Rhododendrons

 First published in Column 8, 17^th Oct, 1990

 I’ve been a bit slow getting my 1990 celebration off the ground. Having to organise a year or more in advance is a bit much for a person of not excessive brain.

I got my idea when I used to do house to house deliveries round the Maori Hill area.

So dazzling were the blazing glories of rhododendrons that I’d finish up delivering in the wrong letterboxes.

It seemed to me that we need to make even more of Dunedin’s invasion by this Asian alien.

I hear some cry: We have Rhododendron Week, don’t we? Yes, we do, and there’s a great banner across Stuart St to prove it. But I don’t think we’ve really made a big enough celebration of it yet.

Just compare Rhododendron Week to Alexandra’s Blossom Festival. They’re hardly to be thought of in the same breath, are they?

I’d like to see Dunedin considered as Rhododendron City.

That’s why it’s a pity I wasn’t quicker off the mark with my 1990 ideas.

I could have made use of the oodles of money the Government was throwing at us to fund my scheme for Every Garden a Rhododendron Garden. (And maybe given some people employment in the process.)

Or my plan for replacing the dreary plants along the motorway between Burnside and Green Island with rhododendrons. Can you imagine what it would be like in October coming into Dunedin from the South?

We could plant rhododendrons all along Andersons Bay Rd – in fact in any space where they’d fit.

If they grow so well here, why not make the most of it? And if they’re so easy to maintain, why not let more people have the opportunity to plant them?

Having said all that, we’ve had a bit of a problem with some of ours this year. (Think they’re sulking because the usual gardener’s a bit crook.)

One of ours has practically keeled over – a most unusual state for the hardy rhodie – and several have decided not to flower.

The gardener says they’re putting in a ‘Year of Growth.’ Maybe it’s their Asian background.

That kind of year might be the only drawback to making more of our rhododendron season – what if the entire rhodie population decided to have a ‘Year of Growth’ together?

It’s something I hadn’t thought of until now, but no doubt horticulturalists could ensure that we had a balanced mixture of flowering plants and just plain growing ones.

I don’t think there’s much balance amongst the 18 varieties in our garden.

We’re not as organised as our neighbours. Their plants bloom in decent order. As one lot of flowers dies off the next are arriving, so there’s a continual display down the line.

Ours come out higgledy-piggledy round the garden.

Fireman Jeff causes the Winsome Princess Alice to go into a Royal Flush of Pink Pearl – under the Yellow Moon.

Anna Rose Whitney, with early Christmas Cheer, rings out Jingle Bells, and the Unknown Warrior, in Purple Splendour and bothered by a Bumblebee, raises the Blue Peter in the midst of the September Snow.

It’s all go at this time of the year.

One of the larger rhododendrons in our Oamaru garden

 Some notes to this piece:

The ‘usual gardener’ was my mother who lived with us for 21 years before going to a place where rhododendrons bloom all eternity around.

It’s only since my wife and I moved to Oamaru, a city some 110 kilometres north of Dunedin, that I’ve discovered that rhododendrons don’t necessarily look after themselves. It does depend on the climate. In Dunedin there was generally enough moisture in the air to keep them flourishing. But in Oamaru the days can be hot and dry and rhododendrons start to gasp for water.

Thus it was that not long after we arrived here, one of the rhododendrons did keel over, literally, and was found to be dead from the roots up. The following year another one turned black, and had to be taken out. A third almost died of the same problem. It turned out that the problem was mostly…lack of water.

This was the only way I managed to rescue a newish rhodie we’d brought with us from Dunedin. It had been given to me by one of my daughters for my birthday (or Christmas) and after establishing itself well the leaves started to curl up at the edges and turn dark. In retrospect there may have been another reason for its near demise: it was planted near a well-established kowhai tree, and my suspicion is that the kowhai was sucking up all available water in the area.

In the end I took the risk of moving the rhododendron, and gave it heaps of water. It’s now happily surviving in an area where the nearest trees don’t disturb it.

As for Dunedin becoming Rhododendron City…since I wrote this piece 35 years ago, the city has planted rhododendrons along the motorway – though not quite in the area I suggested – and there are vastly more of them in private gardens and public parks. The Botanical Gardens itself has a large area entirely devoted to rhododendrons; they make a terrific display for three or four months of the year.

First Column 8

 The very first Column 8 – as far as I can work out from my diary – though it wasn’t the first to be written. That appeared a week or two later. Unusually it was published without a title and was fitted in under part of a letter to the Editor that spread across at least three columns. This one appeared on the 10th October 1990. 

 Untitled.

 I see the Public Library has come to the end of a survey they’ve been doing. They were trying to find out which of the magazines they subscribe to are actually read.

I don’t know if anyone else shared a sneaky feeling I had. If my favourite magazine was cancelled, how would I ever keep up to date with it?

When faced with a survey sheet that had only a single tick on it was anyone else tempted to give it a few complimentary ones?

It’s a bit like wires that get put across roadways to count the traffic. I’d love to go and drive over them a few more times – just in case they’re planning to close the road.

When you’re only interested in certain magazines, you can fail to appreciate just how many the library actually gets each month.

Computer buffs maybe don’t know about those on gardening; fashion devotees may not notice the ones on football. In fact it was only when I had to do a bit of research that I came to appreciate just how many hundreds of different magazines the library holds.

And not only how many hundreds of different ones, but also how many years they cover: some of them date back to the 1930s.

But if I get inspired by the large numbers of magazines the Public Library carries, I have to admit it’s probably beaten hollow by those in the University Library.

And even more amazing, the stacks where the magazines are stored at this library are all wide open to view.

I did an exploratory visit down there one evening recently, trying to find out just what was held. I could have been there from tea-time to midnight and not even begun to scratch the surface, but I did come up with some peculiar items.

It makes you wonder just what the collecting policy is for periodicals at the University. Or perhaps I should say, what it’s been in the past, since a number of magazines appear to have copies up until a decade or so ago. Then they peter out.

Either there was some ruthless purging about that time or some ruthless pilfering.

Be that as it may, what is there is fascinating. Magazines in all sorts of languages, along with well-known English language ones, like Time and Newsweek. There are newspapers too: for example, the New York and the London Times.

The shelves house magazines on every sort of subject, political, literary, professional, historic, plus magazines that no one every hears of anymore or never heard of at all. There are copies of Blackwood’s dating from last century containing original stories by Dickens.

I think my favourite curiosity was this – several shelves spanning several decades of an English women’s magazine. What academic use would that have?

Perhaps many years ago some lady member of the staff dreamed up a crafty plan. In order to read her favourite magazine over her morning cuppa, in the most economical way, she filled in a little form – and let the library pay her subscription.

Monarch Range advertisement from the October 1928 Country Gentleman
courtesy Don O'Brien - Wikimedia Commons

 The last couple of paragraphs caused a member of the University staff to write and inform me that my suspicion about a female staff member was far off the track. The magazines were held to keep track of cultural changes not just in such things as fashion, or homemaking, but in changes in thinking and viewpoints over several decades.  

Apologies

 The following is one of the earliest columns I produced for Column 8. It was published on the 14th November, 1990. Paul Holmes was a well-known broadcaster with strong opinions; Richard Prebble was at this time an MP. 

Apologies

 Back at the beginning of the year, so I’m informed, Paul Holmes put his foot in it and said some things on his show that he shouldn’t have about Mr Prebble.

An apology, on air, was demanded.

I didn’t catch the apology, but it took 38 pages recently from the Broadcasting Standards Authority to say that the aforesaid apology didn’t appear genuine.

Though at times Mr Holmes can open a festering wound to great effect, his usual approach to things that come within firing range is to shoot them down with both barrels. Fast.

So I can’t say I’m surprised at any lack of sincerity.

The BSA felt our beloved Paul was experienced enough to be capable of apologising on television, without making it look as though he didn’t mean it!

Are you with me?

Apparently it’s all right to apologise and not mean it – as long as you don’t show you don’t mean it.

The report reminded me of an incident in my shop recently. I hope a certain little boy’s mother won’t object to my mentioning it.

I’ll apologise in advance – though in view of what I’ve been saying about Mr Holmes above, my apology may not appear to have much substance.

We have a toy box in the shop to occupy small children while their parents are browsing. The young man in question, a pre-schooler, became attached to a small wheel-shaped article with little suction caps around the perimeter.

As the toy is of no great value to us, I should have paid attention to my instincts and told him to take it home.

His mother spied something she wanted, and bought it. Having done so, they left, and I thought nothing more about the little toy. Some minutes later, there was something of a hullaballoo at the door. The boy and his mother had returned. She placed the little suction toy on the counter.

The youth was red-faced, and in great fury at having to return the ‘stolen’ toy. His mother asked him what he was going to say to The Man.

His lips clamped shut, and he looked ready to explode. His mother repeated her request. No response except that he backed off a little.

I should have been warned.

His mother asked him once more to say what he was supposed to say, and he said it.

It came out like a blast from a factory whistle at knock-off time. ‘SORRRRRRYYYYY!!!!!’ Amazing that such a little fellow could produce so much noise.

I think even Queen Victoria on her pedestal across in the Gardens might have been shaken. (Shaken but not amused.) Certainly a number of leaves fell off the trees.

The lad vanished behind a stack of books, and I heard him mutter in a rather disgusted tone, ‘Sorry…sorry!’

His mother looked at me blankly. ‘I don’t think he means it,’ she said.

After reading about Paul Holmes, I think the little fellow was in famous company.

Statue of Queen Victoria, Queens Gardens, Dunedin 
Courtesy Lisa Watkins, Wikimedia Commons

The Little Man in the Background

 First published Sept 1988 in Mouthpiece, the official journal of the Brass Band Association of New Zealand. The comments should not be taken seriously; this was meant to be humorous and ironic. Equally, writing as though all brass band players were male is a sign of the age of this piece. There were in fact a number of top female brass players in the bands, just as there were excellent female accompanists in the Competitions.

 Three years ago I became an official appendix – sorry, official accompanist to the Trust Bank St Kilda Band. In other words I have the privilege of travelling to National Competitions at someone else’s expense, in return for a small service.

Before this I had normally accompanied singers, who are a law unto themselves. Many amateur singers know little music, consider the words irrelevant, and are only interested in the ‘voice.’ I have found bandsmen, on the other hand, to be marvellous musicians for the most part, and very conscious of the composer’s directions.

However, there are times when the ‘traditional’ way of playing a piece imposes itself somewhat on the composer’s intentions. Accompanists, Beware! At such times, the soloist may take a mighty pause – not just for breath – while you go gaily on; he may rallentando where you see only allegro; he may give great expressive emphasis to a phrase that appears to you to be as original as something written at the time Adam’s sons were blowing their own trumpets.

For all this, the bandsmen I know are a conscientious lot who apparently spend hours practicing, building up those muscular lips and lungs, and thinking, living and drinking in (no, not just drinking) band music.

So we will arrive at the Competition having spent a good deal of time rehearsing. In spite of this and the marvellous performances given in the privacy of our own homes, something can go haywire, and the poor soloist may play as though he’s sightreading the entire piece. Very distressing for all concerned, including the accompanist, who knows just how well this person can play.

At my first Competition, I had spent a lot of time with a cornettist, whom I reckoned must be the top favourite. A day or two before he was due to play, he developed that bane of bandsmen, a cold sore. It so threw him off course that in the performance he played only a page of music – about thirty seconds’ worth – before vanishing from the hall in frustration. At times like this the accompanist feels like someone who’s painted himself into a corner. Does he carry on and whistle to his own accompaniment, in a vain attempt to persuade the judge that all is well? Preferably not. He tries to leave with dignity, while the audience shuffle their feet and mumble, and the friends of the soloist depart more rapidly than usual.

It was here, also, I first encountered that most strange of rituals: the Draw. In my naivety, I expected that the person first on the list would play first. No, sir! And nobody told me that the number playing doesn’t have anything to do with the number in the ‘Draw,’ and that the person on the door may be talking in programme number or draw number when you enquire who’s on next, and that to be drawn first is not a privilege, and last is just as bad, and that sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be anybody who know who plays when! Fortunately, this year, someone decided wisely to hold the draws earlier and we were able to sit down in our motel and figure out how I could be in three or four places at once.

This was a great relief. The previous year, in Auckland, I had been shuttled from an upstairs hall in one building to a house in a street across a traffic-congested main road and back again in order to find out where I was supposed to be. Perhaps bandsmen have built-in radars for this sort of thing. For pianists, it’s exhausting. The soloist will usually be in the right place at the right time. The pianist has a tendency to come in blowing and panting from having climbed two flights of stairs. He is then expected to look calm and collected – and remember who and what he’s supposed to be accompanying.

At least in National Comps, there are no cuts. We play the piece from whoa to go – including those nineteenth century epics that require the pianist to play the same chord twenty-nine times in a row – and then do a repeat!

In local competitions, the soloist may decide to cut this variation or that – sometimes at the last minute. Unfortunately you find the previous person who used the music has marked different sections to be cut. In the heat of the moment you ask: which cut is in? (Or is it which cut is out?)

Other bandsmen may present you with a sheaf of photocopied pages that appear to be in order; until you start to play. Worse, if they are not tacked together, down they slide off the stand and float merrily around the room to the accompaniment of the soloist’s cadenza. You hope that he’s still got another four or five fusillades to go while you grab the music and try to get it to stand up straight.

To be fair, it is only a few soloists who decide at the last minute they are going to  have a blow. Most give me at least two days’ notice!

For all these ups and downs, accompanying the quality soloists of today is an exciting business, especially when they play contemporary music. Here the accompanist is no longer treated like background music to films – ‘good if not noticed’ – but like partner. May the partnership be long and fruitful.

 

A few comments: I should have been used to having a bandsmen leave the stage before he’d finished; on several occasions over the years, singers had done the same thing to me.

And it was unfair to write as though singers in general were far less capable at their art than bandsmen. I’ve played for many top quality singers.

And if the music floated off the music stand I had only myself to blame. Back in the mid-sixties I was accompanist for a group called The Opera Quartet. We not only toured the entire country performing at up to three high schools a day, but did the occasional concert in the evening for paying audiences. At one of these, my music slid off the stand and onto the floor. The singer carried on; I scrabbled around for the music. After the concert an audience member came up to me and, without much subtlety, indicated that it was my responsibility to make sure the music didn’t go wandering, and that I had spoiled the concert. It was a tough but important lesson.

 

Learning at an ACE School

I recently came across a clipping from the 80s, a report I did for the local newspaper, the Otago Daily Times. I was working as an assistant pastor at the Assembly of God church in Dunedin at that time, and the church had opened an ACE School for its children. ACE : Accelerated Christian Education. This brief report on how the children learned gives some idea of their daily work.  

At one Dunedin school the pupils decide how much work they are going to do each day.

Children attending the Assembly of God Christian School, in South Dunedin, set their own goals by writing down how many pages of work they expect to complete each day.

They learn five subjects and if they do not complete the amount of work they set themselves then they have to finish it at home that night.

Most of the time, however, they get through this work in about two hours, and that leaves the rest of the day for sport, art, reading and writing stories, music and projects.

Children work at their own pace: in fact their workbooks are called Paces.

That means they do not have to worry about someone else being able to do their maths faster than them, and they do not need to worry if other children can spell better.

Each child works through a few pages out of each of their five Paces each day – when these are revision Paces, the children find they can go faster if they want.

There are five core subjects; English and word-building (which work on spelling and grammar), science, social studies, and maths.

The children may have to do two or three tests every two weeks and will be expected to get at least 80 percent in each test, or else do the whole Pace again.

The good news is that children have every chance of success if they did the work throughout the Pace in a careful way.

In fact, it is normal for the children to get more than 90 percent regularly – often 100 percent – and very rare that they have to repeat a Pace.

The children even correct their own work, most of the time, from special answer books, and cannot go on until each section is right.

You might think that it would be easy to cheat, but remember when children do a test they have to know the work – or repeat it!

What does the teacher do during all this time?

She is kept very busy: even though most of the work is explained in the Pace, the children still need to read sections of their Paces aloud to the teacher, and to  have help with things they do not understand.

Photo courtesy of Mikasa Schools

Jake Atlas

Libraries have always called to me, in whatever town or city I am. 

When I used to work in the Dunedin City Council, right in the heart of the city, the new, much-enlarged Library was built right next door. I can remember the first day it opened to the public: I ran out of my office at morning tea, took a few steps across a newly-built courtyard, and was in the Library door, racing up and down the stairs to see what was on each new floor, and amazed that the old library, which had seemed big enough to me before had somehow expanded into this five-storey building. 

I used to say it was my second home, and I got to know all sorts of nooks and crannies. 

Four and a half years ago my wife and I moved to a smaller town. My first impressions of the library here were not great: it seemed cramped (it was) and there didn't seem a lot of choice - something I was wrong about. Nevertheless, I decided that perhaps at last I could, in a modest way, fulfil a dream I'd always had of working in a library. 

I asked if they took on volunteers to do menial tasks. Yes, they did. I told them I'd be interested, and within a week or two I had a job putting books back on shelves. At most it took an hour and a half, and some days, if the numbers of returned books weren't large, I'd be home after an hour. 

The best thing about the job was that it proved that this 'little' library had a large number of books I'd never seen, and better still, it forced me to look at subject areas I wouldn't normally have bothered with before. 

There was one other bonus. A moveable trolley of books that were now redundant, and which were available to readers to take home for a dollar a pop. But for me, being a worker in the place - I was permitted to take any book I wanted for free. 

This was how, in the middle of last year, I came across Rob Lloyd Jones' series of four books about a character called Jake Atlas. As Lloyd Jones notes: they're part Mission Impossible and part Indiana Jones. 

Jake and his twin sister, Pan, are the children of a seemingly dull couple of parents who vanish early in the first story, Jake Atlas and the Tomb of the Emerald Snake. Jake doesn't do well at school - he seems to be a troublemaker, and his twin sister, who has a brilliant brain, dresses as a Goth. But once released from school, and 'ordinary life,' they prove to be a formidable pair. Through a series of over-the-top adventures they manage not only to find their parents (who are also far more formidable than the the twins had thought) but to chase down a group who are, as you might expect, intent on taking over the world. 

During the course of the four books this ongoing chase invariably results in the destruction of a number of significant world-renowned archaeological treasures - usually unintentionally at the hands of Jake. 

The first two books (the second is The Hunt for the Feathered God) have a similar format, lots of excitement, impossible adventures, and a huge climax. 

And then Lloyd Jones takes a considerable risk with his characters, especially Jake. In the third book, The Quest for the Crystal Mountain, which is mostly set in Tibet, Jake starts to see the world through different eyes, aided in particular by a young Tibetan monk. At first Jake pooh-poohs the values of the spiritual life that the monks have lived by for centuries, but by the end of the book he's begun to change: perhaps the goal he and his family have been focused on isn't the most important thing. 

This may not suit all readers, even though the third book is crammed full of adventures, like the previous two. The fourth in the series, The Keys of the Apocalypse, continues down the unusual path Lloyd Jones has chosen to take. Much bigger in scope, with a 'villain' who's not even human, this book allows Jake to grow as a person. 

I wrote to Lloyd Jones commending him about the way in which this book showed Jake gaining considerable insight into himself and into his actions. He replied - and I hope he won't mind me quoting his email - '...the ending to the series did cause a little disagreement between myself and the publisher, who pushed for a larger, action based finale. I was able to convince them that a quieter ending would feel more powerful (it wasn’t as if the series was already lacking in action) and luckily they trusted me.'

Not all his readers agreed with the direction the books took. Some reviewers on Goodreads, for instance, seemed to miss the point that the books weren't all whiz and bang; others were full of praise for the way in which the series 'grew.'  

Apart from this somewhat unusual turn-away from writing four books all with the same formula - which Lloyd Jones could have done - the books have a wonderful first person viewpoint full of subtle humour and clever character drawing. They're immensely readable - the pages fly by, and there are no slow sections. I'd recommend them to middle grade boys in particular, but not just to them. As an adult reader I was never bored, and never felt as though the author was trying too hard to achieve his purposes. 

Top quality stories, though I'd advise you to read them in order. 

For better or worse?

 While searching for something else today I came across the printed copy of the first article I ever wrote that received a payment: a huge payment of $25. Note the slight formal tone – it was published in the Dunedin Star Midweek’s Soap Box column, on July 27th, 1988. For the sake of history, I'm adding it to my blog, outdated and all as it may be...

When it comes to the matter of a casino in Dunedin, it is difficult not to let my bias run riot. However, to be fair, it is necessary to look at the subject objectively. Some people believe it would be the salvation of our struggling tourist industry. Others see it only in terms of the havoc it could wreak on our society. Are there any good sides to casinos?

The president of the Tourist Industry Federation, Mr Barry Thomas, claims that tourists require entertainment at night, after having viewed our magnificent scenery during the day. He says casinos provide this. obviously, as a city that expects tourists to visit we have to provide an all-round experience for them. are the people who come to see our scenery in fact the same kind of tourists who want to spend time and lots of money in a casino. Can we cater for both?

Certainly I know from experience that overseas visitors expect far more at any tourist place they go to. They are used to souvenir shops, eating places, and even some kind of alternative entertainment. Do we need to concentrate more on this side and less on adding to the attractions we already have? Can we make our present attractions really viable?

The Tasmanian experience seems to crop up again and again in arguments about casinos. (In fact, there are two casinos on the island, one in Hobart and another in Launceston. There are also casinos in Adelaide, Darwin, Perth, Alice Springs and the Gold Coast.)

We hear of the ‘exemplary organisation and behaviour’ witnessed there. certainly that seems to be a plus. In fact, for those businessmen tendering for the latest casino development in Australia, there has already been some upset. Any hint of wrongdoing in the past life of the company has been investigated.

That seems good. I say ‘seems’ because we would have to assume that our own council, or the Government, was prepared to go to the same lengths.

Now that is fine at the outset. There may be no obvious crime in the running of the casino, but what about ‘hidden’ crimes? What about crimes committed by those who are unable to control their gambling addiction? No specific record is kept of this problem area, but it doesn’t take much imagination to realise that many people are affected in a direct and indirect way by the problem.

We have been told that the casino in Dunedin would produce 500 jobs. That sounds excellent. I don’t know of any other industry which has been set up of late which could promise so much. However, this assumes that the tourists will come, and bring their largesse with them. perhaps they will, if Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch don’t all decide to get in on the act as well.

Are we capable of providing the kind of service that these big spenders insist on- or at least are used to?

I remember stopping over in Los Angeles one night, and having ‘breakfast’ at some strange time of the morning – about 3 am, I think. The waitress who served us was as bright and pleasant at the time of day as one could wish. Doe he have that attitude to service here in Dunedin? We have tended to be so egalitarian in our approach to each other that we find it difficult to give service any longer. The evidence is in most of our shops.  

We would have to work hard at our attitudes to provide the kind of service overseas guests expect – even when they are rude with it!

So much for the good points. Unfortunately it seems to me that the bad points far outweigh the good. I’ve already alluded to the addictive aspect of casinos. One writer even suggests that pensioners and beneficiaries might leave their Housie behind and take up ‘something more sophisticated.’ I can see a lot of hard-up people in these categories, if that’s the case.

Even if the casino were to provide video games at 20c, 50c or more, as they do in Australia, it isn’t difficult to see the speed with which lots of money would go down the drain.

One Australian writers says: ‘The only consistent winners in Australian gambling are the casinos.’ And it has been shown in psychological studies of gamblers that they are unable to appreciate the fact that they lose far more than they gain.

We see this in race-course betting in our country now, and in Lotto, and the Golden Kiwi. Another writer says that even in Australia, local residents account for a large part of casino patronage. So where is the advantage to those who live here? If we are only going to be putting more of our money into someone else’s pockets what benefit is that to Dunedin?

Social service agencies in Australia generally agree that casinos only add to the problems of addicts and their families. Again, in the long run, it is the local who pays, either through his taxes, or into some kind of charity.

Big businessmen and investors would perhaps feel that a casino and its subsidiaries would be worth putting their money into. But the Australian Business Journal actually recommends the reverse. They say that the shareholding returns are not very high, and very inconsistent.

Finally what effect would it have on the quality of life in Dunedin? Do we really want a city that goes ahead at any cost? Do we want a city where the high-life is the norm, and where the gap between the rich and the poor gets greater each year?

We already have a much more stable ‘tourist’ population in the city, for several months of the year. The accompanying industry provides employment for a considerable number of people. I’m speaking of the University. Is Otago University as well-known as Cambridge or Oxford? What would it take to make it so? And wouldn’t the side-effects be far more beneficial socially than a business that doesn’t give tuppence of the victims?

The buildings that contain the Southern Cross Hotel
and Casino

()()()()()()()()()

The Casino came, and stayed, so presumably it's profitable for someone. Along with the Scenic Hotel Southern Cross it stretches across three buildings. The tallest of these is the former State Insurance Company building, which was relatively new when I got my first adult job there. The 'State' occupied almost the entire six storeys. Today all its work is done online. 

Baffle-gab

First published in Column 8 in the 1990s, specific date unknown at the moment...

Second-hand bookshops and an interest in curious words sometimes combine together for me in a serendipitous way. Last week, for the sum of $4.50, I purchased a book called Words.  That book, (by Paul Dickson), is the source of this column. (Please apply to me in writing via the Midweek* for a translation of any unfamiliar words!)

By the way, I hope no reader of this column is Hippistic, ie, has a philistine's resentment towards curiosity about words. They won't enjoy what follows.

Let's begin with body words: did you realise that a sciapodous person is unwise to have podobromhidrosis? Or that the philtrum on your face is found below the vomer? And that the feeling you get before sneezing has now been defined as, wait for it, antishoopation.

Are you a person unable to cope? You're in a state of copelessness. However, if you merely put your foot in your mouth at every point, you suffer from dontopedalogy. I have a friend who's a glot, and she knows it! (In fact it's becoming feaseless for her to keep hoarding everything.)

How's this for cliche mode? At this point in time, many of my columns sit on the back burner, biting the bullet and cognizant of a future interfacing in meaningful dialogue with the private sector, and though I try to reinvent the wheel within the context of their two-way street, the underutilization of viability visibly moves me; my obligational limitation towards them is painfully obvious, yet to do a number on them is like nailing jelly to a wall.

Did you know that gutters, furniture, ears, widows, tails and rivers don't necessarily have anything to do with streets, houses, faces, husbands, dogs and banks? They do, however, have plenty to do with some versions of the thing you're holding in your hand.** 

If your hotel room was numbered 14A, and you couldn't find a room 13, someone would be guilty of cledonism. Cledonism, (and that's an example of epibole), is similar to the use of escape words. Gosh! is it? And did you know we could all be lipogrammatics merely by counting to 1000?

Fed up with saying the same things about your sozzled friends? Try some of these: his elevator's stalled; lit up like a kite; mug blotto; needing a reef taken in; is fishy about the gills; is hicksius-doccius; is half-sober; is a drunkulet; slurks; has a guest in the attic.... Benjamin Franklin described the state of inebriation as making "indentures with one's legs." The noise some sloshed people make is akin to P G Wodehouse's description of a pig eating: "making a plobby, wofflesome sound."

But enough of the fairly ripped. How about some new-style (or long-forgotten) insults? A clinchpoop or a clodpoll, a fustilugs or a quakebuttock, a lobscouse or a yazzihamper, a skipkennel or a tatterdemalion.

And here are three bindles. First, Gore might need to reconsider its name. I see that gore means a small, irregular piece of land that can't be fitted into a township. So the township's name is a paradox - a township that's a small, irregular piece of land that can't be fitted into a township. What?

Second, one of the prime duties of this father is to carry, at all times, an extra muckender. Just in case someone has the follow-up to antishoopation.

And third, how are mountains formed?  By orogeny, of course.

Lastly, wordmakers over the last couple of decades have tried to improve he/she and other personal pronouns. Here are some fizzers: co, cos, coself; e and lr (!); et; hesh, hirm, hizer and wan or wen (as in policewan or firewen); jhe (pronounced gee); per; thon. Good grief. For Mr, Mrs and Ms we could have one abbreviation, Pn - pronounced, of course, "Person." And to ameliorate the much maligned mother-in-law, how about kin-mother, our-ma, or motherette? (Sounds like that one would spend all her time doing the family's washing.)

Hmmm, after this quisquillous collection, I think I'd better absquatulate out of here and become circumforaneous.

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*Midweek: the weekly free newspaper in which Column 8 used to be published

** The printed newspaper, in other words. 

Flabbergastation

First published in Column 8, some time in the 1990s 

Flabbergastation isn't a word you'll hear very often. (The emphasis is on "station.") One of the local radio announcers flung it past my ears while describing Dunedin's welcome to the America's Cup winners.

Curiously enough, flabbergastation describes the state in which I've found myself over the last week or two, a state in which I feel as though I must see both sides (or more), of every current argument. It's difficult to be appropriately opinionated when your perspective is stereoscopic.

So when I set out to write about New Zealanders' joy and elation over the America's Cup win, (which I heard on the radio while snivelling with a cold), I'm held back by other concerns as to why we're getting so excited.

We have more people turn out to shout and throw bits of shredded paper than ever appeared at the original VE celebrations we've just been remembering, yet the "victory" we're celebrating isn't anywhere near as historic. I have everybody telling me that it's going to set NZ on its feet financially, yet I suspect the trickle-down effect we'll see here will be about equal to the sweat trickling off Russell Coutt's nose as he sits in a becalmed Black Magic on a windless day.

So I don't know how to try and de-flabbergast myself on that subject. Even worse is the way my mind has been swayed by how/whether/when we settle the issues raised by the Treaty of Waitangi.

I mean, I thought I had it all sussed. I'd finally got hold of the fact that we white New Zealanders are SOOOHH guilty of everything that we should just admit defeat and start leaping into the sea like a pack of lunatic lemmings. I understood that we had no culture, no history, no understanding, no sensitivity, no mana - and hardly any womana - to speak of. I was prepared to believe all the articles I read that told me I was the one having to do the apologising and repenting.

And then, blow me down, along comes this fellow, Stuart C Scott, who at the age of 74 is prepared to put his money where his mouth is, pay to publish his own non-pc book, The Travesty of Waitangi, and say everybody's got it wrong. The Maori have been conning us, he says, and we shouldn't pay them another penny.

That's another subject I no longer know how to de-flabbergast myself on.

Nor on this. The police finally decide to target persistent drink-driving offenders by a surveillance operation which may stop these drivers going out and slaughtering innocent victims. I think to myself, now that's good.

And then I read that the civil liberties people disagree. "I would be opposed in principle to any method of policing which targets individuals not on the basis of what they're doing at the time but on what they've done in the past or might do in the future," says Dr Rodney Harrison.

Well, yes, we must, (mustn't we?), protect crims as much as non-crims - I think...I mean I wouldn't put any security systems round my house, no sir! I mean if one driver has 24 convictions, (and killed someone through his drunken driving), I wouldn't want to stand in the way of his individual rights - would I?

And lastly, most flabbergastating of all, thousands of innocent NZ users of the Internet have the spectre of censorship hanging over them. These people, whom MP Trevor Rogers calls, "nerds and wallies and some people who wanna stick their faces in custard," are just the sort to find out how to blow up schools, or build bombs, or spend their days looking at trite pornographic pictures and reading uninspiring sexual graffiti. None of them can be trusted, you know!

On the other hand, do I want innocent children being propositioned by perverts and paedophiles?

Flabbergastation all the way.....

Surprise - self-portrait by Jeffrey Isaac

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

 One of those posts that for some reason didn't make it online when it was first written. Just rediscovered it and thought it was worth adding here. It's a review of what turned out to be an unexpected marvel. I think I caught up on it some years after it was made, on a streaming service. 

The notion behind The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was always going to cause difficulties for the writer of this movie: firstly in the outworking of the idea that a man could be born old and gradually get younger – it has potential for disaster all along the line – and perhaps more importantly from a dramatic point of view, the loss of the main actor, the star, from the last ten minutes of the movie, at a time when he’s perhaps most needed to complete the thing.

 Surprisingly these two factors are, in general, overcome.  They still cause the movie to be less than it might have been, nevertheless Benjamin Button proved to be a much better movie than I expected. I think it’s too long; there’s an overindulgence in extraneous material. There are two framing stories rather than one (the backwards clock is interesting but essentially fluffery in terms of the movie itself, as is the hummingbird theme, there because hummingbirds can fly backwards). The affair with the spy’s wife in Russia, though superbly done, contributes nothing to the ongoing story. The red herring of the way in which a series of delays can cause someone to be in the wrong place at the wrong time is a great piece of filmmaking, full of detail, and yet it actually has nothing to do with the story. The summing-up piece at the end which points up the different gifts of various characters. Is it necessary? Nope, we’ve already seen these gifts throughout the movie. 

Take all these out and it would have been a much leaner movie, and maybe more effective.  Yet, perhaps to contradict what I’ve already said, all these ‘extras’ are actually very enjoyable, if you allow yourself just to take them as they come. They bring a kind of Dickensian flavour to the film in the sense that Dickens was never averse to adding in extraneous but rich material. (His book, The Pickwick Papers, has several short stories included in it, usually told by characters who have nothing to do with the main story. He avoided this technique in his later books, but never got over the use of including characters who wouldn’t be missed if they hadn’t been there. Another 19^th century writer, Victor Hugo, often stops the story in Les Miserables to write an essay on one of the aspects of his story, such as convents, or the Paris sewers.) 

In Benjamin Button there are also too many themes: missing fathers, loss of time, wasting time, the value of individual gifts, death in the midst of life. Yet within the context of this particular movie, the embarressment de riches somehow works, and keeps the viewer’s mind active. There’s no single straightforward path through this movie.  

Brad Pitt plays the innocent ‘old’ man as someone with eyes wide open to the extraordinary nature of the world, a man without guile. I think it’s a superb piece of characterization, perhaps one of the best things he’s ever done. Cate Blanchett always has a kind of severity about her, and yet this works well in the complex nature of her character as Button’s lifelong love. Curiously, his other passion, played by Tilda Swinton, looks so much like Blanchett at times, that for a while I thought it was the same actress playing both roles. There may be an intention behind this. The vast cast of other actors are all excellent in roles big and small.     

The photography by Claudio Miranda is superb, always at one with the tone of the movie.   Shot after shot uses colour to heighten the emotion of the scene. Yes, I know this isn’t unusual in movies, but it’s certainly done with great art here. Miranda has worked with both Brad Pitt and the director of this movie, David Fincher, before. (Fincher also directed the highly acclaimed, Social Network.)  There’s obviously a compatibility at work. 

And the special effects are seamless: it’s hard to know where Brad Pitt ends and one of the other actors who play his role begins – or vice versa. Several younger actors are credited with the role – though it’s obvious which ones play Button in the last stages of his life, it’s not so obvious in the early stages. 

 This is the sort of movie to take your time over. Don’t be put off by its length (some 166 minutes). Accept it as it is, and enjoy its trips down side alleys, and its delight in human beings. 

Interesting montage of the various stages 
of Button's life. 
Sorry, I've lost the address of the site it came from.

Remembering Nuns

First published in Column 8, date unknown, but some time in the 1990s.

 In the memory course I did a while ago I was supposed to learn how to remember where I'd put things years before, and how to recognize faces from the distant past. 

One face eludes me. Try as I might, I can't remember the face of the teacher, (a nun), who tied me to my desk with a belt because my childish exuberance was somewhat over the top! 

On the other hand, during a recent visit to a convent, (for a friend's Jubilee), I was amazed at the phenomenal memories nuns appear to have, particularly those who claimed they'd taught me at primary school, forty years ago.

 (None of the sisters took responsibility for tying me to the desk, however, and my memory failed to recognize any face that connected to my "traumatic" experience.) 

I don't think these ladies have done a memory course - it just seems to come naturally. If I was a teacher, I'd find pupils' faces blurring into one big Mr Blobby after a few years. 

For instance, the sister who greeted us at the door instantly knew me, and said she'd taught me. As usual I had to ask who she was, and still remembered her not at all. 

Perhaps it's because when I was a lad all the nuns wore long, black, person-enclosing garments that hid them almost entirely from view. The only identifiable parts were the hands and the face. 

I'm not good at remembering hands at the best of times - and faces that used to be tightly framed in black change out of all sight when viewed in ordinary everyday gear. 

But not all the nuns at the afternoon tea were unremembered. One I met again had had the misfortune to follow in the footsteps of my favourite music-teaching nun of all time, the one I adored, and for whom I actually wept when she said she was being transferred. 

This other lady, whose qualities and abilities, while different, were no doubt as excellent, suffered badly by comparison, through no fault of her own. 

Naturally, she remembered more about the past than I did. (Do they keep dossiers?)

She spoke of my poor practice record and the strain it had on my mother's nerves, as well as my embarrassment at bringing her flowers (perhaps as a peace offering). I apparently came half an hour early to escape the unwanted attention of my mates. 

I remember none of this - surely I used to practice perfectly? 

Embarrassed about bringing flowers? Never.

Later, as I was sitting down balancing my cup of tea in one hand and in the other one of those soft, fluffy cakes filled with mock cream and smattered with icing sugar, (the sort that sticks to your beard and can't be wiped off because you don't have a third hand), I was approached by a six foot vision from the past. Someone I could never forget. 

This nun, holding a tray in her hands and encouraging everyone to eat more cakes, turned out to be my first and favourite music-teacher of all time. And she was the only nun that day who didn't instantly recognise me.

(She soon made it clear that this was hardly surprising: when I was seven, I didn't have a beard.) Her delight was even greater than mine, and she greeted me with the warmth of someone to whom everyone is a long-standing friend.

She was as full of beans as ever, words high-tailing it off her tongue as though she had so much to say the day would be over before she'd finished. And she still had an enthusiasm for life that hasn't changed in forty years.

It's curious how we so easily forget the names and faces of some people who leave an unpleasant mark on our memories. This sister, however, had made music a delight to her pupils, opening up a world formerly unexplored. More than that, she filled life with laughter. How could anyone forget her?

Dinosaurs....are bores

 First published in Column 8 in 1993 (and later online under my Poems and Short Fiction blog in 2019). It relates to my surprise that the scientific world seems so obsessed with 'selling' dinosaurs to children. 

I’ve had enough of dinosaurs,

Especially Hadrosaurs.

Dinos must rank, I think, as the

All-time greatest bores.

Who cares about some fifty tonnes of

Hefty Brontosaurus

Shoving all his weight around and asking:

‘Don’t you adore us?’

Who wants to meet and greet some

Rampant Iguanodon,

Marketing his lizard look

Until I feel quite put upon.

Who gives a hoot about a coot called

Rex Tyrannosaurus,

And whether on his nastier days he’d

Gouge and rip and gore us?

Euparkeria, Hypsilophodon, your

Names trip off my tongue –

NOT!

Triceratops, Coelophysis, your

Praises they ain’t sung.

Compsognathus, Dimorphodon, you

Thought you ruled the land;

You missing links, you’re all extinct –  I

Wish you all were banned.

You poor deficient dinosaurs, you

Denizens long gone.

Scarce good it did you, lumpy brutes, being

Weighed up by the tonne.

Go back where you belonged, you lot, in your

Dim Cretaceous time,

And let me try and end this rot with a

Non-Jurassic rhyme.

My wife (on the right) and I disguised as dinosaurs
at a grandchild's themed party. 

De-bearded

First published in Column 8, Sept 1993.  

Fooled into thinking I was good-looking - even handsome - by photographs more than a quarter of a century old, my wife and family had long nagged me to shave off my beard. I resisted the conspiracy to tame this full-blooded feature of masculinity.

However, while my wife was away overseas, I decided (quite unaffected by outside pressures), to see if she would know me at the airport if I met her beardless.

The weekend before she came home, I took scissors, along with a borrowed razor, (fully intending to return to my hairy state within a week), and shaving cream. Breathing deep into my diaphragm, I proceeded to dispense with the facial hair.

Excitement welled up as I embarked on a voyage of rediscovery. I hacked away with the scissors: a reasonable-looking character emerged. Hmm, not too bad.

Then I completed the job. And all those movies where someone's face changes before your eyes - usually for the worse - came back to haunt me.

The youth of the 25 year-old photos was gone. Double-chinned, a bejowelled, bothered and bewildered stranger appeared, like Rip Van Winkle after his lengthy slumber.

I could never confront the world like this. The beard must resume its groundcover as soon as I'd faced my wife.

Sunday morning at church. Every reaction possible. People recognizing me instantly - and laughing! Complementary people: my smile now seen in its fullest glory. Uncomplementary people - like myself - who couldn't wait for my face to go into hiding again. People who knew me but thought I'd changed my hairstyle. And those who didn't know me at all...!

"Mr Crowl," one bearded friend said, "I feel betrayed."

Subsequent meetings with friends and acquaintances convince me that people recognize other people in very individual ways. What else would account for such varied reactions?

On Monday, a shopkeeper and a librarian, people who know me only as a walking beard, recognized me without difficulty. Others recognized the glasses and squeezed-up eyes, but didn't register the loss of the lower part of my face. I feel like someone in those children's books where the top halves of the faces can be matched up with all manner of lower halves.

People say I look twenty years younger. This is odd, since they used to say before that I never looked my age. I must have plummeted back into adolescence. (Some say I look older. Good grief!)

As soon as I move away from my normal context, many people totally fail to recognize me. Anonymous, I melt into the crowd. I'm the victim of beardist remarks, from both men and women, as people's deep anti-beard emotions come out of the closet. All this on top of skin irritations, nicks, rashes, and the sting of aftershave.

Tuesday, my wife returned to Dunedin. At the airport, she screamed, laughed and cried - but avoided hysteria. I've been bearded for 22 years; longer than we've been married.

"I hate it!" she said, which was a relief - so do I. But that was her first reaction. Later she began to enjoy the smoothness of the face - and the smell of the aftershave. It was like having a new husband - at least in part.

I told her I've got plenty of smooth bits on my body that don't need to be razored - the palms of my hands, for instance, or the backs of my ears. If necessary, I can always douse these with aftershave.

The photo above is, at present, a remembrance of things past. Don't despair, fellow bearded ones: negotiations currently underway are hopeful of my naked face returning to its former glory.

Inventive

First published in Column 8, date unknown, but sometime in the 1990s. 

Though only thirty years old, the discussions in this column seem like they come from a different century. Ah, wait! - they do.

Getting irritable with things that don’t do quite what’s expected of them has its advantages. We humans delight in setting to and improving the aforesaid irritable things, or else inventing something altogether new.

I know it sounds chauvinistic to say it, but usually it’s the men who do the improving or inventing. Perhaps this is because they have more of a tendency to tinker.

I’m not trying to be sexist here. I once began writing an article on women inventors but found very little information. There was one American book on the subject, but nothing on New Zealand women inventors. (If anyone can help, I’d still be interested.)

Back to Invention. I’m sure irritation has its place, but I suspect many inventors started out as children who took things apart to see how they were made and couldn’t put them together again.

I’m not an inventor – I can barely take something apart in the first place – but I do have ideas for improvements on things.

For instance, I’ve long wondered why Telecom doesn’t have some way of letting you know that Call Minder has recorded a call. As it works now you have to remember to pick up the phone after you’ve been using it in order to see whether you’ve had another call while you were chatting. Since this takes discipline, calls can sometimes be minded for quite a while.

This obviously irritated some other inventive mind and a company in the US has produced a little piece of equipment called VisuAlert* which notifies you that a call has been recorded, by lighting up its ‘smile.’ (The machine is little more than a white pad with a painted red smile connected to your phone.)

Simple enough, but why doesn’t Telecom just use the red light on telephones for the same purpose? Why buy a VisuAlert when there’s one virtually installed?

Another thing that puzzles me, and which I’m sure I’d do something about if I had the first clue where to start, is this. We hear a lot about water becoming a precious resource – we’re using it to such an extent that we may find it rationed in the next century.

Taking the salt out of the ocean is the obvious solution (desalinisation), but the problem with this idea is the expense. Yet one fishing town in north-west Mexico, Puerto Lobos,** has its own solar still. This produces 3000 litres of fresh water in the summer, and 1000 in the winter. Hardly big time, but a start all the same.

Now here’s a great invention, albeit at this point almost as costly as desalinisation ($899 in the US). A VCR that not only keeps track of the programmes you’ve recorded, their date, channel number and length, but also tells you which tape you’ve recorded them on. That beats flicking through endless tapes to find the one important bit.

I’m not convinced of the value of this next invention, however – a shower valve that ‘remembers’ the temperature you set for your last shower.

Now I know Jeeves always used to run Bertie Wooster’s bath at just the right temperature, and I think I’m right in saying that Bunter did the same for Lord Peter Wimsey, but do we really need the extravagance of a mechanical butler that can drip the water to the right degree?

Dandelion Bones
courtesy Sharon Mollerus

Perhaps more useful on the watering scene is the MoistureSmart Watering Gauge. It tells you exactly how much watering your garden needs. It knows how much water the plants are absorbing, the amount of rainfall and irrigation, and the amount of moisture stored in the soil.   Wow!

Buy one of these and the only other invention we’d need would be the Detect Smart Weed Gauge. This would run round the garden removing weeds from under rose bushes, pulling docks out by the roots, and separating wheat from the chaff. 

Sorry, I haven’t invented it yet.**

//////////////////////////////////

* VisualAlert now appears on the Net as a system invented in Australia, making much use of modern technology. 

**Since this was written the desalinisation process appears to be a much bigger system. 

***But since I wrote this, the idea seems to have taken off in a number of ways! Maybe I'm more of a genius than I thought. Check out Google for variations on the idea; this one, for example.

 

Goodbye to my little best mate

 Our lovely, warm-hearted little dog of immense personality was put to sleep today. At nearly fifteen 
years old he’d had a good innings (105 in dog years), but his back legs had gone phut to the degree that he couldn’t push up on them, making it almost impossible for him to get through the dog door. He’d surprise us sometimes by going out through it without difficulty, but then couldn’t get back in; there was a step on the other side making it a bigger jump. And he’d started to baulk at coming up the three back steps; I’d have to go out and rescue him. Or not. Sometimes he’d just do it, somehow. Even as recently as yesterday.

He was sleeping a lot more, and we’d had to start feeding him on kitten kibble because he’d lost some front teeth. I don’t know when this happened, but it must have been in the last few months. He was losing weight – I could feel bones in his back that I hadn’t noticed before, and even his fur didn’t seem to be growing as fast as usual. On top of all this, there was some constriction in his throat which meant he’d hoick like an old man, and not always get rid of what was there.

But it was still extremely hard to have him put down. Both my wife and I have struggled to make the decision over the last weeks and we’ve put it off more than once. Today was very emotional all round. He’s the first dog we’ve owned – we’d always had a cat or two when the kids were growing up.

He’s been my companion on endless walks, and until recently would walk as long as I was walking. Up till last year people we met still thought he was a puppy. Lately however, a breathlessness would creep in and even walking round the block was an issue. For a while I’d take him out in a pram to make sure he got some fresh air.

So, will we see him again? As Christians we believe we’ll see a lot of people we’ve known in Heaven* - but will we see our pets?

Peter Kreeft in his book, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven: But Never Dreamed of Asking has a brief section answering the question: Are there animals in Heaven? He writes:

The simplest answer is: Why not? How irrational is the prejudice that would allow plants (green fields and flowers) but not animals into Heaven! Much more reasonable is C. S. Lewis’ speculation that we will be “between the angels who are our elder brothers and the beasts who are our jesters, servants, and playfellows”. Scripture seems to confirm this: “thy judgments are like the great deep; man and beast thou savest, O Lord.” Animals belong in the “new earth” as much as trees.

C. S. Lewis supposes that animals are saved “in” their masters, as part of their extended family. Only tamed animals would be saved in this way. It would seem more likely that wild animals are in Heaven too, since wildness, otherness, not-mine-ness, is a proper pleasure for us. The very fact that the seagull takes no notice of me when it utters its remote, lonely call is part of its glory.

Would the same animals be in Heaven as on earth? “Is my dead cat in Heaven?” Again, why not? God can raise up the very grass; why not cats? Though the blessed have better things to do than play with pets, the better does not exclude the lesser. We were meant from the beginning to have stewardship over the animals; we have not fulfilled that divine plan yet on earth; therefore it seems likely that the right relationship with animals will be part of Heaven: proper “pet-ship”. And what better place to begin than with already petted pets?

From chapter 2 of Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Heaven: But Never Dreamed of Asking, by Peter Kreeft . Ignatius Press, 1990

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*When I write ‘Heaven’ here, and Kreeft is the same, it’s necessary to keep in mind that we’re remembering that those who receive everlasting life through belief in Jesus will one day live in a New Earth, a place often known as Heaven, but in fact a wonderfully heightened version of earth as we know it now, a place utterly fit for human beings to dwell in.