Trying to make sense of dress

I was at the Palmerston North Plaza shopping centre a couple of weeks ago looking at the directory sign that describes the shops and their location. The premises are colour coded and I counted the womenswear outlets and there were nineteen.

There were just three menswear shops.

So nineteen to three is apparently the ratio of importance the genders place on their outward appearance.

I noticed however that department stores were separately coded. The Farmers store in the Plaza is huge. As you walk in the door you encounter a gleaming white tiled floor that announces the makeup, perfumes and jewellery section. The goddesses behind the counters with redder than red lipstick and blushed cheeks smell and look gorgeous.

You hurry past them in case your own dowdiness presents too great a contrast.

The women’s clothing section takes up most of the rest of the vast store with a wee corner set aside for apparel for the mere male; so you can alter that ratio to twenty and three and a half.

The women’s underwear section in The Farmers has to be seen to be believed. Now I don’t want to paint the wrong picture here. I am in this area traipsing behind my wife and my daughter carefully averting my eyes away from the racks and racks and rows and rows of women’s bras and other undergarments in various sizes, shapes, colours and designs. Lace in its element and then there’s the exotic and erotic lingerie section with raiment of shimmering transparency.

I am eternally embarrassed when the female section of my family repair to the changing rooms and I am left the only male within a thousand square metres. I look around desperately for another member of my gender, but there are none.

Of course these are not the only shops set aside for female exclusivity. There are hair salons and manicurists and fashionable shoe shops where women can acquire high heels that look agonisingly difficult to wear, but admittedly enhance the appearance of the wearer.

The chemist shops compete with The Farmers and have a myriad of shelves devoted to makeup and perfumes and there are now shops that sell a product that was virtually unheard of a decade or so ago called “bling.”

Women feel obliged to be dedicated followers of fashion and yet on some occasions it works against them.

In an interview with Susan Wood on Q and A last week Australia’s immediate-past Prime Minister Julia Gillard talked of the misogyny she encountered in Australian politics and the news media’s concentration on what she wore and her hair style rather than the substance of what she was saying and doing. Her male counterparts, she said, have a constant uniform that never changes and attracts neither comment nor criticism.

So have our womenfolk fallen hook, line and sinker for the clever marketing ploys of the fashion designers?

Do the skeletal models that walk the catwalks of the western world have the rest of the sisterhood under such a spell that regular wardrobe upgrades are mandatory?

Have our fairer sex in fact made a rod for their own backs?

I was still standing by the directory when I endeavoured to envisage a shopping mall in a male-dominated Islamic country. I imagined just one dress shop with racks and racks of dull blue/grey burka’s purportedly designed to diminish the desire of the menfolk. No need for a hair salon, but a shoe shop with a modest range of sensible sandals - and that’s about it really.

Surprisingly, Islamic women appear to willingly accept these enforced dress codes and when westerners have sought to overturn these seemingly repressive customs those under apparent subjugation have spurned their succour.

This alien society would also be devoid of any liquor stores and so retailing would hardly play a part in their economy. Shopping malls I presume would be few and far between.

Julia Gillard in a burka perhaps?

No worse I suppose than Tony Abbott in speedos.

“I love to shop after a bad relationship. I buy a new outfit and it makes me feel better. Sometimes when I see a really great outfit, I’ll break up with someone on purpose.” – Rita Rudner

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A majestic house with memories

The grand old two-storey brick and reinforced concrete Prior homestead and one-time doctors’ surgery in Perry Street is no more. In its place, almost as a complete about-face to the days of old, is a modern single-storey office block purpose-built for a computer software company.

The Prior family have produced generations of doctor’s for our town, but the imposing dwelling hadn’t been in the Prior family hands for some time.

I think Stan Lane will have purchased the property perhaps in the late 1950s. It was directly behind his Lincoln Road car parts business and no doubt he saw an advantage in ownership by being able to step across the back fence to go to work.

Stan was one of natures’ gentlemen. He was a devoutly religious man, an elder in the Seventh Day Adventist Church and a non-drinker. His business involved dismantling cars that had either passed their used-by date or had been written-off after an accident. The parts were carefully removed to be used again in those halcyon days when we didn’t waste a thing and hub caps, carburettors, distributors, bumpers and the like were made available at a modest price for vehicles where one or more of these parts had failed.

These businesses have been replaced today by the likes of Repco and Super Cheap Autos where we can buy new parts probably more cheaply than it would cost to remove them from a wreck. Meanwhile abandoned cars are stacked one on top of another in a mountainous pile in Ngaumutawa Road, having been bought as scrap metal.

We call this progress.

Stan Lane was extremely community-minded and was at one stage president of the Riversdale Surf Lifesaving Club and was the inaugural chairman of Greater Masterton Incorporated. Greater Masterton had morphed from the Twenty Thousand Club and was itself morphed in to Go Wairarapa and then eventually Destination Wairarapa.

In the early 1960s Greater Masterton came up with a cunning plan to raise some money. They invited arguably the world’s most popular pianist at the time to come to Masterton and perform in the Regent Theatre. Winifred Atwell was on an Australasian tour and was intending to appear only at the main centres. However, somewhat surprisingly, she accepted the invitation.

Miss Atwell was born in Trinidad, but moved to London where she gained a place at The Royal Academy of Music. She signed a contract with Decca records and had a string of hits including The Black and White Rag which started a craze for the honky-tonk style of playing.

She was selling around 30,000 discs a week and was the first black artist in the UK to sell a million records. On one occasion she performed at a private party for the Queen and Prince Phillip and was called back for an encore by the monarch herself.

Masterton’s Regent Theatre which seated 1080 people was booked out weeks before the show and Stan Lane decided that after her performance she should be invited around to the Perry Street home for a cup of tea and some supper.

Back then chemist friend Wayne Snowsill and I used to do a comedy routine at local cabarets and dances based around miming Stan Freberg’s musical parodies; specifically The Great Pretender, The Banana Boat Song and A Dear John and Marsha Letter. Stan Lane insisted that we come around to his home after the Atwell concert and perform for the great lady herself.

He invited two other local characters, twins Clive and Colin Thorne. These two, better known as ace topdressing pilots, also did a comedy act where one of them told a story, quite lengthy and a shade risqué, while his twin brother stood behind him, put his arms through under his armpits and did the gesticulations; straightening his brothers tie, picking his nose and scratching his head etc.

It was a hilarious routine, but I have no doubt that Miss Atwell would have regularly seen far more sophisticated and humorous performances than what we four were offering up.

Now Stan was not a wealthy man and not to put too finer point on it his furnishings were not flash. In fact the word that comes to mind is “quaint.” So here was a world renowned artiste, sitting in an unpretentious parlour in an ageing dwelling in Perry Street having tea and cucumber sandwiches and being entertained by a butcher, a chemist and two daredevil aviators.

She was gracious enough to pretend she enjoyed the interlude though I note she didn’t suggest we make the Royal Variety Performance our next goal.

As far as I can recall Winifred Atwell was the first and only international celebrity entertainer to ever appear in Masterton. She only had a small entourage with her; she needed just a piano and a stage to perform.

Local developer David Borman has used some of the bricks carefully dismantled from the once grand old home to construct wall sections and a splendid fence around the perimeter of the replacement property. Those bricks will hold many pleasant memories, for me anyway. However I suspect Winifred Atwell would have forgotten all about the place even before she left the confines of perhaps one of the smallest towns she had ever performed in.

“The crowds cheered me as I passed by, but they would be just as noisy if they were going to see me hanged.” - Oliver Cromwell

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Facing up to the inevitable

Having passed my allotted three score years and ten I self-consciously realise I am now a continual liability on the long-suffering taxpayer and may potentially become a burden on the health system. Retirees tend to believe that having paid taxes all their lives they deserve to live off the fat of the land - or at least the lean pickings that the state allows.

The pension is no doubt an encumbrance on the treasury coffers, but is hardly generous enough to allow superannuitants to live in the kind of comfort they may have experienced during their working lives. As one dear old lady expressed it, “Retirement means twice as much husband on half as much money.”

The truth of the matter is that successive governments never did put aside a percentage of our taxes to pay back out to us when we reached retirement. They frivolously spent every penny they received on ongoing projects and now have to borrow from frugal overseas moneylenders to pay the unemployment benefits, the DPB and old-age pensions.

Dear old Winston, observing his own greying hair, did come up with the Gold Card granting recipients the use of public transport in off-peak hours. This allows elderly locals to take a train to Wellington, have a few minutes to stride along windswept Lambton Quay, a few more minutes to sit on the world’s coldest railway platform and then come home. Aucklander’s are slightly better off. Apparently they can get to Waiheke Island and back and experience seasickness.

When I first started earning we understood that one and sixpence out of every pound we paid in tax was put aside to pay our pensions. Social Security it was called. Back then we were encouraged to retire at sixty.

Such prudence was halted in1975 when Mr Muldoon scrapped Labour’s contributory scheme based on Singapore’s Central Provident Plan and introduced his National Superannuation Fund, assuring us that there would always be enough money in the kitty to pay out old-age pensions.

He hadn’t factored in advances in medical science and the canny drug companies subsequent surfeit of expensive elixirs that the government is reluctantly obliged to pay for to extend our lives.

Talk about Catch 22.

Benjamin Franklin once said that in this world nothing can be certain except death and taxes. So having paid the taxes apparently we now can only look forward to death.

It’s a sobering fact that at Masterton’s Men’s Shed, where male retirees regularly gather to learn or enhance their carpentry skills during their golden years, some are building their own coffins.

And then nightly on primetime TV either Gary McCormick or Keith Quinn plead with me in the nicest possible way to take out insurance to pay for my funeral. I suspect my children are hoping I will heed their advice, but I intend my will to be one of the shortest: “Being of sound mind, I spent all my money.”

As we approach the inevitable there are all manner of alternatives open to us; not all of course of our own choosing. I’m hoping to die of old age. I want to live to 120 and by then I reckon the government will have paid me back all the taxes I begrudgingly paid them.

The least desirable option is death by a terminal illness. There are a number of maladies in this category and we recently added Ebola to that sordid list. During my working life I handled lots of pork and poultry, skilfully avoiding swine flu and bird flu. But I have got aids; fortunately of the hearing variety and not HIV, so hopefully I’ll hear of any external danger that may creep up on me. Mr Key has warned us of the possibility of beheadings and given the inexplicably high price of hearing devices my severed head may be quite valuable.

An English academic writing in a medical journal said last week that climate change is a bigger threat to humanity than the Ebola virus. I’m glad I live in an inland town so rising sea levels won’t engulf me and I intend limiting my visits to the coast. I will also discard my speedos to ensure I don’t die from over-exposure to the sun’s rays.

I can’t think of any other precautions I should take to maintain my longevity in the face of an excess of CO2 in the atmosphere; though in the thirty years since we were first warned of the danger of global warming I’m not aware of any widespread fatalities.

But I’ve really only skimmed the surface on ways we can die.

There was this fellow who was a karate expert, then he joined the army. The first time he saluted, he killed himself.

“We’ve seen them all on street corners, many of them smoking, many of them on drugs: they’ve got no jobs to go to and once a week we see them queuing for state hand-outs - or pensions as we call them.” - Harry Hill

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Thoughts on earning a living

Last week a New Zealand Herald front page article revealed that after dipping briefly following the global financial crisis the average pay of New Zealand’s top executives is rising once again. The bosses of the country’s largest firms received an average total remuneration - including base salary and incentive payments - of $1.4 million in the 2013 financial year, a 4 percent increase on 2012.

Our highest paid chief executive last year was ANZ’s David Hisco, on $4.1 million, a 14 per cent rise on 2012.

Nice money if you can get it.

The reaction from the Herald readers was swift and vicious and a branch of the ANZ staff, who were in pay talks, threatened strike action. Understandable; I was angry myself when I first read it, particularly when it has been reported of late that thousands of New Zealand children are going to school without breakfast. I remembered too that economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said: “The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.”

These hitherto undreamed of salaries are the preserve of the favoured few, but for the rest of us, perhaps we are our own worst enemies.

I think our problems probably start with all the clichés we’ve been told about money.

As kids we were taught that money is the root of all evil. What the Bible actually says is that the love of money is the root of all evil. And we were told money isn’t everything and that money won’t buy you happiness. In fact to emphasise that belief someone once said: “There is nothing in the world more reassuring than an unhappy lottery winner.”

I’ve often wondered whether these statements weren’t circulated by people who have money, to keep those that haven’t, in their place.

The truth is that money is a warm home and healthy children; its birthday presents and a university education; it’s a trip overseas and the means to help older people and the less fortunate.

There is little doubt that education is the answer to our money woes. In our society, a highly skilled person is worth more money than someone who is not highly skilled and can easily be replaced.

American motivational speaker Earl Nightingale would often quote the disparity of incomes between a janitor and a heart surgeon. He was not suggesting that one person is any better or more important than any other person. The amount of money each will earn will be proportional to the demand for what they do, their ability to do what they do and the difficulty of replacing them.

In a few weeks a person can be trained to clean and maintain a building and replacing that person is not difficult. Meanwhile a heart surgeon spends many years learning his profession, often at great personal sacrifice, and at an extremely high cost, and he cannot easily be replaced. As a result the surgeon might earn as much money in a week as a janitor might earn in a year.

Of course this example is an extreme case, but it shows the relationship of income to demand, skill and supply. You will inevitably find that a person’s income will be in exact proportion to the demand of what that person does, the ability to do the task and the difficulty of being replaced.

In a year a top jockey will earn a great deal of money, which will represent about 5 per cent of the winnings of the horses he or she rides. You might say riding a racehorse serves no useful purpose, but, useful or not, the demand is there. It’s the same with stars in show business like Dolly Parton or sports stars like the All Blacks. Their income will very accurately reflect the demand for what they do.

While this may sound elementary, you’d be amazed at the number of people who want more money, but don’t want to take the time and trouble to qualify for it. And until they qualify for it, there’s no way on earth for them to earn it. It’s like the person who wants a good-looking figure, but doesn’t want to change their eating habits.

When I was a kid there was a poem that in part said: “I bargained with life for a penny, and life would pay no more.” And that’s it in a nutshell. The world will pay you exactly what you bargain for - exactly what you honestly earn - and not a penny more.

People who refuse to do more than they’re being paid for will seldom be paid for more than they’re doing. You may have heard someone say “Why should I knock myself out for the money I’m getting?” It’s this attitude, more than anything else that keeps people at the bottom of the economic pile.

We must however keep money in its proper place. It’s a servant, nothing more.

It’s a tool with which we can live better, see more of the world; it’s the means to a happy, carefree retirement in later years and it allows us to give our children the education they need and a good start in life, but we need to keep it in perspective.

You need only so much food to maintain good health and you really need only so much money to live comfortably, securely and well. Too much emphasis on money reverses the whole picture; then you become the servant and the money becomes the master.

It’s good to have money and the things money can buy, but it’s good too, to check up once in a while, to make sure you haven’t lost the things that money can’t buy.

“We couldn’t afford a proper bath. We just had a pan of water and we’d wash down as far as possible and we’d wash up as far as possible. Then, when somebody’d clear the room, we’d wash possible.” - Dolly Parton.

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An analysis of what went right

It seems implausible that due to our questionable electoral system a party that was only able to capture 48 per cent of the popular vote gets a win that is described as a “landslide.”

You could express it differently of course. 76 per cent of the electorate did not favour Labour, 90 percent wouldn’t have a bar of the Greens, and 91 per cent didn’t want New Zealand First despite Winston being the darling of the aged and infirm.

In the process Internet-Mana lost its mana and Colin Craig sunk a sizable portion of his large personal fortune into his fledgling Conservative Party only to miss representation by one percentage point.

Much of the blame of the unfortunate outcome for some has perhaps been justifiably foisted upon poor old David Cunliffe.

I know him, not well, but he attended a number of licensing trust conferences over the years and I had dinner with him and his wife one night at Solway Park when he opened a national conference here in Masterton. They were a pleasant couple and I enjoyed their company, but a leader of the people he is not.

His problem started when he needed to court the unions to gain enough support to win selection as Labour leader as his caucus in the main despised him. The unions who almost destroyed this country in the 70’s and 80’ were themselves destroyed by the Employment Contracts Act introduced by National in 1990.

These “bully boys” have never been missed by the general populace.

Cunliffe had to promise a sharp left turn to gain their support and Matt McCarten was brought in to set up a “war room” and maintain the direction set. None of this was going to sit well with the electorate.

Large fortunes were thrown around everywhere and Kim Schmitz - aka Dotcom - was lavish with his own. This is where the news media let the country down badly. Night after boring night the portly German invaded our TV screens and our daily papers did their level best to emulate the adoration. They foolishly built up the momentum to his “Moment of Truth” stage show which turned out to be a moment of “strewth”.

In an effort to destroy his nemesis John Key the German fraudster managed to con Hone Harawira and the Waaka-jumping Laila Harre to join him in his wretched crusade.

They then ill-advisedly added Pam Corkery and John Minto to the mix causing the vast majority of the voting public to sense a radicalisation that went way beyond acceptable limits.

Schmitz brought in Glenn Greenwald, a “Pulitzer-prize-winning” journalist from “America” to tell us our government was spying on all of us. I have put inverted commas around Pulitzer-prize-winning and America because neither of these statements is true.

Greenwald actually lives in Rio de Janeiro with his husband; same sex marriages are illegal in the US. He has never won a Pulitzer Prize; the paper he worked for did, but it was a community award for the whole paper where Greenwald worked as a journalist. If Greenwald could claim he was a Pulitzer-Prize-winner under those circumstances then presumably so too could the janitor and the tea lady.

When the fawning media finally woke up to this towards the end of his visit they began describing him as an “award-winning” journalist.

Fair enough, he did indeed win a Polk Prize for journalism.

On the Monday night before the election the Auckland Town Hall was full of the city’s malcontents who cheered the big screen images of Julian Assange wanted for sexual offences in Sweden and Edward Snowden wanted for espionage in America. These two fugitives from justice and the German fraudster were the toast of the evening. Schmitz however failed to present any evidence that proved John Key was a liar and despite the rapturous applause after each utterance from the top table, when the attendees woke up the next morning they would have realised they had been thoroughly duped.

And anyway, by some quirk of fate the messages from Assange, Snowden and Greenwald were completely nullified when on the Wednesday we found out that Australian-based Islamic terrorists were going to take an innocent citizen off a Sydney street decapitate him or her and show an accompanying video to the world. With potential atrocities being committed so close to home most New Zealand citizens were hoping the GCSB were monitoring us to the extent that Snowden, Assange and Greenwald said they were.

Meanwhile Nicky Hager’s claims of dirty politics didn’t gain much traction particularly when it was clear whose billboards were getting defaced.

And yet despite all the evidence to the contrary the miscalculating political journalists assured us that we were heading for a hung parliament and our fate would be decided by wily Winston who was likely to go fishing for a week or two before deciding who he’d coalesce with.

Worse than that, Russel Norman and Metiria Turei, grinning like a couple of Cheshire cats, promised us that they were going to be our co-deputy-prime-ministers.

That awful thought, for most people anyway, may well have been the straw that broke the camel’s

back.

“Under Helen Clark the Labour party was captured by academics, feminists, gays and tertiary educated leaders of a union movement that never worked a shop floor.” - John Tamihere

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