster, the sea. All is calm until something white rips around his feet, sneaking in behind, cutting him off, until great green walls rise up, cold, full of Overwhelming (full of playfulness to someone a few inches taller), and intent on sweeping the child out beyond White Island.

Winter-white legs; the only browned skins come from an expensive bottle or from birth.

Grey-haired late-aged lady tourists, wrapped against the slight sea breeze, large black handbags holding tickets, passports, travellers’ cheques, spare hankies (or hotel tissues), motel keys, maps, monies; leaning on the fence in the few brief moments before they’re whisked off again to another breathless night in some unfamiliar place.

Dunedin on a good day, when an umbrella is non persona grata; when raincoats hang mouldy in the hall; when shoes don’t squelch in puddles; when winter woollies sleep heavy in the bottom drawer; when sunglasses, sunhats, suntans are the order of the day; when rhododendrons and motor-mowers make up for lost time; when we remember, for all our island exposure, that we live in the equivalent latitude to Spain; when even old men roll up their sleeves and trouser-legs and go for a sea-paddle, and call to mind a long-forgotten John Milton twist from the long gone radio show, Take It From Here: ‘They also surf who only stand and wade.’

 

St Clair Esplanade, Dunedin

The TownAce was one of those vehicles that, in spite of its durability, our family eventually managed to wear out. The sliding door dropped at least twice in the street and had to be put on again, amongst other mini-disasters.

The line – ‘They also surf who only stand and wade’ is a parody of ‘They also serve who only stand and wait’  which comes from John Milton’s sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent (also known as ‘On His Blindness’). I say in the Column that this parody turned up on Take It From Here, but I got that wrong. I remember that the words were the punch line to a long-winded story by either Frank Muir or Denis Norden, the sort of story that turned up most weeks on the radio show in which they themselves appeared, rather than being scriptwriters.  However, looking at the format of Take It From Here, there was no place in which such a story would be told, and I’m now sure it appeared on My Word, where Muir and Norden regularly gave a suspect origin to a well-known phrase or quotation.

My line above - the uniform of the surfie and skateboarder alike – reminds me strongly of poem by Les Murray The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever. In this poem Murray divides shorts up into four kinds, one of them being ‘scunge’, and in the scunge section talks about the kind of loose much-worn clothing of young beach people, and surfers.

 

Rabbits

First published in Column Eight on the 28^th October, 1992

Earlier this month the Sunday Times printed a full-page advertisement requesting people to sign one of those typical Government-petitioning forms. Your signature agreed that the Government was holding back the possibility of a major industry in the export of rabbit meat and fur.

Apparently a large number of people signed the form and sent it in.

Since MPs either don’t hear what the people are saying, or don’t want to, it naturally followed a few days later that Mr Falloon beetled on about it being utter nonsense that rabbits could constitute any sort of industry. The large number of people who signed the form must be wrong.

I often have the disheartening feeling that we have reached a curious stage in our democracy where only those elected to government are ever right about anything. Those who disagree, or who have to live with the consequences of Government policies, are not considered worth paying attention to. (Even when there’s a referendum.)

Back to rabbits. When it comes to rabbit control politicians think ‘myxomatosis.’ (Personally, I always think myxomatosis sounds like a medical name for athlete’s foot.) The politician’s attitude is paradoxical; after all, is myxomatosis ecologically sound? It certainly isn’t a pleasant (or quick) method of exterminating the rabbit. Slow and painful by degrees is the myxomatosis approach.

Once Mr Falloon had had his say, Warren Cooper got in on the act. Mr Cooper, who is known for his wisdom in all things related to the land, piped up and said that historically there was no sound economic precedent for exporting rabbits.

I don’t claim to be a great historian. I can only remember that the French Revolution began in 1789 because three of the numbers run in order, and the other one must be less than 2.

What I know about the topic of rabbit history I first gleaned from the New Zealand Encyclopaedia lying on my shelf. I guess this heavyweight tome is available to Mr Cooper – by law all books in New Zealand have to be.

That two and a half kilo muscle-builder states that as early as 1894 more than 17 million rabbit skins were exported from this country. That sound like a sound economic precedent to me.

In case the encyclopaedia isn’t enough, here’s another bit of history: in the Shag Valley, in 1883, 85,000 rabbits were taken, and contrary to current practice, every effort was made to get some financial return for the labour of trapping and poisoning. By 1896 a factory at Dunback was putting through a quarter of a million rabbits annually (and only 10,000 sheep). And keeping men in work.

This exporting so expanded that up until the 1940s there was a significant trade in frozen and canned rabbit meat. Isn’t that a major industry?

Perhaps the sheep industry wasn’t doing so well as a result of the rabbits. The two don’t mix (which is probably where mixomatosis comes in) – at least not when they’re trying to share the same land. I know as much about export as I know about history, but with sheep exports in the state they are, I sometimes wonder if we’re focusing on the wrong animal.

Equation? Excess-rabbit problems in NZ. Europeans want rabbits. Answer? Give them rabbits. To those of us untrained in bureaucracy, answers sometimes seem too simple.    

Unfortunately I don't know the name of the artist in this case. 

I was slightly off the mark in regard to all NZ books having to be available to Parliamentarians as this article shows. All NZ books have to be made available to the National Library of NZ. Only some of those books are then available to Parliament, depending on the subject matter.

In spite of what those long-gone MPs thought, the facts about rabbit export are all true, and can be verified online. The rabbit plague hasn’t gone away. In the small town of Moeraki, and 35 minutes south of where we now live, the rabbits were visibly in charge, not in farmland but in the back yards of people’s houses.