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.

 

A few questions

First published in Column 8 on the 8th December, 1993

Poetry – what is it? Who needs it? Does it mean anything? Has it any Economic Value?

Since I came across the poetry of a minor American poet, Billy Collins, a couple of months ago, I’ve begun to explore other people’s poetry again, after a poetryless patch. (Billy Collins is so ‘minor’ I can’t even get any of his four books in New Zealand libraries, and so far I’ve tracked down only seven of his poems – and a fragment.)

Poetry: often little more than a few words on an otherwise white page; sometimes so obscure in meaning that the thought behind the words has to be teased out line by line – if it can be found at all. Sometimes running on for page after page, like an eleven-course meal, yet capable of lifting you onto another plateau.

Poetry is magnificent and wondrous – and banal – from the doggerel-dinosaur type to the highly refined and processed. But why do poets write something that isn’t prose? (Apart from ‘prose poems.’) Why do some men and women spend their lives producing a handful of jottings – barely enough to fill a book – when others are so prolific their work becomes almost impossible to collate?

Why should we feel awe at being in touch with a poet? Aren’t they human?

When I was in London, a close friend dragged me into a bookshop one day, found the poetry section, opened up a book with poems by John Heath-Stubbs, and making enough noise to awaken the other customers, showed me that one of the poems was dedicated to  her. Twenty precisely organised lines.

When I was a postie, my colleagues pointed to the tall, skinny fellow in the next bay. ‘Ian Wedde.’ So? ‘He’s a poet.’ Wow! Shivers ran down my spine. This was what a poet looked like.

Not necessarily. At the funeral of a distant cousin: hair and beard long and unkempt, wild-eyed, on the periphery of the crowd, a different sort of person. ‘Jimmy Baxter,’ someone mumbles. ‘Look at the state he’s in.’

All this name-dropping tells us nothing about poetry, except perhaps that we attach some mystique to the poets. Some poets are normal people, some are crazy. Whatever, they’re all born with an urge to write in this peculiar fashion. Few poets produce prose.

Can poetry be taught? Robert Bly, the American poet, doesn’t think so. For him, life is the best teacher; the kind of life that’s dedicated to searching the soul for depths most of us don’t bother to plummet.

His mode of teaching would be to send students out in the woods for six months, each one alone, each having to build their own shelter and find their own food. And after that six months they might be ready to think about putting words on paper. Is he serious?

Billy Collins, in Advice to Writers, with the same tongue-in-cheek seriousness, says:

Even if it keeps you up all night, wash down the walls and scrub the floor of your study before composing a syllable.’

Do those fragments of writing on a page really have to be worked at, or can they be jotted down almost in the time it takes to read them? Yes and no. Some poems arrive full-blown in their creator’s minds. Others take years to write, and still the poet isn’t satisfied.

I enjoy taking words at random out of the dictionary, or random sentences from magazines or books, and trying to turn them into poetry. Some take on a life of their own.

‘The jobless momentum makes paupers of thugs,’ or ‘My advice to the bloated is to crackdown on diamonds.’

It’s an enjoyable way to play with words. Is it poetry, or merely a collage? Is poetry more than words anyway?

Why write poetry? Still less, why read it?

Why sing songs? Why have children?

 

Billy Collins, courtesy of the New York Times

Billy Collins was perhaps only minor in New Zealand in 1993. By 2001 he’d been nominated U S Poet Laureate and has since received a large number of awards. In 1993 there were only four books of poetry by him available, now in 2026 there are something like twenty, and I’m missing several from my collection. He remains one of my favourite poets, and plainly is a favourite poet of a vast number of people. 

In addition to the line quoted above about washing the walls etc, Collins gives this ‘response’ to an unnamed questioner about how he goes about writing poetry, in a poem named ‘Purity.’ It always has to be remembered that Collins tends greatly to the tongue-in-cheek…

 

My favourite time to write is in the late afternoon, 

weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.

This is how I go about it:

I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.

Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile

as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only

a white shirt, a pair of pants and a pot of cold tea.

 

 

 

A most ingenious paradox

First published in Column 8 on the 1^st December, 1993

I hope you’re sitting while you read the next sentence. Let me say, Thank God for New Zealand politics (if you weren’t sitting down, you must be now.)

An article in the ODT last week attempted to unravel the so-called Italian paradox. What paradox? As far as I could make out, the paradox is that Italian politics and Italian life in general, thrive on corruption. To quote Professor Franco Ferrarotti, holder of Italy’s first academic chair in sociology, ‘Corruption is of the essence of being a politician.’

Professor Ferrarotti has been living in the hot Mediterranean sun too long, methinks. He considers telling lies is an expedient. Stealing, he says, is not a serious offence, especially if you do it with dexterity. Corruption, as long as you don’t physically hurt anyone, is considered a fine art.

Now do you see why New Zealand seems like a sweet place to live, in spite of Jim and Ruth and Mike and Bill and Jenny?

The professor is one of the founders of modern sociological studies in Italy, and it might be thought he’s merely observing his countrymen’s habits. He doesn’t, however, seem to see much wrong with the way they behave.

Professor Ferrarotti makes more paradoxical statements further on (if paradoxical is really the right word), when he talks about the Catholic Church, an institution he apparently regards as belonging to Italy alone.

Having been brought up as a Catholic, I may have slightly more knowledge about this corner of Christianity than some.

The eminent professor claims that confession is merely an institution wherein people confess only in order to go out and sin again. He calls it a ‘virtuous cycle of vice,’ whatever that clever-sounding phrase may mean. (It might join my collection of all-purpose modern phrases such as ‘orchestrated litany of lies’ and ‘mother of all whatever-you-wish.’)

He also claims confession is a Mediterranean institution, which outsiders cannot understand. I think Prof F’s sociology lacks breadth. Mediterranean confession may be a little difficult to grasp, but confession is as broadspread as the Catholic Church (which in spite of its ‘Roman’ adjective, is only Roman in Rome).

He says repentance doesn’t mean you won’t sin again. It’s curious that the first Christians were hot on it meaning just that. They certainly never saw it as a means to cover up your sins for a few moments before you went out and acted as wickedly as before.

According to the Prof, only Italy is able to talk negatively about itself as a country. ‘Insecure nationalities cannot afford the luxury of self-criticism.’

Our Kiwi-clobbering machine, then, ought to make New Zealand a very secure place.

Perhaps the truth lies closer to the fact that following Ferrarotti’s view, Italy appears to be unable to control its destiny, unable to deal with the wickedness inherent in its daily life, and unable to appreciate how the rest of the world see it: a nation bankrupt politically, and perhaps morally.

There is nothing worse than a nation which in its arrogance claims to know itself better than anyone else. France takes that stance, apparently unable to see how oafish and boorish its behaviour is within the world community. Robbie Burns’ phrase about seeing ourselves as others see us, seems more than appropriate.

I’m not against Italy or Italians. I spent my honeymoon in Rome, and stayed there briefly on another occasion. I enjoyed the place, the history, the people (but not the lack of public toilets). However, New Zealand’s lack of corruption, aversion to lies and stealing makes it look the more pleasant of the two countries.

If Prof F’s views are true, heaven help the Italians – it will take more than a Mediterranean-coloured confession to change their ways.

Photo courtesy of Carlo Bordoni

 

Silly reason?

First published in Column 8 on the 15^th December, 1993

I know Christmas is sometimes called (most aptly) the ‘silly season,’ but some communities go more for the ‘silly reason.’ I’ve probably mentioned the following episode in my column previously, so bear with me being repetitive in my old age.

When my youngest was still at kindergarten, I asked the head teacher why the children weren’t singing Christmas carols during the days before Christmas. She said they couldn’t do that because it would offend those for whom Christmas had no special significance.

The minority rules, okay? Never mind that carols at Christmas, and Christmas itself, are woven into the web of our culture, whether you have any Christian association or not.

Now I see that the wise and respected burghers of Birmingham, in England, have gone the same way. They’ve banned the symbols of Christmas from their street lighting. I could see why some anti-Christian people might throw out Christian symbols, but in Birmingham even Santa Claus (who in his present guise is far more the symbol of commercialism than Christmas) has been given the push.

All in the name of ‘acknowledging’ the other communities. All in the name of tolerance, no doubt. All in the name of political correctness – gone overboard.

Birmingham’s festive lighting can now be seen as anything and everything: celebrating the Hindu and Sikh winter festivals, the Jewish Chanukah and the Chinese and Vietnamese New Year. I think it’s barmy.

Minority cultures expect us to accept their ways – when we’re under their roofs, or within their compounds. We’re not allowed to do certain things because of their protocol. Fair enough. But when the majority says it’s going to deny its own culture, I begin to wonder if it has thought the matter through.

I don’t personally think that Hindus or Sikhs or Jews or Asians are going to care two hoots about what the culture within which they have made their homes does. In fact, my feeling, if I were part of such a minority, would be puzzlement as to why that majority culture wished to deny its own heritage.

That was my argument with the kindy teacher several years ago: why should my children be taught all about someone else’s culture when their own was being suppressed? It doesn’t make sense. Our discussion was at the time when certain parties in the land were claiming that the white majority has no culture – a piece of rubbish that even Christmas goodwill finds hard to countenance.

Enough of grizzling at PC nonsense. Let’s look at something more positive.

People in Paeroa are hoping to become New Zealand’s ‘Christmas Town.’  They’ve been holding an exhibition and festival right through December.

Among the displays is a 90-minute tour of Christmases past and present, an art exhibition, a country music competition, an international food fair, a ‘third world’ café, and a multimedia drama about New Zealand’s first Christmas.

The business people and retailers have offered overwhelming support and about 400 people in the community are expected to be involved. Good on them for going all out for a celebration that can encompass real joy if we’ll allow it.

I don’t see any point in pulling back from the celebration of Christmas, whether you believe I the reasons why we celebrate it or not. Whatever we do, don’t let’s be wimpy like the Brums – let’s be like the people from Paeroa and go all out for it.

Part of Birmingham Christmas Market in the mid-2020s

It’s chilling to read again that as long ago as some time in the mid-eighties there were people already playing the Woke card; our own heritage and customs were being pushed out by the so-called offence to people who didn’t happen to believe in them. Now in 2026 this has taken on the cloak of a huge industry, and anything that’s connected to our British and European heritage is in danger of being wiped out by people who were not only born into this heritage, but who benefit from it.

Not remembering the Birmingham incident after all these years I thought I’d check up on it. Here’s Google’s AI take on it.

The claim that Birmingham City Council banned Christmas decorations and Santa Claus from its streets in 1993 is a longstanding myth.

The rumour stems from a real media controversy that took place that year, but the details were heavily distorted by local press:

·         The Reality of the Lights: In November 1993, Birmingham City Council installed festive street lights along New Street. The contemporary, abstract design of the lights had been unanimously approved by a cross-party committee of councillors and local trade representatives.

·         The Media Backlash: The Birmingham Post ran an editorial criticizing the design because it did not explicitly depict traditional images like Santa Claus, reindeer, fairies, wise men, or angels. The paper accused the council of an "outbreak of political correctness" and deliberately downgrading the Christian significance of the holiday.

·         The Council's Position: The council never passed any ban on Christmas decorations or Santa Claus. UK Parliament records from the time show that MPs even raised an Early Day Motion defending the council, labelling the newspaper's reports as "anti-Labour fantasies" and "press misrepresentation".

·         This 1993 dispute laid the groundwork for the much larger, internationally famous "Winterval" myth in 1997 and 1998, when a generic marketing banner used by Birmingham to promote 41 days of diverse winter events (including Christmas markets and Diwali) was widely—and incorrectly—reported by national media as an official attempt to rename or "ban" Christmas.

I haven’t disputed AI’s take on this – though it would be interesting to see if it would rethink its information – but when you read Michael Chubb’s comments on his Winterval, it seems to me he’s still defending the actions of this council after many years. Why Parliament got in on the story is a bit of a mystery. It really had nothing to do with them; it was the newspapers who spread most of the controversy, and apparently continue to do so after all these years.

Paeroa continues its now longstanding Christmas Show. I’d be interested to know if its drama about the First NZ Christmas was still part of it…

What I learned in 1993

First published in Column 8 on the 22^nd December, 1993. I must have had a bit of a year in 1993: this should have come across as witty, but it verges on the vitriolic.

I learned what a homie is (though I am still not sure if I’ve got the spelling right, or if, in fact, anyone knows). Homies like to wear super-baggy jeans, slung so low round the hips they threaten to slide down to their ankles. They hide their torsos in tent-like tops.

They often have undercuts – another word added to my vocab this year. This means they cut their hair stubble short (often at ‘number one’ on the blades), underneath longer hair. This may be kept hidden – in which case it is only the fact that you have done it that’s important – or the longer hair may be tied up, making the scalp look as though the barber had a sudden seizure.

I learned that homies invade families indiscriminately, rather like stray cats or scabies.

I learned, yet again, that statistics are extremely flexible. It all depends on who is using them. Thus one group can claim that men are almost entirely to blame for violence in the home, while another says statistics show women to be the major offenders – 53% in fact. And that women caused death in nearly 56% of the cases.

That’s an interesting statistic for Suffrage Year.

I learned you can utterly forget that you have been sexually abused as a child, but that certain therapies can help you remember.

I learned also that some therapists can help you remember things that never actually happened, and if you are clever, you can make a lot of money out of remembering – you will need to, to pay your even cleverer therapist.

I learned that other people deny this.

I learned that women in power are no different to men in power, and that there is barely any difference between politicians and poets – both have to be somewhat crazy.

I have also learned that politics is about ambition: it has little to do with integrity, wisdom or servanthood. It has a lot to do with back-stabbing, sudden demotions, and revenge. And that’s New Zealand politics I’m talking about, not Italian.

I learned that I was wise to wear a beard for 22 years: it conveniently hid the ageing of my face. For one beardless week I felt like either Jekyll or Hyde – I’m not sure which.

I learned also that there is a very strong cultural bias against beards: sadly many of the male population have succumbed to the lie that men are better-looking without their beards. (Well, we’ll all have beards in heaven!)

I learned to smile at the frazzled parents of little children when the latter were wrecking things, or carting their baby sisters down the stairs. I now know that being a parent in those years is a delight by comparison with being a parent of a teenager – let alone of four. Teenagers are no different to preschoolers – they’re just bigger.

I have yet to learn whether there is any truth in the theory that children in their twenties are almost human.

I learned that people are just as interested in what I don’t want to write about, as in what I do. In fact, I debated detailing today all the subjects I would not write about in 1994, but I wasn’t sure if I could hold to such a resolution.

I’ve learned that in spite of all the commercialism of Christmas, in spite of the people in our community who would have us wipe Christmas off the calendar – and its message off the map – in spite of Santa Claus proliferating like the flowers that bloom in the Spring (tra la), in spite of the pressures of holidays and presents and even the violence that surfaces so readily at this stressful time of the year, Christ and Christmas do not go away.

Their truth remains, focused in the birth of a child who changed not only the course of history, but is still capable of changing the hears of men and women.

I’ve learned that when nearly everything else around is changing, a few things do not.

Three young men dressed in their homie best

I noticed when retyping this some thirty years later that a subeditor appears to have changed all my contractions to fully written out words, something I was unlikely to be doing after three years of writing the Column. It’s nice to be able to put all the contractions back in again.

I’m not sure why I claim poets are necessarily crazy. Certainly there have been crazy poets – you may even know one or two – but by contrast with politicians they are people of great sanity. Although Rimbaud and Verlaine notoriously had knife ‘fights’ and Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist with a pistol once. Apparently Ben Jonson fatally stabbed an actor in a duel – I’m not sure if this counts…