The threat of care

If we come to needing care or special protection, then it will be best if we have already found out how to make friends with the inevitable in life and to accept what is necessary with grace and gratitude.  That is in considerable measure a spiritual matter, it seems to me.  It is something to be faced and attended to long before, through the years of strength, activity and maturity.  Part of the homework is learning how to face reality and make friends with the truth. 

Now we have the gleaming spires of the modern Retirement Village.  It looms up before us in our senior years as a serious option.  What is new about this phenomenon, I think, is that we are invited to make decisions about moving to a retirement village before we actually, physically or mentally, have need of it.  It is seen as prophylactic.  And so one silly superfluous wisdom wafting around these days is:  Don’t leave it too late!  You must consider your prospects in wealth and health – not be blinded by how content you are feeling right now.  You must ponder all the perils ahead in life.  It is an attempt to ward off adversity, everything nasty such as dependence, loneliness, frailty, becoming pathetic. 

So now we are pestered with daily advertisements and glossy brochures depicting all manner of happy senior people, usually well groomed, poncing about in pleasant surroundings, bowling, laughing, lounging and chatting, sometimes disporting themselves embarrassingly in some swimming pool, sometimes being led in wretched geriatric calisthenics…  There are always beautiful flowers nearby.   I notice that what these shining handouts do not show us are the inmates in real care, the ones not smiling, the ones sliding into dementia, needing to be fed, the ones with collapsed spines from osteoporosis and falling.

The modern retirement village has a hierarchy of living arrangements.  It categorises and labellises life.  You may have an independent villa or apartment.  That means that you will live in your own self-contained space with largely your own décor and stuff, but have access to communal facilities such as a dining and social area, and perhaps a gym, a hair salon, a bowling green and suchlike.  It is all very contemporary and jolly, and safe.  You will have a call button with which to summon help if you fall… in practice it turns out to be not so simple.

The operative word in these places is Happy.  They live with style.  They have a weekly Happy Hour.  One retirement village at Howick has a video I watched with mounting horror, which shows all the geriatrics prancing around joyously to pop music.  It was false to the point of terminal embarrassment.  This dreadful video was intended to attract me to their village. 

Or you may have some closer care arrangement, depending on your needs, including professional dementia care.  Withal, you have their guarantee of watchfulness over your welfare, on-call status of the management and staff, protection of your asset… 

OK.   But what you buy in most of these places is not ownership of your villa or apartment.  Ownership remains with whoever owns the business.  You buy something called a Licence to Occupy.  It is pretty expensive.  It more or less equates to rent in advance.  You must also pay ongoing fees to cover management and costs.  These fees only increase over time.  And eventually you or your beneficiaries get back some substantially reduced sum after various factors including what management had to do to bring your/their unit up to date again. 

Not all retirement villages have this arrangement.  I believe there are some where you actually do buy and own your living premises.  Lawyers are required to make sure their clients understand this difference.

These places offer an illusion of safety and security – but my impression is that anyone can drive into and through our nearby villages, any time, without question, as I have frequently done.  You are no safer living there than where I am living, and hope to remain.  And as for on-call response if you fall… well, anecdotal evidence suggests you are really on your own.  It would be wise to have your fall during weekday working hours – otherwise you may be calling your own ambulance.  Prompt, caring, professional response simply didn’t happen in reports I have heard.

They have no sound of children playing in these places, or adolescents occasionally hooning around.  Everyone there is elderly, or getting that way.  How boring is that!  I have heard that they can have fights at their Happy Hour –that would be some excitement perhaps.  Consuming topics at Happy Hour include the weather, the temperature, their little gardens, the village management, and everyone’s aches and pains.

The BBC series Waiting for God dealt definitively and dramatically with some of these issues.  Someone had seen the capitulation and horror of it all and put it into drama.  Waiting For God dealt often sensitively and always hilariously with two retired people who had actually plenty of life – which their new surroundings in a retirement home simply sought to deny, repress, control and quell. 

And there is the classic British movie, Mrs Caldicott’s Cabbage War, a delicious account of rebellion in a retirement home.  Somewhere in that movie Mrs Caldicott describes the retirement home as “this overpriced knacker’s yard”. 

My own impression of one of the local retirement villages is its similarity to photos of Siberian gulags.  It has rows of grey villas, relieved only by pretty flowers they may have planted out the front.  The village has rules, a list of which is supplied to residents when they take occupancy.  The rules restrict what you can do to alter your villa or apartment and your life there – changing decor, installing things, having pets, making modifications… 

However, it suits people who are frightened of danger, ageing and dependence.  For me.. well, if I became obliged to become an inmate of one of these places, I hope I would do so with grace and dignity and a minimum of fuss.  But I devoutly hope not.  It would certainly hasten my demise. 

Slumbering on…

Parliament's Speaker David Carter announced the other day that the traditional prayer he uses to open daily sittings of Parliament will remain as is, with its Christian references.  Here is the prayer:

Almighty God, humbly acknowledging our need for Thy guidance in all things, and laying aside all private and personal interests, we beseech Thee to grant that we may conduct the affairs of this House and of our country to the glory of Thy holy name, the maintenance of true religion and justice, the honour of the Queen, and the public welfare, peace, and tranquillity of New Zealand, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Just about everything is wrong with this prayer, and the problem is, where to start? 

·         It is addressed to God.  It assumes that God knows, cares, or bears any special regard for the NZ House of Representatives, beyond what he/she bears for the Taneatua Bowling Club.  It assumes that the cursory recitation of this prayer because it is required in Standing Orders somehow gets God’s attention.

·         It professes humility.  That is not normally my impression of this assembly.

·         It claims that the members want guidance, that they are keen to lay aside all private and personal interests, that they seek to debate and decide things to the glory of God, etc – some or all of which is difficult to believe.

·         It assumes that “the maintenance of true religion” is the business of the NZ Parliament.  It decidedly is not.

·         It assumes that they are all professing Christians, or that if they are not they ought to be – whereas some are of other faiths and some are of none.  This is offensive and dishonest.

The Parliamentary prayer has quite a history, I find.  It was realised as far back as the 1850s that it would always be a bit of a minefield.  They solved the problem at one time by bringing in some hapless cleric to say the prayer, as it were vicariously, each time Parliament convened – that seemed to some to absolve them from any direct responsibility.  The current prayer, read each day by Mr Speaker, has been around for quite a while now.  I presume it was put together by some Anglican prelate and was thought unexceptional at the time.  It assumed that this is a “Christian country”, something some people still believe. 

Speaker Carter recently followed a very low-key consultation process with MPs and offered an alternative prayer which removed religious references to "Almighty God" and "Jesus Christ our Lord" from the older version.  But what he proposed turned out to be ten times worse.

His alternative prayer included lines in Maori - E te Atua Kaha Rawa - that translates to "Almighty God," something Assistant Speaker Trevor Mallard described as "almost dishonest."  Carter proposed to farewell the deity in English and welcome the deity back in Maori.

As well as that, the Speaker would have included a daily acknowledgment to the local tribe Te Ati Awa.  To most of New Zealand that simply beggars belief.  It is arrogant, unnecessary and embarrassing.

This is the alternative prayer Speaker Carter suggested:

E te Atua Kaha Rawa (Tr: Almighty God) Ka whakamanawa taua hunga katoa kua riro atu i mua i a tatau - moe mai okioki (We honour those who have gone before us - rest, slumber on).  We recognise the mana whenua, Te Ati Aawa, the kaitiaki of this region, Te Upoko-o-Te-Ika-a-Maui.  We acknowledge the need for guidance and lay aside all private and personal interests so that we may conduct the affairs of this House for the maintenance of justice, the honour of the Queen and the public welfare, peace, and tranquillity of New Zealand.  Amine (Amen).

I love the slumber on bit.  They might as well.  There will be little enough to edify them if they sit up and pay attention. 

Mr Carter refused to entertain any debate on further options; it would be either the current prayer or the alternative he proposed.  He refused any public comment also, clearly seeing it as a matter only for MPs.  Then he issued a statement saying: "A substantial majority of members expressed a view to retain the existing prayer. I intend to respect that wish."

Is all this really a measure of the extent to which the politicians are out of touch with reasonable sense and sensibility, with intellectual honesty, indeed with decency?  They are way out of their depth.

But they do need some serious and mindful observance with which to begin each parliamentary day.  So why not keep it simple and unexceptionable.  When the Speaker enters, all stand.  Let there then be one minute, and I mean 60 seconds timed by the Clerk of the House with a bell, of silence and stillness.  No one should enter or leave the house during that time.  That is all.  It may be seen by all as a moment of pausing and remembering.  It may be seen by some as a prayerful time.  That is all they need to do.

Man overboard

 

We had a report that the cruise ship Sun Princess, en route Auckland to Sydney, arrived one passenger short.  An 84-year-old man had fallen overboard.  I don’t know how you search one of those immense ships for a missing passenger – but this seems to have become academic anyway because they found CTV footage showing him falling into the sea.  Four hours earlier, at 3 am, his fellow travellers had reported him missing.

At this point we could have some black jokes about the increasing intrusiveness of spy cameras in our lives at every point.  Presumably there are cameras aimed along the sides of the ship, as well as along all the decks and companionways, restaurants, swimming pools, casinos, atriums, lifts…  Presumably someone on board is monitoring these things.   That’s a job I could apply for.

No one will ever know for sure whether he fell, or jumped.  The captain turned the ship to do a search, without result.  Heaven knows what that cost Princess Cruises.  Maybe he fell… and there has been some discussion about the height of rails on the many decks of these ships.  My wife and I recently spent two weeks cruising on Emerald Princess, around the Baltic.  The rails seemed fine to me. 

But it did occur to me that a depressed and lonely octogenarian might well decide to save everyone a lot of bother and expense, if he felt his life was substantially over, by getting a leg over the rail late at night.  It makes sense.  From one of those upper decks the fall to the water would be probably lethal. 

This is not something I would do.  It is something I could understand. 

But it would have been considerate to leave a note in his stateroom:

I’ve gone over the side.  It seemed best.  Love to all.  (PS:  Port side… although, as Lady Bracknell might have said, the side is immaterial.)

That should do it.  Then it’s tidy and considerate.  And it’s a lot less messy than all the conspiracy and drama accompanying elected suicide these days, expensive clinics and expensive drugs and excruciating goodbyes. 

Maybe this 84-year-old got plastered in one of the many bars, and simply fell off the deck.  But I doubt it.  I suspect he had a plan… and perhaps being rocked in the cradle of the deep seemed OK.


Later (2.12.2014)...  This morning early, in clear and still air, from our lounge, I watched a huge cruise ship steaming past the Tawharanui - Kawau gap, en route to Auckand.  On the web, on my iPad, I found it was the Dawn Princess, sister ship of the Emerald Princess on which we cruised the Baltic.  Dawn Princess was due to berth in Auckland two hours later at 0915.  I could even access her ship's web-cam, and see the way ahead.  There seemed to be no one falling off the decks...


I wondered whether, as we had steamed into Stockholm or Tallinn, Oslo or Gothenburg, some elderly gent had watched from afar and had similar thoughts. 

 

 

 

 

Hi, Honey…!

I hope every bloke who works in an office, store, military unit, factory, transport, walked in this morning and greeted each female cheerfully, perhaps even with a hug:

“Good morning, Sweetie / Honey…!”

Of course it would be over the top, unnecessary, in many cases inappropriate because the mood was otherwise.  But it would make the point – the complaint against Roger Sutton, CEO of the Christchurch Earthquake Recovery Authority, and the solemn silly sanctimonious response to it, are plain bloody humbug. 

Most people who have a life know that Roger Sutton, who came to this job at a pretty desperate moment in the life of Christchurch City, has been a light and a leader.  He was already deeply involved as CEO of Orion, tending all the electricity reticulation.  To take over the Cera job he accepted a substantial drop in salary.  He brought style and efficiency, and manifest care for people.

I don’t know Roger Sutton.  I know his parents.  We were fellow parishioners for a while at St Luke’s Church, Remuera.  St Luke’s is Presbyterian, but the Suttons were Anglican.  We all got on fine, we never thought we wouldn’t… and it indicates that the Suttons are not easily pigeonholed or categorised.  Roger’s mother was at university with me and our lot, long ago.  We were devout, and we assumed that liberal attitudes were the intelligent way ahead. 

Neither do I know his complainant.  Let me see… Is she perhaps about 50… divorced, maybe, no longer with some bloke who decided he couldn’t face the rest of his life this way…?  Does she wear a black suit to work, relieved slightly by a chiffon scarf in mute tones to hide her increasingly elderly neck?   Yes, I am being rancid and petty here, but I am confident Dante would reserve a place in one of the circles of hell for some (by no means all) of these complainants.  I imagine Roger’s complainant as a section leader in the organisation, and she quite enjoys being formidable.  Her nightmares are her own regular performance reviews, when she is vulnerable, but which so far she has managed to survive. 

She has an issue with any man who is in authority over her, who perhaps turned down her recommendations, or who treated her flirtations lightly, or who seems to be happy with his own life and love and family.   Any of this is neurotic, and dangerous for males. 

It was wonderful to see Roger Sutton’s wife, Jo Malcolm, step up in high indignation to point out the obvious about her man.  She loves him.  He is OK. 

It's been hideous. He is a really good man. Why his hugs and jokes have been misinterpreted, I have no idea. He's a touchy-feely person.

Sutton could be silly, she said.

That's what I love about him and he forgot he is the leader of the public service and he's too informal, he's too relaxed. That's who he is, and that what makes him who is and why the Cera staff love him – the majority of them do – and I think it's really sad for Christchurch.

The disastrous still-developing complaints culture needs urgently to review itself.  It is now increasingly ruled by juvenilism and humbug.  This is sad, partly because there are still serious instances where women and men are bullied, vilified and oppressed, in the workplace and elsewhere.   Our ability to respond to these things should not be hampered by the manifest time-wasting triviality of the pursuance of Roger Sutton by some sad woman.

Verity's constipation

I have a guilty secret.  It's not Geordie Shore. It's not peeing in the shower. It's not wanting just "a milky coffee", not a triple mocha frappa rubber dubber cappuccino.  It's that when I stand in a bar, I find the guy outside smoking sexy.  I don't want to. I actively try not to. And frankly I wish it didn't happen. Not in the least because I end up internally wrestling with this while I'm trying to impress said sexy person. Which normally means I end up looking constipated.

No, I did not write this mindless, tasteless claptrap passing as journalism.  It is written in the NZ Herald (18.10.14) by Verity Johnson under the title: Rebels with a cough - why I find smokers strangely sexy. 

By my count, the first person singular pronoun occurs nine times up to, appropriately, constipation. 

The NZ Herald editors seem to admire writers who interview themselves.  Michelle Hewitson is another.  The culprits include men.   We seem to have a culture in which Ego is best, and with it goes the corollary, the assumption that what happened to me, or to my teenage kids, or what my day was like, or how I am feeling about something, or what food I would die for (or from, hopefully), is an interesting or even informative “read”.   Once upon a time when I was a junior journalist on the late Auckland Star we called it “interviewing your typewriter”. 

The Herald does have some competent and edifying writers, among them Brian Gaynor and Fran O’Sullivan.  Sir Robert Jones is good for a laugh and usually some sense.  There are others.  But surely the Herald can do without the excesses and indulgences of the women’s magazine scene, the fixation on bodily processes and food.  If Verity Johnson can’t stir herself to some real research on issues that matter, she should make way for journalism.

Occupy Omaha

Omaha is a beach community not far from here.  It is mainly on a sandspit, the houses in brave defiance of the biblical warning about the man who built his house on the sand.  A medium tsunami would wipe them out.  Nevertheless, a fair proportion of the Omaha houses are the upmarket summer retreats of Auckland’s wealthier lifestylers.  One of these is NZ’s Prime Minister, John Key.

Omaha is an extraordinary sight in places – house after house behind high grey security walls, dutifully equipped with built-in barbecues, pools, indoor-outdoor flow, pebbled surrounds, yuccas and pampas grass.  Each house says Keep Out, privacy, privileged only.  These people employ professional day and night surveillance of their assets at Omaha, video cameras and all, 24/7. 

You can sight some of the inhabitants on sunny summer Saturdays when they venture out to the Matakana market.  Women in their casual designer label frocks accompanied, often as not, by their indulged bored and sullen 14-year-old daughters named Samantha or Madison.

Behind the sandspit is a large lagoon, a golf club, a state-of-the-art boat ramp.  Not going there often, I don’t know much about it.  It’s altogether too depressing.

Suddenly there appears a delightful little novel set in Omaha.  Cathie Koa Dunsford: Occupy Omaha (Global Dialogues Press, 2014).  Our local rag, the Rodney Times, had a news item about this but, typically I’m afraid, omitted to give us the title of the book.  I prised that somewhat essential information out of the editor, ordered a copy, and behold – what I got turns out to be Copy 10 of 100, signed indeed by Cathie Koa Dunsford. 

Her story is witty and instructive.  Her hero is a 60-year-old named Gloria, made homeless since her new house turned out to be a leaky home and worthless.  The developer responsible for this had his holiday home at Omaha.  Gloria decides to move in, since it’s vacant most of the year.  She is very caring and responsible.  The Moet she drinks and the items from the freezer are all credited to his debt to her, the amount she believes she has lost through his deceit.

Soon it’s the occupation of many of these Omaha mini-mansions by single mothers and others, all strictly enjoined to do no harm, and all done legally by signed house-sitting arrangements.  It builds to a great drama involving the blocking of the causeway to Omaha, legally again, helicopters and much fun.  Cathie Koa Dunsford makes her point about various basic issues. 

Well, this afternoon I attended a meeting at our local Mahurangi East Public Library, at which Dr Cathie Koa Dunsford launched her book.  She was accompanied by Dr Karin Meissenburg.  I am unsure of Dr Karin’s role or relationship, but she played a kind of soulful ocarina or Maori flute while Dr Cathie read extracts from the book. 

I am no good at these events.  Dr Cathie knows how to talk.  I would have preferred quiet thoughtful questions from people who had actually read the book.  As it was, we luxuriated in memories of former days before garden centres and inequitable distribution of wealth. 

For all that, it’s a worthy little novel.  I think it might be time to read one or two of her others.

 

Neither male nor female

Dr Bruce Hamill, a Dunedin parish minister, has clarified a cloudy issue for me.   I am grateful to him.  In the just-concluded General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa NZ, the big issue of contention was, unsurprisingly, whether Presbyterian ministers were to be permitted to marry same sex couples.  The Assembly said no. 

I am a long way from these debates these days – I watch from afar with emotions ranging from dismay to despair.  The generation of ministers and lay people younger than mine, who long for an inclusive and intelligent church marked by generosity and Christlike openness, have been hanging in there, “much in sorrow, oft in woe”.   Some of their ministers and churches have been open for same sex marriages ever since the law of the land allowed it, and for same sex civil unions and blessings even longer.  But now the church has spoken.  The church has said no. 

The next day St Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace in Wellington announced that they will defy the Assembly’s ruling.  Others will follow, and I have no idea what the outcome of that will be.

My difficulty with all this until now has been recognizing same sex unions as marriage.  Civil unions, it seemed to me, and de facto arrangements, could be blessed in Christian ceremonies and in Christian churches where they were genuinely loving and stable relationships between people who know what they are doing.  But I saw marriage as a special thing.  It is clearly and biblically intended to be permanent, however often marriages fall short in practice.  I saw marriage as between a man and a woman.

Bruce Hamill identified for me the point I had been missing.  Here is what he had intended to say in the General Assembly, but was prevented by the exigencies of debate.  He began with St Paul:

In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, there is no male and female” (Gal 3:28).  Not even the great complementarity of male and female defines the new world of life in the body of Christ.  What there is according to the writer to the Ephesians is a practice called marriage which signifies the mystery of Christ’s relationship to the church. (Eph 5:32)…  Both a witness to God’s love and a practice in which we learn to love, in all the intimacy of our bodily existence, our nearest neighbour.   ... I do not want to deprive homosexual people of the opportunity to share in this witness, this asceticism, this practice in holiness and hope.  Jesus made the reform of a range of institutions into an art form.  I believe he is calling us to reform our understanding and practice of marriage, not to set it in ecclesiastical concrete.  I urge this assembly to remember the spacious love of Christ.

If (for the Christian) marriage is a sign of the love of God in Christ, then on what basis do we deny such a sign to two people of the same sex, in a loving, committed bond? 

Good one.  Thank you, Bruce Hamill.

 

Oklahoma

There can’t possibly be anything new to write about capital punishment.  The Americans however continue to widen our imaginations on its implementation.  Having switched in some states to chemical obliteration of persons they have deemed trash, they found that some countries manufacturing the necessary lethal drugs were now declining on moral grounds to sell them to the USA.  It became necessary to source these drugs or substitutes from places without adequate quality control. 

The latest result of this is a hideously botched execution in Oklahoma.  The victim writhed and refused to die.  His veins collapsed and it was impossible to insert needles properly.  They tried a needle in his groin.  That was futile.   They said the man was unconscious – he was not.  Eventually and mercifully the man died all by himself, after the execution had been called off, of a heart attack.  There is now some report that he had been tasered and knocked around before even entering the execution chamber.

Plenty of Americans (and some New Zealanders) consider all this perfectly OK.  One insightful commentator said it was nothing compared to what the man did to his victims.  Oh, sorry, that’s alright then.  An eye for an eye and all that.  This is Christianity in practice in the Bible Belt.  Formerly they used to electrocute the condemned with often prolonged and hideous results.  There are atrocious stories of events in the gas chamber, and with old fashioned hanging.

It is scarcely credible but true that these execution chambers are fitted with an adjacent gallery where prison personnel, lawyers and state officials can witness the procedure – the Oklahoma facility has a separate watching gallery for families of the condemned’s victims, to see “justice done”. 

The Land of the Free is generally in love with guns and with death.  Of course they are in interesting company – China executes hundreds every year, but rather more humanely, with a gunshot to the back of the head.  And other countries can be listed.  In some you get beheaded, in one or two you might be buried up to the neck and stoned to death. 

In every case it involves a prior decree that someone of human flesh and blood is no longer of value of any kind and should be eliminated, removed from human company.  The fact that that a person, by his or her acts, is deemed to have relinquished the right to life and is officially considered beyond reform and worthless, does not in my view deliver the right to state-sponsored murder.  We are perfectly capable of locking up a seemingly hopeless or dangerous criminal for life, if necessary, and providing him or her with some kind of helpful environment, without hope of release.  Of course that would be expensive – so what?  We are not at liberty to deprive him or her of life, let alone by this kind of barbarism.

Miscellany, March 2014

Corin Dann is TV1’s chief parliamentary journalist.  He usually tells us things from outside the parliament buildings in Wellington, against the backdrop of the Beehive, or occasionally in the front lobby against the backdrop of that curious old-fashioned lift with metal grilles and a clanking concertinering metal door.  I suppose all that is long protected by the Heritage Trust.  These elevators used to feature in old movies with Humphrey Bogart.  Corin relates everything with measured emphasis and confidence, and an honest, square-jawed manner.  He gives the impression of having Sources whose identity is seriously hidden and who live dangerously.  All of that I can manage, if he gets his facts right. 

What I find silly is his enslavement to the word Look…!  But look…! – and then he goes right on to tell us something else.  It’s silly, it’s trendy, it’s unnecessary.  I do not appreciate being told to Look…!  But it seems to be catching on as a hallmark of on-the-button reportage.  Discipline yourself, Corin.  Do without it. 

…………………………………….

Smiling John Key has just announced that our next General Election will be on 20 September.  He and his strutting, smiling National party – Judith Collins, ye gods -- feel as though they are on a roll right now.  David Cunliffe stumbled and staggered into leadership of the Labour Party, and so far does not impress me. 

I want to vote Green this time, mainly because they do have principles – and because I think the time has gone for haggling about the environment.  The weather is clearly moving towards the more ferocious around the world, and it does seem that our carbon and other emissions are a large factor.  We are wondering what on earth, literally, our grandchildren are going to inherit and will have to survive. While NZ is isolated and small, the weather does not know national boundaries, and everyone affects everything. 

Green doesn’t have a political hope, I realize.  They are routinely ridiculed and caricatured, often with an anger which makes me even surer that they have struck oil (if I may be pardoned the phrase).  Some of the things they say, I wish they hadn’t.  But still, I intend to vote Green.  Ten years younger, I would go out and work for them.  But they are in love with meetings.  That horrifies me.  I loathe meetings. 

My sister says she has always voted National (and always will). That seems to be the end of the matter.  Ye gods.  So did old Tom, our father.  Phrases such as a safe pair of hands, are much loved by Tory supporters, who want only safety and continuity.  My brother seems enraptured by the reactionary government of Tony Abbott in Australia. 

Only tonight we had an item about the serious continuing pollution of NZ waterways by runoff from dairy farms – and a highly defensive statement from some Federated Farmers luminary (who turns out to be the brother of Key’s Minister of Finance).  They dispute the charges of pollution and wish to continue, “steady as she goes”, a classic, vote-winning phrase of one of their heroes long ago, former PM, Smiling Keith Holyoake. 

But dairy farming is a filthy, loathsome operation – the runoff is horrendous – and I am increasingly sure the industry, however hallowed, is seriously inefficient as a means of producing milk and animal protein.  It is sad indeed to see the Canterbury Plains now given over to dairy farming.  It is not dairy country.  The vast irrigation needs too are a huge issue – but the Tories will always support their own. 

I’m voting Green.

………………………………………….

‘Flu shots are available again.  I had mine this morning.  There is a neat little public health ambush up at the local doctors’ surgery’—you go in there for something else altogether, and find some large nurse coming at you with a needle.  It’s free, I gather, for Senior Cits.  This way, thousands of our senior locals get immunized, allegedly, against whatever hideous ‘flu strains are coming out of Asia currently. 

But we had a little bit of drama.  An elderly bloke walked in, I think to get a dressing changed. 

Receptionist:     Time for your ‘flu shot, Sir.

Elderly B:             Eh…?

Receptionist:     ‘Flu shot… They’re available now.

E B :                        What’s available?

R:                            Influenza, your injection which you’re supposed to have every year.

E B :                        Never heard of it.

R :                           You had one last year, I see…

E B :                        Eh…?

R :                           You’ve had it before. 

E B :                        I’m ‘ere for me dressing.  I’ve got an appointment.

R :                           You can have your ‘flu shot while you’re here.  It saves you another visit.

E B :                        What’s it bloody for…?

The receptionist gave up.  Leave it to the GP.  The silly old coot was younger than I am, but he has dropped off a few million more neurones than I have, so far, if indeed he ever had them.

Oh, Lorde...!

The final straw was that the Herald On Sunday, 2 February, included a very large wall poster, a glossy colour photo of Ella Yelich O’Connor, alias Lorde, looking 17-going-on-40.  The caption is: Year Of Our Lorde.   And there is a quote from her song Royals: We’re bigger than we ever dreamed,and I’m in love with being a queen.  I don’t know what that means.

A day or two previously the NZ Herald had a front-page banner headline which read: LORDE ALMIGHTY.  Tacky, tasteless, tediously silly. 

I was driving past Takapuna Grammar School last week, and saw to my horror an immense banner with a photo of Ella Yelich O’Connor (as I assume she was known at school until recently) draped down the front façade of the main building at the head of the entrance driveway.  All pupils are to be inspired. 

This young woman, age 17, has won two Grammy awards   She did not win the main award.  Her song Royals has gone viral, as we now evidently say – gone viral...?  I listened to it, several times in case there was something the matter with me and I was missing what I should be getting.  It’s cute.  In a way it’s clever.  It doesn’t require you to be able to sing.  But it was hard for me to get past the strange spastic gestures in the video, as though she was on the brink of a grand mal episode. 

Forgive me, but I do have to wonder whether her Grammy awards reflect talent so much as the clamant needs of people to be freshly entertained, the hunger for celebrity, the voracious demands of trends and trendiness.  Is it not all completely shallow?  Does no one ever read Hans Christian Andersen, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” any more?  I am advised that Lorde’s lyrics are quite interesting.  Well, I have listened to them and read them.  Sorry.  I’ll swap them any day for George Herbert or John Betjeman. 

In the flood of sycophantic writings about Lorde one writer told how she responded to some enquiry about what she would be wearing at the Grammys.  She said a white shirt and black pants.  She didn’t even name a designer.  This depth of naivete cannot last.  Does she know what the pressures will be once the fashion gurus get hold of her if she is marketable?  Maybe she is starting now to find out. 

I wonder how much of all this is with the really informed consent of this young woman.  I wonder what is being destroyed, in the glittering prospect of celebrity and money, not only for her but also for managers, designers, recording studios, security personnel.  I wonder what has happened, not only to genuine talent but also to the ability to assess such talent.  I wonder about the deleterious effects of hideous TV shows such as NZ/Australia/Wherever Has Talent.   I wonder about a culture that has such a relentless and insatiable need to be amused.