Heat and Feet

Mary left for Brisbane this morning, to spend 4-5 days with Rhys, Grace, Boaz and Lauren, in their new house at New Beith. So I have this time on my own, to revert to my default mode of hermit. It also means that I can buy some cream to enjoy with summer fruit.

This meant a swift trip to the New World supermarket at Warkworth, city of the brain dead – not Warkworth, the supermarket. Where do these people come from? I parked next to some unregistered wreck, bald tyres, doors fastened with filthy cord... And inside the supermarket were the owners, resplendent in grubby bare feet, torn shorts and filthy singlet, hairy tattooed shoulders, matted unkempt hair, yellowed teeth – and that was only the wife. The bloke was worse. The kids were, well, indescribable. It would have been good to call the health department, but where would they start?

I object to bare feet and horrible human specimens where I buy food. People simply too dozy to be clean, sanitary, more or less presentable. This is the Kiwi “Good Keen Man” Syndrome, popularised in the 1960s by Barrie Crump, who shot deer and pigs and beat his wives.

Human feet in any case are not normally a pretty sight, and it astonishes me that some weirdos seem actually to find them erotic. I recall being at some retreat long ago where one of the leaders, unable to cope with silence and stillness, and looking for things to do, suggested a communal foot-washing ceremony. Ye gods. I said I had no affinity with feet, and received the immediate thanks and relief of several other leaders. Perhaps that is the point of the Jesus story – that feet are such ugly things, especially one might presume, at that time to say nothing of now, Middle-Eastern feet, but he washed them all the same. OK. The Pope does it, with carefully screened and scrutinised and pre-washed feet. I prefer not. I take the point of John’s story, which is something much deeper and more precious than feeling we have to replicate it every time we’re spiritually bored.

But the bare-foot Kiwi Bloke ethos around here is pretty strong. The sound of their tractors, hauling boats to the boat ramp, back again, running their outboards... The uniform is shorts, singlet, bare feet, baseball cap – and they are usually an unedifying sight. The bloke next door runs his tractor out of the garage some mornings, just to drive it around the lawn and back again.

However, Mary is off to Oz. Melbourne and Victoria are currently having truly dangerous heat. So are South Australia and much of Western Australia, even Tasmania. But in other parts there are storms and floods. It’s all a bit dire. I think it’s OK where Mary is going. And of course bush fires are a terrifying fact of life and death now. You have to wonder what the future is in a land where the water seems to be petering out.