Confession

First published in Column 8 on the 11^th May, 1994

I confess! I’m conservative, dogmatic and opinionated. I’m middle-aged, illiberal (un-liberal?, non-liberal?), and semi-quasi-fundamentalist. I’m a closet reactionary redneck and almost certainly an elderly old guard. I’m pig-and-bullheaded, cocksure, mulish and hard-nosed.

Worse, I don’t even know if I’m culturally safe – I don’t even know whether that means I’m suppose to be safe from culture or keep it safe from me.

PC propaganda is finally raising my consciousness, and what it says must be true. However, I’m having more trouble learning the nuances of How To Be Culturally Political than I am learning the peculiarities of the Russian alphabet.

I mean, how would I ever have guessed that I should be upset by a belch at the end of a Kentucky Fried Chicken advertisement? Yet supposedly a ‘significant section of the community’ were, according to the decision of the Advertising Standards Complaints Board. This belch was in extremely poor taste, we’re told, and the ad is banned.

Perhaps the belch affected the ozone layer, and repeated screenings were making the hole larger. Did the belch offend the greenies? How difficult these things are to understand when one is used to being imperious, obdurate and peremptory.

Phew! I think I’ve got hold of that – now let’s consider this: a naughty American lad in Singapore scrawled graffiti over cars in a vandalistic spree, and was caned for it.

But everyone knows we don’t cane anyone anymore. Caning causes us to become child abusers and to take it out on the next generation. If we stop caning the next generation, instead of damaging people, they’ll only go out and damage property. And this will have the useful effect of teaching the rich to ‘practice modesty in their show of wealth.’

So we must avoid any form of discipline, otherwise hidden addictions may appear in the younger generation.

And talking of addictions, I was dismayed to learn that a man in Maine who suffered a permanent mental disability of sexual addiction (I kid you not) lost his job as a teacher because he insisted on kissing his students (the female ones, anyway).

He says the school is illegally discriminating against his mental disability. Perhaps they’ve confused it with a disorder I seem to recall from my pre-PC days: I think it was called Lust, but I’m a bit confused myself.

However, in cases of confusion, there’s always plenty of PC material to learn from. Polytechnics, for example, are wonderful places to find out about how to live in a PC way.

Waikato Poly is having a little trouble with a couple of tutors who, I’m told, have been paid exceptionally well to keep their mouths closed about the way the nursing course is run. But are they satisfied with all that money? Not likely. One of the naughty fellows has begun to blow whistles – no wonder they didn’t want him on the course. Loud, noisy whistles are the last thing most patients want to hear when they’re sick.

And in Nelson Polytechnic there’s a very PC dispute over which colour one should be to go on a fishing course. That’s easy: I don’t have any colour, so I won’t be eligible. What a relief! I’d hate to pay for a course others get for free. It would make them feel so embarrassed, wouldn’t it, when I started flashing all my colourless money around.

How difficult it is to keep up with all the legal niceties of Correctness which is Political. I’m now beginning to appreciate how the Chinese felt when Mao-Tse Tung presented them with the Little Red Book.

 

Courtesy: ToonPool.com

 I haven’t been able to trace the KFC ad with the belch, although a link appears online that seems to go to it – but doesn’t.

A bit of achievement

First published in Column Eight on the 4^th May, 1994

As a family we don’t normally pay much attention to those long-winded advertising programmes on television, but one featuring a certain memory program did grab our attention. I ordered a copy – particularly as there was a 30-day money-back guarantee, and I’d been left a bit of money in my uncle’s will.

Three of us in the family have been working our way through the program and enjoying the effect it is having on improving the use of our memory. For once it is something that I’d recommend; if you’re interested in expanding your brain capacity give it a try.

Why should anyone want to improve their ability to use their memory? Firstly, I want to remember people’s names with greater ease, and not have to say to people I know perfectly well, ‘I can’t for the life of me remember who you are.’

I want to remember things that escape me so easily. I want to finish a book I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading, and be able to recall why I enjoyed it. I want to be introduce to some new ideas, and still be able to explain them within a day or so.

I want to be able to make my way around in the lunch hour without using a list, and I want to stop forgetting things that cause me frustration in the forgetting thereof…

I want to go and see an art exhibition, as I did the other day, and come away not only remembering the pictures, but who painted or drew them.

What’s the point, after all, of having the equivalent of a computer inside my head which is utterly superior to anything human beings are ever likely to able to invent, and only be able to use it at the most basic level? It’s like having the latest DOS on you IBM compatible, and finding that some things won’t work because you have insufficient RAM. Or buying some fancy new program and finding it eats up all available memory, and you can’t print your pretty pictures.

If it is true that we only use round 10% of our brain’s ability, I’d like to tap into a it more!

I don’t want to grow older and find I’m learning less when I could still learn far more. As Wallace Stevens wrote, ‘It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.’

I’ve started trying to teach myself Russian, partly because I’m frustrated at not being able to greet the occasional Russian seamen who come into our shop, or understand when they say they want to buy a newspaper – a gazetta.

Learning Russian is different from learning the Romanised languages I’m more familiar with. There’s a new alphabet to tackle, I have to learn how to repronounce letters that look like some in the English alphabet but sound quite different. There are letters printed rather like various forms of gates or pillars, or like a pot-bellied stove, or someone slipping out of a window, half a dozen of these only differ by a slight tick. One of our English alphabet letters is written backwards. Some letters don’t have any sound at all. Phew.

At the end of the short time I can spare to deal with these matters, however, I come away feeling as though I’ve achieved at least some small thing. It may only be to appreciate that the Russian word for glad is similar in sound to our slang word, Rad!, or that the word for I is pronounced along the lines of Yah!. Yah rad!

And when I took my memory round that art gallery a couple of times, and found I could come away and tell you who all the artists were and give you some indication of what they’d painted, I began to sense I’d started upping the brain box usage to 11%.

Cover of the 1999 edition

The memory course was Kevin Trudeau’s Mega-Memory. It basically took a number of fairly well-known techniques and worked them into a system. It was certainly a good deal better than many things advertised in infomercials, and my wife, my older son and I got plenty from it. Like most things it required ongoing work to make the systems part of your system, and of course we always ran out of time to keep going on such things. But I’d had a lifelong fascination with memory and ways of remembering and I certainly enjoyed my introduction to techniques I hadn’t found on my own previously.

Over a number of years I’ve learned a bunch of poems by heart as well passages of Scripture, including around 30% of the Psalms. The things I learned about memory helped me to memorise these pieces, though it always required work. Which I don’t think Kevin Trudeau emphasised quite enough!

As for the Russian, it became one of those things left in the dust of experiments. I never got into it far enough to make use of it. Though when I was helping a Chilean with his English speaking, I learned that there are similarities between Russian and Spanish. In fact, he has learned Russian - enough to get himself around in that vast country, at least. Since I’m now learning Spanish, and make good progress with it, it might time to compare Russian and Spanish, and see if learning one helps learning the other.

Russian alphabet poster found on E-bay

Passporting

First published in Column 8 on the 20 April, 1994

As I had to write this column earlier than usual (for reasons which I’ll explain in a moment), I was glancing through the ODT in search of a stray thought when I came across an intriguing juxtaposition of headlines.

‘Lively and colourful tone to Haydn’s “The Creation”’ said one, followed on the same line by, ‘Police arrest 20.’

 Amazing how these old composer get ‘em going!

In the same paper a conservative Anglican group in England called Ecclesia accused the Movement for the Ordination of Women of ‘killing the church,’ and ‘dancing on the Church of England’s grave.’

Now surely one can only dance on the grave of something that’s already dead. And if the C of E is already dead, why are Ecclesia accusing the women of killing it?

As an institution the C of E has been dead for donkey’s years. We watched a video of Barchester Towers earlier this year – the behaviour of these 19^th century clerics was even then more political than spiritual.

If some old diehard Anglicans want to flog a dead horse, let them get on with it. They’ll die doing it. The Christian church, one section of which these women were being ordained into, is alive; it may be struggling with theology that works in the 20^th century, but it’s still forging ahead.

I think Jesus Christ would  have said to Ecclesia, ‘Get on with real life – let the dead bury the dead.’

The funniest part about all this Anglican kerfuffle is that some of their priests have ‘gone over to the Catholics,’ with some vague idea that the Catholics have remained as dead as they are. I think they may have a few thinks coming, as one of my grandparents used to say.

And why am I writing this column earlier than usual? Because I have to travel to Wellington to get a new passport.

‘What,’ you say, ‘travel to Wellington? To get a passport? Ain’t you a New Zealander? ‘Ave you been criticising our institootions and quirks all this time when you’re something else? you ain’t an…Aussie, are ya?’

Yes, I have to admit it. I’m a cuzzie from across the water, and I’ve had to make the choice of becoming a New Zealand citizen, at some cost to my pocket, or remaining an Aussie, at an equal cost to my pocket.

The curious fact is that my native government doesn’t trust my word on paper, nor my photo accompanying it, nor the affidavits of my legal mates. Without interviewing me face to face they don’t believe I am who I am. What my face will tell them I’m not sure.

Will my face convince them I’m not a drug dealer, or a terrorists, or that I’m not out to defraud them? As Michael Joseph Savage said, ‘Though I was born in the same district in which Ned Kelly did his bushranging, I did not inherit his methods.’

The Australian government’s rationale is that I only have to go Wellington once every ten years to renew my passport. I asked them if they were going to pay for the trip, particularly since I was standing by them in their hour of need and not changing my allegiance. No way. I have to pay my own fare.

Strangely enough, if I wanted to apply for my temporary twelve-months passport, I could get it without showing my face. Seems to me that a twelve-month period is ample time to do something fraudulent!

I’ve a good mind to write to the Australian government – my real government – and demand my money back, or insist they call me home.

When I see in the latest Metro that Australia’s got a worse unemployment problem than New Zealand, however, I think maybe that isn’t such a good idea.

 

Australian Passports galore
Photo courtesy of Citro

 

 

I was born in Australia, but at the time this column was written had only set foot in the place once (in the sixties, for a month) since leaving Melbourne in 1948 to come to Dunedin. My father was English-born and my mother was a Kiwi. I’m not sure that really qualifies me to be called an Australian at all, but up to this day – the 3^rd Nov, 2026 – I continue to be one, officially.

The last time I applied for a new passport, only a few years ago, the Australian Embassy was happily sending staff around the country to do the job with their face rather than mine, as it were. I met the staff member in the hotel that’s situated in the rear of the old Chief Post Office building, and we were as friendly as two Aussies can be on such short acquaintance. It was all done and dusted without fuss.

On the occasion written about in the column, when I went to Wellington for my ‘interview,’ I expected to be at their office for some time, and duly turned up for such an important occasion with sandwiches and a flask. (I’m kidding.) In fact, the interview consisted of a man behind the grill in some pokey office taking a look at me, asking some question that could have been asked over the phone – like ‘Who are you?’ - going off out of sight for a couple of minutes to pretend he was doing something important and coming back to say my passport would be in the post in a few days’ time.

Incidentally, I’m not sure why the ‘typical’ Kiwi who asks amazed questions in the middle of the column should have sounded more like someone who wasn’t sure what part of the English-speaking world he was from…

 And apparently there are great benefits in holding an Australian passport!

 

Prizegiving

First published in Column Eight on the 13^th April, 1994 [our twentieth wedding anniversary!] 

Golf (to quote Mark Twain) is a good walk spoiled. Wordsworth claimed it was a day spent in strenuous idleness.

I was interested, therefore, to consider last week’s reports of the wimpy prizes given to the girls participating in the PostBank Golf Tournament.

After an earlier report we were present on Saturday with a gloomy photograph of a young ladies’ quartet (accompanied by towels) expressing all the injustice of coming second in a ‘male’ world. There was no sign, however, of the jubilant males with their barbies (barbecues, that is, not Barbie dolls).

Everyone would agree that a set of towels appears to relate in no way value-wise to a barbie or a CD player. Towels do have the advantage, however, of not needing the additional purchase of a range of overpriced CDs or a couple of steaks before they can be of use.

Towels, in fact, could be seen as showing practical value, while CD players are frivolity. So maybe the boys were worse off than the girls, since the boys’ effort was undermined by frivolous prizes.

The young ladies, ever creative, suggested golf-orientated prizes would have been more sensible. Did they mean something appropriate like Tee-shirts? Or electric irons? Or lessons in how to make green tea using a caddy?

Ironically, this little sage of pathetic prizes brought an inequity of a different sort out into the open, the kind that rears its divot-shaped head not infrequently in relation to areas which have tended to be mostly the fairway of males.

In this particular case the inequity is in regard to the fees male golfers pay compared to those handed over by females.

The theory is that lower fees for females will encourage more women to participate in the sport. Thus we have a schoolgirl paying $22.50 at the Otago Golf Club while a boy pays $33. A female student pays only $56, however old she is. But 24-year-old male students, for example, pay anything from $66 to $420 a year.

Politically I am incorrect to speak of such things. But why the fuss on one hand, and not on the other? To be truly objective, we should have had a photo of a quartet of boys expressing bewilderment at being charged a higher rate of membership because they happen to have been born male.

I appreciated the comments made by Otago player, Shelley Duncan, who said she didn’t recall feeling the prizes were unfair when she attended national high school tournaments. Prizes, she said, have to  be kept in perspective. She added that women’s golf is now very strong.

If that’s the case, why are the gents still subsidising the ladies?

And talking of gentlemen, a couple or three came to the fore in this prize foray, two of them fathers who made up the lack of value in prizes through their own generosity. (I have to say something commendatory about this: one reads my column, and long ago we played Suzuki violin together with our youthful female prodigies. Whoops! Old Boys’ network.)

Isn’t it interesting that the spokesperson for the PostBank people was a woman who seemed to have little sympathy for the unfairness caused to her sex, while men, who were on the side of those getting the flak, came to the rescue?

Why should I wonder? Such generosity towards daughters is just normal for us blokes. (Ask my daughters. Ask Alan Duff!)         

 

Lydia Ko, top NZ golfer

 Alan Duff lives with his family and has three daughters (including pianist Katea Duff). In interviews discussing his viewpoints and social commentary, he has defended his appreciation for women's roles in society by explicitly stating, "I really care; I've got daughters." Commentators on his life have noted that despite his controversial public persona, he "walks the talk" in his personal life when it comes to showing profound respect and empathy toward the women in his family.

Plain reading

First published in Column 8 on the 6^th April, 1994

I’ve recently been looking into the area of accelerated education. One of the latest books on the New Zealand scene is The Learning Revolution, by New Zealander Gordon Dryden and American Dr Jeannette Vos.

Much of the book enthuses me for the whole idea of accelerated education, but I find one of their statements a little difficult to take on board. It goes as follows, ‘If you can read a newspaper in an hour, you already know how to read at least four books a day.’

Well, I can read some newspapers in a quarter of an hour – or less – and gain as much as I’m likely to, but other newspapers and magazines take a bit more of my time.

This isn’t because I’m any sluggard when it comes to reading. I believe it’s because some writers won’t write plain English.

Dryden and Vos do say in their book that much non-fiction writing is thick, cluttery and not user-friendly. They’re talking about medical jargon at that stage. Medical jargon hasn’t got this on its own; another field of writing is so jargon-filled you have to be in the know to decipher it.

I’m talking about computerese. Before I go on, let me say that some computer magazines make great efforts to be intelligible. Many don’t.

My discovery of the week came in a computer magazine which had a right-hand page headline boldly announcing, ‘Survey Results Call For Plain Speaking.’ Two paragraphs down the writer says, ‘The overwhelming finding was that large scale buyers of computer software have tired of buzzwords and glitzy marketing terminology.’

Never a truer word. But what do we find on the opposite page? (I’ve substituted Buzz for the real names, by the way.)

‘Buzz’s suite of client tools includes 3GLs (Buzz C++v4.0 and Buzz Pascal) for the most complex mission critical applications, to 4GLs (Buzz and Buzz) for business critical, departmental applications, to decision support tools (Buzz) for analysing data.’

This is plain speaking?

Further down we try to read, ‘Application modules will eventually break down into more manageable “function objects” which provide the flexibility to support rapidly changing process oriented and matrix organisations.’

Buzz embeds ‘OOP philosophy’ (should that be oops?). It upsizes ‘client/server and workgroup capabilities.’

Now I can figure that out if I want, but I could hardly speed-read it and make any sense of it.

This magazine wasn’t alone in its incomprehensibility. Try this piece of front page news: ‘An enhanced transmission control protocol/internet protocol stack will support technology for centrally configuring Buzz NT clients and server on enterprise networks and tracking their IP addresses.’

I know the saying, if you can’t stand the heat, don’t go in the kitchen. If I can’t read computerese, don’t buy the magazines. However, when it comes to words (at least), I’m ever willing to learn, and I do have a fair understanding of a variety of jargons. But why do I have to work so hard to makes sense of someone’s words?

In the book Kiwi Journalist Jim Tucker says journalists face the problem of dealing with complex communication styles, ‘from politicians, scientists, lawyers, bureaucrats, medics, academics and the literati’ – and the computerati. Journalists are supposed to be able to translate jargon, and ‘eliminate barriers to comprehension.’

Tucker goes on to say that journalists writing for the famed Wall Street Journal are supposed to ensure a child of eleven can read their news stories. Plainly – or should that be unplainly? – neither of the magazines I’ve quoted from have such rule of thumb.

In-house journals have a right, I suppose, to use in-house words. I believe, however, both these magazines are intended for a more general reader. And if this well-past-eleven general reader finds their writing difficult to manage, I think they’ve lost their public.

 

Jeannette Vos
Photo courtesy of LinkedIn

 This was one of those columns that started off in one corner and somehow wound up in another. Never mind.

It’s less difficult to read the computerese mentioned above now than it must have been in 1994. While I don’t immediately understand the quoted text I can get the gist of from the accumulated experience of the last thirty-plus years. Journalism, meanwhile, has gone well down the tubes. There are still journalists who can write, and write clearly. But many of those who write in newspapers these days appear to have been expected to produce stories at the speed of light – and consequently make a hash of them. Time after time in the ODT, to name just one paper, we have a news item that tells us the story, then repeats it again (sometimes word for word) a few paragraphs later, while the rest is filled with filler. A person related to the story suddenly appears out of nowhere with no introduction. And ‘quotes’ frequently now consist of words starting with f or c with a long dash behind them. The necessity for including swear words is beyond me. It adds nothing to the quote, except perhaps to say that the person being quoted said very little, and so a bit of ‘colour’ is included. And perhaps worse still are the quotes from ‘a witness who declined to give their name’ – usually these consist of little more than…’I heard a noise.’ Or, ‘This is a nice neighbourhood. These sorts of things don’t happen round here.’

Enough griping.  

Jeannette Vos is still going strong on accelerated education, under different names: high-performance learning method; accelerating our innate self-learning abilities, etc.

Jim Tucker is alive and well and writing news columns on his own blog.

I checked out the Wall Street Journal on behalf of its eleven-year-old readers. Yup, it’s certainly clearer than many magazines/papers, though I suspect most of the subject matter is above the interest level of an average eleven-year-old. Nevertheless the paper doesn’t dumb down its language either.

Modern gods

First published in Column 8 on the 30^th March, 1994

This Easter I was going to look at the weird and wonderful customs performed each year at Easter by the English. Many of these customs, however, mean little to New Zealanders, so I thought something related more to the spiritual aspect of Easter was required.

The senior pastor at our church said in his sermon a couple of weeks ago that this is the only century in which people have stopped believing in any sort of god at all.

I don’t think the pastor meant Western people have completely stopped worshipping gods; rather, they don’t believe in gods with any sort of personality. Modern gods exist, however, and are a pretty varied bunch in spite of their impersonality.

G K Chesterton once wrote: ‘When people stop believing in God, they do not start believing in nothing; they start believing in anything.’ People will turn anything into religion, whether it has spiritual value or not.

Many New Zealanders, along with millions in the Western world, make a god of money. And a right nasty piece of work this god is too – a driving taskmaster without compare. He has a sidekick named Gambling, a greedy, addictive god.

Many choose fitness as god, or health (must eat only the right foods), or recreation (worshipped 24 hours a day where possible). There’s the tubby tube-god, television; there’s the god called sport (whose praise has the biggest proportion of any newspaper); and the multiple-personality god/dess expressed as pop stars.

There’s the great god, materialism, a god who is never satisfied, even when you’ve bought all the furniture imaginable on HP (no deposit is his latest ploy), and are up to the eyeballs in weekly payments.

Many people now believe in themselves – not in some measure of improved self-esteem, but in claiming that they themselves are gods. A fairly ancient lie, and one that leads to considerable delusion, and disillusionment.

Atheists believe in atheism, which means not only don’t they believe in God, they believe in not believing in God. Humanists also don’t believe in God, but do believe in humanism, a philosophy that’s turned itself into a religion. And evolutionists proclaim their theory with the fervour of the most fervent evangelists.

Then there are people who ‘believe’ in God only as long as He fits into their little box.

What many Westerners no longer believe in is a God who knows us, cares about us, or even gives two hoots about us. Science (another one of the modern gods) is supposed to have done away with Him, but the battle still rages. If the followers of science give Him any place at all, it’s to say He wound up the universe like a clockwork toy, set it going, and went off on holiday.

Some think He might have been round at the Big Bang – that’s if they can agree that the Big Bang happened – but after that He left us to it. Whether He’ll make a repeat appearance when the universe finally turns in on itself, is seldom debated.

Meanwhile God Himself sits in His heaven and laughs, rather like a father laughing at his children’s inability and unwillingness to comprehend what He’s really like, or to listen to what He tells them about Himself.

The facts of God don’t change, like the facts about our parents, however much we may want to fit them to our own agenda.

Easter comes as a pertinent annual reminder of these facts, for those of us who’ve become so besotted with our petty gods we haven’t got time for the One who’ll make an eternal difference.

Easter gives us a chance to take a rest from the petty gods, to spend, perhaps, a bit of time in a pew, and check out those facts.

Living language

First published in Column 8 on the 23^rd March 1994

Being a person fascinated by the wonder of words, I’m amused at France’s futile efforts to preserve the so-called purity of their language.

Recent attempts to reverse the influx of Franglais into French include, among others, the formation of the Higher Council of the French Language (29 wise men and one undesignated woman). A Bill banning the use of foreign words in public announcements, work contracts, advertising, and on radio and television, is planned, and a suggestion that ‘language observers’ should be appointed to monitor television and radio in order to punish offenders.

Haven’t the French anything better to do? Haven’t they realised that the English are subtly getting their own back for the Norman invasion, when poor little Anglo-Saxons, already bamboozled by Danish, Latin and Gaelic, were forced to mouth that most easily mispronounced language, French?

Don’t they realise that English maintains its strength because it’s the most absorbent of languages?

Can you imagine a Higher Council of the English Language back in William the Conqueror’s time (with 30 good men and true – sorry, no women) struggling to retain the purity of ‘English?’ And the English Academy of the day refusing to allow people to eat eclairs, or the trumpet player to worry about his embouchure, or the cooks to glacé their cherries?

One of the most aptly appointed people in the French Higher Council is a comedian, Raymond Devos (a Belgian, incidentally); the whole thing smacks of farce. Perhaps Devos will break through the weighty Gallic seriousness, unlike Maurice Druon, the French Academy’s secretaire perpetual, who with earnestness thanked the Prime Minister in the name of the first and oldest body established to defend their language: the Academie Francaise.

What is it about the French that they need an Academy to protect their language? Is French dead? Perhaps it is, since living languages are pretty much able to look after themselves.

And anyway, if the Academy has attempted to preserve the purity of the French language since 1635 without success, I’d think the Eiffel (sorry, Ivory) Tower Academy might also be a bit of a dinosaur.

At the Expolangues Language Fair, another Francophile, Jean-Pierre Van Duth, regarded the maintenance of one’s own language and culture as a way to ensure peace. (Even though his EEC-type name belies it.) ‘If we think of European nations as natural friends,’ he said, ‘we are doomed to failure.’

He doesn’t begrudge the role of English as a common linguistic currency but claims it’s only good for shouting across borders – it doesn’t allow insight into other cultures.

This from the president of Expolangues, where computers last month displayed their remarkable abilities to teach people each other’s languages.

I sometimes feel the French have a bad case of sour grapes – a possibility, I suppose, considering one of their major industries. French is not one of the prime international languages and standing against the inroads of Franglais is typical French gall, about as arrogant an approach as testing nuclear weapons in someone else’s back yard.

In summary, I’d like to paraphrase: the nation that tries to preserve (or pickle) its language will lose it – the one the loosens it, will save it.

Raymond Devos, comedian, 
cover of book by Stephen Dupre

Proper parenting?

First published in Column 8 on the 16^th March, 1994

I’m turning today’s column into a film review – since the film in question raises some interesting points.

The movie is Mrs Doubtfire. It concerns Daniel, an actor, the laid-back, somewhat irresponsible father of three, who precipitates a crisis in his household by over-celebrating his son’s birthday. His wife uses this event to insist on a divorce, with the result that Daniel lose virtually all contact with his children.

In the guise of a buxom lady, Mrs Doubtfire, he becomes ‘nanny’ to his own household. Until his cover is blown, first by two of his children, and later, at his wife’s birthday party, by everybody, he’s very successful in the disguise.

That’s a slim outline. Mrs Doubtfire is supposed to be a comedy, with antecedents in Charley’s Aunt, and a host of plays going back for centuries. The problem with Mrs Doubtfire is that it also wants to make a statement about modern family relationships. In doing so it goes off at an odd angle and leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

I don’t care what revisionist playwrights think, comedies should end satisfactorily – all round. This one resolves only one of its conflicts: Daniel’s desire to be with his children. He’s insisted throughout the film that he can’t live without them.

But the other conflict, between Daniel and his wife, is skewered off and left dangling, as though the producers thought they might have a sequel on their hands.

As Mrs Doubtfire, Daniel’s in the unique position of learning directly from his wife the good things she thinks about him but has never said. He’s also able to get his own view across – without heat – particularly in relation to a man from the past who turns up to complicate the wife’s life.

Yet at the end, nothing comes of this knowledge. To all intents and purposes, Daniel, allowed to be himself again, reverts to being a child with his children, and the wife/mother carries on pursuing her career till seven each night. For the audience, a real downlift (the filmic equivalent of downmanaging).

The problem with the marriage relationship, initially, is that Daniel hasn’t grown up and become an adult; he wants to remain a child.[see below] Yet as Mrs Doubtfire, he’s transformed into a parent who maintains discipline and insists his children do their homework. He’s a counsellor to his wife, and he keeps house in the best female-Jeeves style.

Why then is he not allowed to grow up into adulthood once his disguise is removed? He obviously has it in him. Why all the ironic woman-to-woman discussions if he’s only to be sent back to play with the kids?

I think the moviemakers got it wrong. Almost at the end of the film, Mrs Doubtfire (who has now found her niche on syndicated children’s television), spouts forth some blather about there being ‘all sorts of families.’

‘As long as there is love,’ she proclaims, ‘it doesn’t matter how the families live, whether they be split up or together, with children fostered, or scattered to the four winds.’

A cop-out. The relationship between adults in a family counts for far more than the filmmakers want to admit. Years ago, in a film called The Sundowners, a teenage son tried to get his mother to say she loved him more than she loved her husband. Her answer was unequivocal, and Mrs Doubtfire would have been better to have heeded it.

The woman said she’d made a vow to love her husband. Love for children, she said, has its limited time – children grow up, leave the nest, and learn love for themselves. But the love between husband and wife grows, strengthens, and prevails.

Photo courtesy of IMDB.com

It’s interesting that only two years before Mrs Doubtfire, Robin Williams played Peter Pan in Hook. That character grew up; I wonder why Daniel couldn’t?

About six years after I wrote this column I read the book Mrs Doubtfire was based on. It’s called Madame Doubtfire, and is by Anne Fine. My succinct review of it was: Superior to the movie in every respect. Wittier, and more honest about the difficulties the family faces. Something, unfortunately, got lost in the translation to the big screen.

Soul-baring

First published in Column 8 on the 9^th March, 1994

This must be the week for columnists to bare their souls – not excessively – in public.

First up was Alan Duff, using his column to tell us of the novelist’s trials, and how he’s had to hive off to the woods for solitude in order to face the awfulness of his 500 blank pages.

I’m glad to see that in his solitude he’s rediscovered the ‘economic value’ of poetry: in his case poetry is helping him to earn money by writing a novel. Probably more useful than using it to cure depression – although the depression that arises in front of 500 blank pages is considerable.

Good on yer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, for helping Duff’s creative juice to flow.

I’m also glad to see that Mr Duff has realised there’s more to write about in the world than the vexed question of whether the Maori need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It was becoming dull as the only subject of his column.

Another soul-baring writer, Sandra Coney, also has a tendency to play a harp with one note.

In the now defunct Sunday Times, she this week gave us a rather peculiar valedictory, as though at the time of writing her column she wasn’t entirely sure whether she was still employed or not.

She, too, spoke of the blankness that can hit a writer: ‘times – terrifying times – when I have faced my computer screen with not a thought in my head and a deadline looming. On other occasions my mind’s a-buzz like a nest full of wasps.’ (I find comparing ideas with wasps as appropriate as comparing sentences with stinging nettles.)

Ms Coney also mentioned the way in which public feedback often comes only when you say something people don’t want to hear. (Bouquets are garnered in private.)

This fact was confirmed on the opposite page by Piers McLaren of Rotorua, writing in the Letters department. Sandra Coney’s articles ‘contain little of substance.’ She ‘hates men.’ She should write ‘one – just one – article in which she praises the good qualities she has experienced in males.’

I tend to agree with Mr McLaren in regard to Ms Coney’s anti-male theme: truth can, after all, be spoken without constant sniping. Balancing on the other foot, however, I concur with her remarks about facing a computer screen with not a thought in my head. I’ve had that experience more than once myself. (Readers might think it was more often still.)

We columnists have further problems. Some great idea swoops in like an eagle and we find it is too big to handle in the space available. You have to abandon the attempt to fit all you want to say into 600 words.

On other occasions so many possibilities contend for your attention you can’t make up your mind which to tackle. But there’s one worse problem.

I read once that male writers were supposed to be better off than women writers, because men had ‘more time.’ As a male part-time writer I am puzzled by this. Any writing I do has to be fitted in between my full-time job, my family commitments (nowadays mostly consisting of ferrying one or other of my numerous offspring hither and yon at all hours of the day and night), and other duties of the average parent’s life.

On top of that, I’m no longer able to have my writing machine tucked away in private. It now resides in one of the living areas. Meal cooking and eating rage around it while radios blare; teenagers discuss current fads on everlasting phone calls, or cavort or highjink or argue or throw each other on the floor. Interruptions turn all you thoughts into split infinity.

After all this moaning, perhaps we columnists need to stop boring you with the difficulties of writing – but don’t hold your breath.

Sandra Coney -
photo by Mike Sykes

Sandra Coney went on to write her column for the Sunday Star Times, which seamlessly replaced the Dominion Sunday Times (the full name of the paper mentioned above). She gave us another six years of her thoughts.

Honouring

First published in Column Eight on the 2^nd March, 1994

Two interesting articles have come my way in the last week or so. One in the ODT concerned Shere Hite’s newest report, in which she contends that the traditional two-parent family is not worth saving. A second in the American edition of Time debated wittily and wisely the status of men in Western society.

I believe Shere Hite – (or should it be, Sheer Hate?) – is saying less that families are on the way out, than that men are. The Time article (written, thank goodness, by a man) looks at an underlying assumption of many feminists and brings some needed balance.

And what is this underlying assumption? The assumption that men are definitely second-class (fifth-class?) beings, tolerated only because they’ve been around so long. I quote: ‘We know the overt man-bashing of recent years has now refined itself into a certain atmospheric snideness – has settled down to a vague male aversion, as if masculinity were a bad smell in the room. Man-bashing is dispensed, so to speak, in aerosol spray (Man-Diss), which coves the male’s nasty essence in a fine mist of shame.’

Men, curiously enough, are acceptable targets for jokes and abuse we wouldn’t dare use about any minority. It’s politically incorrect to be publicly rude about gays, lesbians, Maori, and people with disabilities. It’s apparently perfectly acceptable to be rude, abusive, and, most particularly, demeaning towards men.

I quote once more from Time: There is a greeting card “that said: ‘Hear you’re looking for a man who’s your intellectual equal…does that expression Fat Chance mean anything to you?’ Mild enough, but still: ‘Would the company have sold a card that said, ‘Hear you’re looking for a black who is your intellectual equal…Fat Chance?’”

Substitute any of the groups mentioned earlier and you get the idea.

I said last year I found the book title, 100 Things to Do with a Useless Man, offensive. Having looked at the book – what little I could stomach – I am still more opposed to such garbage.

Many feminists, I believe, have not matured past the point of realising only a minority of men abuse, rape and harass. Shere Hite is typical of this type of feminist. Though she’s hardly an objective researcher, on first glance her statistics appear to add up well.

Take one example: ‘81% of men who grew up with just their mother found it easier to form good relationships with women later, as opposed to 40% of men from two-parent families.’

She fails to tell us that one of the problems for boys growing up without a father is that they find it difficult to relate satisfactorily to other men in later life. Forming good relationships with women may not be so much the problem – though I suspect forming good relationships with their wives is another matter.

Lance Morrow, the author of the Time article, makes an excellent point. Perhaps women did in the past reflect men at ‘twice their natural size,’ and now tend to be more realistic in their assessment of men’s status. (Some, however, reduce the assessment to much less than reality.)

Morrow says this has had a counterbalancing effect. Men now look at women as they really are: equally human, and equally culpable. Honour on both sides has gone out the window, and demeaning the opposite sex is the order of the day, perhaps worse than it was before women’s lib.

He winds up: ‘We might spin the thought that good can come of each sex thinking the best of the other, and might see the converse truth: that only bad can come of each one thinking the worst. Tolerance and decency are creative, civilising traits.’ A society which continually dishonours, I believe, will disintegrate.

And quite in spite of Hite, I believe the traditional two-parent family (with plenty of extended relatives) is actually the only version worth saving.

Lance Morrow

The following letter from Anon relating to this column was published a week or so later:

Mike Crowl’s column on male bashing was spot on. For a thorough look at these issues readers really must get a copy of Not Guilty: In Defence of the Modern Man by David Thomas (first published 1993). I bought my copy at the University Book Shop. Femi-Nazi groups are bound to block the sale of this book in shops, so be in quick or write to the publisher, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Orion House, 5 Upper St Martins Lane, London, WC2 HqEA. Satirist P J O’Rourke says of this book: ‘A splendid book – A Charge of the Light Brigade against the batteries of current wisdom.’

There is a bit of a problem online with Thomas' title. When you go to Amazon.com, the blurb presented is obviously speaking about different book, though it appears at first sight to relate to the one Anon is writing about.  

The book title in the column should be Things You Can Do with a Useless Man. Plainly I didn’t check my own notes when writing this. 

 

 

A discovery

First published in Column 8 on the 23^rd February 1994

Last year I queried whether poetry had any economic value. I’m happy to report now that doctors in England say it has, and are confident of using it to reduce some of the 80 million pounds per annum spent on antidepressants.

In a study at Bristol University, doctors discovered that a few lines by poets such as Wordsworth, Keats or Browning could overcome a depressed patient’s need for pills.

Just a few lines? I find this a little surprising. The whole of Paradise Lost would at time hardly have been sufficient to set me straight again.

Let’s take up our Palgrave’s [see below], return to the poets mentioned, and see how appropriate their verses might be.

Here’s Wordsworth:

She lived alone, and few could know

             When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and oh,

            The difference to me!

Given the right circumstances, this might well give a depressed husband a life. But what about this bit of Keats?

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

            With horrid warning gaped wide,

And I awoke and found me here

            On the cold hill’s side.

That sounds more like the sort of thing Jenny Shipley should be reading every morning before breakfast. On the other hand, being the wise, all-knowing lady she is, maybe she would recommend this for the nation:

But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,

            And frequent sights of what is to be borne!

Such sights, or worse, as are before me here:-

            Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

Browning and Shipley might well be soulmates. Here he is in a mood calculated to make every manjack and womanjill pull themselves up by the bootstraps:

Then, welcome each rebuff

That turns earth’s smoothness rough.

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!

            Be our joys three-parts pain!

            Strive, and hold cheap the strain;

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!

(There are 31 more stanzas of like ilk to make you leap out of your gloom.)

It’s plain that the choice of poem counts for a good deal in this therapy. What’s good for the goose may not so befit the gander, but I suppose there’s a chance some of the heavy stuff might lift the spirit through sheer perversity:

The rain set early in tonight

            The sullen wind was soon awake,

It tore the elm-tops down for spite,

            And did its worst to vex the lake,

I listened with heart fit to break…

Just the thing for depressed Christmas campers – though that poem improves with the timely appearance of lady called, inelegantly, Porphyria.

Perhaps we’re again unfair and choosing the wrong poets. What about Tennyson?

As thro’ the land at eve we went,

            And pluck’d the ripen’d ears

We fell out, my wife and I,

We fell out, I know not why

            And kiss’d again with tears. 

Hmmm. Let’s try further back. Here’s Fletcher:

There’s nought in this life sweet,

If man were wise to see’t,

            But only melancholy,

            O sweetest melancholy!

After these examples, I can only assume the doctors’ choice of poems was more fitting than those I found by plunging into Palgrave.

(Apropos of nothing, I was intrigued to find that Browning had hidden marketing skills: he wrote a poem called The Lost Leader.)

Portrait of F T Palgrave,
not looking his most cheerful

Palgrave's Golden Treasury—originally titled The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language—is a celebrated and highly influential anthology of English poetry. Compiled by English critic and poet Francis Turner Palgrave, it was first published in 1861 and quickly became the definitive collection of British verse for generations of readers.

In her book, The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies andthe Making of British Culture, published as recently as 2023, Clare Bucknell called it ‘…an anthology of the best poetry in the language constructed upon a plan sound and spacious, and followed out with a delicacy of feeling which could scarcely be surpassed.’ Hmmm.

Though I can’t find the Bristol study, AI told me this: Modern research, including a notable collaborative UK study by the University of Plymouth and Nottingham Trent University, confirmed that reading and writing poetry can help up to 50% of participants manage depression and anxiety.

More meaning

First published in Column 8 on the 16^th February, 1994 

I wrote last week’s column ahead of time, one of those few occasions when I manage to beat the deadline. For once, it was ready before the same week’s column was even printed.

You may recall I was contemplating the meaning of life – as much as it’s possible within this rectangle.

The day after I finished the column, my mother-in-law died in England. Two days later, on the Friday, my uncle, my only close blood relative on my father’s side, also died in England. Neither of these deaths were exactly unexpected, but they gave a new dimension to the words I’d written.

What those deaths bring home is the fact of how difficult it is to express grief at a distance. When there’s a funeral to attend, and ceremonies to go through, and seldom-seen relatives to meet and hug, the process is a little easier, in the sense that it gives our physical beings something to do.

When the funeral has to be imagined, with all the arrangements taking place out of your hands, and all the family talking and meeting, but not in your presence, the deaths take on an unreal, unbelievable aspect, and have insufficient meaning. Because there seems little point in taking time off, our physical beings are forced to get on with the mundane duties of life, and most of the grief stays below the surface.

Grief’s a strange thing anyway. I was very attached to my grandfather as a child – I lived in his house, along with other assorted relatives. He became ill one sunny Saturday morning after church, sitting awkwardly in the back of the Austin, his face uncustomarily uncheerful.

He went to bed, but later in the morning I found him on his hands and knees in the passageway. ‘It’s all right, sport,’ he said, grinning at the puzzlement on my face.

It wasn’t all right.

He asked, ‘Did I give you a fright?’ as the ambulance took him away. I never saw him again.

Forty years later, returning late one night with my wife from a church get-together, something we’d been talking about triggered off the grief I’d never experienced as a child, and I lay on my bed and cried for my grandfather.

Whether or not we live in an age that’s more difficult in terms of loss and instability than any other, I can’t say. I know that the more friends I lose over the years through shifts [shifting houses and towns], the harder it is to try and make new ones. The more separations and divorces I hear about, the harder it is to feel concern – or to know what to feel anymore. The more sudden deaths I’m hit by, the more I wonder if I haven’t closed off to avoid the pain.

Writers have a terrible tendency to take all aspects of life, including death and loss, and file them away for future reference, in case they’re useful material for some article or story some day.

I haven’t got this on my own. I’m reading a biography of Dorothy L Sayers: again and again she expressed a similar concern. While she behaved appropriately, her feelings often failed to match the external behaviour.

Is this callousness, or just difficult in having the ‘right’ feelings at the right time? We often use the word ‘callous’ to mean people hardened to life.

Calluses on the violinist or guitarist’s fingers come from contact with the strings, from making music. Calluses on the woodworker’s hands come from turning rough wood into smooth bowls or carvings. Hardness becomes part of the very hand itself; a thing necessary to protect the softness underneath.

Perhaps hardness, or some form of indifference on the outside, isn’t always a true indication of what’s going on inside. 

Calluses developing on a guitarist's fingers 

 The grandfather in question was my maternal grandfather. I never knew my paternal one, who not only lived in England but died when I was a toddler.

It turns out that a callus is what you get on your finger, hand etc. Callous - with an 'o' - is an adjective describing what kind of a person you might be. It’s taken me many decades to know this. 

 

 

 

Inconsistencies

First published in Column 8 on the 26^th January, 1994

Dear Bro (on postcard of Cathedral Square),
This year we went to Christchurch for our holidays. We took most of the children. We really enjoyed ourselves. The days of having fun holiday have not passed.
Yours, Mike.

Dear Mike (postcard of Eketahuna garage),
Glad to hear things went better this year. Did I say I enjoyed your list of things you learned in ’93? Learn anything else on holiday?
Big Bro

Dear Bro (on Orana Park stationery),
Learnt about inconsistencies. Learnt not to give up on people – there’s always hope for change. (Not sure if I can relate that to Saddam Hussein or Idi Amind, however.) learnt that people (and spelling) aren’t consistent.

Learnt also that if I’d put money on certain horses one week – I didn’t, Bro, so calm down – I’d have done very well. And if I’d followed the same laid-back ‘system’ the following week, all the nags would have left me broke. (They didn’t, because I only used play money.)

I finally learnt what quinellas and trifectas are, as well as Burlington Berties, Double Carpets and Trixies. I also learnt new meanings for Patent, Yankee and Canadian!

Horses are inconsistent brutes, but it was an interesting holiday exercise, all the same.

Learnt, also, that there’s something very inconsistent about advertising for staff. We’ve known for a while, Bro, that you can’t, e.g., advertise for a male member of staff – you must advertise gender-undefined. But does that stop you taking on a male member of staff anyway, and turning down all the females who’ve wasted their time applying?

The Press told us about a Japanese shop-manager who advertised for a male and was rapped over the knuckles by the HRC. Presumably, she could still have rejected all the females who applied, couldn’t she? What do you think, Bro?
Yours, Mike

Dear Mike (postcard of a different Eketahuna garage)
I don’t know everything, but as sometimes happens, your answer seems to make sense. Why do you ask me questions like these? It’s only January.
Yours, tired already, Bro

Dear Bro (typed on computer paper)
I learnt from the correspondence columns of the Press that no matter how good and sensible and life-saving an item is, some people will always object to using it. Bicycle helmets, for instance. The ‘I’ve been cycling for 40 years and I’ve never had an accident’ approach. You’d think they’d want to encourage those who were only just starting cycling to make it through their own 40 years, wouldn’t you?

And I notice another inconsistency. In the pages of both the Press and the Times, there have been discussions on world population explosions and birth control – especially for those naughty nations where there are people who refuse to practice the latter.

I was interested in the comments of the one correspondent. She said that the most densely populated areas in the world were the most developed and affluent: Holland, for instance. Yet the IPPF’s population control programmes concentrated on Third World countries.

She said, ‘poverty is caused by economic and social factors, as we are discovering in this country,’ not lack of birth control. The Third World represents ‘a threat to the economic monopoly of the developed world, so kill them off through birth and economic regulations.’ What do you reckon, Bro?
Yours, Lil’ Mickey.

Dear Mick (postcard of Taumarunui garage – who knows where my brother lives?)
I reckon you’re getting too serious and heavy for the beginning of the year. Lighten up, brother. Forget the debates – I’m more interested in what you learned on holiday.
Your weary Bro

Dear tossed and turned Bro,
I also learnt 15 different ways to make my column look varied and interesting. Did you notice?

 

Cathedral Square, and its famous cathedral, were wrecked by two major earthquakes less than fifteen years later, in 2010 and 2011.

Burlington Berties, Double Carpets and Trixies are all traditional UK horse racing and sports betting terms:

• Burlington Berties: Slang for odds of 100/30 (or 10/3). The name comes from traditional bookmaker tic-tac rhyming slang, inspired by the famous early 20th-century music hall song Burlington Bertie from Bow.
• Double Carpets: Slang for odds of 33/1. In betting jargon, a "carpet" represents 3/1 odds (derived from the old criminal slang "carpet" meaning a three-month prison sentence). Repeating it as a "double carpet" signifies 33/1.
• Trixies: A type of multiple combination wager consisting of 4 separate bets across three different selections (3 doubles and 1 treble). A punter only needs two of the selections to win to secure a financial return.

 

Questions

First published in Column Eight on the 2^nd February, 1994 

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

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

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

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

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

The question ‘Is this a question?’ initiates various obscure answers, including ‘All these cunning answers are actually irrelevant because Shakespeare told us that ‘that is the question’ or ‘This sentence no vere. Who cares. The reader bored. Time to bring subject to a.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally what do you notice about the following poem?

I know a little man both ept and ert,

An intro? Extra? No he’s just a vert.

Shevelled and couth and kempt, pecunious, ane,

His image trudes upon the captive brain.

When life turns sipid and the mind is traught

The spirit soars as I would sist it ought.

Chalantly then, like any gainly goof,

My digent self is sertive, choate, loof.

Or the following sentences? Jump, dogs! Why vex Frizt Blank, QC? or Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx.

After all this, here’s my question. Has anybody seen volume one of Notes and Queries?

 

The word vere most commonly functions as a Latin adverb meaning "really," "truly," "actually," or "correctly", or as a historical name derived from Latin and Old French roots.

It’s interesting that in the last few months (of 2026) the famous (in Dunedin) University Book Shop announced its closure – various matters had evolved to bring it down. There was a great outcry from those who regarded it as a precious resource. And lo and behold, somebody bought it and has kept it open – someone who actually knows how to run a bookshop, as well.

The meaning of lumbago?

First published in Column Eight on the 9^th February, 1994 

In spite of last week’s quote about newspaper columns not being the best place to consider the meaning of life, I’m going to throw 600 words in that direction today.

1994 has already distinguished itself as a year in which to ponder just how fragile we humans are. Floods here and abroad; forest fires threatening to devastate a city outright; earthquakes tossing buildings, cars and people around like leaves in a breeze.

In a year in which Hell is said to have frozen over, I think we’d do well to take some time out to mull over our mortality.

I remember one young fellow I used to work with – he may have grown up in the years since I knew him – who claimed that Hell was the place to go. All his mates would be there, he said, and they could spend eternity partying with no moralistic do-gooders looking over their shoulders.

Personally, I don’t consider Hell, heated or frozen over, to hold much charm, even with the possibility of always doing my own thing. (I find it bad enough in this life coping with the aftermath of doing only what I want.)

A current television ad claims we spend most of lives doing boring things, and have only five and a half unadulterated (by which I think they mean time spent away from adults) months to PAAAAAARTY! My mathematical kids think the admen have miscalculated – or consider life to be very short.

As an adulterated person, however, I believe those five and a half months might be better spent in a bit of contemplation.

Contemplation isn’t in, right now, I realise. In fact, the world around us, particularly for us city folks, is downright against it. We have constant noise from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same. Who could survive with – yuk! – silence.

Consequently, we don’t spend much humble-time sitting and thinking about how insignificant we are – the commercials tell us otherwise, anyway. Neither do we give ourselves much free space to wonder at the fact that each day is a gift, not something belonging to us as a right.

Life is to be lived, we say, and forget the hereafter.

Some years ago the stands collapsed at an overseas football match and hundreds of people were killed or maimed. Not only did it appear ‘live’ on television, but the game carried on. In commenting to a workmate about the callousness of this, he said the rest of the fans would have caused a riot – with worse results than the aftermath of the collapsed stands.

Once upon a time, when someone died, we used to take time out to stop and think. Now we’re hardly any different to those soccer fans: we want to ignore the dead and dying and get on with the game. Distractions on every side pull us away from thinking about anything the here and now.

I include myself in this: Death barely makes a tremor on the surface of my soul, unless it’s someone extremely close to me. Constant exposure to death in the media tends to make me callous. I can turn from death to life in a moment, barely blinking a brain-cell.

But I’ll have to face death for myself one day, sooner or later, suddenly or slowly. And in spite of my Bros’ recent suggestion to ‘lighten up,’ there are times when a bit of reflection in the gloom-room doesn’t go amiss.

Considering the meaning of life is a good deal more interesting than considering the meaning of lumbago – if that’s philosophically possible (anyway, lumbago always sounds like a South American dance to me). And though the year is well on its way, I’m determined to think more about where I’m going in this life, as well as the life beyond.

(Hopefully, however, I haven’t already wasted my ‘five and a half months’ in partying.)

 

Courtesy Manchester Physio

 Nowadays AI has an answer regarding The meaning of lumbago…

The precise capitalized string 'THE MEANING OF LUMBAGO' originates from a specific philosophical analogy popularised by the famous psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl in his seminal works on meaning and existence.

While it was written earlier, it became heavily studied and quoted in 1990s university lecture halls, psychology textbooks, and self-help literature.

Frankl used the phrase to explain why you cannot ask a broad, blanket question like "What is the meaning of life?" He argued that life's meaning is highly specific to the individual and their current situation, using this exact logic:

Asking for a general "meaning of life" makes as little sense as asking a chess champion, "What is the best chess move in the world?" It depends entirely on the game situation. It is just like asking a doctor, "What is the meaning of lumbago?"

 [What is the meaning of life? – Antonio Gallo, quoted on Goodreads.

I believe all men ask themselves, at least once in their lifetime, this question. I remember, once I asked this question to someone during a lecture: I was answered that “life is a sexually transmitted condition with a 100 per cent mortality rate”. What we do know for certain is that “we were not once, we are now, and we will not be again”. Life is not a linguistic term and hence has no meaning. Just as if I asked “what is the meaning of lumbago”. At this point, you might as well ask me “Why are you putting this question?”. To be frank, I don’t know. I forgot to ask my parents …

 The Joke / Logic Behind It [AI likes to explain jokes, even though I'm not it/he/she understands them]

In medical terms, "lumbago" isn't a complex, profound disease with a hidden purpose—it literally just means lower back pain. Therefore, asking for the "deep philosophical meaning" of a standard muscle ache is inherently absurd. Frankl used it as a humorous, dry reality check to show that people look for abstract cosmic answers to life when they should be focusing on the practical, specific reality right in front of them.