In my hands

 The longest Psalm in the Bible, Psalm 119, has 176 lines. In one verse after another it focuses on the way in which we should live, that is, according to the commandments and instructions of our Father God. 

But every so often there’s a line in this Psalm which seems puzzling, almost out of place. One such line is, My life is continually in my hands. 

In whose hands? You’d expect the writer to say my life is in God’s hands. But no, he writes: in my hands. 

How can that be? Surely one of the consistent statements of the Bible is that we should give our lives into God’s hands, not try and run our lives our own way. 

Even though God does allow us to live as though we had control of our lives, He doesn’t recommend it. Back in one of the first five books of the Bible, when the people of Israel were about to enter the Promised Land, their leader Joshua warned them about not going off in their own way, doing their own thing.

After explaining what will happen to them - both if they didn’t live according to God’s laws, and if they did - he says, Choose you this day whom you will serve.

Even though God brought them out of slavery in Egypt, they were still given a choice as to whether to follow Him. Their lives were in their hands.

It’s a decision we all have to make, on a daily basis. Are we going to do what we want – or what God wants? 

However, the line back in Psalm 119, doesn’t just consist of my life is continually in my hands. There’s a second line, a kind of answer to the first, which says, But I do not forget Your law. That is, of course, God’s law. 

So we might say My life is continually under my control, but I need to choose who I’m going to serve. Is it me and things I idolise, or is it the one true God?

A verse from Psalm 119

The budget

Unusually, the Editor of the Star Midweek gave me a little promo on the front page of the paper – or else he had a little gap to fill - and decided to introduce my column thus:

Mike Crowl in his Column 8 today writes about the budget; well, sort of writes about the budget; well, would you believe almost writes about the budge on…Page 2.

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

The budget

A friend asked me if I was writing about the budget. (I hadn’t thought about it.) Without waiting for a reply, he answered his own question: Well, I don’t suppose it’s all that funny, anyway.

So I’m half-heartedly writing about the budget which, funny or not, by the time you read this will have already banged or whimpered into our lives.

Firstly, I’m pleased to see from the Listener’s alternative budget that I’m not classed in the wealthy bracket anymore (in spite of the untold millions I earn from writing this column each week).

In fact, our size of family doesn’t even make it on to their charts. And it’s not because we have seventeen kids either.

I’d better explain. After my wife and I had our first child it became a standing joke between us that when anyone asked how many kids in total we were having, we’d say, seventeen. Even our Catholic friends turned pale.

We didn’t make it. Blame it on a lack of stamina, or too much writing of Columns Eight, or the high-chair falling apart, or running out of nappies - when it comes to a large family we hardly hit the mark.

There’s something to be said for a large family, though. (I haven’t been able to find out what it is, so I’ll carry on.) Older moviegoers will remember Clifton Webb as the indomitable father in the film, Cheaper by the Dozen. He claimed it was more economical to have a dozen kids and proved it time and again by fronting up to bemused shop-keepers and asking for discounts.

I didn’t see the film, but I did read the book. Practically all I can recall about it now was that the father, a time and motion study man, insisted it was speedier to do up his shirt buttons from the bottom, instead of the top. He would have made a successful politician, I think.

Oh, well, back to the budget. I see one of the economists in the Listener thinks we need more people in the country to make the economy work. I’ve held this same despised theory for years – although, like any economist worth his salt, I won’t be cornered about the details (and now Mr Birch is even coming round to my way of thinking).

Surely if more people come into the country (preferably with some ready cash) then there’ll be a need for more facilities and goods, and, in spite of what pessimists would say, more employment. New Zealand’s present immigration policy seems to be like a person who digs a moat round his castle then pulls up the drawbridge – and wonders why he feels cut off. No doubt some bureaucrats would say of the immigration policy that it’s all right here, but I can’t agree.

There’s probably an optimum figure at which things cease to work well, but at three and a half million I don’t think we’ve reached it. We’re already suffering in the South Island from an exodus north – why not open up some of our endless acres to the bodies standing shoulder to shoulder overseas? They’d be glad to have some personal space.

Oh well, back to the budget.

More people, more pollution, some would say. One scientist writes that because of pollution and jammed roads and motorway costs, bigger cities are now forcing drivers to leave their cars at home. People have to use public transport. It’ll come here, no doubt.

And built into that carless age we have a solution to unemployment. Everyone who’s anyone will have to take a bus, or a train – remember trains? Believe it or not, there’ll be buses going everywhere you want to go, instead of just where they think it’s economical.

Won’t that make the bus drivers glad? (They might celebrate by turning the lights back on in the buses so that when we’re travelling we can read again.)

I was going to get back to the budget, but unfortunately, having fewer pages to work with than our Ruthie, I seem to have run out of room.

 

Clifton Webb with some of his dozen children

This column probably shows why it was a good idea I never took up the role of an economist. Not that anyone asked me to. Since 1991 New Zealand’s population has increased to over five million, still no large number, since many cities in the world have the same population. And while we have a lot more cars, our roads are hardly jam-packed.

Unfortunately there has been a change in thinking about immigration, but not, I feel, a wise change. Instead of inviting people who had some money behind them, we’ve taken in a number of people who have nothing and who also bring their families with them – who have nothing – and we find them houses (somehow, even though houses are in short supply) – and we maintain them until they get on their feet. In spite of this, many immigrants prove to be practical and entrepreneurial citizens; a number do not, unfortunately.

As for stopping people bringing cars into cities, the powers that be eventually came up with a seemingly credible reason why we shouldn’t: climate change, and the damage cars’ emissions  was doing to the planet. So parking spaces are increasingly removed in cities, replaced by cycle lanes. Some cities are amenable to cycles, since their mostly flat. The city I lived in when this column was written was built on seven hills (supposedly) and cycling was only of value to people who stayed in the flat parts of the city, or who were excessively energetic.

 

 

Thankfulness

 My granddaughter recently texted me to say: I stop and think about how important it is to enjoy our time and be grateful for what I have, so I have been really focusing on just being present and thankful each day at the moment.

I responded with the question: who are you being grateful to?

Can we express gratitude without there being a recipient of our gratitude?

I’ve been intrigued to see ads appearing occasionally in the newspaper asking, ‘What are you thankful for?’ They show a man thinking about things he might be thankful about.

I was interested to know where these ads originated, and found that they come from The Thankfulness Project. This is run from a website called Be Great.

The Thankfulness Project focuses on mental health. Its aim is to help people get past their issues with themselves and look outwards.

The question I ask when I see the Thankfulness ads is the same one I asked my granddaughter. Can we actually be thankful without having someone to thank? It feels to me a bit like we’re thanking in a void, or just inside our own heads, as if we’d received a birthday present from our parents, took it outside and said to no one in particular, Thank you! Thank You!

I’m not sure that the parents would feel their gift was being acknowledged.

Being thankful is something that God’s Word, the Bible, continually encourages us to do. But unlike the Thankfulness Project, the Bible shows us who to be grateful to, that is, the One who made us, and who gives us everything in creation to enjoy.

In more than one place, the Bible says: Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, and his mercies towards us are ongoing and forever.

Stuart Townend, one of the best Christian hymn writers of today, wrote a song called, My Heart is Filled with Thankfulness. In the last stanza he writes:

My heart is filled with thankfulness
To Him who reigns above;
Whose wisdom is my perfect peace,
Whose every thought is love.

Just as the child should thank his or her parents for their gifts, so we should thank Our Heavenly Father for His many gifts to us. This is good not just for our mental health, but our spiritual health.

Stuart Townend, from the In Christ Alone UK tour.
Courtesy Getty Images

Being had on (having someone on...)

 First published in Column 8 on the 24^th July, 1991

 I recently overhead a conversation at the library – my second home.

‘We’re only having you on,’ the librarian said with some amusement, after having found she’d unintentionally convinced a lady that she’d have to pay a fee to join the library.

But the lady was oblivious to the joke – somehow it had passed her by.

I mention this not to condemn the librarian in any way – librarians are amongst my most helpful acquaintances – but to comment on the fact that it’s only in the last few years that I’ve understood how great a divide separates the two peoples of the world: those who appreciate being had on and those who don’t.

When I was a callow youth, I spent my first several months in London blissfully having everyone on in a typical Kiwi fashion. Only after a portly Welsh baritone came to me one day and told me that not everybody understood I was only joking did I reconsider how I put things.

To be quite honest, I was amazed. Everybody I’d gone to school with – or nearly – and certainly all my family regarded having other other people on as a normal part of human interaction.

And having people on is so ingrained I find it hard to stop. I’m addicted to it: I have to test everyone out. Some people click immediately. Others stare blankly, because what you’ve said to them is so blatantly silly they wonder why an apparently intelligent person could have opened his mouth and said it.

I can often tell from people’s body language what their reaction will be and that it would be wiser to leave them alone, but even then I’ll risk it.

Most New Zealanders can be had on, unless they’re in the midst of some trend that requires everything to be taken very seriously. Yuppies and Dinkies (double-income, no kids) possibly fall into this category, as do people who are having guilt trips about our ancestry.

In spite of what the Welshman said, many English people can be had on. My wife and her family are prime exponents of the art. The out-laws, as the rest of us call ourselves, vary somewhat in our ability to respond, from the reasonably aware like myself to those who adopt the cold fish approach.

I don’t find, however, that many Americans enjoy having the mickey taken out of them.

My theory about that is as follows: the English have been around so long they can afford to be had on; they’ve survived the Norman Conquest and Hitler and having their crisps mucked about with by the EEC.

The average New Zealander enjoys being had on because we’re still like a nation of kids, finding out how to pronounce each other’s language, and either overdoing it or doing it undone.

The Americans, however, have discovered that they now have culture with a capital C. After all, they invented some real art forms, like jazz and Westerns and the Simpsons, and people are beginning to release that they’re a force to be reckoned with. They’re out to save the world.

This makes them more likely to take themselves seriously. Someone coming along and trying to have you on, is just not on!

Here’s a totally irrelevant afterthought. Has anyone considered doing a thesis on the etymological roots of the phrase ‘to have on?’ I’m sure it’s a subject that would keep an otherwise unoccupied English major occupied for years.

 

The photo has little to do with my subject, but it's 
delightful to see Princess Anne enjoying herself. 
Courtesy: Ian Livesey

Since I wrote this thirty-four years ago, nothing’s changed. I’m as bad as ever at having people on, or kidding them, or taking the mickey out of them. Though I’ve never learned exactly what the mickey is…

 

 

 

Aliens

First published in Column 8 on the 17^th of July, 1991

One of the most difficult statements not of a third kind that I’ve closely encountered in the last week related to the 22^nd annual gathering of the Mutual UFO Network.

Stanton Friedman, a physicist, but plainly not a plain-speaking on, said, ‘Most people believe in UFOs, but most people believe that most people don’t believe in UFOs.’

Run that by me again, Stanton?

Visitors from out space have been the ‘in thing’ for several decades, helped along by Hollywood, television, a burgeoning sci-fi market, and people who either really have seen things from outer space or dreamed them up. People such as Debbie Toomey, who tells the story of being abducted by aliens back in 1983.

I’m not one to scoff at beliefs in UFOs. Modern physicists’ theories about the universe are far more incredible, anyway. Nor do I have any great trouble with there being a possibility of inhabited planets somewhere else in the immense reaches of space.

More to the point, I find it odd to think that aliens would be interested in visiting us. Would they really travel not just the length of our otherwise uninhabited solar system to find us, but billions of miles from their own home?

Encouraged by films such as Star Wars we have these marvellous ideas about the speed of space travel, what with time warps and skipping through light years. When it’s only a story, we don’t have to explain how mankind – or any other kind – is supposed to have developed skills sufficient to travel through the limitless reaches of space. (Anyway, most space stories are about something much less subtle altogether – cops and robbers.)

If aliens did turn up here, what would our reaction be? People would either tend to keep quiet about it, because the aliens were so out of the ordinary, or feel threatened by them. These two have been the staple of stories as widely different as ET and It Came From Outer Space. It’s what you’d expect.

To be honest I don’t think aliens would normally make their presence widely known – they’d only have to take one look at our planet to realise that we don’t treat anyone who smacks of ‘difference’ too well.

The most alien being ever known to have visited this world arrived in very unpublicised circumstances. During his stay he managed to keep out of the limelight as much as possible, even though his actions made that difficult. He often told people not to talk about what he’d done, and when they did anyway, he tended to retreat into the mountains.

Many of the top dogs felt exceedingly threatened by him: in fact, the ruler of the day tried to wipe him out within a year or two of his arrival and massacred a number of innocent babies in the attempt. Typical reactions towards an alien.

When he did come out in the open and explain his ‘mission,’ as you might call it, he had exactly the same response from people that alleged aliens still have.

Unfortunately, for the most part people didn’t want to hear his words, or believe what he had to say, and, as in so many alien stories, they attacked him and eventually killed him. This alien did something truly spectacular – he came back to life, and has had a major impact on the world and its inhabitants ever since.

Of course you have to believe the story.

What I find strange in all these current discussions of aliens is how so many people who find the story of Christ incredible can cheerfully swallow all manner of nonsense about anything else.

 

Poster from the 1953 movie It Came From Outer Space

A couple of quotes relating to Debbie Toomey – also known as Kathy (or Kathie) Davis. The sources are in the links at the beginning of each paragraph.

The argument Ufologists make about the physical reality of abduction experiences has been well expressed by Bruce Maccabee in a recent letter in the Bulletin of Anomalous Experience, a newsletter I publish for mental health professionals and others interested in abductions. Though Maccabee acknowledged that "to date most abduction experiences are not accompanied by evidence that could establish a physical reality, e.g., physical effects on the environment or even independent witnesses," he pointed out that some are:
Of particular interest are the abduction cases in which there is a continuum between the apparently objective experience of seeing a UFO (bright light or structured flying object) and the abduction experience itself. The case of Kathy Davis (Debbie Toomey) in Budd Hop kins' book Intruders is an excellent example. Physical phenomena recorded in the ground in her back yard (a sizeable area in which the grass was killed, the soil seemingly sterilized because grass didn't grow back for a long time) during the abduction experience, plus the recollections of other members of her family at the time provide a considerable amount of evidence that something "real and physical" (whatever that means!) occurred during the abduction. (Maccabee, 1992, p. 1)

and

In Intruders (1987), Hopkins provides the reason behind the tracking of humans. The book centres on the experiences of Kathie Davis, who claimed upwards of a dozen abduction experiences since childhood. During Davis’s experiences, the “Grays” performed repeated gynaecological examinations. Under hypnosis, Davis eventually recovered memories of the aliens impregnating her and subsequently removing the foetus. In a later encounter, the beings showed her the result of this experiment: a half-human, half-Gray daughter. She described the being as having big, blue eyes; pale skin; a tiny mouth; and a head that was larger than normal (p. 223). Based on Davis’s memories, Hopkins concluded that alien abductions are part of a long-term extraterrestrial breeding experiment.

Hopkins, B. (1987). Intruders: The incredible visitations at Copely Woods. New York: Ballantine. Hough, P. (1989).

 

A night to remember

 First published in Column 8 on 10^th July, 1991

Before Christmas I wrote that some of the city’s historic events get bypassed in the news. Today I’m under obligation to mention one such occasion, though perhaps it should have been forgotten – and quickly!

 As I’ve said previously, I accompany soloists in one of the town’s brass bands – in view of the following I won’t mention its name. One of the perks of the job is being invited to their annual dinner, this year held amongst dragon decorations in a Chinese restaurant.

At their annual dinners the various sections of the band each like to perform a little item. This year they were to do some lip-synching; in other words, pretending to play and sing along to a pre-recorded tape.

There were to be four judges for the evening, including, I found to my dismay, yours truly.

As judge I was supposed to give marks and make notes (read ‘rude comments’) about the performances. However, it isn’t easy to be witty between umpteen courses of a Chinese meal, the constant refrain of ‘it’s my birthday tomorrow’ from a slightly inebriated bandsman, and the spectacularly varied items. None of my uninspired judgements received an airing, for which I am grateful.

About midnight, when the waitresses were despairing of ever going home, the judges were summoned before the audience to speak. I was given a generous 48 seconds, but since public wit comes to me no easier than private, I gave them no more than a sentence – and I don’t mean life.

Now that I’m in the relaxed atmosphere of my word processor, I can say the items varied from the insane to the amazing to the ‘I’m only doing this because I have to, but I wish I was somewhere else.’

The baritones performed the perennial Along Came John. This enthusiastic pack of melodramatic hams were so boisterous you failed to notice their lack of synchronisation.

The second cornets mimed a song by the rock group, Queen. The energy level was over the top in this one, cardboard guitars and all, and the lead singer was almost as gross as the sound. The female guitarist seemed incapable of standing up or still. Nevertheless, whether supine or rampant, she continued to play her guitar.

The performance was rather surreal, really. By the time they finished it was hard to tell whether the antics of the actors aroused the screaming and shrieking on the soundtrack, or whether the latter was causing the painful gyrations of the performers. Either way it was a major assault on the senses.

Somewhat more refined was a performance of a piece by Diana Ross and the Supremes. Diana Ross was played by a gentleman with a wig definitely in need of a perm. (The wig, I mean.) A bit of electrolysis wouldn’t have gone amiss, either, on his/her moustache, or on all of the performers’ six hairy armpits.

Apart from these tonsorial matters the three artistes lip-synched excellently, the two back-up singers elegantly performing a complex choreography like up-market Hawaiian hula girls.

The most credible lip-synching came in the piece de resistance of the evening. It was also the only item in which the males managed to stay in male attire.

These gents performed Nessun Dorma with all the bravura of Signor Pavarotti and Co, and twice as much stress and body language, including constant deference to one another, and handkerchiefs to the brows. So strong was their performance, and so full of vocality, that it threatened to spill over onto the audience. I mention this because I was in the front row and the thought of three hulking tenors tumbling on you makes even the most equitable judge mindful of his mortality.

For better or worse, I lived to tell the tale.

 

French brass players clowning around in a street performance
courtesy: KimonBerlin

 The ‘baritones’ mentioned above are not singers but the bandsmen who play the instrument known as a ‘baritone,’ that is, in the middle range of the band.

A list-full

 First published in Column 8 on the 3^rd July, 1991. This is the original version of the column – a later rewrite for a now defunct revenue share site, Triond, appears elsewhere on this blog.

When the television series, The Story of English, was shown some time ago, I was so enthusiastic about it that I videoed it each week at a friend’s house – even though we didn’t even own a VCR. The series only confirmed what I think about the English language – that, like Muhammad Ali, it’s The Greatest.

However, in the course of much study over many years, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are some omissions in the language, even though it’s as ever-expanding as the Universe.

English lacks a number of what could be quite useful words, particularly in the suffix departments labelled ‘ful’ and ‘less.’

To get started, take the word ‘wrongful.’ We use this in relation to a person being unjustly arrested. Surely the word should be ‘wrongless.’ If you’ve done nothing wrong, then how can your arrest be described as wrong-full?

We think of certain kinds of marriage as ‘loveless.’ Why then don’t we call those marriages that last for 50 or 60 years – you know the Darby and Joan kind that get reported in the paper – as loveful? What about the person who wins several prizes at once in Lotto? Isn’t he luckful? (If ever I have occasion to possess a Lotto ticket, I can always be described by the more familiar ‘luckless.’)

And don’t we often wish that politicians were more speechless than speechful, letting us a truthful earful?

Isn’t it curious that we describe certain kinds of sunless rooms as airless, when in fact only a vacuum can be airless. All rooms are airful, though not all are sunful.

One of the most commonly used adjectives is ‘awful,’ which is a shortened form of what used to be a word of great strength: ‘awe-ful,’ meaning full of awe. It would be far more accurate to describe most awful things these days by the opposite adjective. We should be using that awkward little squashed down word, ‘awless.’

Turning to another awless area of life, dentists must  be pleased that we are toothful rather than toothless. Equally, chiropodists should be pleased with footful people – even if they are wearing footless tights or fingerless gloves. (Actually haven’t you thought how much more couth it would be to give someone a fingerful rather than a fistful? Though I’m usually pretty fistless when it comes to such occasions.)

I’m sure the peaceful would like to see a lot more hateless people around them, while most mothers would be grateful for willess children, rather than grateless and wilful ones. (When you use the word ‘willess,’ however, you can see why it’s never really made the grade.)

Actually I was being truthless when I said that I’d made a lengthy study of this matter. These endful curiosities first distracted me in the middle of listening one morning at church to an otherwise interesting sermon.

It was there that I saw we’ve managed to retain some twin words. Even in our less than Godful society we still have sinful and sinless, faithful and faithless, graceful and graceless, joyful and joyless, fearful and fearless.

How come all these kept their partners, when lustful has no lustless, or topless no topful, or bottomless no bottomful? (The mind boggles.)

I guess they were successful instead of successless.

P.S. I didn’t do all this on my own – my daughter helped me listfully.

 

Darby and Joan statue in the ward of Ancoats and Beswick, UK
courtesy Oliver Dixon

I don’t remember ever seeing the Story of English series again on those video recordings. No doubt by the time we got a VCR, they’d gone AWOL on us – or we'd unwittingly copied over them.

It occurs to me, now, that patients wearing footless tights would actually be helpful to a chiropodist, and the way I write about Darby and Joan marriages here makes it sound as though they're rare. But no longer: even my own marriage is into its 52nd year. 

In case the minds of American readers are boggling, they should note that the spellings are all British ones, as is normal in New Zealand, where this piece first appeared.

The value of creativity

 Some years ago I read Tom Wright’s Surprised by Hope, and found it a great book overall.   

One morning I was reading it in the bath and had a kind of ‘understanding’ about what he was saying.

He talks all the time about how Jesus’ Resurrection opens the door for us to be resurrected too, but not just that, it enables us to live in the new heaven and new earth that God will bring about in due course. There is hope both in the future and here in the now. The now suddenly has much greater importance than many Christians give it credit for. I knew this already, in a sense, because I’ve long been a believer in the fact that we will be resurrected and live in a home that is like this earth only much greater. We will truly be at home.

But something else hit me: over last few months I’d been ‘tidying up.’ Tidying up things like getting my favourite watch repaired, getting two pictures sorted out, one to be framed for the first time and another to be reframed. Tidying up my music, and thinking about printing out the drafts of two novels so I could do some real work on them, instead of letting them slide. Writing new music for another concert. Getting the computer fixed so that it worked properly. Having one of my daughters and her four-year-old son come to live with us long term, upstairs, filling the space in the house left after my mother’s death. 

I thought that perhaps I was doing all this because I had an unconscious premonition that I might not have long to live. Then it occurred to me (thanks to Mr Wright) that these are all things that show hope. I wasn’t doing all these because of gloom, or wanting to clean up things for an imminent death (even though that’s always a possibility), but because I had hope: the watch was worth fixing, the pictures were worth hanging, the computer was worth getting repaired and upgraded.

And it was wonderful that morning to have life in the house again, with a four-year-old banging and crashing around in the morning, because daylight saving hadn’t affected him yet! 

None of these things are ‘utterly’ important in any eternal terms – there are of course far more important things – but they were still important. 

The watch continued to convey meaning in itself because it was a particular gift from my wife.

The two pictures had special meaning for us: we’d bought one early in our marriage, as a couple. Only a few weeks before my revelation in the bath the picture had fallen off its hook in the middle of the night. It would have fallen on our heads if ‘by chance’ we hadn’t moved the bed to a different place in the room a week or two earlier.

The other picture was a detailed brass rubbing my wife did when she went to England with our oldest daughter. For many years it had been carefully rolled up to avoid creases. Now might be the time to show it in all its glory.

The creative things were important, not because they focused on me, I realised, but because they’re part of God’s output through me. He doesn't ‘use’ me as a channel: He’s given me the ability to create ‘on his behalf’ – to put it rather badly. 

Perhaps through Wright’s book, and through my own reflections, I was finally getting some sense of why I do creative things, and why they’re worth doing.  

 

Transcendental Meditation

 First published in Column 8, 26.6.91

Every time I open the paper these days I see something about TM, more fully known as Transcendental Meditation.

I note that the same old lines are being trotted out. for instance, because it so much improves health the Government should seriously consider making TM a part of the health service – it will save us so much money.

None of this is new. It’s been the line TM exponents have taken since the Beatles became disillusioned with it back in the 1960s.

At the risk of stepping on people’s toes, I’d like to express some of my concerns about TM.

Let me say first, meditation can ease stress – but there are plenty of other styles of meditation around. TM is only one in the bag. When it comes to mind over matter, then TM, like any other form of meditation, works – up to a point. but it’s a lot cheaper to relax in front of an open fire in the winter and watch the sparks fly up, or sit in the garden looking at the birds swinging round the trees in summer. And you don’t have to endlessly repeat some mysterious word.  

It might be okay if that was as far as TM went. But TM is religious in origin, and has in no way lost its roots.

Newcomers, before starting to learn the techniques of TM, are asked to bring some simple offerings, such as fruit. They will remove their shoes, and be asked to bow down before a portrait of Swami Brahmenanda Saraswati, the Divine Master (or Guru Dev). This was the man who trained Maharashi Yogi, who later brought TM to the West. (It seems he felt it was more profitable to do so, since there were already plenty of impoverished Yogi in India. And as he said, ‘people in the West are in the habit of accepting things quickly.’ In fact, until  he found the right way to sell it, they didn’t.)

Then the teacher will intone a Sanskrit hymn of praise in Hindu – to traditional Hindu gods.

TM enthusiasts usually deny it’s a religion, but in at least two countries (one of them being the USA) it has been legally ruled as such. By appearing in various disguises, TM has been passed off as a political movement for world peace (the World Plan Executive Council), a source of calm for the use of stressed-out businessmen, or a method to keep children from unruly behaviour.

But there’s more. I remember hearing a man who’d seen the error of his ways in regard to TM talking about the fact that people learnt to levitate when they became real disciples.

Even stranger was the behaviour of his flatmate whom he heard bumping around his bedroom. After some weeks of being given the brush-off, he finally got the fellow to tell him what he was up to. This guy was supposed to be flying.

From there it was only a matter of time before the first man was trying it too, going to Wellington to what might be called the ‘flying school.’ The flying room was like a large gymnasium with lots of padded mats around, and ordinary New Zealanders trying to get off the ground.

If all this sounds rather foolish, it isn’t. in 1977 TM offered a Sidhi programme which promised advanced students the ability to levitate, fly, become invisible, walk through walls and have superhuman strength.

In 1980 five former TM disciples told the Guardian newspaper that they’d paid £30,000 between them to learn such skills. In spite of the great financial outlay, none of them could do any of these things.

Beatles and Maharashi 1967

 On the clipping of this column I’ve written a note at some point saying, ‘Only column to warrant any editing.’ Editing by the Editor, presumably. I no longer have the original copy of the column and after more than thirty years I can’t remember what was deleted. Perhaps I should be grateful it was printed at all.

Evil

First published in Column 8, 12.6.91            

In the last week I’ve read two reviews of a film showing in Dunedin at present. Apparently overseas critics have raved about the story in which, among other things, a character skins his female victims in order to make a coat out of them.

According to some, The Silence of the Lambs is one of the best horror movies ever made. Critics say it portrays its human monsters in an intelligent way.

No doubt the film has been made intelligently. While we may laugh at most of the horror movies of the past, the best of them – if that’s how you’d describe them – have always been made with considerable intelligence. And I don’t mean those of the Friday the 13^th ilk.

The use of intelligent writers, directors and actors, however, doesn’t mean that the producers of such sick films are concerned about the audience’s intellect, only that they are keen to make a buck – or a million of them – out of any means at their disposal.

In this century I would hazard a guess that we’ve seen more horror than at any other time in history. When I say ‘seen,’ I mean actually viewed it, whether in magazines, in the movies or on television. We’ve been bombarded with graphic pictorial records of every kind of insanity mankind can devise.

Anything to keep the dollars rolling in.

Book publishers are the same. The writer Bret Easton Ellis was paid an advance of $500,000 for the novel, American Psycho, in which an insane but ‘respectable’ killer describes in gross detail how he dismembers men, women and children. Then the publishers got cold feet at the last minute, and cancelled publication.

A glimmer of light in the darkness, you’d say. Unfortunately not. Some other publishers, who by then had the benefit of all the free advertising sent their way, came along and quite happily put the book before the public.

The determination of Viking-Penguin Press to publish The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie in spite of protests was a similar case. No matter that at least two people lost their lives as a result of a book offensive to Muslims, or that the author has been imprisoned, as it were, by his own words.

The recent authorised biography of Nancy Regan is another case. Even if every destructive word of the book had been true, and it seems very little was, its existence is an indictment against the money-greedy publishers who put it on the market.

Nevertheless they wouldn’t have had so much success with it if every newspaper in the USA hadn’t reviewed it – some of them, like the New York Times (in a quite unprecedented move), on their front pages.

Few newspapers or magazines could resist the lure, even though they may have been deriding the book. Anything to keep their readers reading their paper.

What am I trying to say? Not just that the heart of man is desperately wicked – even though few of us would care to admit it – but that when it comes to promoting evil this century seems one long downward spiral.

Maybe there is hope. As far as movies are concerned, pundits quote box office figures to show that moviegoers are mostly staying away from more distasteful films. I’d be interested to know if readers are buying less distasteful books, or people watching less distasteful videos.

Will the producers of these movies and the publishers of the books get the message? The Silence of the Lambs, for instance, is already spawning other horror-movies for ‘intelligent’ people.

Apparently the purveying of evil will go on as long as there’s money to be made out of it. Where there’s muck there’s brass.

 

The advance figure quoted above may have been in NZ dollars; the US figures was $300,000 – still a colossal sum for an advance.

Since this column was written, of course, Rushdie has continued to be a virtual prisoner as his memoir, Joseph Anton, shows, and he has been attacked in public, in 2022, being severely injured. Other people have died or being attacked.

Nancy Reagan’s biography was written by Kitty Kelley who wrote a number of similar ‘unauthorised’ biographies.

As for audiences staying away from ‘distasteful’ films, I think I was being hopeful rather than realistic.

Phones

 First published in Column 8, 19^th June, 1991

One of my readers tells me I forgot to mention personal stereos in the ‘music, music everywhere and not a note to sing’ article.

The difference between the muzak that follows us everywhere we go and a personal stereo wrapped around our ears is that with the latter we can choose what we listen to. (At least I assume we still can. Hopefully our legislators – under urgency with only five members in the House – haven’t passed a law while I was asleep stating that you must listen to parliamentary broadcasts on your personal stereo.)

Here's some good news. I’ve just come across a report of a marketing breakthrough in the States.

It seems that in the land of the brave and free, when you telephone the number you want, you may have to wait to be answered not just for several seconds, but for several minutes. (And Telecom brought Americans in on our little phone system. Oh, boy!)

No longer, however, will you have to listen to telephone muzak. You’ll be able to listen to…wait for it: advertising! First there’ll  be a minute’s worth of the latest music tape, then a little intro by the announcer, and off into the next track. Naturally it’ll be of their choice.

Well, it can’t be much worse than the new phone systems that are proliferating in Dunedin.

We had to have them, of course, being new technology. We couldn’t learn anything from the misery on other phone customers’ faces around the world.

The new system – and I won’t mention the ailing health board or the government department that says it’s their job to be fair where you’ll strike this horrendous device – works as follows.

A recorded voice answers by welcoming you. It then proceeds to inform you that if you have a push-button phone you can press number one and the operator will answer. If you know the extension you want, you can press the required numbers. This won’t immediately get you your extension. A woman’s voice will arise and ask you to wait a moment. Finally the extension phone will start to ring.

That’s what happens when things are working properly. At another place where this system has been installed, the following sequence of events happened to me over and over again. A recorded voice said: This is so and so. If you require the operator, press One. If you know the number…

Well, at that point I pressed one. The voice told me: You have pressed an invalid number, please wait for the operator to answer.

I waited, but the operator, it seems, didn’t know of my existence, because the next thing I knew the recorded voice returned and told me to press One for the operator. Two seconds later, I was informed that I had pressed an invalid number. And so on, until I was ready to dash the receiver into its place with enough force to send it through the wall.

And Gordon McLauchlin races all over America and breathlessly tells us communications are improving.

Phones are such fun! However, there is another side to all this. Sometimes it isn’t just the customer who gets a little tetchy.

I used to work in the International Telephone Exchange in London. Dozens of segregated operators – men at night, women in the daytime – trying their hardest to answer hundreds of calls an hour.

On one overloaded Sunday afternoon (men worked the weekends as well) my neighbour told me listen in on his line: an irate caller was abusing him at length for not having answered his call an hour ago.

Since my neighbour hadn’t stopped answering calls since he came on his shift this was hardly his fault.

Unfortunately the operator’s attempts to explain the delay and apologise fell on deaf ears: the bumptious male caller continued his abuse.

A fatal mistake. In the next second my workmate said a couple of non-Post Office words and the caller’s connection was unplugged. Once more he took his place at the end of the hour-long queue. My workmate sighed a little sigh of regret at losing such a friendly customer.

International Telephone Exchange - though note
the man in amongst the ladies; not in my day!
Photo courtesy of Science Museum

A bit sinister

 First published in Column 8 on the 29^th May, 1991

 My left-handed relative and I (she in her pre-war gumboots, of course), were recently out in the sun sawing up wood.

While we stopped for a cuppa her eye caught a report by a Canadian professor regarding left-handed people in an old newspaper.

Reading it, my relative thought his statements smacked of Leftism, a form of prejudice at least as old as racism, and possibly older.

“Just look at the words he uses,” she said. “Sinister, and macabre and gauche. Even the headline refers to ‘lethal.’”

I suggested some smart-aleck sub-editor may have added the headline.

That really set her off. It was bad enough for a professor to draw his conclusions from insufficient evidence – he’d only used a sample of 1896 students – but for some upstart newspaper man to give his bias free reign was beyond the pale.  

Had I forgotten that left-handed people had been forced to go against their inner nature for years, hypocritically pretending to be right-handed?

The professor’s survey indicated that left-handed people were in grave danger of shortened lives.

My 74-year-old relative scoffed. “He didn’t include my 95-year-old grandfather in the survey, did he? Or your 75-year-old mother-in-law? Pablo Picasso was no chicken when he died – what’s he using him as an example for?”

The professor had also come to some conclusions regarding the driving ability of left-handers.

“What nonsense is this about left-handed people being worse drivers?” she asked. “The only accident I’ve ever had was when a drunken pedestrian bumped into my car.”

I pointed out that the professor had unwisely taken his findings from students, a group in the age range with the worst road accident record. This seemed to provide his figures with something of an inbuilt bias.

My relative checked the report again. “It’s plain the man’s no statistician,” she said. “One minute he says we widdershins are 85% more likely to have a road accident, and further down he says the figure is 135%. Can’t he make up his mind?”

“And,” she added, “what’s this nonsense about being likely to swerve to the left in a crisis and hit other cars?”

“He’s plainly myopic when it comes to countries that drive on the left-hand side of the road. If a driver in New Zealand raises his right hand on the steering wheel, and lowers his left, he’ll sail off onto the footpath, and mow down the pedestrians.”

Her final comments – before we went back to sawing the wood – were about the peculiar results of other surveys mentioned in the last paragraph, where it stated that while 13% of 20-year-olds were left-handed, only 1% of 80-year-olds were.

“Probably the left-handers were just showing off their ambidexterity on the days those surveys were taken,” she said.

“Left-handed people are so much more adaptable. By the time they’ve reached 80 they’ve truly learnt to be ambisinistrous. You have to be, in a world with right-handed scissors and knives and cheque books.”

“Show me some right-handers who’ve achieved ambidexterity,” she added, “and I’ll show you left-handers galore who’ve adapted themselves to a right-handed world.”

My relative picked up the chainsaw. “Come on slacker, we haven’t got all winter.”

Junior Campbell playing left-handed guitar
courtesy Justthefactspal

Left-handedness was a hot topic for me when this was written. I had a mother who was left-handed, as well as a mother-in-law, and two children. I’m left-handed myself when it comes to playing any game that involves a bat, or a club – anything that you swing in order to hit a ball.

Music memories

First published in Column 8 on the 5^th June 1991

Recently we acquired a record player after having been some years without one. (The last was picked to pieces when the boys were small and investigative and had to see how everything worked.)

Hearing records not played for years brought back some strange memories. There’s something special about the music we first heard when we were very young and our world was somewhat unexplored.

I put on Imagine and I’m back in an upstairs London flat in a row of terrace houses in Tooting Bec, in front of a pale brown radio my English uncle gave me.

I play James Taylor and think of long evenings sitting in front of a gas fire sucking up its two shillings, listening to Taylor’s half-melancholy tapes, with my soon-to-be wife snuggled up beside me. And if it wasn’t James Taylor, it was gloomy Leonard Cohen, or Harry Nilsson draining every last ounce of romance from songs on the one record of his we owned.

I pick up a Moody Blues album and remember a terrible residential child care placement I had in the middle of Cheshire, where two other displaced persons and myself used to listen to the group’s sci-fi sounds after all the awful maladjusted kids had been put to bed.

Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, was on the first LP I ever owned. Hearing it was like going back to childhood and discovering that the world is so much bigger than you’d ever imagined. (Walt Disney tried to ruin the Sixth for me by using it in Fantasia, but Beethoven and I survived.)

When I heard Mahler’s Fourth Symphony it was as though Mahler himself and his sleigh bells and all the angelic choirboys had burst blazing into my Dunedin living room.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. Noel Coward is credited with remarking that there is a potency in cheap music, and it’s strange how something that really has no particular depth can affect you again and again.

When I was young, I spent a couple of weeks in some larger North Island town – possibly it was Hamilton. Two things I remember vividly – learning to swim on my back, and everywhere I went hearing the song sung by Frank Sinatra, Strangers in the Night.

The moment that used to get me every time was when, about two thirds of the way through, the music suddenly shifted up a notch. It was like remembering when you first fell in love. (At that naïve stage, I hadn’t.)

The composer Michael Tippet said in a newspaper interview that all sorts of music stopped him in his tracks. He and I would be in agreement about Strangers in the Night, I think, in spite of the simple device it uses to wind the listener up.

Pavarotti has the same effect when he sings the aria from Turandot over the ad for all those anguished footballers. Puccini might be turning in his grave, but emotionally, for the rest of the world, the combining of the film of those footballers and the achingly romantic music is a stroke of genius.

Music can move people at their point of least resistance. At a party years ago, late at night, when the drink had turned everyone soporific, the radio played Paul Simon singing Bridge Over Trouble Water. One man, a respectable policeman by day, was crawling around the floor on his hands and knees, shaking his head, tears in his eyes, and mumbling, ‘It’s the greatest piece of music ever written.’

And in some ways he was right.

Pavarotti in St Petersburg

‘Extraordinary how potent cheap music is’ – the line comes from Noel Coward’s play, Private Lives.

There’s a rather poor recording of the World Football Cup ad here.

 

Much music

 First published in Column 8 on the 22^nd May, 1991

 I was informed after my column on cycling that I couldn’t be old enough to remember when motorcycle helmets were first proposed: it was pre-war, seemingly. That proves I wasn’t born in the total dark ages.

However, is anyone else old enough to remember a time when, unlike the lady who had rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, you didn’t have music wherever you goes?

I’m not just referring to ghetto blasters and their like. They’re usually like ships that pass in the night, and a quickstep away from them is all that’s needed.

I’m more concerned about the tendency to debase music by shoving it in where it isn’t wanted, such as on the telephone, when it’s supposed to keep you cool while you wait for someone to come.

I used to enjoy listening to office noises, off, and trying to figure out what was happening. Even more I enjoyed the times when someone had their hand over the receiver, but not properly, and you got an earful of what you weren’t supposed to hear.

Now we have the mind-disorientating experience of a Strauss waltz in one ear, and your own shop muzak in the other. I know that sort of thing is considered very modern in the serious music scene, but when you’re not already trying to keep track of who you’re ringing and why you’re doing so in the first place, it’s discombobulating. (By the way, ever seen someone who’s combobulated?)

These days there’s music everywhere: trains and planes and buses, the dentist’s and the doctor’s, supermarkets and government offices. (Now there’s an area where Ruth Richardson could save some money.)

What’s the problem with having music everywhere you go, you might ask? Isn’t it supposed to soothe the becalmed spirit? Isn’t that a good thing in these days of super stress? Doesn’t it take our minds off our problems?

Exactly. It distracts constantly. Just like television, when it’s in a permanent state of ON.

The human mind needs space. It needs times of quiet, not being filled up every moment of the day with someone else’s noise. We never have a chance to think because the thinking part of our brain competes constantly with noise. And where does it dump all this aural rubbish?

If it was true that things go in one ear and out the other – and it isn’t, because I’ve tested my kids and there’s a definite blockage between one side of their heads and the other – we could let sounds musical waft through without a murmur of complaint.

But as it is, the sound gets stuck in there somewhere, as in that old song: ‘The music goes round and round, whoa-oh-oh-oh’ (Danny Kaye and several Pennies.)

Eventually, like a computer with all its bytes taken up, we’re going to find the drains of our brains are clogged beyond further action.

All right, all right, I know most of us are supposed to use only 10% of our brains anyway, but just think what it’ll be like if we ever make it into the other 90. We’ll find endless screeds of leftover muzak have soaked up all the cells, with songs we’d thought we’d forgotten and songs we wish we had. (And who’d want to recycle that?)

Meanwhile, out in space all these aliens listening in will find their airwaves becoming increasingly jammed. At least we’ll have no fear of any invasion with all that noise going on – who’d want to invade a planet that’s never quiet?

Unless they want to put us out of our misery.

So who’s going to help me found a Society for the Prevention of Extraneous Music?

 

The German melodic death metal band Dawn of Disease 
at Rock unter den Eichen 2018 in Bertingen, Germany 
courtesy: S. Bollmann

Things have got worse, of course, since this was written. Telephone muzak is anything but calming these days: it usually consists of something exceptionally repetitive, or some unknown ‘artist’ wailing his/her heart out in a fashion that’s anything but musical.

Of course, we now know that it’s virtually impossible to use up all the bytes in a computer…and the idea that we only use 10% of our brains has long been shown to be a myth.

 

Playing percussioin

First published in Column 8, on the 15.5.91

National brass band competitions are here again. By the time you read this, I should be in Christchurch in my capacity as official accompanist for one of the Dunedin bands.

No Harold, I don’t accompany a whole brass band, just play the piano for the soloists.

I used to think brass bands were rather at the bottom of the musical barrel before I got involved. Then I heard them play the complex music they’re expected to perform for those competitions.

You have to be there. Bands aren’t heard at their best marching along George St in the Festival Procession. Or in the Gardens on a Sunday afternoon. In marching most of their wind goes into keeping their feet moving. What air is left has to try to produce some musical noise out of pieces of plumbing with plungers.

In band rotundas any musical subtlety is wafted away for only the seagulls and sparrows to hear.

Bandsmen are at their best when they can sit and play without the distraction of kids whining for ice-blocks or wanting bread for the ducks. And the music they play has greatly increased in difficulty in the last few decades.

I know the difficulties at first hand, because twice I’ve been roped in as a supernumerary percussion player. Band conductors are under a delusion that reasonable pianists make more than adequate percussionists.

(Since I already make the trip as a pianist, it’s economic, if not musical, sense to employ my abilities as fourth percussionist.)

In my first foray into percussioning, I came in on rehearsals after the band had been practicing for weeks. I was assured by the conductor that I’d find it all straightforward – ‘an excellent musician like yourself.’ (His words, not mine.)

That particular experience is now embalmed in the recesses of my memory, hopefully never to be revived. The second occasion is not so easily forgotten, although I had plenty of rehearsal.

I found myself playing – not simultaneously – tambourine, glockenspiel, cymbals, triangle, marimba and gong (a large one). I am not fluent in any of these instruments.

You’d think hitting a triangle or gong would be easy. It is, if you’ve nothing else to think about. But hitting either one precisely in time with a group of other noises, most of them windy, isn’t simple.

Worse, to hit the gong, I had to turn my back on both the music and the conductor. (If I missed my cue, I tended to keep my back to that gentleman.)

As for the tambourine, it’s not just a matter of giving it a thunk! Sometimes the jingles mustn’t jing, and sometimes you have to rub it the wrong way to produce what percussionists call a trill. Producing that sort of trill it not trilling to a pianist.

The glockenspiel can’t be played with the fingers, which I’d find easy. It has to be played at a distance, as it were, with a couple of sticks, rather like dancing on stilts, and making your feet hit a precise spot on the ground each time. The marimba’s just as bad, except because it’s bigger, there’s more of it to miss.

Add to this the nervousness of playing before a large crowd, who all know you’re a fraud and not a proper percussionist at all, unlike those superhuman youngsters who can play three timpani and a triangle and a side-drum simultaneously.

A bit of performance adrenalin never went amiss, but after my forays into percussion playing give me accompanying any time.

A marimba player (NDR Radiophilharmonie), Hanover, 2003
courtesy איתן טל Etan Tal

I’m not sure who ‘Harold’ is supposed to be, but I think it was one of those names I’d picked out of a hat as a kind of person to address on occasions. The ‘trip’ I mention was going to Christchurch with the band.

I talk as if playing for the brass band was my first experience of being a percussionist. I think that came much earlier, back in the mid-sixties, when I was the repetiteur (rehearsal pianist) for the NZ Opera Company’s nationwide tour of the opera Die Fledermaus. Again it was a matter of economics. It made no sense to employ a percussionist to play a few random bars at odd times during the production, so, since I was already being paid, they roped me in. I used to hit a triangle during the overture, and then spend a good long time reading in the orchestra pit (I remember getting through The Hobbit among other things). At some point I played a glockenspiel, trying to keep in time with a singer on the stage pretending to get music out of the prison bars. I don’t remember what else I did, but it wasn’t much.

Glockenspiels have a mini-keyboard, hence my comment, but the keys are small and fashioned to be hit by little sticks with little round wooden heads. The marimba is similar except everything is bigger.

Car ads

 First published in Column 8, on the 8^th May, 1991

Recently I came across something pinned up in my daughter’s classroom – about our car.

Under the heading ‘Embarrassing,’ my daughter said it was embarrassing going to town because she had to travel in our old car – and bits were always falling off.

Apart from a door that fell off a couple of months ago (through metal fatigue), the only other bits that have fallen off have been helped on their way by our kids. So what my daughter wrote is only halfway close to the truth – she likes writing fiction, you see.

I suppose she’s only following in the footsteps of the agencies who put advertisements for cars together. In these ads, fiction and fantasy seem to be the order of the day.

Who on earth are these ads meant to appeal to? Is anybody interested in a car that’s advertised as being for a certain kind of executive, when the same executive is shown as being so at a loss for words he can’t even explain why he likes the car?

This seems to be a common feature of many ads at present: having said everything possible about the car, or the company, or the product of your past 50 ads, you now say absolutely nothing.

The flashy camerawork obstructs your view of what’s being shown, like a conjurer’s trick. There’s really nothing there at all.

(A certain bank presented several ads along this line, with people too busy to talk being hounded by a camera slinking behind bits of material. They were very cagey about naming their bank, for some reason.)

To get back to car ads. Why should I complain? They’ve been extreme as long as I can remember, often focusing on anything but the product.

We have girls cracking whips, models sitting moodily in front of a fire on a freezing cold beach and peasant women standing longingly in the midst of burning fields while some dolt rushes past the flames.

On the masculine side we have hyperactive drivers tearing through the countryside at speeds far in excess of the limit, and stopping short of dropping off a rotting bridge.

There are guys dreaming of their first car, behaving like maniacs in front of their kids. Or worse, imitation-Sinatra vocals while various men – and now I see there’s a lady – get stopped in their tracks at the sight of something no more amazing than a parked car.

The aforesaid gentlemen – and lady – then stroll around the vehicle for an expensive 30 secs of advertising time doing absolutely nothing, except raising the occasional eyebrow. (Thirty seconds it may only be, but it seems more like 30 minutes when you’re waiting for your programme to restart.)

Looking interested when there’s nothing to be interested in is a test of any actor’s skills; especially when it has to be conveyed with intensity. When those ads appear I watch the extras in the background – at least they seem to have some purpose in life.

Perhaps it would be less fictional in these lean recession days for the advertising men to go down to the local car yards. Against a background of anxious car salesmen, they could feature a few fellows raising their eyebrows under flapping flags and mooning over cars only the wealthy can afford.

1922 Car Advertisement