Masterton’s most exclusive club

The following story is true, though I concede it may beggar belief. Some names have been omitted to protect the innocent, if indeed there were any.

Circa 1960; I am of course single and at a party at a house in Masterton in which four young women “flat”. Back then we called them girls and these particular females were mostly school teachers. The house was brim full of revelers of both genders and I decided to tell a joke. It wasn’t new then and it certainly isn’t now. I said that there had been a meeting of all the virgins in Masterton on the previous night. Right on cue somebody asked: “Where was it held?” and with impeccable timing I said: “In the telephone box in Roberts Road.”

Trust me, back then there was a telephone box in Roberts Road.

The young ladies present all expressed disappointment that they hadn’t been told it was on. They assured me that had they known about it, they would have all been there.

I agreed to inform them when the next meeting was going to be held. A week or so later I put an advertisement in the personal column of the daily paper which read: The annual general meeting of the “V” Club - you would never use the word “virgin” publicly back then - will be held next Thursday night in the telephone box in Roberts Road at 7.30 p.m. For those requiring transport a motor scooter will leave - and here I gave the address of the house where the party had been held - at 7.15.

To some extent I had called the bluff of the female party goers, but they responded well and confirmed that they would all legitimately attend the meeting and that I was going to have to organise bigger premises.

One young lady in the group lived with her mum in Renall Street and she offered a quite large summer house that sat in their tree clad grounds as a potential venue. I accepted the offer and enlisted the services of a good friend, chemist Wayne Snowsill, to assist me in conducting the meeting. Wayne and I both played in a rock band and although the phrase “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll” had yet to be coined we certainly had the expression in mind well before the flower power people were to later claim authorship. Wayne dispensed drugs and we played rock’n’roll and so we were two thirds of the way towards our goal, which was infrequently reached.

About twenty women, all in their early twenties, turned up to our inaugural meeting. First-off we needed office holders and I was elected patron and Wayne secretary/treasurer. Not that there was anything to treasure; it was decided quite early on in the evening that no subscription would be payable.

The sexual revolution was not even in its infancy and so the validity of the lady membership was justifiably taken for granted. It was unanimously agreed that eligibility to belong was on a neither confirm nor deny basis. Once again we were light years ahead of our time with the clichés. It would be some twenty years later that the Americans would lay claim to this one when they were requesting access for their nuclear armed ships to our ports.

The format for the next meeting was discussed and our members requested a guest speaker. Wayne and I had a friend who was a little older than us and his success with the fairer sex was legendary. For the want of a better name we shall him “John.” We decided to engage him for the next time. We knew it was entirely possible that he may be intimately aware that one or two of our members were attending under false pretenses, but if that were so, he never let on. The age of chivalry had not yet passed.

Our second meeting was held at my parent’s home. They were away on holiday. I opened up the doors between the dining room and the lounge, had chairs arranged in rows for our members with a top table for the patron and the secretary/treasurer and a lectern for the guest speaker who was hidden in one of the back bedrooms while we read the minutes of the previous meeting and went through the other necessary formalities. As I went to retrieve John from his exile in the sun-porch I heard the ladies speculate as to who the mystery speaker might be. The top contender for some unknown reason was Dr. Wyvern Cook, a local GP with a wry sense of humour, and I made a mental note to invite him next time.

John, who was widely travelled and well read, gave a wonderful dissertation on the virtues of chastity. Whatever other attributes he had, you could now add “skilled orator” and the audience hung on his every word. I wish I had recorded it for posterity; it could well have been a classic for its time. Unfortunately the speech was so all-encompassing that further meetings seemed superfluous.

So sadly the club died as quickly as it had been conceived. Our record book contained only two sets of minutes, meticulously written up by our secretary/treasurer, and I have patroned no other organisation since.

In the intervening period, Telecom has dismantled most of the town’s telephone boxes.

There was now little demand for them, they said, even as meeting venues.

“Had God consulted me on the matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them out of clay.” - Martin Luther

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Are you being served?

The district’s mayors’ are constantly on our wireless’s imploring us to buy locally, not to shop out of town and keep the money revolving in the Wairarapa. It’s a good message. I just hope that it’s a public service broadcast and not a charge on ratepayers. Ironically our radio stations are mostly run by computers domiciled I imagine in Auckland where I suspect most of the advertising revenue accumulates.

There is no doubt local businesses, particularly retailers, are having a tough time, but I can’t help but wonder if to some extent they aren’t the architects of their own misfortune.

Some years ago I attended a two-day seminar on salesmanship in Palmerston North. The course lecturer was an Auckland real estate salesman named Kevin McMahon. He was a big man and an entertaining raconteur. One story I vividly recall was when he told us of holidaying in Queensland and visiting a menswear shop in Brisbane when he needed to buy a belt. He paused at this stage and asked the course attendees: “What does a shop assistant invariably say to you when you walk into a shop in New Zealand?” There were about twenty of us in the room and we all said in unison “Can I help you.”

McMahon then wanted to know, “And what is our response?” Again in unison, almost as though we had rehearsed it: “No thanks, I’m just looking.”

This, he reckoned, was the New Zealand shopping mantra.

But things, he said, were different in Brisbane. A young male shop assistant approached and asked him if this was the first time he had visited the shop? He affirmed that indeed it was. The shop assistant then told him they had a gift for first time customers and leaned under the counter and presented him with a small exquisitely wrapped parcel. There was a visitor’s book on the counter and the shop assistant asked if he could record McMahon’s name and address. With the gift in his hand he felt obliged to reciprocate in some way so he was happy to give the information. He was even asked for his date of birth which again he gave readily.

Now the young man wanted to know what he had come into the shop to buy. Kevin said he needed a belt. The young man led him to the section of the shop where the belts were located, but on the way paused at a rack of shirts. These shirts, McMahon was told, had been specially tailored for the firm to fit the fuller figure. The company had noticed that for some unknown reason when shirt manufacturers made shirts for the larger man they made the sleeves lengthier, wrongly assuming that a large girth indicated long arms. McMahon knew this only too well; he said he always had to wear elasticised arm bands to maintain his shirt sleeves at wrist level.

He tried on one of the shirts and was so impressed he bought three. The shop assistant - McMahon was now calling him a salesman - suggested a couple of nice silk ties to go with them. McMahon eventually walked out of the shop spending over two thousand dollars. Apart from the belt, the three shirts and the two ties he also bought two beautifully tailored Italian suits which fitted him perfectly.

When he got back to his hotel he opened the gift and found two silk handkerchiefs and a card with the salesman’s name on it. This meant, said McMahon, that each salesman in the shop had his own separate set of gifts.

Every birthday he gets a card from the menswear shop and three times a year they send him a brochure about their upcoming sale. Those items they think he might consider are highlighted and he is invited to visit the shop on the Sunday before that sale starts to have first choice of the items available.

McMahon said that this may sound ridiculous, but he now feels such loyalty towards this company, whenever he wants any clothes he hops on a plane and flies to Brisbane.

A lesson for retailers in this country? I think so. I’m so old I can remember when shop assistants always used to attempt to sell you something instead of expecting you to serve yourself. Sometimes this was a nuisance, but it inevitably resulted in a sale. The rot set in when the supermarkets enticingly laid out their product and introduced checkouts and service stations became petrol retailers.

Everyone else followed suit at their peril.

Last week I was holidaying up north and went into a number of gift shops where without exception there was always a woman sitting on a tall stool behind a counter and not one of them made any attempt to leave their comfortable repositories and assist me to find the article I was specifically seeking. Two of them were actually talking on the phone.

I walked out of all of them with money still jingling in my pocket.

These would be the self-same people who would respond to those reporting on the economic pulse of this country by telling them that business was “very quiet.”

“The only reason a great many American families don’t own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.” – Mad Magazine. 

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Confessions of a confirmed peasant

Beauty, they say is in the eye of the beholder. When Ralph Hotere died I Googled his website to be beholden by the images of his art. I’m sorry to say I was sorely disappointed.

Obviously my eye has a different focus to those who revered him. Don’t misunderstand me here; I’m not suggesting for one minute that Hotere and his admirers are wrong and that I am right. Quite the opposite. I am lamenting my inadequacy to recognise and appreciate art in all its forms.

And I am a long way behind the eight ball. Writing in the Listener Gregory O’Brien said of Hotere: “As a painter he is capable of great fury. His art can smoulder and brood; it points accusingly at those who abuse power, yet often in the space of a single work can simultaneously strike an introspective or elegiac note. At other times he can be euphorically romantic and decidedly amorous. His reds can be as sensuous as they are cataclysmic.”

Who can argue against prose such as that? Reds that are sensuous and cataclysmic? I now have a whole new respect for the dye we dipped our saveloys in.

In the same publication actor-person Sam Neill told of how he and his brother went round to Hotere’s one day and were given a job sanding some charred planks from a devastating fire at a boatbuilders shed. Hotere asked them to sand a section on each piece of the blackened wood. Hotere then told the two young men that he had to slip away, something pressing had come up. He returned four hours later admitting that he had been caught up at the pub. They went back the next day to complete the task and again Hotere slipped out and went to the pub, probably “giggling all the way,” Neill thought.

The work went on to become the “masterpiece” Black Phoenix. Neill says he wants to cry every time he sees it.

So would I, but probably for a different reason.

Artistic prose is a bit like those who pontificate about wine. I heard John Hawkesby on the radio recently waxing lyrically about a wine that was “reasonably priced” at $95 a bottle! The wine he said was “tight and not flabby” – for a moment there I thought I had stumbled upon an R18 airwave – and had a hint of asparagus in the taste. Tight, not flabby with a hint of asparagus. And all this from a tart-tasting liquid made from rotting grapes!

My cousin was once the CEO of a large state owned enterprise. On one wall in his expansive penthouse office in one of Wellington’s most imposing high-rise buildings hung a Colin McCahon. Much to the disappointment of my cousin I viewed it from all angles but could perceive no beauty. He did his best to expose the mystical artistic intricacies of this taxpayer funded artwork, but to no avail.

We grew up together in Masterton and I was surprised just how much his tastes had matured and developed compared to my own, I should have sensed this when some years earlier he admitted to me that he loved going to the ballet!

I once visited the Sistine Chapel not long after the ceiling art had been restored and I thought to myself, now Michelangelo, there’s a real artist, but we are told realism has been superseded by the coloured photography. We have to move on. And yet last week I went to the opening of an art exhibition in the foyer of the Carterton Events Centre where local painters - I dare not call them artists - had done their impressions of sunflowers to highlight the upcoming production of Calendar Girls, and thoroughly enjoyed the realism of the almost photographic quality of the exhibits.

Meanwhile Ralph Hotere, whose real name was Hone Papita Raukura, has been laid to rest on Mount Zion in the Hokianga amidst great ceremony and a huge band of followers. His body was transported there from Dunedin by the Air Force’s new NH90 helicopter which reportedly costs more than $30,000 an hour to operate. In the New Year’s honours list Mr Hotere was appointed to the Order of New Zealand, our highest award.

You don’t get all that unless you deserve it.

Best-selling author John Gray says men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

I reckon I must be from Pluto.

“Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never succeeding.” - Marc Chagall

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Two dollar shops eye new venture

It was the best of times and the worst of times for the airline industry last week with  Air New Zealand announcing that it had more than doubled its half yearly profit compared to last year and then having to admit that one of its overworked pilots fell asleep at the wheel twice on a long haul flight. Meanwhile Jetstar, already plagued with problems involving well-publicised passenger dissatisfaction, refused to change the bookings for the Murawai beach shark victims mum so she could travel from Wellington to Auckland to be with her family. This must surely leave an opening for a genuine no-frills airline to challenge the existing carriers.

Asian entrepreneurs seem adept at producing cut-price retail outlets so what if a Two Dollar Shop or Uncle Bills decides to spread it wings so to speak and moved into the domestic airline business? I imagine an on board announcement for such an enterprise might sound something like this:

“This is the captain speaking. Welcome to Uncle Bills flight 486 from Auckland to Wellington. This is the inaugural flight of our no frills airline and we trust you will enjoy your journey with us this morning.

The first officer on the flight deck with me this morning is Cindy Johnson. Ms Johnson is not licensed to fly, in fact up until two days ago she was working on the checkout counter at one of our retail outlets, but we’ve put her through a crash course so that she can do her best to take over the controls in the case of an emergency.

I will be showing her a thing or two on the trip down to Wellington.

With our incredibly cheap fare regime you will appreciate that we have had to make some radical changes to the way in which we run the company compared to our overpriced competitors.

To double the 737’s passenger numbers we have removed the seats and you will notice that we have installed hand straps hanging from the ceiling, like the old trams.

We have also had to cut some of the other facilities and services that we have always deemed to be unnecessary extras anyway. Luxury items such as a navigation system, air traffic control personnel, radar and maintenance.

To burn less fuel we will be flying at an altitude of around 40,000 feet. Unfortunately we cannot afford to pressurise the cabins so if your ears start to bleed you will have to stuff them with cotton wool. You will find some of this in plastic bags sitting in what’s left of the overhead lockers.


There will be no safety instructions given either. With no seats we don’t have anything to store the lifejackets under so we sold them, along with our life rafts, to the surf lifesaving team at Piha.

Not that these presentations were of any real value anyway. 99 per cent of our flights take place over terra firma and 95 per cent of the world’s airline crashes to date have all occurred on land. No one has yet found a viable use for lifejackets in these circumstances.

Even if we did go out to sea to ditch, extensive research has shown that a fully laden 737 will sink in about two seconds flat, so there never was a snowballs chance of you ever getting out and scrambling to safety no matter how many in-flight safety demonstrations we gave you.

Without any navigational aids we will need to follow the state highway down to Wellington, probably turning left at the Bombay Hills and then following the route to Matamata and Tirau in an effort to avoid heavy traffic flows coming up the other way.

We may also hang a left at Vinegar Hill, fly through to the Wairarapa and weave our way through the Rimutaka ranges. I understand there is low cloud over Wellington so if you recognise some landmarks as we approach the Capital would you please let us know so we can see if we can work out where the airport is.

Now we appreciate that with one of your hands holding on to the ceiling straps, reading will be difficult, but we do have some periodicals on board for your amusement. You will notice that these are almost exclusively Penthouse or Playboy. This is an integral part of our security system. New Zealand First MP Richard Prosser has assured us that all hijackings are performed by Muslim men and as Muslim men are forbidden to view the naked female form they will be discouraged from flying with Uncle Bill.

On the other hand New Zealand businessmen will be queuing up once they get wind of our new magazine policy, so it’s a win-win situation for the airline.

There is of course no food or drink service on this flight. However we bought the aircraft from a bankrupt airline in America’s Deep South and to our surprise we’ve just discovered that the cocktail cabinet on the flight deck is stocked to the hilt with 12-year-old bourbon.

Cindy had the presence of mind to bring a couple of cocktail glasses with her this morning and she and I have been sampling the wares while I’ve tried to get these darn motors to fire.

Cheers!

So sit back and …oops… I mean shtand up and relaxsh and enjshoy the flight.

And shank you for flying wish Uncle Bill’sh Airlines.”

“People want economy and they will pay any price to get it.”     -Lee Iacocca

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