Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Miscellany 2

On 3 November 2009 I posted a blog called Miscellany. It was a vehicle to help me feel better about various idiocies. If I write it, I can move on. Here is Miscellany...2.

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An early 19th century captain in the British Royal Navy was renowned not only for his seamanship, but also for his Christian piety and his propensity to quote the Bible. It is said that another naval captain, whose ship had been badly damaged in an encounter with the French, had lost its masts and was crippled, saw this man sailing up to his aid. He was flying a signal, and it read, “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.”

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An utterly irascible Scottish general in the British army in India, David Baird, was captured and held for a while by an Indian rebel leader whose custom was to chain his prisoners in pairs. When this was reported to General Baird’s mother in Scotland she said, “I am so sorry for the poor man chained up with my Davie.”

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I once heard the late BBC raconteur Frank Muir give an after dinner speech at the British Club in Tokyo. He began by saying he was honoured to have been invited, but that it was rather like having been invited to kiss Margaret Thatcher full on the mouth, in that the honour outweighed the pleasure.

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We learn that Donald Trump has already started his run for the Republican nomination to stand for President of the USA. Can there be worse news? We hear he has joined the paranoids committed to the belief that Obama was not born in the USA and therefore is ineligible to be president. This is a curious phenomenon, akin to climate change denial and worship of Michael Jackson. It can sometimes seem as though the collective silliness of the USA might just elect him. It’s terrifying. And now the news is that Arnold Schwarzenegger, having presided for two terms over the disintegration of the California economy, may now look to be president of the European Community. This cannot be so. I trust the Germans, French, Swiss, and even the Albanians, are falling about laughing.

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But back home, there is worse. Don Brash is suddenly challenging Rodney Hide for leadership of the Act Party. Don is not at present a member of the Act Party. The NZ Herald is running a poll on which you would prefer as leader of Act, Rodney or Don... That choice is akin to asking whether you would rather die painfully of a stomach tumour or a liver tumour. Both blokes are buffoons. Somehow (I don't need to understand this) we are also getting threatened with John Banks in the mix. Well, perhaps it is best to have them all in one camp, a kind of political isolation ward -- close to the psychiatric wing.

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We were told that the Rugby World Cup represented riches to New Zealand, and that the fortunes invested would bring dividends enabling us to build roads and set up magnificent sports facilities... Now we have been informed that the revised and improved estimates are out, and they show:

Cost $1.2 billion.
Net Income $700 million.
Deficit $500 million.

Now remind me... I concede that sport is important, although it is supremely unimportant to me. The RWC is about one arguably minor sport on the world stage, Rugby Union football. Most of the world will neither know nor care about the RWC.

It will come, it will happen, countless litres of beer will go down the alimentary tracts of thousands and into the gutters and drains. Something called Party Central (taxpayer subsidised) will operate in downtown Auckland, to the detriment of everything from the environment to the drinkers’ livers, to decency and order -- but not to the detriment of the brewers. Anyone who reaches for words like disgust will be accused of being a party-pooper. The ticket scalpers came out in force weeks ago and the whole event will be marked by increasing corruption. All sorts of necessary tasks in the community will get neglected while people are caught up in the waves of hysteria...

And then it will all go. We are left here with a $500 million deficit. Great. Maybe (which heaven forfend) we won’t even be holding the Cup. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

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Solar bonus blowout to sit on budget bottom line



...Headline in the Sydney Morning Herald, 24.04.11.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Why I am not watching Coronation Street

I am recording it for Mary. Five minutes of it is more than I can stomach. This extraordinary programme was on UKTV when we lived in Carfin in 1964 and someone gave us a clapped out old black and white TV because they had upgraded. I remember watching Churchill’s funeral on it, too, and that agonising climb of the soldier-pallbearers up the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral in London with the coffin. But that’s how old Coronation Street is. Ken Barlow is still there five decades on. I am not.

I loathe the way they consistently lie to each other. I loathe the way they talk to each other, abuse each other, the malice always lurking in their relationships, the relentless cruel gossip and the way nothing whatever is confidential. The occasional fist-fight in or outside the Rovers can actually come as a relief -- some resolution at last, maybe, maybe not. I am astonished at the sums these people spend on booze, daily, nightly. A pint of beer in Scotland was expensive enough in our time there -- heaven knows what it costs now. But on Coronation Street they put it away even at lunchtime before going back to work in the Underworld knicker factory. Children are routinely denied the truth, sent upstairs, and no one ever seems to discover that the kids, not being stupid (that comes later) are unfooled.

One of the positive aspects of Coronation Street is that it does from time to time feature social issues in its plots and subplots -- homosexuality, transgender, various forms of criminality, abuse of minors, deafness, terminal illness, grief and suicide... And indeed, just about every character on Coronation Street has some interesting marital and extra-marital history, or a police or prison record. Published albums of Coronation Street give fascinating summaries of the marital and sexual vagaries of various characters over the years.

Does this accurately reflect life in the surrounds of Manchester? One or two of the characters are actually interesting. Roy and Hayley, I think. But Ken Barlow, Rita, and Emily Bishop have become simply predictable. Deidre is excruciating. Audrey also. Sometimes they introduce a character too evil and devious to be credible, even in Weatherfield. Scottish Tony is the latest.

Perhaps I have shot myself in the foot... I seem to know rather a lot about Coronation Street for someone who doesn't watch it. Well, it's part of life around here, or death. You can see nothing of it for a year, and then pick up the plot again in five minutes. For Mary, all those years, it constituted rest and relaxation when she got home from Middlemore, and could sit there with a nice meal on her lap.

Some years ago, at St Luke's Church in Remuera, I ran a seminar called "Coronation Street Aversion Therapy". It was very well attended. All we did was talk about Coronation Street. That was fun.

This is my 50th wedding anniversary speech

We had our celebration a little early, on 2 April. It was a lovely day and a lovely venue, the Ransom Vineyard just south of Warkworth. All our family showed up, and other relatives and friends... a happy occasion. Someone suggested I put my speech on the blog. It seems harmless...

Mainly, Mary and I have a sense of wonder that, almost 50 years following that ceremony on 13 May 1961, we are both still here and still happily together, showing our age and wounds perhaps in some ways, but still with most of our marbles and our sense of irony and the ridiculous, and our love. We are still capable of some faith and wisdom, and still glad of what we once upon a time called the holy estate of matrimony.

One of our grand-daughters informed Mary the other day that she does look like a grandmother in the face, but the rest of her still looks normal. It is a huge gift that we continue loving friends with our three children and our grandchildren. And it is very satisfying to note that this achievement is shared in their own cases by others of our friends and relatives present today, who were married in those days, long ago.

Generally speaking, at that time, we assumed that you got married and you stayed married, one way or another, unless it was a real calamity -- and even then sometimes. The number of times in ministry one has encountered a marriage which had found some modus operandi, but which was nevertheless a marriage which should never have happened in the first place... There were plenty of those. I came across a rather nice passage from G K Chesterton, written in 1902, in an essay entitled, “A Defence of Rash Vows”. Chesterton assumed that marriage vows, by their nature are rash. Well, anyone exchanging marriage vows with Gilbert Keith Chesterton was indeed rash. He would send his wife a telegram which read, “Am in Bognor Regis. Where should I be?” Anyway, this is what he wrote:

The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words -- “Free Love” -- as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.

For the record... We were married on 13 May 1961, at St Andrew’s Church, Symonds Street, Auckland, by the Rev George Jeffreys. George Jeffreys was a fine minister and friend, and I remember him most fondly today. I had introduced George to his wife Ngaire, and so it was the least he could do for us. Mary and I were living in Dunedin at that time, and we arrived in Auckland only in time for last minute dress fittings and all that. That is by far the best way to do it. If they want you to have a large wedding, an inter-tribal agglutination, something between an Indian Durbah and the Congress of Vienna, for your wedding, then my advice is to do what we did -- stay at the other end of the country, or perhaps in the Falkland Islands, and show up at the last minute, adopt an air of silly bewilderment, and absolutely veto one or two things at the outset. I must have got a new suit from somewhere -- I really don’t remember that, let alone how I paid for it. Our wedding was attended by 15 thousand people including some somewhat unhinged distant cousins and National Party stalwarts.

Mary looked lovely -- I do remember that -- otherwise, I was hanging out to get out of there. We were seriously broke. Mary was still a student for another two years, and I was on an assistant minister’s stipend and had yet to be introduced to concepts such as saving and budgeting.

Over these 50 years we have lived in Dunedin; in Browns Bay briefly; in Whitehill and then in Carfin, both in Lanarkshire, Scotland; in Mairangi Bay; in Timaru; in Suva, Fiji; in Ellerslie, and then in what the land agents called Onehunga Heights during 15 years at St Peter’s, Ellerslie-Mt Wellington -- and finally here at Algies Bay.

We produced our children, each one of whom is different from the others, mercifully you might think different from us, and indeed from all the rest of humanity. They have produced their children, and I guess the generations will proceed. We have been blessed -- which is one way of putting it -- by the clamorous presence of our grandchildren these last two weeks.

Mary found she was able to do things the way she preferred, over the years. So she was a full time mother until we were living in Suva and Rachel went to school, and then she sought a job at the Suva public hospital. She asked them not to be thrown in at the deep end, so they put her in emergency medicine, and Mary came home and said to me this is not a good time to be having an accident in Suva.

When we came back to Auckland she completed a postgraduate Diploma in Obstetrics. That was quite enough to convince both her and us not to pursue obstetrics. So Peter Herdson, a fine doctor and pathologist, persuaded Mary to sign on for the 5-year course for the Fellowship of the Royal College of Pathology Australasia -- which she got in 5 years, and proceeded as a specialist thereafter at Middlemore Hospital until retirement in 2009. A couple of years before her retirement she was named Distinguished Pathologist by her College, and there is a medal to prove it. I am very proud of what Mary has done.

There are so many important people here with us today. But first I want to honour some who were at that wedding in 1961, but whom we don’t see today. Mary’s parents, and mine... Aunts, uncles and friends... That day we even managed to visit my Scottish grandmother, Leonora Miller, who was able to get to the church but not to the reception. We called on her at the rest home in One Tree Hill. I think that might have been the last time we saw her.

It is wonderful that we have Margaret and Heitia Hiha with us, all the way from Napier.

And of course, this occasion was a reason for our offspring and their families to arrive. Lex and family came out of Japan at a time of huge anxiety there. Rhys and family came from Queensland, and although they were not directly affected by the floods, they certainly saw what happened around the Brisbane River. And of course we have Rachel and family here too.

Our dear cousin Joan Bell has come from her home in Cumbria in the UK, and it is wonderful to see Joan again. My sisters, Marilyn and Barbara are here, with Lionel and Noel. My brother Duncan has come from Brisbane with Genevieve. And my brother Morris has come. It is all good. It is also, I may say, all a great deal more than I ever imagined I was letting myself in for when I feebly agreed to what Mary called a small celebration.

Mary’s cousins Mary and Terry Boyd are here, Judith and Chris Parry, Helen and Don Fletcher...

Then there are our friends -- Barrie and Robin MacCuish, Peter and Barbara Wedde, Graeme Ferguson, Marjory Ramage, and from Wellington, Judith Aitken, with whom we have shared much over these years. (Actually, Judith set out to come from Wellington, but got foiled by Jetstar who cancelled her flight.) We had a message from Kim and Lola Bathgate, in Christchurch, who wanted to be here but had an earthquake.