Saturday 20 January 2018

Be careful what you wish for

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The new government’s desire to reduce plastic packaging is compelling, but we should be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Despite the devastating effect on the environment (which I fully acknowledge) plastic packaging has revolutionised our lives and we might not enjoy stepping back into the alternative lifestyle

Back in the 1950s my father and I used to start work at 6 am in our butchers shop. It’s not that we were light sleepers, but from 6 to 8 we were very busy serving mostly male members of the community who would come in at that time to purchase the families meat requirements.

There was method in their madness. Sans plastic bags, meat was wrapped in brown paper with the odd square of greaseproof paper (very expensive) in between some of the cuts. Inevitably these parcels bled. Not ideal for wives to carry home with other purchases that could include items of clothing. Groceries and other items in brown paper bags weren’t immune from absorption from the blood-weeping meat parcels and so it was important that meat was purchased separately.

With the introduction of the incredibly cheap plastic carry-bags all manner of food and other items could be bought together without any risk of contamination.

The man of the house could now sleep in.

Our whole attitude to waste in those halcyon times was different. We almost always had incinerators in our back yards to burn off our paper and cardboard rubbish, compost bins got rid of the food waste and we had a relatively small metal “dustbin” for the litter that wouldn’t burn and I guess the dust (hence the name) from our vacuum cleaners.

Down at the rubbish dump (we didn’t call them landfills back then) the discarded rubbish was mostly metallic. We didn’t have to recycle bottles; we sold them back to the retailer who had sold them to us in the first place. At the Masterton “tip” the green waste and other combustibles were turned into compost by the two genial Blake brothers. Their product was put into a paper sack and sold at a shop attached to the municipal building where you also paid your gas bill. The shop also displayed modern gas appliances alongside the bags of garden compost.

It all made too much sense to last of course. The gasworks closed, the Blake brothers retired and increasing plastic waste made composting impossible for any successors.

The pace of life crept up as shops opened seven days a week and people had less time to tend their gardens so disposal units were installed in our kitchen sinks to get rid of our food waste and incinerators were banned.


On the credit side of the ledger however was evolving plastic packaging that meant shops could introduce the self-serve style of merchandising, reducing staff and lowering costs. Supermarkets replaced grocers, greengrocers, butchers and even milkmen and these huge retail caverns gave us food choices previously undreamed of at competitive prices.

Do we want to go back to the future?

I don’t think so.

“Do not buy what you want but what you need; what you do not need is dear at a farthing.” - Cato the Elder

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Saturday 6 January 2018

Welcome to the new year

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I’m pretty sure that when I was a kid I wouldn’t have thought I’d be around to celebrate the arrival of 2018. Life expectancy was a tad shorter back then, but modern medicine has done wonders for our generation and I’ve learnt with proper care the human body will last a lifetime.

In “As you like it” William Shakespeare talks about the seven ages of man, but at my age there are just four: ill, pill, bill and then will.

I’m doing my best to maintain my sense of humour; they say happy people resist disease better than unhappy people. In other words the surly bird catches the germ.

Anyway the Bible says we cannot get any older than 120 so I’m setting my sights on seeing in the New Year in 2060.

Those mathematically inclined among you will have deduced that I came into the world in 1940. Mind you, if my father hadn’t been so shy and retiring I’d be three years older than I am now. At about the same time I was born Churchill was intoning that “this was their finest hour” and my parents thought he was talking about them. This illusion was maintained right up until I reached adolescence and then they wished they had sent me off to the war. Dad always disowned my misbehavior by claiming I was abandoned on their doorstep. I wasn’t actually found there; our door opened outwards, and they discovered me two somersaults out on the roadway. He reckons there was a note pinned on my shawl, it read: “Keep your head down, the door opens out. Mum!”

And so I was an unwanted child; my father spent weeks trying to find a loophole in my birth certificate and when I was born he tried to collect on his accident insurance. My mother went to the clinic to seek an abortion but it was too late, I was already in primer three. When I went to school my parents used to paint the house a different colour and change the number on our front gate.

Dad taught me to swim by taking me out to Castlepoint, rowing out in the bay and dropping me off. Swimming to shore wasn’t so bad; getting out of the bag was the hard part. As a teenager I had such terrible acne that my dog used to call me Spot.


By the time you’ve reached your late seventies you’ve learnt everything, but you can’t remember any of it. I don’t know what they went back to before the advent of drawing boards and I haven’t a clue what the best thing was prior to the invention of sliced bread. One old codger reckoned if they’d had electric blankets and sliced bread in his day he’d never have got married.

I’m in really good health, though I do have aids. Don’t panic Mr. Mainwaring; I’m talking about the hearing variety. They weren’t cheap; about nine thousand dollars. An old friend who died a few years ago and who was a technical engineer by profession took his apart and reckoned all up they contained about a $1.45s worth of components. Obviously those who assemble them are on more than the minimum wage.

It’s amazing though how your perception of age changes. When I was a kid I thought seventy-seven was really, really old, but now that I have got there I regard it as middle aged at most. However my four kids, insensitive little brats that they are, assure me that I am old. I remember when I turned sixty my daughter worked out that I was a sexagenarian, something I had known all my life but hadn’t been able to put a name to.

Someone asked me just last week: “Have you lived in Masterton all your life?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“If I knew how old I was going to get I would have taken more care of myself.” - George Coote

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Thursday 4 January 2018

There are regulations and regulations

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The 1984 Labour government set out to deregulate society. Roger Douglas (now Sir Roger) led the charge and not before time.

I remember back in the 1960’s, after seeing schnitzel steak in Australia, I decided to introduce it to our butchers shop in Masterton. Schnitzel was made from a thick flank of beef sliced thinly on the bacon slicer. Back then though we would get regular visits from inspectors from Wellington who checked to see that we were not deviating from the New Zealand standard specifications on meat products that were in booklet form and only occasionally updated.

Our man from the capital nearly had fit when he saw schnitzel steak and demanded that we withdraw it from sale immediately. I kid you not. At the time I was on the executive council of the NZ Meat Retailers Federation and fought through that body to have schnitzel included in the standard specifications. It took about eighteen months and New Zealanders were denied this delicacy for that period until it was finally included.

But it wasn’t just schnitzel.

We came up with all sorts of new cuts; Beef Olives, Steakettes, Canadian T-Bone Steak to name a few, but none of these could be marketed until we got them included in the book. You won’t believe this, but hamburgers were also outlawed. It was about 1973 before we were allowed to sell the patties. Up until then we could only sell the mince that you made them out of.

A previous Labour government, convinced that meat retailers were profiting too much from the sales of their product, decided to set the retail prices on all cuts of meat. At first this didn’t worry those of us who traded in the provinces. Our overheads were lower, access to fresh stock easier, and so the government calculated meat prices that had to suit the city meat retailers meant that the maximum allowable prices were well above what we were charging anyway.

But meat is a perishable product and you need to sell all cuts in equal proportions. Sometimes you needed to price something up because demand was outstripping supply and drop the price on another cut so that at the end of the week your stocks had run out at a comparable rate. No good having a whole lot of forequarters of lamb left over without the corresponding number of lamb legs, if you know what I mean.

Price control took away that flexibility and made our balancing act almost impossible. Inspectors from Wellington checked on us regularly, always arriving unannounced of course, and prosecutions were handed out to the non-compliers.

Mercifully for retailers that sort of nonsense is now a thing of the past and the market rules. You overprice your product at your peril.

Some of you would perhaps recall Geoffrey Palmer declaring war on “quangos” years ago. These little beasties were government inspired committees set up to do a variety of projects or check on the progress of other government inspired committees. We never really found out how far he got in this battle, but it would be a safe bet that if he were to go through the exercise again today, another group of quangos will have replaced the last lot.

That’s how regulations work. Governments exist to pass laws. Laws require regulations and we deregulate and then regulate some more, to fill the vacuum caused by deregulation.

Local governments do the same, but at a more leisurely pace. Take the dog controls. Encouraged by parliament and then warmly embraced by local council’s a couple of decades ago now man’s best friend cannot roam in freedom with its owner, but must be leashed, and signs are stenciled on to our footpaths reminding us that’s dogs are not to set paw in the CBD.

In Britain no such regulations exist. Dog owners can take their dogs anywhere; on the trains, into cafes and pubs. They even let them sit beside you in restaurants. Despite this shockingly uncivilised behaviour, I suspect there will always be an England.

In recent years have come the ordinances that meant it is illegal to have a drink on the Wairarapa beaches and apparently all other beaches in this fair country on New Year’s Eve. I can’t think of a more ideal place to celebrate the Hogmanay, but local legislators just hate to see people enjoy themselves.

And so I was delighted to read about the group in the Coromandel this New Year who built a “sand sanctuary island” in the Tairua estuary claiming they were in international waters and therefore entitled to “knock back a few cold ones” without being chastised. Three of those involved were apparently Americans who were probably encouraged to think outside the square by their unorthodox President.


But don’t get me started on the Worksafe regulations that the National government introduced a couple of years ago. If only I’d had the foresight I would have invested in a scaffolding company and today I could afford to be sipping a latte in a posh London cafĂ© with our dog at my feet.

We will of course eventually regulate ourselves out of existence. The last person left to turn out the lights will likely be the great-great grandson of the man who used to chastise us for selling meat cuts that weren’t in the book.

Poor old Roger Douglas will be rolling over in his grave - and he’s not even dead yet!

“However harmless a thing is, if the law forbids it most people will think it is wrong.” - W. Somerset Maugham

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A new year lunch

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