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.

Retrospect

First published on the 16^th December, 1992 in Column Eight. 

During December the media tends to review the events of the last twelve months, so, not wanting to be behind the times, I now offer my own personal retrospective.

This was the year in which my children once again insisted on their right to grow, and now all but one of them look me straight in the eye – or eyebrow.

This was the year in which, for the first time ever, I completed a correspondence course. Early next year I may give you the details, but as yet I’m still too close to the event to speak of it without emotion.

This was the year in which my body said; ‘If life began at forty, I’m out of here!’ Nearing the completion of my fifth decade on this planet, my body and I have lately had some disagreement over the value of life as we know it, Jim.

For example, when compensating recently for the soreness following a minor op, I put my back out, got it in again, then put it out again – (rather like a dance step, this.) After which the body pretended it had some virus, and my lower limbs ached. I put the body to bed for a bit of rest, but it responded with a stiff neck.

The ‘thing’ travelled down and made the back of my left knee sore, then wound up putting both my thumb joints out of action.

However, I’m still breathing. A lot of other people aren’t as a result of 1992.

We have this illusion that all of us are due for three score and ten years, but as C. S. Lewis points out in The Screwtape Letters (which I read again this year): ‘The majority of the human race dies in infancy; of the survivors, a good many die in youth.’ The trouble with reviewing the year just gone is you release that the chances of your staying around much longer are getting slimmer.

This was the year in which AIDs took a back seat to Abuse. Who needs mandatory reporting of the subject? We have so many people claiming abuse now that no one can keep up with it. The court cases of the land seem to deal with little else. Only murder, which started off the year in great style, takes precedence, and it has become so commonplace we barely notice its frequent grim reaping.

Abuse is like a cancer that’s been eating away at the nation, underground. This year it’s really come out in the open. As a nation we need to acknowledge our shame that this evil has gone unchecked for so long, and somehow deal it a death blow.

This was the year in which thousands of New Zealanders for the first time stood silently on the streets proclaiming that thousands of their fellow human beings had never seen the light of day. They were spat at, and cursed at. So was Jesus.

This was the year in which the trickle down approach to economics has begun to lose ground, internationally. Hopefully a different kind of trickle down in politics and economics will begin to make progress here, with people put before policies, however cost effective those policies may be.

This was the year in which millions of readers of tabloids and magazines encouraged the shameful actions of so-called journalists and aided them in destroying a family. That the family had made mistakes wasn’t the point – every family does. That the family suffered more and more intrusions on its privacy is a shameful indictment on the people who continue to buy garbage instead of boycotting it.

That hardly begins to sum up the year. Sorry – small columnists can only make small contributions.

I assume the family I mention towards the end was the Royal Family. In 1992 three couples split up: Princess Anne divorced Mark Phillips, Prince Andrew separated from Sarah Ferguson and Charles and Diana formally separated. On top of that, Windsor Castle was badly damaged in a huge fire, and the Queen summed up the year as her ‘annus horribilis.’

 As for the correspondence course I finished, I no longer have any idea what it was. 

 

Fences

First published in Column Eight on the 9^th December, 1992

All of us as children, while out walking, will have spent time teetering along boundary lines, balancing on a wall or wide-topped fence. Of course, as we grow older, fences don’t take much of a front place in our interest. Anyway we become too self-conscious to clamber up on one, and would probably break something important if we did.

Consequently, when out walking, I usually ignore boundaries. But while strolling recently, I took some notice of the ways in which sections are bounded, and was surprised at the variety and ingenuity of construction I encountered.

We get so used to what’s around we never notice it. Only when I checked did I realise the diverse fencing on our own property. Palings along the front (with an almost imperceptible curve out towards the footpath). Two different styles of fencing on the left: one a combination of wire and corrugated iron on wood, the other foursquare wooden palings.

Our back fence is the most solid – part of the way – and the newest piece. The only problem is that when we assisted our former neighbours to erect it, someone in the party wasn’t good at uprights, and they all tipsily lean to the left – visible on our side, of course. The uprights on the right hand fence are worse: having plainly partaken to a greater degree, they lean further still. Finally a hedge with ideas above its station completes our perimeters.

Hedges used to be the mainstay of suburban fences – until they became unfashionable. I can remember the enormous prickly affair that protected my childhood house from passersby – and from much of the sun, too. Now you won’t find hedges in such profusion at all: soft, unprickly, tidy, pale or shiny green leaves are the mostly likely to be visible. Only one hedge I met with on my walk leant menacingly out into the road, claiming I was encroaching on its personal space.

Fences and walls are what divide the front of most properties from belligerent strollers. They range from solid constructions that allow no one to see through, to those consisting of a few tiddly rocks on the ground: barely an apology for a barrier. (Lack of fencing in a state housing area seems almost to be a tradition.)

Some fences go with the flow, by following the incline of the road, and some step up in the world. One construction I found had horizontal bricks leaning downhill, like people in bed with their feet on the pillow. On top of these were more bricks standing on end, barely holding themselves upright – only a muscular column at the end prevented them from spilling, lemming-like, onto the path.

Fences, like me, have a problem with age: they tend to bulge out in the middle a little. This gives the impression that they want to snuggle up to anyone concerned enough to care. (That’s not the impression I want to give, mind.)

Interesting fences stand in stark contrast to the bare bones fence typically erected by the City Council: one long white square piece clamped onto one upright by one metal plate and one bolt. A fence to keep no one in or out nor stop them from falling. Fencing without inspiration.

Decorations occur on wooden fences, but far more so on brick and concrete. Here the artists go crazy, with round holes and triangular spaces. Bricks doing circus balancing acts stand alongside bricks pretending to be hot-cross buns or organ pipes. Some concrete blocks hide their bland appearance by masquerading as pavlovas, covered with cream. Only the strawberries are missing.

At the opposite extreme, one wall I met consisted of recycled bricks: no longer breathing fumes of smoke, the naked bricks rejoice in the open air – in spite of still having chips on their shoulders.

When strolling, it pays to take time and explore: even the most mundane can unmuddle the mind.

An intrepid snail on our holly hedge

I remember this rather weak excuse for a column being the result of desperately looking for a subject. It could have been better: the constant use of the word fence for what was plainly a wall or a hedge when described; the idea that you could balance on a wide-topped fence (whatever that was); the ‘ignoring’ of boundaries – no idea what I meant, as I don’t remember walking all over people’s properties randomly. And the idea that you no longer found hedges. No idea where I got that from.

Reading it now, more than thirty years later, it looks very like a column that wasn’t quite finished, wasn’t really re-read and tidied up. And I failed to mention that the section of hedge on our property was a pain: nasty sharp-edged leaves, and a delight in growing upwards and outwards. One of our former neighbours used to trim it for us, and later we had to do it ourselves. Very painful. 

Anyway, it is what it is.

Obsessive housekeeping

First published in Column 8 on the 2^nd December, 1992 

Jenny has been in the news rather a lot lately. In fact one day last week she made the headlines three times.

Her by now infamous statements on how to budget have received considerable comment – indeed, Jenny herself had the foresight to say: ‘No doubt I will have my head shot off my shoulders.’ Unfortunately a Minister of Parliament in New Zealand is unlikely to receive such just desserts – only in a country known for revolutionary proceedings would she be literally right.

I have a suspicion that Jenny’s got a bad case of the Obsessive Housekeeper disease. This obsession makes the person see housekeeping as the be all and end all – at considerable cost to those around her (and him, in some cases).

The Obsessive Housekeeper never allows dust to remain for a moment. In fact, the dust doesn’t often get a chance to settle, but is caught in mid-flight.

In the house of the Obsessive Housekeeper the windows will be washed and polished every day; there will never be a speck of flour in the floor after baking; rings round the bathtub, if they managed to get a head start, would bring such wrath upon the culprit, that he or she would have to wash outside in a tub – in cold water – for six weeks.

Magazines on the coffee table are there for decoration; neither are they to be removed, or altered from their artistic arrangement. They must never be placed anywhere where it’s convenient to read them.

Woe betide those who live in such a house: their lives will be misery in at least two ways. First, they will never be allowed to leave anything out of its assigned place, from dirty clothes to newspapers to plates. Secondly, if they do manage to commit such a mortal sin, they will never be allowed to forget it. Unlike God, who delights to forget our mistakes, the Obsessive Housekeeper takes pride in remembering the minutest details of our human failings.

So why call Jenny the Obsessive Housekeeper? I get the impression she sees New Zealand as a large sprawling mansion and can’t cope with all that untidiness. And of course the most untidy people are those who are on a benefit; they haven’t learned how to behave in the house of the Obsessive Housekeeper.

Not only can’t they budget their benefit to pay for mortgages and rents, for food and clothing, and perhaps electricity, they argue that they should be allowed to have one or two pleasures in life. These pleasures might consist of salt in their gruel; toilet paper; enough hot water to fill a hottie (which water they will naturally recycle for washing next morning). They might wish for a board (from the demolition yard) down the middle of the bed to avoid any likelihood of producing more disorganised New Zealanders.

You see they haven’t been educated in life skills. If only they could be, and quickly, there would be no more problems. They would then quite happily live without the lights on in the evening; televisions and telephones would be things of their bourgeois past; a car would be something people who managed their well-paid budgets would drive – in fact the beneficiaries would wave to the occupants out of respect. And going barefoot would become a sign of self-esteem.

I think Jenny believed her benefit cuts would make everyone good and righteous – and tidy. I think she believed people would implicitly understand she had written an eleventh commandment: Thou shalt grind down the poor until they no longer cry for mercy.

Unfortunately for our Obsessive Housekeeper Jenny, her commandment stands in stark contrast to everything the writer of the other ten ever said.

AI reminds me of the history of this period:

In 1992, Shipley was forcing through incredibly unpopular cuts to the welfare state and restructuring the public health system. As a result, she faced intense public anger, weekly protests, and literal death threats.

When she spoke to journalists outside the debating chamber or during press conferences that year, she frequently used blunt, battlefield language to justify why she was marching ahead with the reforms despite the backlash.

The specific line you quoted from the news was her frequent warning to reporters (and to fellow National MPs who were getting cold feet):

"If you stick your head above the parapet, you have to expect to get your head shot off."

Because she repeated this specific metaphor to the media throughout 1992 to describe her political survival, the press heavily associated her with the imagery of ‘getting her head shot off.’

It appears that I ‘distilled’ (as AI tells me) her famous 1992 news media phrase into the slightly more dramatic, direct quote I used at the beginning of this column.

 

Honour

First published in Column 8 on the 25^th November, 1992

One recent balmy Friday evening I spent part of my tea-break taking a turn round the Queen’s Gardens, imbibing a little late afternoon Vitamin D while sheltering from the Harbour breeze on the leeward side of the statuary. The stroll caused me to consider how little and how short-lived is the honour we give to people these days.

There are three monuments in these Gardens: one enormous pole honouring the Glorious Dead of the century’s two major wars, and two more than life-sized statues of figures who were notable in their time. Both statues were put up within a few years of the deaths of those they portray, which gives some indication of our forebears’ respect for them.

Who would we honour with a statue today? We’re more prone to raze statues, in line with the communists, than raise them. And along with razing statues we raze the characters of people to whom we once might have considered giving honour.

The statues in the Gardens are of Queen Victoria, (accompanied by two somewhat sorrowful ladies), and of Dr Donald MacNaughtonStuart, D.D. While the Queen stands stolid and sure, Dr Stuart sits comfortable and relaxed in his study chair, legs crossed, the sole of his shoe swinging high above your head.

I was told an interesting anecdote about the Stuart statue. It was the first to be erected, in 1898, four years after the venerable doctor had died. Originally he faced the Exchange, perhaps casting a quizzical eye at Jacob’s Corner. But when the Queen arrived about 1904, with her ladies-in-waiting, it was felt not fit that the doctor should have his back to her, and with considerable effort he was turned around 180 degrees. However, I suppose it as a bit late then to get him to stand.

I’m reminded of all this honouring of past figures today – and Dr Stuart was noteworthy enough to have a bust of him placed in the KnoxChurch grounds as well – when I read about the fire at Windsor Castle. The present Queen is said to be devastated.

The fire is just one more thing for her to be devastated about. I don’t think we should necessarily go back to the days when school holidays were declared if a royal figure toured (though it was a more reasonable excuse than sending school pupils onto the street to sell raffles), but I do think we need to ponder the destructive tone we’ve taken towards the Royal Family.

And I say ‘we’ because all of us are involved in this destructiveness. We’re involved when we read the latest piece of media gossip, much of it totally false. We’re involved when we watch a satirical television programme that uses real film of royal personages but adds new dialogue, making a mockery of their every move and expression. In each and every case we’re guilty of shameful behaviour.

The Queen’s life this last year must have been hellish, to say the least. She may be a distinctive and experienced public figure, but she’s still human, a mother and a grandmother.

To see her sons and their wives reviled at every turn, to see photographs that pinpoint their folly displayed for all the world to see, to hear of tapes that purport to record unwise relationships, and to read of books that threaten to ‘tell all’ would be enough to destroy the best of families.

What’s changed our attitudes? We prefer to read and watch garbage about this family’s life than to give them honour. Ultimately our merciless criticism of them – and other public figures – must rebound on us as a society.

 

Queen Victoria and the Cenotaph

 
Dr Stuart

he ‘enormous pole’ is called the Cenotaph. The Queen’s Gardens (the Queen being Victoria) were once a proper single garden but due to a gradual increase in traffic a road was cut through the Gardens, isolating Dr Stuart from Victoria. The shop I managed at the time this was written was literally across the road from them. 

Jacob’s Corner was the corner of High St and Princes St, a famous meeting place in my youth for the young people of the city on a Friday night (in the days when shops were open on Friday nights, rather than on Saturday mornings). It was named after Jacob’s tobacconists, and although that particular shop was occupied by other businesses over the years, the Jacob name attached itself well and truly to the corner.  

Spurious

First published in Column 8 on the 18^th November, 1992

What little I know about the logical use of words has been somewhat casually acquired over the years through books like Straight and Crooked Thinking. The need to step cautiously through the minefields of words is a lesson more could learn.

For instance, some of the arguments against the reintroduction of corporal punishment have a kind of spurious logic. (Spurious – false, not genuine – is a word I learnt many years ago under the tutelage of one W S Gilbert; he introduced umpteen words into my vocabular. I didn’t always know what they meant at that time, but I used them anyway.)

Because corporal punishment is violent in the eyes of some people they claim that re-introducing it would increase violence in our society. Just a minute. The enormous increase in violence has come in the period since corporal punishment was removed from our schools. Our society was actually less murderous and less aggressive when corporal punishment was the norm.

It doesn’t follow that c.p. had anything to do with keeping violence under control, but neither does it follow that re-introduction would increase violence. Spurious logic.

We’re often victims of similar logic. In fact, the whole school of thought that says things are now better because we have less censorship, less restrictive laws and much greater freedom of expression uses such spurious logic continually.

Look at many of the arguments in favour of sex education. The theory goes that in the past people never knew enough, and therefore they got themselves into all sorts of spots (and in some cases came out in all sorts of spots).

To compensate, sex education has been given free rein in our society. Both those who (probably) sincere educators, and those who are sexual exploiters, express themselves freely. How is it then that sex education is so ineffective now we’ve had so much more of it? The results of two or three decades of sex education aren’t stable marriages, less adultery, less promiscuity and a decrease in venereal diseases. Quite the opposite. Why do the educators continue to insist that more knowledge means fewer problems? Spurious logic of the moral sort.

Finally, we have a prime case of spurious logic on the part of that innovative gentleman, Mr William Birch. (Actually if anyone should be in favour of re-introducing corporal punishment, it should be him.)

Mr Birch last week proclaimed to any Australian who would listen, that the Employment Contracts Act is working. He 74% of employees are satisfied with it; they have increases in wages; strikes and stoppages have decreased dramatically.

Spurious logic of the parliamentary kind.

A closer look at Mr Birch’s own quoted figures show only 42% of people had increases. And naturally strikes and stoppages have decreased. In a society where there is now little or no protection for many workers, no one can afford to go on strike anymore. If they do, hundreds of others will be willing to do the job for less.

Furthermore, Mr Birch failed to mention one small fact to the Aussies: so many people are out of work, any wage figure looks good.

How ironic that two newspaper reports below the one on Mr Birch tell us first that over a 1,000 cases await decisions from the Employment Tribunal, and second that Auckland bus workers have agreed to average weekly pay cut of $100.

 

The Employment Contracts Act didn’t work and lasted barely a decade. Whether it’s replacement – the Employment Relations Act 2000 – was, or is, any better is a moot point.

The removal of Corporal Punishment from schools eventually led to it being illegal to physically punish one’s own children. And of course, sex education (so-called), has devolved into a myriad other areas relating to sex and gender and become a knot round the world’s neck.

Parking

First published in Column 8 on the 11^th November, 1992

I see another watershed in the long running saga of Dunedin’s parking meters has been reached.

A few years ago our city’s traffic control tried to release us from the coin-in-the-slot approach to parking that had been the norm since the 1950s. Are you familiar with the parking coupons that required the driver to punch out the year, the month, the date, the hour and the minute? Did you ever experience one?

Those coupons were not user-friendly. For a start, on a windy day you wound up with punched out pieces scattered throughout the car. As if cleaning the car wasn’t awkward enough at the  best of times.

Then you had to hang the coupon in the window. This was when the wind really came into its own. Just as you got the thing stuck in place along came a gust, and with one phoof took off with it. Down the street went the cash coupon, and with it all the fiddly amount of time involved.

If shoving a coin in a meter was a 100 metre dash, sorting out a coupon was marathonic. And, if you were minus a watch and couldn’t remember the date, you’d had it.

The coupons went on sale in a large number of Dunedin stores. I’d say there are still vast unsold quantities of them lying in drawers or in the basements of shops; space-takers, and possibly even cashflow drainers.

Then the next stage in the saga arrived: we were to have coupons that changed colour as your/their time ran out. The APM, the automatic parking meter, was enthusiastically heralded as the saviour of meter persons.

That wasn’t to be their only claim to fame. They were supposed to bring to an end the sight of ugly meters cluttering up our streets. But what happened? They themselves died a quiet and unmemorable death, while the parking meters continued cannibalising coins by the tonne.

Streets without parking meters – who can imagine it? What a barren wilderness; how little upon which to hang one’s proverbial hat, or to lean one’s person and bike upon while chatting up a young lady outside the place of fitness. Parking-meterless streets – a wonder to behold. But not just yet.

Now comes stage three. Dunedin is to get the new improved computer approach to meters. We have to move with the times. Let’s hope these babies fare better than three expensive space-age meters Auckland tried out a couple of years ago – and found wanting.

The Auckland models were to be solar-powered – and all-knowing. They were supposed to be able to inform parking officers when a car took over time left on a meter which had been paid for by another driver. They were supposed to be able to tell the same officers how long a recalcitrant driver overstayed his welcome. And they were supposed to reject foreign objects.

They couldn’t, they couldn’t and they didn’t. The windows through which all this information should have appeared fogged up. The wide open mouth of the meter took on the status of a trash can and accepted anything put into it, including washers and foreign coins.

But Dunedin’s three thousand dollars a throw computer whizz kids come with the typical razzamatazz of all new gadgets. Not for them ignominious failure – after all, this isn’t Auckland.

What I like about the meter-maidettes (or traffic officer error-reducing automatons) is their ability to produce tickets faster. This means the human parking officers will have more time to chase people. (O frabjous day!) Instead of puttering around the streets on their little bikes, they’ll be whizzing.

Whizzing. Hopefully in their hour of speed they won’t themselves wind up on the receiving end of a ticket.

 

My comment about ‘stage three’ may be an error. I think it should have been ‘stage four.’

From what I can gather the new machines that were installed were the central ‘pay and display’ ticket machines. Instead of single-space meters beside every parking space, the machines were ‘central,’ meaning drivers had to find a machine and pay for a coupon which was then placed on their dashboard.

Most recently the City has installed ‘Pay by Plate’ machines: you enter your licence plate number directly into the machine or a mobile app, and no tickets are printed. In Oamaru, where I now live, a similar system was installed virtually overnight: one day we had an older system, the next new electronic machines were scattered around the streets. But to make sure motorists are kept on their toes, there are two or three different models. You can’t guarantee you can use each one in the same way (!)

The column received a response from the then Parking Services Manager, Trevor Lewis, whom I knew slightly from him having been around the building when I worked at the Dunedin City Council.

15.11.92

May I take this opportunity to comment on the matters raised in Mike Crowl’s article on November 11. Parking coupons in which you punch out the month, date and time are still in use in Dunedin as well as Timaru and Christchurch. Council is currently considering the Automatic Parking Coupon which is a revolutionary concept and ideally suited as a parking management tool. It is extremely user friend, doing away with the problem encountered with the present punch out programmable coupon. The concept is, to say the least, ingenious and although development has been complicated, the coupon looks simple. Consequently, it needs good credible support particularly in relation to performance. It has up to now suffered because of premature presentations which which exposed manufacturing and design problems which I am told as recently as last Monday, November 9, have been resolved. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research reports that the APC has the potential to operate satisfactorily within the specification and parameters as laid down to meet any legal requirements. As the coupon is currently undergoing optimum performance tests, the first of these coupons could be here by December.

Having been involved with coupons since their introduction, I have observed a very rough prototype of the APC develop into a very sophisticated, well-designed and presentable article, which has a very easy and excellent method of activation. Consequently, providing the APC is conveniently and attractively packaged and readily available, it should prove most popular even to the most ardent mechanical parking meter user.

Mr Crowl also reported on ‘space-age parking meters’ while he reports that Auckland rejected them, a fact I can’t confirm. I would report that in June this year we installed in Hanover St outside the Baptist Church two fully electronic parking meters. Both our meter technicians have provided rave reviews on the operation of these meters. Wellington, Invercargill, Lower Hutt cities have already replaced their old meters with these new electronic ones.

On a good day

First published in Column Eight on the 4^th of November, 1992

Dunedin on a good day – what can beat it?

By the time you read this we may be back to dour days again. Let’s  hope not. But even if you read this in the midst of cold day troughs, let’s keep remembering and celebrating the city on one of its father-son sitting together staring at the horizon orange-chocolate-chip icecreams days.

I’m writing this (lacking a laptop, in longhand) while sitting in the TownAce, on the St Clair Esplanade, with the bluest of skies, and the sun spread out like glistening gladwrap from one end of the visible world to the other, sparkling off car mirrors, wristwatches and hair gel, off surfers’ iridescent wetsuits and totem-painted boards.

A sockless-look lover strolls past with his girl, her blonde hair hairdresser-crinkled into such a dishevelled style, she might almost have got out of bed like that. Another couple sit eating hamburgers, knee to knee and playing footsie, all white T-shirts and bleached jeans. Everywhere the sloppy loose-fitting shorts and shirts – the uniform of the surfie and skateboarder alike.

The surround-sound of the sea like music from Taizé, endlessly repeating patterns until the mind slows down to a pulse slower than heartbeats, and chooses to relax, even if only for three-quarters of an hour.

Dogs! Freed from the city restraints, full of excitements, beach-crazy tails barely keeping up with the cantering, side-stepping, sand-covered swerving, the barking, leaping, bound and skidding into the waves. Fur a-dripping, sudden-shaking-splashing over sandwiches, toddlers and towels.

Dogs, lolloping after swooping and screaming seagulls, or barking at bumptious birds balancing one-legged on a post. The seagull pecking order in full force – the most irritable one arching from pole to pole in a series of violin phrase marks, deposing less aggressive brothers like toppling rows of dominoes.

The rubbish tins are unfinished papier-mâché. Old sun-bleached advertisements peel off: Dr Mobile Cycle Service, the Crown Thursday, September 3, ‘not a national joke (hopefully)’ beneath the bearded face of an optimistic local Government candidate.

The barely-walking baby with brand new yellow bucket and matching spade, fearless in his father’s hand until he reaches that great child-eating monster, the sea. All is calm until something white rips around his feet, sneaking in behind, cutting him off, until great green walls rise up, cold, full of Overwhelming (full of playfulness to someone a few inches taller), and intent on sweeping the child out beyond White Island.

Winter-white legs; the only browned skins come from an expensive bottle or from birth.

Grey-haired late-aged lady tourists, wrapped against the slight sea breeze, large black handbags holding tickets, passports, travellers’ cheques, spare hankies (or hotel tissues), motel keys, maps, monies; leaning on the fence in the few brief moments before they’re whisked off again to another breathless night in some unfamiliar place.

Dunedin on a good day, when an umbrella is non persona grata; when raincoats hang mouldy in the hall; when shoes don’t squelch in puddles; when winter woollies sleep heavy in the bottom drawer; when sunglasses, sunhats, suntans are the order of the day; when rhododendrons and motor-mowers make up for lost time; when we remember, for all our island exposure, that we live in the equivalent latitude to Spain; when even old men roll up their sleeves and trouser-legs and go for a sea-paddle, and call to mind a long-forgotten John Milton twist from the long gone radio show, Take It From Here: ‘They also surf who only stand and wade.’

 

St Clair Esplanade, Dunedin

The TownAce was one of those vehicles that, in spite of its durability, our family eventually managed to wear out. The sliding door dropped at least twice in the street and had to be put on again, amongst other mini-disasters.

The line – ‘They also surf who only stand and wade’ is a parody of ‘They also serve who only stand and wait’  which comes from John Milton’s sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent (also known as ‘On His Blindness’). I say in the Column that this parody turned up on Take It From Here, but I got that wrong. I remember that the words were the punch line to a long-winded story by either Frank Muir or Denis Norden, the sort of story that turned up most weeks on the radio show in which they themselves appeared, rather than being scriptwriters.  However, looking at the format of Take It From Here, there was no place in which such a story would be told, and I’m now sure it appeared on My Word, where Muir and Norden regularly gave a suspect origin to a well-known phrase or quotation.

My line above - the uniform of the surfie and skateboarder alike – reminds me strongly of poem by Les Murray The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever. In this poem Murray divides shorts up into four kinds, one of them being ‘scunge’, and in the scunge section talks about the kind of loose much-worn clothing of young beach people, and surfers.

 

Rabbits

First published in Column Eight on the 28^th October, 1992

Earlier this month the Sunday Times printed a full-page advertisement requesting people to sign one of those typical Government-petitioning forms. Your signature agreed that the Government was holding back the possibility of a major industry in the export of rabbit meat and fur.

Apparently a large number of people signed the form and sent it in.

Since MPs either don’t hear what the people are saying, or don’t want to, it naturally followed a few days later that Mr Falloon beetled on about it being utter nonsense that rabbits could constitute any sort of industry. The large number of people who signed the form must be wrong.

I often have the disheartening feeling that we have reached a curious stage in our democracy where only those elected to government are ever right about anything. Those who disagree, or who have to live with the consequences of Government policies, are not considered worth paying attention to. (Even when there’s a referendum.)

Back to rabbits. When it comes to rabbit control politicians think ‘myxomatosis.’ (Personally, I always think myxomatosis sounds like a medical name for athlete’s foot.) The politician’s attitude is paradoxical; after all, is myxomatosis ecologically sound? It certainly isn’t a pleasant (or quick) method of exterminating the rabbit. Slow and painful by degrees is the myxomatosis approach.

Once Mr Falloon had had his say, Warren Cooper got in on the act. Mr Cooper, who is known for his wisdom in all things related to the land, piped up and said that historically there was no sound economic precedent for exporting rabbits.

I don’t claim to be a great historian. I can only remember that the French Revolution began in 1789 because three of the numbers run in order, and the other one must be less than 2.

What I know about the topic of rabbit history I first gleaned from the New Zealand Encyclopaedia lying on my shelf. I guess this heavyweight tome is available to Mr Cooper – by law all books in New Zealand have to be.

That two and a half kilo muscle-builder states that as early as 1894 more than 17 million rabbit skins were exported from this country. That sound like a sound economic precedent to me.

In case the encyclopaedia isn’t enough, here’s another bit of history: in the Shag Valley, in 1883, 85,000 rabbits were taken, and contrary to current practice, every effort was made to get some financial return for the labour of trapping and poisoning. By 1896 a factory at Dunback was putting through a quarter of a million rabbits annually (and only 10,000 sheep). And keeping men in work.

This exporting so expanded that up until the 1940s there was a significant trade in frozen and canned rabbit meat. Isn’t that a major industry?

Perhaps the sheep industry wasn’t doing so well as a result of the rabbits. The two don’t mix (which is probably where mixomatosis comes in) – at least not when they’re trying to share the same land. I know as much about export as I know about history, but with sheep exports in the state they are, I sometimes wonder if we’re focusing on the wrong animal.

Equation? Excess-rabbit problems in NZ. Europeans want rabbits. Answer? Give them rabbits. To those of us untrained in bureaucracy, answers sometimes seem too simple.    

Unfortunately I don't know the name of the artist in this case. 

I was slightly off the mark in regard to all NZ books having to be available to Parliamentarians as this article shows. All NZ books have to be made available to the National Library of NZ. Only some of those books are then available to Parliament, depending on the subject matter.

In spite of what those long-gone MPs thought, the facts about rabbit export are all true, and can be verified online. The rabbit plague hasn’t gone away. In the small town of Moeraki, and 35 minutes south of where we now live, the rabbits were visibly in charge, not in farmland but in the back yards of people’s houses.

Free education

First published in Column 8 on the 21^st of October, 1992

I was about to sit down this morning and write out a cheque for the balance of my children’s secondary school fees when I discovered I’d mislaid the bill. This brought temporary relief to my beleaguered debt system, and meant I didn’t have to borrow yet more of the bank’s money to pay the account.

Fees are only part of the problem.

Though we’d hardly regard ourselves as wealthy, by many parents’ standards we must be reasonably well off. The fact is we have less money now than we had before, thanks to the famous Employment Contracts Act, and have to make it stretch further.

School teachers must be aware that most parents are now worse off than they’ve been for years, yet they constantly require more and more funds to cover the costs of innumerable school extras. Day after day I am confronted by an eight o’clock in the morning demand from at least one of my children.

It gets worse as the kids get older. To its credit the primary school seems to appreciate that parents’ spending power is reduced. Not so the secondary school. (And I hear from other parents that most secondary schools are the same – or worse.)

Perhaps at the school end it doesn’t seem as though there are so many demands. But on the home front we never stop paying out for something. Which is why this year’s fees are still unpaid.

School camps are one of the chief costs, though by no means the only one. In a discussion with a teacher recently over one of these I was told that the better-off parents want everything that’s available for their kids. So the school must provide.

I understand why she feels schools are the meat in the sandwich, but having to follow the desires of those with money means that the parents who aren’t so well off, and the ones who are downright impoverished, have no choice but to keep up with the Joneses. And to keep up with little or no resources.

Yes, I know there are funds available for parents who just can’t manage to pay for their kids to go to camps. And I’m grateful for them. But how long are these funds going to survive? We know they’re not bottomless pits as much as we know parents’ cash doesn’t grow on trees.

You could say it’s all my fault: I shouldn’t have had so many kids (we originally planned for seventeen). Maybe we shouldn’t have. But the end of that argument is that no one should have more than one or two children. And further on down the track we have this Catch 22 situation: fewer children, fewer teachers required; more teachers out of work. (Abortion has already caused a good deal of unemployment in the teaching industry.)

To me there’s no give in the system. We must have our children educated, by law. This means nowadays we also have to fork out for whatever the schools insist is part of their curriculum.

Isn’t it time the schools woke up to the economic crisis many parents are struggling through and pulled their horns in a bit? Fewer camps might result in kids having a little less confidence, and in their socialising a little less. On the other hand that would give teachers more time in the classroom.

Who knows? We might then find tertiary students who, when they make it to university, could spell, count and comprehend.

Artwork courtesy of Grok on X

More on learning Spanish

Elsewhere I've talked about learning Spanish, and after nearly two years of working on it, I'm still not particularly fluent. (Okay, I'm not really fluent at all.) But re-reading this post on Michael Caine and line learning linked a bit with my recent attempts at fluency. 

The challenge has been not just to remember the words I want to say in Spanish but to translate my English thoughts into Spanish in the first place. Both Gabriel Wymer (in my favourite book on language learning: Fluent Forever) and various other language teachers talk about needing to start thinking in Spanish rather than shifting over ideas from English to Spanish. It's a kind of mental trick, I suspect: the brain has to decide that the language it's been learning forever isn't the only language it can think in. 

Well, I haven't found thinking in Spanish at all easy, but earlier this week the idea occurred to me that my brain doesn't really has any deposit of Spanish, in terms of whole sentences. There are heaps of words and the Anki cards I use - Gabriel Wyner's much-promoted method - have plenty of sentences, but I read these rather than memorising them. 

After I came back to Wyner's book a while ago I began to try and memorise some Spanish rather than just translating it, and started with things I already knew in English - like the Psalms, for instance. This helped a bit, but it was slow progress. 

What my idea the other day involved was not trying to learn a whole thing in Spanish, but to take random sentences from my Anki cards, list them out, and memorise them. In the process this gives my tongue actual fluency in speaking Spanish, and I start to think more in Spanish. Yes, it's in the smallest way possible, perhaps, but then, as children we learn in the smallest way possible. It's only because we're surrounded by native speakers night and day that we build up our vocabulary and eventually start speaking in our native language: perfectly, and grammatically. All without apparent effort. 

Okay, I can't mimic that process completely but I can throw myself into a kind of not particularly deep end and memorise sentences. In themselves they make sense to me in Spanish, and they're not just isolated words, but connected groups of words, such as Un viejo puente cruza por encima de la via del tren, pero el puente no lleva a ninguna parte. (This is a sentence I'm memorising today, for instance.) Holding that group of words together in my head, along with a number of others, means I start to see connections in how things are said, and better, I retain these connections.

Yup, it might sound a bit out of the way in terms of fluency. But I've already got ten sentences under my belt, and have seen connections I hadn't previously noticed, and I'm now on my second list of ten. Early days, but I feel confident that some further step in the process is now in progress.

One other thing: this process means I'm speaking the language more than I would otherwise. Yes, of course with Duolingo part of the learning process was speaking words and sentences out loud, but then I would immediately forget them once I'd done the exercise. I needed something that means I retain what I'm speaking - even if for the time being, it's a random sentence. In due course these random sentences will make more and more connections. I believe. Time will tell!

UPDATE 5.7.26:

My idea of becoming more fluent in Spanish by learning sentences got off to a great start but partly because of last week’s sheer busyness, the second group of ten sentences didn’t go so well. I did actually have the ten new pieces under my belt, but obviously not as well as the first ten, and there are a few gaps still in a few of the sentences. But after getting a bit discouraged I’ve got back onto them – in fact while reciting them in bed this morning I found that for the most part I hadn’t completely forgotten any of them. I had been using my time out walking for learning things like this, but since the dog we're babysitting for several weeks arrived it’s not possible to have a dog on a lead in one hand and the phone - with the sentences on it - in the other and still avoid tripping over anything. 

The dog taking over the day bed in the sun porch. 

A fable

First published in Column 8 on the 30^th September, 1992

Once upon a time there was a fountain.

For much of the day she was quiet and almost invisible to passers-by. But at certain hours, such as in the heat of midday, or in the cool of evening, music from an unseen source would play. Then it was as though a kind of magic overtook the fountain. She would begin to dance.

Her arches would soar high, and her spray shone in the sunlight. She would toss peaks of water hither and thither, interweaving them like figures in some old, formal dance. Though the music itself was somewhat unimaginative, there were moments when the fountains and the music were one.

The fountain was popular with people of all ages, and from all lands. Strangers were encouraged to come from far and near to listen to her music and see her dance; even to photograph her.

The fountain was never completely still. She had subdued moods when she was not leaping and prancing. Those who spied on her in these reflective moments might have found her less attractive. A tangle of sharp, thorny spikes could be seen, rather like the back of some prehistoric monster. The bushes nearby did their best to shelter the fountain when she was in this state, and were for the most part successful. Yet it was as though she was alternatively a beauty and a beast.

Then came a day when Great Ideas were put forward. Great Ideas that were to improve the look of the city in which the fountain lived. Much money was to be spent, and many changes were to take place. Decisions were made in chambers, and plans set afoot.

Someone decided that the fountain was no longer suitable – she did not fit in with the Great Ideas. As the flower of the field, she had flourished. Now when the wind passed over her place, she would be no more.

Hundreds of intricate pieces were dismantled and boxed up. She was no longer a thing alive, the sum of her parts; her spirit was split into components, to become lifeless pieces of piping.

The place where she had danced was covered over – her memory was regarded with as little honour as the subterranean toilets nearby: both sites vanished under hundreds of bricks as though they had never existed.

In her place, due to the theory that two are better than one, were installed twin ‘fountains’ of modern design, rather like plaster bath-tubs, or concrete saunas, or even worse, lead cisterns in which the ball-cock had ceased to function, and the water flowed continuously.

They claimed Mystery: how did the water churn forth continually yet never go anywhere? No one really cared; there was  no mystery about them, only pretence. They had no intrinsic beauty, and proved to be nothing more than bird-baths, or paddling pools for intrepid toddlers.

There was no peace about them. To sit near was to sit beside a noisy rushing waterfall, but without the grandeur; or a swirling weir damming nothing. They were as out of place as the multicoloured doors that once demeaned the Town Hall; some architect’s dream method of using up leftover paint. A method that left the Town Hall looking like a staid grandmother in fluorescent socks.

The true fountain, ever since, awaits her fate. She has sometimes heard arousing rumours that a new and more imposing site is to be her reward for suffering long dark days of imprisonment.

But, for her alas, they remain rumours.

 

The Star Fountain, to give it its proper title, because it was gifted to the city by the Star newspaper, was much loved, and many people remember it with delight. Unfortunately the powers that be decided it had had its day – apparently not consulting the Star itself. By all accounts the many pieces were stored somewhere – it seems a mystery as to where – with the vague idea of it being restored in another location. In due course however much of it corroded and was discarded, and the brass fittings were stolen and sold! Extraordinary.

From memory, when it played in the evenings, lights gave it different colours. 

The men’s toilets in the Octagon were underground and were a wonderful example of how to build a toilet and make it look good at the same time. The story goes that it was simply covered over when yet another Grand Decision was made and is still there. It’s more likely that it was filled in so that at no point would the ground suddenly open and people fall into its remains…

On re-reading Stephen King's 'On Writing'

The cover of the latest edition of
Stephen King's On Writing

I've just re-read Stephen King's book On Writing for the third time after I found a new edition in the Library and saw that he'd added yet another short Preface to the book. This one is called Joy. It made me want to read the book again, so that's what I've just done. I did borrow the copy from the library, but I then switched to reading my own copy, which I've had for a long time. It's the English Hodder and Stoughton hardback edition from 2000, which I must have picked up secondhand somewhere, and which was one of the books that survived our house shift from Dunedin to Oamaru.

I'd forgotten a lot of the book: the first half is his 'CV,' an interesting and succinctly-written history of how he grew up, and more importantly, how he became a writer. Towards the end of the book there's the section on the time that he was knocked down by a truck near his home. This was followed by a painful recovery and the necessary return to writing as a way, in part at least, of healing. This section is vivid and awful, and it shows how well he writes. 

The 'On Writing' middle section of the book is interesting but again I ponder on his claim that he writes once in first draft, revises and that's pretty much it. He does give a bit of a more detailed description of that process at one point, saying he writes at white heat when he's doing the first draft, aiming for a minimum of 2,000 words a day, even though, like Lee Child, he's basically writing a book without any idea where it will ultimately go. 

He then puts the completed, and unrevised, first draft away for six weeks - refusing to touch it - and it's only after the six weeks are past that he comes back to it, reads it right through, and begins to adjust and cut and get everything in its rightful order. 

It shows his skill in forming an idea into something coherent in one blast, as it were. It's an intutive approach, and my own writing tends to follow an intutive path too. But my whole process takes infinitely longer than his because I find myself going down by-ways and paths with no exits or signposts. It's how I write most of my music too, but again the finished product requires a huge amount of tinkering before I'm satisfied that I've reached the end. 

So the difference between Stephen King and me isn't just that he's much more prolific, even though we usually both start with little more than an idea. It's that he has the ability to take that idea and see into it much more effectively than me. My process is like hacking away at the huge thorny forest that's grown up around Sleeping Beauty's castle and getting well and truly scratched and torn and bruised. 

One other comment. Like so many American writers who've produced a book on how to write, King regards Strunk and White's The Elements of Style as one of the must-have guidebooks to writing. This book was originally written in 1918 by Strunk alone, and then revised and expanded by White in 1959, since when it's been continuously in print. 

I think it's valued far more by US writers than English ones. And even then its most useful point seems to be: get rid of excess in your writing. Refusing to use the passive voice, or chopping out adverbs as though they were never meant to exist, are both nonsense. There's a time and a place for everything and moderation in writing is as sensible as it is in drinking. 

Professor Geoffrey Pullum is one of a number of British writers who criticise the book. On his fascinating blog, The Language Log, her writes that Strunk and White is 'the book that ate America's brain.' And it's worth reading his post on the passive voice a la S&W here for its wit and good (grammatical) sense. 

Hair and there

 First published in Column 8 on the 14^th October, 1992

 Some articles in newspapers are published to fill an inconvenient gap. But how in the first place some of these reprints get past even the busiest of sub-editors is a mystery.

One northern newspaper recently printed a piece reporting US studies on beards, eyes and faces. The author began with the fatuous statement – I suppose he had to start somehow – that ‘since at least Aristotle’ we’ve been speculating that faces reveal the inner man. Wow…

First, from a study made by a psychologist, Michael Wogalter, we’re told three things about the wearing of beards. (1) They make men seem older. Well, the Victorians knew this, and grew them for exactly that reason. (2) Bearded men are less attractive. Who says? Attractiveness depends very much on the style of beard, and the country of the face’s origin, and the fashion of the day. (3) Bearded men are less sociable than their clean-cut counterparts. Fortunately Mr Wogalter has the tact to say that none of these are facts, only possibilities.

However, he assumes from this that beards are viewed unfavourably, though on the basis of those three points I can’t see why. There’s nothing wrong with appearing older. (In fact, in spite of my beard, most people think I’m younger than I am!)

Attractiveness is very variable: when beards were ‘in’ a couple of decades ago, women still married men in the same numbers as in the short back and sides era. Many of my contemporaries’ wedding photographs show the males with long straggly beards and hair down to the shoulders.

‘Hair is the most salient feature of the face,’ says Mr Wogalter, ‘therefore it must have a big impact on people’s perception.’ The only time I find a beard makes a big impact on me is when a man uses it as a tablecloth and leaves his food fluffling around in it.

Other researchers, who remain nameless, suggest beards were worn by our ancestors to intimidate the members of the opposite tribe – who presumably also wore beards, and also wanted to appear intimidating. Love-all. However, these studies also say the aforementioned beards attracted the females, which flatly contradicts all Mr Wolgater’s findings.

Now we come to lack of hair. Using computer generated mug-shots, Mr Wogalter finds that balding men are perceived as smarter, and a little older – considered a failing in bearded men. I’d say balding men are always perceived as older; that’s one of the reasons so many of them wear toupees, or go for hair-growing tonics.

As for being perceived as smarter, I find that hard to believe. Look at your average television formula thriller or comedy: Who’s the baddie? The bald-headed man. How come, if he’s so smart, he always winds up in the cart?

A certain Caroline Keating of Colgate (University, that is), sees a pattern in all this, we’re told. What the ‘all’ is, or what the pattern is, we’re not told. But she does have a theory. (The fact that it’s about as bright a theory as the one that says ‘mankind stood up straight in order to prevent too much sun from shining on his back,’ is neither here nor there.)

Her theory is that males evolved the receding hairline to attract mates. In Ms Keating of Colgate’s eyes baldness isn’t seen as oldness, but is commanding, authoritative.

Now the writer introduces some other studies. In these, people with large eyes are on one hand seen as warm and honest – but on the other as naïve and submissive.

Ms Keating of Colgate takes these paradoxical pieces of research and assumes that women like males who are dominating and powerful-looking, not naïve and submissive.

I can’t win. Since my glasses make my eyes appear smaller than they are, and I’m bearded, these studies imply I must be cold, dishonest, old, bright, bossy, antisocial and unattractive.

And yet my wife loves me.

Portrait of a bearded man by Jeremy Lipkin

Since this was written, of course, beards have become the norm. Not the larger bushy kind so much, but hair on the face in some form is so commonplace as to be barely noticeable.

Mr Wogalter gets some rather rough handling in this column. He can be found on the Net, as far as I can see, usually involved in some way in studies that other people have done.

Caroline Keating is also fairly visible and is an ‘expert at interpreting social psychological phenomena.’  She focuses on charisma, and social dominance.

While I was looking for information on Wogalter and Keating I found the names of two writers attached to a research paper: Heather Flowe and Ebbe B Ebbesen. A nice combination!

To pants, or not to pants

 One of the arguments - mostly with myself - that I've had over the years I've been writing fiction, is: do I outline or do I write by the seat of my pants (frequently called being a 'pantser')? I've always come down on the side of being my own kind of pantser since I can't work out a plot in advance, and it's only as I write that I find (a) what the story is actually going to be about and (b) how many words I will need to abandon, how many scenes, and chapters will be cut, before I get to the point where I'm satisfied with what's on the page. 

With The Counterfeit Queen, my fourth children's fantasy, I must have written in the region of a million words before I was done. I tried counting them one day, but gave up in exhaustion. The story always had a kernel of my original idea hanging around, but the characters were different by the finish, the beginning as it now stands had nothing to do with anything I'd written in the first three or so years of drafting it, and the story was always going to have a dragon in it but I had to drag the thing in by the scruff of the neck before he let me write about him - or was it a her? (I never quite decided.) 

And then I'd read, yet again, some published writer who'd insist on an outline. But I'd insist back - to myself - just as vehemently, that you can't do an outline until you know something at least as to what the story is about. And I never really do. 

Most of these writing instructors (they're usually taking time off from writing their own novels, it seems or else writing instruction manuals on writing is more lucrative) scorn at pantsers - apart from the one who wrote a book about being a pantser. And even she seemed to have a kind of outline mentality within which her pantser persona managed to work. But she was nice to me when I wrote to her...

Anyway, all this by way of a long introduction to the fact that I just came across a review that I wrote back in 2021 on Kit Reed's Mastering Fiction Writing. (The book itself had been written in 1991.) In it I wrote: 

...probably her best chapter, which comes early in the book, rather than later, as is so often the case, is on rewriting, though she’s a writer who tends to rewrite from the word go, rather than setting down a whole draft and then rewriting. Still she doesn’t care which way you do it, as long as you do it. She feels that you learn what the story is as you write and rewrite, and as more depth is added to the layers in the story. She says that when a book is finished you can see how things plotted out, but often that’s not something that can be seen in advance. She hasn’t got anything against outlines, as long as you realise they’re not the story set down in concrete, and may have to be adjusted frequently.

Sounds like she was a writer after my own heart.