Contradictions in a modern world

It is somewhat surprising that in an increasingly secular world the celebration of Christmas seems to be gathering more and more momentum. The commercial world undoubtedly initiates the fervour and there are more and more houses lit up with yuletide greetings, a multitude of channels beaming Christmas shows on television, and aisles and aisles of decorative ornaments, the majority of them ironically made in atheist China, packing the shelves of our superstores to eventually adorn the trees that invade our living rooms. Some enterprising folk are selling authentic pine saplings cocking a snook at the “genuine Taiwanese plastic” versions that have been making inroads for years.

We love Christmas for a variety of reasons, few of them religious. It heralds the start of the summer holiday season which usually means inclement weather right up until it’s time to go back to the grindstone. But mostly we enjoy the reaction of children - in my case grandchildren - the wide-eyed look on their faces as we reiterate the myths that entranced us when we were kids. That Father Christmas comes down the chimney and drinks the beer and eats the mince pies on the hearth and leaves behind the colourfully wrapped presents as a kind of quid pro quo.

I’m not sure just how modern day mums and dads get the jolly fat gentlemen into the confines of the log fire and through the glass fire door with a latch on the outside. I guess they’ve embellished the story to fit the composition of a contemporary home and anyway we were always desperate to believe the impossible even when some smart-alec worldly kid in the primers awakened us to the fact that we were being mightily deceived.

The real story of Christmas is always under constant threat. More and more academics articulately reject the birth of Christ in a lowly stable and find the claim of a virgin mother and an immaculate conception harder to stomach than a sleigh riding, North Pole domiciled, deliverer of gifts to millions of waiting kids, overnight.

They offer up Jesus as simply a prophesier and a good man who brought a message of love and reconciliation, which they find easier to swallow than Jonah was for the whale. However it’s unlikely that 2000 years on we would consistently remember merely a good man.

And the world around us changes. The Apostle Paul’s miraculous conversion took place on the road to Damascus. Today he would likely be caught in the crossfire of troops loyal to Bashar al Assad and the rebels opposing his regime.

Fundamentalist Islamic revolutionaries dream of a world without Christians and by destroying them, and themselves in the process, believe a paradise awash with virgins beckons.

I suspect both Christ and Mohammed would weep at the misinterpretation of their teachings.

Despite these diversions the Christmas story still endures. Locally the churches will be gearing up for the usual influx as many choose to attend just once or twice a year. Humourists point to C of E being an acronym for Christmas and Easter, the only time many Anglicans make the pilgrimage, rather than Church of England.

Contrary to popular belief church regular attendance may not be on the wane. Arguably Masterton’s most imposing church is the newly-built Lighthouse facility in Intermediate Street and St. Andrews at Upper Plain recently celebrated the opening of a brand new hall for their junior congregation. This indicates the churches are still popular as places of worship, although many people now use secular facilities for funerals and prefer to conduct weddings in restaurants or garden settings with non-religious vows led by celebrants rather than clergy. Few women want to honour and obey their menfolk.

The church’s influence on our lives however cannot be brushed aside. Christ gave the world its calendar and our two greatest holidays, Christmas and Easter, marking His birth and His resurrection. His teachings gave us the doctrine of marriage and aroused men to abolish slavery, create orphanages, homes for the blind, the first hospitals, and the first schools. History shows that nations of the past rose and fell according to their beliefs in His teachings. Rome under Constantine, England under Alfred the Great and Queen Elizabeth the First and Queen Victoria and the United States under their Christian forefathers.

Christ inspired the world’s greatest art and music such as Michelangelo’s Pieta and Handel’s Messiah. Our doctrines of right and wrong, the morals of life, are based on His utterances. No other human being has changed so many sceptics into peace-filled believers, offered so much hope to the mentally disturbed, the physically ailing, and the spiritually lost.

The centurion at the foot of the cross said it all: “Surely this man was the Son of God.”

Have a great Christmas!

(First published on the 19th of December 2012)
 

“How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few, his precepts! O! ‘tis easier to keep holidays than commandments.” - Benjamin Franklin

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Food Banks needed because of unchecked inflation

I attended a committee meeting of the Masterton Food Bank this week and there was good news and bad news. The good news was that there are many generous individuals and businesses that add value to the Food Bank coffers on a regular basis allowing the good people that voluntarily operate the facility to buy-in and access lots of food and other household items of necessity to fill their constantly depleted shelves.

The bad news is that demand for the services is increasing exponentially.

I tried to think why in a country that should be prospering; the constant demand for food parcels for families is an ever-increasing problem.

I might have at least part of the answer. I happened upon an advertisement for our butchers shop back from 1990. Legs of lamb were $13.95 each, a leg of mutton was $9.95 and you could buy a two kilo pack of sausages for $2.95. Sausages in a smaller pack were $1.95 a kilo.

Some explanation. “Mutton” was in fact ewe mutton. The government meat inspectors at the abattoirs would give it a red stripe (first quality) if it had good conformation. We would buy around 200 ewes a week and the best 100 of these we would set aside to make into cuts and joints for retail sale. The other 100 we would bone out and trim to create lean meat. This meat would be mixed with our beef trimmings to make beef flavoured sausages.

(We also bought in weekly about 30 lambs, around 50 hoggets, plus about 25 bodies of beef and twelve porkers.)

The legs of mutton, which were half as big again as a leg of lamb, were sold (as previously mentioned) for $9.95.

We would bone the forequarters and roll them up with seasoning, wrap them in cookable netting and market them as “colonial goose” for $5.95 each.

The loins were sold for $7.95.

There was good profit in this for us, and great buying for our customers.

I looked up our old wages book and found that our senior staff were being paid $12 an hour. Checkout operators and meat packers who were invariably of the female gender were paid between 8 and 10 dollars an hour. I Googled the minimum wage in 1990 and it was $6.12 an hour.

Fast forward to today. Average wage in New Zealand, according to Google, is $50,000 a year. This equates to around $24 an hour. So wages have doubled. Now let’s look at meat prices. A full leg of lamb will set you back $50, mutton has disappeared from the market entirely, so too has hogget which was usually mid-priced between mutton and lamb.

Beef flavoured sausages, once a staple diet for many, in my New World supermarket today were selling for $9.49 a kilo!

Do the math and you can see why so many families today are, comparatively speaking, finding it hard to make ends meat.

“One part of mankind is in prison, another is starving to death; those of us who are free and fed are not awake. What will it take to rouse us?” - Saul Bellow 

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Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside...

I wrote a letter to the Dominion-Post last week, but was disappointed to see that it was not published. I have since found out however that Patrick Crewdson, Editor in chief (I kid you not, that is his title) of Stuff will not publish anything from climate-change denialists. Another blow it seems for free speech.

Anyway here is the letter:

Dear Editor,

In a front page article in the Dominion-Post on Wednesday the 28th of November Nicholas Boyack reports that parts of Lower Hutt and Petone could be under water before the end of the century, according to a damning report.

I am reminded that back in September 1988 a 'damning report' in Wellington’s Evening Post made the same dire predictions:

“As a result of global warming, across the nation temperatures are breaking records and severe southerly storms which traditionally smashed the capital three or four times a year have become a thing of the past as Wellington bathes in year round balmy weather. Spring flowers are appearing up to two months earlier than usual, heating bills are way down, skin cancer is on the rise and numerous other changes are readily observable.”

The Evening Post author was concerned that there was universal agreement that the polar ice caps were melting which could lift sea levels from three to twelve feet. “As a result nations like the Maldives and Bangladesh would be wiped out, which in the latter case, given its huge population, raised unprecedented re-settlement and refugee problems.”

The writer thought that most of New Zealand’s concerns could be solved building sea walls, but felt that cities like Wanganui and Lower Hutt, with sizeable river outlets, may have some special difficulties.

Other towns, such as Raglan, the article went on to say, were probably doomed, being not of sufficient size and importance to justify saving.

As an occasional visitor to Wellington I must say I am blissfully unaware of the year-round balmy weather; perhaps I visit on the wrong days. Meanwhile sea walls are conspicuous by their absence and I’m fairly certain that, thirty years on, the dear hearts and gentle people of Raglan still live and love in their home town.

Not to worry, didn’t I read somewhere that Al gore recently bought a house by the sea?

Yours faithfully,

Rick Long

“Now there sits a man with an open mind. You can feel the draught from here.” - Groucho Marx. 

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When will they ever learn?

The nutty Greens are craftily convincing the gullible New Zealand public into allowing them to legislate to decriminalise cannabis for recreational use. “Decriminalise” and “recreational” are buzz words for open slather for anyone who wants to partake of the psychotic substance known as THC, but surveys show the Greens may well succeed while the sleeping giant of the so-called silent majority slumbers.

Green MP Chloe Swarbrick wants to take an even greater leap forward for mankind. She proposes decriminalising all drugs and if she has her way this means heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine will be readily available on acquiescent streets of ‘Godzone.’

Inexplicably The New Zealand Drug Foundation, whom I naively assumed where there to dramatically reduce drug habitude, agree with Ms Swarbrick’s potty proposal. And then, to complete the unholy trifecta, in weighs regularly-quoted economic commentator Shamubeel Eaqub who reckons if Chloe’s ambitions are realised the New Zealand government stands to make tens of millions of dollars of savings.

Conspicuous by their absence to mount any form of opposition to all of this are the Ministry of Health and their attendant District Health Boards (DHB’s) who have been striving for years to reduce smoking to an eventual zero tolerance goal by 2025 and will now have to deal a whole new raft of inhalers passing around ‘roll-your-owns’ with higher-rated carcinogenic elements than tobacco.

DHB’s have more cause to worry. Most are already struggling with crippling deficits, but these are likely to blow out even further. According to the Colorado Department of Public Safety (Colorado has legalised the sale of marijuana) hospitalisation rates (per 100,000 hospitalisations) with possible marijuana exposures, diagnosis or billing codes increased from 803 per 100,000 before commercialisation (2001-2009) to 2,696 per 100,000 after commercialisation (January 2014-September 2015.)

I do however sense some method in the left’s madness. The Green Party make no attempt to disguise their socialist roots and the only way to install socialism in an otherwise successful society is to drag down that society to such an extent it is willing to try something new. They will be ably abetted by comrade Jacinda who before entering parliament was the president of the International Union of Socialist Youth and was reported as saying during the election campaign that ‘capitalism was past its use-by-date,’ or words to that effect.

Jacinda and Chloe then are deadly bedfellows and these two kids are too young to know the terrible past tragedies of communism and appear to have little knowledge of the pernicious experiences of Eastern Europe, Cuba and North Korea. Nonetheless they need look no further than across the ocean where the dispirited citizens of Venezuela are wallowing in yet another failed socialist experiment.

Ageing and conservative, and perhaps even a conspiracy theorist, I’m probably past my own use by date. Leaving the planet (by natural causes) before all that I fear comes to pass, may be a Godsend.

“Marxist socialism must always remain portent to historians of opinion – how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and an enduring influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.” - John Maynard Keynes 

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A sermon for Saint Luke

I was a tad surprised when I got a call from Reverend Dashfield  asking me to do the sermon tonight. His reasoning being that this was a time to celebrate the feast Saint Luke and as he was a physician and as I was on the District Health Board it seemed entirely appropriate.

On the health board yes, but I am not a doctor, though in a previous vocation I did call myself a heart, liver and kidney specialist. When customers came into the shop and asked me how much kidneys were, I’d tell them sixpence each or five for half a crown.

Now those old enough among you who remember the old imperial currency, and who can also do the math, you will see that there was no real bargain in that offer.You’d surprised however, just how many people bought five at a time.

There were other tenuous connections. Most of you probably wouldn’t know that the Reverend Dashfield’s late great father-in-law was a doctor, a general practitioner. He was Dr Berney- and as a youngster he was our family doctor.

Doctors were much venerated in those days and they deserved to be. If you were perchance to fall ill and rang your doctor, he would jump in his car and come to you. These were known as “house calls” and it’s an expression that has completely disappeared from the lexicon. If you asked today’s generation - the generation Xers or a millennials - what a ‘house call’ was they wouldn’t have a clue, any more than they’d know what a half a crown was.

My sister and my mother and I referred to him as Dr Berney, but my father called him Hugh. This was because they both belonged to the Masterton Rotary Club, and a tenet of membership is that you must call your fellow members by their Christian names. Today of course we have to call them first names, rather than Christian names, in case we cause offence.

So next I went to Google to see if in fact I was a fit and proper person to be making this address tonight. And Google sent me to Wikipedia, another 21st century name, and there I found some pretty startling information about Saint Luke.

I’m going to read what it said, word for word, and I took a screenshot of it on my iPhone to prove to those skeptics among you as to the veracity of my claims. (Screenshots, Google, Wikipedia, IPhone. If dad and Hugh Berney were still alive - and here tonight - they would think I was talking in a completely different language.)

Anyway, here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Saint Luke. Word for word remember, The Roman Catholic Church and other major denominations venerate him as Saint Luke the Evangelist and as a patron saint of artists, physicians, bachelors, surgeons, students and butchers. And I’m not kidding.

Artists, physicians, bachelors, surgeons, students and butchers. That’s a fairly eclectic mix!

So, at last I feel justified and at home in this pulpit.

And so now to the reading about Jesus and the rich man.

One of my favourite songs is “If I were a rich man” from that wonderful musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” I even have it in my iPhone, and the version I chose to download is by Roger Whittaker.

It cost me a $1.94 to download the song - and if Mr Whittaker’s version is popular worldwide, as I suspect it is, then collectively we will have made him a very rich man.

You all know the words. The lead character in the play, Tevye, is pleading with God to make him a rich man. He wants a big tall house with rooms by the dozen with three staircases. One for going up, one for coming down, and a third one, going nowhere just for show.  And the final plea, which ends the song perfectly: “Lord who made the lion and the lamb, you decreed I should be what I am, would it spoil some vast eternal plan, if I were a wealthy man.

He’s taking a risk here of course if he wants to receive eternal life.

Now I am not a rich man and my bank manager would confirm that.

But wealth is subjective. Someone in South Auckland sleeping on the streets or in their car, might well consider that comparatively speaking, I am rich. But looking for a real rich man I might point to the immediate past CEO of Fonterra, a Mr Spierings, and suggest that he’s taking a risk if he’s longing for eternal life, but to extricate himself from that accusation he might well point to Bill Gates and say “Now that’s a rich man!”

Bill Gates can’t go any further up the chain because he’s the richest man in the world.

But I reckon Bill must have read Luke chapter 18 verses 18 to 26 because he and his wife have determined that they’re going to give away all their money through the Bill and Melinda Gates Charitable Foundation.

Rotary International, the head office of the Rotary club that my father and Dr Berney belonged to, resolved in the mid 1980’s that, as an international project, they would rid the world of polio, and in recent years the Gates Foundation has given tens of millions of dollars to Rotary to ensure they complete the task - and they’re almost there.

There are just a few pockets on earth where poliomyelitis has not been completely eradicated.

Incidentally, in Dr Berney’s day, polio was more often referred to as infantile paralysis.

Now Luke tells us that Jesus said it is going to be much harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Which on the surface seems like a rather unusual declaration.

But Jesus was not prone to say things that didn’t make sense.

I was going to bring a needle along tonight, to expose just how small the eye is, but needles are notoriously hard to find, particularly, I understand if they’re in haystacks. Incidentally when did you last see a haystack? Haystacks were abandoned long ago, along with half crowns and house calls. Now the hay is rolled up in unattractive green plastic wrapping and left out in the paddock. The plastic eventually blows away and gets caught up the fences, despoiling the environment.

Anyway, I’m sure you would have some difficulty in imagining a camel going through the eye of a needle, so this needs to be more fully explored.

In Christ’s time, the cities were walled. Jerusalem was a walled city and even today I understand Damascus still is. The main wall had a huge double-doored front gate so people and carts and donkeys and all manner of commerce could go in and out freely during the day. But at nightfall the gate was closed and locked securely so marauders could not enter and plunder and pillage the city.
The problem was, folk often needed to leave the city at night or alternatively seek entrance when arriving after dusk. So when they built the wall they created an entrance, a building block wide, so that people could slip in and out of the city at will.

Now some travelers arrived after dark on camels and the entrance, which was known as the needle, was barely wide enough for a camel. I’ve seen some wonderful illustrations in old bibles of camel owners pushing and shoving their animals, endeavouring to get them through the needle gate.

Camels of course had saddles - and saddle bags, and in the saddle bag was usually all the owners worldly goods. In an effort to shove the camel through the needle gate the owner needed to take off the saddle and the saddle bags and therefore dispose of all his worldly goods.

Therefore Jesus’s explanation was in fact perfectly illustrative.

And so I left the needle at home.

And so that just leaves me to somehow work in hospitals with Saint Luke.

In fact hospitals were originally established by the church. Not just hospitals, but all our learning institutions. The great universities - Oxford, Cambridge Harvard and Princeton were all established by the Christian Church.

But about century or so ago men started to leave the church and sought camaraderie and fellowship in organisations like Rotary Clubs, Lions, Freemasonry and a host of other secular associations where they could do their good works.

In fact one wag said: "Rotarians are a bunch of self-made men who gather together once a week to worship their maker."

There’s a bit of self-deprecation here, as, like my father and Dr Berney, I am a Rotarian.

And so eventually the government had to take over these places and whenever the government gets involved there tends to be a little bit of inefficiency, and of course you lose the volunteer aspect that was a hallmark of church involvement.

However Saint Luke the physician would be amazed to see the advances in medical science today, and our magnificent hospitals and the wonderful staff who care for our sick. You might be surprised to know that the Wairarapa hospital has 300 nurses and 45 doctors, plus a host of ancillary staff to care for the 40,000 people that live in our wider environs.

Doctors and nurses, camels and needles, and rich men and poor men. I think I have probably covered the gamut of subject material Saint Luke might have expected of me.

And so the moral of the story is this:

When you leave here tonight, before you go out the narrow front door, I want you to leave your wallets, credit cards and jewelry on the table in the foyer.

Just kidding; the government’s going to tax you to death anyway!

As for me, I’m hugely disappointed that I spent 38 years behind a butcher’s shop counter - and didn’t know that I had a patron saint!

Jesus saw that he was sad and said, It is much harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. –Luke 18 verses 25 -25

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The towns biggest enterprise

My very earliest recollection of life is visiting my father in the Masterton Hospital when I was two-and-a-half years old. I vividly remember this for two reasons. First we weren’t allowed to go into the hospital proper because he had diphtheria and was therefore isolated. I clearly recall my mother holding me up to the window where I could talk to my father from the wide concrete window ledge above the solid brick wall.

The main reason the memory lingers however was that my father told us of a disturbance during the night when a large contingent of Japanese prisoners-of-war had been admitted who were seriously wounded. The word Japanese, given the state of the world at the time, struck terror into the heart of an impressionable two-and-a-half year old.

The Japanese had come from the POW camp at Featherston. The Japanese never did invade New Zealand despite widespread fears that they would, but around 800 prisoners who had been captured at Guadalcanal were brought to Featherston in 1942.

They were mostly civilians who had been drafted into the Japanese navy, but later captured military personnel were also interned at Featherston. These military prisoners regarded capture as the ultimate disgrace and some wanted to commit suicide. In February 1943 there was a sit-down strike and a subsequent riot that saw the guards open fire, although there had apparently been no order to shoot.

Although the one-sided altercation only lasted about thirty seconds 31 Japanese were killed instantly, 17 died later and about 74 were wounded. If 91 wounded and dying Japanese had been admitted to the Masterton hospital the night before I was taken to visit my father perhaps I had good reason to be alarmed.

Of the historical accounts I have been able to read on the subject there is no disclosure about where the wounded prisoners were taken. The whole incident was hushed up at the time in case there was retaliation in the Japanese camps on Kiwi POW’s.

It’s entirely possible then that I was the only infant in the country to have been briefed about the episode.

Having lived in Lansdowne for the greater part of my life, to some extent the hospital has tended to loom large. Various visits for minor ailments; having my tonsils and adenoids and then my appendix removed causing my older sister to taunt me by saying that “I wasn’t all there.” A cruel description back then of someone who was mentally deficient. She was probably quite right on that count, but it was unfair to blame the extraction of body parts.

I’ve always wondered if the medical profession will one day discover that there is a vital role for the appendix and advocate to have them all put back again.

Later I did my courting – now there’s an old-fashioned word - at the hospital; eventually marrying a nurse whom I constantly remind is the luckiest woman in the world; though I suspect that she does not necessarily share this view.

In 2006 the government presented the town with a  brand spanking new hospital, now renamed Wairarapa rather than Masterton, despite being contained within the same grounds as the original infirmary. Perhaps the government "presenting" is a misnomer. Actually the Wairarapa District Health Board (WrDHB) have to pay back the cost out of the population-based funds the government meagerly provides.

Solid brick walls have been supplanted by a temporary-looking Hardiplank structure and outwardly the single-storey fabrication looks considerably less imposing than its predecessor which still lingers forlornly in the background.

One option was to upgrade the existing hospital however the WrDHB's resolution to go for a totally new structure was probably the sensible decision. It is exceptionally well configured and is filled with hi-tech equipment, no doubt some of it manufactured by the Japanese.

The wards contain a number of single rooms with en-suites and lead to a centralised nursing station and this looks suitably efficient. There are accessible, well equipped out-patient facilities set in bright and airy corridors and the well-planted courtyards which provide a healing outlook from most corners of the building.

You almost wish you were sick so that you could experience the place first hand. 

Back in 2006 when I first visited the new edifice I asked where the entrance to the nurse’s home was, hoping one day to be able to pass on this vital information to my growing grandsons. Sadly, I was told these institutions are a thing of the past. No wonder dating apps are so popular.

The old hospital had over 300 beds with about 12 doctors and 100 nurses to cope with the infirm. Despite a massive increase in population since the original hospital was established the new institution has only 94 beds, but is staffed by 45 doctors and 300 nurses plus the usual plethora of administration people. There a message here somewhere, but I haven't a clue what it is.

If my appendix had been kept in formalin no doubt it will have been lost in transit during the shift from the old to the new. So if modern medical science does decree that reinstating this once non-vital organ is now essential for your ongoing good health I'm probably going to have to miss out.

“After two days in hospital, I took a turn for the nurse.” - W. C. Fields.

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At least I'm consistent

This was my first weekly column written for the Wairarapa Time-Age in January 1998. Below that is a copy of a letter I wrote to the same paper this week. In the intervening twenty years my opinions haven't changed much!

1984 came and went with a whimper. George Orwell’s dire predictions for that year never did materialise.

1998 isn’t shaping up quite so well. Big Brother’s first action was to deny tobacconists the right to have a sign above their doors advising what the shop actually sold. And New Year’s Eve saw revelers at Riversdale and Castlepoint denied the privilege of having a beer or something stronger on the beach to herald in the New Year. (Homeowners in adjacent-to-the beach sections however could imbibe as much as they liked, which puts a new spin on the expression private privilege versus public desire) 

Don’t think New Zealand alone has the “thought police” problem. As from January the first it was illegal to light up a cigarette in any bar in California. I feel for the hapless bar owners in that sunshine state who will now surely see their turnovers diminish and the receivers over the horizon. If you think about it, where better to have a drag than in a down town bar in the twilight atmosphere; a cold beer and a Cuban cigar, as you watch the Superbowl final?

Clamping down on smokers is the new prohibition yet strangely alcohol marketing is being given a free ride. Despite this alcohol still causes staggering devastation. It kills hundreds of New Zealanders a year, not only from disease but also from accidents. It creates huge economic losses and untold suffering. So too does tobacco of course, but alcohol is far more deadly than tobacco to innocent bystanders. A hard headed fact is that premature death from smoking usually occurs at the latter stages of an abusers life and is probably an economic boon to society. The money saved on pensions and health care probably far outweighs other costs incurred.

Police say that domestic violence is almost always fueled by alcohol; in N.Z. 41% of fatal road accidents are alcohol related and all ages are involved. Drunk driving kills toddlers, teenagers and whole families whereas tobacco strikes late; its victims have at least had a chance at life.

Cigarettes shortens lives, alcohol abuse can deprive people of it. Just think about it: if you knew your child was going to become addicted to either alcohol or tobacco, which one would you choose?

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not for one minute suggesting we impose the cigarette-style restrictions on alcohol. But I am curious to know why we as a society are so selective. Is the lobby of the liquor barons more powerful than their tobacco counterparts?

Despite the war against cigarettes I get the feeling that younger folk are smoking more than ever these days. Also Hollywood, which now operates in a suburb where smoking is not allowed in adjacent barrooms, seems to have its stars lighting up more than ever in the current crop of blockbusters. No doubt if you want to make something more popular give it a bad name.

What really concerns me is how many freedoms we have taken away from us each year by Orwellian legislators local and national. With the very best of intentions they may be choking us to death.

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Another friend passes on

My very close and dear friend Brian Davey died suddenly in Australia a couple of weeks ago; my wife and I went over to the funeral. Here is my tribute:

My name is Rick Long, I’m from New Zealand and live in a town called Masterton where Brian and his young wife Joyce came to settle from New Plymouth in 1963. Brian had bought a physiotherapy practice in the town.

Masterton is 90 ks north of Wellington and about the same size as Ballina with a population of around 25,000 people. Last year it was voted New Zealand’s most beautiful city.

My wife Marion got to know Joyce when they were in the maternity ward at Masterton hospital together where they had their firstborns, both sons, Gregory for the Davey’s and Brandon for the Long’s.

I had already met Brian as he had become a regular customer in our family butcher’s shop.

The Davey’s bought an imposing house looking down Masterton’s main street just around the corner from where we lived.

Their house and ours both backed on to my parents’ home which had a quite substantial in-ground swimming pool where our growing families spent lots of time together.

Brian and I became firm friends, having an occasional drink together (and I can see both Joyce’s and Marion’s eyes roll when I said the word “occasional”) and we were both invited to join the Masterton Rotary club where we were both very hard-working members.

Brian in fact made a big impact on the town with his enthusiasm and energy and besides being very active Rotarian he was also chairman of the Crippled Children’s Society and chairman of the finance committee of the local Catholic Church.

Brian and Joyce had all their children in Masterton; after Gregory there was Susan and then Fiona. A few hundred yards from where we lived was Lansdowne primary school; our kids all went to the school and Brian and I were both on the school committee.

We used to get away with murder, well almost. On one Saturday morning Brian and I took over the local radio station at gunpoint, binding and gagging the announcer and then reading out ads we had pre-sold to local businesses to raise money for the Plunket Society. You’d never get away with that today.

Few of you will know this, but in 1972 Brian and I started up a very successful business.

Some background; Masterton was dry for 40 years up until 1947. By dry I mean you couldn’t buy alcohol in the town. The citizens voted for restoration in 1947, but also decided the town would own all the liquor outlets and the profits would be returned to the community. A Licensing Trust was set up with a six man board of directors who were voted in every three years at the same time as the local body elections. Incidentally there are twenty six licensing trusts in New Zealand; many other communities followed our lead.

In 1972 the Masterton Licensing Trust built a splendid new lounge bar which they called the Elizabethan Room. It was built Tudor style with high wooden beamed ceiling and a parquet dance floor and a stage for a small band.

It was to be a ladies and escorts bar, but it never took off. A friend of ours who was an elected trustee on the licensing trust board took Brian and me in there one Friday night and we were surprised how few patrons there were. He told us the three piece band on the stage was costing the trust $37.50 a night and the takings over the bar were around $35. Charles Dickens’ Mr McCawber would have been appalled. “Nightly income $35, nightly expenditure $37.50 - result misery.”

Brian and I had had a few drinks and with our usual misplaced optimism we told our friend to tell his fellow board members to give us the room and we’d show them how to fill it.

To our amazement a few days later the trustee rang us and said he had discussed the offer with his fellow board members and they said we could have the premises every Friday and Saturday night for $5 a night, they would keep the takings over the bar, but we could set a door charge at whatever figure we considered viable and that would be ours to keep.

So now we had to put our money where our mouths were.

Discotheques had just come into being though there were few if any in New Zealand but Brian and I did some research, had a local sound technician build us a desk with two turntables, attached to a 400 watt amplifier with four huge speakers which we suspended around the dance floor. We put coloured lights that danced to the music hidden underneath the curtain pelmets, projectors that played psychedelic images on the walls and we installed a large strobe light.

We called all this The Light Fantastique (you Aussies would pronounce this fantasteek, but then again you never ever did learn to speak properly English) and invited dancers to join us every Friday and Saturday night. The fire department decreed we could only have 150 people in the room, we upped that to 200 and charged 50 cents per person at the door. I was the disc jockey playing 45 rpm records on the turntables and Brian was the genial mine host.

Thanks to Brian’s incredibly good welcoming manner at the door and my choice of the right music our enterprise really took off. After the second weekend we had to have a “house full” sign made. Closing time was ten o’clock, as required by law back then, so it wasn’t too much of an imposition. Many of our friends came to join us and in fact we were really just having a party every Friday and Saturday night and making money to boot.

We were taking $200 cash over the weekend which meant a $100 each into our pockets; good money in 1972. The only expenses we had were buying new 45 records from time to time; the trust never ever charged us the $5 a night rent. They either forgot or were so pleased with their bar takings they decided they really didn’t need to.

But all good things must come to an end. I got elected on to the board of the licensing trust at a bye-election when one of the trustees died. Four others stood against me, but Brian was my campaign committee chairman, so I couldn’t really miss.

I worried that there was a conflict of interest with being on the trust and running a business in their premises and Brian said he would like to go overseas and find a new place to settle with his family.

So we sold the business in 1973 after a year of solid trading. Six weeks later the new owner went broke which just proves butchers and physiotherapists really know how to run a disco!

Brian settled in Sydney with his family and I settled down to selling sausages.

In 1990 I rang Brian to boast that I had just been elected the national president of the New Zealand Licensing Trusts association. He countered with the fact that he had just been elected the World President of the Physiotherapists Association, so my news paled into insignificance.

Shifting to Australia didn’t mean the end of our friendship. We have regularly visited the Davey’s and them us. We have been on lots of holidays together in both Australia and New Zealand and on one occasion we took our respective families to America.

And there are constant phone calls and emails.

I rang Brian on the 4th of August, the day after his 78th birthday and a few minutes after the Crusaders had beaten the Lions in the Super 15 final just to remind just how good New Zealand rugby was. He was in high spirts then, unbelievable that he passed away two days later.

And those emails. The last one from him was just a couple of weeks ago and it typically went like this:

A Canadian walks into a New Zealand bar and there was immediately some tension among patrons thinking he might be, God forbid, an Australian. The barman served him a beer and then said, “What do you do for a living mate?”

“I’m a taxidermist,” the stranger replied.

“A taxidermist,” said the barman, “Does that mean you drive a taxi?”

“No,” said the man, “I mount animals.”

“Relax fellows;” said the barman, “He’s one of us!”

You Aussies never let up.

Rest in peace old friend.

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Aids not necessarily a death sentence

I’ve just received a letter from Joel George. Mr. George you will recall is the genial gentleman who runs our public hospital. Been there a while too; which says something about his tenacity and fortitude. It must be frustrating managing an organisation where the funder underfunds you to ensure your frugality. But I digress. Attached to his letter was a survey form which he asks me to fill in as I was, according to his records, latterly a user of his facilities.

I struggled to recall when I had been a patient at his institution in recent times. Apart from visiting the odd indisposed friend I have had no cause to use the services he administers as far as I could remember. It wasn’t always that way. Before I was married I was a regular visitor to the hospital. My sojourns at that time however were centred around the Nurse’s Home and if a survey had been thrust at me back then I would have revealed that the matron was crabby and made strenuous efforts to hamper my progress into the building, but that the nurses were wonderful. They must have been; I married one of them.

But then the penny dropped. I had visited Choice Health in Chapel Street, which is of course an outpost of the Joel George empire and no doubt his questionnaire related to that attendance. The awful truth, which I shall now reveal publicly, is that I have aids. Those of you who would look forward to the inevitable demise of the column and the columnist will be disappointed to hear that the aids are of the hearing variety and sit snugly and almost anonymously into both my ears.

I came about these appendages virtually by accident. Walking past Snowsill’s friendly chemists some years ago I spotted a sign offering free hearing tests. I marched in and demanded an appointment forthwith. I told the lady, visiting from Auckland, who conducted the tests, that I needed a credible certificate showing conclusively that my hearing was perfect. I was even willing to pay for such documentation. 

For years my family had been chiding me for having the TV turned up too loud, accusing me in the process of being deaf. My grown-up children reckoned that when they visited they could start to hear our TV three or four streets away. The little brats. During their upbringing I told them hundreds of millions of times not to exaggerate. 

It reminded me of when I was a kid and our next door neighbour bought a new radiogram. For the uninitiated ‘radiograms’ were the forerunners of ‘hi-fi’s’ which were themselves the precursor’s of ‘stereos.’ The proud purchaser suggested over the fence to my parents that perhaps they would like to come over to his place and listen to his new radiogram. Dad’s callous response was that the neighbour could just as easily come over to our place and hear his new radiogram.

But again I digress.

The friendly lady at the chemist’s shop told me after conducting the tests that she had good news and bad news. The good news was that my family was very perceptive, the bad news was that my hearing was appalling. “What do you do for a living?” she wanted to know. At the time I was endeavouring to sell real estate. She looked puzzled. “Have you ever had any other vocation?” she enquired. Well, I admitted, I had spent 36 years as a butcher. “Did you perchance use a bandsaw?” was her next probe, and I allowed that I had used one for about four hours a day during the duration of my tenure in the meat trade. 

Her examination was complete.

Using impressive alliteration she reckoned ‘butchering beef bones on a bandsaw’ was the worst thing you could do to ruin your hearing, though perhaps she really meant it was the best thing you could do to ruin your hearing, but whatever, “You’re lucky,” she gushed, “ACC will pay for your aids.”

I was glad I hadn’t told her that from about age 17 and into my early twenties I had played in a Rock’n’roll band. An unkind but not entirely uninformed music critic, writing in the Manawatu Evening Standard after a concert in Palmerston North wrote this about our performance: “What the band lacked in talent they made up for in volume.” The lead singer - and that was me- he went on to say: was “Unimpressive” and “over-amplified.”

ACC may not have been so generous had they known about the routine punishment I had given my teenage eardrums.

But the aids, state of the art seeing I didn’t have to pay for them, have put me in the class of the six million dollar man. Well, in his hearing section anyway. Eavesdropping is easy. I can now hear intimate conversations from across crowded rooms and people who want to keep confidential information from me ought to learn sign language or resort to written memos. Rather than hasten my departure from this earth they supply such clarity that I confidently expect to live to 120, an age I have worked out I will need to reach to get all my taxes back.

Meanwhile I will reply to Mr. George’s questionnaire in a positive manner. The treatment I received at the hearing clinic was exemplary and I will tick all of the boxes at the highest end of the scale. But he may not necessarily get the answers he wants from all he surveys. An acquaintance, presenting for surgery, got as far as the front door of the hospital when he saw a sign on the building saying: “Guard dogs operating.”

He hasn’t been seen since.

(First published on the 31st of January 2001)
 

“My doctor gave me six months to live, but when I couldn’t pay the bill, he gave me six months more.” - Walter Matthau 

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Lest we forget

The phone rang frighteningly in the middle off the night. I picked it up with trepidation, as you do. Calls at this hour seldom bring good tidings. I needn’t have worried. It was around midday in England and a gentleman with a polished British accent announced that he was a spokesman for the R.A.F. It seems the good people in the village of Dennekamp in North Eastern Holland are unveiling a memorial to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of a bomber crashing on the outskirts of their village in Holland in 1941 with a total loss of life. My father’s brother Frank was the pilot. The unveiling is to take place on the 13th of March, sixty years to the day since the tragedy.

I was to let other members of the immediate family know and if any of us were to make the pilgrimage to the ceremony he promised we would be made extremely welcome.

It reminded me of this coming Sunday’s airshow at Hood Aerodrome and the heroic pilots who made it back, some of whom will no doubt be in attendance to watch with respect a display of some of the planes they flew that helped win the Battle of Britain. The fact that some of the planes and their pilots still endure is a testimony to their fortitude. These men and their aircraft played a huge role in allowing us to live as bountifully as we do today.

They might well reflect, however, that in the interim we have become a nation of wimps.

Last week for instance ACC announced that anyone who has witnessed a traumatic event may be eligible for compensation. Whilst I have the greatest sympathy for those folk who have observed a tragedy at first hand, I am mystified to know how throwing money at those traumatised, by whatever the event, is going to make the unfortunate images dissipate.

But that was just for starters. It was also disclosed that the precious people who work for the N.Z. Qualifications Authority had been given $2000 each for the severe discomfort they had suffered when they shifted from one centrally heated/air-conditioned office to another centrally heated/air conditioned office, just up the road. This was on top of a $1000 performance bonus for presumably doing the job they were being paid for in the first place. And not all that well according to students who rang the 0900 number to get their exam marks and were told that they had got 0! “A glitch in the computer,” explained the Qualifications Authority spokesperson as he or she no doubt downed their caviar with champagne.

Then there were the highly indignant Air New Zealand passengers who threatened, through their lawyers, to sue the hapless airline for not disclosing to them the risks they took flying in economy class and contracting a form of thrombosis that could prove fatal. Never mind that Air New Zealand reported that since its inception it had flown millions of passengers with no known clots.

An ex-RAF pilot rang last week after reading about these litigants and wondered how he and his colleagues survived World War Two. My caller flew Lancaster bombers for up to 12 hours at a stretch in cramped conditions and the thought of blood clots never entered his head - nor his legs. The Catalina crews, he told me, were in the air for up to 22 hours. He didn’t say so in so many words but I suspect neither those Lancasters nor the Catalinas had stewardess service, with drinks and nibbles, in-flight movies or stereo headsets. I’m not sure that they even had toilets.

My uncle survived dozens of bombing raids before the one that killed him and a magazine interview he gave in 1939 after a reconnaissance flight over Germany, gives us some idea of the discomfort they endured so that we might live in comparative luxury today.

“ As the temperature, increasing with our descent, approached freezing point a snowy type of ice grew on the control column, on the insides of the windows, and on the instrument panel....the visibility was bad..so I opened the window to see better. It was snowing. The navigator table and the instruments were soon covered again with half an inch of snow.

The front gunner could see nothing from his cockpit but white snow - when he came back to see us his helmet and his shoulders were buried beneath an inch of the stuff. Shortly afterwards a blinding flash, and a bump bigger than the others, took away our trailing aerial - and knocked all the snow off the instruments.”

Later in the article he said the discomfort had been shared with other planes in their group.

“In one machine the tail gunners eyebrows became frozen when the aircraft was at twenty-one thousand feet where there was 72 degrees of frost....Two of the gunners of the other machines suffered from frostbitten fingers.”

The Whitley bomber had much of its wings shot away on this trip and its safe return to England was described as “a miracle” by the newspapers of the day.

“We thought we should have to land in the sea, so the navigator went back to prepare the rubber dinghy and collect the rest of the crew. However as we got down to 500 feet the engines began to pick up and when the navigator returned to report “all OK for landing” we were maintaining height at one hundred and ten miles per hour and it seemed that we might be able to make England.”

Those brave men and women who served in the army, navy and air force could never have envisaged at the time that we, as a result of their sacrifices, would have inherited a society that today has so many creature comforts. Not that they would have begrudged us these, but those ‘so few’ might have been disappointed to know that it now takes monetary compensation to help us overcome those uncomfortable events that life throws at us from time to time.

A phone call in the middle of the night might even be worth a couple of hundred dollars. I must check with ACC.

(First published  on the 24th of January 2001)

“Older men declare a war. But it is youth that must fight and die.” - Herbert Clark Hoover 

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The camera never lies

My late father had a wonderful sense of humour. I remember when the young Queen Elizabeth came to Masterton in 1953 she had lunch at the Empire Hotel. Rival butcher Mr. C. L. Neate, who had only recently settled in the town from Britain, served the Empire with their meat requirements and immediately after the lunch, while the Queen and the Duke were still driving out of town to their next destination, he wrote on his shop window in white poster paint: “The Queen ate our meat.” Quick as a flash my father wrote on our shop window: “God save the Queen.” One of the national weekly periodicals at the time, concluding a story on the incident, asked: “Would you buy meat from a man like that?” Fortunately many did.

In 1961 I went to Sydney to work in a butcher’s shop that had won an award that year for the most modern meat market in Australasia, Dick Stone Ltd. at Rockdale. 

Rockdale is one of Sydney’s southern suburbs, back then buoyant and very Australian. A visit there a couple of years ago revealed the butcher’s shop has given way to a lending institution and the population is predominantly South East Asian. In the fifties and sixties the white Australia policy was hugely obvious.

The owner of the shop was Richard Setten Stone. He had three shops in Rockdale; one called Richard’s, another called Setten’s and the award winner, where I worked, called Stone’s. Each was independently managed, mine by a hard taskmaster named Jimmy Blakemore, and each shop had a fierce rivalry going with the others. When I first started at Stones, as I was unknown to the staff at the other two shops, Jimmy Blakemore would send me to spy on their prices and report back. We would then undercut them. This, despite them all having the same owner.

Stone’s had a staff of eleven butchers and we were constantly busy. There was always a sea of faces at the counter waiting to be served. One evening, at around closing time, I managed to assemble everyone behind the counter and take their photo which I sent back to Dad with a letter explaining this was the staff of the shop where I was working in Aussie.

This was too much for my father. He had a staff of about seven back then so he rang up the laundry, asked for all of our white coats and aprons to be delivered back to the shop post haste and then rushed around the neighbouring shops seeking recruits to boost his complement for a return photo. Dad managed to line up 17 people behind our shop counter. Another phone call, this time to photographer Ted Nikolaison, and the shot was taken, processed and sent to me at the shop in Rockdale. A simple note attached said: Dear Rick, thanks for the photo of the staff in the shop in Australia. Here is a recent photo of our team in Masterton. 

I opened the envelope at the shop, saw the possibilities immediately, and soon had all the staff, including Jimmy Blakemore, gathered around me to see the photo. They were all amazed, none more so than the erstwhile manager, who had justifiably been treating me like a serf/peasant type from lowly New Zealand. His attitude warmed markedly when he saw the apparent size of our family business. “What did all these people do?” he was keen to know. He was particularly intrigued by the two Chinamen, Tommy and Charlie Wong. Their fruit shop backed on to ours and they had been Dad’s first two recruits as he had sought help to increase, albeit temporarily, the number of his employees.

Back then I could think quickly on my feet so I told the impressionable manager that they made the smallgoods. I said that they locked themselves in a backroom each morning and produced, with secret herbs and spices, the best sausages in the country. People, I prevaricated, came from far and wide to taste Long’s oriental polonies. Next on his question list was the huge bear of a man in a bow tie and chef’s hat. This was George Bogala, actually the Yugoslav cook at the A1 restaurant, but I told Jimmy that he broke down all our beef. I said he could single-handedly process about six bodies of beef in a day, and that he kept a bucket of cold water on the floor beside him so he could dip his knife in it from time to time when it got too hot.

I found various jobs for the photogenic conspirators including gift shop owner Jack Whiteman, Army Stores proprietor Frank Pool, abattoir manager George Brown, plus two hairdressers, Mel Catt and George Corlett, all of whom had been press-ganged into posing for the photo. Pharmacist Wayne Snowsill had arrived when all the coats and aprons had been used up. In his chemist white smock he looked a little professional to be a straight butcher so I told the boss that he was a window dresser. This was the too much for Jimmy Blakemore. “You employ a window dresser?” he said incredulously, and now saw me in a totally, if unjustifiable, new light.

From then on I was looked upon as something of a guru in the field of meat retailing.

Jimmy would constantly ask me, as we were completing some task, if this was how we would do it in New Zealand. I enjoyed by newly acquired status and milked it for all it was worth. Once I had established myself, about six weeks after the photo had arrived, I admitted the deception. Fortunately, Aussies enjoy a good joke. Although I went back down the rankings ladder, I never descended to the bottom rung from whence I had started.

Wellington’s Evening Post published the story and cleverly captioned the accompanying photo: “Camera proves Masterton Butchery a much larger joint.”

Like my own children today I always thought fathers were of little use, but I was pleased that mine, with his incorrigible sense of humour, had given me the opportunity to excel in a country where New Zealanders had about the same credibility as the Irish have in England.

(First published on March 31st 1999)

“Everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else.” - Will Rogers.

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Man's inhumanity to man

The fiscal outlook for the world’s eighth largest economy Brazil looks gloomy with The Financial Times suggesting it has gone from zombie to walking dead.

I spent six weeks in the Amazon region of Brazil in 1986, leading a Rotary Group Study Exchange team. I never really felt safe the whole time I was there. I was physically assaulted on three occasions during the six weeks. I was unscathed - only my pride was hurt - thanks to people around me who came to my assistance, but I vividly remember wanting to do a papal kissing of the tarmac when I got back to Auckland airport. 

The problem with Brazil, and I guess this applies to a great many countries, is that abject poverty resides alongside audacious wealth. The two don’t co-exist and the have-nots, with little to lose, often decide to take what they want. NZ yachting hero Sir Peter Bake Blake was murdered there in 2001 and apparently died for the sake of a couple of watches and some banknotes of the near worthless Brazilian currency.

In 1986 I also found the scale of poverty in Brazil to be frightening, Back then it was claimed the majority of the wealth resided in about five percent of the populous. The biggest city at the mouth of the Amazon is Belem - pronounced Belame - short for Bethlehem, its original name. It has a population of a million and a half souls. From the air it looked like a modern metropolis with high rise buildings in abundance. At ground level it wasn’t quite so splendid. Most of the high rises were tenement buildings; concrete bunkers stacked on top of one another providing the most basic of living amenities. But the ‘favelas,’ corrugated iron lean-to shanty towns, on the outskirts of the city, were far worse and the multi-storey bunker dwellers would have considered they were comparatively well-off.

We were in Belem for two weeks before moving on to other parts in the region and while there I was billeted with a well-to-do Japanese family. They lived in a modest home by our standards, but it was pretty spectacular for Brazil. As it was surrounded by the dwellings of the poor. It was distinguishable by the bars over the windows and every evening at seven o’clock a hired armed guard would arrive, wearing a holster with two six-guns, who would parade around the house all night providing protection for the inhabitants. It was hard to sleep in that heat, despite the house being air-conditioned, and the footsteps going past the window every few minutes were an unhelpful distraction.

The poor seemed never to go to bed. No matter what time of the night you arrived home the whole population appeared to be occupying the footpaths, with the kids invariably kicking soccer balls around. Even at one or two in the morning the suburban streets were full of people. We were told their houses were so hot it was nigh impossible to sleep.

In an area that attracts few tourists we were conspicuous of course and were generally believed to be Americans, for whom the Brazilians have little respect. As you walked passed a group you would hear them say disparagingly: “Americanos Gringos!” whereupon we would hastily turn around and exclaim: “Noun, noun, Nouvelle Zealandia!” which made us much more acceptable. 

Peter Blake probably didn’t have time to make the distinction.

One city we stayed in, just up-river from Belem, was Manaus, which has the sordid reputation of being the murder capital of the world. More murders are committed there than in any other place on earth, and I understand that this is not calculated on a population basis.

There appeared to be no social welfare system in Brazil; if you didn’t have a job the government offered no handout system to get you through. Beggars line the streets, many with severe physical disabilities, and it was explained to us that this was due to polio, still rife in that country. The vaccines of the first world were unaffordable in the third world, although Rotary International programme to immunise the whole world will have meant this will not now be the case.

We visited factories where working conditions were so draconian that it made you sick to the stomach. You’d wonder where the world’s labour organisations were, but it would seem they only operate in the wealthy OECD countries.

Life expectancy was short and life was cheap. I saw a man run over by a bus one day. He died instantly, but no one ran to his aid. They all stood on the crowded footpaths and watched him lying there in a pool of blood. No ambulance came and I was told he would remain there until relatives came to claim him. I asked what the road toll was, but no one knew; no statistics are kept.

Things no doubt will have improved in the intervening 30 or so years. Inflation back then was running at 300 percent and interest rates were 1400 percent! I assume they have got their monetary system back in some semblance of order, but the poor will still be poor and the vast majority of the population will be struggling with their day-to-day living.

There is a lesson in this for us of course. Since 1986, reforms in New Zealand have hardly created the utopia promised and have most certainly resulted in a greater gap between the rich and poor. Not that we compare with the deprivation of the average Brazilian, but the trickle-down theory that didn’t work there, hasn’t worked here either.

Sir Peter Blake and the memories of him, so poignantly encapsulated in documentary films, will be an ongoing inspiration for those who follow on to complete his work which was to save species of the animal kingdom heading for extinction, but now we require some heroic leaders of his ilk to turn their attention to the human of the species.

Homo Sapiens is desperately in need of some new champions to save his own skin.

“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills to prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.” - Oliver Goldsmith 

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Forty years in the wilderness

When I was a youngster we had a wind-up gramophone. My father had received it for winning an event at harriers. The turntable used to revolve at 78 rpm, and you had to put in a new needle every time you played a record. Needles came in little tins of 100 and you bought them at local gift shop Arts and Crafts. I remember my cousin Bill Geary moved the technology forward by building a turntable powered by electricity. He made the pick-up arm out of balsa wood. This marvellous machine played the new ‘long-playing’ records that went around at 33/and a1/3 rpm and had a needle that played over and over.

There were no record shops as such back then - the popular music industry had not yet started and so the selection was limited. I was so enthralled by the electrified player that I was unwittingly exposed to classical music, which I grew to enjoy. My favourites were the Hungarian Rhapsody part 2 and The Waltz of the Flowers.

Films influenced our lives; we called them ‘pictures’ and in my early teens my unlikely hero was Mario Lanza. I saw all his films, bought all his records (our wind-up gramophone had now been replaced by a ‘radiogram’) and I even wrote to him in Hollywood expressing my admiration. I got a letter back from his secretary with an autographed picture of the great man himself. I had this framed and hung it above my bed. My parents watched me quizzically; most of my contemporaries would have had Marilyn Monroe on their bedroom walls. (Later on, when I started to take an interest in the opposite sex, mum and dad yearned for my Mario Lanza era).

I was fickle though. A new hero emerged in the form of clarinetist Benny Goodman. I saw ‘The Benny Goodman Story’ at the Regent Theatre four times. We had a music shop in the State Theatre building back then called the Geoffrey Farrell School of Music. As I recall Mr. Farrell showed a greater interest in alcohol than he did arpeggios, but I espied a second hand clarinet in his window and determined I must have it. Mr. Farrell allowed me to put it away on layby and I was soon its proud owner. I offered myself to the Wairarapa College orchestra as first clarinetist and I’ll never forget the sheer thrill of playing in an orchestra with violins, violas, cellos, and the like.

When I left college my father sent me to Palmerston North to learn the meat trade at an old and well established butcher’s shop in that city. I found myself a clarinet teacher over there and continued my studies in that instrument.

But as Bob Dylan was to later put it: “the times they were a-changing.” A fellow named Bill Haley was making his mark with a new and exciting style of music and I put a guitar on layby at a Palmerston North music shop. My music teacher, sensing the interest was waning on the clarinet said I had to choose one instrument over the other. I sought wise counsel with my landlady. She told me rock’n’roll would soon die and that clarinet music would live on forever. I listened attentively then opted for the guitar. I went to her funeral in Palmerston North seven or eight years ago. It was too late to point out that rock’n’roll had outlived her.

I taught myself to play the guitar; I sold my clarinet and bought an amplifier and when I came back to Masterton after two years in Palmerston North I formed a rock’n’roll band with a friend named Melvin Carroll. We called ourselves ‘The Drifters’ then later 'The Signatures.’ I was the band’s vocalist and alternately played guitar, bass guitar and double bass. We were the only rock’n’roll band in the Wairarapa at the time and played regularly two or three nights a week. I was making more money strumming a guitar than I was stringing sausages.

Marriage, family and business interests intervened but a couple of years ago my wife suggested we go to Wellington to the ballet. I nearly had a fit. Me go the ballet! Then I had pangs of conscience. Hadn’t I dragged her over the years to concerts of my choice, like Neil Diamond and the Shadows? I agreed to make the pilgrimage as long as I could go in disguise in case there were other people from Masterton there. I had a reputation to maintain. I didn’t want anyone to think my pre-pubescent love of Mario Lanza had more latent meanings. In the event I sneaked into the Wellington Opera House without being seen, slunk down in my seat and waited to be bored out of my brain. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I was enchanted from the minute the curtain went up. The ballet was The Nutcracker Suite and you can imagine my delight when, the orchestra suddenly burst into Waltz of the Flowers and I saw Tchaikovsky’s imagery as it was intended. I had to choke back the emotion and fight back the tears. Now I knew how the ancient Hebrews felt; I had spent forty years in the wilderness.

It’s not that the rock’n’roll we played was all that bad. The lyrics were simple love songs and the music basic 12 bar blues. As it has progressed, however, the words have got more complicated and somehow twisted in the process. There has been a sort of a darkness emerge that was never there in its infancy. Music can influence us hugely; it has a power that can either enhance or destroy. I peruse some of the lyrics from today’s offerings and can only conclude that they are concocted in depraved drug-induced minds. You hear of teenage suicides and suspect that for many, evil music had dominion over their lives. On the other side of the coin it has been discovered that classical music has healing powers and surgeons are playing it in the background during operations with amazing results.

It’s not for me to preach. I still tend to have a liking for middle of the road popular music and to date The Nutcracker Suite is the only ballet I’ve attended. But I have a belated admiration for my wise old landlady and from time to time contemplate what direction my life might have taken if my clarinet teacher had only been a bit more persistent.

(First published on 30th of September 1998)

“At every one of those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it.” - George Bernard Shaw. 

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Endeavoring to hold the peace

There was a good deal of comment that the presiding priest at Prince Harry and Meghan’s wedding asked if anyone saw just cause for the couple could not be joined in holy matrimony. It was a regular feature of weddings in “my day”; I haven’t been to a wedding for some time and it seems the custom may have been discontinued. So I thought it may be appropriate to re-run this column which I wrote back on February the 24th 1999. You may find it hard to believe, but every word is true.

Marion and I tied the knot on Masterton Show day in 1963 at around 5 o’clock in the afternoon, and after the nuptials we were greeted by my butcher’s shop staff dressed as undertakers, complete with top hats, forming a guard of honour at the church door.

They and some friends had also sent off the taxis and had replaced these with horse and gigs. We were then paraded down the main street, now full of people coming home from the show, bagpipers in front, the undertakers next and the horses and two gigs with the bridal party bringing up the rear. My new bride, who hailed from Eketahuna, didn’t know what she’d struck.

I was determined to get even at the future weddings of those who had perpetrated this and I didn’t have to wait long. Lew Milne was to marry Alison Cooke in Greytown. I was to be a groomsman. Lew was a stockbuyer for Borthwick’s and he had organised the horses and carts for our wedding from Tom Hood at Kopuaranga. Retribution was in sight.

It had always occurred to me that it would be exceptionally funny if somebody responded when the minister intoned the words: “If anyone can show any just cause why these two cannot be lawfully joined together, let them now speak or hereafter forever hold their peace.” Mind you, it’s quite difficult to find anyone who will actually make a response.

Locally no one was game.

I had a friend in Wellington named Ian Dawson who owned the Sorrento coffee bar and managed The Libretto’s, New Zealand’s foremost rock band at the time, and I rang him to see if he could find an outgoing Wellingtonian who might be able to assist. He rang back and said he’d found someone, but the price would be quite high. I agreed to pay whatever it cost.

The wedding was at 4.30 p.m. at the Methodist establishment at the north end of Greytown. The groom and we groomsmen were resplendent in white ties and tails and the little church was packed; standing room only. When the minister, I’ll never forget his name, Reverend Hornblow, made the statement I was anticipating “If anyone can show any just cause (etc.) speak now or forever hold your peace.” there was the usual pregnant silence.

Then suddenly a dapper little chap in a dark suit and thin black tie came running up the aisle; “Stop the wedding, stop the wedding,” he cried. The atmosphere was electric (electric atmospheres, pregnant pauses, don’t you just love the English language?) My expensive actor person got to the startled couple, looked them up and down and said, “Oh no. Sorry! Wrong wedding” and ran back out the other aisle.

At this juncture I expected the congregation would burst out laughing, the wedding would continue without further delay, and afterwards I would be congratulated by all and sundry for organising the ultimate practical joke. Not so. Close family members of the bride suffered discomfiture; some quite seriously. Nobody laughed, not the least the Reverend Hornblow, who stumbled through the rest of the ceremony as though it was his first outing. There was a pall over the breakfast and I was sent to Coventry by most of the guests, though I must say the bride and groom took it in good humour.

On the Sunday I sat down and wrote a long letter of apology to the brides’ parents. The Methodist vestry held an emergency meeting on Monday and considered taking me before a church court to discourage other misguided humourists from attempting the same prank. However, they saw the letter I had written to Mr. and Mrs. Cooke, assumed I was repentant, and asked that a similar letter be sent to them, and all would be forgiven. I couldn’t write that second letter quickly enough.

The Sunday News in Auckland ran the story, describing me as having “a curious sense of humour,” whatever that means. They asked for comment from prominent clergy in that city. Most were strongly condemnatory.

Jokes I played at subsequent friends’ weddings were low key and more acceptable all round.

The dapper Wellingtonian who had made the foray up the church aisle was a regular patron at the Sorrento coffee bar, an Argentinean named ‘Chico.’ They never did send me the bill. I’m not sure whether they forgot or if they felt sorry for me for all the trouble I had got myself into.

I’d like to think it was the latter. Though to be fair, I probably didn’t deserve the sympathy.

“Before a marriage a man declares that he would lay down his life to serve you. After marriage he won’t even lay down his newspaper to talk to you.” - Helen Rowland.

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Everybody wants to go to heaven

What’s with this word Karma? It seems to be getting frequent usage. Hekia Parata once used it, apparently suggesting that the Novapay debacle was “karma” for the teachers daring to challenge her and her ministry whenever they tried to institute change.

According to my trusty Chambers dictionary karma is a Buddhist and/or Hindu based word used to describe a transcendental retribution for something done that perhaps ought not to have been done; the theory of inevitable consequence generally.

Somehow in the increasingly secular world it has replaced the age-old belief that a mystical out-of-world figure, believed by many to be God, punishes you for any wrongdoing. This doctrine leads to that oft-heard exclamation: “What have I done to deserve this?” Why we have suddenly decided to apply eastern mysticism to what was once comprehended in plain English is anybody’s guess.

Although action and reaction is a scientifically proven concept I doubt that it extends to our personal misfortunes. I guess it’s not uncommon for someone who discovers they have a terminal illness to ask “why me?” but unless their diet or lifestyle has contributed in some way then surely it’s just the luck of the draw rather than retribution from a deity.

I recall when our contemplations of this complex ideology were sharpened by an in-depth evaluation of the life and times of broadcaster Paul Holmes just prior to his untimely demise. In a soul-searching interview Janet McIntyre wanted to know did he believe in the afterlife and did he think he was going there. Paul said he hoped he had done enough, though he conceded that he was scared.

Later in a radio interview Pam Corkery let slip that Paul was a serial philanderer, though she herself had not succumbed. Not a good look for entry into the realm of angels. And yet on the other side of the coin he brought heart-rending stories to our attention on a nightly basis, not the least being the plight of young Eve van Grafhorst who had been pilloried in Australia for having aids. Paul’s response was to bring her to our screens, show genuine love for the little girl and expose to all of us that HIV was not a transferable disease at a time when we needed to know.

And Paul certainly reached a sainthood of sorts in the various embellished Television One accolades for his contribution to their ratings; the channel conveniently forgetting that at the peak of his popularity he had left One to launch Prime, expecting further fame and a bigger fortune. Somewhat surprisingly his audience stayed with One, and Prime had to outlay a large amount of money to release him from their contract.

Further homage was paid to him when he was knighted and arose to become Sir Paul.

I met him once at a book signing at Solway Park Copthorne. Later on in the evening I spoke to him briefly and found him to be a thoroughly nice man. His claim that he “loved people” was born out when he was prepared to talk to me, a complete stranger, and genuinely show interest.

That book, his autobiography, was a best seller, but I’m not sure some of the revelations were the kind of experiences that ought to have been aired in public. Certainly in his initial courtship of Fleur Revell a dinner date was graphically described, allowing too much information and must have embarrassed the young lady unfairly. He came across as a complete cur.

I bought his next book, the award winning Daughters of Erebus, and all the time while reading it I had to stop and wonder how this man could have written such a brilliant tome.

In my view this book alone qualified him for a Knighthood.

From cur to Sir is a giant leap for mankind.

Just who is eligible for entry into the afterlife is a moot point. Certainly it would be hard for a mortal man to pass the litmus test the Bible details for admittance. However Eve’s mother reckons her daughter will be at the Pearly Gates to receive Paul and show him around.

I guess that’s karma, in the nicest possible way.

(First published on the 13th of February 2013)

“Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.” – Graham Greene 

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A tribute to an old friend

Wayne Snowsill died on the 21st of April 2018, aged 79. This was my eulogy to him at his funeral service.

Wayne Snowsill was an extremely handsome young man. He was a couple of years older than me, but my peer group, whenever we were at places where teenagers congregated, were always envious of the fact that the girls we wanted to attract, were inevitably gathering around Wayne.

And I so it came as a complete surprise to me when I went into Snowsill’s Pharmacy one Friday night and instead of one those goddesses that normally serve you from behind a chemist shop counter, Wayne came out from the dispensary to attend to me and the first words he said were “They tell me you play the guitar”.

I was surprised, and flattered even, that he knew who I was, and even more surprised that he knew I played the guitar.

“Do you know Melvin Carroll?” he wanted to know. I did by reputation, but not personally. Melvin was another good looking young man about town. Black curly hair, with a DA at the back.

Thinking about it, Melvin was probably Masterton’s answer to The Fonz although the Fonz hadn’t been invented at the time. It was some years later that TV arrived in New Zealand and some years after that that Happy Days was screened.

Wayne said Melvin was coming around to his parents place the following afternoon to learn to play the guitar and would I like to come around and help to teach him. Of course I readily accepted the invitation; to be able to rub shoulders with these two titans of the teenage scene was quite unexpected.

The Snowsill family home was an art-deco style house at the bottom of Cole Street, next to the Times-Age building and Wayne and I spent most of the Saturday afternoon endeavouring to teach Melvin to play the guitar.

Melvin left just before I did and as we were walking out the gate Wayne said to me, “Do you think Melvin will ever be able to play the guitar? I told him no, I didn’t think he had it in him. Less than twelve months later Melvin invited me to join a rock band he was forming called the Drifters with him as the leader and lead guitar.

Melvin was now a better guitarist than Wayne and I would ever be!

Wayne and Melvin were both members of the Riversdale Surf Lifesaving Club and they insisted I join. I was as skinny as a rake and not much of a swimmer, but I joined anyway. Wayne was a good swimmer and had an admirable physique. Despite Riversdale being a notoriously safe beach he would fearlessly dive into the surf and rescue young ladies in bikinis who from my observation were in no danger of drowning.

Our form of transport around the beach was in Wayne’s open-top Model A Ford.

Wayne didn’t join Melvin’s band. He was already in a band with his brother Jack – and Clive and Colin Thorne and Darcy Christianson. Jack and Wayne both very accomplished musicians, able to play a number of different instruments; their talent I suspect inherited from their parents. Wayne’s Mum Ivy was a superb pianist and I have seen a photo of his father Bill playing the clarinet in a symphony orchestra.

There were two other siblings. Janice who as good looking in the feminine sense as her older brother - and young Gary, who was the sort of person whose photo you might see in a college yearbook with the caption underneath “Most likely to succeed.” Indeed, he went on to become a very successful businessman, domiciled on the Gold Coast of Australia. His daughter Emma is a world renowned triathlete and an Olympic and Commonwealth Games gold medallist.

Wane however did play with The Drifters when his band had a night off. He and I became vocalists in the band, Wayne could harmonise well and we sang mainly songs by the Everly Brothers, popular at the time. I’ve often thought that it was just as well the Everly Brothers never heard us, but we can’t have been that bad. The Manager of the Regent theatre in Palmerston North saw us at a function in Masterton one night and asked us if we would come over to his theatre whenever he had a teenage movie screening and sing to the young audience at half time. The pay was good, so went over whenever requested. The Palmerston manager was also the manager of the Regent in Pahiatua so we sang there occasionally as well. We performed in the gap between the front of the stage and the curtain which wasn’t very wide and we were in constant danger of falling into the orchestra pit.

One night Wayne peered beyond the spotlight at the enthusiastic young lasses in the front rows and told me later that they were only about thirteen or fourteen years old. Well you can’t win them all.

Next we tried our hand at comedy. We worked up a 45 minute routine that mainly involved miming some of Stan Freberg’s parodies. Specifically The Great Pretender, The Banana Boat Song and The Dear John and Marsha Letter.

We also wrote and sang some parody’s of our own. My Old Man’s a Butcher was based on Lonny Donegan’s My Old Man’s a Dustman.

We’re the Boys from Camp Wairarapa – this was a story about a local boy-scout troop who go camping up north and happen upon some girl-guides skinning dipping in a lake. It was based on Johnny Horton’s The Battle of New Orleans.

We took Elvis Presley’s song Are You Lonesome Tonight and made it Are You Moansome Tonight.

We even wrote a song about Riversdale Beach.

(Sing with ukelele:)

Show me the way to go home,
Said the girl from Riversdale Beach
I lost my togs about an hour ago
and they've gone out of my reach
Now I've got nothing on,
But seaweed and some foam
So bring me a page of the old Times-Age*
And show me the way to go home.

(Well it wasn't going to win any Grammy's)

We did these shows all around the Wairarapa and sometimes beyond. We played at New Zealand’s only licensed restaurant at the time, The Zodiac in Wellington, and the manager wanted us to perform there every Friday and Saturday night, but we felt the constant travel was going to be too much of an effort.

Our biggest audience was when we performed before two and a half thousand people at a conference at the Rotorua convention centre.

We used to charge twelve pounds for the act; six pounds each, usually cash - so tax free.
(I’m hoping the statute of limitations for tax evasion is now well passed.) Sometimes we would perform our act at cabarets, private parties and dances three times over a weekend. Perhaps once on a Friday night; and a couple of times on a Saturday. Therefore we earned eighteen pounds each over a weekend.

We were both working for our fathers at the time, Wayne at the chemist shop and me at the butcher’s shop. Coincidentally, our fathers were both paying us eighteen pounds a week before tax. We explained to them that we could earn eighteen pounds for a few hours work over the weekend and people would ply us with free drinks and applaud us when we finished. But for the 40 or fifty hours a week we spent working for them from Monday to Friday we got the same money, less the tax, and neither free drinks nor applause.

Suffice it to say, they were unmoved.

It was about then that Wayne and I concluded “there’s no business like show business.”

You're never going to believe this, but Wayne and I once started up a "Virgins Club." We even put an ad in the paper disclosing the meeting place as being in the telephone box in Roberts Road, however about 20 young ladies of whom we were acquainted assured us they were eligible and wanted to attend, so we had to find a bigger venue. Wayne was the secretary/treasurer and I was the patron. At our second meeting we had an outstanding guest speaker who gave a dissertation on the importance of chastity. Members were accepted on a neither confirm nor deny basis, but we eventually had to disband the club due to a paucity of suitable applicants.

Virgins clubs, bikini-clad young bathers and skinny dipping girl-guides. There’s a disturbing pattern emerging here. Fortunately the me/too movement was sixty years in the future.

It’s interesting having a chemist as a friend. On one occasion he came up with some tablets that were the precursor I think to no-doz pills. These will keep us awake and on the mark doing our performances he assured me.

We were involved in a concert in the Regent theatre in Carterton one Friday night. The packet advised one tablet at a time but we took a couple of pills each and nearly jumped out of our skins on stage. He rang me next day; “Did you sleep alright?’ he wanted to know. I hadn’t slept at all; my heart was still racing furiously. So we decided to give them a miss.

Another time he came over to shop with a miracle pill that would give you a fake tan; no need to risk going out in the sun. He hadn’t tried them himself, I reckon I was a guinea pig for Snowsill’s Pharmacy. It was a round orange pill that looked for all the world like a Jaffa. “Don’t chew it,” he said, “swallow it whole.” That was an effort in itself, try swallowing a Jaffa whole. I nearly choked. Two days later I turned bright orange.

The only person I know still using these pills is Donald Trump.

But all good things must come to an end. Stan Freberg didn’t produce any more new songs and Wayne and I ran out of ideas for parodies. Anyway most Wairarapa people had seen the show at least once - and so we put it to bed.

Marriage and families were the order of the day. Wayne was the best man at my wedding and godfather to our eldest son, then he got married himself and had two sons of which he was extremely proud. We both joined the Masterton Rotary Club to do our bit for the community and both even dabbled in religion. Wayne studied education for ministry for five years - and to cap that off, he married a priest! 

A very loving marriage has ensued.

He took communion at home with Elizabeth a few weeks ago and then just after that, communion with Bishop Justin. “Communion twice in a fortnight,” he said “I must be going up in the world.”

A few years ago we decided maybe we could bring the old comedy act out of the closet and start performing again. A great way, we thought, to supplement our pensions.

Six pounds each in 1960 must have inflated to $100 in the 21st century, surely? That meant potentially $300 each over a weekend which could put us in the lap of luxury.

Technology had moved apace in the intervening years. We used to have a portable record player hidden at the back of the stage. We then had to carefully put the needle arm in the minute groove between each track on a Stan Freberg long-playing record which was precarious, but this was now a thing of the past. Now the tracks could be downloaded on to an iPad or an iPhone and plugged into the amplifier and fired up at the touch of a button.

And so we were back performing.

We played before seemingly enthusiastic audiences at a couple of Probus Clubs, at a 70th - and then an 80th birthday of two friends, at a retirement village, at a Wairarapa College class reunion, and even a wedding. We got the message out there that we were back on the road again and waited for the phone to ring.

But it never rang. It was a quite sobering to find out that we were passed our use-by date.

They say old comedians never die, they just fade away.

Well that’s not entirely true. One died last Saturday.

Rest in peace old friend.

(*Local newspaper.)

“Life levels all men: death reveals the eminent.” – George Bernard Shaw

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