Useless?

First published in Column Eight on the 1^st Sept, 1993

While attending the last stretches of the Dunedin Competitions, my ear caught a line from a song on suffragettes: ‘We enjoy men individually, but as a group they’re rather stup…id.’

This must be Give Men Flak Week, because I’ve also come across two book titles: Things You Can Do With a Useless Man, and Dads Say the Dumbest Things. Can you imagine the outcry if the subject was the opposite gender? Sexism doesn’t appear to exist when men are being put down – it only runs one way.

Men, solid citizens as they are, have put up with being flailed for decades – long before women’s lib came on the scene. And they continue to suffer it. you only have to look at the television to see the way men are treated in commercials, or in sit-coms. They’re always the fools. The worst examples are the ones where some game is being advertised. Who’s the schmuck who loses? Always the father.

Let’s get real here. What man is useless? Useless is defined (rather weakly) in my dictionary as ‘having no practical use or advantage.’ But the inference in the book title I mentioned is of something even less than that: a person with no purpose or function at all.

You’d think that womankind, having been victims of oppression for so long, would (on gaining a measure of equality), look kindly on those now less fortunate than themselves. Not so. Condescension is the order of the day.

A Useless Man: this sounds to me like a man seen through the eyes of some woman who expects things of him that he has no skill at, or no innate ability to do.

Perhaps a useless man is one who doesn’t fit the Kiwi bloke model: the man who doesn’t drink much, if at all; the man who doesn’t go crazy if he misses a rugby match, or the man who can’t remodel his home because it’ll look worse at the end than it was at the beginning.

On the other hand, perhaps a useless man is one who communicates with his kids (even if, as they grow older, it is with some increasing degree of difficulty). The man who knows when his wife’s birthday, and their wedding anniversary, occur. The man who can take something his wife bought back to the shop, and complain – because his wife is too chicken to. The man who knows how to cook three variations of his favourite mince and rice dish.

The man who continues to love his wife when her logic fails him, when she has PMT three weeks running, when she decides to try out a recipe for a very strong curry or when she’s got the cheque book in a muddle.

If there really is such a creature as a useless male, he must be getting as rare as the yellow-eyed penguin, though perhaps needing less money spent on preserving his species.

One of the positive things unemployment has done for many blokes is to give them time with their kids when they never had it before. Time when they’re not tired, or absorbed in trying to do up the house after tea and on the weekends.

Now they have time to walk with their kids to school, to sit in on classes, to help them with their homework, and tuck them up at night. To go out and play games with them. That can only be an improvement.

But even apart from unemployed men, a feature of modern day manhood is the way in which they parent their kids: how many men of the last generation would have pushed a pram, carried their babies in a backpack, or even changed their nappies?

I get irritated at the way fathers in American sitcoms still act stricken when their wives are having a baby. I saw each of my children born: five wondrous and unforgettable occasions. I even helped deliver the last, a rather frisky fellow. This is something many older men never experienced.

But according to some, men are so useless. They can only repair cars, play pianos, clean drains, paint pictures, empty gutters, wash dishes, program computers, lay concrete, write books, keep wives warm, and snuggle children on their laps.

I’m sure there are many more things they’re useless at, but that’ll do for starters.

The Dunedin Competitions would have been the singing competitions specifically, the section I had most involvement with. I did occasionally accompany instrumentalists in the instrumental section as well.

Somewhat sadly, the two books I mention were both written by men. Men have a great ability to put themselves down.

Trade unions

First published in Column Eight on the 26^th May, 1993

An election year promise: New Zealand will become a nation of brown and white Asians.

Brendon Burns in The Press quotes words spoken by one Rev G H McNeur in 1926. ‘The average New Zealander has not begun to realise that the future of his country is in any serious way bound up with the happenings in China. China is awake. Is New Zealand asleep?’

Burns claims McNeur wondered why we hadn’t understood that our future is inextricably tied to China. Was that what McNeur had in mind? Perhaps, in those days, he was rather more concerned with China as a threat.

In the 1920s many New Zealanders barely knew that nations like China and Japan existed. And during the war one of these people became hated foreigners – for some Kiwis that still are. Perhaps we were wise to wait.

Mr Bolger, in his recent junket round three of the Big Asian nations, at least avoided the appalling arrogance attributed to Sir Keith Holyoake in his Asian dealings. Austin Mitchell wrote: ‘Sir Keith admonished the Japanese to drink more milk and eat more meat, to grow up big and strong and presumably slow their economic growth rate down to New Zealand’s.’

As a thumb-sucking self-secure little nation for so long, tied to Mother Empire’s apron strings, some of us are baulking at all the new trading partners we’re acquiring. We have some mind-resetting to do, especially in terms of viewing Korea, China and Japan as part of our neighbourhood.

Exporters, however, see dollar signs clinking above the heads of the 1.2 billion Chinese. But they look further than that: to other Asian countries – and the Pacific. There’s Papua New Guinea, and of course, the great Pacific nation, Australia.

Trade is all very well, but it isn’t all one way. You can’t just empty your containers on foreign shores while your overseas bank account fills up with dollars. Our trading partners will want to send us something in return.

Australia promotes Neighbours-liness in one of its soaps, but in real life, Crass Economic Return lies across the Strait.

What do we get for our export of expatriates, for example. A million dollar bill for feeding them! do they appreciate us sending them our finest rugby players? No – they stomp their springs all over the face of our national sport by cluttering up our TV screens with something called State of Origin. (Very puzzling – I thought I knew the names of all Australia’s states. Or is this some obscure reference to the confusions of an early church father?)

The more trading we do the more like our trading partners we may being to look. (And possibly like us, although with 1.2 billion Chinese it seems unlikely.)

Will all our New Zealand-made stuff have to go overseas, just to keep up with the rush we’re told is coming? Will we in return begin to wear garments made in places as diverse as Port Moresby, Osaka and Beijing (or even Melbourne!)?

No doubt this trading will eventually reduce our overseas debts. We can begin putting some money back into our own people again, in the form of classes in Japanese, Chinese, Pidgin and Ocker. That may prove more long-sighted than sending people off to Burnham/Waiouru for six weeks.

I would like to contribute this suggestion to international trade in celebration of my new-found Asiasticity. On a recent trip to China, a friend of mine found it necessary to carry toilet paper – at all times. Obviously this produce is in short supply.

Right here in Dunedin we have a company producing the stuff, almost on the wharf. How easy it will be to run the fork-lift across the road from factory to ship.

With all this new trade-unioning, I have another hope. That soon we’ll be able to call our national fruit by its rightful name again: the Chinese gooseberry.

Rev McNeur. Photo courtesy of 
The Presbyterian Research Centre, Dunedin

 think this is a good example of how not to write a weekly column. The title is a pun that doesn't get referenced again the text. The focus starts in one place and shifts halfway through to another. It begins in a fairly serious fashion and ends with mostly oddball humour. It doesn’t sound to me as though I actually had much idea what I was talking about when I wrote it, so it probably can be classed, at best, as a filler.

However, it has a certain historic value: trade is still a big issue, and there are now far more Asian people living in New Zealand than would have been contemplated in 1993, many from India, which doesn’t get a mention in this article.

 

All for one

First published in Column 8 on the 16^th Sept 1992

Struggling my way late on Sunday afternoon towards the deadline of writing a column on Monday morning, I was considering discussing deadlines, when a reader kindly informed me of the absurd presentation conjunction on all three television channels.

I promise this is the last time for a while (a fortnight at least) that I mention the word television in this column. Otherwise my columnistic colleague, Miles Synge, will wonder if I’m stealing his thunder.  

Anyone who wanted to watch something apart from rubgy on television between the hours of five and six on Sunday evening must have wondered if they were expected to put on a videotape. That’s right, Stanton, all three channels screened rubgy, or one of its variants.

And, believe it or not, those able to get Sky would have seen archive film on…rubgy. Good grief.

(For those who wonder why this strange word ‘rubgy’ occurs in this column, you’ll have to consult my computer; I think it’s incapable of writing the word correctly.)

And it wasn’t only this hour that was overloaded with uniform entertainment: Television One had shown sport since 2.00 – (four hours in all); Channel 2’s sport went for two hours; and TV3’s for three (appropriate, I guess).

Don’t television presenters talk to each other anymore? Don’t they check out what’s been shown on each other’s channel? As my reader said, here was a prime opportunity for at least one of the channels to show something different. (Even that gentlemanly sport, soccer, perhaps.)

Does this tripling-up happen because rubgy is cheap to produce on television? (More economical obviously than importing quality programmes from overseas.) Or is it true that television companies get paid large sums of money to show certain sports? Even that might be acceptable, up to a point, if there was variety. But we don’t see other sports anywhere near as much as rugby, mainly because those sports can’t afford the cost of being shown. Talk about cheapskate television!

I can see the television channels turning their viewers right off (which I suppose would be a change), and the video shops being saturated with customers. Either that, or else viewers will do what friends of mine mostly do: they record the quality programmes – which almost invariably are shown around midnight – and watch them the next evening, during the junk food television.

In the future television producers may find it easier to sell their material direct to the video outlets, where customers can really have a choice about what they want to watch.

Then with fewer viewers watching the prime time pap, the advertisers may have to rethink their priorities. Watching television may become a very non-U thing to do. In fact I wonder if that isn’t already happening. Television may join the cinema in becoming old hat.

And talking of old hat cinema, I see the Octagon movie theatre, where the stalls swept upwards towards the screen, has finally closed.

No wonder there are so many back problems amongst now middle-aged former film-goers. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have suffered a crick in the neck or an ache in the back from having to sit with my head at an acute angle for anything up to three hours – as occurred after arriving late at The Sound of Music, and finding that the only seats left were a bare few yards from the screen.

Let’s hope the new cinema complex will be built with the customers in mind; which is more than we seem to be able to hope for from the television moguls.  

 

 I used to visit an elderly neighbour until he died a couple of years ago: his television was apparently incapable of playing anything but rugby, I thought, until I visited him in a rest home and found that there the television was incapable of playing anything but horseracing.

It’s also interesting that my comment about television producers selling to video outlets (when they still existed) came true, to a degree, and now, of course, many minor films only ever appear on streaming channels, and thousands of hours of television shows of all sorts are available there too. We’ve gone from no choice to total choice.

Refs rule, okay?

First published in Column 8 on the 18^th August, 1993

Whenever I watch a game of rugby – you’ll note that I’ve finally learnt how to spell the word – my heart goes out to one particular person on the field.

In my rugby days it used to be the hooker – me – sandwiched between two great hulking props, my ears mangled, my shoulders wrenched and my head forced – Crrrunch! – up against an opposing wall of bull terriers. However, after I retired (round the age of 10) my sympathies diverted to a person who acts in a sense always as the bridesmaid, never the bride – if I can use such an expression in this context.

That person is the referee. He’s never the star – he’s only noticed when he does something wrong. He has to be in the action at all points, yet he can’t be part of the action.

He’s like a child in a field of raging bulls, and woe betide if he’s careless enough to get in the way of a footballer making his way like a diesel engine (converted to lpg) towards touchdown. Not only would the ref’s name be mud, he might be buried face down in it.

On my walk to work I often come across a huge mastiff looking over a fence – a tall fence, thank goodness. His eyes are red and the expression on his black face is ambiguous enough for me to think twice about going close to him.

A ref often finds himself in a similar situation: he’s supposed to stand up to the equivalent of several mastiffs and state his case for claiming they’re in the wrong. If necessary he has to send one of them, like a schoolboy caught making stinkbombs behind the loos, off the field.

Refs have to have the stamina to keep up with a ball kicked from one 22m line to the other, and still somehow be in the right place at the right time – always. I don’t know how they do it.

The reason I mention rugby is that during the last week I was in a somewhat similar position to that occupied by your average ref. (Note, I said somewhat similar.) I was one of several stamina-requiring bodies who acted as accompanist to singers in a musical mini-version of the BleedUsSlow Cup: The Dunedin Performing Art Competitions.

(Singers, by the way, are not equatable with mastiffs. Singers come in all sizes: Chihuahuas, St Bernards, Pomeranians.)

Accompanists have to  have many of the qualities of the average ref. They must somehow be at all times invisible and subtle; in control but not pushing; as musical as the singer, but patently not more so.

They should never be seen to be nervous, lest they put the singer off; and they should make no mistakes…lest they put the singer off (in other words, when the singer misses a page out, so does the accompanist).

Accompanists must ignore trickling itches in inaccessible spots, as well as the ones they could reach but can’t afford to because they’re just about to turn a page over. (As refs must get on and blow the whistle when they’d prefer to blow their nose.)

They must at all times act as though they hadn’t a care in the world, and that performing in front of a crowd is an everyday occurrence to be taken in their stride. Just like refs.

Football and musical crowds are both very discerning. The ears of the latter are more acute, but the former know all the rules – better than the ref.

Accompanist can pour out their emotions through their fingernails. But what does a ref do when he’s feeling all churned up? At the end of the game, no one ever swaps his shirt with the ref.

Because my week was musical, I’ve had an idea. Next Saturday, let’s all give the ref a treat, and nominate him for Most Valuable Player.

2024 Six Nations Championship, ITALY vs ENGLAND,
3 February 2024, Stadio Olimpico, Rome
photo courtesy Stefano Delfrate

Barbered

First published in Column 8 on the 29^th July, 1992

Some weeks are better than others for making you feel old – well, older, anyway.

This week I went to a barber for the first time in eighteen years, the very barber to whom I used to go when I was a callow youth. He’d lost more hair than I had, which was a sort of consolation – and shifted premises – but little else of the familiar going-to-the-barber routine had changed.

There was still the partnering of tobacco with male tonsure – even in these enlightened days you don’t see tobacco in the ladies’ hairdressers. There was the scent of men’s hair spray. There was the feeling of being like a bed being made as the cloth was swept around me and tucked in at the edges.

There were the large mirrors reflecting a blurred shape that to me looked much the same before and after. And as always, however careful the barber is, there was the rest-of-the-day-awareness inside your singlet of having been barbered.

The same old art of casual conversation was still practiced, an art for which I had no talent in my youth. Since I didn’t know anything about the ‘important’ topics of the day – rugby, politics and rugby, I used to think nothing I had to say could possibly be of interest to a relative stranger, and kept my mouth more closed than open.

This may have been frustrating for the barber, though I guess it would be more frustrating for a dentist. Why do dentists seem to expect just as much conversation from you as barbers? Maybe their meal times are like ours…

After some years of attempting to increase the intellectual level of what passes for conversation at our meal tables each night – ‘pass the salt; he’s flicking rice everywhere, Mum; she touched me; he’s taken all the butter’ – I know now that conversation can be made from any coming together of a couple of minds.

In fact, after the experience of our mealtimes, it was quite stimulating to sit in the barber’s chair and gradually work towards finding some mutual topics of interest.

I’m always more than pleasantly surprised to find that eventually a few snippets of thought (even amongst snipping of hair) will assemble themselves into a conversation. Often some unsuspected mutual ground, as there was in tis case, will once again surprise you as how small the world really is.

Having my hair cut was no longer the ordeal it used to be. (I might even get to like it, and go and find a barber every time I’ve had enough of ‘Is this green stuff really a vegetable?’)

(By the way, in case you suspect, because I haven’t been to a barber for eighteen years, that my hair grows remarkably slowly, and I’m due for a paragraph in the Guinness Book of Records, let me assure you it sprouts at the pace common to all personkind. My home-barber – the one I acquired at marriage – decided she needed a break.)

When you think about it, in my 18 years away from things tonsorial I’d actually gained hair (unlike the barber). Eighteen years ago I had no beard to trim. Intuitively, unlike some male friends of mine, I hadn’t tried to grow one until there was actually something to cover the chin.

My family has pleaded with me for some time now to cut off my beard, their excuse being that they’ve never seen me without it. But in this winter I’d be daft to take off any more hair.

I’ve already made a mental note never to venture near a barber’s during the frosty season, even if I end up looking like Albert Einstein after he’d discovered his relatives.

Mike as Uncle Andrew in The Magician's Nephew -
no beard but an 'orrible wig instead. 
The boy playing Digory is Josh Chignell. 

 The ‘blurred shape’ I refer to was me, unable to see what the barber had done due to my shortsightedness; glasses were always removed while having a haircut even though the barber would invariably ask what I thought of the cut.

I’ve had a second family barber/hairdresser for around thirty years – my eldest daughter, who was trained as a hairdresser. She and my wife take turns, as it were, to cut my hair.

I did take my beard off in Sept 1993, to surprise my wife who’d been in the UK visiting her family. And again, twelve years later (to the month) in order to play Uncle Andrew in an adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, by C S Lewis (see photo above). In both case it was grown again pretty smartly.

Rubgy

First published in Column Eight on the 26.3.92 – the unorthodox spelling of ‘rugby’ was intentional.

Cars park from the bottom of the Glen to the top, making you wonder why their owners take a car at all. (It’s traditional.) People stand next to the motorway to get a free but very long-distance view of The Game. (They can’t hear all the sound effects on television.)

Inside the ground, crowds entangle on the terrace to such an extent you don’t know if the can you’re drinking is in your own hand. And the roar of the crowd gives you a headache – if you don’t already have a hangover from the big binge last night. (If you do, local residents have no objection to you parking in their garden – it’s traditional.)

Visitors pour into the city and make the place untidy by acting in ways they’d never think of at home. One youth showing off to his mates walks backwards into the traffic outside the Southern Cross and tries sticking his rear end into the passing cars. And that was before The Game.

The Great Game of Rubgy. Worshipped and idolised. For many people this game is sport’s golden crown. Beside rubgy’s shimmer and sheen, all else pales.

If I don’t sound enthusiastic about the game, it’s for a good reason. I’ve discovered that I’m one of a minority of New Zealanders who have been born without the common Kiwi rubgy gene.

I used to pretend I had it, of course. I tried to play the game of rubgy at school, but since I couldn’t see the point of dirtying the clothes my mother had only just washed, or exerting great energy in chasing after a ball the other side seemed to own, or having my nose bashed every time I found myself as a hooker in the middle of the scrum – I was always the runt of the team – I gave it up.

In the end I had to face facts – the gene was missing. Though I’ve never been able to hold my head up in a crowd of beer-swilling pure-bred Kiwis insisting on conducting a port-mortem of every move made during the course of the most recent game, I’ve learned to live with it.

Psychologists my think my disinterest in rubgy was the result of an unfortunate experience in childhood, when in the ‘fifties I went to an international rubgy game. (The Lions were involved.) The parent and I walked down the Glen (as tradition required). We forced our way through the jam-packed maddening crowds on the terrace, hoping to find a place where we could actually see the game.

Within the aforesaid crowd were jokers whose delightful pre-match sport was to make the crowd sw-a-a-ay. Being only knee high to a grasshopper in those days the notion of being squashed in a crowd of toppling trees or crushed by rampaging elephants did not appeal.

In panic and horror, and without seeing one iota of the game, we fought our way out again, along with a number of spectators now suddenly stricken with sanity.

I’d like to think a bit of brain-washing would fix the problem, but I know it’s irreparable. The genes don’t fit.

Gene-correct Kiwis do fit in. Unlike me they have a natural fat layer for protection from the sleet in which one is often required to play rubgy, and unbreakable ribcages on which to crash land when scoring a try.

They have eyeballs that don’t drop out and hang loose if trodden on during the course of the game. The bones of their digits don’t snap, crackle and pop when ground into the material that lies on the surface as grass, but proves to be thinly-disguised concrete.

They don’t get irritated when so much of our local television quota is given over to rubgy. (To rubgy and Shortland St, where a nurse has discovered she has ‘aides.’ She’s fortunate to work in a hospital where they can still afford ‘em.)

Ah well, they say suffering is good for the soul. I won’t be crushed into a state of all black gloom, watching others take the lions’ share of enjoyment. It’ll try and spring bok.

 The ‘parent’ mentioned was my mother, who didn’t mind the game but didn’t usually attend it in real life. The Glen is a longish steep street near where I used to live as a child – it was even closer to the house I lived as a married adult. The Southern Cross refers to a hotel, not the constellation. And Shortland Street is an extremely long-running NZ TV soap, that once was watchable but has now become full of bad actors eking out long existences as characters who change their partners as often as they change their pants.

 

Progress

First published in Column 8 on the 4^th March, 1992

Put progress in the driving seat and she takes some curious turns. This week we bought a four-slice toaster to replace the old two-slice job. The latter had indicated it was on its last legs by burning the bread alive after refusing to pop it up.

However, once we’d unpacked the new four-slicer, and tried to toast in it, we found that the bread sat up above the top of the toaster by a good inch.

Now the bread we use isn’t abnormally-sized. When you purchased a toaster in the past you could assume you’d fit the bread into the machine and get the whole slice cooked. You don’t expect to carry a slice of bread around in your pocket to measure the depth of toasters.

Wouldn’t you think that a manufacturer would build this machine to take ordinary sliced bread? Maybe it’s a weight-watching plot to get us all to eat less bread. But there’s a problem with that: what do we do with the inch we have to cut off the top (or the bottom, depending on which way you choose to insert your bread)?

Toasters aren’t the only item to have missed the march of progress. I remember Katherine Whitehorn, the English columnist, saying that taps were no longer made merely to turn on and off. Instead of being consumer-friendly – as things usually were, long before computers arrived on the scene -they’d become designer-focused.

You know the sort I mean – you go to turn the top piece, and it swivels and swivels. Eventually you realise that the swivel motion is merely a pretty design – the tap only works when you press it down firmly. When pressed, these taps then emit a gush of water which you may or may not have time to get your hands under. And some stay stuck on: you have no way of knowing whether it will eventually turn off again by itself or whether you’re wasting gallons of hot water – and being unecological into the bargain.

Some public basins have foot controls. They’re very water-economical, since most of us take so long to discover how the tap works that we give up in disgust and leave our hands unhygienised.

I didn’t intend to talk about design progress, but about progress of a different sort. What caught my eye during the week was a snippet about dwarf-tossing, that mediaeval-sounding fad that recently took some European countries by storm.

Seemingly, just as we thought we were on the right bandwagon by expressing disgust that anyone should toss ‘people with a physical difference’ through the air, because it was an ‘intolerable attack on human dignity’ and an ‘exploitation of the handicapped,’ we find that at least one dwarf has campaigned to have the whole thing continued.

This man’s livelihood was being threatened by those who viewed the ‘sport’ with distaste and had banned it. His company, Fun Productions, was in danger of going bust.

Now wouldn’t you have thought that he’d been the person to ask in the first place as to how he felt about being used as a mini-caber? I mean, does a dwarf normally walk into a bar and find himself (in the process of being hoisted on to his bar stool) catapulted through the air by some burly fool? Or does he get the idea creatively, and decide, like any other entrepreneur, that this isn’t a bad way to make a living?

After all, there are rougher sports, such as rugby league. I think if I was a smaller person, and inclined for a bit of a thrill, I’d go for dwarf-tossing any time. (With knee, elbow and bum protectors of course.)

Rugby league seems to do nothing but bring out the violent in anyone with a bit of muscle. And there ain’t no inflated mattress to land on when someone forces you to the ground by pulling your shirt, your hair, your eyes, or any other loosehanging part of your anatomy.  

What a fine line we tread between deciding what’s best for other people and trampling on their rights.

 

Four-slice toaster, though not the one we own. 
Photo courtesy of SimonTrew, Wikimedia Commons

(2026) We bought a new four-slice toaster recently after our previous one gave up the ghost, and have had no end of trouble with it. Of course it comes with fancy gizmos, but doesn’t actually do the job it’s intended for. The side I normally use has been turned up to full throttle since not long after we got the thing, yet apparently it chooses to produce the ‘toasted’ bread at whatever heat it desires. So a piece put in straight after the toaster is started up will come out light, as though it’s barely seen the heat. The next piece is likely to make up for the lightness of the other and be cooked to death, or, if the toaster’s in a different mood, it will somehow bake the bread so that it’s nicely-coloured but hard to the point where it cracks and crumbles when you try to butter it. My wife normally uses the other half of the toaster, and her toast is mostly what you’d expect: toasted bread. A sexist toaster, apparently.

Since this column was written many public taps (as in restrooms) have no visible means of turning them on or off: you wave your hands around like an idiot, trying to get the thing to start, and then out of the blue it starts when you least expect it, and you still don’t know what caused it to do so. Nor how to turn it off again.

Libraries

 First published in Column 8, on the 7^th August, 1991. This version is slightly altered from the original.

 During the recent Dunedin Competitions I sat in a large room I hadn’t been inside for years. I ran my eye over a quiet corner where I’d spent half my childhood reading books on film until I could tell you everyone who directed this and everyone who acted in that. The shelves from which I’d taken the books were still there, but their worn brown boards are now bare, apart from a couple of bland pot plants.

The room used to be part of the old library. Now I know I’m always going on about libraries, but I’ve got to talk about something in this column, and who wants to mention rugby league ever again?

Sitting there I recalled the days when I was a shining, morning-faced schoolboy, creeping up the stairs and into the room so that the harridan of a librarian wouldn’t see me. Not only did she insist on silence from schoolboys, we also had to remove our caps in her presence.

The New Zealand room ran off the main area. It was years before I summoned up the courage to sneak a look inside. When I was little, several of us nosey altar-boys snuck upstairs in the parish priest’s presbytery – and got caught. I had something of the same feeling about venturing amongst the New Zealand books.

In due course I came to know every nook and cranny in the larger room. One nook was the little listening cupboard under the stairs, where there wasn’t enough space to swing your satchel. When I became a working man I used to spend untold hours eating my lunch in that close little cockpit while discovering the library’s vast resources of recorded music.

No doubt the harridan would have bailed me out for dropping crumbs in her inner sanctum, but she well retired by then.

Every inch of the old library was utilised: on the landing outside the chief librarian’s office were housed the theatre magazines, including Plays and Players, which in those days used to contain complete playscripts. I can remember standing there, (cap in hand), shifting my weight from foot to foot, soaking up A Man for All Seasons.

Down on the next landing, which extended over the main entrance then, were what was viewable of the books A H Reed had collected. Because the area was so small, these treasures were squashed up into glass cases, hardly able to be seen properly.

The library had a summer feel about it. One impression is of sunlight pouring into the large back room on the ground floor. (The children’s library, on the other hand, which I discarded after I’d considered I’d read everything of interest, always seemed to be like the land of Narnia, in a permanent state of winter.)

Incidentally, that sense of sunlight is lacking in the new library, which has been designed under the quite reasonable philosophy that books and light don’t go together. Somehow they survived in the old place, including those in the harridan’s upper room with its vast skylight.

The old library had warmth too. The polished wood surroundings and staircases gleamed, and perhaps because the reading public and the books were all squashed together, everything seemed cosier.

Now I’m not saying anything against the new library. In fact, I remember its opening as if it were yesterday.

I worked then in the Civic Centre right next door, and could hardly contain myself waiting for ten o’clock. My ten minute tea break stretched to half an hour while I raced up and down the stairs – including those that proved to be off-limits – taking in the immense sense of space, exploring everything I could lay my eyes on, trying to identify old friends (books, that is). In fact I was amazed there were enough books to go round. Where had they all been hiding in the old place?

I appreciate the new library for its roominess. But when occasionally I dream of libraries, the books, like cats on windowsills, purr in the sun, my sandwiches revolve at 33.3 rpm and the harridan smiles.

 

Mary Ronnie and Ada Fache - two of the Chief Librarians
I remember from my youth and childhood. 

I’m very unfair in this column to the librarian I refer to here as ‘the harridan.’ Libraries were quiet places in her time, and schoolboys were known to be noisy – especially en masse. I think the lady in question would have been Ada Fache, but I’m not one hundred percent sure, and from the photo above she doesn't appear in the least to be a harridan. It may not have been the City Librarian anyway, but some other staff member.

The Children’s Library was in a separate building about three minutes’ walk away. It was housed in a two-storey terrace house, and if the main library was short of space, the Children’s Library had no idea what space was. There were books in every conceivable place, like an old secondhand bookshop that’s sold a good deal less than it’s acquired. And it was dark.

 

 

 

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. 

Pettifogging Fisticuffs

Pettifogging Fisticuffs

First published in Column 8 on the 26^th Oct, 1994

Remember the saying ‘real men don’t eat quiche?’ It inferred that real men were too tough to get into food that melted in your mouth. In other words, no males eating fluffy-food needed to apply for the ‘real man’ brigade.

I think the saying should now be amended to ‘real men don’t play rugby.’ Perhaps that broad statement needs a little qualification. A few real men play rugby, but they’re getting harder and harder to see amongst the pack of scruffs who’ve been performing on the fields the last few seasons.

I don’t suppose rugby ever qualified as a gentle man’s game – there’s always been a rough edge to it.  But these days there’s no way you’d think of it as a game for gents: the rugby field’s become a place where galoots with weight to throw around think their weight’s the main reason they’re in the team.

If someone else gets in your way, poke him in the snout, or pull his arm off, or throttle him. What do you mean, tackle him? That’s for quiche-eating sissies.

My biggest concern with all these lumps whose brains reside in their fist is the effect they’re having on the up-and-coming generation of footballers.

Kids are learning a mindset regarding this game: the opposing team’s only there to walk over. In fact, if you don’t get in first, they’ll demolish you. Hang the game: this is warfare.

I’m appalled by kids who think that rucking someone’s face or head or torso or let is the way to play 
rugby. I cringe when kids consider that injuring the opposition is part of the game. I even hear about kids who go into the scrum determined to punch someone’s lights out so as to put them out of the action.

Where do they learn all this? Do their coaches teach them? I don’t think so.

Courtesy Jwgfoto

It’s not long since we used to see an advert on television where an aggressive young player in the changing rooms was told he wasn’t going to play because he had the wrong attitude.

The philosophy behind that advert no longer impacts on the minds of the kids out on the fields. Aggression and ugly play are getting to be the norm.

And why? The answer’s obvious. Refs spend countless minutes in games these days sorting out adults who can’t control their tempers or fists. They’re forced to waste the time of paying spectators because so-called top players get steamed up over nothing and don’t have the self-control to behave on the field. And half the time it’s fully televised for all the nation to see.

The skills of good rugby players are going down the tubes because they’ve forgotten their purpose is to play a game, not have a fight. If these players are so much into fighting, send them into a boxing ring.  At least there people expect you to knock your brains into sludge.

Let’s leave fisticuffs off the football field.

I struggle to persuade the rugby enthusiasts in my family (with the exception of the Aged Parent) that doing serious damage to other players is not the norm. They see it all the time now and see the best-known players getting into it. If those heroes do it, it must be okay.

Does the pressure of playing rugby, or the hype of a championship final, or the state of the ground really cause grown men to fling their fists about? I don’t think so.

And will hitting the pockets of the players with a fine really tackle the problem? Coughing up cash is the easy way out.

I think these guys need to be hit where it hurts: ban them from the game, not just for a few weeks, but for a full season. Put them on the back burner and see if some sense of shame starts to seep into their system.

So what if they’re big-time rugby stars? In the future, are most fans going to remember Richard’s Loe’s playing, or the way he eye-gouged Greg Cooper?

And while these guys are out of it, let them do a bit of community work with people who find being battered isn’t so macho. And perhaps they could write a few essays for general publication on why they think a lack of self-control is so vital to their game, or how they reckon young players can avoid being influenced by their petulant behaviour.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the NZRFU has the guts to turn these players into real men.

You great wazzock!

We were on holiday recently, and my wife bought me a Code Break puzzle book from the $2.00 shop (it cost $2.50, which seems slightly odd, but maybe altering the name of the shop to the $2.50 Shop wasn't worth the extra fifty cents).

Unusually for a puzzle book, I'd discovered some new words. The compiler obviously didn't like to go for the mundane, so we had SCHMALTZ, GRIPPE and ENCYST in one puzzle. None of those were unfamiliar, but the following three made me check the anagram app on my phone which is usually a pretty reliable source for checking the validity of a word.

These three were: WAZZOCK, MAJOLICA and OSMIUM. Plainly I should know the second and third as even Blogger doesn't think them unusual, but it put a red line under WAZZOCK, which means it thinks it's suspect. Word (the Microsoft programme) on the other hand, seems quite happy with it, although not with its alternative spelling, WASSOCK.

Well, Blogger and Word, it isn't suspicious at all, in either spellings. And it's a useful word which obviously no longer gets the room in most people's vocabulary that it deserves. Know someone who's stupid or annoying? That person is a wazzock.

It may be a newish word. Certainly most dictionaries I could find online seemed to think it had originated in the twentieth century. The Urban Dictionary, on the other hand, a dictionary I don't always find entirely reliable (which may be just that I'm ignorant of a great deal of slang) claims an interesting history for it.

On the basis of the Urban Dictionary's explanation WAZZOCK is the sort of word that I'd have expected to find in David Crystal's The Disappearing Dictionary. This isn't a thriller about a book disappearing from someone's library, but about many English words - many delightful ones - that are no longer used, except, in some cases, in remote parts of England where local dialects are still more common.

Here are a bunch just to give you some examples:

abundation, aizam-jazam, awvish, bemoil, brackle,cank, craichy, cramble, giddling, hask, illify, knivy, lozzuck, nesh, poweration, queechy, ronkish, scorrick, splute, work-brittle (which doesn't mean work-shy).

To give you an idea of how useful some of these words are, here are the meanings of four of them.

aizam-jazam, in spite of it looking foreign, and difficult to get your teeth around, merely means equitable, fair and square. It might be a word to face up to your lawyer with when you think he or she has been overcharging. Or you could just save your teeth and call them a wazzock.

bemoil just means covered in mud, and seems like a word we could resurrect for rugby players. 'They were so bemoiled, half the pitch went with them into the dressing room.')

queechy means sickly, ailing, feeble. This one could be useful in describing someone with Coronavirus.
'Doctor, I think I've been hit by this pandemic.'
'Yes, you do look a bit queechy.'

And last, scorrick means a fragment. Crystal gives a wonderful sentence in dialect using the word: ‘Ah thowt ther would ha bin summat left, bud ther waant a scorrick.’ [Translated: I thought there would be some left, but there wasn't a scorrick.]

A plate in the Majolica style
[courtesy Getty Images]

If this word sounds familiar, it may be because in some parts of England it's pronounced sceerick, or skeerick (this is the spelling I'm more familiar with, here in New Zealand). And it has exactly the same meaning.

Time to resurrect some of these wonderful words, I think!

Oh, BTW, Majolica [often pronounced Maiolica] is a type of pottery in which an earthenware clay body (usually a red earthenware) is covered with an opaque white glaze (traditionally a lead glaze including tin), then painted with stains or glazes and fired.

And Osmium (from Greek ὀσμή osme, "smell") is a chemical element with the symbol Os and atomic number 76. It is a hard, brittle, bluish-white transition metal in the platinum group that is found as a trace element in alloys, mostly in platinum ores.

So now you know...

Banks and bouncers

The following column originally appeared in Column 8 on the 21^st July, 1993. Like a number of my columns, it's a bit of a riff on an idea that drags in a bunch of possibly unrelated issues. The BleedUsSlow Cup (generally known to rugby fans as the Bledisloe Cup.) It's fought over between Australian and New Zealand teams - mostly annually. 

Banks and bouncers

Bledisloe Cup
courtesy Hpeterswald

Some time ago I promised I’d write about banks and bouncers. And seeing a bouncer being choosy about the cup crowd entering his pub doorway last Friday night reminded me. (Here, this should raise my mana a little; I actually watched all of the BleedUsSlow Cup – and got excited about it.)

Have you noticed the new trend in our main shopping area? Everywhere you turn, banks and bars. Both these institutions are eating up retail space, instead of loitering round back streets where they belong.

Furthermore, one bank has turned into a bar, and another bank and bar are cohabiting. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the pre-cup crowd confused one with the other.

That might not be a bad thing: banks could do worse that taking on the look of a bar, and vice versa.

In the matter of bouncers, for instance. When the teller sees someone whose cheques continually bounce come in the door, she just calls on the fullback at the doorway, ‘A moment of your time, Bill.’ And when Bill arrives, ‘Show this bankrupt the street, will you?’

You’d expect bank bouncers to deal with a better class of customer, having none of the confusion which with bar bouncers must contend.

On the surface a bouncer needs nothing more than muscle and an assortment of fierce looks towards unwanted clientele. But discernment is required. The worthy were once distinguishable from the unworthy by their state of dress. Now scruffy and up-to-date are much the same.

The feller who turns up with his shirt hanging out front and back, with baggy pants and no socks – his girlfriend wearing her singlet over her sweat shirt and her hair in three vibrant colours – may be an acceptable customer. Equally you can’t automatically let in the besuited.

This would also apply in a bank, of course. The besuited might be the pauper and the scruff the one with the money.

When bars become like banks they’ll need to install automatic barpersons. We have this in part already, with drink-dispensing machines – the idea just needs a little extension.

Bar personnel do little besides race around all night pouring drinks, grabbing bags of chips and taking money. A modern machine could handle the job easily. (Barmen who lend an ear to garrulous soaks only appear in the movies.)

Automatic barpeople would fit into the walls of your average bar. The customer slots in his bar card with its own PAN (personal alcohol number); the machine pours into his glass the exact amount of liquor the licensee desires – and there’s no problem with change.

Humans might still be seen behind the bar, but their job would no longer be sweaty and hectic.

Banks, on the other hand, need to take over something that’s prospered in bars – live bands.

Instead of piped music, inducing the customer to soporificity, we’d have live bands performing (and beginning to work in the daytime like normal people). They’d probably need to go upmarket, and change their image from ragged and hairy to couth and cleanshaven (I will not be applying).

Bands encourage customers to linger – necessary in the midst of banks’ fierce competition for people’s money. Picture yourself walking into a bank and hearing your favourite band playing heavy metal or rap or string quartets – depending on the kind of image the bank wishes to portray. Isn’t that more exciting than posters full of percentages?

Not only that, customers could relax in banks after work, discussing their finances, and maybe being allowed to count their money. Tellers who’ve been made redundant by automation could return to work as cooks and waiters, and serve meals.

In fact, if banks and bars joined forces and occupied the same buildings, they’d save on overheads, save on staff, and provide interesting alternative venues.

A three sheets in the wind customer might mix up his PIN and PAN and pour dollars into his glass. Bill the Bouncer would take his elbow, guide his feet along the white line, and quietly open an investment account.

Football on the rise for both sexes in NZ

The national game in New Zealand, as you probably know, is rugby. And it's a blokes' game. Or rather it used to be. In fact there are plenty of women throughout the country playing rugby just as fiercely and energetically as their male counterparts.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a Saturday morning game one of my grandsons was playing in. His position is hooker, that guy who dangles between two props in the scrum. And this fellow really does dangle because he's small for his age. Some of my friends won't believe this, but I actually played hooker myself way back when I actually played rugby. But unlike my grandson, who's in there boots and all, I wasn't cut out for the game. Half the time the players from the opposite team would wind up covered in blood when we went down in a scrum: my blood, because my nose would bleed at the drop of a hat. Even if my nose hadn't bled, I still preferred indoor sports, with the less physical contact the better.

It was interesting that the visiting team in this particular game had one girl player in it. And she was very good: she had speed, and she was excellent at kicking goals. She could have been easily hurt by some of the bigger boys in either team, but she seemed to manage to keep out of their way - or perhaps they avoided her, because I think even in boys of that age there's an inbuilt sense that girls won't take the impacts a boy might.

Courtesy NZ Football

I said at the beginning that rugby is our national game, but soccer, it appears, is rapidly catching up. And of course there are girls in soccer too, and plenty of them. (The National women's team is called the Football Ferns; the men's is the All Whites, in contrast to the internationally-known men's rugby team, the All Blacks.)

One of my other grandsons used to play in a team when he was younger that had girls as well as boys in it. Now that the boys are bigger I think the sexes are separated off into their own teams. But girls' teams are catching on fast. There was a photo in the sports pages of the newspaper a couple of days ago promoting girls' soccer, in fact.

Which was part of the reason that I decided that the main character in my latest children's fantasy, The Disenchanted Wizard, would be a girl who plays soccer - with a passion. And also idolises Xanadu Whitworth, the top player in the city. At the beginning of the story, Della, the soccer player, is putting up an enormous poster of Xanadu in her bedroom. Her younger cousin Harold thinks Xanadu's smile is probably photoshopped. Della scoffs at the idea, and it turns out, in due course, that she's right to scoff. But she's wrong about some of the other things Harold has to say...

Pillow Talk

One of the characters in the play our church is doing for its 150th anniversary celebrations is called Hopestill Pillow.  Yup.  And she was a real person and that was her real name.  Extraordinary.   Which set me to thinking about pillows as a topic, so I trolled through my clippings on Evernote to see what came up.  

First there's a tweet from the witty writer who goes by the name of Kim Kierkegaardashian.  He or she mixes the serious spirituality of Kierkegaard with the vacuousness Kardashain philosophy of life.  

Weary of people, weary of myself, so weary that I need an eternity to rest. That's why I always carry a pillow when I'm travelling.

 

And talking about neck pillows, another favourite tweeter, Alan Jacobs, wrote: I salute you, dude who walks around the airport with your inflatable neck pillow tied around your collar.   There's something daft about this sentence. 

 

On another tack entirely, Joan Acocella wrote an article on the grimness of the Grimms Brothers' fairy tales. There's a reference to pillows in this one: In “The Twelve Brothers,” a king who has twelve sons decides that, if his next child is a girl, he will have all his sons killed. That way, his daughter will inherit more money. So he has twelve coffins built, each with a little pillow. Little pillows! For boys whom he is willing to murder!

A super-preganancy pillow!

And in another article related to the after-effects of abortions, we read about Emily, who, after having had an abortion, began to have flashbacks in relation to live babies: Emily’s first flashback hit her violently when she had her first ultrasound while pregnant with a “wanted” child. As time went on, she would get frequent intrusive thoughts concerning her abortion when looking at the faces of her babies. After a time, she began to also experience habitual, obsessive, and scary thoughts about hurting her children. She imagined stabbing her children with a knife one by one, suffocating them with pillows, and strangling them.

 

In a piece by Lois Swagerty about churches sometimes forgetting what they exist for, we read:

One way the church may have its comfort zone stretched is when new elements of the community are welcomed inside.

“A young lady from the neighbourhood came in when she was high on drugs,” recalls Cindy Milbry, director of community outreach for Redeemer Lutheran Church in Toledo. “Pastor was doing the sermon and the girl  disrupted the whole process. Someone said, ‘Let’s call the police,’ but I told them, ‘This is what the church is for.’ Instead I took her downstairs and fixed her a plate of food. The next time she came in, she wasn’t as high, but she was still disruptive. One of the girls sat down with her and she fell asleep, so we got her a pillow and covered her up. People didn’t say as much.  Next time she came, she went up front for prayer and gave her testimony. She said the only peace she has is when she comes to the church. She’s learning that the church is a safe place to come and sit. And the congregation is learning that Jesus came for the unsaved, not the saved.”

And finally, a joke which touches on the friendly rivalry between Australians and New Zealanders:

An Australian rugby fan, a South African rugby fan and a New Zealand rugby fan are all in Saudi Arabia, sharing a smuggled crate of booze when Saudi police rush in and arrest them. The mere possession of alcohol is a severe offence in Saudi Arabia, so for consuming the booze they are all sentenced to death. However, after many months and with the help of good lawyers, they are able successfully to appeal their sentences down to life imprisonment. By a stroke of luck, it was a Saudi national holiday the day their trial finished, and the benevolent sheikh decided they could be released after receiving just 20 lashes.

As they were preparing for their punishment, the sheikh announced, "It's my first wife's birthday today, and she has asked me to allow each of you one wish before your whipping."

The South African was first. He thought for a while, then said, "Please tie a pillow to my back."

This was done, but the pillow lasted only 10 lashes before the whip went through. When the punishment was done, the South African had to be carried away bleeding and crying with pain.

The Australian was next up. After watching the South African's horror, he said smugly, "Please fix two pillows to my back." But even two pillows could take only 15 lashes before the whip went through and the Australian was soon led away whimpering loudly (as they do).

The New Zealander was the last one up, but before he could say anything, the sheikh turned to him and said, "You are from a most beautiful part of the world and your culture is one of the finest. For this, you may have two wishes!"

"Thank you, your most royal and merciful highness," the Kiwi replied. "In recognition of your kindness, my first wish is that you give me not 20 lashes but 100 lashes."

"Not only are you an honourable, handsome and powerful man, you are also very brave," the sheikh said with an admiring look on his face. "If 100 lashes is what you desire, then so be it. And your second wish"?

"Tie the Australian to my back."