Encouragement

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

A few days ago I spent a pleasant half-hour writing a letter to an author, someone I know only through a book discovered by chance in the library. I’ve never come in contact with the man before, and I’m not even sure if his other books will appeal to me.

However, the book I read (which was about the craft of writing), struck a chord on most of its 255 pages. The nearer I came to the end, the more I was sure I wanted to drop the writer a note.

Writing to authors isn’t something I do every time I read a book – if it was, I’d be writing letters all the year round. But when someone has written a book that really pleases me, and I wish it would never come to an end, then a few words of appreciation are always worth the effort.

Probably the first author I had the nerve to write to had been the victim of an unpleasant American review (the victim was a Brit).

Initially I wrote a rather stroppy letter to the magazine in which the review had appeared, telling them while everyone else had to put with and understand the American sense of humour, they didn’t seem to reciprocate by understanding anyone else’s. I believed that was the main reason why the reviewer hadn’t seen the point of the British book.

(A reviewer in the same magazine on another occasion claimed that the spellings on the British edition would be off-putting for American readers – perhaps the Americans really are becoming a different people.)

Surprisingly my pugnacious letter was published in the magazine. I photocopied it and the original review, and sent them to the author, along with a sympathetic letter which I hoped would ‘console’ him a little for the way in which his work had been attacked.

Naturally he was hardly grateful to the extent of sending me five free autographed copies of his book, but he did appreciate the fact that a reader had gone to the trouble of writing.

Writing to authors is a way of expressing appreciation for their work, and I’ve done it a few times since. Moreover, it establishes human contact that’s otherwise missing for most authors. Each of those I’ve written to have replied: in doing so they come across as ordinary people doing a job that most of us regard as something out of the ordinary.

Sure, authors get paid, and one or two out of a hundred are able to make a decent living. But apart from the payment, the mere sale of a book doesn’t mean as much to a writer as the fact that some other mind has taken hold of it, grasped its point and enjoyed it – or been stirred by it.

All writers like to be told how much their hard work has meant to their readers (incidentally, this isn’t a personal request to be inundated with fan-mail!)

Writers must work for the most part on their own; they have to cut themselves off from families and friends to get the work done; a tremendous number of brain cells are used up over a job that may barely make a ripple on the sea of books published each year.

For writers of books which aren’t bestsellers the encouragement of some readers must go a long way towards telling them what they’d done wasn’t wasted.

A short letter lets them know, months and perhaps years down the track from when they first conceived their ideas and shaped them into sensible sentences, that someone understands what they’re saying, and has responded.

Rob Lloyd Jones [see below]
from his web page

The author was John Jerome, and the book was The Writing Trade, the first book of his that I’d read. I really enjoyed Jerome’s work, the apparently effortless style, the quiet humour, and the ability to make something fairly ordinary seem extraordinary. Even the weather.

I also wrote at one time to an author of commentaries on Old Testament books. Dale Ralph Davis had by that time written several books covering the period of Biblical history from Judges to Second Kings. I received a very gracious letter from him, and still have it. I’ve read almost all of his books now, and re-read the history commentaries two or three each.

I don’t remember the incident about the British book I got ‘pugnacious’ about – so I haven’t a clue as to who the author was or what the book was called.

The most recent author I’ve written to is Rob Lloyd Jones, who among some thirty titles wrote a series of four kids’ adventure books. I found all four of these in the give-away section of the Waitaki library, where I do some volunteer work once a week. Sadly it didn’t look as though they’d been read much. However they turned out to be funny and imaginative and very readable. The main character, Jake Atlas, usually manages to unintentionally destroy quite a number of famous ancient treasures and famous places in the course of each of book; the Aswan dam in Egypt, for instance, or a well-known museum of antiquities, or some long-standing place of ancient worship, or the Terracotta Army, which goes down like vast rows of skittles. But he’s not out to destroy, but to save. He grows as a character through the series, and the last one has an ending that is surprising in light of the style of the books up to that point.

Salmon education

First published in Column 8 on the 17^th March, 1993

Hamlet once told that patient and passive listener, Horatio, that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in his philosophy.

Hamlet was giving him the reasonably sound advice that he needed to keep his mind open as well as his ears. And in the play, Roots, Beatle Bryant says, ‘Education ent only books and music – it’s asking questions, all the time.’

Which brings me to the fact that I never fail to be astonished at the things I don’t know, or at the things I can learn by a conversation with someone who has interests different from mine.

For instance, our household knowledge has increased since the time salmon fishing became a feature of our lives. All manner of new words and ideas are now part of our mental furniture: sprat jigs and smolt, quinnat and sockeye. Being a burglar even takes on another meaning, in the sense of someone cheekily catching a fish in another person’s patch.

In mid-February I had an intriguing conversation with Jack Chandra, the chairman of the Otago branch of the New Zealand Salmon Anglers’ Association, on the subject of doorstep fishing. This is one of Dunedin’s somewhat underrated tourist attractions. (It certainly attracts the locals, particularly the wife of one of the locals. The minister of one church even spends his off-duty hours salmon fishing – ‘gathering sermon material.’)

I hadn’t realised that salmon fishing in our harbour is a relatively new thing: a decade ago it was virtually unheard of. Salmon aren’t native to South Island waters; they were imported last century.

However, the shallow waters of the Leith aren’t deep enough for the salmon to do any of that upstream swimming which is a feature of their spawning cycle. So the Anglers’ Association took a ‘put and take’ approach to salmon fishing in our harbour. This means you don’t get salmon out of the water unless you put them in first, in the form of very young salmon, called smolt.

One of the interesting things about smolt, which are hatched further north and brought down here in oxygenised tankers, is that while they are very young a few degrees’ change in temperature can make quite a difference to their little lives.

Turn the temperature up about four degrees and all the males become females. Now that must please my feminist readers – or the one I know I have, at least.

Can you imagine such a process taking place amongst humans? Here’s some cool young dude all geared up for a sunbathe at the beach. It’s a hotter than usual day, and he gets his tan all right. However, he also finds, to his horror, it’s necessary to go home and change his trousers for a skirt. Permanently. The dangers of melanoma pale by comparison.

Back to the serious stuff…

Once the smolt arrive in our harbour, they make themselves at home for up to six weeks before heading out to sea. So what makes them return? Though the harbour waters are salty, they’re diluted enough to act as fresh water for the salmon; this water ‘imprints’ them, and like salmon everywhere, they will eventually return to their ‘home’ ground.

Of course salmon can only be taken if they are put in to the harbour in the first place. This exercise costs money, and though the association’s members work very hard at raising it, they could always do with more. Along with Jack, I feel it would be a sad day for Dunedin if a burgeoning tourist attraction died a premature death for lack of cash.

We need to encourage this doorstep recreation.

Then, perhaps, when the City Council puts the cable car back into High St, it could run the other end down to the wharf. As the tourists reach the turntable, they would step off the platform, gather up their ‘rods for hire’ fishing gear, (including a container of freshly caught sprats), throw in their line and relax. The salmon would do the rest.

 

Part of Otago Harbour - the main city is to the left;
the sea off in the distance. 

It’s interesting that we discovered while we were on holiday in Wanaka this year a place called Hook, where you can fish for a Chinook salmon, have it filleted and gutted and vacuum-sealed in order to take home. Or you can have it cooked on the spot by their café chef, and eat it while enjoying the sun and water. There are several ponds in the place, and most of them have salmon in them; some in large quantities. It’s a great place just to walk around in, or sit watching amateur fishermen and women doing their best.

You can still fish for salmon around Dunedin’s harbour, though not so readily anymore at the wharves close to the city, some of which have been closed off. These are Quinnat salmon, apparently.

Good intentions

First published in Column 8 on the 10^th March, 1993

Grammy award winner Eric Clapton sings a poignant song, with words along the lines of ‘Would I know your name, if I saw you in heaven?’ This song heart-tugs, rousing hard-to-deal-with emotions. There’s a plaintive cry of hopelessness.

Clapton may or may not be interested, but I have it on authority that there will be no tears in heaven, and I can’t see any sensible reason why we shouldn’t know people’s names there. His song, however, makes an interesting contrast to those of the 60s and 70s, when Lennon and Co told us we didn’t need God; rather we needed to ‘Imagine there’s no heaven.’

A cry of hopelessness, and tears on Earth. What to do and where to start?

In recent weeks a group of churches issued a combined ‘Message of Intent’ (a thing unthinkable a couple of decades ago) which dealt primarily with a social justice initiative in a (post) God-zone.

Though I’m told the media extensively discussed the statement, I’m not sure the said principles reached the ears of the person in the street. Just to recap on them, the churches want (1) the life and dignity of human beings enhanced; (2) to encourage good relationships in the community.

They want us (3) to recognise that all are called to work for the common good; (4) to believe work is an expression of human worth and self-respect, which all people have a right to; (5) to proclaim that the poor and vulnerable must be a major concern in social policy.

All very worthwhile statements. I’m sure they weren’t only being proclaimed to church members. The churches are declaring to those in power the need for social justice. Though the New Zealand churches have been noticeably remiss in their role as a voice of any authority for several decades, they’re to be applauded for making up lost ground.

Many New Zealanders don’t think the church as a body counts for much, but it still, in fact, has a very substantial role to play in the history and workings of this nation. I believe it’s gradually coming back into its own.

The churches are the ones picking up what they can of the pieces the Government has dropped in its be-all-and-end-all approach to economics. And last year it was a churchman who rightly informed Jim Bolger he was misquoting the Gospel.

Moreover, though non-churchgoers may not yet be aware of it, Christians are closer in unity now than they have been since they first came to this land. They haven’t got it all together yet, but it’s coming.

All that aside, I look at these five principles, and find there’s something lacking. They could just as easily have been produced as part of a party-political manifesto. As a statement of intent by Christians, a major piece of Christianity is missing.

To quote another part of the statement, the five principles are ‘firmly rooted in the teachings of Jesus Christ.’ Yes, I guess you could say they are, although one of Jesus’s provocative statements was, ‘You’re always going to have the poor with you; pay attention to Me while you have the chance.’

The five principles, it seems to me, need to have a sixth added to make them worthy of the Christian body. Jesus Christ, for all His good works on Earth, which we’re told were too many to be counted, came here for a more specific purpose than any of the five stated above.

He came to make a way that could change people’s lives from the inside out. Thus when the people wanted more bread, He spoke about feeding their spirits; when they wanted to make Him an earthly King, He told them His kingdom wasn’t of this world, and hid from them.

I rejoice that the church is finally getting up off its chuff and doing what it has always done best. But I want to see it doing the whole job, dealing not only with the outer person, but with the inner.

 

From the Blog: On Teaching

I can’t find any reference to Jim Bolger misquoting the Gospel online, so I don’t know what this was referring to. And I also can’t find further details of the ‘Statement of Intent.’ Like so many well-intentioned things it appears to have disappeared from history, though perhaps someone can point me to a copy of it.

Even more on learning Spanish

The sentence-fluency process I wrote about a few weeks ago hasn't been getting much elbow room over the last few weeks, but I have continued learning Psalm 139 in Spanish - I already know it in English, so I've got a framework to start with. I'm up to verse 17 as of today. This has been an ongoing process since before the other (fluency) thing started, and since it's along the same lines, it's worth continuing with. 

The most difficult part is remembering how the verbs and pronouns go; they vary greatly from phrase to phrase in the Psalm. But more difficult is recognising the various irregular 'states' of the verbs - Spanish is far more full of irregular verbs than English. Most of these are fairly common words that are used frequently, verbs like hacer - to make, or do - or dicer - to say. Or worse: ser - to be - and ir - to go which are both the same in the oddly-named preterit tense: the tense that describes something that's done once and then finished. Here they're the equivalent of the English I was and I went tenses. These are irregular in English, but like most English verbs, don't change much from person to person ('person' as in I, we, you etc).

I assume Spanish speakers get used to using the same words for I was and I went - the context will no doubt make it clear. But it's hard to imagine English speakers using I was, for instance, for both I was and I went. I was downstairs when you called doesn't quite mean the same thing as I went downstairs when you called. But I could be making a mountain out of a molehill here, not yet being sufficiently au fait with the nuances of Spanish - or - No estoy suficientemente familiarizado con los matices del español. (That's Mr Google's translation; hopefully he's got it right, but it looks reasonable.)

Anyway, all this is leading to the following point: I decided to do something about the verb situation - dealing with the irregular ones, that is - and so I've started using the Anki cards to help me. I've taken several irregular preterit verbs (or preterite, as Wikipedia has it) and listed them in different ways on the cards. So I might focus on three of these verbs on one card, and list the first person singular for each in the answer. That kind of thing. Some of them are relatively familiar in their irregular forms (after all we use the past tense a lot in any language) so I recognise them. But remembering them is another matter. However, I've only been at this process for two or three days, and it's starting to come together. 

By the way, I got the various irregular verbs from The Red Pocket Book of Spanish Verbs, a book I found - if I remember rightly - at the Hospice shop in Dunedin. They have two shops at virtually the same location: one a normal op shop and the other nothing but books, mostly in good condition. And in categories. And in alphabetical order of authors! Wonderful work, Dunedin Hospice Shop!!

You don't have to have a red pocket to put the book in; it's the cover that's red. It tells us on the cover that it conjugates 333 verbs and does it fully. Yes, I can believe that. But in order to do so in a pocket-sized book (pocket as in large pocket) it has reduced the print to almost miniscule. I can just read it and no more. On a good day. With lots of sunshine. 

This copy used to belong to someone called Jack Bermingham. 
Thanks, Jack, for giving it a second life at my place.
I hope your eyesight didn't deteriorate as a result of the font size!

Bald again

First published in Column 8 on the 3^rd March, 1993

I’ve written previously about studies done in the United States on bald and bearded men, and the speculative and contradictory conclusions that were reached.

Bald men were supposed to have ‘evolved’ their baldness to impress the fair sex. Apparently that wasn’t such a good idea. A new study (published in all seriousness, one assumes, in the Journal of the American Medical Association), says that totally bald men are three times more likely to die of a heart attack than those with a full head of hair.

Significantly, the study was funded by a company which makes a treatment for baldness.

Only men with vertex (see below) baldness are seriously at risk. Men who are partially bald can relax a little, and fellers like me, whose hair is receding at a pace only marginally faster than Australia is heading towards Singapore, are not even in the running for a heart attack. (Well, not as a result of hair loss anyway – a fatality might occur if my wife went ‘ boo!’ in the night.)

Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence) writes that he now keeps his massive Chambers dictionary on his desktop not only to check out words he can’t spell, but as a way of discovering new words. I find reports of medical studies are just as effective: new words are always cropping up in them.

I had to drag my dictionary down from the shelf to look up ‘vertex.’ In maths, it means the point opposite the base of a figure. I suppose that’s appropriate for its use here. The word comes from the Latin word for whirlpool (as does ‘vortex’), but that hardly befits someone bald. Vertex whirlpool hair-swirling cannot be seen on a bald head.

Would you believe that there had been either other studies done on baldness and heart attacks before this latest one? The obsession with coronary baldness is remarkable. Not being bald, I’d think there were rather more pressing problems for scientists to get their teeth into. (Getting their teeth into baldness, anyway, could be painful.)

However, these previous studies very sensibly concluded that smoking and hypertension were likelier culprits in coronary disease. You’d think that would satisfy. Quite frankly, bandying medical terminology about doesn’t convince me of the bald heart attack syndrome. But it is very poetic: metabolic by-product of testosterone, and artery-clogging cholesterol. I love it!

As usual with these studies there are obstinate bald men who are the exceptions, refusing to die of anything but what they intend to die of. My father, who was well into baldness, died of cancer. His bald brother, who at 88 is still going strong, suffers only from a little short-term memory loss.

And it’s a probability (though not a mathematical one) that sometime soon the results of a study done on hairy-headed, -chinned, or -chested men will ‘prove’ they are more like to die of gangrene than the fortunate bald.

I wish that hairy man, Albert Einstein, had done a little tangent work on his balding relatives when he was into relativity. Then we might have had a genuine solution to the coronary problem years ago, instead of waiting till now for nine studies of depilatory (bald-faced?) speculation.

Least anyone out there thinks I’m being baldist in my remarks, let me encourage them. There’s one positive thing about being bald. As the old proverb says: Bald heads are soon shaven. (And cheap to keep that way, I’d guess.

My uncle Reg playing chess with me in Queenstown where we went 
for a holiday when he and his second wife came for a visit.

Re-reading this piece again in 2026 reminds me that I have had a heart attack. Last year, in March. Hmm.

My uncle, mentioned above, died just a little under a year after this was written. He increasingly suffered from Alzheimer’s (not just memory loss, it turned out) and his last year or two involved some painful episodes for his wife. He appears occasionally in one of my other blogs: https://hannaganfamily.blogspot.com/ - search for Reg (Crowl).

Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can the Voice of Television sincerely agree?

Cartoon by Ed Gamble

Perspectives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*  *  *

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

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

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

Good on yer, Jennie.

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

Holidays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s the solution?

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

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

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

 

History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kneeling

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

Welcome to Christmas 1992!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Christmas 1992!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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