Ten things that will disappear

I received an email recently postulating that there will be ten things that will disappear in our lifetime. The document seems to have originated in the US, but as you would expect, it is just as applicable here.

First to go they reckon is the Post office. Well it’s almost disappeared already in our town.

A “Temporarily Closed” sign on the posting slots in Lincoln Road has been there for months and the government have agreed to a three day delivery service as opposed to the six day service we are currently receiving.

Shouldn’t be too much of a problem; most items that now come in the letter box are either bills, begging letters or junk mail.

The second item listed is the cheque. Plastic cards and online transactions supersede the necessity to write a cheque. Receiving online accounts and paying them by direct credit is just hastening the demise of the cheque – and the post office.

If you are reading this via a conventional hand-held periodical you will be disturbed to know that third on the list is the newspaper which will go the way of the milkman says the writer. You will be able to read the newspaper online, but you have to be ready to pay for it.

Fourth item is the book. Although I personally enjoy the physical book you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages you can now browse a bookstore online and even preview a chapter before you buy. I love conventional bookstores, but I guess the eventual departure of the genial bookseller is inevitable.

Number five is the landline telephone. Most people are keeping their landline just because they’ve always had it. Even primary school kids have got cell phones.

Next up – number six – is music. This is the saddest part of the change story. The writer reckons the music industry is dying a slow death because of the lack of innovative new music. Can you imagine anyone walking around in some future time whistling Royals?

Apparently over forty per cent of music purchased today is “catalogue items” meaning traditional music the public is familiar with; older established artists. This is also true of the live concert circuit and here I am thinking of the sell-out concerts of Neil Diamond the Rolling Stones or Cliff Richard.

Television is number seven. Revenues of the networks are down dramatically. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their computers and they’re playing games and doing lots of other things that take up the time previously spent watching TV.

Number eight is surprisingly “Things you own.” Here the author claims that your photographs, music, movies and documents are now being stored in a “cloud” that is either under the control of Apple, Microsoft or Google. So do you actually own this stuff or will it be able to disappear at any moment in a big “poof?”

Makes you want to run to your cupboard and pull out a photo album, grab a book from the bookshelf or open up a CD case and pull out a recording.

In ninth place is joined handwriting. Already gone in some schools who no longer teach joined handwriting because nearly everything is done now on computers or iPad

Last but not least at number ten is privacy.

Actually it’s already gone. There are cameras on the streets, in most buildings and even built into your computer and your smart phone.

“They” know where you are right down to the GPS co-ordinates and the Google Street View. The TV show Person of Interest may not be as far-fetched as you might think.

When you buy something your buying pattern is circulated a million times and “they” will use this information to try to get you to buy something else, again and again.

On the privacy issue the author concludes that all we will be left with and can’t be changed are our “memories.”

Lack of privacy has never worried me; after all I’m a law-abiding citizen, I’ve got nothing to hide. But that’s fine if you’ve got a democratically elected government you can trust. But under our dopey MMP system of governance, which is patently undemocratic, anything could happen. Imagine the tyrannical potential if ex-Australian communist party member Russell Norman or ex-German fraudster Kim Dotcom were to rise to power.

So number eleven on my wish list would be the demise of MMP.

“Future shock…the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” - Alvin Toffler

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The welcome return of the artisan

According to various explanations of the Grimm Fairy tales the “rub-a-dub-dub” rhyme was referring to the laundering of money. The upper floors of candlestick shops were often used as poor tenant housing and houses of ill repute because the process of rendering tallow to make candles smelled so terribly that no one who had money/social standing would live in the space. Back then prostitution was regarded with the same sort of disdain as it is today, so spending money gained from arranging such encounters was frowned upon.

Legend has it that the butcher and the baker were in cahoots with the candlestick maker, sending him clients for the “ladies of the night” who were his main tenants and were laundering their share of the profits through their successful legitimate businesses. When they were caught “cleaning” the money all three became public embarrassments.

The explanation for the candlestick maker however has always confused me. I assumed a candlestick was the device for holding a candle and not the candle itself. However research has shown that in those centuries before Liberace was to place a candelabra on his grand piano a candle was indeed known as a candlestick. Once the wax started to melt the ancients set it firmly in a saucer.

Anyway all this is merely a dubious lead into a story about two new businesses in Masterton, both of which I have a tenuous connection to.

David Gallagher was the last apprentice I trained back in the 1990’s and if that makes you want to question his skill level then I can tell you that under my stewardship he won the New Zealand Butcher’s Apprentice of the Year Award. His craftsmanship however should perhaps be credited to my senior staff.

He has spent the last twelve years in the police force, but he approached me some months back asking me if he thought a stand-alone butcher’s shop might once again be viable.

In the early 1990s there were butchers shops all over town, but a new law completely abolishing shop trading hours and restrictions was enacted in 1993 allowing supermarkets to open all hours and sell whatever they liked which meant traditional food retailers such as butchers, greengrocers and bakers largely withdrew from the marketplace.

I agreed with David it was probably time for the re-emergence of the traditional butcher’s shop, but I thought his choice of venue in First Street was a shade risky. However since opening Gourmet Meats just before Christmas the business has thrived and has exceeded all his, and to some extent my, expectations.

It makes sense; there are more people living in Lansdowne than there are in Pahiatua. He is also displaying a desirable product using his skills and flair as a craftsman butcher.

Meanwhile a separate office section of the Sign Factory which was once the Tip Top Ice Cream Factory and then Long’s Bacon Ham and Smallgoods Factory has been largely underutilised since the Wairarapa Organisation for Older Persons (WOOPS) shifted to new premises at the Solway Showgrounds.

Enter Frank Bain, original owner of the Ten O’clock Cookie Company, who concluded that a traditional bakery would be popular once again and siting it on the corner of Villa and Victoria Streets would be an ideal location for such an enterprise.

After extensive and I suspect expensive alterations The Old Bakehouse is opening for business next Monday where Frank and his family will be cooking up a storm.

One member of the family, world-renowned pop vocalist Ladyhawke who was over here for Christmas and helped paint the shop area, won’t be there to serve you a mince pie. She is domiciled in Los Angeles.

In a cashless society overrun by eftpos machines it is unlikely that the butcher and the baker will be laundering money from the ill-gotten gains of a candlestick maker. Nonetheless Frank’s wife Jillian, Ladyhawke’s mother, says she could well be described as a lady of the night given that she intends working during the darkness hours as she will be kneading the dough.

Well at least I think she meant kneading.

“Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub; and who do you think they be? The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker; turn ‘em out, knaves all three!” - Olde nursery rhyme

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Not everyone free after long walk

Unlike the Prime Minister I have a clear memory of where I stood on the 1981 Springbok Rugby tour of New Zealand. I was unashamedly pro-tour. Not that I went to any of the matches. I may well have attempted to go if they had been any played in our neck of the woods, but I was content to view the games on TV - well at least those contests that were allowed to go ahead.

I was not pro-apartheid; I personally didn’t know anyone who was, but I went along with the mantra that politics and sport don’t mix as expounded by Ces Blazey, Ron Don and Rob Muldoon and was less enamoured with the contrary view put to us by John Minto, Trevor Richards and Tom Newnham.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and after witnessing the worldwide awe in which the late great Nelson Mandela was held I can only conclude that I got it all wrong.

But we were the product of the times and the information we had of South Africa meant we thought we understood why the segregation of the races may have been inevitable.

We were taught for instance that the Boers and the British migrated to the cooler end of the African continent which at the time was sparsely populated. After warring amongst themselves they eventually built a thriving industrialised state whereby black Africans came from far and wide to share in the wealth.

Unfortunately border controls were not in place and soon the 2 million Europeans were overwhelmed by 6 million native Africans which was an impossible situation for the economy to absorb. Ghettos sprang up and crime was rampant due to the inequality between rich whites and poor blacks.

Further we were told the colour of a person’s skin was not the issue, but it was more of a cultural divide.

We knew of the abhorrent genital mutilation that some African tribes practiced and we saw newsreels at the “pictures” of a custom whereby black people would cut the jugular vein in the neck of cows, collect the blood and then drink it. We watched with horror as the cattle-beast subsequently staggered and died on the screen before us. Excessive examples perhaps, but we could be excused for assuming they were mainstream.

So somehow we had an understanding, or perhaps a misunderstanding of the reasoning behind some form of segregation.

We also had a grudging admiration for the Afrikaners as we witnessed their prowess on the rugby field. Yet we despised them for the very same reason in a confused dichotomy of thought.

In 1981 I don’t think we’d heard of Nelson Mandela. If we had we would have believed that he was a terrorist who led a militant sabotage campaign against the ruling South African National government and was sentenced to life in prison where he subsequently languished for 27 years.

We might have even thought that he was lucky to get such a light sentence. Back then there were plenty of folk in this country who would have welcomed the return of the death penalty and even today many say a life sentence should mean whole of life.

Meanwhile for the black majority day to day life itself was not too rosy. The South African police force proved the old adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Despite this Mandela it seems got on well with his jailers and it was a Messianic “Madiba” that emerged from Robben Island and against all odds, and using a forgiving spirit not seen for two thousand years, reunited a country that was on the brink of anarchy.

He was elected President of the previously divided nation and set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that amazingly forgave those who had committed the most heinous acts of inhumane cruelty.

The rest as they say is history, but history hasn’t been all that kind to the rainbow nation.

John Minto, the national organiser of the Halt All Racist Tours movement was nominated for the Companion of O. R. Tambo Award by a South African government official, but asked for the bid to be withdrawn.

The Tambo Award is the highest honour given to non-South Africans in recognition of friendship, co-operation and support.

In an open letter to South African president Thabo Mbeki, Minto lambasted the African National Congress government which he said had side-lined social and economic rights.

“When we protested and marched into police batons and barbed wire here in the struggle against apartheid, we were not fighting for a small black elite to become millionaires. We were fighting for a better South Africa for all its citizens. The faces at the top have changed from white to black, but the substance of the change is an illusion,” wrote the disenchanted protester.

But nothing is in vain and Nelson Mandela’s lack of resentment is a stunning example to us all. Four presidents and seventy-five heads of state attended his memorial service exhibiting the high regard in which he was held.

John Key attended; I bet he will never forget that.

“Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” - Nelson Mandela

 

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