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.

Free education

First published in Column 8 on the 21^st of October, 1992

I was about to sit down this morning and write out a cheque for the balance of my children’s secondary school fees when I discovered I’d mislaid the bill. This brought temporary relief to my beleaguered debt system, and meant I didn’t have to borrow yet more of the bank’s money to pay the account.

Fees are only part of the problem.

Though we’d hardly regard ourselves as wealthy, by many parents’ standards we must be reasonably well off. The fact is we have less money now than we had before, thanks to the famous Employment Contracts Act, and have to make it stretch further.

School teachers must be aware that most parents are now worse off than they’ve been for years, yet they constantly require more and more funds to cover the costs of innumerable school extras. Day after day I am confronted by an eight o’clock in the morning demand from at least one of my children.

It gets worse as the kids get older. To its credit the primary school seems to appreciate that parents’ spending power is reduced. Not so the secondary school. (And I hear from other parents that most secondary schools are the same – or worse.)

Perhaps at the school end it doesn’t seem as though there are so many demands. But on the home front we never stop paying out for something. Which is why this year’s fees are still unpaid.

School camps are one of the chief costs, though by no means the only one. In a discussion with a teacher recently over one of these I was told that the better-off parents want everything that’s available for their kids. So the school must provide.

I understand why she feels schools are the meat in the sandwich, but having to follow the desires of those with money means that the parents who aren’t so well off, and the ones who are downright impoverished, have no choice but to keep up with the Joneses. And to keep up with little or no resources.

Yes, I know there are funds available for parents who just can’t manage to pay for their kids to go to camps. And I’m grateful for them. But how long are these funds going to survive? We know they’re not bottomless pits as much as we know parents’ cash doesn’t grow on trees.

You could say it’s all my fault: I shouldn’t have had so many kids (we originally planned for seventeen). Maybe we shouldn’t have. But the end of that argument is that no one should have more than one or two children. And further on down the track we have this Catch 22 situation: fewer children, fewer teachers required; more teachers out of work. (Abortion has already caused a good deal of unemployment in the teaching industry.)

To me there’s no give in the system. We must have our children educated, by law. This means nowadays we also have to fork out for whatever the schools insist is part of their curriculum.

Isn’t it time the schools woke up to the economic crisis many parents are struggling through and pulled their horns in a bit? Fewer camps might result in kids having a little less confidence, and in their socialising a little less. On the other hand that would give teachers more time in the classroom.

Who knows? We might then find tertiary students who, when they make it to university, could spell, count and comprehend.

Artwork courtesy of Grok on X

More on learning Spanish

Elsewhere I've talked about learning Spanish, and after nearly two years of working on it, I'm still not particularly fluent. (Okay, I'm not really fluent at all.) But re-reading this post on Michael Caine and line learning linked a bit with my recent attempts at fluency. 

The challenge has been not just to remember the words I want to say in Spanish but to translate my English thoughts into Spanish in the first place. Both Gabriel Wymer (in my favourite book on language learning: Fluent Forever) and various other language teachers talk about needing to start thinking in Spanish rather than shifting over ideas from English to Spanish. It's a kind of mental trick, I suspect: the brain has to decide that the language it's been learning forever isn't the only language it can think in. 

Well, I haven't found thinking in Spanish at all easy, but earlier this week the idea occurred to me that my brain doesn't really has any deposit of Spanish, in terms of whole sentences. There are heaps of words and the Anki cards I use - Gabriel Wyner's much-promoted method - have plenty of sentences, but I read these rather than memorising them. 

After I came back to Wyner's book a while ago I began to try and memorise some Spanish rather than just translating it, and started with things I already knew in English - like the Psalms, for instance. This helped a bit, but it was slow progress. 

What my idea the other day involved was not trying to learn a whole thing in Spanish, but to take random sentences from my Anki cards, list them out, and memorise them. In the process this gives my tongue actual fluency in speaking Spanish, and I start to think more in Spanish. Yes, it's in the smallest way possible, perhaps, but then, as children we learn in the smallest way possible. It's only because we're surrounded by native speakers night and day that we build up our vocabulary and eventually start speaking in our native language: perfectly, and grammatically. All without apparent effort. 

Okay, I can't mimic that process completely but I can throw myself into a kind of not particularly deep end and memorise sentences. In themselves they make sense to me in Spanish, and they're not just isolated words, but connected groups of words, such as Un viejo puente cruza por encima de la via del tren, pero el puente no lleva a ninguna parte. (This is a sentence I'm memorising today, for instance.) Holding that group of words together in my head, along with a number of others, means I start to see connections in how things are said, and better, I retain these connections.

Yup, it might sound a bit out of the way in terms of fluency. But I've already got ten sentences under my belt, and have seen connections I hadn't previously noticed, and I'm now on my second list of ten. Early days, but I feel confident that some further step in the process is now in progress.

One other thing: this process means I'm speaking the language more than I would otherwise. Yes, of course with Duolingo part of the learning process was speaking words and sentences out loud, but then I would immediately forget them once I'd done the exercise. I needed something that means I retain what I'm speaking - even if for the time being, it's a random sentence. In due course these random sentences will make more and more connections. I believe. Time will tell!

UPDATE 5.7.26:

My idea of becoming more fluent in Spanish by learning sentences got off to a great start but partly because of last week’s sheer busyness, the second group of ten sentences didn’t go so well. I did actually have the ten new pieces under my belt, but obviously not as well as the first ten, and there are a few gaps still in a few of the sentences. But after getting a bit discouraged I’ve got back onto them – in fact while reciting them in bed this morning I found that for the most part I hadn’t completely forgotten any of them. I had been using my time out walking for learning things like this, but since the dog we're babysitting for several weeks arrived it’s not possible to have a dog on a lead in one hand and the phone - with the sentences on it - in the other and still avoid tripping over anything. 

The dog taking over the day bed in the sun porch. 

A fable

First published in Column 8 on the 30^th September, 1992

Once upon a time there was a fountain.

For much of the day she was quiet and almost invisible to passers-by. But at certain hours, such as in the heat of midday, or in the cool of evening, music from an unseen source would play. Then it was as though a kind of magic overtook the fountain. She would begin to dance.

Her arches would soar high, and her spray shone in the sunlight. She would toss peaks of water hither and thither, interweaving them like figures in some old, formal dance. Though the music itself was somewhat unimaginative, there were moments when the fountains and the music were one.

The fountain was popular with people of all ages, and from all lands. Strangers were encouraged to come from far and near to listen to her music and see her dance; even to photograph her.

The fountain was never completely still. She had subdued moods when she was not leaping and prancing. Those who spied on her in these reflective moments might have found her less attractive. A tangle of sharp, thorny spikes could be seen, rather like the back of some prehistoric monster. The bushes nearby did their best to shelter the fountain when she was in this state, and were for the most part successful. Yet it was as though she was alternatively a beauty and a beast.

Then came a day when Great Ideas were put forward. Great Ideas that were to improve the look of the city in which the fountain lived. Much money was to be spent, and many changes were to take place. Decisions were made in chambers, and plans set afoot.

Someone decided that the fountain was no longer suitable – she did not fit in with the Great Ideas. As the flower of the field, she had flourished. Now when the wind passed over her place, she would be no more.

Hundreds of intricate pieces were dismantled and boxed up. She was no longer a thing alive, the sum of her parts; her spirit was split into components, to become lifeless pieces of piping.

The place where she had danced was covered over – her memory was regarded with as little honour as the subterranean toilets nearby: both sites vanished under hundreds of bricks as though they had never existed.

In her place, due to the theory that two are better than one, were installed twin ‘fountains’ of modern design, rather like plaster bath-tubs, or concrete saunas, or even worse, lead cisterns in which the ball-cock had ceased to function, and the water flowed continuously.

They claimed Mystery: how did the water churn forth continually yet never go anywhere? No one really cared; there was  no mystery about them, only pretence. They had no intrinsic beauty, and proved to be nothing more than bird-baths, or paddling pools for intrepid toddlers.

There was no peace about them. To sit near was to sit beside a noisy rushing waterfall, but without the grandeur; or a swirling weir damming nothing. They were as out of place as the multicoloured doors that once demeaned the Town Hall; some architect’s dream method of using up leftover paint. A method that left the Town Hall looking like a staid grandmother in fluorescent socks.

The true fountain, ever since, awaits her fate. She has sometimes heard arousing rumours that a new and more imposing site is to be her reward for suffering long dark days of imprisonment.

But, for her alas, they remain rumours.

 

The Star Fountain, to give it its proper title, because it was gifted to the city by the Star newspaper, was much loved, and many people remember it with delight. Unfortunately the powers that be decided it had had its day – apparently not consulting the Star itself. By all accounts the many pieces were stored somewhere – it seems a mystery as to where – with the vague idea of it being restored in another location. In due course however much of it corroded and was discarded, and the brass fittings were stolen and sold! Extraordinary.

From memory, when it played in the evenings, lights gave it different colours. 

The men’s toilets in the Octagon were underground and were a wonderful example of how to build a toilet and make it look good at the same time. The story goes that it was simply covered over when yet another Grand Decision was made and is still there. It’s more likely that it was filled in so that at no point would the ground suddenly open and people fall into its remains…