Porridge, possums, politicians and solo parenting

 First published in Column 8 on the 11^th August, 1993

 Having negotiated the twisting sands of a local newspaper last week, I decided to go on to the big time – a metropolitan daily from the CER. This distraction was necessary as my wife has gone to England for five weeks, leaving me a solo parent.

I discovered there’s a square in Sydney lumbered with a motormouth cognomen. (‘Where do you live?’ ‘Sesquicentenary Square.’) I discovered that if everybody in Australia obeyed the law, the treasury coffers would be depleted. Let’s not tell Ruth. With our parlous state of economy she’ll make it compulsory to be obedient.

Someone in Britain is encouraging us to be green even after we’re dead. The trees will grow better if we’re buried beside them and cleanly turn ourselves into mulch.

On this basis, trees in the year 2126 will do very well. In 2126  (when I’ll be shifting into my 80s) a comet named Swift-Tuttle will loosen a barrage of space debris and drop it on the Earth. The meteors will be the size of city blocks and will wipe out entire countries – if they don’t fall in the ocean.

To give us a foretaste, Swift-Tuttle will be doing a mini-version of its trip next Saturday, the 14^th. Meteorites on that day will only be the size of peas and grapefruit. (Meteors always seem to come in city block, pea and grapefruit sizes; you never hear of banana, kiwifruit or paddock.)

I know last week I said No Politicians, but since this one’s Australian we can make an exception. The Victorian Premier, who is apparently very popular, appears on the front of a magazine (without his permission) apparently very naked.

His head was in the picture all right, but the body belonged to an unidentified person. The magazine’s intention was to prove that the eye can be deceived. The Premier’s eye was not deceived, and he threatened to sue.

The editor, with dubious logic, said he had no case. The Premier, she said, wasn’t held up to ridicule (!), wasn’t defamed (!), and nothing had been done to detract from his reputation (!!!). Her eye wasn’t deceived, just her brain.

As if to keep up with us, the Australians have gone in for some cultural sensitivity. Only this time it may upset the sensitivity of 51% of the population.

In an Aboriginal art exhibition, one room has been genderly segregated: they call it the men’s room. In this area, culturally sensitive paintings are on display. I understand their point, but could male pakeha painters get away with it?

Here’s an item of interest. Up until the last century the Welsh donned clean white stockings and went up to a warm dry room (usually the bedroom above the kitchen) where they trampled and stomped upon porridge oats laid in an oak chest, aiming to compress them. (The oats, not the stockings.)

No peculiar custom here: merely an attempt to keep the mites out. Try this at home if you’re heavily into porridge.

And talking of keeping things out, I finally found out how, if I was an Aussie, I could keep the possums out of the roof – and from the eating the roses. Unfortunately the rose-protecting method seems likely to keep humans away from the roses as well.

Take a number of woollen dags, the scungy bits that don’t make good knitting, and hang them on the rose bushes. Possums object to having one of their favourite foods so spiced, and keep away.

And how do you keep possums out of the roof? You set up a light in the attic, and leave it on for two or three nights. The poor possums soon suffer from insomnia, and go away in a dozy huff. At that point you nail up the gaps.

Not forgetting to turn the light off first.

And talking about turning off the lights, you will suffer from poor sleep hygiene (disturbed nights) if you go to bed at erratic times, drink coffee beforehand, read, or watch television in bed.

Or allow your wife to go gallivanting.

 

 

CER: I think by this I meant: The Australia–New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement, commonly known as Closer Economic Relations (CER).

I was plainly confused when I wrote that I was only going to be in my 80s in 2126 – I should have said I’d be in my 180s (!) Furthermore, telling people the oddly named Swift-Tuttle was coming a week later, in 1992, seems to contradict Wikipedia’s hindsight version of the facts.

The photo of Jeff Kennett appeared just three years after Photoshop came on the market. The magazinewas the Good Weekend Magazine, July 31, 1993.

Incidentally my wife, thirty years or more since this was written, still goes to bed at erratic (usually late) hours, drinks coffee in the evenings, watches television late at night (but not in bed). Her sleep hygiene isn’t much impaired by any of this…

Troubles with roubles

First published in Column 8, on the 4^th August, 1993

Newspapers are a great source of education. I had time to read a newspaper more thoroughly last week and discovered informative facts, and fictions, on nearly every page.

That day, the Russians had troubles with roubles. The Central Russian Bank decided to dabble with the money bubble and gobble up pre-1993 roubles. This nobbled people’s savings, causing a scrabble for new money. The banks quibblingly closed for ‘technical reasons.’

Many elderly wound up with barely a nibble; they hobbled to the banks to exchange their old roubles – paid out the previous week in their pensions – for a maximum sum amounting to the equivalent of NZ$64. This reduced them to quivering blobbles.

Why the rabble didn’t reduce the banks – or better still, the government – to rubble, I don’t know.

This time the West didn’t get the blame. A couple of years ago, when a similar thing happened, the cause was a ‘Western financial plot.’ (I thought, at first, that was the part of a cemetery where you bury a paid-up corpse.)

Plainly the Russian government still has a blind spot when it comes to the people – a bit like one or two of our own parliamentarians – but I’ve vowed not to give parliamentarians any more free publicity this month.

Talking of blind spots, I discovered that a blind electric ray can give you a nasty shock if you meet each other in the sea.

I quote: ‘The ray’s ‘electric organs are composed of specialised cells called electrocytes.’ (Not electrolytes – those hang from the ceiling.) ‘These are wafer thin, hexagonal and arranged in stacks of 450 plates.’ (These fish would make good waiters.) ‘There can be several thousand of these columns, each composed of 450 electrocytes.’(Reminds me of Steve Parr’s dishwashing ad.)

In spite of its blindness the ray electro-sights its prey with ease. What I want to know is why when the ray lights up in water it doesn’t electrocute itself.

Talking of blind spots, I noted the continuing saga of the Christchurch Polytechnic nursing course, and its cultural problems. I like what one local nurse said, ‘We’ve bred a bit of a monster. It’s cultural fascism creeping in where you can’t afford to have different views. It’s almost like because of the wrong in the past we have to try and make up for it. Where has our freedom of speech gone?’

Where indeed?

The answer to her last question is that free speech has drowned in the sea of political correctness. Yes, we Caucasians have done a lot wrong, and yes, we have a lot of ground to make up. But the cultural content of this nursing course has the bad breath of indoctrination in its mouth.

Perhaps we need to park the Treaty of Waitangi back in the history books where it belongs. Then, in accordance with our current marketplace-type thinking, we could negotiate a new, contemporary contract.

A contract that doesn’t squabble over different interpretations, and one which, in raising the status of the minority, doesn’t have to put down the majority. Or cause them to doublespeak.

My son has been investigating cultures for school. We have icecream tubs perched around the house containing moulding of bread. Seeing the process of culture at home I hope, if I’m in hospital, that the nurse will treat me as a human being first, and a culture second.

Finally, I learned a new word from my newspaper reading: vexillologist (requires careful spelling – and pronouncing!). A vexillologist is a flag fan.

I’ve been indulging in some vexillology – flag waving – in the above paragraphs.

I guess you shouldn’t get vexed when vexillating.

 

Electric ray Narke capensis

Photo courtesy of Peter Southwood

 

See more about Steve Parr here. Unfortunately I can’t find the particular ad I mentioned.

For ‘political correctness’ read ‘woke,’ a word easier to remember than a phrase, and with so little real meaning that it can take hold of anything and make a problem out of.

Outrage

First published in Column 8 on the 19^th August, 1992

During the Vietnam War the public expressed outrage when a piece of newsfilm seen on television showed a member of one side of the warring factors being shot in the head, and killed.

The outrage was because the end of a human life was treated as mere newsfodder. His personhood didn’t matter – he was being used as an example of the horrors of war.

No one denies those horrors. The horrors of modern life are multitudinous. What concerns me is that these horrors are more and more being used by the media in a way that turns us all into spectators at a gladiatorial bloodbath.

I have come across two examples recently, neither of which I sought out, and both of which linger on malevolently in the recesses of my mind. And if these two came to my attention so easily, how many more have there been that have not crossed my path?

I wrote a few weeks ago about the media and the royal couple, and the way in which the lives of these two were being abused. The lack of moral concern in some parts of the media is an abuse as sickening as sexual abuse of children.

You can say that by writing about them I’m extending the abuse still further. But unless someone writes, how do we combat the immoral flow?

The first instance occurred on television in one of those news compilation programmes, and discussed the murder of a teenage girl by her father.

This Middle Eastern family had emigrated to the States. The father lived by the old rules; the 15-year-old daughter wanted to live by the new. By his culture’s standards, the father considered her rebellious, especially when she went out and got an after-school job. The father forbade such behaviour. When the daughter continued to work, the father one night took a kitchen knife and stabbed her to death. In his culture that was ‘acceptable’ punishment for her behaviour.

Of course it wasn’t acceptable in the culture of the USA, and he was imprisoned. Nothing very startling about all that, you say. Nothing, except that somehow the US authorities had suspected foul play might occur, and had bugged the house. Unfortunately for the girl, no one was listening the night she died. Only a tape-recorder picked up the terrified screams as the child was repeatedly stabbed.

And those screams were played over and over on television. Not some actress simulating horror, but a child’s dying agonies as her own father killed her. Was the broadcast necessary?

The other situation is worse, and also involved young people: the murderer was around seventeen, the victim maybe a couple of years younger. These two boys were part of an ongoing Asian war. But the news magazine article in which they became known to the world was on revenge.

Somehow a photographer was there at the moment when the murderer, in revenge, used a heavy knife to stab his victim in the chest.

And now comes the part that sickens. That observer photographed the murder. He took more photos of the murderer now satisfied at having achieved revenge. Some editor paid that photographer for those photos, and a writer for writing about them. Some publisher published them. The victim’s personhood became nothing. His death was mere newsfodder.

In the 17^th century John Donne said, ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind.’

Isn’t there a point where the objectivity of the media goes beyond the reporting, and reporters discern that they are involved in Mankind? Isn’t there a point where getting the news becomes much less important than the life of those involved? Is there any sense of moral outrage left?

()()()()()()()()()()() 

Since I wrote this article over thirty years ago people have become numb to such violence being shown on screen or on the Internet: either it’s reality, and real people die in front of our eyes, or it appears in movies and television with the kind of grisly detail that once would have been unacceptable in so-called entertainment. Such scenes are commonplace, and the media thrives on them.

Sadly, even the best of us are becoming immune to these scenes because they are innumerable.

It’s interesting that journalists who watched the hour long compilation of video shot by people who were attacked and killed in the invasion of Israel by Hamas on the 7^th of October, 2023, has proved that even the media is not entirely immune to the human suffering that was shown. Many of those audiences found themselves still able to be shocked.

 

Heroes

 First published in Column 8 on the 12^th August, 1992

The Olympic Games have brought the idea of the hero before us constantly, with people overcoming considerable odds, and struggling against personal battles.

However, I find the way some athletes carry on when they win rather sickening, and anything but heroic – especially, I’m sad to say, the Yanks. They don’t really need the crowd to applaud them; they do more than enough of it themselves.

New Zealand competitors, for the most part, are rather more self-controlled, humble even – a facet of our national personality I  hope we can retain. With them you share in the enjoyment of the win; you’re not turned off by self-adulation.

The heroism of the athletes follows hard on the heels of Mr Bolger’s remarks about viewing successful businessmen as heroes. In spit of New Zealand being sadly in want of heroes I’m glad he didn’t suggest any politicians for the role.)

Mr Bolger’s remarks struck me as barking up the wrong tree. A businessman who makes it is a success, just as a businessman who doesn’t make it is a failure. Neither of them fit into the hero category.

Heroes are few and far between in this country at the moment. Not only that, the heroic people we do have are likely to be the most unsung. Merely surviving, for a good proportion of Kiwis, is an heroic undertaking. Those who manage in these days under a government which has lost its compassion for its people are more than heroic. To me they’re made of much tougher stuff than most businessmen, including successful ones.

The typical businessman Mr Bolger wants us to admire has some capital to work with. The large group of semi-underprivileged people which has been created by dole cuts and unemployment (and the Employment Contracts Act) have no capital. They achieve what they achieve in spite of having nothing to come and go on.

I believe New Zealand’s real heroes are found in places away from the noise and bustle, especially away from commerce. These real heroes sometimes appear in the Queen’s awards, but their achievements are more often obscured by famous people who turn up in the lists.

(Actually I’m often astounded by the people who receive recognition. Film actors for instance – are they really stuff that Knights are made of? Aren’t they only doing what comes naturally, and what’s very well paid for? I’d always thought the awards went to people who gave their lives freely for a cause. Dare I even suggest that many sportspersons receive awards for doing little more than developing a talent they were born with?)

As I said, I believe New Zealand’s real heroes are found away from the limelight, and I believe we lost a special hero last week.

This was a man who had given a good dela of his life to attempting to change the view many people hold, that abortion is okay. He spent not only his energy in this, but much of his income. The man was John O’Neill.

It takes considerable guts to go against the flow. When we go against what is right, and the majority know it’s right, that’s foolhardiness. But when we go against the flow, believing that the majority are wrong, that’s heroic.

Sometimes a martyr’s blood is shed without immediate result. During his lifetime John O’Neill seemed to achieve very little in his fight for right. However, I believe he has not fought in vain, and a time will come when we finally accord him the honour a hero deserves.

 

Anti-abortion March by SPUC members 1974

 A Tribute [Letters to the Editor – the corner of the clipping was torn off for some reason]

Thank you Mike Crowl once again for a quality item. I too, pay tribute to John O’Neill. For years I have admired his lone stance on the abortion issue, and I have often wondered where were those men of position and money who would profess to be Christian who could have stood beside this man and shown their support. We have a march once a year. There are those who wear the little feet on the lapel and subscribe to SPUC but nary a one to say in public, ‘I stand beside O’Neill.’ Equal with John is Elizabeth, his wife, whose efforts matched his. I pay tribute to this man, his wife and his family. How proud the family must be to have such a father. He dared to go against the tide – no waiting…[missing from clipping] for John O’Neill to see which way it flowed. Such sacrifice…[missing from clipping]…wasted and since our God reigns we will…[missing from clipping]…results.

Name missing from clipping.

Life in the not so old girl yet

Back in late 2023 I published my fourth children's book, The Counterfeit Queen. It had taken some five years to write it, not because it was exceedingly difficult, but because of procrastination, self-doubt, and a busy life. And then, once published, it turned out to have the least number of sales of any of my books, though a number of free copies were passed around to family and friends. That way, at least. it had some readings: certainly more readings than sales. And it made its way in due course into my local library as well. 

But...disappointing. 

In late 2024, discouraged with the way the book had gone, I decided to do something positive in relation to it, and wrote eight piano pieces relating to some of the characters and scenes. To me these seemed a successful set of pieces: complex enough, but not to the degree that they didn't appeal in some measure on first hearing. 

A friend whom I play piano duets with nearly every week (and she and I have played some of the duets in local concerts, which has been very satisfying) has heard some of the music; her comment was: 'They're so inventive.' Once my head ceased to swell, I felt that all of the work on the book and the piano pieces, was justified. Something worthwhile had been created out of the whole mix. 

I've played some of the pieces for other people, in-house, but a few weeks back, after a friend's husband - as a surprise - bought her a baby grand for her birthday, they got a bit more visibility. (Though the piano was secondhand, it was still a substantial birthday present, and required some trickery in order to get it into the house without her knowing about its arrival.) 

The birthday girl had wanted a piano for some time in order to start playing again after a gap of many years. As a result of a conversation with her I offered to 'test-run' the piano, since she herself was a bit rusty keyboard-wise. So after a Bible Study at her and her husband's house one night I played her a couple of the Counterfeit Queen pieces, along with a piece I wrote a long time ago - back in the eighties in fact. 

Of course there were some other people at the study. I explained to the group the way the pieces had come about, thus giving away the 'secret' that I was a published author of children's books, something this group hadn't known. (I guess advertising myself as an author might increase sales - perhaps - but it's not something I tend to do.)

However, one of the people at the group was interested to read the books, and over the last couple of weeks has made her way through all four of them, to my surprise and delight. She's just texted me: I wanted to check out the Grimhilderness books to see if my granddaughter might like them, and I got hooked. They are wonderfully imaginative stories, with great characters and a timeless appeal. I'm sure she'll love them.

That's made my day. I suggested she might tell other grandmothers she knew as well (!) I'm also hoping to include some of them in a concert my duet friend and I are planning to do later this year. Maybe there's life in The Counterfeit Queen yet. 

The four books:

Grimhilda! a fantasy for children and their parents
The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret
The Disenchanted Wizard
The Counterfeit Queen

The bookaholic

 First published in Column 8 on the 5^th August, 1992

Some would say the worst ‘disease’ in the nation is alcoholism. Certainly it is prevalent, and the cause of much physical and mental damage.

However, there is another disease even more widespread, whose insidious effects on the population, though seemingly mild, are ravaging the nation. I talk of bookaholism.

Before I speak of symptoms, let me give you some statistics – conveniently culled from the latest Listener. New Zealanders spend $130 million on newspapers each year. In 1991 alone, local authority libraries (that’s not including private libraries) made 38 million issues, and held 8.5 million books.

I blame the libraries, in part, for their encouragement of bookaholism. Their casual attitude towards lending is evident in the lifestyle of every bookaholic you meet.

We know there are some people in the country who resist libraries, who are temperate in their  habits. And of course few babies read, although there were some supposedly enlightened people a few years ago trying to encourage the habit in mere infants.

But even if the libraries were all closed down, we’d be struggling with the enormity of the problem – bookaholics also buy books.

What is an average bookaholic like? Age doesn’t enter into it, though of course the older the bookaholic the more ingrained the habit. I know one man who as a child couldn’t sit down to a meal without a book in front of him. You can imagine his response now when his beleaguered wife tries to converse. ‘Hmmm?’

And gender is irrelevant. There are just as many woman bookaholics reading their Mills & Boons as men reading their car manuals.

Bookaholics are always desperate for something to read. They will read an ancient newspaper when lighting the fire, or pretend to do the crossword in an out-of-date magazine. Half-finished books with turned-over corners or with bookmarks made out of any scrap of paper (as long as it has print on it) litter their  homes.

Every room in the house has evidence of this malady. The lounge, with books flung down on (good grief, Stanton!) the television. The bedroom, with books hidden under the pillow. The kitchen, where the bookaholic will even read cookery books if the craving cannot otherwise be satisfied. The bathroom, where the soggy remains of a book will lie curled up inside a sodden towel. The toilet – yes, even the toilet. Here you will find books dumped on the cistern, flat on their face – only a few of the worst bookaholics will use blank toilet paper for bookmarks.

(I have known bookaholics in the loo bereft of print on paper who take to reading toilet roll wrappings. Inconceivable.)

Nothing is sacred. The bookaholic will put on a long playing record – they won’t have caught up with cassettes or CDs because their funds are never sufficient – and fail to listen to the music. Instead you will find them reading the sleeve, and even attempting to translate the German and French.

See them at the Regent Booksale: they bring their own boxes, and fill them to overflowing with Readers’ Digest Condensed Books.

See them in their lunch hours – at the library, or ‘browsing’ (as they call it) in their local (bookshop, that is). One bookaholic I knew works in a bookshop; what does he do in his free time? Browse.

I know the bookaholic isn’t guilty of bookish driving (though some have been known to read at the steering wheel), and he doesn’t beat up his wife or kids – more often he doesn’t notice them. But the drain on resources and the damage to the youth and flower of our nation is appalling.

Surely it is time for someone to adapt the 12 Steps and set up a BI (Bookaholics Innominate). Is there no one willing to stand up and turn us from a nation of bookworms into semi-illiterates?

 

My instinct on reading this piece after thirty plus years is that New Zealanders in 2026 would be reading a lot less than in 1992. But in fact they’re Bucking the Trend. The National Reading Survey shows that reading in NZ is up!

Juror #2

 Here be spoilers...

We watched Juror #2 last night on Netflix, and only discovered at the very end that it's the most recent movie directed by the extremely venerable Clint Eastwood. 

Now the expectancy over the last few years in regard to movies directed by Eastwood is that they will be more than satisfying in their presentation, and that the script will be thoughtful for the audience and generous to the actors. In other words, Eastwood's latter-day movies have usually been a must-see. 

Juror #2, however, is a surprise in the worst sense. The script has a thoroughly unfinished feeling to it, and leaves the actors with vast holes to fill that can't easily be filled. It starts (mostly) with what must be the most inadequately-founded trial we're likely to see in the movies. No one, but no one, seems to pick up on the fact that the evidence - mostly circumstantial and not at all convincing - is an insult to the audience's intelligence. The arrogant prosecutor (Toni Collette) doesn't even have to walk all over the defence (Chris Messina): he's given every opportunity to tear the case to shreds and, as scripted, fails to see any of the problems with the prosecutor's arguments. If you can call them arguments; most of what she provides are mere accusations against the accused. 

The accused himself (Night Agent's Gabriel Basso) is allowed to speak in his own defence and waffles on in a most unmannerly way about how he's now a changed man and that the man they see on a video arguing with his soon-to-be deceased girlfriend is a thing of the past. (But even their 'argument' is poorly scripted; the actors struggle to make it work.)

And things get worse: most of the stereotypical twelve jurors take what miniscule information they've been given as a watertight case and run with it. In fact their decision against the defendent would take about ten minutes if it wasn't for the fact that one of the jurors - coincidentally - was also a witness to the original argument and, as the audience quickly realises - probably committed a hit-and-run, killing the girl. The defendent's worst crime, on the other hand, was leaving his girlfriend to walk home in the pouring rain. 

Juror number 2 (Nicholas Hoult, who was Collette's son in About a Boy) had reasons not to confess to the hit-and-run, but not particularly compelling ones. As these reasons are eked out over the movie's length, we increasingly lose sympathy with him. Not only that, he had every reason not to be a juror in this case, if he'd only opened his mouth. Refusing to show his connection only sinks him into a deeper mess, and more lies, including to his wife, who of course is expecting a baby any day and really, really wants him home with her. Did I tell you that they'd lost twins a year before?

The only other juror to side with Hoult is played by J K Simmons. At one point he convinces Collette to change her mind, and do some more investigation - something she apparently hasn't in the least bothered with beforehand - she is, after all, running for some political role at the same time. (The police case is barely mentioned at any point, and appears to have been ticked off by them in a couple of minutes.) 

And then, unbelievably, in a scene we don't see, Hoult decides to go for a guilty verdict, which apparently changes the mind of the other jurors who'd started to look at a not guilty one. And suddenly the innocent man is sent to jail for life.

The whole thing ends for Hoult in a moment of ambiguity, apparently leaving his character in more of a mess than he started with. (We've long lost our sympathy with him, even though he appears to be the main character.) More likely the scriptwriter (Jonathan A. Abrams) got himself into a total tangle and couldn't find a way out. Perhaps Eastwood didn't have the time to help him. 

Kiefer Sutherland is also in the movie for a few brief scenes that really don't help the hero in any way, shifting from full support to giving up on the boy. Odd.  

Trinity College Marks Centenary

First published in the Dunedin Star Midweeker, July 19^th, 1992

How many musical or elocutional Kiwis over the years have entered a long, large room – usually with a piano in it – to front up to a person slowly writing over a desk? And when that person lifts their head and speaks, how many Kiwis have been stricken with inarticulation when confronted by those oh-so proper English tones?

The numbers are in the thousands.

This year marks the centenary of the first examinations in New Zealand by the Examiners of the Trinity College of Music. Those first exams were held in Christchurch, in 1892, but Dunedin wasn’t too far behind, setting up a centre four years later.

The Rev. William Hewitson was the first chairman, and the first secretary was Arthur Barth, a member of one of the two families within which the position has remained since.

In 1905 Mr Barth’s daughter, Beatrice, was appointed; 25 years later her sister, Irene, succeeded her, and held the reins for a formidable 31 years.

The secretaryship finally passed out of the hands of the Barths and into that of Niepers      . Miss Ellice Nieper took the job for five years before handing over to her sister Olive. And this Miss Nieper has been the ‘face’ of Trinity College to thousands of examinees ever since.

The local centre has gone on strongly over the 96 years, holding exams continuously in spite of the disturbance of two world wars. During World War II New Zealand had a resident examiner, Anderson Tyrer, who was instrumental in forming and conducting the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

There was also a time when the centre was divided into several smaller pieces: for many years the Catholic schools held exams at their convents. A 1955 newspaper cutting in the minute book of the centre shows exam results from St Dominic’s, St Joseph’s, Holy Name and St Philomena’s. And down in the list of names of those having passed preparatory is some youngster called Michael Crowl.

Many better known names appear in the minute books: Prof Peter Platt, who frequently chaired the meetings; Walter Sinton, of Charles Begg and Co; and Margaret Lion, who in 1955 won the gold medal presented by that firm for the highest marks.

In 1963 we find Prof William Lovelock, the writer of many standard theory texts, speaking severe words to teachers and telling them they were to blame if their pupils received poor marks.

Yet another examiner, a Mr Johnson, complains of the cold approach of the students, and their lack of personality. Perhaps he failed to realise the effect of a person speaking ‘received’ English had on already nervous youngsters.

A rather more generous approach was taken by Miss Mary Tweedie, who made at least seven visits to the city, and who said that music students here were comparable to any in the world. She will still be remembered with affection by many musicians.

There have of course been other types of exam apart from practical music: I remember doing theory exams for three hours on cold Saturday mornings – and speech has long been examined.

To celebrate the centenary, a concert is to be held in the Glenroy Auditorium on Monday, July 20, at 7.30 pm. The artist will be Rae de Lisle, playing piano works by a variety of composers. Miss de Lisle is well-known throughout New Zealand, and also has an established career overseas.

The seating arrangements will be somewhat informal at the concert: seats will be placed around tables set out in the middle of the hall. Supper will be served at the conclusion of the performance.

Rev Hewitson

I’ve included this piece amongst the Column 8 articles, because not only was it published in the sibling paper of the Midweeker, it was full of well-known Dunedin personalities, some of whom I knew well, or had met on occasions.  

Prof Platt turned out to be, amongst others, an anonymous financial supporter of my going to London to study at the London Opera Centre. He and I had worked together on some of the Dunedin Opera Company’s productions. I remember Miss Tweedie being my examiner on at least one occasion, and Margaret Lion and I were both at one of the Summer Music Schools in Dunedin; she was streets ahead of me in confidence, and, most likely, in performance. Miss Olive Nieper was in charge of the Trinity College exams during my time of going through that system. It wasn’t her full-time job; from memory she worked in some secretarial capacity in an office in the centre of town. I had occasion to visit her there at least once.

Barbered

First published in Column 8 on the 29^th July, 1992

Some weeks are better than others for making you feel old – well, older, anyway.

This week I went to a barber for the first time in eighteen years, the very barber to whom I used to go when I was a callow youth. He’d lost more hair than I had, which was a sort of consolation – and shifted premises – but little else of the familiar going-to-the-barber routine had changed.

There was still the partnering of tobacco with male tonsure – even in these enlightened days you don’t see tobacco in the ladies’ hairdressers. There was the scent of men’s hair spray. There was the feeling of being like a bed being made as the cloth was swept around me and tucked in at the edges.

There were the large mirrors reflecting a blurred shape that to me looked much the same before and after. And as always, however careful the barber is, there was the rest-of-the-day-awareness inside your singlet of having been barbered.

The same old art of casual conversation was still practiced, an art for which I had no talent in my youth. Since I didn’t know anything about the ‘important’ topics of the day – rugby, politics and rugby, I used to think nothing I had to say could possibly be of interest to a relative stranger, and kept my mouth more closed than open.

This may have been frustrating for the barber, though I guess it would be more frustrating for a dentist. Why do dentists seem to expect just as much conversation from you as barbers? Maybe their meal times are like ours…

After some years of attempting to increase the intellectual level of what passes for conversation at our meal tables each night – ‘pass the salt; he’s flicking rice everywhere, Mum; she touched me; he’s taken all the butter’ – I know now that conversation can be made from any coming together of a couple of minds.

In fact, after the experience of our mealtimes, it was quite stimulating to sit in the barber’s chair and gradually work towards finding some mutual topics of interest.

I’m always more than pleasantly surprised to find that eventually a few snippets of thought (even amongst snipping of hair) will assemble themselves into a conversation. Often some unsuspected mutual ground, as there was in tis case, will once again surprise you as how small the world really is.

Having my hair cut was no longer the ordeal it used to be. (I might even get to like it, and go and find a barber every time I’ve had enough of ‘Is this green stuff really a vegetable?’)

(By the way, in case you suspect, because I haven’t been to a barber for eighteen years, that my hair grows remarkably slowly, and I’m due for a paragraph in the Guinness Book of Records, let me assure you it sprouts at the pace common to all personkind. My home-barber – the one I acquired at marriage – decided she needed a break.)

When you think about it, in my 18 years away from things tonsorial I’d actually gained hair (unlike the barber). Eighteen years ago I had no beard to trim. Intuitively, unlike some male friends of mine, I hadn’t tried to grow one until there was actually something to cover the chin.

My family has pleaded with me for some time now to cut off my beard, their excuse being that they’ve never seen me without it. But in this winter I’d be daft to take off any more hair.

I’ve already made a mental note never to venture near a barber’s during the frosty season, even if I end up looking like Albert Einstein after he’d discovered his relatives.

Mike as Uncle Andrew in The Magician's Nephew -
no beard but an 'orrible wig instead. 
The boy playing Digory is Josh Chignell. 

 The ‘blurred shape’ I refer to was me, unable to see what the barber had done due to my shortsightedness; glasses were always removed while having a haircut even though the barber would invariably ask what I thought of the cut.

I’ve had a second family barber/hairdresser for around thirty years – my eldest daughter, who was trained as a hairdresser. She and my wife take turns, as it were, to cut my hair.

I did take my beard off in Sept 1993, to surprise my wife who’d been in the UK visiting her family. And again, twelve years later (to the month) in order to play Uncle Andrew in an adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, by C S Lewis (see photo above). In both case it was grown again pretty smartly.

Abuse

First published in Column 8 on the 22.7.1992

One of the side-benefits of feminism has been the exposing of a once much hidden area.

In just one day I came across the following –

A couple of articles in the newspaper Crosslink discussing sexual abuse by counsellors and ministers.  A radio documentary in which women talk about being sexually abused (in some cases by their fathers), and being freed from the memories that have bound them. A television film about a bigamist who gets his just desserts when his daughter, whom he sexually abused, murders him.

In the Listener, by contrast, a reviewer writes about a positive book, My Father and Me, in which sexual abuse isn’t an issue.

Some years ago we had a Telethon for victims of sexual abuse, and the claim was that this had happened to one in four female children. This figure was afterwards disputed, and the percentage is not thought to be so high. Be that as it may, there’s a dreadful corruption in the hearts of many men in this land.

To hear women speaking about the abuse they suffered as children, which they have subsequently buried away in their memories to such an extent that the episodes are virtually forgotten, ought to distress us greatly. The plight of the victims is horrifying: generations of men – these women are often talking about events that happened up to 40 years ago – have subjected their children or those of other people to this victimisation. We ought to cry out to God for mercy.

The sexual abuse isn’t all: the sense of power these men have over weaker beings is equally horrifying. Power tends to corrupt, Acton said, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The worst of this abuse is that men who being this malpractice seem neither to have pangs of guilt nor any awareness of the corruption in their hearts.

Some use the excuse that the victims might enjoy what happens. As the radio programme stated, the body may react with a certain degree of enjoyment, because the body enjoys touch. It’s made to react that way. But the victim ends up feeling betrayed not only by the person who is abusing (especially if it’s the father), but by the body itself. The very thing that’s suffering the abuse, seems in part to enjoy it.

Of course the repercussions with later normal sexual relations are not hard to envisage.

What causes men to shut their eyes to their wickedness? How do they live with it? do they feel in some warped way justified by their actions? Do they feel they have a ‘right’ (it certainly isn’t a God-given one, as the Book of Leviticus tells us) to have sexual relations with other members of their family besides their wives?

And where will it all end? Sometimes the abuser is brought to justice, forcing the victim to make public those acts of violence they would sooner not see proclaimed abroad.

Justice brings another quandary for the victim: if the abuser is the father, there’s a sense of betraying someone close to you, a person with whom you may have had some good times, the person who helped bring you into this world.

Cleaning out the corruption is never a pleasant process.

After all this ugliness, it was a relief to turn to My Father and Me. In spite of the reviewer wanting to make out a case for these fathers not always being ‘worthy of honour,’ the writers convey the fact that it’s possible to have a good relationship with a father. They show that there have been, and are, and always will be men who take the job seriously and know what it means.

They convey hope. So while much of the male garden is a tangle of weeds, here and there is a patch of roses.

Crosslink was a monthly publication jointly funded by the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, which ran from March 1987 until April 2001.