The pleasure of their company

My younger brother lives in Queensland, and his lovely Aussie wife Genevieve thought he might spend his 60th birthday with his siblings across the Tasman here in Algies Bay. Thus we turned to and arranged a kind of tribal coagulation for lunch here at our house last Saturday, the actual birthday.

So Duncan travelled from Brisbane with Genevieve and their two sons, Tom and Hamish. Tom and Hamish, let me tell you, are handsome, urbane, accomplished, poised, sociable, world citizens. They have two younger sisters of similar quality presently travelling somewhere in Greece.

Here at Algies Bay on any normal day that does not involve shifting furniture around for some family jamboree, arranging food, negotiating times and places, you would find my peaceful home with Mary, my sister Marilyn’s stable and tidy home with Lionel (another great Aussie), and my even younger sister Barbara’s welcoming home with Noel, a dinkum Kiwi.

Just over the ridge at Sandspit, where the boats leave for Kawau, is our sister-in-law Jan, who has an art studio. Jan doesn’t socialise with us. Jan’s husband Morris is our brother, Marilyn’s twin. And. mirabile dictu, Morris showed up smiling on Saturday, a wonderful gift for us all.

I hope you are keeping up with me here because now we come to the offspring, and their offspring. I won’t name them, and some of them couldn’t come. But quite a few of them did. One even brought his very brave girlfriend. And so we all ate ham and chick pea curry, salads and cakes, with wine, and beer for the blokes on the balcony.

We gave Duncan a birthday book, a real quality one about the 18th and 19th century sailing ships, with brilliant accurate illustrations, the best kind of gift, the one you would love to have yourself.

Now, you understand that in our tribe there are plenty of more or less constant adverse currents, relating to things that happened in years long gone which have left their wounds, memories, griefs.

Each of us has long ago gone our own way, making our own private arrangements eventually with the past, perhaps failing in the main to listen to or understand the others. It’s all pretty normal, actually. I don’t think we are a dysfunctional family. It’s just that the years bring their scars, and choices people made long ago have had huge effects down to this day.

The years also have brought their triumphs. We raised families. We did learn things and teach our kids things. We did support each other solidly from time to time. But now we certainly show our wounds.

I think in the main we have managed to demonstrate the triumph of openness and hospitality over division and bigotry; of love over fear of difference; of dogged loving loyalty over shock and catastrophe. We have all turned out different, quite different -- imagine that! From the same stock, we each became something else. We have no need to come together to pretend we are all the same. We are not. And that’s perfectly OK.

Our offspring will go on widening the diversity, even as they retain the genetic inheritance. That’s amazing. Our parents, Tom and Eulie’s cohabitation, long ago now, results in vastly different people in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and travelling everywhere, adapting to the cultures they discover, learning the languages and folkways.

We had a good tribal meeting. Nothing of any value got negotiated. There were too many people and there was too much noise and activity ever to discuss anything properly. But it was worth it all to see each other and get an impression of each person, recognise worth and what various people have survived and overcome, sometimes to share a brief heart to heart moment and understanding... It all mattered.

Prayer to Allah

Officials in the world's most populous Muslim country admitted on Monday that they made a mistake when issuing an edict in March saying the holy city in Saudi Arabia was to the country's west. The Indonesian Ulema Council, or MUI, has since asked followers to shift direction slightly northward during their daily prayers.

"After a thorough study with some cosmography and astronomy experts, we learned they've been facing southern Somalia and Kenya," said Ma'ruf Amin, a prominent cleric of the MUI. "We've revised it now to the north-west."

He said Indonesians need not worry, however. "Allah understands that humans make mistakes," he said. "Allah always hears their prayers."


Well, the above diagrams should be helpful. Perhaps the Islamic authorities have not yet caught up with the fact that the Earth is round -- a rather more serious problem than Indonesian two-dimensional geography. Clearly, Islamic prayer in most parts of the world needs to be on a slope, and at times on such a slope that the worshipper would require to be tethered, or somehow fastened on Velcro.

The inter-faith chapel at Auckland International Airport actually has an arrow on the floor, pointing to Mecca I presume. Presbyterians should ignore this. I profoundly hope the pilots don’t rely on it.

Someone will surely upbraid me now for poking fun at other religions. Well, tough. Humour has become one of the most important correctives we have.

Orange Road Cone

From: mosspub@rodney.govt.nz [mailto:mosspub@rodney.govt.nz]
Sent: Saturday, 29 May 2010 9:53 a.m.
To: customerservice
Subject: Contact Us Enquiry
New Contact Us Enquiry
Name: Ross Miller
Email: ross.miller@paradise.net.nz
Comments:
May the residents of Willjames Avenue, Algies Bay, have a new orange road cone at the intersection of Willjames and Alexander? The old one, which has been guarding an unfinished hole in the road temporarily filled with gravel for several months now, and has become an old friend, is getting very weathered and shabby. This brings the whole neighbourhood into disrepute.


From: customerservice
To: ross.miller@paradise.net.nz
Sent: Monday, May 31, 2010 10:14 AM
Subject: RE: Orange Road Cone Enquiry

Good Morning Ross

Thank you for your email.

I have raised a request, CR 664774, for a replacement cone for the hole at the junction of Willjames Avenue and Alexander Road as you have requested.

Regards
Lindsay

Lindsay Powell | Customer Service
p: 09 426 5169 | f: 09 426 0721 | e: customerservice@rodney.govt.nz
Rodney District Council | 50 Centreway Road | Private Bag 500 | Orewa 0946 | New Zealand p: 0800 426 5169 | f: 426 7280 | www.rodney.govt.nz

Please consider the environment before printing this email.


From: Lex Miller
To: Ross Miller
Sent: Monday, May 31, 2010 10:31 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: Orange Road Cone Enquiry

Would it be going to far to raise another request for replacement of the gravel?

Lex


From: J and M-A
To: Lex Miller ; Ross Miller
Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2010 9:00 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: Orange Road Cone Enquiry

And surely the hole must be due a makeover?

M-A


Ah well, you see, following my email to the Rodney District Council, and the allocation to me of a work number, CR 664774, silence reigned over the land for the space of maybe three days. The shabby orange cone remained. Then, overnight, as it were in a miracle, the cone disappeared and the hole had been filled in, sealed and levelled -- and the place thereof knew it no more.

I would cause a Te Deum to be sung in the local community church, but they wouldn't know what that is.

Much shalom,

Ross

Ross Miller
ross.miller@paradise.net.nz
http://rosssmoment.blogspot.com/



From: customerservice
To: ross.miller@paradise.net.nz
Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2010 3:01 PM
Subject: CR 665009 Cone - Willjames Avenue and Alexander Road

Good Afternoon Ross

A quick email to let you know Downer EDIWorks - Water have advised me as follows: -

" 15-Jun-2010 11:49:50 - - Rodney Water - SN Waiting on hot mix to repair patch. ETR one month. "

Unfortunately I understand the cone hasn't been replaced with a newer one but I hope knowing the patching will be done within the next month is of help.

I will email you again once I am advised the repair has been made.

Regards
Lindsay

Lindsay Powell | Customer Service p: 09 426 5169 | f: 09 426 0721 | e: customerservice@rodney.govt.nz

Rodney District Council | 50 Centreway Road | Private Bag 500 | Orewa 0946 | New Zealand p: 0800 426 5169 | f: 426 7280 | www.rodney.govt.nz
Please consider the environment before printing this email.


20.06.10
Lindsay...

How good of you to keep me posted. Silly me, I thought the job was done. Evidently not.

Now I am alarmed to learn that it takes your contractors one month to acquire one square metre of hot mix. Is this one reason it has taken so far over 2 years to complete the fix up of State Highway One at Warkworth? If someone sends me the recipe, I could probably have it ready and waiting "in situ" as it were, when the blokes arrive. Say on Tuesday. I could do this at cost plus 10%.

And as you point out, we now don't have even one grubby orange road cone. It has gone. We now have none. So I rely on your assurance alone that progress is being made. So much of our lives consists in going forward in hope and trust.

Sincerely,

Ross Miller
ross.miller@paradise.net.nz
http://rosssmoment.blogspot.com/

At this point, typically in serious but complex discussions with public officials, people start to lose the plot. This chap now thinks someone stole the cone. But no -- they took it themselves, the RDC. We begin steadily to move into some parallel universe. It may still be fun, but you can forget about anything like the original topic.


Hello Ross

Thank you for letting us know the cone has gone missing. I have spoken to the contractors and requested a replacement be put in place as soon as possible.

The reason for the delay in patching, I am advised, is because it is more cost effective to make the repair when there are several jobs in the area requiring to be reinstated rather
than the maintenance team making separate journeys to individual locations through out Rodney.

Regards,

Lindsay Powell

Customer Service p: 09 426 5169 | 0800 4265169 | f : 09 426 0721 | e customerservice@rodney.govt.nz
Rodney District Council | 50 Centreway Road | Private Bag 500 | Orewa 0946 | New Zealand p: 0800 426 5169 | f: 426 7280 | www.rodney.govt.nz
P Please consider the environment before printing this email.


Greetings Lindsay,

Willjames will rejoice at the advent of a new orange cone. It will lift everyone's spirits, as we await the final resolution of the hole in the road issue, hot mix and all.

It is of course reassuring to be reminded that your contractors store up jobs to be done in a particular area for reasons of time and other efficiencies. This is as it should be. Perhaps then we can expect, when the contractors venture into this area to fix the mix in Willjames, they will attend also to the small tasks along the walkway at Snells Beach. For many weeks now we have had iridescent pink markings from a spray paint can along the route, indicating to the simple minds of us locals that some trimming and repairing of concrete and edging is being planned around the council table. Indeed, more recently, these markings were renewed and refreshed, this time in dual colours, iridescent pink, and orange. Doubtless the colours denote different things to be done. We are in awe at this evidence of detailed and thoughtful planning. And we await what it all promises, the trimming of the concrete and the verges.

There you are, sitting at your desk co-ordinating all these things for us. Thank you again,

From your grateful ratepayers and employers...

Ross Miller


25.06.10

Good Morning Ross

I am advised by Downer EDI Work - Water, they have now reinstated the carriageway at the junction of Willjames Avenue and Alexander Road and trust it is satisfactory.

Regards
Lindsay

I too am a happily grumpy old man

This is a revised list. On seeing the first list, my brother emailed me to tell me not to be so censorious. But there are certain realities of old age, among them that, having lived a little, one has likes and dislikes. I am happily grumpy. It seems to be my default mode. I can envisage a happy state in which people generally set aside their egos and behave courteously. The list may be added to as time goes by.

People who think it necessary to censor, conceal, re-write, lie about or sanitise their family histories for their descendants and others.

Anglicans and other church luminaries who in the 21st century insist on poncing around in grotesque gear.

The noise that now passes for music. Why can no one write a decent tune any more?

Apologies that are more about adjusting other people’s feelings than about any true sorrow or amendment of life.

Corporate criminals who avoid any real consequences for their actions.

Silly, banal, unnecessary, unpleasant and sad swearing.

People who call me mate when I am not their mate. People I have never met before who call me Ross. People who say no problem. People who say have a good day. All these people are assuming things I will decide. People who address my wife and me as you guys.

People with no inner resources to manage boredom.

People unable to cook themselves a meal. Finicky eaters. Compulsive vegetarians. People with no sense of good food someone has thought about and prepared for them.

People who phone at dinner-time, or any time, wanting to sell me something.

People who never listen to Bach. People who don’t know who Bach is, as though it doesn’t matter.

People who enter a room talking to everyone, or worse, try to make some kind of Entrance, irrespective of, or not even bothering to know, what they may be interrupting.

People who interrupt a conversation to start up another one of their own. All people who interrupt. Radio interviewers incapable of letting their interviewees complete a sentence.

Pre-dinner drinkies. Cocktail parties, and all such mindless, banal, pointless, tiring occasions.

Stream-of-consciousness conversation which passes for intelligent communication. People who routinely respond to every statement in the first person, talking only about themselves.

Journalists, columnists who write only about what happened to them and how they felt about it.

Wine columns, wine correspondents, wine experts, Masters of Wine, anyone who thinks that wine is anything more than an expensive medium for alcohol, wine bores, wine tasting, wine bars.

Bony chests and low necklines. Silly drunken women at race days, wearing silly hats and displaying bony knees, and staggering around in high heels. The mindless unfunny drunken males who seem to accompany them.

Tattoos, piercings and all forms of body mutilation.

Blokes who think it’s appropriate to enter restaurants, cafes, shops, supermarkets, in smelly singlet and shorts, hairy legs and grubby bare feet with or without jandals.

Baseball caps, especially worn sideways or back-to-front, as though these people think their heads have been installed the wrong way round.

Motor racing and all petrol-heads.

People who can’t spell and don’t think it matters, people with no concern for grammar and logic.

Sports fanatics -- as though any of that actually matters...

Anyone who says, “What you’ve got to realise is...”

Luridly painted toenails. The current female trend for long straggly unkempt hair with all the life dyed or bleached out of it -- what we used to call dull, lifeless hair.

Dog lovers. People who let their pets live inside, feed inside, smell inside. People who think I ought to be charmed with their bloody pets.

Pseudo-sophisticates, usually female, who say O my God!

Mindless adjectives such as sexy, funky.

Racists. People unable to live happily with different cultures in the community, different habits, different languages, different customs and values – ie, in the real world. People who assume the best society is some extension of themselves.
Gated housing developments, and the assumption that anyone who seems to be different is not an acceptable neighbour.

(Usually) American women expressing surprise or some other emotion with their mouths wide open.

Utter dishonesty in funeral orations. The usual range of lies following a violent tragedy... he died doing what he loved, he would never have hurt a fly, he was a gentle giant... It was a quiet cul-de-sac where nothing ever happened...

Pseudo-concepts such as “closure”.

People who “want answers”, as though they would understand them if they got them.

People who can’t sleep because they want “heads to roll” – or because the law has deprived them of the right to hit children.

And all of the following...

At the end of the day
Fairly unique. (Huh…?)
I personally
At this moment in time
With all due respect
Unbeknownst
To be perfectly honest, candid, frank… (Was he not before?)
Absolutely… fantastic… incredible…
It's a nightmare
Shouldn't of
24/7
It's not rocket science
In any way, shape or form
But look…
Basically… Obviously…
Mayhem, carnage (when it’s not)
Turning 1-syllable words into 2-syllable: grow-en, unknow-en
Anythink
From here on in
Going forward
Heading into negative/positive territory
For free
Accenting prepositions, as in: We now go to our correspondent IN Wellington, who is ON the scene…

Liars, Hypocrites and Humbugs

Duplicity comes in many forms from malignant to benign, and most varieties were conceived by rulers and politicians from ancient times. I have reached the stage where, encountering now some of our leaders on TV or radio or making portentous statements anywhere, I find myself thinking, I do not actually or implicitly believe anything this man/woman is telling me.

Alison Weir in her recent and very detailed account of the fall of Queen Anne Boleyn, describes what happened on 8 June 1536. Henry VIII showed up at Parliament for the opening. He had already deployed the brightest legal luminaries in the realm to find him a way to divorce his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and this had been done. The grounds were consanguinity (she was the widow of Henry’s brother), and her failure to produce a son who could survive 16th century neo-natal care.

Then Henry, having been married briefly to Anne Boleyn, and still not having a son, decided he needed to get rid of her in favour of Jane Seymour, with whom he was now besotted. Cromwell had come to the rescue, and found so-called evidence that Anne had been adulterous all around the court, even with her own brother. Tricky -- in times like theirs, and ours, marked by hypocrisy and galloping paranoia. She was convicted of high treason and sentenced to death. Henry decided to be “kind”, and decreed that she would not be burned at the stake, or beheaded by an axeman, but swiftly decapitated by a swordsman brought over from France for the purpose. Within a few days Henry was married to Jane Seymour.

Now we come to the opening of Parliament. Lord Chancellor Audley made a speech to the King and to both houses. This included reading out the King’s Speech in which Henry plunged into serious damage limitation. Alison Weir reports how Henry publicly lamented that, having been disappointed in his first two marriages, he had been obliged, for the welfare of his realm, to enter upon a third, “a personal sacrifice not required of any ordinary man”.

At this the Lord Chancellor paused, and asked, “What man in middle life would not this deter from marrying a third time? Yet this, our most excellent Prince, not in any carnal concupiscence, but at the humble entreaty of his nobility, again condescended to contract matrimony, and hath, on the humble petition of the nobility, taken to himself a wife this time whose age and fine form give promise of issue.” Audley thanked the King for his selflessness and the care he had shown for his subjects.

This is what public office and power seem to do to people. Of course there are occasional shining exceptions. I do not know how I would have conducted myself had I ever been given high office and power. Over the years I have learned too much about my own inner frailty ever to be sure. I never learned how to carry on regardless, simply riding over the debris I have created and emerging again, as so many do. St Benedict has important teaching about personal humility which would be entirely lost on today’s achievers and all who set goals as though their personal attainment is the meaning of life and the universe.

Unless we discover and adopt a better way, such as Benedict teaches, or others such as the Dalai Lama, we are doomed to wars and destruction, paranoia and the collapse of hope, bombs, disease and starvation, injustice and brutality -- all of which, more or less, is what is happening now.

Episcopal Barbie

Meet Barbie, the Episcopal Vicar..


Bess writes: She has more than 6,000 FaceBook fans, and a wardrobe that sparkles with clerical chic. Even her own matching thurible.


Yep that’s right, meet Barbie, 51-year-old blonde rector of St Barbara’s-on-the-Sea, Malibu.


Nope, Mattel hasn’t got religion. Episcopal Barbie is the invention of a real clergywoman, Rev Julie Blake Fisher, resident in Kent, Ohio.

A dab hand with the scissors, Blake Fisher has fashioned “vestments, clothing and holy hardware for well-dressed 11.5’ Episcopal clergy."

A gallery of Barbie modelling her finest ecclestical garb may be seen on this "open" access group on Facebook. And this is merely the start.

“My next project will be Episcopal Priest Barbie: Cathedral Edition” Blake Fisher reveals, in this article on virtueonline.

But expect radical changes: Bishop Barbie will be African-American. Naturally the news has sparked a host of Barbie-theology joke posts.

Will Barbie save the Episcopal Church?” asks Faith Matters on the American Interest Online: "Every now and then I am tempted to believe that the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States is in a death spiral as its membership ages and dwindles, as more and more of its parishes go on life support.."

But “there is still hope; we Episcopalians still have a message to the contemporary world. We are ‘fun’. We dress up. We are PC. We have incense. As a church which has borne Christian witness in this land for more than 400 years falls to pieces on our watch and around our ears we have hundreds of hours to spend making vestments for dolls”.

Quite.

Personally I've seen nothing yet to beat Greg'scouch and the speech bubble coming out of Barbie’s mouth: “I used to eat like a normal human being, but then I found God. Now, I’ve been blessed with a 2-inch waist, a car, anorexia and a man!"


Genius.

Murdered teen's mum ... 'farcical' sentence

It’s become a ritual. Desperately aggrieved, bereaved, shocked, enraged, relatives and friends attend in the courtroom, equipped with Victim Impact Statements which they have worked out over the weeks of the trial, full of purple prose -- and with photos and mementos, complete with teddy bears.

The media lovingly report the juicier bits of these statements, the ferocity of the delivery, the eyeballing of the accused, and the visible reactions, if any, of the accused. Judges seem to have become astonishingly tolerant of all this. Sometimes, but very rarely, one of these statements might speak of understanding and forgiveness, of decisions to avoid bitterness and hatred, rancour and revenge.

Then inevitably, the sentence imposed turns out to be less than the eternity of torture they believe appropriate, so they convene outside the courtroom and say how disgusted, or “gutted”, they are, how they have lost faith in the justice system (why would anyone think that an intelligent assessment?), and what they would do to the offender if they had access.

Of course these people are feeling desperate and helpless, powerless. But the country’s justice system can’t save them from the facts of life. Life includes tragic events. The world is a perilous place. Living is dangerous. There is grief and loss, and huge injustice all the time.

Typically the victim’s families say, as in a case this week, “So eleven and a half years was all my daughter’s life was worth…” Well, lady, that’s not what anyone thinks, not the judge, not the counsel, not the jury. The victim’s life is incalculable. The judge dares to believe that the offender’s life is worth something too. So do most of us in our better moments.

Then, behold, it turns out that the victim’s family have suddenly become experts on criminology and penology. The silly media start to hang on to their every word as they prescribe what they think should now happen in law, in police action, in prison administration, in parole guidelines.

A lot of this has been gathered up in a lobby called the Sensible Sentencing Trust, whose representatives are wheeled out every time there is the slightest public perception that some judge has “got it wrong”. The head guru in sensible sentencing is Garth McVicar. Garth sees the world in black and white.

“Sensible” sentences are apparently those governed by the central rubric of these people, that “The punishment should fit the crime.” So what they really think, although they rarely say so, is that we should reinstate capital punishment, and possibly also corporal punishment. “An eye for an eye…” They never seem to grasp that (a) the bible does not teach an eye for an eye; or that (b) another name for it is the Law of the Jungle.

In a civilized society, accused people are protected from the rage and revenge of others. Justice, to be just, does have to include a solid component of wisdom and mercy -- otherwise we are back in the jungle, subject to the law of the lynch mob. We have judges precisely so that we are protected from people such as Garth.

And all of this is without venturing into the question whether our prisons are doing any good anyway. Obviously some people have to be detained, perhaps for life. Otherwise our prisons seem to be simply assembly belts of crime.

(Postscript: It costs five times more to keep a convicted youth offender in prison in the UK, than it would cost to keep him at Eton. Eton might work better.)

Priestly Paedophilia

It seems unlikely that Pope Benedict XVI will read and pay close attention to what I write here. But the main function of blogs, as ever, is to make the writer feel better.

I wish the Pope had not apologised, as he did at inordinate length, to the RC church and people of Ireland, for the many instances of priestly paedophilia which are being revealed almost daily. Benedict’s apology is at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article7069664.ece

I can’t bring myself to read it closely.

Of course the media have also decided, from their once-over-lightly reading of history, that a papal apology is unprecedented -- popes simply don’t say sorry -- and therefore this one highlights the severity of the crisis.

Well, crisis indeed it is. Ireland has long been famous for clergy abuse, including sustained brutality of children, girls and women, the handicapped and helpless, in its schools and orphanages and other “Christian and charitable” institutions. But Ireland has never had any monopoly on this human disease. The latest is from Bavaria, the Pope’s own Heimat, where the Pope’s own brother, Father Georg, used to slap around the boys in the prestigious choir of Ravensburg Cathedral, the Domspazen, the Cathedral Sparrows. Stories of abuse are flooding in from almost everywhere. The USA, some years ago, was only the start, probably because it has more people aware of the possibilities of litigation and compensation.

But this is now beyond apology. The Pope should have made a simple address from his position of awesome power and prestige in the church, and said: It is a crisis. I intend to deal with it. These activities, whatever their cause, are intolerable. They are an abuse of power inconsistent with the way of Christ. Priests and others in the church who abuse children will be expelled, and I am instructing the bishops accordingly. The church will no longer make arrangements for monetary compensation -- that is a matter for the civil courts.

Apologies have become a pastime in our culture, and they are largely worthless. I dealt with this in my own way some time ago, in my blog http://rosssmoment.blogspot.com/2009_05_01_archive.html

Of course, the media have now decided that the real problem is not the abuse itself, but the historic unwillingness of bishops to deal with the offending priests decisively. The bishops have been simply transferring them elsewhere. Crimes have been getting concealed from the police. There has been, and remains, a ecclesiastical culture of coverup. Thus, the church has been and is complicit in crime.

Well, it’s quite simple. All this has to cease. The Pope could instruct the bishops accordingly. The coverup has been disgusting. The expectation of the priests that mother church would protect them has to give way to the manifest right of children and others to protection from predatory priests, users, bullies, sadists, nohopers…

Obviously there are many contributory causes. The insistence on celibacy is one of them, but only one. Compulsory vocational celibacy outside monasteries is a silly, unnecessary and false doctrine.

Also, there is the malignant culture of power in the church. Hierarchy. Nothing could be less consonant with the way of Christ. Priests living apart and wielding power over the flock. Bishops poncing around in medieval gear and issuing orders. The miracle is that, within this structure, there have been so many christlike, scholarly, wise and thoughtful people, so many non-abusive and horrified by all this.

When John XXIII said he wanted the windows thrown open, one wonders now if he was thinking also of this whole area of clergy abuse and misuse of power.

Then there is the issue of vocation. Who becomes a priest, or a nun, or a minister or pastor? Who knows? There are complex admission procedures, tests, assessments. But it remains a human issue, and no one understands the echoes of personal loneliness or resentment, the subterranean areas where decisions may get made. Only a wise and developed theology of human fallenness and redemption can cope with this.

The victims…? It’s sad, profoundly sad. But victimhood is a chosen state. No one has to be a victim. I realise how unpolitical this statement is -- but it is possible to get over it, to get on with life. That may be the main and heroic task.

Meanwhile, it is utterly tragic that all this continues now to be dealt with on the level of who should pay for what happened.

Ethanol

Inside the Rover’s Return, in Coronation Street, is where most of the action happens, episode by episode. Over the 50 years since the series began in 1960, we have seen this corner pub renovated, crashed into, burnt out, rebuilt, remodelled – yet it remains the focal venue of just about every plot and sub-plot.

I do understand that the “local”, in England at any rate, has long been an important social institution. And it’s easy to see how convenient it must have been to the producers of Coronation Street to have so much of the action in one place. Right from the start, when Ena Sharples, Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst sat and swapped their venomous gossip in the Snug over their milk stouts, nicely insulated by frosted glass from the raunchier and riskier world of the public bar, it has been possible to concentrate on faces and moods and dialogue, with only the occasional irruption of action and flying fists. The Rover’s is where they daily oil the social mechanism, bonding, abusing each other, reassuring each other, planning one-upmanship, checking their defences and nourishing their antipathies. You can’t do any of that alone at home, really; it’s social, it requires others to listen and respond.

But how much week by week do these people spend on their alcohol? The “girls” who sew garments in Underworld routinely adjourn to the Rovers for their lunch. Sure, there they have Betty’s ‘Otpot, which presumably would give them some sensible protein. Come to think, does the Rover’s ever serve tea/coffee? I have never, ever, heard of it. Typically, day or night, the locals require ale, wine or spirits, or some fruit drink if you’re pregnant. Mike Baldwin normally asked for “my usual, please, and whatever she’s having”. His usual was a double whisky. He died. These people drink. A pot of tea, on the other hand, “a brew”, is what you have at home. “I could murder a brew...”

Perhaps the normal level of salaries/wages in the UK takes account of the money one spends on buying alcohol for oneself and on purchasing rounds for others. I doubt it. It must be considerable. It would be bad enough here in NZ... It says something about the place alcohol has come to assume in the lives of so many, as though it were indispensable as a social lubricant.

We too have the beer culture, and the profoundly silly wine culture... There is a NZ talkback host who thinks it sophisticated to inform us that he would never buy a bottle of wine under NZ$25.00. We have wine “experts”, and some radio chap who is wheeled on to advise us which wines to choose with which foods. People are making money from telling us which wine they personally prefer, as though it matters or is even remotely interesting. We now have “Masters of Wine”, whatever they are. Wine, however ancient, is simply another slightly more sophisticated vehicle for shunting alcohol into our brain cells. You like a particular wine or you don’t, I would have thought.

The beer culture has drunken obnoxious Britons fouling the streets of Europe and elsewhere following rugby or soccer or league. They threaten to come here for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, as useless and abhorrent an event as I ever imagined. Vulgar yobboes with their tinnies and over-strained livers.

The wine culture, more pervasive, has otherwise sensible people thinking they can be connoisseurs of taste/smell/whatnot... They have their own wine literature about redolence of apricot and lavender, slightly... ye gods, who invented this humbug...?
But the real social damage is in simply drinking. Alcohol is an addictive drug, for many. Teenagers are getting paralytic at parties, and are falling about on the streets. Beer boozers in rugby clubs and at home are beating up their womenfolk and their kids, sometimes with fatal consequences. Alcohol moreover potentiates the effect of other more serious drugs. It is behind many of society’s tragedies and horrors.

I don’t drink. I decided some time ago to put alcohol out of my life. It was a good decision. No one needs that stuff. And I have recently decided it is not wowserism or puritanism to advocate really strong restrictions on the availability of beer, wine and spirits – it is simply to take seriously a serious social disease. I believe alcohol is unnecessary. For me the best social and personal remedy is abstinence. Most people don’t believe that, of course. But they have to come up with some remedies likely to work.

Awaiting Women

Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 12:24 PM
Subject: Stephen

Hi all,

Stephen has learned to be patient. He has had to. I explained to Stephen that he'll spend a good portion of his life waiting for women, so I'm helping him get used to it.

Gran was amused to find Stephen reading while he waited for someone to get him up.

A couple of days ago Simon had a mug of coffee on the coffee table. He warned Stephen it was very hot. So Stephen dipped his finger in it. He then felt the mug to see whether that was hot, and then dipped his finger into the coffee one more time to confirm that the coffee was definitely hot.

Stephen is a sensate.

Hope all is well with you guys.

Love,
Rachel

.................................


On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 7:56 AM, Ross Miller wrote:
Listen Magoo...

This business of Stephen spending all his life waiting for women... I am the one to educate him about this phenomenon, not you. I simply know more about it. And the trick is not to be patient, or "get used to it". That's only what girls think. Girls think men are performing some proper function by waiting around patiently.

The trick is to learn strategies, which not only make better use of the time, but also alter the future. Read a book, for instance, is a good strategy. Always have a book with you. I have got through War and Peace, Vanity Fair, and quite a lot of the Bible, while waiting for your mother. (And for you, incidentally...) Other possible strategies include getting real mad (but that one is ultimately too costly... it just helps sometimes to lay a real good guilt trip on them...) I do not really advise getting mad. It is also a good time to recalibrate the clock in your car, do your fingernails, make difficult or boring phone calls -- best of all, make one or two phone calls which really annoy someone. You can check your tyre pressures or even clean the car, inside or out, or both, that's entirely up to you. If you are waiting in some public place there are endless possibilities. Mentally write short stories about the weirdos you see. All of this and much more we could call the creative use of time spent waiting for females. But Stephen needs proper instruction in this at the right time... not some boring old advice to be patient.

Much love and shalom,

Ross

...........................

On 01 March Lex Miller wrote:

There are various grades of being made to wait:
1. No waiting required. This is only theoretically possible.
2. Being made to wait a period of time for which patience is possible for the normal bloke.
3. Being made to wait a period of time for which patience is possible for the normal saint.
4. Being made to wait a period which renders the eventual departure meaningless.
5. Suffering 4 and then being blamed for it.

Getting used to it only takes you as far as about 2.5.
Reading a book may take you to 3.
Number 4 probably required some sort of preemptive action.
If anyone knows how to deal with 5, please let me know.

Lex
..........................

On 02.03.10, Rhys Miller wrote:

Stoicism works for the 2 to 4.5 range.

Rhys

Tsunami...!

Well, I’m sitting here above Kawau Bay, awaiting the tsunami. Still waiting... Turned on the radio as usual at breakfast, and behold, the interesting Sunday morning programmes had been abandoned for what they keep calling a Radio One News Special.

The “massive” earthquake off the coast of Chile has generated a “massive” tsunami, which is “racing” across the Pacific in our direction at “the speed of a jet aircraft”. There are vague reports from the Marquesas, as though they are farewelling the world and gurgling in an unseemly manner as they sink. Then it seems the Chathams are getting a series of waves, but they don’t seem too big to me. It’s about now I learn something new, about “negative” waves – that’s when the bay empties before a big one comes in.

Ah yes, I remember that. Old Ron Connolly from Fiji once told of standing on the wharf in Suva when the whole lagoon suddenly emptied. Fish were flapping on the seabed. He was a silly twit to keep standing there – but being Ron, he survived.
There’s a long reef jutting out from the south end of Algies Bay, and I figure that it will be my marker. If a negative wave happens I will see the whole reef. It hasn’t happened yet.

Radio One News Special is grinding on, interviewing mayors, a variety of Sunday morning activists and blearily on-duty civil defence type persons, and copious vox populi. There is a certain amount of bureaucratic indignation about Members of the Public who presume to defy orders not to venture on to the beaches. How could they...? The worst offenders, it seems, are dog owners. That figures.

At 1045 hrs Kawau Bay does seem to be shallower. The reef is more visible than I would have expected. Maybe some of the boats at their moorings will be aground soon. Up north at Tutukaka, I hear, the boaties have put to sea thinking that’s safer. It sounds like a cast-iron excuse for a day’s fishing, to me.

Many years ago when I was a journalist on the Auckland Star there was a standard journalists’ joke about boring headlines. One such was Small Earthquake in Chile – Not Many Hurt. Well, this one was a big one. We have yet to hear about casualties. Organisations such as Red Cross and Medicins Sans Frontieres will be stretched to the limit. It tends to give perspective to the NZ obsession this morning with the safety of people on our beaches.

At 1400 hrs all is well in Kawau Bay. The south-end reef is more exposed than I have ever seen it. Everyone seems to be coping. Nothing has come roaring in from the Pacific.

Going to the barber

We used to have barbers. Remember that? They were strictly for blokes. The barber at the Remuera shopping village – this is in the 1940s -- had all manner of stuff going on. Cutting blokes’ hair was part of it. He sold cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, pipes, cigarette papers, matches, walking sticks... and, I now realise, c-nd-ms. I got sent up there with 1/- or maybe 1/6d for a haircut whenever my mother thought I was starting to look terrible.

The shop had a sign which said, “We post to Tasmania.” Well, we all did if we wanted to. But that was code for Tatts. Gambling was illegal in NZ except for the government-sponsored Art Union, but Tattersalls operated in Australia. People bought Tatts tickets in hushed tones at the barber’s.

The place also seemed to have a lot to do with horse racing. The senior blokes hanging around knew everything, all had copies of Best Bets in their pockets, and the walls were replete with pictures of horses and jockeys. The barber took bets, which was seriously illegal. A 9-penny haircut kid sitting in the chair just had to wait, frequently, while these things were fixed up.

No one had ever heard of styling. The only kind of cut was off. The Remuera barber ran his fingers through my hair, hard against my scalp, and amputated everything above them. It’s actually not a bad style, and all the boys at the local primary schools looked the same.

The Warkworth hairdresser in 2010 differs from this in certain important respects. First, she is seriously female. There is no nonsense about suspect activities. Just when I have come to the time of life when I have an alarming paucity of hair left, she talks to me about styling. Styling...? I simply don’t want it in my eyes or ears any more. Off remains the stylistic criterion.

Blokes still turn up, however, with that old blokey awareness of who’s first, who’s next... Girls would never do it that way. The hairdresser, Julie, conducts an incessant banter with everyone within earshot. She knows just how to engage each bloke, more or less, although she does have some difficulties with me.

Norman Rockwell has a wonderful painting of Shuffleton’s Barber Shop (Saturday Evening Post, April 29, 1950). The shop’s actually empty and in semi darkness. But light is streaming through from the back room, and you can just see three blokes playing violin, flute and cello. Nothing like that in Remuera, in my memory. But at Shuffleton’s in the gloom of the barber’s shop the coal fire still glows, the hair is swept up from the floor and the large broom rests against the wall. Life is all as it should be. There is a large poster of the American flag.

The PCANZ - gently sliding from sight

I am in the curious position, having altogether departed from the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, of watching from a distance as it dies. It is something like, having been rescued from a torpedoed boat, sitting in safety at a distance and seeing it ever so slowly upend, teeter, struggle for buoyancy, and slide from sight.

The PCANZ was torpedoed when the forces of biblical literalism, fundamentalism and moralism, and people who simply want safety among their own kind and all the familiar ancestral noises, and think that is what the church is for, eventually achieved the majority vote in the General Assembly and presbyteries of the church. In 2006 they were finally able to force through legislation which severely proscribed gay and lesbian ministers and officebearers. Very serious injustice was done to a lot of people. The new alpha males began to fashion a church in their own image. A lot of intelligent and sensitive members had been sidling out of the PCANZ for some years past. Others remain, some because it is still their livelihood. Many feel alienated and persecuted.

The PC(A)NZ in which I trained and was ordained was very different. It doesn’t exist any more. Ministers were seriously trained – you were expected to have a tertiary degree before you began theological studies – and Elders knew themselves to be part of a long tradition of thoughtful if conservative lay leadership. Zealots and charismatics were discouraged. The church was far from perfect, but it had some wise and good leaders. It was moreover a church in which necessary change tended to happen from within, by processes of prayer and theological reflection, rather than by revolution. That is the way the PC(A)NZ came to accept women in both the Eldership and the Ministry, ahead of many other denominations.

I don’t know what they have now. The ruling class in the PCANZ doesn’t share its thoughts with me. I occasionally get echoes of programs and projects supposed to put fire in your nostrils, and all more or less pathetic to this elderly bloke. Then there is the sector that doesn’t seem to believe in anything much, always plagued by doubts and provisos, generally devoted to the current trendy causes. These are the post-modern brigade, if anyone knows what that means. And we have the angry and alienated sector, the gays and lesbians – and the people always trying to agonise about what is Christlike in this or that situation... The whole show is sad, neurotic and dying. I guess it doesn’t matter. The PC(A)NZ served its purpose in its time and space, and often did very well indeed. I remember numbers of its great leaders with affection and awe.

Of course it will hang on for a while yet, propped up and temporarily resuscitated, in the recovery position.

But the trick these days is to make some simple but firm decisions about personal allegiance to Christ and his people. For me that means contemplative prayer and life in the Benedictine mode – which antedates most things in the Christian spectrum and history. It actually does mean general adherence to the faith of the great creeds, more as songs of praise and wonder than of norms of belief which include some and exclude others. I am very happy with all that. There is no longer any patience with denominationalism – I can’t be bothered with it. Inwardness is all – at any rate, in the sense that without it there is nothing else.

It is a life and a discipline in which one is formed, mostly in silence and stillness, according to the pattern of Christ, just as St Paul taught. And one joins the company of those contemplatively formed by Christ.

The Flag Debate

Suddenly the flag debate has heated up. A wide assortment of malcontents, of whom I am probably one, think it’s time to replace the official NZ flag, based on the Union Jack and the Southern Cross. It does refer to our history and to our situation in the Southern Hemisphere. But it’s also redolent to many of colonialism and the days when dear old England was still called Home. Since then Britain has become part of Europe and New Zealanders have to get in the queue for Aliens at the border. And there are apparently a lot of strange people who have difficulty distinguishing it from the Australian flag.

Now the Prime Minister has said he prefers the Silver Fern flag. Please, oh please, let this not prevail…! It’s black. The silver fern is nice, and it’s connected with sport – and that’s about all that can be said for it. I know that Canada adopted the simple maple leaf, and that seems to have worked. The silver fern won’t work for me. It’s not even halfway exciting. And we are not, repeat not, defined by our sporting reference.

One of the horrors of this debate is that everyone thinks this or that available choice would be perfect given just a little alteration, redesign, fine tuning, addition, twitching here or there. Some of the products that get suggested are… ye gods. And, it seems to me, the very last thing we want is something produced by an advertising agency or design school. I have enough experience of committees trying to finalise some report or official statement or creed, to know that this is never the way to achieve any good result.

We also have the Tino Rangatiratanga flag. I suspect this one is summarily dismissed by many because it is associated with Maori protest and aspirations – and even more because it gets disastrously called the Hone Harawira flag.

But it is a fine design. It is simple, dramatic, its colours are strong and restless, and it evokes for every Kiwi the meaning of the bush and the fern, and growth. Adopting this flag would also be a real gesture in our society right now. It doesn’t matter what the rest of the world might think – this flag would be inalienably New Zealand and nowhere else.

William's Epiphany

Prince William came to New Zealand on an official visit this week. A couple of days before I had watched a TV clip in which Flight Lieutenant William Wales came briskly forward in a thoroughly military manner to receive his flying wings (I think on this occasion flying helicopters) from his father, Charles, Prince of Wales. William was already commissioned as a lieutenant in the Blues and Royals, Household Cavalry – serving with his brother – and, two years later, he earned his wings by completing pilot training at Royal Air Force College Cranwell. Last year the Prince transferred to the Royal Air Force, was promoted to flight lieutenant and is training to be a full time pilot with the Search and Rescue Force. Prior to all this he is a graduate of St Andrews University.

William had the grace, style, and clear common sense, to carry off that possibly embarrassing moment in front of his mates, smoothly and with aplomb. He and his father could effortlessly combine dignity and humour.

You have to admire a young man who is already a qualified airman, to say nothing of other achievements, from polo to coping with the hideous media. Yes indeed, I know, both he and his also talented brother Harry are hugely privileged people. They still had to prove themselves and pass exams, and win the trust of their mates, in the real world. All of this is entirely lost on sad commentators such as Brian Rudman in the NZ Herald, who probably couldn’t fly a kite.

However! what do we do now with William when he comes to NZ representing his grandmother the monarch, to open our new Supreme Court building in Wellington? This new building, for all its silly design, does matter because the NZ Supreme Court replaces our long reliance on the Privy Council as the final recourse in law. Well, we parade William around the obligatory hakas, hangis, barbecues... god help us all... across to Kapiti Island to be photographed with a kiwi... and of course through the children’s ward at the hospital, very nice.

We subject him to hordes of screaming silly orgasmic females in the Wellington streets. Where do we get these dreadful people, whose minds, if that is the word, never rise beyond their perception of celebrity, and ritual fantasising? We saw one little girl, Jacinda, hideously disfigured by Pink Disease, who said it was the greatest moment of her life. She was all of 10 years old, but that’s what you say to the media now when you’re on the fast track to fame and celebrity. Behind her was her awful mother, also pinked out, who said they would remember this all their lives. My kids used to have a word for that: “Double Yugghh...!!” Sometimes they would stick their fingers down their throats. I discouraged that.

There was one real moment, I thought, at the National Shrine in Wellington, the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, a very, very moving place. This fit, handsome, qualified young man, who knows as much as most of the people present about war and weaponry and loss, stepped up, laid a wreath, stepped back. That sort of gesture takes my breath away. It is not simply that he has learned to carry through a formal, ritual function. Neither is it that William of Wales has history built into his genes. It was that he is real, himself – that is what he seems to have inherited from his generation, and which people like Jacinda and her mother will never know.

Meanwhile the pathetic media bleated on about how well or otherwise William was performing on the Celebrity level – and worse, so help me, about whether we should become a republic. Ye gods. This is now the abyss of the media, that we “interview” people randomly encountered in the street about complex questions Plato wrestled with.

We now go to our reporter in Queen Street. “Excuse me, sir, should we become a republic?”

“Huh..? what..? eh..?”

“What do you do for a living, sir, if I may enquire?”

“I’m a bank executive...”

One of the miracles is what this young man has overcome. He seems to have emerged intact from a spectacularly dysfunctional family, back to Henry VIII. Bullies, psychopaths, sadists, nymphomaniacs, simpletons... His mother, a beautiful woman, driven to distraction, separated from her husband and the culture of the Windsors, died violently in a Paris underpass with her current lover.

I don’t know why we have a “royal family”. Does a country need one family that special? We got the Windsors from the Hanovers, from the Stuarts, from the Tudors, from the Plantagenets... In that movie The Queen, at the height of the Diana’s death crisis, the two queens, Elizabeth and her ageing mother, go walking through the garden at Balmoral, and Elizabeth the Queen Dowager says to Elizabeth the Queen, “You go back 1000 years. Remember your vow....”

Well I honour that too. It was a sincere and very solemn and public vow from a remarkable young woman at that time, and I suppose that’s why we still have a royal family. Does NZ have to have one? We could honour all that history and let it go. I would be sad – although we could much easier do it than England could. Scotland and Wales, even Ulster, might feel that way too.

The main argument against a republic, it seems to me, is who would lead it. The USA does not inspire confidence. Neither, I may say, does the imminent race to decide who will be Lord Mayor of the new Auckland Supercity. It’s chilling.

But William did well. He is a hopeful, talented, poised, handsome, thoughtful young man. And may he not be repressed and ruined by the Establishment. He could just be the one who resets the boundaries of monarchy and republicanism, to say nothing of leadership and decency.

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.

The church grinch steals Christmas

... I feel
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come, see the oxen kneel
In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know”,
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Thomas Hardy’s wistful lines. I knew that Christmas morning at the local community church at Snells Beach would be deleterious to my poise and fragile tolerance, so somewhat to the disappointment of my wife and daughter I headed off to 8 am at the Anglican church in Warkworth. Surely that would be a simple, unadorned following of the liturgy which, after all, speaks for itself.

Oh dear, oh dear... I don’t know where the vicar was, but the service was conducted, if that’s the word, by some kind of geriatric clerical comedian who hadn’t actually prepared a damn thing. That in itself is insulting. The congregation was mainly elderly (like me), but what they were experiencing was evidently what they expected – a string of unfunny jokes, some of the familiar carols very badly sung, and some kind of “sermon” which was more an embarrassing quiz on the details of the Lukan story, with mild telling-offs for “not listening”. All this was to the unrelenting accompaniment of small children who had not the remotest awareness of where they were or why, yelling, running, fighting...

I had gone searching for some thoughtful statement of love and incarnation, grace, peace, pardon. It wasn’t to be. Once before, some years back, I had gone to Christmas morning communion at the same church, and that time the vicar at least admitted that he had prepared nothing, and so he told us about his dog. A couple of years ago, Mary and I attended 8 am Christmas Day communion at the Anglican cathedral in Auckland. Old Paul Reeves officiated – and so help me he had prepared nothing. He had to ask the organist what the next hymn was. A major Christian festival, and these blokes don’t even try. Once again I came home, got on the web and found the sermon of Rowan Williams in Canterbury Cathedral, and thus a bit of actual nourishment, some thoughtful and scholarly message from the fact of incarnation.

This morning we were not ten seconds into the service but we were talking about food. The local churches are obsessed with food. They can do nothing without first ensuring their food supply. They have committees on food. Confronted with the mystery of incarnation this morning, this chap began by telling us the food arrangements for the New Year’s Eve barbecue, while various women in the congregation jumped up to correct him. Mary says they’re good people and they mean well.
-------------------------

On National Radio I heard some business luminary commenting lucidly on the economy: “The big driver going forward is the reverse of the one we had to start with.”

Seasonal Seizures

The clergy buffoons at St Matthew-in-the-City in central Auckland put up a large poster showing Joseph and Mary in bed, with a silly offensive caption. Of course it provoked an immediate reaction from all sorts, who then got sprayed with general abuse from the vicar, Glyn Cardy, and his offside, a dim and angry chap called Clay Nelson – people who objected to the poster, they announced, were narrow and humourless, and so on. Well, I am neither narrow nor humourless, but this poster was by any decent standards obnoxious, and it certainly wasn’t funny except to those many who think anything to do with sex must be entertaining.

Someone then obliterated the poster with brown paint. So the buffoons erected a copy of it, while informing us that these things cost $250 a pop, and the replacement got slashed with a knife by an elderly woman.

Thus the church goes about celebrating Advent and Christmas. Inspiring, is it not? Cardy and Nelson, silly gits, are still fighting battles most of us retired from ages ago when we grew up. St Matthew’s has long been a centre for gays and for what some see to be liberal attitudes and all that. So there are always people running around there with chips on both shoulders. A little while back someone started teaching in the Christian gay community that one of the tyrannies under which they suffered was the constraint always to be nice and polite. But Jesus wasn’t always nice...etc. So now we get some pretty angry stuff emerging.

The local Anglican bishop, who should have firmly and without fuss instructed Cardy to remove the poster, instead made some anaemic comment that he didn’t like it. News and publicity of Cardy’s crassness went around the world, and reactions flooded in from Canada to Costa Rica. Yet again we are made to look pathetic – but then, I guess, that is what we are. It’s only one step higher from being boring.

Meanwhile, the miracle of Advent and Christmas is being quietly passed along in other ways altogether, heart to heart, in love and beauty, in justice and peace, in understanding and forgiveness, in silence and stillness.

Atheism on the omnibus

Only one aspect of the “God probably doesn’t exist” promotion on buses actually bothers me. It is that Garth George might feel called to leap to the defence of God. Or worse, “Bishop” Brian Tamaki. (For those who don’t know these gents, Garth George is our resident Christian bigot who writes a weekly column in the NZ Herald; and Brian is a self-appointed and anointed bishop who requires his followers to support him even when he’s wrong, which is just as well because it is usually the case.)

The news since is that the local atheists who asked for $10,000 to put their slogan on buses have received a flood of donations. They can now do more buses than they thought, and have other slogans.

C’mon, punish the church, write a cheque... Get right up the nostrils of those sanctimonious hypocritical Christians. It’s also a little sad that their slogan is unoriginal, as though there were no creativity whatever among the godless. They copied it from the London buses.

Well, I saw the leading atheist on TV the other night, and he’s quite a decent bloke who needs to cheer up a bit. He didn’t seem fazed by the observation that he’s actually having a bob each way – “God probably doesn’t exist...” He thought that it was time the rationalists, humanists, agnostics, atheists, got their say, as though the boring monochrome old NZ Rationalist Society has not existed here for about a century already.

How come these atheists think they have some monopoly on reason and rational thought?

I agree with them, however. The god they say doesn’t exist, in my understanding isn’t there at all. Never was. Neither is the god of Garth George, sad old bloke. Garth’s god turns out to be spookily like Garth. I have my doubts too about the gods of Presbyterianism, Anglicanism and Catholicism – although they are so obscured by the churches that it’s difficult to be sure. I suspect that in biblical terms they’re idols.

Faith for me has simplified with age. About all that is meaningful to me is the picture of God that Jesus offers, Jesus the Jew, the person the New Testament calls the “icon of the invisible God”. So it’s just as well perhaps that I don’t have to preach sermons now. Faith and prayer for me are best expressed in silence and stillness, and simplicity. Certainly not chatter or dispute.

Fleeing the football

Today they announced that seats at Eden Park for the 2011 Rugby World Cup final start at $350, and the premium seats will be $1250. Apparently they are not making this up. About 25,000 seats total will be available for locals, by ballot. The other 35,000 seats in the park are all allocated to the International Rugby Board for sale around the world and for giving to their mates.

There are zealots here who will tell you instantly, day by day, if you ask, how many days are left before the NZ 2011 RWC begins. Don’t ask. We saw a clock in Christchurch Cathedral Square which exists for exactly that. Presumably it is going to remain there in the Square, counting down the days, hours and minutes, until the glorious apotheosis of Rugby Heaven.

Major public works are scheduled to be completed for the RWC, as though that were their entire raison d’être. A plan to integrate all fares and tickets on bus, rail and boat transport services in Greater Auckland must be ready, they demand, for the RWC. Presumably were it not for that incentive it would never get done.

It daily becomes clearer to me that the 2011 Rugby World Cup is something to be strenuously avoided. The game is of no interest to me whatever. Should it be?

Someone tried to tell me that, up here at Algies Bay, the tranquil waters of normal life will remain unruffled. Indeed he said, Algies Bay might be just the place to be. Like smoke it will. The highway from here to Auckland will be unpassable. TV, radio and the newspapers will be obsessed. Global warming will be speeded up. Thousands of drunken British rugby yobboes will descend on the land and spread their foulness everywhere. The police will be completely occupied elsewhere and burglaries and rapes will thrive.

That most execrable and objectionable of all the manifestations of Kiwi “culture”, the haka, will drive us all nuts.

So I am plotting to escape. Somewhere far away. Mary is not so sure.

Rodney Writes

The Rodney public libraries system has what it calls its annual Rodney Writes Writing Competition. I knew nothing about this until, behold, on the counter at our freshly renovated Mahurangi East branch, free copies of the 2009 prizewinning entries in a quite handsome little booklet.

Now one’s whole inclination is to lend solid support to our local efforts, both in writing and in publishing. It is really amazing after all that we actually have such a light and airy and helpful library branch at Snells Beach (Mahurangi East), with all the on line systems and pleasant staff. But, in fact, there are a few questions about the Rodney Writes Writing Competition.

The three judges are named, one for each of the three categories – Premier, Novice, and Young Writer – but the names mean nothing to me. Why not introduce the judges? I am sure they are excellent people, and probably well known among the potters and vignerons and pickle-makers at the Matakana Farmers Market. I needed to know something about their fitness to judge. And there are no judges’ comments. What did they think of the standard of entries? Why did they like the winning entries, because I didn’t.

This year participants had the choice to “write on any topic of your choice. You may write a short story up to 2,500 words about anything you wish! Write to inspire, provoke, excite or entice your reader. We encourage you to be creative in your thinking.” Well, in those terms it was something of a disaster, it seems to me. That was far too wide a brief. Why not ask for a short story, or a brief biography, or something that required some research? So much NZ writing, journalism, these days, somehow defaults to what happened to me one day and how I felt about it, sometimes artfully but not successfully disguised. Michelle Hewitson and Garth George in the NZ Herald are prime examples.

But enough about being critical…! My first encounter with public libraries was at the stylish brick Remuera Public Library in Auckland, which is there to this day. Behind it, and all of a piece, is the Remuera Library Hall – where I once, to my everlasting shame, featured in a Meadowbank Primary School concert as a Nigger Minstrel, my face blackened, and singing “Massa’s in de cold, cold grave”. I don’t recall ever giving my permission for any of that.

However, back in the library, as a barefoot 9-year-old, I discovered Arthur Ransome. Remuera Public Library had a Children’s Section, in which children who dared to appear were subject to constant surveillance, and required to Make No Noise. I knew how to become invisible – a skill of increasing value in subsequent years – and could hide myself there, on the floor at the back, and read Swallows And Amazons and many other amazing books.

Libraries are what liberated me. They had ideas and experiences which were not described, authorised or explained by my seniors. That is always why libraries matter. Of course, there were also librarians. I still fight with them sometimes. But, clearly, there is a new generation, dedicated to facilitating things for people. We are well served at Mahurangi East.

Logic rules...!

Long ago, in the never-to-return days, when you could enrol as a fresher at Auckland University without conniptions about whether this was the most advantageous career path, whether these were the correct subjects and courses to take me through to a distinguished and lucrative professional life among all the right people – back then before anyone invented vocational counsellors or advisors... counselling indeed was a curious science still in its infancy and scarcely heard of... (pause for breath...) Long ago, I say, before gaining entrance to popular courses and subjects required A-passes and successful interviews with deans, to say nothing of a guaranteed supply of parental money for fees, books, trips, living expenses... Way back then, a lot of us used to sign on for Philosophy I. It promised to be interesting, and it was. It had not been taught in secondary school – and in my experience at that time at Auckland Grammar, teachers pretty well incapable of teaching Maths or English, History or Chemistry, would have been incapable of Philosophy. Also, as an added attraction, Philosophy seemed to have nothing to do with anything practical.

So it was, back then, we encountered Professors W Anderson and W Anschutz, and Mr K B Pflaum. I did not know at the time that Pflaum in German means plum. All I remember about Pflaum in that first year is that he was very keen on Ludwig Wittgenstein, who then, and to this day, remains impenetrable and incomprehensible. In subsequent years Pflaum seemed reasonably lucid on Locke, Berkeley and Hume, as also about Descartes, Spinoza and Leibnitz. I didn’t take any of Anschutz’s courses.

The department also included Father Forsman, whom we rarely saw. He was the parish priest at Parnell, and he taught Aquinas. I heard him say at a departmental party that so long as he had his beloved Aquinas and a full wine cellar, he was content.

Now, pay attention... A lot of us gathered twice a week in Room 19 for Anderson’s lectures on Logic. This turned out to be surprisingly fascinating to me. Anderson in some ways was a silly old goat. At least twice he arrived for the lecture, academic gown and all, staggered on to the rostrum, saw that the side door had been left open and went to shut it, but instead left by the side door and we didn’t see him again until next time.

Logic meant Socratic Logic. Syllogisms, major and minor premises and conclusions, fallacies, undistributed middle... I imagine no one teaches it anywhere now. Whatever was the textbook we used – I still have it somewhere on my shelves – it should be required study for politicians and all media personnel. We learned what doesn’t follow. It does not follow that because Hone Harawira supports his iwi, he is a racist. We learned about ad hominem and non sequitur. We filled ourselves with syllogistic logic. Our exams were a joyous process of spotting fallacies and constructing elegant syllogisms.

By the time we had passed Philosophy I we were really sensitive about these things in the circumstances of public discourse. To this day it profoundly frustrates me that spokespersons and media personalities seem unable to see that some charge is logically stupid. The inability or refusal to see this seems to be behind most of the current inexcusable media beatups on issues and personalities. Old Willie Anderson actually alerted and sensitised us to What Doesn’t Follow, and it stuck. It’s this kind of thing that makes some politicians froth at the mouth about ivory tower academia. If you are not from the outset sold out to compromise and half-truths, you are uncomfortable to those who assume that “Paris is worth a mass”.

Democracy...?

Some clown is now organising a Citizens Initiated Referendum which would attempt to require the government to enact anything decided in a Citizens Initiated Referendum. These people are hugely frustrated because they think if a “majority” has spoken in a CIR (eg, recently, to satisfy the apparent need of some parents to hit children) the government then ought to have no option but to implement it. This is what these odd people call democracy, and they are frothing at the mouth because the government seems normally to ignore the results of CIRs. I never cease to give thanks that they do.

Heaven help us all when naive idealists ever get their way. New Zealand has a representative democracy. We have only to look to Fiji to see what happens if this ever gets set to one side. Representative democracy means that we regularly and in an orderly manner elect people to decide important matters on our behalf. If we don’t like the people elected, we seek to change our representatives at the right time. If we want them to decide things our way, we lobby them and try to persuade them. This system has very real weaknesses, and it is generally inadvisable to listen in on parliament and their behaviour – but some good work still gets done, it seems to me.

I would be inclined to cancel the right to CIRs, as the waste of time and money they inevitably are, and urge the government to pay more careful attention to serious petitions. If outfits such as Family First want the government to do something, they should persuade by the force of their argument and data. It seems to me so utterly typical of right-wing pharisees that they instead seek to legislate and coerce.

Winston Churchill once said something very clever but wise about how no one in their right mind would support representative democracy, until they have surveyed the alternatives. (My own faith in representative democracy is regularly shaken when it generates someone like Rodney Hide – whereas Hone Harawira seems to me a national treasure.)

Miscellany

Small things occur to me from time to time. I had not really noticed or used the word miscellany, until I read about the English 19th century lord, Marmaduke or somesuch, who maintained an entire subsidiary and substantial family of children born to his various mistresses – and that they were referred to in polite society as Marmaduke’s Miscellany.

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A NZ Herald reporter, telling us about the trashing of a $4 million Queenstown mansion by its tenants, writes that “the secluded property... overlooks Coronet Peak”. Yeah, right...

It reminded me of the deliberate gaffe in the song Wunderbar, in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate:

Gazing down on the Jungfrau
From our secret chalet for two,
Let us drink, Liebchen mein, in the moonlight benign,
To the joy of our dream come true.

Given that the Jungfrau is the highest mountain in Europe, it must be some chalet.

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Mary and I took the TransAlpine train from Christchurch to Greymouth, stayed there for a couple of days, and then returned the same way. It’s a grand journey, just over 4 hours each way through the plains and the alps. But what a third-rate typical Kiwi tourism disaster! The train has a buffet arrangement with the usual cardboard food items, and booze, but no dining facilities. I was impressed with the number of people who, faced with a few hours of sitting still and other forms of tedium, as it seemed to them, filled up the space with eating and drinking. Some people on the end of a meat pie are not a pretty sight.

The piped-in commentary along the way is “Kiwi Basic” – a series of silly stories and jokes read from a script. Much of this vernacular is clearly incomprehensible to American and Asian travellers. You get the same lame and tame jokes on the way back. No serious facts lucidly presented about the amazing geology of the landscape, or the forests or the flora and fauna. We were given some comment on the impressive engineering of the Otira Tunnel, but even that could have been done much better.

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I am ploughing through Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize winning novel, Wolf Hall – a story of Thomas Cromwell. It’s 650 pages of florid dialogue, most of it singularly unlikely. And the writer has such an irritating style... The pronoun “he”, it finally dawns on you, is always Thomas Cromwell, and yet the story really contrives to be told in the 1st person. Both Cromwell and Wolsey, whom I always regarded as more or less monsters, are depicted as kindly, avuncular religious devotees, passionately concerned for truth and the law, who just happen also to arrange disappearances, torture and executions. Henry is unconvincing. Cranmer... You ask yourself, if such people were fluent in several languages as well as Latin and Greek, to say nothing of mathematics, how come they lived like cavemen among each other? The greed, the paranoia, the cruelty. The women... And how come that man Cranmer ever got to produce the sublime Book of Common Prayer?

You know that when one of those Tudor blokes, habitually wading through mud and blood, disease and danger, and vast social inequities, actually complains about the smell of the privies that day, they must have been apocalyptically bad.

The path to Whisper Cove

Cynicism flowed a few years back when the Mahurangi locals learned of the proposed residential development at the north end of Snells Beach. It was to be large and very expensive. It was to be called Whisper Cove... Whisper Cove...? The name bore no relation to anything except money and marketing. Nobody welcomed the prospect of a surge of newcomers who would prefer to live their prawns, pinot noir and barbecue lifestyle safely apart from the rest of us, among their own kind. Part One of the development proceeded, with much landscaping and drainage, roading and planting, and then about 36 dwellings, jammed up together, all a monotone grey, each peering around the next for a share of the view of Kawau Bay. Nobody except the locals, certainly not the developers, ever mentioned that “Whisper Cove” like the rest of Snells is mainly tidal mudflat for half of each day. The promotional photos never showed the tide, just the distance and the sunsets. Perhaps that is the connotation of “whisper” in this instance.

Then came the Recession. Everything stopped, except the tides. Nobody wanted to buy the units that were by now built and furnished, and were standing there like Shelley’s dry ruins in the desert. The developers went rapidly broke. Local contractors were left unpaid. Weeds began to grow through the flaxes and hebes. The ducks, who had wisely never believed in any of it anyway, continued to thrive. The rabbits came back. One or two forlorn human occupants do appear on the decks from time to time, like survivors of some nuclear disaster, but most of the units are clearly unsold. Nothing ever seems to happen there. The developers owe $36 million to Westpac and $17 million to other investors; some $2 million is owed to contractors, and it seems unlikely they will get a cent. The units were originally offered for sale for between $850,000 and $2.6 million each.

If you go down to the seafront at the other end of Snells Beach there is a convenient car park and the start of a walkway which follows along the shore all the way to Whisper Cove. There and back is about a 40 minutes walk, and we do it frequently because that’s what Senior Cits do. I take a walking stick, not so much because I need it, as because I can use it if necessary to intimidate dogs. Dog owners with their intense attitudes and little plastic bags, and scant regard for the seasonal rules about letting your dog off its leash, abound, so to speak. They form a loose community of their own and stop across the path to swap canine veterinary information. What dogs do is excrete, it seems to me. The owners seem to find some aesthetic value in this.

We walk to the end, at Whisper Cove. There is a wooden fence, which clearly delineates private property – but you can sit on the fence for a while, contemplate Kawau and the bay, and the desolation that is Whisper Cove -- and draw strength for the return. It’s such a good routine. This morning I thought also about another sector of our district altogether, Omaha. Omaha differs in that it has had huge commercial success. Its upmarket homes are a hymn of praise to all these people think matters. But Omaha is built on a huge sand dune. A local builder told me there’s nothing there, mate. Come the Perfect Storm, it all goes. Come the perfect tsunami, Whisper Cove goes too. So in that they are brothers.

Personal Racism

We were expressing perhaps somewhat smug satisfaction recently that our offspring appear to be free of racial hang-ups. We had talked with old friends who, like us, have lived for some years in the South Pacific, and their kids too all seem to have linked up with, and fallen in love with, people of other races and cultures, and live around the world. Our children effortlessly played and went to school with Fijians, Indians, Samoans – indeed as part of a cultural minority where they were. They enjoyed the differences. They simply assumed the need to make personal adjustments. A safe monocultural club, society, suburb or street seems to them simply anaemic.

Former US President Jimmy Carter has just said bluntly that much of the antagonism to President Obama’s health reforms is plain racism. So many of Obama’s critics, he said, actually object to any Afro-American being President of the United States – that’s what bothers them. One of the many tragedies of our time, it seems to me, is the abyss that seems to run down the middle of US history, society and politics, including some of its awful versions of Christianity, separating people God actually made of one blood.

And from the major to the utterly minor: The NZ Geographic Board has ruled that NZ’s small city of W(h)anganui should be spelt in the Maori way, with the “h”, since it is a Maori word and might as well be correct. This led the somewhat manic mayor of W(h)anganui, Michael Laws, to publicly label the NZ Geographic Board as racist. What Mr Laws meant was that they had presumed to make a decision which favoured Maori. And that is precisely the kind of decision that seems to have power to keep many non-Maori New Zealanders awake at night. Once upon a time in NZ white folks made decisions, and the natives simply had to listen and obey.

Clifford Longley, writing in The Tablet about regulation of the media, says that Fox News is: “the blatant and unashamed example of what happens when broadcasting is insuffiently regulated. Some of the people who appear regularly on it in the United States, not just guests but anchor persons and presenters, are rabid, raucous, racist, partisan and bigoted, happy to stir up any kind of rabble-rousing nonsense such as the idea that Barack Obama isn’t really American but Kenyan and isn’t really Christian but Muslim”. And to be sure, on the few occasions I have dialled up Fox News on Sky it has seemed to me beyond belief.

I guess the roots of racism are about as complex as humanity. Many PhDs have been researched therein. But surely racism is a choice, for adults, even if millions of racists have never thought of it as such or would be incapable of understanding the implications of choice. You can choose to be otherwise. Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine expresses gratitude to Jimmy Carter for having so publicly named and nailed the evil disease, because that is what we should always do. Racism is unnecessary and destructive, immoral, blasphemous, even in its so-called benign forms.

Antisemitism is ignorant and always intolerable. Racism based on colour, equally. Religious bigotry, and the now too familiar emanations from Islam and some sections of so-called Christianity... Social discriminations of all types... to realise how embedded this is in English society read the novels of Jane Austen, the writhings of many of her early 19th century characters to be sure they are inhabiting their correct social stratum (or that of their betters) and that others remain where God in his infinite wisdom has placed them.

The relentless paranoia of much of right-wing politics... I have lived long enough to cease trying to find excuses for these things. Our friends seem all now to have seen the new movie, The Young Victoria, which portrays Lord Melbourne as a kindly avuncular guy, precisely the kind of bloke a teenage queen might want as her Prime Minister. He was in fact a rancid and promiscuous old bigot who stubbornly resisted social change, and maintained the primacy of privilege. Just a little bit of that does emerge slightly in the movie.

I suppose I am suggesting that one of the principle tasks of maturity in today’s world is to be personally free of racism and of all tribal attitudes which tend that way. I am beyond making global claims, but I would think that this would be one of the best contributions anyone could make towards world peace. Simply refuse to have adversaries or enemies, anywhere. Don’t permit them that power over you. And if they are people who are seeking to eliminate you, well... it’s tough, sure, but still don’t make them enemies. Jesus was right about that.

No dogs on Aitutaki

There are no dogs on Aitutaki. It’s worth a mention, because the dogs on the parent island, Rarotonga, are endemic, mangy, flea-ridden, sullen, starved and generally obnoxious. They bark and howl at night, they range and prowl, they foul the ground. But on Aitutaki they are mercifully conspicuous by their absence. No one seems to know why there are no dogs. Some chief long ago banned them, perhaps. The island is therefore free also of dog owners.

Back on Rarotonga however, some woman called Esther Honey made provision for a charity veterinary service where dogs hit by vehicles can have a leg amputated. There are notices outside this clinic appealing for money to help the dogs.

Aitutaki is a long way from where you ever are normally. 50 minutes by Air Rarotonga, from Rarotonga. You fly over the featureless Pacific, and then, suddenly, below, there is this breathtakingly exquisite atoll with its huge turquoise lagoon, its islets and coconut palms. Some parts of the Cook Islands are even more remote – Penrhyn, Pukapuka, Palmerston...

We stayed at a resort with nice clean villas – but the dining area and bar were another story. The owner had begun with romantic visions of guests dining on the beach, which is always a bad idea. So the tables and chairs are all on the sand, and nothing is actually level or stable, or free of insects, birds, vermin and other people. The owner herself sits at the bar and gets steadily less coherent as the day goes by. You share your food with predatory minah birds, cats and crabs. You also share it with the resident deity (pictured), whose name is Tangaroa, and who needs some pants.

Downtown on Aitutaki things heat up somewhat. The Blue Nun Cafe is straight out of Graham Greene. It’s right on the waterfront, and you can imagine pirates and yachties lurching ashore to grab a beer and a woman. Any vestige of sophistication has long ago been abandoned. Minimalism rules. A Fijian woman with about 30% metabolism staffs the cafe during the day. Of course we asked her why she came to the Cook Islands. She said, for the job. Well, it’s fairly low on the ladder of human advancement, one might think. Perhaps it’s a stark commentary on the regime of silly Bainimarama, back in Fiji. This manager of the Blue Nun Cafe takes 20 minutes to make a black coffee. But we have it on good authority that, at night, the Blue Nun Cafe really rocks.

One does get weary of tourist rip-offs. The Rarotonga departure tax at the airport is $55 per person, to be paid in cash. If you want to drive a motor vehicle you have to line up at the central police station in two queues, one to pay $20 for a one-year licence (never mind that you want it for only 2 weeks), and the other to have your photo taken. All of this can occupy an hour or two. Most restaurants are seriously overpriced. The toilets anywhere else but at the major resorts range from marginal to sordid. And don’t buy black pearls at the Avarua Saturday market if you want to be sure of their provenance. It’s better not to ask about the government or about corruption or competence... Every time you drive around Rarotonga you pass the sad, derelict Hilton hotel complex, never finished, bankrupt, and it just about bankrupted the country.

But a day out on the lagoon in sunny weather is a very redemptive thing. We visited three islands on the reef – Maina, Moturakau, Tapuaetai.