Bits and Pieces

 First published in Column Eight on the 21^st November, 1990

 I intended this week to write about a certain international restaurant chain and its recent decision to stop using foam packaging in order to please its green customers.

However, by the time my wife had used here felt-tip censor’s pen there were more black holes in the article than in all the galaxies.

As if that wasn’t enough, two acquaintances told me my piece on How to read articles was mere burbling.

A schoolteacher, on the other hand, said he had to read it through twice to make sense of it. He said he seldom has to do that with anything in the newspaper. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.

I guess all this comes under the category of reader-response, or friendly feedback.

Feedback was mostly why my wife’s felt-tip went so heavily to work. She didn’t feel we were in the position to face a libel suit from a company which boasts 11,000 restaurants world-wide.

(Of course, if anyone wishes to read the article, I’ll send them a copy for a small charge, say $25. That seems at least as valid an offer as a similar one by my forebear, George Burck.)

The other major piece of feedback I’ve had, since I’m on that subject, is the question of this column’s name. One or two people have asked why it’s called Column 8. (Well, one person has.)

I would have preferred to have had something like Crowl’s Cosy Corner, or Crowl’s Quiet Clippings, or Quaint Crowl Comments. As it happened, (fortunately, some of you may think), I was not given the choice.

Nor was I offered a choice of which portrait would be displayed in the top right corner. I am not actually bald or nearly-blind, as the photograph implies. However, to my dismay, people still recognise me from it.

Back to Column 8. It doesn’t get its name from being eight inches across the page from ‘THE Column.’ (I was born in the heady days before metrics were brought in, so if you want to know what that is in the new lingo, you’ll have to convert it yourself) – (20cm – Ed.)

Nor does it get its name from the fact that we have eight people in our family.

Nor, as far as my memory serves me, is it the eighth column to appear on this page.

It doesn’t refer in any sensible way to a rowing shell occupied by eight persons. Speaking of which, I was intrigued to find on the programme, Beyond 2000, that sporting scientists have discovered they can tell which people make the best rowers.

They experimented with a team of girls in Oz, and these kids took to the sport like ducks to water.

If only sports scientists had existed when I was a youth. I might not have wasted the better years of my life wondering what I was supposed to play.

I know it wasn’t rugby. I was so small I was always made hooker. But every time I got a knock, my nose bled all over the other players.

As for cricket, I was too short-sighted to see the ball coming.

Perhaps there really was some sport that would have suited me down to the ground. Then I might not have felt so out of the play in those sport-is-king days.

Too late. Back to column eight.

The title was the editor’s idea. The column is the eighth in the newspaper, if you count the seven on the first page. Pretty cryptic, huh?

 

Young rugby player looks as though he's broken his neck...

Of course, Column Eight, in consisting of the upper halves of two columns each week, was actually Column Eight and Nine. Bit too clunky a title, perhaps.

Unfortunately I don’t remember what George Burck’s offer was to the readers. He was the previous writer – and his column had a much more appropriate name (which I can’t now remember either).

What ‘THE Column’ was I have no idea. I doubt if it was called by that title – maybe I assumed everyone would know which particular column it was.

The ‘hooker,’ during the short time I played rugby, wasn’t one of the great hulking front row forwards of the present day, but a smaller person who could be lifted up and used as a kind of bat to kick the ball backwards or sidewards out to the bloke who passed it onto the backs. At least that’s how it appeared to me. I had very little idea of what the game was about.

Rugby players from 1904
courtesy Wikimedia Commons

A letter to the Editor in relation to this column:

Our columnist Mike Crowl doesn’t know it (yet) but from his comment today about his schooldays rugby I see that he has something in common with former MP Stan Rodger, and myself. Like Mike’s, my nose bled whenever it got a knock, usually about the first ruck, and soon my face, arms, and jersey were crimson. But it was able to turn this to considerable advantage as (a) it transformed my diminutive presence into a rather more fearsome-looking proposition, and (b) it discouraged all the opposition 14-year-olds who didn’t like blood from tackling me.

Stan Rodger had Mike’s other problem, short-sightedness. Stan and I were once in a King Edward Technical College team of substantial insignificance (none of your 1^st XV stuff here) and Stan’s value to the team lay more in his bulk than his speed – the latter of which he lacked to about the same degree as he did vision. A couple of us would be briefed each game to keep an eye on Stan and make sure he kept heading for where the play was, with the instruction to him of ‘when you get to the next ruck, fall on it.’ This usually had the effect of instantly moving the ruck about 10m towards the opponent’s goal line (or our own, depending on how well Stan had maintained his sense of direction.)

Stan’s other value came on the odd occasion that he found himself with the ball. He could build up quite a head of steam over 20m and be virtually unstoppable, and a try was usually ‘on’ as long as he had a couple of us on either side keeping him on target – rather like destroyer escorts flanking an aircraft carrier.

Sadly, I note that Stan never made it into the All Blacks. Perhaps it was his political aspirations that got in the way. Which all, of course, explains where the term ‘Sideline Stan’ really came from!

Penman.

 Penman, I think, was George Burck, the writer of the column that had appeared before Column 8 took over.