FOURTH COLUMN
This column comes from the days of the 1995 Americas' Cup, when New Zealand,
my home country, grabbed the thing off the people who'd had it for far too
long. One of our local lunatics gave it a thump, but its was put back into shipshape order before the next outing.
****
Occasionally people
ask me where I get my ideas from. There's no great secret: it's a matter of
picking up opportunities, just like salesmen do when trying to sell something.
And it really isn't
hard to get ideas - I sat in the car one night waiting to collect my wife from
work and came up with several possibilities. The problem is to know what to do
with the ideas once you've got 'em!
This is the fourth
column I've started this week. With four columns sketched out you'll appreciate
I haven't lacked ideas, just the right approach. Half way through saying
something, I've begun to wonder: do I really know as much about this as I'd
like to think I do?
I've said in the
past, I'm not a journalist. And I'm not objective. Although I try to get my
facts right I'd sooner manage without any facts at all.
That's where the
difference comes between an opinionated person like myself and a real
journalist. Real journalists have their facts right before they commit
themselves to paper. I'm not always even sure which ones are my facts.
In fact I tried to
be very factual this week, but my opinions kept tripping me up.
 |
| New Zealand's team celebrating their win in 1995 |
I started to write
about the Americas' Cup - but I wasn't sure whether I had the apostrophe in the
right place, or if there really was a dash in NZ-L20.
Actually I'm glad
it's all over. Never in the field of human conflict was so much hype given to
so many by so few. (Until I checked, I'd always thought the original quotation
used the word "endeavour" instead of "conflict". Whew!
Well, that will do as the fact for this week's column.)
I was going to
write about riots, (or is it right about wriots?) both at home and abroad, and
injustice (this has nothing to do with the America's Cup) - but such a theme
required more space than I have here, (and possibly more brains).
More problems arose
when I wanted to right about the Write to Silence matter. But because I was
going to comment on what seemed to me to be a very contentious legal area, and
one in which lawyers might well have a field day, I thought I'd better give my
lawyer a call first. (And got his answerphone.)
I wanted to write
about sceptics, and evolution (separately). But reducing these dinosaur issues down to homo
sapiens size proved difficult. I could combine them, of course, and say I'm sceptical
about evolution.
I've also had in
mind to write both about banks, and bouncers. For those of you who immediately
jumped to the conclusion that I was going to advise banks to employ bouncers, I
wasn't, though it occurs to me that might yet be an idea to follow up.
When it comes to
being as opinionated and dogmatic as I am, you see, settling down to getting
the right column off the ground can be a tricky matter.
My apologies if
you've felt that you've wended your way through this maze, and found no prize
at the end. However, consider this column as a trailer, like they have at the
movies or on tv, whetting your appetite for controversies to come.
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