Burbling on about snow

Well, the weather people predicted there'd be snow yesterday.  There wasn't.  A bit of foul weather, but hardly worse than some other winter days we've had.  Snow is so often predicted for this part of the world that you get blasé about it.  I was glad there wasn't any snow, as I was meeting my son for lunch yesterday as well as playing for four young people who did singing exams.

When we were in Auckland last week, we had to reassure our host, who's only been to the South Island briefly, that it doesn't snow here every other day, as the forecasters tend to indicate. I'm not sure if he believed me.

Back in June this year, the weather people got it right, though here in Dunedin, as is so often the case, it was mostly the upper hills that got the heavy snow.  At the time, the ODT reported that a 'special weather advisory had been slapped on the whole country'.  I like the idea of a weather advisory being slapped on the whole country, though I have no actual idea of what it means.

We were also told that 'emergency refuge centres are being set up, motorists warned off the roads, and shoppers urged to stock up, but to refrain from panic buying.'  Of course, people didn't refrain, and supermarkets actually ran out of some items. But it was a bit of a mixed message: stock up, but don't panic buy. Of course, the supermarkets only have to announce they're going to be closed for one day (like at Christmas, or Easter) and people go crazy.  How did they survive before supermarkets opened on Sundays?  Did they all starve because they couldn't shop?

There was a time when it people just got on with life when it snowed; kids went to school, people went to work. These days it's become a major crisis, in spite of the fact that Dunedin is mostly negotiable in the snow - though you might have to walk rather than drive.  I can remember, as a child, walking to school in the snow, a trip of about three kilometres.  I was quite small, and was frozen by the time I got there, and somewhat later than most of the other boys. I was allowed to warm up in front of a small radiant heater - it might have had two bars rather than one - for a few minutes before getting on with the school work.  We might have had another similar heater down the back of the room. But in general we just froze.

Obviously they made kids a lot tougher in those days!

Things that bug me

Why don't supermarkets put ice cream cones next to the ice cream tubs?   I remember to buy the ice cream, but forget the cones because each supermarket stores in them in a different place, like amongst the cereals, for instance (at Countdown) or in some quite obscure place which I can never remember (New World) .

Something that bugs me more, however, is why people in obituaries or reports about someone who died doing something that involved extreme sport - or even mountain climbing - insist on writing: He (it's nearly always a He) died doing what he loved.   Is that the best way to die?  I think dying in your bed overnight of really old age would be a much better way to go.

Do I really want to die typing a blog, or in the middle of composing a song, or playing the piano, or watching a great movie?   Nope.  Give me the quiet death in a bed in the middle of the night when I'm in my old age any time, when I've seen my grandchildren, when I've learned to live with someone for forty or fifty or sixty years.


The papers recently reported the death from cardiac arrest of a 30-year-old Southland woman (Natasha Harris) who'd been drinking at least eight litres of Coca Cola a day for several years without any other kind of liquid to counterbalance it - and often without any proper food.  The family, reportedly, said Coca Cola should be blamed.  (We like to have someone else to blame, these days.)  


Did she die doing what she loved?  Seemingly...


And following from that, here's another thing that bugs me: Peter Dunne, the MP, was quoted today as saying: “Preventing suicide is everyone’s responsibility."  But is it?  People in high places always seem to be saying: stopping this or preventing that is the responsibility of everyone.   It's a concise way of saying two things: people in the community don't care (in fact they do), and it's not really our responsibility as leaders to do everything (no, it's not, but have you realised that you're part of the community, and therefore preventing or stopping these things is part of your responsibility, if you're going to mean what you say).   


I sometimes feel that when someone in authority adds this phrase to a report of someone's death or in relation to a serious accident, or whatever, that they really mean that you and I could have prevented this.  Well, you and I might have been able to, but equally we might not.  


The Southland woman was the mother of eight children - and she was only thirty.  Blaming the community in her case is ridiculous - the children had a father, the woman had a mother.  They knew how much she reacted to the Coca Cola - she was vomiting every day.  But no one close to her seems to have taken responsibility.  Surely preventing something begins at home, rather than in the wider community.  


You could say that perhaps these people were too close to her and that she wouldn't listen.  Well, there are plenty of health officials out there capable to dealing with something like this, and if she wouldn't listen to her family, surely they could have called in some professional help.  Or am I being naive and judgemental?  


I struggle with the limits of what I can be responsible for at the best of times, and always feel I don't live up to (my) expectations as to what I could do.  But blanket statements about everyone being responsible are nothing more than blanket: they mostly seem to be ways of avoiding the actual issue of who is responsible, and whether they're doing anything about it. 

Coupons here and there

When we were in the USA earlier in the year (for my son's wedding) we came across stores that we'd heard of but never had the chance to visit: Barnes and Noble, for instance.   Being a bookaholic, this was one place I wanted to at least step inside, even if I didn't buy anything.  (I didn't, but that wasn't B&N's fault.)   The shop had all those sorts of things that I used to dream about doing when I was running a bookshop - though my shop could have been squeezed in one of the smallest corners of the B&N - a place for people to stop and have coffee, an internet bar, trolleys for wheeling large boxes of books around, and staff who knew what they were doing!

That's the advantage of being part of a huge organisation (although some of the things I'm reading about B&N in the news don't make for good reading, in terms of its battles with Amazon and various publishers.  But that's a different story for another day.)

While I was visiting B&N my wife was off with my son's new mother-in-law visiting other well-known places, like Target.   We weren't in the States long enough to collect any coupons from Target but I'm sure if we'd stayed there a few weeks longer she would have managed to have picked some up...and use them!

Coupon collecting isn't so popular in New Zealand - perhaps it's because coupons aren't so readily available here, or because we just approach the whole idea from a different angle.  But it seems, from my understanding of it, that some people spend half their lifetimes collecting coupons and doing very well out  of it.

Of course we collect things like Fly Buys and Airpoints (on the rare occasions when we fly) and make use of the discounts that the New World or Pak N Save supermarkets give on petrol.   I guess these are similar to the coupon system, but are basically taking a slightly different approach.

Some internet sites in New Zealand have tried to get the coupon idea up and running more successfully - I'm not aware of them really taking off.  Perhaps you just have to be really keen to go to the effort of printing out coupons and cutting them out and so on.  And of course, the coupons have to be worth your while - if they're for stuff you'd never buy in a hundred years, they're just a waste of time, and will cause you not to visit the site.   It's rather like what's happened with the Automobile Association here: they're now offering discount on petrol if you buy stuff at various motor-related outlets - plus some other places.  The problem is that most of these places are ones I'd never visit; I'm just not that into automobile outlets.   My grandson might be able to name the model of any car that we see on the road (and he's only eight) but I can hardly tell one car model from another.  It's just not my interest.

For me then (and by the sound of it, a lot of other motorists) the new approach the Automobile Association has taken to discounts is a bit of a fizzer.  In the past, whenever you bought petrol you could have you AA card swiped and that would go towards a discount on your annual fees.   Now you're never sure whether swiping the card is going to be of any value: it's very much up to the AA's random system of discounting.  Some days you'll get something, other days you won't, and I think this is a huge marketing miscalculation.   The AA has lost a good deal of its kudos in the process.

So it looks as though our approach to coupons is pretty minimal compared to the US approach - it's like the size of my former bookstore compared with Barnes and Noble in total.  Minuscule!