tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-46388306394536543702024-03-28T12:54:42.562+13:00Looking for the man who killed my mojoThe Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.comBlogger246125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-69777564274245132512024-02-22T14:18:00.003+13:002024-02-22T14:18:51.617+13:00Do we actually exist?<p><span style="text-align: justify;">I used to go drinking with a
friend, who after consuming seven or eight pints, would bring up the same
question. Do we actually exist? This was usually his get out of jail card when
he was failing in other arguments. He had studied philosophy and could polish
his opinions with quotes from Aristotle to Wittgenstein.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I floundered for years,
instinctively believing in our existence, but unable to prove it. Then Google
came along and I was able to do some interesting research. When we next met for
a drink and the subject came up, I puffed out my chest and announced, “I think,
therefore I am”. The very fact that we were even having the debate proved that
we existed. At least, I think that’s what it meant. I tried to argue from a
scientific perspective, which became more difficult with each pint I sank.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I’m not a scientist, it should be
said. I’m an Accountant, due to an accident at birth. The accident being that I
wasn’t born into a family that could afford to send me to university. I envy
those people who dreamed of being a doctor, an actor or a scientist. There is a
bullshit idea that can be found in many self help books and motivational
videos. “If you follow your dream, one day you’ll find it’. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">That might work for people with
parents who can fund you during your dream chasing phase, but it doesn’t work
for people who have to buy food and pay rent. I went down the path of getting
any job and then using the money I earned from that to pursue the interests I
have. Most of those interests turned out to be beer and curry related.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve
wondered what career I would have ended up in, if my parents could have
afforded it. If you look at my bookshelf you’ll see that it is dominated with
History tomes. Most of these relate to Ireland. It’s troubled relationship with
England and the origins of the Irish race in particular. I’m now in my late fifties,
so Second World War books are becoming more prevalent. I’m not sure why men of
my age become interested in that topic. Perhaps it’s a throw-back to the comics
we read as Children and the games we played in back gardens with imitation machine
guns fashioned from tree branches and where everybody inexplicably wanted to be
a German. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I’ve gotten to the age now where
I want to visit a WW2 re-enactment festival, drink real ale and count the
rivets on a replica Sherman tank to assess its authenticity.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">But I notice that another subject
is slowly worming its way onto my shelves. I chose biology over physics at
school on the advice of my older brother. Like most of his advice (how to chat
up girls, source underage alcohol etc.), I now wish I’d ignored it. The world,
the universe and all that is in it is something I’d like to understand.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">If I look at the science books
that I have, they lean towards physics rather than biology. One in particular
has fascinated me recently and I’d like to explore it further.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Scientists would have you believe that the
discovery of the Higgs Boson particle is on a par with the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>unearthing of penicillin or the first moon
landing, although the God Particle, as it is known, is unlikely to ease the
pain of venereal disease or create conspiracy theories about its dark side.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">In fact, it’s not a discovery at all, more a
confirmation of what scientists already theorised, or perhaps it is just a
simple justification for all the money they spent on the large hadron collider
at a time when they should have been investing this money in the more
honourable adventure of bailing out banks. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Science is the art of studying the behaviour of
15,000 people to discover what you already know or suspected. For example, you
will never see a report on research by the University of Arkansas into
childhood obesity, which says that to their great surprise, sugar and a lack of
exercise is actually good for kids.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">The major achievement of Higgs Boson appears to
be the proof that mass can be created out of nothing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Energy shares space in Einstein’s famous little
formula with mass, dangling out there on the left, like a <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">hallucinating drug trying to get into a rave
party</span>. Energy can also be created out of nothing. Imagine you are tired
after a hard week at work. You want to hit the sofa with a takeaway and a brain
numbing night in front of Love Island. You feel like you don’t have the energy
to make it to the toilet and contemplate fashioning a colostomy bag from the
various crisp packets that litter your sitting room.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Then a text message arrives from a friend
inviting you the pub. For the formula to work it has to be a particular friend
who makes you laugh and encourages you to have one for the road at 3am. You
will find that an instant infusion of energy results and before you know where
you are, you are skipping down the road like a Duracell battery on acid. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">So if mass and energy can be created out of
nothing, then the speed of light must also be nothing. This means that the sun
doesn’t exist and this is all a dream. If somebody will give me 10 billion
Euros and a large round hole in Switzerland, I’m confident I can prove this.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">And perhaps it also proves that my old drinking
buddie was right. That science can also prove that we don’t exist. But that
would also mean that history doesn’t exist and I’ve been wasting my time
reading all those books. But if we don’t exist, then this is all a simulation
and I’ve been programmed to be a history reading, blog writing Accountant. I
pity the guy who wrote that code. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-62540631719863510682024-01-03T15:36:00.001+13:002024-01-03T15:36:21.275+13:00My Podcast Life<p><span style="text-align: justify;">On the morning of my 40th
birthday, I stopped outside an Apple store in London and looked scornfully at
the products within.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I've never been fond of their products,
and I made this clear to my friends who were with me at the time. One of them
held a senior position within Apple and he chuckled conspiratorially. Later
that evening I found out why. I opened the tightly wrapped present they had
purchased me and inside was a gleaming new iPod, adorned with an inscribed
message from my friends.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">That device was the one I
listened to my first podcast on. After I had copied all my CDs onto iTunes and
transitioned from music to the spoken word. When I left Australia all those CDs
went to an op shop and I presume somebody in Melbourne is now enjoying that
collection of mournful American female country singers and soft rock. The iPod
has also gone to God, so all I'm left with is an electronic copy of 25 years of
obsessive music purchases. It's on an old laptop and I'm not even sure I can
access it.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I can't remember the first
podcast I listened to. But one thing I'm pretty sure of is that I'm not
listening to that series now. Over the years my tastes have changed and every
time I get a new device, I use it as a chance to cull my library and start
again.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">My current list is an eclectic
mix of politics, sport, comedy and history as well as the occasional one-off
series such as Serial. I enjoyed these as interlopers in the normal dreary
routine of my weekly episodes. “13 minutes to the Moon” remains my favourite.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">One thing that troubles me
though, is the business model of podcasts. Increasingly they are becoming the
main income source for artists. Many of the ones I listen to are free,
subsidised by licence payers in Ireland and the UK.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The others are commercial to one
extent or another. Some depend on advertising alone. This suits me as a
resident of New Zealand who tends to listen to northern hemisphere podcasts.
Advertising is local and few Kiwi companies bother advertising on the obscure
Irish podcasts I listen to.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">As a result, I'm not tempted by
these offers of an ad free experience in return for a small monthly stipend.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Neither am I tempted by the offer
of additional episodes in return for cash. I already struggled to get through
the list I have, not helped by an OCS compulsion to listen to everything I've
downloaded.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">So, I'm left with the ones who
make a shameless plea each week for nothing more than a guilt free listen.
Podcasting must be the only product that is initially offered for free before
they try to guilt you into paying for it.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I have a problem with paying for
something I don't have to. If offered a view over the fence rather than paying
at the turnstile, I'll choose the fence every time. I don't think it's because
I'm tight, I just don't like the idea that I'm paying for something that others
are getting for free. I also wonder about equity. I have about five podcasts
that depend on voluntary contribution and if I paid for all of them, it would
be more than I used to pay for Sky Sports at the height of my hedonistic TV
watching.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Most of the ones who plea for
money are comedians. Historians and economists are usually more circumspect.
They know that the product they produce would previously have been on radio.
They might have been paid for this but it's unlikely it was more than the
advertising they manage to attract for their products now.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Comedians never admit it, but
they are the ones who benefit most from the development of podcasting. Most of
the stuff I listen to is too sweary to have ever made it onto mainstream media.
They can find an audience now that was never previously available. In the old
days, they earned an income by touring the country and playing in as many
venues as possible. This would involve travel costs, hotel costs, venue rental,
promotion and all the non-financial hassle of being away from your family for a
month.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Now you can sit in your bedroom
with a cheap microphone and reach a bigger audience than you could with six
months of touring. A couple of thousand subscribers would earn the comedian the
same income as they had in the past for a lot less hassle and for a lower cost.
And when they do want to tour, they end up with bigger venues as they now have
a larger dedicated audience to promote too.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Given my experience with podcasts
and particularly the fact that I tend to get bored with them after about six
months, I'm reluctant to sign up for a payment schedule. Like gym memberships,
I’ll forget to cancel and find myself paying for something in years to come that
I no longer listen to.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I think that there needs to be a
new economic model. Perhaps, a pay per listen process set at a small notional
fee. I would be happy to pay for this. And surely technology is sufficient
these days to support this.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Of course, on the music side, I now
listen exclusively on Spotify. I'm happy to pay a monthly subscription for this
that is roughly equal to the amount that I used to spend on CDs. I do think
however, that if CDs still existed, there would reach a point where I would
stop buying them and be content with the haul I already had.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">As things stand, I'll be paying
for Spotify until I stop listening to music, which hopefully will be the day I
finally stop listening to anything. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Perhaps 2024 is the time to change
and finally pay for something. And I might see if I can access those old CD’s
too. <o:p></o:p></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-24088415436390123012023-12-18T18:08:00.001+13:002023-12-18T18:08:09.336+13:00My Parenting Life<p> <span style="text-align: justify;">“Will we go and see the horses?”
my Dad asked. My uncle threw him a conspiratorial smile and said “Aye, we
should, indeed”. They grabbed their coats and headed for the door, giggling
like school children as they got into my uncle’s car.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I raced behind them “Can I go
too?” I asked. “I love horses”. My Dad and uncle looked at each other and I
could tell their enthusiasm to get going overruled their desire to argue. I was
told to jump into the back seat and we set off.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I was twelve and we were on a
family holiday to the part of Ireland that my Dad grew up in. I spent that
afternoon in the company of these two men and let’s just say we didn’t see any
horses. We transversed the windy roads of South Wexford, stopping off at thatched
roofed country pubs that could have fallen out of a 1950’s Hollywood movie that
presented a romanticised version of what Ireland should look like.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I consumed more Coca Cola than is
good for a growing boy and ate about ten packets of Tayto crisps. It wasn’t
great for my stomach but years later I still remember that afternoon because of
the easy blanket of love that embraced me. My Dad was having one of those
afternoons that I now treasure. The chance to share a few beers with somebody
who makes you laugh. But he was comfortable enough to let me sit in and listen
to their grown-up conversations. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">They talked about Hurling and
Wexford’s chances in that year’s Championship. My Dad grew up in the
countryside and moved to town when he met my Mother. He loved nothing better
than to return to his earlier life of fertiliser and turnips and the affect of
rain on that year’s harvest. For two weeks every year he could slip back into
his earlier life and leave behind the pressures of work and helping to raise
five unruly children.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I only have one child and she’s
now the age I was when I went on that odyssey in South Wexford. Like all Dads,
I look back on my own childhood and the experience I had with my own father. I sometimes
get frustrated with my daughter and ache for some free time. A chance to get
away from the demands of parenting. I wonder if my Dad felt like that too. He
worked long hours when I was growing up. He said this was to earn as much
overtime as possible as providing for seven people wasn’t an easy task. My
Mother claimed it was to get away from parenting and leave it all to her. With
the benefit of hindsight and my own experience, I think it was probably a
combination of both.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">But when my Dad was at home, he
was fully invested in his kids. Memory is of course selective. We can choose to
only remember the good times if it suits our narrative and it’s also not linear
and continuous. I remember events from my childhood but don’t know when they
happened or how often.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I can remember my Dad covering
our school books with wall paper at the start of the new school year, putting
up Christmas decorations on the 8<sup>th</sup> December in the exact same way
every year, attaching an old piece of carpet to my bicycle seat when the
original wore out, taking me around the sports shops of our hometown looking
for an Arsenal sticker after my Mother had mistakenly brought back a bag with
Liverpool FC on the front.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I often fret about whether I’m
being as good a Dad as my father was. There are certainly things I do that he
never had to. I take my daughter to cricket every Saturday. I had to make my
own way to football when I was twelve and we would have been mortified to have
a parent watching. I spend a lot of time each week driving around town to
sewing classes or girl guides. Much of this is due to living in a big city as
opposed to the medium sized town I grew up. When I was young, I could reach
everywhere on foot or on bike. My daughter would struggle with this as her
activities are spread across a wide area. But it’s also due to this generation
being much more cautious than the one I grew up in. Despite the modern world
being statistically safer, nobody would dream of letting a 12 year walk home
alone.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">But I can’t help feeling that
we’re softer too. My parents would regularly make the point that we had it easy
as kids compared to their generation. My Dad was old enough to remember World War
Two and the rationing that it imposed. He talked about going to school barefoot
and being sent out to work full time at fourteen.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I find myself feeling the same
about my daughter. That things are so much easier for her. We didn’t have the internet,
Nexflix or mobile phones. We weren’t wealthy enough to go on exotic holidays.
My daughter had travelled across the world four times before she was six.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">But the truth is that life is
just as hard for her as it was for me, because we can only deal with what is in
front of us. She has a far better material life than I had but I didn’t have to
deal with climate change, internet weirdos and the pressures that young girls
face in the modern world.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I hope that in a few years time,
when she stumbles across this blog that she’ll know that I did my best. I’ll
try but never quite manage to do as good a job as my Dad. But I hope one day my
daughter will look back to when she was twelve and think of a day when she was
smothered in love. Although I doubt if that day will involve horses either.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-34542125391559085172023-10-31T16:47:00.001+13:002023-10-31T16:47:25.740+13:00I'll keep the red flag flying here<p> <span style="text-align: justify;">“He has no heart who is not a
socialist at twenty. He has no head who is still one at thirty”. That’s a
phrase that may have been coined by Churchill, Shaw, Disraeli, or Bismarck. I
heard it first from my English teacher in secondary school. Mr. White insisted
that we attribute any quotes in our essays to their original source. As he made
no mention of a source, I assumed he was the originator of these profound
words, and he shot up in my estimation.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">It was back in the sunlit uplands
of 1982. The Human League were number one in the charts, the hunger strikes had
just fizzled out, kicking off thirteen more years of misery just up the road
from where I was living. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Down south, we were in the middle
of three general elections in eighteen months. I was developing an interest in
politics and was seduced by the rhetoric of the emerging left-wing parties
whose growth suggested that Ireland might finally be growing up. For years
before that I had looked at British and European elections and marveled at the
balance between left and right in their politics. Back in Ireland, we were
haunted by the ghosts of the 1923 Civil War. Two center right parties came out
of this conflict and have ruled Ireland ever since, conning the people that
they are fundamentally different to each other.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I was hopeful that this cycle
would be broken in 1982 and took the opportunity to pen an article in the
school magazine to this affect. Mr. White, who was a card-carrying member of
one of those right-wing parties, was editor of the magazine. He graciously let
my article through without amendment, apart from the above quote scribbled in
the margin. I’m now fifty eight, well past the age of thirty when I was supposed
to swivel into a right wing zealot. And I think of that scribbled quote every
time I search for the most left-wing candidate on a ballot paper.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">When I could first vote in 1983, my
choice was the Worker’s Party. They were an unapologetic Marxist group with
completely sensible policies, but who would have shit themselves if they had
ever been put in a position to implement them. Luckily, this was never a
possibility and I could bask in the smugness of voting for the correct party
and then complaining about the parties that actually had to govern.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I moved to London when I twenty
two and immersed myself in the fight against Thatcher. In 1992, I became part
of an incongruously named group called “Accountants for a Labour victory”. I
worked in the head office of an Insurance Company. Our premises were in a small
town to the South of London. As a result, we didn’t attract the posh end of the
Accountancy profession, who all seemed to work in City institutions run by
their uncles. The twenty or so Accountants in our office had all come up
through the public education system and the English ones at least had all gone
to “brown brick” universities that had sprung up in the sixties. Over chats in
the canteen and pub we learned that most of them planned to vote Labour and a
couple of us even went so far as to hand out leaflets.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">We met up on the evening of the
election for a victory party, but by 11pm it was clear that our efforts where
in vain. Britain was condemned to another five years of Tory rule, by which
stage I was back in Ireland looking at Tony Blairs ascendancy with admiration.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">By this stage, I had become more
pragmatic, as had most of my old comrades in the Worker’s Party. They had shut
up shop and joined the middle of the road Labour party. I followed them, as it
seemed the most logical root to election success. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unfortunately, when I did, Labour joined the
government as a junior coalition partner and surrendered all their principles
for a few tawdry bobbles of office.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I spent seven years in Australia
and couldn’t vote as I wasn’t a citizen. Ironically, I got this title just as I
was a leaving and under the mandatory voting rules in that country, I’ve had to
vote in every Australian election since. I was in Australia in 2007 when Kevin
Rudd won and at the ripe old age of forty two, I found myself living under a
Labour government for the first time, although sadly not a left wing one. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">New Zealand allows me to vote,
although in fairness they have never bothered to check if I’m entitled to. Most
of my time here has been spent under the benign leadership of Jacinda Ardern.
She’s not exactly a radical left winger either but was a decent skin at least.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">But I have to admit, I never
voted for her. The Green party in New Zealand are much more left wing than
Labour. They want wealth redistribution, a policy that used to be a given in
Labour parties around the world, but is somehow never spoken about today. The
Greens are also concerned about that other small matter. Saving the planet from
its imminent climate catastrophe. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">We had an election here recently
and sadly my vote was in vain. The country is lurching to the right and we face
at least three years of tax cuts for the rich and climate change denial.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">But I’m proud to still carry the
red flag. If anything, I would say I’m even more radical now that when I was in
my twenties, despite being financially comfortable and knowing that the right
would benefit me more financially. I’m not sure what happened to Mr. White. I
guess he’s retired now and living off a pension funded by the tax paid by the
working men he despised. I will keep dreaming of a Socialist paradise while
doing nothing to achieve it apart from a tick on a ballot paper every three
years.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-81655385182412501042023-10-12T16:10:00.002+13:002023-10-12T16:10:33.676+13:00My Life on the Stage<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">As with most important events in
my life, my involvement in theatre started in a pub. The Black Stuff is a
venerable hostelry tucked just inside the city limits of Luxembourg. The large
car park at its rear hinting at the loose drink driving laws in place in the
Grand Duchy in the early 1990s.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I was several pints in and Brenda
was being very persistent. “You’ll be perfect for the part”, she explained,
ignoring the fact that I had never been on stage before. She went on to tickle
my ego to the point where I could see Oscar nominations and a Hollywood career
in the future. She sold it to me as the leading role in a 19<sup>th</sup>
Century Irish classic, a dashing young hero who sweeps the wife of a farmer off
her feet and disappears, Heathcliff like, into the fading Wicklow mists. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">In fact, I ended up playing a
village idiot, a role I have reprised many times since. The plot involved an
old farmer who had apparently passed away and was tucked under a sheet in the
back corner of the stage. I was busy seducing his recently widowed wife, when
at a key moment in the dialogue he would sit up and explain that he had only
been sleeping.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">It all went well until the last
night, when he turned up excited as a spring lamb in the changing room before
the show. He explained that his family had flown in from London for the show. I
later learned that his marriage had fallen apart due to his alcoholism and the
strong smell of Whiskey on his breath should have let me know that a wagon had
just lost one of its passengers.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">We got to the part in the play
just before the big reveal, when I heard loud snoring coming from beneath the
sheets. I was the only other person on stage at the time and realised that I
would have to rescue the situation. I made my way over to the bed and kicked it
gently. The snoring increased. I kicked harder but with no success. In the end
I shook him violently, making up dialogue that would have shamed the original
author.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">He eventually woke up, spotted
dialogue from a completely different play and fell back on pillow in a deep
slumber. I blurted out the last line of the play and signaled to the stage
manager to draw the curtains. We cut twenty minutes off the play length and
probably left the audience short changed and confused. But in fairness,
audiences in Luxembourg had pretty low expectations from the drama world in
those days.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">In the changing room afterwards,
the director was keen to change the play’s ending to one where the old man
actually ended up dead, but we held him back and ensured that no violence took
place. I was left with the assumption that this happened in every amateur
production. That you flew by the skin of your pants and it would be alright on
the night. And that’s largely turned out to be true.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I went on to do two further plays
in Luxembourg and then about fifteen in Dublin. The social scene in both
countries was fantastic. In fairness the Luxembourg group was made up of Irish
ex pats, who party harder than their companions back in Dublin.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I left Europe for the Southern
Hemisphere in 2007 and hoped that the fun and laughter I’d found in theatre
would continue. I performed in four plays in Australia, until parenthood
stepped in and caused me to swap grease paint for nappy cream. I don’t remember
those plays with any great fondness. Australians strive for perfection in
everything. Sport is the obvious example, but no country will join a song
competition named after another continent and expect to win it every year. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Don’t get me wrong. I want to do
the best when I’m on stage. But I took up acting for the fun of being part of a
group and not to become the next Brando. There always was talk of a ‘party’ at
the end of each production, but this generally involved a warm bottle of beer
while you took the set down.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">New Zealand has been a better
experience. They call it “Community Theatre” here and you do get a sense of a
more collegial experience. But I’m also getting older and feel theatre requires
a big commitment. I’ve just finished a show that had a large cast ranging in
age from fourteen to eighty. In the week of the show, I was getting up at 7am,
going to work, getting home and grabbing a quick tea before heading to the
venue. Then getting home at 11pm and doing it all again. The fourteen year olds
and the eighty year olds seemed to cope best. They weren’t working and looking after
an eleven year old.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">So, my conclusion is that community
theatre is a young or old man’s game. Those of us in the middle, and
particularly those of us who left becoming a Dad until our mid-forties, struggle
to summon up the required energy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I might take a break now from the
stage, or ‘rest’ as we luvvies say. I need to fall in love with it again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But of course, ego plays a strong role. If
somebody contacts me and says that they are putting on a show and need me for a
crucial role, I will probably say yes. There is nothing like being told that
you are brilliant.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">“Life is a gift, it would be a
shame to send it back opened”, is a line from the recent show I did. That’s why
I cling to all the activities I did in my younger life. I want to act, to play
sport, to drink beer like I did in my twenties. But I’d also like to sleep. And
life, love and age are dragging me inextricably in that direction.<o:p></o:p></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-13785401696493043502023-09-04T15:23:00.000+12:002023-09-04T15:23:41.724+12:00You'll need an App for that<p><span style="text-align: justify;">I’m not sure if Joe is a real
person or a bot. I hope he’s a real person, because if he is a bot, I fear for
the future of humanity and the hope that technology will save us.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I started my conversation with
Joe when he popped up on the bottom right-hand side of my screen and asked if
he could help. I was trying to book a flight. In the old days, you’d walk into
a travel agent, deport yourself in a comfortable seat and speak to a lady in a
crisp white shirt and colourful neck scarf. After giving her a rough idea about
where you wanted to go to, you’d engage in polite conversation about your
holiday plans while waiting for a ticket to come out of their dot matrix
printer. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">But apparently technology has
made this better. You can now book from the comfort of your sofa. This started
out well. You found the airline’s website, filled out your name and credit card
details and it was done.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I don’t want to appear like a
grumpy old man, but the truth is that I am. Everything has gone downhill since.
It started when they websites wanted personal information they don’t need. If I
want to book a flight, why does it matter where I live or what my date of birth
is. I guess it stops three-year-olds stealing their Dad’s credit card and
plotting a trip to Disneyland. But if they were clever enough to do that, I
doubt if they would have entered their actual date of birth. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Then they started upselling.
Offering Insurance, car rental and hotel suggestions and making it as difficult
to navigate these pages as it is to find your way around IKEA. Then someone
came up with the great wheeze of splitting the fare. It used to be taken for
granted that you needed a seat on a plane, would quite like to sit next to your
partner and to bring a suitcase along on your travels. Somebody, probably
Ryanair, realised that if you sell these separately, you could spin the myth
that air travel is cheaper than ever, when actually it ends up at the same cost
it always was, after you have added on all the items you used to take for
granted.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Apart from everything else, this
makes booking a flight more complicated than brain surgery, with a similar pain
impact. After you have unclicked all the items you never wanted to purchase in
the first place, entered more personal information than even your wife knows and
committed your credit card details to a website that otherwise filled you with
suspicion, you might finally get the “Flight Confirmed” message. Or more often
than not a message that would send you back to the first page like a naughty child.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">That’s how I ended up talking to
Joe. The Auckland to Sydney route is dominated by the national carriers of New
Zealand and Australia, who clearly call each other every morning to agree their
eye-watering fares. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">There is an alternative to this.
An Asian interloper that is trying to sneak into this market. We travelled with
them at Christmas and they were half the cost of the national airlines. However,
my daughter was disgusted that there was no TV screen on the back of the seat
in front of her, I was annoyed that my seat that was stuck in the reclined position
and left me staring at the ceiling for the whole trip and we were all upset on
the return trip when they seated the three of us in random seats throughout the
plane.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Nevertheless, I turned to them
again last week when I wanted to book another flight to Sydney and saw the eye
watering fares that Air New Zealand were quoting. Since Christmas, their website
has changed in one key aspect. You now have to set up an Account. You can no longer
be a casual traveller, you have to a fully signed up member, willing to accept
daily emails and share all of your personal details. They have also enforced
two factor authentication. This is normally enforced by banks and government
agencies or other parties that need to protect you from fraud. It’s rarely used
by websites that simply want to sell you a product.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I went along with the charade. Entered
my phone number and pressed the button that promised to send me a text that
would finalise my account set up.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The text never arrived and that’s
when I started talking to Joe.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">“Please uninstall the App and re-install
it”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">“I’m not using your App, I’m looking
at your website”.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">“Thank you for your response. Please
uninstall the App and re-install it”.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">“I’M NOT USING YOUR BLOODY APP”.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">At this stage, the conversation changed.
Joe passed me onto an anonymous manager who gave me an official case number, as
though I’d stumbled into a murder case. His suggestion was that I install their
app and try to do a booking through this. I was indignant that technology had
got us to the point where an App was needed for a simple transaction but did it
anyhow. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The App didn’t work. I still didn’t
get a text to finish my account set up.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I gave up and booked a flight
with Qantas. It was expensive, but it came with a meal, movies and a bag included
in the price, without having to navigate 12 screens.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The cheap airline wasn’t giving
up though. They sent another email from a “Do-Not Reply” email address, saying
that if I wanted to keep the case open, I should reply to the email. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Two weeks later, I got my final
message. It said that they were closing the case and if I wanted it reopened, I
should log on to my account, ignoring the fact that my problem was that I
couldn’t open an account. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I hanker for the old days and
ladies with crisp white shirts.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-31795415137361654982023-07-31T20:26:00.001+12:002023-07-31T20:26:52.065+12:00First World Problems<p><span style="text-align: justify;">Seth is about 18 months old with chubby cheeks
and a flock of blond hair. In normal circumstances you would think he was as
cute as kitten. But with a sixteen-hour non-stop flight on a packed airplane,
he is public enemy number one.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US">We had boarded in Dubai. Like me, most
passengers had come off connecting flights of varying lengths and had forsaken
sleep on that leg with the anticipation of making up for it on the long journey
to Auckland. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US">Seth, however, had different plans. He started
crying before the plane took off. As a parent, I immediately recognised the
type of wail. He was overtired. Had probably come off another connecting flight
where his Mother had desperately tried to get him to sleep and had
unfortunately failed. He had missed his window and no amount of gentle rocking
was going to carry him into slumber.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US">This crying went on for two hours until the
food arrived. Then his mother released him so that she could sleep and he took
off like he had just stolen something. It seemed that he had an issue that he
wanted to take up with the Captain, because that’s the direction he headed for
on about 25 occasions. Each time he took off he would mutter a high-pitched
scream and repeat the word “Bubba” at an ear splitting frequency. Each time,
his exasperated Mother or one of the even more exasperated crew would pick him
up and carry him back to his seat as he screamed and wriggled in an attempt to
escape.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US">This went on for about five hours, by which
stage the other 300 passengers would have happily strung him up in the galley.
Thankfully, he must have fallen asleep for a few hours before the wailing started
again as we approached Auckland.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US">It wasn’t like in the good old days when
Children were seen but not heard. I took my first long haul flight in 1988 in
the glamour days of international travel. Mind you, it was with Aeroflot, so
there wasn’t much glamour involved. I can’t remember if they showed a movie,
but if they did, it would have been in Russian. Smoking was discouraged, apart
from down the back by the toilets. The flight crew all seemed to be undercover
KGB agents or former Olympic shot putters. I remember at one point a muscular
stewardess walked down the aisle with a basket of apples and flung them to the
passengers in the way a kid on a bike delivers newspapers. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US">But at least the airport experience back then
was pleasant. A nice lady would look at your silky tracing paper ticket and
take your bags with little fuss and very little queuing. In the years before
cost accountants had looked at staffing levels, airports had appropriate staff
to deal with the passengers coming through. It’s an industry that knows exactly
how many customers to expect each day and pretty much how many there will be
each hour. But you still queue for hours at check in or security, as though the
airlines and airport staff are surprised that so many people who had pre-booked
flights had actually turned up.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US">In 1988, after a perfunctory look at your
passport, you could sail straight through to the plane. None of this belt and
shoe removing nonsense. Back then, you
could bring a rifle or a live animal on board and nobody would bat an eyelid. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US">My next long haul excursion was the grand daddy
of all my trips. This was a round the world tour in 1995/1996. I flew on the
queen of all long haul aeroplanes, the mighty Boeing 747. They definitely would
have played a movie on these flights, but it would needed to be bland enough to
meet the tastes and needs of two year olds and eighty year olds. Once airborne
and after dinner was served (the food was better then too) a large screen would
descend in the cabin and headphones would be distributed. A caption would
explain that the inflight movie had been formatted for airplane enjoyment,
which was code for “cut to ribbons to exclude all the naughty bits”. This meant
that it would run for about an hour and make no narrative sense. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US">If you didn’t fancy the movie, there was
another option. You could listen to a selection of golden oldie songs
introduced by an octogenarian BBC DJ, who mentioned the airline after every
song in return, one assumes, for free flights.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US">I started making more regular flights after
that to Australia and New Zealand. And then when I moved to the Southern
Hemisphere, I could regularly fly home to Ireland. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US">The entertainment got better. TVs in the back
of seats brought variety and meant that you could watch what you wanted, rather
than having to settle for the common denominator. But comfort went the other
way. As I became physically bigger, the seats became smaller and with tighter
leg room. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US">In the past month, I’ve finally been able to sample
the delights of long haul travel after a four year hiatus caused by “the
Thing”. I was curious to see if anything had changed. The needless queuing at
check in, passport control, security, boarding, disembarkation and baggage
retrieval has got worse. A two flight I took in Europe swallowed up six hours
of my time from arriving at one airport and leaving the other. Four years ago
they insisted you turned off your phone during the flight in case you
interfered with the electronics and risked crashing the plane. Now they insist
that you keep it on, so they can sell you overpriced Wifi. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">All in all, it’s become a very uncomfortable and
boring experience. It used to be just as much about the journey as the destination.
Now it’s all about the destination. The days of glamour travel has gone the way
of VHS and Walkmans. I’d even watch only Russian movies on board if we could
get them back.</span>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-24895581530902525092023-05-11T13:58:00.000+12:002023-05-11T13:58:05.089+12:00Sue, The Sovereign Citizen<p><span style="text-align: justify;">Sue is angry. She can’t remember when it
started. Maybe it was when she moved out of the city and bought a lifestyle
block in the country with her husband. But she doesn’t think so. In her now
hazy memory, the first few years were good. They escaped the rat race and
bought five acres and some animals and spent a couple of years doing up a
draughty 1930’s villa.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">It was all good until the council told them
they couldn’t get access to the town’s water supply. Then that “bloody goofy
toothed” woman became Prime Minister and in Sue’s mind the whole thing went to
shit.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">All the environmental laws that the new Labour
government brought in seem to be targeted directly at Sue. And after all the
hard work that she and husband had done, the layabouts and work shy people
seemed to be winning out. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Then Covid came along and Sue disappeared
entirely down the rabbit holes that the pandemic offered. She was already
suspicious of anything Jacinda Ardern said. She was trying to ban cows after
all and was poisoning the land with 1080 bait. And Sue had moved to the country
to immerse herself in the freedoms that New Zealand life is supposed to offer.
The freedom to slaughter your own animals, to own as many vehicles as you like,
and to beat your kids if you saw fit.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Ruby was one of the first people that Sue had
met when she visited the local farmer’s market on her first weekend in the
country. She was a naturopath and a life coach and had sold Sue a home-made remedy
that cured the hay fever that several Auckland doctors had failed to mend.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">She had never been sick since, so she wasn’t
going to listen to some bloody woman in Wellington telling her what to do.
Particularly when it came to wearing a mask in the supermarket. Sue didn’t even
wear shoes when she went there and was often in her pyjamas. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">It was a short trip from hating Covid rules to
liking Trump conspiracy theories on Facebook and believing that Pfizer had
secret plans to buy the South island to house the illuminati after the vaccines
had killed off all the regular people.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Then in February 2022, Ruby invited Sue to a
demonstration in Wellington. Three weeks later Sue was throwing bricks at the
police and setting fire to tents. She got home and was fully radicalised and
started reading parts of the Internet you can’t find with a google search.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Ruby was the first to mention the term
Sovereign Citizen. Sue embraced it enthusiastically. She stopped paying her
rates, car tax and rego. Sent back every letter that came from a government
department, with a message that they had no authority over her.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I belong to the side of politics that laughs at
people like Sue. I’m a city living liberal, who wouldn’t know the right end of
a cow to milk.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">But when I was younger, I dabbled with left
wing politics. We were the ones who wanted to overthrow the state. We believed
that society was rigged against us. That it was controlled by hidden forces in
dark rooms, smoking large cigars in their stuffed waistcoats. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I realise now that these are the same arguments
that Sue makes on Facebook. Except these days the arguments come from the right
and not the left. I guess the other difference is that our heroes were trade
unionists and revolutionaries that lived in bed sits. Sue’s heroes are
billionaires like Trump or Alex Jones. We also liked to protest by joining
marches and picketing visits by foreign leaders that we disagreed with. We
still paid or taxes and fines. We wanted to build a better society and not to
withdraw from it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Sue wants to withdraw from society, not to
change it. Every country has its own version of sovereign citizens, but I
sometimes wonder if New Zealand has more than its fair share. Unlike Australia,
which was colonised by convicts who didn’t want to be there and rapacious gold
diggers, New Zealand white settlers came from British and Irish people
searching for a bucolic lifestyle. They wanted to escape from the smoke filled
cities of Victorian Britain and to live out their lives on the verdant pastures
of the Southern Isles. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The reach of Government was pretty thin back
then. She had to home school your kids and rely on family remedies and the
kindness of strangers if anyone got sick. It bred a culture of independence.
Many city dwelling Kiwis have a desire to move to the country and live ‘off
grid’. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Most of Sue’s friends have taken that first
step to live outside the real world. Unfortunately, they have also tapped into
feelings of neglect and despondency within the Maori community. This is a
country built delicately on the foundations of a treaty signed in 1840. It’s a
treaty that hasn’t always been adhered to and it has built up a culture of disconnect
between many Maori and the state. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The sovereign citizen movement was quick to
ferment this disconnect and like many revolutionary movements and governments
for that matter, they are quite happy to use Maori as the muscle in their
clashes with authority.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">We live in strange old world now. Nationalism, nativism
and isolationism is rampant throughout the western world. It’s like we’re
living in the 1930s again and that most people have ignored the past and are
now condemned to repeat it. Sue doesn’t like being called a Nazi, but that’s
what she is. I just hope she never needs a state provided hospital or has to
drive her untaxed car on government built roads. I hope she never has to post
her toxic messages on Facebook that connects to a Government built cell phone
tower. She also doesn’t like being called a hypocrite. But then neither did I
when I was a young radical who wanted to work for American Banks. <o:p></o:p></span></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-65149747777835501762023-03-14T14:27:00.011+13:002023-03-14T14:27:55.343+13:00I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled<p><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; text-align: justify;">I moved to New Zealand at the venerable age of fifty. Some say that
fifty is the new thirty, but only if they are innumerate or refuse to accept
the concept of linear time. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">I certainly didn't feel like thirty when I stepped off that plane from
Edinburgh but I think it's fair to say that my body was in pretty good working
condition, give or take a missing testicle or two. I wish I could say the same
now.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">The first thing to go was my left shoulder. I leant back from the
driver's seat of my car to retrieve a bag from the back seat. Something popped
and when you're my age and hear that sound, you're best to freeze and to check
your extremities from the outside in. I found that I couldn't lift my left arm
beyond elbow height. Luckily for me, that's not the arm I use to hail barmen or
to reach the cookie jar on the top shelf at work. So, it took me a day or two
to drag myself to the physio. He poked and prodded me like a farmer
inspecting a bullock at a country mart. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">After a few non-productive sessions and a scan, he announced that I had
'frozen shoulder', which I took as code for 'we haven't a bloody clue."</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Next to go was my right knee. I remember descending the escalator at
Auckland Central station and being in a hurry to catch a soon departing train.
I tripped on one of the steps. It was so slight and my recovery so balletic and
graceful that none of the other commuters even noticed. But a pain similar to
being stabbed shot through my knee. This time the physio was more on the ball,
or patella to be more precise. She diagnosed some arthritis and warned that
this was a ticking time bomb that would lead to canes and Zimmer frames in
later life. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">It's unpleasant to lie on a bench in a cold and clinical treatment room,
looking at posters of fit and healthy athletes and having your future mapped
out to in such depressing tones. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">She kindly put it down to all the football I played in my twenties and
not the extra twenty kilos of weight that the knees have had to support since I
stopped playing football.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">At this point you might be assuming that these physio visits were not
only treating but costing me an arm and a leg. Thankfully, New Zealand has an
excellent system in place for such events. This is a country famed for its
physical sport and outdoor endeavours. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Accidents are common, so to avoid the leisure and sports industries from
being inundated with law suits an Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) was
set up. This is funded through taxes and pays for treatment when you have an
accident. The only issue is that you have to have had an accident to avail
of it. “Tripped on the stairs at the station and twisted my knee” will
generally pass muster. But “woke up in the morning with a sore ankle” is going
to be refused.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">This happened to me when my left knee popped. It clearly got upset that
his right compatriot was getting all the attention from the pretty physio. I
woke up one morning with a pain in my knee that wasn’t there before I got out
of bed. When I filled out my ACC claim form at the physio, I had to use the
full power of my imagination to conjure up an excuse that had elements of truth
layered with exaggeration. Dreaming of scoring the winner at Highbury didn’t
make it onto the form.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">My back, however, is the most regular offender. It first paid a painful
visit about three years ago and has popped back about once a year since. On
that first occasion, I was seated at the station and stood up to walk towards
an incoming train. My back suddenly went into spasm and I crawled, almost on my
hands and knees towards the carriage.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">I spent the morning on the boardroom floor at work with a lap top
nestled on my chest. Luckily, I was able to procure a lunchtime physio
appointment (at this stage I’m such a regular customer, I clearly have gold
card status) and the application of some strange smelling ointments and some
acupuncture did the trick. I was able to shuffle home that night and within a
week or so, I was back to normal.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">For the purposes of my ACC form on this occasion, I was able to
reference an incident two days earlier, when I helped carry an 80kg table top
up two flights of stairs. I probably didn’t bend my knees properly on this
occasion, but then I was probably scared of doing more damage to them at the
time.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">You would think I would have learned from this experience, but two of my
subsequent issues with my back can also be traced to lifting things that a man
of my age should be avoiding.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">New Zealand is, of course, an active place to live. Part of the
attraction of living here is the great outdoors. Hiking, swimming and generally
being a sporty bloke is part of the deal.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">I’ll be 58 in a month’s time. That’s an age when you tend to look
towards retirement as opposed to a new career, for example. I think part of my
problem is accepting this. That my body is showing the normal levels of aging
and decay. Time, after all, waits for no man. When I was in my twenties, years
moved like treacle, these days they race like an express train.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">In the words of the great Leonard Cohen, I ache in the places where I
used to play. But I’ll keep fighting, raging at the dying of the light. I’ll
just be a little more careful when descending escalators and lifting anything
heavier than a pint of beer.</span></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-72213152818953455162023-02-03T10:21:00.001+13:002023-02-03T10:21:49.477+13:00Before the Deluge<p><span style="text-align: justify;">There was a time when I could think of nothing
better than having the opportunity to work from home. In my first job, I shared
a small office with two smokers who seemed to be engaged in a daily competition
to ingest the most nicotine. Back then most communication was done by telephone
and when I had my head down trying to work I would be regularly interrupted by
one of them shouting abuse at a tax officer or client who was slow in paying
his bill.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">At least the commute was easy. It was about ten
minutes on a bike, eight if the gale from the Irish Sea was behind me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Commuting has been an issue in every job I’ve
had since. I’ve sat in traffic jams for hours in London, Luxembourg and Dublin.
Melbourne was probably the best in this regard, but we couldn’t afford to live
in the city centre, so even with excellent public transport, I still spent two hours
a day on a tram or on my bike.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The technology to work from home was not in
place for most of my working life. I’ve owned a PC since the early nineties,
but it was only when I got to Australia in 2007 that I found a job that would
allow me to connect to work.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">But I was working for a Corporate Bank then,
with a boss with the management style of Tony Soprano. The work from home
option was set up to allow you to work at weekends or in the evening. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">My then boss was so old-school he was probably
educated in Latin. I had a colleague with a two hour each way commute who
wanted to work from home between Christmas and New Year. He was treated with
the contempt that a conscientious objector would have received during the First
World War.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">My current employer has always been more
flexible. They were pioneers of the concept of the four day week which they
adopted into a flexible model long before Covid came along. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">When that little respiratory tickle came along,
the game changed for everyone, in New Zealand and beyond. The first lockdown
was a novelty I guess. It lasted for seven weeks and we were amused by washing
our groceries with a damp sponge, zoom calls with friends and family overseas
and the chance to walk in parts of the city that are not normally open to plebs
like me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Auckland has had several lockdowns since and
they became progressively more boring as the novelty wore off. With each
lockdown I became more nostalgic for the old days of commuting and office life.
Commuting in particular is seen as a total negative. But my cycle to work kept
me healthy and gave me a front row seat of the city waking up each day. Even
when I was stuck in a car, I could listen to whatever I like without being told
to ‘turn that bloody racket down’. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Time in the office is a delicate balance
between fascinating social engagement and annoying assholes that you have
nothing in common with other than the same employer. But you can work this to
your advantage. I spent two hours today chatting to the people I like. We
discussed whether the new Auckland Mayor is as big a dickhead as the media are
portraying him and whether Ireland should throw the six nations championship
and concentrate on the World Cup. I work in a large open plan office were you
can see the dickheads approaching like slow moving Wildebeest on the savanna
and take appropriate avoiding action.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">But I also got lots of work done. Technology
has come a long way but you can’t beat standing at a whiteboard with somebody
to nut an issue out or having three screens and a colour printer at hand. I’ve
made a lot of improvements at home in the three years since Covid came along.
But it’s impossible to recreate the office set up experience. When I’m in the
office I plug my laptop in and sit back in my comfortable chair and watch all
my applications pop up magically. At home, I have to jump through more hoops
than a Russian hacker trying to get into the CIA database. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">These days I can work from home as often as I
like. During the school term, I drop my daughter to school, grab a coffee and
then amble into work. I work from home once a week, mainly to catch up on
admin. And I have to admit it’s nice to have the house to myself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">School was supposed to start again today and
normality would have resumed. Then the rain came and all that was thrown in the
air. Last Friday, parts of Auckland got 300mm of rain in 24 hours. That’s about
40% of the annual rainfall in Dublin, a city that I knew from personal
experience is wet and miserable for most of the year.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">It brought landslides, power cuts and flooding
to many parts of the city. We were told to work from home for the rest of the
week and school reopening got pushed back to next Tuesday. We got the dreaded
“home schooling” text from the school principle.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Triggered is a strong word. It invokes trauma,
memories of dark days buried in your sub conscious. But it feels appropriate.
Being told to work from home for even a day or two brings back memories of
those lockdowns. I’ve been working for forty years, most of that in an office
environment. I don’t exactly pine for it but I don’t like being told I can’t go
there. Covid brought more than a virus, it also unleashed an existential crisis
for many people. We have lost the ability to plan for the future with any
confidence. I’ll be back next week. At least I hope so. You can’t be sure of anything
these days.<o:p></o:p></span></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-84392709427969477182022-12-23T12:04:00.002+13:002022-12-23T12:04:24.706+13:00Engerland!<p><span style="text-align: justify;">One of life’s little pleasures is to receive a
message out of the blue from a long lost friend. This happened to me around
Christmas 2001, when one of those old fashioned airmail envelopes arrived at my
parents’ house. It was from a friend that I worked with in Luxembourg several
years earlier who had found an old letter from me when she was moving house.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">For younger readers, that’s how we used to
communicate with each other in the 90’s. You might have somebody’s landline,
but we were rarely home in those dance filled days, so the best way of getting
a message to them was through an old fashioned letter in the post.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Anyway, we started using a new- fangled
communication method called e-mail and even got to meet on one occasion. She
was English and a devout Christian, so we spent most of our day together in St
Paul’s Cathedral in London, mouthing sweet nothing’s to each other in the
whispering gallery.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">My memory is hazy, but I think I might have
harboured romantic intentions, but obviously not strongly enough to do anything
about them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Our email exchanges continued up to the 2002
World Cup in Japan and Korea. Ireland and England both qualified for that competition
and she mentioned in an exchange that she’d be cheering for Ireland in our
match against Spain and said she presumed that I’d reciprocate when England
were playing Denmark. I replied that 700 years of history prevented me from
supporting England in any endeavour.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I was then subjected to what would now be
called ‘ghosting’. I haven’t heard from her since. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I mention this because it highlights the
sensitivities English people feel towards the lack of support from Ireland for
their national football team.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">There are some in Ireland who see this as our
problem. That we have a national chip on our shoulder or that it shows common
currency with the extremists who supported the IRA during the troubles. They
argue that a modern, self-confident country wouldn’t feel the need to dislike
their neighbours. The people who put forward this point can be found arguing
for Ireland to re-join the Commonwealth and proudly display mugs with the image
of Princess Diana on their mantle-pieces. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I think this argument misunderstands the nature
of sport. That it is all about liking one team and having a rivalry with
another. It also misunderstands the nature of International sport. The key part
of this word is “nation”. We fly flags, sing national anthems, kiss badges but
then try to pretend that the events have nothing to do with the history of the
countries involved. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">This is a particular problem with England. They
have a colonial past and have left a trail of misery across Africa, Asia and
Ireland. And in the old Empire countries that were populated by European
settlement, they have made themselves unpopular by using the young of those
countries as cannon fodder in their various wars. I’ve lived in Australia and
New Zealand and they choose England as the country they would most like to see
lose at sport, if only because the English patronised and humiliated them in
the early days of the Empire.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">There is an assumption that if you hold a sporting
bias, then you must hate the people who support those teams. I support Louth in
Gaelic Football, Wexford in Hurling, Carlton in AFL and Arsenal in English
football. As a result, I dislike Meath, Kilkenny, Collingwood and Tottenham
Hotspur. I know many people who support these teams and while I enjoy winding
them up and they like winding me up, I don’t dislike them as people. Some of
them are my best friends.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Only my English friends seem to have a problem
with this sporting rivalry. It’s ironic, when they have no problem laughing at
German losses.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I wonder what the reasons for this are? I
sometimes think that English people have a soft spot for Ireland. That we are
the young cousin, that despite a few rebellious years, are still fondly looked
upon. They love our sense of humour, admire our music and flock to our pubs. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And maybe they can’t except when that beloved
younger cousin laughs at your pitfalls.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">But maybe it’s just that old fashioned lack of
proportion that sometimes happens in sport. I mentioned that I’m a Wexford
hurling fan. While we have an enmity towards Kilkenny, it’s not reciprocated.
They have ten times as many titles as Wexford and as a result they see us an
irritant and not a rival. Even more frustratingly, they’ll patronise Wexford
fans on the few occasions we beat them. We’d much prefer it if they hated us.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">England must feel the same towards us. We had a
few good years in the 80s and 90s but they don’t really see us as a threat. We
struggle to make tournament finals whereas they are always looking to win them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">This doesn’t happen in Rugby. Ireland are on a
par with England, if not better, and as a result, no English fan expects support
from Ireland.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I might be wrong of course. Maybe I do harbour
some deep seated republican sympathies. I bristle at Ireland being included in
the “British Isles” for example and particularly when people describe it as “just
a geographical description”. I also get annoyed when commentators talk about
The British Lions instead of their proper title of British and Irish Lions. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Rationally, I accept that I come from an island
that has a long intertwined relationship with its neighbour. My surname, for
example, has English roots. There is a lot at play. History, politics and the
normal rivalries that come with sport. I try to take all this into account and
to be as fair-minded as possible. But that didn’t stop me emitting a guttural roar
and leaping out of my seat and punching the air when Harry Kane smashed that
penalty over the bar against France. <o:p></o:p></span></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-72741170091044028632022-12-05T17:19:00.002+13:002022-12-05T17:19:36.077+13:00I measure out my life in World Cups - Part 3<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I last updated my World Cup odyssey in 2010,
when I was living in Australia and France were embarrassing themselves in South
Africa (karma, huh?). I wrote two installments of this tale in that long
Melbourne Winter and it’s time to update the story now. Twelve years and three
world cups have come and gone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">2010 became Annus Horribulis. By the time I’d
written the second part of this story, I’d already had a bike accident that
broke an arm, an eye socket and my cycling confidence. My Mother died two weeks
after the World Cup final that year. I can’t remember where I watched that game.
I’m guessing at home but the shadow of my
Mother’s impending demise hung over it.
I flew back to Ireland to say goodbye to her then flew back again a
week later for the funeral. Those were carbon-unfriendly times.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Later that year, I had a visit from the Big C
and paid the ransom of my left testicle to get it to go away. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">By the time the World Cup in 2014 rolled around
another seismic event in my life was taking place. I was made redundant in
April of that year and my departure from Australia was put in train. By the
time of the final in July, we were in a hotel in Abu Dhabi on our way to
Edinburgh. I watched the match at 1pm in the morning in the courtyard of the
hotel. It was Ramadan and while Abu Dhabi is not a big drinking place at the
best of times, during Ramadan it is like a Presbyterian wake. They set up a ‘bar’ in the courtyard for which
you had to pre-purchase tokens. I bought $50 worth of vouchers and that
entitled me to four small cans of Seven Up. That was the strongest drink you
could buy and made me realise that ‘bar’ has a different meaning in the Islamic
world than where I grew up.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">If nothing else, it convinced me that I would
never attend a World Cup in the Middle East. Thankfully, with the controversy
that is going on in Qatar right now, that is never likely to happen again in my
lifetime.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">2018 took place in Russia. Another country I
have no intention of visiting. I was living in New Zealand at this stage, but
cunningly booked a month-long visit to Ireland that allowed me to watch games
in real-time, or at least at times of the day when drinking is socially
acceptable. International sport is tailored for the European market. That means
that games are usually on in the middle of the night or early morning here.
That’s made me realise that I enjoy sport much more when I have a beer in my
hand.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I watched the England v Croatia Semi-final with
my Dad and we took guilty pleasure in England’s defeat. I was in Glenbeigh,
County Kerry the following weekend when the final took place. It was a
beautiful summer’s day, made better by the fact that I was in a pub.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Eight days later my Dad was dead. He passed
away in the early hours of the 24<sup>th</sup> July. Eight years to the day
since my Mother’s death. My father was a very thoughtful man and I’m sure that
he hung on past midnight so that we’d only have to pay for one anniversary mass
each year that would cover both of them. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I’m now onto my 15<sup>th</sup> world cup.
Don’t remember the first one (thankfully, as England won). But I reckon I’ve
watched all of the others, in six different countries. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">This year, the games are in Qatar. I’m glad
Ireland didn’t qualify. We’re rubbish at the moment and would only embarrass ourselves.
But the thought of thousands of Irish fans unable to get a drink of beer is
unimaginable. It also means we are not faced with the moral dilemma of playing
in a tournament mired in corruption and played in a country that fails to
respect gay people or migrant workers. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I read about this a lot in the woke European
media that fill my newsfeed. It reeks of hypocrisy of course. Take England for
example. As Irish people would know, they don’t have a proud record of treating
their own migrant workers well. No professional footballer in England has felt
comfortable enough to come out while still playing. This is because of the
negative culture towards LBGT culture within British sport. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">The underlying problem is that the whole world
is not moving at the same pace when it comes to what we define as human rights.
In fact, some of the world is moving backwards. America has recently allowed
for abortion to be made illegal in many states. It also allows for armed
militia to shut down gay bars. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Africa, Asia and South America are well behind
Europe when it comes to liberalising reproductive and sexual rights. There
seems to be an assumption that the World Cup should only be held in countries
that match the social and moral structures of Western Europe. This is the same
message that 19th-century colonialists gave. Only white men should
be in government because they are the ones with the education and culture to
manage the task. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">It’s a great danger to say that we’re better
than everyone else, that we exist on a higher plane. By all means campaign for
changes around the world, but if we boycott countries we don’t like, then we’re
at risk of excluding most of the world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Anyway, I’m boycotting much of this world cup
because the games are on in the middle of the night here. I will get up early
to watch the final though. It’s a 4am start here. But I have to keep up the
tradition of watching every final. I just hope that no seismic event in my life
happens at the same time. There is a lot to be said for a quiet life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"> <o:p></o:p></span></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-1165671811328190532022-11-14T16:44:00.003+13:002022-11-14T16:44:37.196+13:00Away with the Birds<p> <span style="text-align: justify;">Regular readers of these missives will know
that I don’t have a great fondness for animals. I like eating them of course
and I’ve sometimes taken pleasure in watching them race each other. But caring
for them as living sentient beings has always been beyond me. If truth be told,
as I progress into grumpy middle age, I find that I’m not even fond of most
humans.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">So, the events of the last month have taken me by
surprise. It started on a balmy Saturday night. Spring had uttered a chesty
cough and finally woke after a long slumber. We’ve had the wettest winter in
Auckland since records started, so when the sun finally returned, we broke out
the deck chairs and encamped onto our deck. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">As I relaxed with a refreshing APA in hand, I
noticed something on the back wall of our house. There, on a light fitting
about three metres from the floor was a bird’s nest. It seemed to me that it
had been constructed that day, but if truth be told, they might have been at it
for months. It was an intricate design of interwoven twigs that seemed to
conform to all the relevant building codes within the bird world. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">The only thing it was missing was a resident.
We wondered if it had been built and then abandoned after the birds realised
how many cats live in our neighbourhood. But the next day, we heard some
cheeping and found a fat, female blackbird perched majestically on top. I
should point out that I know as much about ornithology as I do about nuclear physics.
My wife was the one who made the
identification, including the important fact that female blackbirds are not actually
black. They are brown.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">She was wrong on one important matter though.
She reckoned we were watching solo parenting. That blackbirds were like bawdy
sailors, arriving into a different town each week, knocking up the ladies and
then high-tailing it (if you’ll excuse the pun) whenever an egg appeared. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Some loud chirping the next day disproved this
theory. Daddy blackbird (who is indeed black) had made a grand entrance and
wanted to let everyone in the neighbourhood know of his arrival. It became
clear that his visits were to allow his partner to temporarily leave the nest
and seek out food. When this happened, he rarely came to the twiggy home
itself. He would perch on a fence nearby, keeping a wary eye on the
neighbourhood cats and presumably letting the other birds know to stay away.
Once Mammy had returned with a full belly, he would leave without so much as a farewell
cheep.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Things changed when the kids arrived. We
noticed a couple of tiny, nervous beaks peeking out of the nest, arching their
necks whenever Mam came back with food. At this point, Dad became a bit more
hands-on. He stays with the nest now when Mam is out feeding and often arrives
with a couple of tasty worms that he shares with the family.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">What surprises me most is how interested I am
in all this. Our neighbour’s cat came for a visit and I found him climbing on
our garden furniture and making a beeline for the nest. I immediately grabbed
a broom and raced outside with murderous intent. The cat got the message and high-tailed
it back home. I then rearranged the furniture to make access more difficult.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">My wife and I now regularly check on the birds.
She has started leaving out food for them which they studiously ignore. These
are strong, independent hunters, well able to feed themselves from the bounty
in our garden. My daughter is less enamoured. She is a cat lover and hates the
way we portray them as potential chick killers. This has caused a rift in the
house based on which side of nature you want to prevail. Cats are not native to
New Zealand and they kill millions of local birds each year. Most native New
Zealand birds evolved to be ground dwellers and never expected a moggy to
arrive on a boat from England and trap them in their greedy paws.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">My daughter, who is far too smart for her age,
has pointed out that blackbirds are also not native. Somebody in the 19<sup>th</sup>
century thought it would be a great wheeze to bring all sorts of fauna to New
Zealand. Why they wanted to bring blackbirds is anyone’s guess. Perhaps they
snuck onto one of the early ships.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I don’t know the long journey their ancestors
took, but I’m glad that this couple of birds made it to my deck. It’s wonderful
to watch them interact, take care of their offspring and to bring new life
into our lives. I should also acknowledge that as pets go, they are very low maintenance.
They don’t need feeding or watering, don’t leave hairs all over furniture and
you don’t have to carry a small plastic bag to pick up their pooh.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">But of course, they are not pets. They carry on
as though we don’t exist. Somehow, they know we are not a threat and that the
cats are. We just happen to be the people who live in the house they have
chosen to stay at this year. When the chicks are old enough, they’ll fly the
coop and the parents will move on to their summer homes. If they survive the cat apocalypse,
there is every chance they’ll be back next spring to start the process off
again. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">And so the wheel of life keeps turning. My job
now is to see those chicks off into the new life. I’ll keep shoeing the cat
away and keep an eye out for that first nervous step out of the nest. Apparently,
this is a high-risk time. If that first flutter of wings doesn’t work, then
they’ll fall three metres to their death. I can’t even contemplate that
thought. But I’ll keep you updated. <o:p></o:p></span></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-88292808641917218472022-11-03T15:52:00.003+13:002022-11-03T15:52:29.318+13:00London in the Rare Old Times<p> <span style="text-align: justify;">Like many things from my early years, Dan Air
no longer exists. It was sold for a pound in 1992 to British Airways and
disappeared from the public imagination.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">In the eighties, however, it represented an
early incarnation of budget travel, albeit with a whiff of danger thrown in.
Eleven crashes in the previous twenty years had earned it the nickname “Dan
Dare”. This included an incident when a plane landed at the wrong airfield when
approaching Belfast Aldergrove airport.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">That was where I boarded a Dan Air flight for
the first and only time. I paid the princely sum of 39 pounds for a one way flight
to Gatwick in February 1988. I was leaving my hometown of Dundalk for the
bright lights of London. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I would end up
spending 22 of the next 34 years abroad.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">London became my home for five years. It would
have been longer but my girlfriend at the time had itchy feet and wanted to
move abroad. A year later, I discovered that her itchy feet weren’t confined to
where she lived. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">But London still holds a special spot in my
heart. I lived there during the formative years of my mid-twenties when the
world was a sun-drenched garden waiting to be explored. I was innocent and
curious. Full of energy and ready to throw myself into everything that the
metropolis had to offer. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Ireland in 1988 was a mono-cultural wasteland
in permanent recession. In that year, ninety thousand other young people made
the same decision as me and got out. Many went to New York or Boston, some to
the regional cities of Britain. But most, like me, went to London. There are
probably only five other cities in the world that could compare for opportunity
and excitement and for us, London was only an hour away on a rickety Dan Air de
Havilland Comet.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I had first visited London as a ten-year-old
and remember being amazed by the colours, smells and sounds. It was as though I
lived in a damp caravan with a black and white TV while a drug-fuelled disco
raved nearby. I came back as a nineteen-year-old for my brother’s 21<sup>st</sup>.
I remember walking around Soho and Covent Garden and being mesmerized by the anonymity
and freedom that London allowed. I can’t remember when I choose to move there,
but I’m sure the seed was sown that weekend.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I arrived on a Tuesday, played my first ever
organised game of adult football on the Saturday and then had my first ever
Indian Curry (a Chicken Korma, which at the time was the spiciest thing I’d
eaten). I had my choice of jobs and
picked the one with the best canteen, as cooking wasn’t a skill I had brought
from the old country.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Ireland has a complex relationship with its
nearest neighbour. Eight hundred years of invasion, rape and pillage will do
that to a friendship. We like to see them lose in sport and even the Eurovision
Song Contest and we get indignant if they claim one of our sport stars or
writers as their own. But we follow their club football teams, love their music
and watch their TV. We are also obsessed with their culture and history. I’d
wager that a higher percentage of Irish people could name Henry 8<sup>th</sup>’s
wives or the top British generals of World War Two than could their Anglo
counterparts.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I loved every minute of those five years and I
have visited London many times since. But I’m glad I don’t live there now.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">It’s with a feeling of sadness that I look at
what Britain and particularly England has become. In hindsight, the signs were
there in 1988. Thatcher was in her ninth year of power. She had gutted the
mining and manufacturing industries in the North and promoted a Financial
Services industry in the South. As a result, London boomed and I surfed that
wave like a kid in a sweet shop. I did well out of Thatcher’s policies and
earned enough to keep me in beer and curries, with plenty left over for travel
and nice cars.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I was too self-indulgent to realise that while
we were partying down south, the rest of England was in terminal decline. I saw
it occasionally. My Mother visited once. We took her to Chinatown to show off
the fantastic food options. She came out with a memorable line when we’d
finished our meal of noodles and dumplings. She asked my friend if he liked it ‘or
would he prefer his dinner’. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"> She
asked me to drive her to Leeds later that week, so she could visit her sister.
As we left the outskirts of London, we drove under a bridge where somebody had
painted “It’s Hell up North”. They weren’t wrong. I also visited a company
outside Manchester for work and was left with the impression that my hometown
in Ireland was more cultured and eclectic.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Those decisions by Thatcher have now caught up
with the English. The population outside London are now revolting. The Tories
bought them off for a few years by blaming everything on foreigners and immigrants.
But that lie is now been exposed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">England is now at a crossroads. History tells
us that when steam has left the kettle, it is not possible to force it back in.
All you can do is direct the course of travel. It could go left, as peasant
revolts have done in the past. The labour movement could harness it and drive
towards a socialist revolution.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Or it could go right. And unfortunately, that
looks like where it is headed. Towards populism, fascism and violence toward
anyone who doesn’t belong to the narrow band of heterosexual Englishness. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">This makes me incredibly sad. A country I
admire greatly has gone to the dogs and worse still, they might win the World
Cup and next year’s Eurovision Song Contest.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-29010971217369851692022-04-01T15:04:00.002+13:002022-04-01T15:04:16.496+13:00Dr Dolittle<p> <span style="text-align: justify;">My first visitor was a frog. A large green one
with a suspicious set of eyes and a lazy stride. At first I thought it might be
a modern day woke Prince, who thought nothing of approaching a middle aged man
in pursuit of a kiss. The frog certainly didn’t look very kissable to me. He
had an oily coat and spindly legs that propelled him up my driveway to my open
garage door.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">He probably would have marched inside, if I
hadn’t turned around at the crucial moment and stopped him in his tracks. We
stared at each other like characters in a Sergio Leone movie, and when he
showed no signs of retreating, I picked up a nearby broom and marched towards
him. The threat was enough and he scuttled back to the drain from which he
came. He is still there, five months after I first met him. He seems to have
not moved in that time, standing on a pipe below the drain cover, like a lonely
sentinel, perhaps waiting for a spoiled princess to arrive.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I’ve been sitting in my garage, with the door
open, for most of the last seven months. The country was closed down on August
17<sup>th</sup> last when Delta poked its head over the parapet and first
entered New Zealand. We got that under control just before Christmas and then went
on holiday. By the time we got back, Omicron had pushed Delta out of the way
and was sweeping through the country.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">At this stage, Jacinda threw her notes in the
air and said “I told you to wear a bloody mask, do what you f-ing like”. My
company interpreted this as come in to the office once a week. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">As a result, I’ve manned this lonely station in
my garage for more than seven months now. My wife goes into work, my daughter
goes to school, so for most of the day it’s just me and whatever member of the
animal kingdom stumbles up the driveway.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Pukekos are a regular visitor. They are a
variety of swamp hen and are numerous in our neighbourhood. We live near a
large pond and they nest there. Occasionally they wander up our street in
search of feijoas (a fruit unloved by most humans I know, but devoured by our
avian friends). They seem unafraid of humans and immensely curious. The broom
has to come out often when they are around.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Cats stroll nonchalantly past most days without
deigning to look inside. The exception is the pug faced mozzy from two doors
down. He regularly tries to sneak in and curl up on the old sofa that rests
against the back wall. He’s clearly unaware that I see cats as the hand-tool of
the devil. I don’t even bother with the broom for him. He normally gets the sharp
end of my toe.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">This annoys my daughter greatly as she adores
cats, dogs, and every other domestic creature. I haven’t the heart to tell her
that not only do I dislike all animals, I’m not even fond of most humans.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">The local pond is also home to a wide variety
of ducks. Four of them paid me a visit some time ago. They were a long way from
home, but looked like they were out for an afternoon stroll. They waddled up to door, had a quick look
inside and then flicked their beaks contemptuously towards me and wandered off.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">On hot days, skinks like to sun their slimy
backs on the bare concrete of the driveway. They are tiny lizards that live in
Auckland gardens. They rarely come into the garage and usually slink back in
the undergrowth if they catch me looking at them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">A large heron flew down last week and perched
on the lamppost across the street and peered over his long crooked beak like a
judge pontificating on a lenghty and boring court case. One of the street cats
stationed himself at the bottom of the lamppost and salivated as he surveyed
the large bounty above him. Then a crashing disappointment descended on the
poor moggy, when a couple of abortive attempts at climbing the lamppost proved
that it was impossible.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">The heron watched all this with barely
concealed contempt and then flapped his majestic wings and took off into the
afternoon sky.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">He was back on ground level the next day,
having confirmed that no cats were around. He marched up the street, stopping
at each house individually as though he was accessing how well each of us was
maintaining our properties.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">You’ll note that I haven’t mentioned dogs.
There are plenty in this neighbourhood but they are kept under lock and key and
only brought out for supervised walks. It’s not like my youth when mongrel dogs
would wander round all day, intimidating timid little boys like me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">There is a debate raging across the world on
whether the pandemic will lead to working from home being the norm, rather than
the exception. I think what’s missing from these conversations is the social
aspect of work. Whenever I’m in the office, a good part of my day is spent
chatting to colleagues. Even when its work related, you spend some time before
and after meetings catching up on weekend sport or the new best place to buy
coffee. You don’t tend to do this on Zoom calls.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I’ve been working in offices now for almost
forty years. That adds up to a huge amount of social interactions. I’ve met
some of my best friends through work, mainly by discovering that they shared my
enthusiasm for beer after work on Fridays.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">You miss all that at home. It’s hard to have a
social interaction with somebody you’ve never met. I’ll be happy to get back
into the office for a few days a week at least. In the meantime, I’ll have to do
my best Dr Dolittle impression and keep my interactions limited to the Animal
Kingdom.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-28841215055666469462022-01-10T20:34:00.003+13:002022-01-10T20:34:28.276+13:00A Postcard from Pauanui<p><span style="text-align: justify;">Body surfing is a skill that
Kiwis learn at an early age. You need a surf beach, of which there are
thousands spread around the coastline of New Zealand. Then you wade out to
about waist deep and watch the incoming waves like Keanu Reeves in Point Break.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">When you spot a “good one”, you
turn and face the beach and move to where you think the wave will break. Then
you dive headfirst into the water and assume the body shape of an eel. If you
time it right, the wave will carry you the whole way to the shoreline and
gracefully deposit you on the sand. If you time it badly, the wave will either
smack you on the head like you are an errant school child, or it will pick you up
like an old sheet in a tumble dryer and smack you un-ceremonially on the sea
floor. In between these two events, you will summersault with the grace of a
drunken hippo. But luckily this all happens within the wave and nobody will see
it. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The additional problem with this
manoeuvre is that you end some distance from the shore. You’ll, first of all, get
sucked out to sea by the undertow of the wave that just humiliated you. As you
struggle to your feet, the next wave, which is invariably bigger and stronger
than the one before, will smash into you with the ferocity of an All Black who
has just been mocked for knocking the ball on. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I took up body surfing at the age
of 43, much too late in life if I was ever going to achieve Olympic level
standards. In truth, I’ve only practised once or twice a year since. I’m less a
novice and more an occasional dabbler. As a result, my timing is terrible and I
end up losing my dignity and quite often my shorts on a regular basis. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Occasionally, I catch a sweet one
and the rush of adrenaline as you glide through the water is magnificent. In
the same way that a weekend golfer will sometimes catch a drive nicely and
convince himself that he is Tiger Woods, when I’m successful in the water, I like
to think I’ve finally mastered it. The truth is that the sea likes playing with
you. I’ve never managed more than one nice run in all my visits to the beach.
Maybe, I should learn from this and step out of the sea and grab my towel
whenever I’ve managed to time a wave right. But I never do.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I’ve managed to practice a lot
this summer. In the absence of foreign travel, we are keen to see as much of
New Zealand this holiday season as we did last year. We started with a week in
Pauanui. That’s a sandy spit on the west coast of the Coromandel peninsula,
dotted with multi-million-dollar beach properties. It’s the favourite retirement
destination for Waikato dairy farmers, who made their fortune servicing the
Chinese demand for milk powder. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Everyone owns a fishing boat with
a powerful outboard motor and they pull these down to the wharf each morning
using the 1950’s Massey Ferguson tractor that they rescued from the farm when
they retired. They have seamlessly replaced milking Friesians with coaxing
Snapper out of the sea. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">My father-in-law is one of these
retired farmers and kindly opens his door to us each Christmas. We stayed for a
week this time. Enjoying the beach and the slow bicycle race pace of life. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">It is a town of roughly 1,000
souls. At Christmas that swells to about 20,000 as the kids and grandkids of
the retired residents descend on the place, tempted by the allure of free
accommodation and their parents home cooking.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">As a result, at this time of
year, it’s difficult to get to the Supermarket or to the small number of cafes in
the town centre. Covid passport rules added to the complexity. Those of us who
live in Auckland have just come out of four months of lockdown when we couldn’t
leave the city. This was relaxed just before Christmas and it feels as though
the whole city has decamped to the beach. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Thankfully, most of the kids
headed home after New Year and the village went back to its traditional pace of
life. I say traditional, but in fact, this place hardly existed 50 years ago. It
was a sandy spit of land at the end of a long dirt road. A visionary developer
with an eye for a quick buck saw the potential. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The spit had a surf beach on one
side facing the Pacific Ocean. On the other, it had a calm harbour beach, safe
for kids and rubbish swimmers like me.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">He started building in an
unconventional style. There were to be no fences and sociability was encouraged.
He also built a grass runway to attract the burgeoning rich from Auckland who
wanted to splash out their wealth on light aircraft. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Many of the original residents
have passed away now and the houses have been passed on to their kids and grandkids.
This has made the place livelier but has also increased the number of fences.
It seems that our generation is not as sociable as the last.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">It’s a town that will always be
special to me as it’s the place I got married in ten years ago. It has
everything you need with one exception. For some reason, there are no pubs in
town. There are cafes you can get a drink in, but no traditional drinking establishment.
Maybe I should open one. I think you
could make a good living running a pub there. There are still a lot of retirees
living there and from what I can see, they all like a tipple. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">But until then, I’ll have to find
my thrills in the ocean. Watching the sun rise from the Pacific, and catching
that big one that serenades you back to the beach.<o:p></o:p></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-6834460059983143752021-12-22T12:01:00.001+13:002021-12-22T12:01:33.881+13:00In Memory<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">The sun was already sinking into damp western
fields when the red and cream CIE bus pulled out of the Long Walk car park. It
was the 4.20pm service from Dundalk to Galway, via every village in between.
This was the mid-eighties, long before the motorways that came to represent the
Celtic Tiger had been built. The trip was scheduled to take four hours but that
was merely a fantasy in a statisticians head. A double-parked car in Moate
could add twenty minutes to the trip and there were at least thirty similar
villages to pass through.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I was with my mate Dave. We’d hatched the
travel plan in the pub on Thursday night. We had a friend at college in Galway
who had regaled us with tales of wild drinking sessions and sing songs by open
fires with the Atlantic roaring outside. Galway had a reputation as the coolest
place in Ireland. We were huddled on the opposite coast in a town that had many
reputations, none of which could be described as tepid, never mind cool.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">After a few pints of Harp, we resolved to head
West the following afternoon and stay with our mate for the weekend. There was one
small problem. We didn’t know his address and it being the mid-eighties, we had
no phones either. We communicated back then by letter. A charmingly Dickensian
process that didn’t really work in last-minute spontaneous decisions. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">But Dave was an adventurous sort. He had
history in the Scouting movement and I trusted him to deal with the practical
side of things. I imagined he could furnish up a sleeping arrangement out of
moss and twigs if we got really stuck. I was in a low paid job at the time,
while he was surviving on a small college grant. We did a quick budget in the
pub on Thursday and figured out how much we’d need for two days of drinking, four
takeaway meals and the possible price of entry to a disco. We never even
thought about allowing for accommodation costs. A B&B back then would have
cost as much as ten pints of beer and that wasn’t a trade-off we were willing
to entertain.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Plan A was that our mate would be in a
particular pub in Salthill. That was the whole point of our trip. On a previous
visit to Dundalk, he had regaled us with tales of this mythical drinking
establishment. By all accounts, it had the best Guinness on the Western
seaboard. The best traditional musicians. The best view out into the Atlantic.
And the best looking girls from the Arts Faculty at UCG. We were convinced that
we would find him there.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">We travelled light, as we always did back then.
A couple of pairs of socks and jocks and a spare shirt wrapped up in a paper
tin sleeping bag. Anything else could be carried in the numerous pockets of our
Parka Jackets. But that hardly stretched beyond a toothbrush and a dog eared
paperback novel. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">We stored our sleeping bags on the overhead
racks and settled in for the long ride. We were just outside Mullingar when
Dave brought up the possibility that Plan A may not work. What if our friend
wasn’t there? We quickly put our minds to thinking of other possibilities.
There were a couple of other pubs that he had mentioned. Plan B and C covered
this. We did think about just getting back on the bus and spending four hours
driving east. That was plan D. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Throwing ourselves at the mercy of Church-run
homeless services was considered as was breaking into a church itself and
kipping on a pew. As we passed through the brooding town of Ballinasloe the
bronzed dome of St Bridget’s Mental Hospital peaked its pernicious nose through
the evening fog. Plan X was to affect a twitch and to talk in tongues in an
attempt to get a night’s stay in that scary institution. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">We had made it to Galway by the time we had
dreamt up plan Z. I’m guessing we walked from the city centre to Salthill. Our
budget certainly didn’t stretch to Taxis. We found the pub and to our immense
relief, our mate was parked at the bar, Guinness in hand and holding forth to
an attentive audience. We went on to have a wild weekend and budgeted perfectly so that we had just enough for the bus ticket back to Dundalk on the Sunday afternoon.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">On the 1<sup>st</sup> November last, Dave
packed his bags for the last time and headed off on a celestial journey. The
cancer he had battled for six years finally got the better of him. He had faced
that challenge with the same resilience and dark humour that accompanied all
our teenage adventures. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">When I was 17 I spent every Tuesday night at
his house listening to Simon & Garfunkel records. He brought a letter from
my first girlfriend telling me that she was taking our relationship on a
journey and I wasn’t invited. We stared out of the school window and he gently
put his arm around my shoulder. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I spent my first holidays away from my family
with him when we camped all over Ireland and then Europe. He was my first
flatmate when we moved to England. I stayed at his house in London when I
needed a stopover when my life took a left turn and I required an escape. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few
weeks thinking about those teenage years. All the great events of my life
between 15 and 25 had Dave at its core. He was the best of friends and the best
of people and it breaks my heart that I wasn’t there to say goodbye.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="background: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 115%;">It was the garden of the golden apples,</span></i><i><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 115%;"><br style="text-align: start;" />
<span style="background: white;"><span style="text-align: start;">The half-way house where we had stopped a day</span></span><br style="text-align: start;" />
<span style="background: white;"><span style="text-align: start;">Before we took the west road to Drumcatton</span></span><br style="text-align: start;" />
<span style="background: white;"><span style="text-align: start;">Where the sun was always setting on the play.</span></span></span></i><i><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p><span style="text-align: justify;"> </span> </p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-87143288863024261232021-11-26T15:19:00.007+13:002021-11-26T15:19:51.422+13:00Get a Jab!<p><span style="text-align: justify;">5,000 people protested outside New Zealand’s
parliament last week. If you took a photo of them and blurred the image of
Wellington’s iconic Beehive building in the background, you could imagine you
were in Washington DC on January 6</span><sup style="text-align: justify;">th</sup><span style="text-align: justify;">, or Paris when the maillot
jaunes were in town. Or pretty much any place in the Western World where Covid
restrictions are in place.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">There are nutcases all over the planet.
Protesting about lockdowns, vaccination mandates and simultaneously arguing that
Covid is a hoax but also a conspiracy to wipe out white people as part of the
great replacement project.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I’d usually find this stuff amusing. I laughed
at the antics of Trump supporters and the brexiteers getting themselves in
knots when trying to find a positive argument for the destruction they brought
upon their country.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I even found it funny when I’d pass two guys
draped in Union Jacks on my way to work on Monday mornings. They were
protesting Tommy Robinson’s continued imprisonment in the UK. Most Kiwis
wouldn’t know Tommy Robinson from a bar of soap, but it didn’t deter these two
brave souls from bringing a little bit of Barnsley to Auckland’s main street. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I stopped one day and pointed out the irony of supporting
an anti-immigration racist while being an immigrant themselves. Needless to
say, I didn’t convince them. Although funnily enough, I haven’t seen them since
the Christchurch shootings. So, maybe they finally examined their conscience
and found to their great surprise that they had one.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I’m not laughing today. We’ve been in lockdown for
14 weeks and let’s just say, it’s starting to get a bit boring. We’ve been
promised that things will change when the country hits 90% vaccination rates.
The only problem is that it has to be 90% in every health board district.
Auckland is a cosmopolitan city and we’ve already hit those heady highs. But
let’s just say that there are parts of the country where the Guardian Online is
rarely accessed but banjo playing is at a high standard.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">There is a theory that the Europeans who came
here and settled in the back of beyond, did it for a good reason and not just
because the land had been stolen from the locals and could be sold cheaply to
white immigrants. They did it because they had a strong sense of independence
and a dislike of the controlling government they were escaping. The South
Island of New Zealand in particular was settled by Scottish Presbyterians,
descended from people who weren’t going to be told what to do by the Pope or an
English Anglican Archbishop. There is a strong culture of questioning authority
among them. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">This has been bolstered by recent immigrants
from America and Northern Europe, who see New Zealand as the last great outpost
of libertinism. It makes for an interesting mix, with the local Maori and
Pacifica and the decedents of English and Irish, who came here in Victorian
times and still harbour some of those conservative Victorian values.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Needless to say, I keep a close eye on Irish
and New Zealand media when it comes to Covid. The countries have similar
populations, are ex-British colonies and perhaps most importantly, have decades
of under-investment in their health services. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">There is one obvious difference though. New
Zealand went hard and early in fighting Covid, whereas Ireland fell into the
same ‘will we or won’t we’ trap that beset Europe. As a result, approximately
5,000 people in Ireland have died from Covid, versus 33 in New Zealand.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Both countries, however, are trying to
vaccinate their population as quickly as possible. Ireland is ahead in this
area, mainly because those 5,000 deaths have somewhat focussed the mind. New
Zealand is catching up but it will be another few weeks before I’m allowed back
into the pub.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">While almost 90% of the population here have
taken the jab, you tend to only hear about the ones that haven’t. They are
noisy and well-funded and have tapped into other concerns that some kiwis have.
This includes the 5G rollout and the demand from the Government that farmers
stop pumping shit into the nation’s rivers.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">The evangelical churches play a large role in
these protests. This of course brings up a lot of my inbuilt bias when it comes
to the behavior of Catholics and Protestants. Catholics are communal and tend
to do what they are told. Vaccination depends on a whole community acting in
unison and Catholicism fits easily into this process. I haven’t checked but I’m
sure Catholic communities have a higher take-up of the vaccine than the other
Christian faiths. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">But of course, it’s not that simple. There is something darker at the heart of New
Zealand’s anti-vaxxers. Like in the US, evangelical churches here are split by
race. Maori and Pacifica belong to one set, while middle-class white people
attend other, more grandiose churches. The well-fed and well-paid pastors in
these places fill their congregations with tales of bygone days and how it has
all been stolen from them. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">These people have spent their life in ascendency.
They have rarely faced unemployment or homelessness. That happens to other,
less virtuous people who deserve what they get as a punishment for their
immoral lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">And then a pandemic comes along and they are
asked to restrict their lives in the same way as all the poor brown people.
This doesn’t compute in their tiny entitled brains. They have never had to suffer
in the same way as others. For the first time in their lives, they have been
told that they are just the same as everyone else.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">This is the same thing that happened under
Trumpism. They looked at a country that had elected Barack Obama and realised
that black people were now considered to be equal to everyone. That is a
scarier prospect than Covid itself. A world of angry white evangelicals. And
most of them have guns. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-62623164498271699712021-10-19T09:57:00.002+13:002021-10-19T09:57:24.336+13:00Lockdown Blues<p> <span style="text-align: justify;">I wrote a letter to the Irish Times “Emigration
Generation” section in January that I’m glad they never published. I also put
it up as a blog here, which I’ll leave up because it reflected how I felt at
the time. I come here now with a confession. But one I’m not going to beat
myself up over it. In the great words of Keynes, “when the facts change, I
change my mind.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Back in January, I had just returned from a two
week break in the South Island of New Zealand. Pubs and restaurants were open
and because there were no overseas tourists, it was easy to get accommodation.
My emotional memo to the Irish Times was based on my strongly held belief that
New Zealand was the best country in the world to be in, during these dark days
of Covid 19. I wanted Ireland to follow New Zealand’s example and close its
border to the outside world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">New Zealand enjoyed sixteen months or so of
relative freedom while the rest of the world fought with the virus. We had less
than thirty deaths and the hospitals ran smoothly without the need to cater for
coughing, virus sufferers. There was the occasional blip when a case would
sneak out of managed isolation, but we smugly patted ourselves on the back in
these times, because a snappy, short-term lockdown tended to smother these
outbreaks at birth.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Then Delta came along, and the whole ball game
changed. There was an inevitability about this. All the other countries in the
teacher’s pet section of the Covid classroom, such as Taiwan, Singapore and
Australia, had succumbed to the latest variant and proved that the strategy of
getting Covid numbers down to zero through a tough lockdown was futile. Delta
is a different beast from what came before and spreads faster than a conspiracy
on an anti-vaccination Facebook page. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">On the 17<sup>th</sup> of August, a single case
crept out of a managed isolation facility and drifted across the Auckland night
sky until it found a willing host. In line with the government’s strict and
hard-line policy the country was plunged into full lockdown immediately and we
all sat back in our protective bubbles and expected it to be over in a couple
of days.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">That was two months ago. I’ve been working from
home in that time while trying to home school my daughter. I’ve had a lot of
time to think as I sit at the kitchen table each day. It is clear now that New
Zealand took a massive gamble that came very close to paying off but looks like
it might fail at the final hurdle.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Due to geography and a strong left-wing
government that prioritised public health, New Zealand kept Covid at bay while
thousands died overseas and lockdowns became the norm. We lived a normal life
here and became the poster child of left-leaning editorials all over the world.
It was hard to open the Guardian or New York Times online and not find a
glowing article about Jacinda or smug kiwis at sports games or music gigs. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Everybody knew that this was akin to keeping
your finger in a dyke. Sooner, or later you’re going to have to fix the leak or
the person providing the finger will collapse with hunger and exhaustion and
the flood will come in. The gamble that New Zealand took was to kick off a
vaccination program and hope that this would be high enough when the day
eventually arrived that delta took hold within the community. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">You can trace the day this bet went sour. Back
in the middle of June, a limo driver in Sydney picked up an International
flight crew. He was unvaccinated and wasn’t wearing a mask. More than 400
people have died in Sydney from Covid since that fateful taxi ride.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">New Zealand has a close connection to
Australia. Thousands of kiwis live over there and one of them brought the virus
with them when they came home. The government shut the country down straight
away but the genie was already out of the bottle. The numbers didn’t get out of
control but almost from the first day, it was obvious that the public wasn’t
quite as compliant as in the initial shutdown of 2020. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Back then, everything was novel. The whole
world was shut down and the internet was full of Joe Wicks fitness videos and funny
home movies. There was a sense that we were all in this together and New
Zealand embraced this. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">This time, there is a sense that the rest of
the world has moved on. Pressure from business and right-wing parties to open
up is rising every day. This is highlighting a fissure that runs through every
aspect of New Zealand society. There is inequity here that most people overseas
don’t notice. When they watch the All Blacks, they see a happy combination of
white and brown people. When people come here on holiday, they don’t tend to
spend time in poverty-ridden suburbs of Auckland and Wellington. And when you
meet Kiwis overseas they will talk in glowing terms about how they treated
their native population so much better than the Australians did.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">But the truth is that Maori are disadvantaged in
education, health, and pretty much every other aspect of society. Many of them
live in cold and damp homes, so are most vulnerable to respiratory illness and
to have underlying health conditions. They tend to work in the sort of
businesses (such as Supermarkets) that have stayed open during lockdown.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">When you add to this that many young Maori feel
disconnected from society, then it’s not surprising that Maori vaccination
rates are low and they are overrepresented in current cases.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">If we open up early, many of these Maori will
die from Covid. That’s the position New Zealand is in today. And while many
people love Jacinda, I don’t envy her for having to make that choice.<o:p></o:p></span></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-62029970970763904792021-09-11T19:34:00.003+12:002021-09-11T19:34:54.703+12:00The Gilded Cage<p> <span style="text-align: justify;">This is the second anniversary of my last
overseas visit. That was a short hop to Sydney for a two day work trip. I
thought nothing of it at the time, as I was a regular visitor to Australia. My
sister lives in Sydney and my favourite sports team is in Melbourne. So,
jumping across the Tasman was a frequent feature of my first three years in New
Zealand.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I also managed two trips to Ireland in that
time and planned to go back once every two years in the future.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Travel has always been passion. I qualified as
an Accountant when I was 22 and started earning a decent salary. I had simple
tastes, a few beers at the weekend. The occasional takeaway curry. I didn’t
spend money on fancy cars or designer clothes. I didn’t gamble, smoke or dabble
in Columbian marching powder as so many of my colleagues did.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I spent my money on overseas trips. It started
with an Interrail excursion when I was 20 and by the time I was 30, I’d
visited almost every country in Western Europe. I came out of a doomed
relationship at that age and that drove me further, to look for solace and
comfort in the Southern Hemisphere. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I bought a ‘round the world’ ticket that year
and spent five months working my way around the planet. My trip took me to Hong
Kong, then to New Zealand with a few days in the Cook Islands and Hawaii on the
way home. That cemented my love of flying and the thrill of seeing new
places. I used to really enjoy aviation,
the thrill of the acceleration down the runway, the scream of the engines as the
plane clawed its way into the clouds. I even enjoyed the smells. Aircraft fuel,
the hot soupy air that met you when you landed in a foreign city and that faint
aroma of coffee and stale beer that you find in every airport terminal. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">But it was the destination that always drew me
to those flights. I’ve seen the world and kept on running and sometimes I ran
back to places I’ve been before.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">I’m blessed that when the music stopped, I
found myself in New Zealand. If you’re going to live through a pandemic, then
this is the best place to do it. We’ve enjoyed a normal lifestyle for much of
the last eighteen months, albeit with the occasional lockdown thrown in. I’ve
even managed to squeeze in a plane journey in that time. We headed down to the
South Island just after Christmas. That was fun, but it barely satisfied my
thirst for adventure.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Four weeks ago, Auckland went into its fourth
lockdown. The dreaded Delta variant had finally sneaked into New Zealand and
had wormed its way through the city before anyone noticed. I’ve coped pretty
well with the previous three but I’m finding this one tough. Staying at home
doesn’t bother me too much. It’s a little boring and I’ve demonstrated beyond
doubt that I was never cut out to be a teacher. It’s the Groundhog day feeling
that gets me and the sense that this will go on for a long time. New Zealand is
determined to keep working on an elimination policy which means that borders
won’t be open any time soon. It means that all Kiwis need to be vaccinated and
everyone coming in and out of the country would need to be vaccinated too.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">This is a big ask and will take many months to
accomplish. My worry is that is an unachievable goal. Like every other country,
New Zealand has its fair share of tin foil hatted nut cases that are running an
anti-vaccination campaign. It would be nice if we lived in a world where only
anti-vaxxers could catch the virus, but it’s not as simple as that. About 10%
of the vaccinated population would catch it and we have to pay for the
anti-vaxxer buggers when they get hospitalised.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">In the meantime, we are following what’s known
as an “Elimination Strategy”. That means tough lockdowns like the one we’re
currently going through until we fully wipe out any infestations. Then we open
everything up except the border.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Strangely enough, this felt fine until the Delta
variant arrived at the beginning of August. We could go to the pub, sports
events and so on, while the rest of the world suffered in their lockdown. Now
the roles have been reversed. I’m stuck in the garage most days trying to work
and do homeschooling, while I listen to Northern Hemisphere podcasts and
reading the Irish Times. The rest of the world seems to be opening up while New
Zealand clings to its high principles.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">It feels, as my favourite NZ economist said,
that we live in a gilded cage. It’s a cage that has kept the country healthy,
avoided the deaths that other countries have experienced and meant that we’ve
lived relatively normal lives for most of the last eighteen months. But the
Delta variance has made people wonder what the exit strategy is. It sort of
feels like the American invasion of Afghanistan (and feels almost as long).
It’s easy to start off a policy, but more difficult to end. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">New Zealand doesn’t have the ICU beds to deal
with a major outbreak. That’s why they go with the elimination strategy. One
unchecked Airbus A380 from Asia would likely overwhelm the hospital system
within days. Alternatively, you could vaccinate the entire population but even
if we met that unlikely target, the numbers of edge cases would probably still
destroy the health system.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Which means we have to wait for the rest of the
world to sort the problem out. They might discover a magic vaccine that is 100%
effective or let the virus rip through the countries until it wears itself out.
Neither of those things are likely to happen soon. In the meantime, I’ll have to
find some other corners of this gilded cage to visit.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-62471740850808809162021-07-06T16:11:00.002+12:002021-07-06T16:11:56.781+12:00The Four of Us<p><span style="text-align: justify;">The text would usually arrive around 2pm on
Saturday afternoon. There were four us and we’d do our best to avoid being the
one to send it. Nobody wanted to appear needy. But by 2pm one of us would
crack.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">“Anyone fancy a few scoops tonight? Bettys at 9
bells?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">We had our own code for beer drinking. We asked
for Charlie Birds rather than Carlsberg, a pint of Arthur rather than Guinness
and a wedgy was a drink bought outside of the tightly controlled and monitored
round system. It was all part of the comfortable vocabulary of drinkers, ‘the
wink and elbow language of delight.’<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Our numbers would vary depending on high days
and holidays, but we had a core group of four. There were three of my school
friends who had settled down in our hometown. And myself, the one who
stubbornly refused to live in that hometown since the day I left in 1988, but
still felt a gravitational pull most Saturday afternoons.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">We would settle into Betty’s pub at 9pm. If we
were lucky, we’d get our favourite corner seat which gave easy access to the
bar and more importantly as the evening progressed, provided a clear run to the
toilets.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I had my leaving drinks there, before I took
the long road South in 2007. Celebrated birthdays, Christenings and Weddings.
Put an arm round friends after funerals and enjoyed the many ordinary nights in
winter when a joke would be cracked that would make that night magical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Betty has long since gone to the great pub in
the sky and the pub shut well before Covid had the chance to put the final nail
in its coffin. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I was the first of that group of four to
succumb to Cancer. In hindsight I was the luckiest. Testicular Cancer is the
most survivable and I’m now eleven years free of the Big C, despite the best
attempts of a specialist last year to convince me otherwise.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I was in Ireland in 2015 when the second guy
was diagnosed. We met up in Bettys that Christmas and I noticed he wasn’t
drinking. That was a red flag given our previous history. He explained that he wasn’t
feeling well and was getting tests. It spiraled pretty quickly after that and
he’s still fighting Cancer to this day. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When
I speak to him and hear what he’s going through I feel embarrassed for ever
making a fuss about my brush with the disease. I had an operation and was
discharged the same day. Spent a week with my feet up, enjoying the pain
killers I left the hospital with. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Chemo was even easy in hindsight. It came with a
side serving of anxiety, but I had no discernible side effects. I’ve had scans
and so many blood tests that my arm feels like a second-hand dartboard. But
these were all precautionary and if nothing else, got me time off work.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">My mate has had more Cancer than any single
person should have to endure, but bears all this with a stoicism that shames
those of us who have moaned about the petty troubles of our lucky lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Not long after my mate was visited by the
tumour ghost, it came looking for another victim. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was Leukaemia this time. That ghoul that
tricks its way into your bloodstream. This struck down the third member of my
drinking group. But thankfully, he got back on his feet and so far at least, he
has fought it off.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The last time I was home was in July 2019. I
met my mates in a new pub and the subject of Cancer came up. We joked with the
fourth guy in the group. His time would come.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">That time came last Thursday. I woke up to a
message on our Whatsapp group. He announced that he had bowel Cancer and was
going in that day to have the tumour removed. He’s now recovering from having
the tumour removed and is trying not to think about the long journey he’s about
to embark on. You eat an elephant one bite at a time and the same applies to
living with Cancer. There is no need to worry about the long term when there is
enough activity going on this week.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Now that all four of us have has danced with Cancer,
you might ask if Betty was putting something dodgy in the beer. It could be a
statistical blip. 40% of people will get Cancer at some stage. It might have
been 100% of our group but that could be put down to bad luck.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">There are stories of radioactive winds blowing
across the Irish Sea from Sellafield. But if this was the cause, we would have
all developed the same type of Cancer, when in fact each of us had a unique
form. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">We’ll probably never know and I’m not sure I’d
want to anyway. Ignorance will at least allow all of us to believe that our ailments
were caused by factors beyond our control.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">It’s now July 2021 and ordinarily, I’d be
planning a trip back to Ireland around now. But we don’t live in ordinary
times. We live in the era of Covid, when International travel seems as a likely
as Ireland winning a major football tournament. I try not to think about this
too much, but since I found out about my mate’s condition last week, it’s been dominating
my thoughts. I would like nothing better than to spend a night in Ireland,
holding up the corner of a bar and drinking with those same three friends I
spent so many fun nights with. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">We would trade war stories, reminisce about old
times, outdo each other with shaggy dog stories and raise a glass to Betty and all
those who have gone before us.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Then we would stumble out into the streets in
the wee small hour and scream to the Gods above. Covid can go fuck itself and Cancer
can too. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-89556697516332207792021-05-05T16:09:00.002+12:002021-05-05T16:09:20.761+12:00Thoughts in the time of Covid<p><span style="text-align: justify;">Back in January, I passed through Customs Street in Auckland, my head
down and my headphones firmly lodged in my ears. I was listening to the RTE
Playback podcast. The street bustled with commuters hurrying to trains and
ferries, in an urgent rush to get home or to the beach for a swim. The crowds
around me in shorts and t-shirts offered a contrast to the stories of Mother
and Baby homes, winter snow and Covid restrictions that were filtering through
my headphones.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 106%; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-NZ; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">My path was blocked by a middle-aged woman, with one hand clasping a
phone to her ear while her other hand pressed against the glass door of the
Grand Mercure Hotel. As I got closer, I noticed a younger woman on the other
side of the glass. Her hands also cradled a phone while her palm was squeezed
against the door. They laughed and cried in equal measure. Mother and daughter
separated for years and now almost within touching distance.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 106%; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-NZ; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">New Zealand’s approach to Covid was summed up in their emotional
exchange. With a few exceptions, only Kiwis are allowed to fly back to their
home country. When they do, they are bussed straight to Hotels that are fenced
off and guarded by the NZ Defence Force. They spend two weeks there, getting
tested regularly and after 14 days, they can step through that glass door and
enter into the free world beyond. It can’t be easy being so close to your
family but not able to touch them, but 14 days in a nice hotel is a small price
to pay for the benefits that lie ahead.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 106%; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-NZ; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Being Irish in New Zealand is an odd experience at the moment. Most of
us chose to live here because it is a beautiful country with easy-going people
and an outdoor healthy culture. Last March, we were handed an additional gift.
We found ourselves living in the country with the best approach to the virus in
the world. We have a government that listens to its scientific advisors and a
public that complies with the restrictions. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 106%; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-NZ; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">As a result, we have spent most of the last year living normally. Going
to concerts and football matches. And more importantly, being able to drink
white wine in the sun in a busy beer garden. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 106%; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-NZ; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">This elicits a little guilt. We have Zoom and Facetime and can see how
tough our relatives and friends are doing it back home. But I think what upsets
us most, is that we know that what worked here could also work in Ireland. We
live on Islands, we have similar populations, we have a large number of hotels
that will be empty if foreign tourists are kept out.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 106%; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-NZ; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">When New Zealand’s success in battling Covid is mentioned online, an
army of people who have never been here will reply with explanations ranging
from the remoteness of the place, the low density of the population and the
fact that hobbits are immune to the virus. New Zealand might be thousands of
kilometers away from anywhere else, but international air travel means that
nowhere is remote. Pre-Covid, thousands of tourists arrived here each day.
Auckland has a higher population density than Dublin. And as for the hobbits,
they packed up and left when the tourist buses stopped coming round.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 106%; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-NZ; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The real reason for New Zealand’s success is that it threw a quarantine
blanket around its borders and told its citizens they could no longer go to Fiji
or Queensland on their holidays and that trips to support the All Blacks
overseas was off the cards.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 106%; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-NZ; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Some right-wing commentators overseas see this as an open prison. That
we are trapped on an island surrounded by barbed wire. In fact, anyone that can
afford an airfare is free to leave any time you want. It’s only awkward when
you want to come back. And if you are willing to spend a couple of weeks in a
nice hotel, then coming back is manageable too. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 106%; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-NZ; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">In return, we were offered a ‘normal’ life. The only real change is that
Kiwis had to holiday in their own country this year. We saw parts of NZ we had
never been to before and in doing so, helped the tourist industry, which has
taken the brunt of the Government's border decisions. Statistics so far show
that the tourist industry is holding up. Kiwis are getting to do things they
always wanted to do, such as walk one of the countries famous national trails,
which were previously booked out by overseas tourists. We noticed this
ourselves in January when we holidayed in the South Island and most places
were busy.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 106%; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-NZ; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Recently, New Zealand opened up a bubble with Australia and will soon do
the same with the Cook Islands. This means that quarantine is not required for
travel between these places and indicates that life is slowly getting back to
normal. As vaccines roll out across the world, this will also help to bring us
back to the days before that bat bit somebody in Wuhan. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 106%; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-NZ; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">I see that Ireland has introduced the Hotel quarantine model in a limited
form. I think it’s a no-brainer. The alternative is the constant drip-feed of
lockdowns, the tragic daily death toll and crippling pressure on the health
service. Throw a blanket across the borders, quarantine new arrivals and sit
back and enjoy the normality. If the biggest price to pay is that you have to
spend your holidays in Cliften this year, listening to a trad session while drinking
a creamy pint of Guinness, then take it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 106%; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-NZ; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">It also means that I’ll be able to get back to Ireland sooner than I had
dreaded. If I don’t get to return until July 2022, it will be the longest time I’ve
ever been away from my homeland. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 106%; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-NZ; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Nothing would make us Irish Kiwis prouder than seeing our home country
emulate New Zealand’s actions. And it might even ease the guilt of spending
another warm evening at the pub. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-2866427078796889082021-04-27T14:46:00.000+12:002021-04-27T14:46:58.051+12:00Beer<p><span style="text-align: justify;">This story starts in July 1981. The Hunger
Strikes in Northern Ireland were entering their grim final denouement, Reagan
was invading Central America and warming the coals under the Cold War cauldron
and Thatcher was just starting on her project to destroy the social cohesion
that Britain had enjoyed since the war.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">But I was oblivious to this. I was 16 and
setting off on my first independent adventure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Father of one of my friends was the local station manager and had
sourced cheap tickets for three of us to travel the country at our will. We
borrowed a tent and packed the backpacks that had nestled in our cupboards
since our days in the Scouts.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">We ended up camping in sand dunes just outside
Tralee in County Kerry. We had barely two pennies to rub together, so free accommodation
was a priority. On our last night before heading home, we pooled our remaining
cash and decided to execute a plan that had been bubbling through every
conversation for the previous two weeks. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We planned to buy beer.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">We approached the off-license warily. None of
us could muster the hint of bum fluff on our upper lips and we looked as guilty
as a guy in a mask and stripy jumper in an Art gallery.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Conor was chosen as the oldest looking and most
confident. He approached the shop nervously and we waited outside for what
seemed an eternity. Then he emerged, grinning from ear to ear and clutching a
six-pack of Harp Lager to his chest. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">We raced back to the tent and prized open three
bottles. It would be years until we realised that beer should be served cold,
but at that moment we didn’t care that the bottles we held were as warm as tea.
We gulped them down greedily. I seem to remember a fight then breaking out.
Same as it ever was, I guess.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">We awoke the next morning and packed up for the
trip home. We still had three bottles left and didn’t want to carry them. So,
we drank them before we left. This grew into an urban myth that we had poured
beer onto our cornflakes. The truth was more prosaic. We rose late as we did
every day on that trip and were packed and ready to go at 2pm. I’ve started
drinking earlier than that on many occasions. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">It is now almost forty years since my first taste
of the amber nectar and I’ve been a regular visitor to the well ever since. It
took almost 18 months from that first venture into the world of beer before I
had my second. By then, I was in full-time employment and able to stand my own
round. I got drunk for the first time at a work Christmas party in December
1982 and at almost every Christmas party since.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I’d be reluctant to estimate how much beer I’ve
drunk in the interim, but suffice to say that my sister once described me as a
not too complicated mechanism for turning alcohol into urine.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">But I sat in a pub last week, fresh from turning
56 and finally took some time to contemplate my relationship with beer. I’d
been invited on a pub crawl around four of Auckland’s most famous craft beer
pubs. We were there for the Fresh Hops Festival, an annual event when craft
beer companies are able to extort even greater revenue from their punters than
they normally do. I had just tucked into my third pint of the day, a cloudy
Extra Pale Ale, when I realised that I don’t actually like this craft stuff. My
companions were all searching for the hoppiest, darkest beers they could find. They
wanted something that was as far away from the generic beers of Heineken and
Carlsberg as possible.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">In that moment, I realised that despite forty
years of drinking the stuff, my tastes are still the same as they were in 1981.
I like Lager. I’ll tolerate a Pilsner but anything with Ale in the title can
disappear up its own arse, as far as I’m concerned. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I drink beer to be social, to loosen up
conversation, and to get merry. I don’t drink it for the flavour. As long as it’s
cold and refreshing I couldn’t care what it tastes like. I realise now that my
favourite memories of drinking do not involve what was in the glass that I was
holding. My memories are of the company or the venue. A thatched roof cottage
in Doolin with a fiddle band playing and the Atlantic Ocean crashing outside.
The bar in Raffles Hotel on a sultry afternoon in Singapore. The Great Northern
in Melbourne on ten-dollar steak night. I probably drank Guinness in Doolin,
Tiger Beer in Singapore and Carlton Draught in Melbourne but none of that
matters to me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Craft beer is now the assumed beer of choice
for men of a certain age. You are expected to mock the generic, mass-produced
beers in the way a fine diner mocks McDonalds. I’ve seen these phases before
however. You see it with coffee, where instant coffee is frowned upon and
unless the beans have been passed through the intestinal system of a Malaysian
monkey, they are not acceptable. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I’ve seen it with Wine. Blue Nun used to the
perfect gift at a dinner party, now it would be akin to bringing a bottle of petrol.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I’ve decided I’m too old for this. You can’t
teach an old dog new tricks and I’m set in my ways. From now on, I’m only going
to drink what I want and not be bullied into going with the crowd. I just hope
that all the favourite places I’ve drunk in will be accessible in the future.
That I can visit old friends and continue the odyssey of travel and adventure
that I started in 1981. That one day we can celebrate an end to this pandemic.
I’ll raise a glass to that. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-80723106427402525152021-04-05T16:21:00.003+12:002021-04-05T16:21:42.723+12:00A Funeral in Lockdown<p><span style="text-align: justify;">My Mother-in-Law passed away recently. She was
a lovely woman but had been sick for a long time. So long in fact, that I have
no memory of her being healthy. I met her first thirteen years ago and she was
frail then. Parkinsons and several other diseases wrecked her body and she
spent the last two weeks of her life unconscious in hospital after a stroke and
my wife spent almost every night with her.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Needless to say, when the passing finally came,
my wife’s family were exhausted and full of the emotional conflict that arises
in these situations. Part relief, part grief and mostly tiredness. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">It happened on a Friday night and my wife’s
family gathered the next day to arrange the funeral. They had shared the strain
of looking after their Mother in those last few weeks and it showed on their
faces and in their thoughts. Somebody suggested a slide show at the funeral,
another suggested that the congregation should be invited one by one to come up
and give voice to the memories. It was then that my wife pointed out her Mother
was a devout Catholic and at the very least she would want a Catholic funeral.
Nobody saw a problem with this. Surely the local church would be amenable to
them changing the entire service to suit their needs.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">It became clear to me at this point that I was
in a room of Atheists and Protestants (my own Mother would have said they were
one and the same). I stepped forward at this point and offered myself as the
representative of the Holy Church of Rome. I spent the first 22 years of my
life going to Mass, so I could still remember the basic rules.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I didn’t let on that I had stopped believing in
God in my twenties, around the time that I realised that there was very little
evidence that God believed in me. My attendance rate at Mass had diminished
ever since. But I’ve still gone along at Christmas, Easter, Weddings and
Funerals and knew that the words hadn’t changed much in the interim. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">And while I no longer believe in God, I still
have respect for the Church. I saw how they helped when my parents died, how
the Church provided structure and support. I was married in a Catholic Church
and it provided a foundation to the day and some mighty fine hymns. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">So, I set about choosing the readings and
prayers of the Faithful. I arranged to meet the Priest and to become the family’s
point of contact for all things Churchy.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">We adjourned at that point to the living room
and tucked into a bottle of whiskey to toast the dearly departed. The plan was
that we would all drive down to the Coromandel coast the following day, to the
seaside community where my Parents in Law had retired. We came home and my wife
went to bed to try and get her first decent night’s sleep in a week. I tucked
into a six-pack while researching appropriate readings from the Letters of St
Paul.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The first thing that struck me was his
diligence. He kept writing to the Romans, Corinthians, etc with no evidence that
any of them ever wrote back. He never starts his letters with “I refer to your
letter of the 4<sup>th</sup> inst”. The other thing that struck me was the
number of readings that dealt with violence and misogyny. I realised from our
Saturday discussion that I was dealing with a congregation that used secular funerals
as their point of reference. They were used to Joni Mitchell's lyrics and not the
rantings of a wandering disciple from the first century. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I was on my fifth beer when my wife’s phone
rang. I ignored it. She was deep into a well-deserved sleep and I didn’t want
to disturb her. Then my phone rang and I realised it must be important. It was
my brother-in-law telling me that Auckland was just about to go into one week
of Lockdown. The road South was due to close at 6am the following morning,
which meant that if we didn’t leave soon, we’d be stuck in Auckland and unable
to make the funeral. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I immediately woke my wife who was bounding for
the car before I could stop her. I reminded her that we had a sleeping child
upstairs and that both of us had drunk more than we should if we were to take
command of a heavy vehicle. We compromised on going to bed and rising at 4am to
get through before the check-points were installed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">New Zealand has largely escaped the trials and
tribulations of Covid. We had one serious lockdown last March and April, but
otherwise, it has been life as normal here. But when something happens the
country takes it seriously. While we had escaped Auckland before the shutters
came down, others who had intended to come to the funeral weren’t so lucky.
That included the Priest who initially was supposed to take the service. My
first job on the day we arrived on the coast was to source a new celebrant and
venue. While we were away from the hotspot of Auckland, the rest of the country
was in level two which meant a maximum of 100 at the funeral. It also required
two-meter distancing between groups in the congregation. A quick Maths
calculation suggested that this will limit the funeral to about 25 if we used
the small church in the township my in-laws lived in.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Luckily another Church in the neighbouring town
was found and the Funeral Mass went off without a hitch. We even rigged about a
laptop and set up a Zoom call for all those overseas who couldn’t make it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">My Mother in Law would have liked it, I think. And
my Mother would have been proud of me too. All that Mass going as a child had finally
paid off. <o:p></o:p></span></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638830639453654370.post-56660329547720347942021-01-17T14:37:00.000+13:002021-01-17T14:37:12.589+13:00Social Networking<p><span style="text-align: justify;">2020 has now passed. I guess a lot
of people did things they would never have dreamt of doing in that year. Homeschooling, drinking wine at midday on a workday, googling ‘how to turn the microphone
on for Zoom’, wearing masks, bumping elbows rather than shaking hands.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I’m lucky enough to live in the
western country with the best record for managing Covid. But the pandemic has coughed
over the land of the long white cloud too. We went into lockdown in March at
the same time as I had been given what turned out to be a false cancer diagnosis.
I was put into the high-risk category and banished to the garage. I fashioned a
work station in the corner and prepared to face the world for the foreseeable
future from that lonely space on an Auckland suburban street.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">One morning back in March, in
that bubble of boredom and isolation, I did something I swore I’d never do. I
signed up for Facebook and Twitter.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I’d always felt that I was initially
too old for Facebook and then too young. When it emerged in the early
naughties, I was already in my mid-thirties and still obsessed with socialising
in that old fashioned way of meeting people face to face. Facebook was used by
teenagers locked in their bedrooms and raging with hormones and desperation
to connect to the wider world. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Somewhere along the way, Facebook
became uncool for this generation. Tik Tok and Snapchat better suited their
short attention spans and when they discovered that their grannies had just
befriended them and you risked your inheritance if you continued to post pictures
of drunken orgies on a channel shared by your relatives.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Around this time, laptops and
Ipads dropped in price and they became a common Christmas present for the over
sixties, so they could email their kids who had emigrated to Australia. Email was
the entry drug but Facebook became the crack cocaine for the older generation.
Once they realised they could trace that girl they used to fancy in school fifty
years ago, they were hooked.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Clever old Facebook then filled their
timeline with racist and conspiratorially rubbish and we ended up with Trump
and Brexit. But that’s a story for another day.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">When this pivot to an older
audience happened, I thought I was too young and hip to be on a crinkly’s platform.
Facebook had become uncool but I found that as well as being a forum for gossip
and racism, it was also the practical place on the internet for updates and
information. I’m a keen amateur actor and wanted to know about upcoming plays. Groups
don’t bother updating their website anymore. They just have a link saying “Check
out our Facebook page for details”.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, is
another term I only became familiar within 2020. Stuck in that garage in
March, I clung to the possibility of the world reopening and feared that if I
wasn’t on Facebook, I’d still there while the rest of the world partied. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">There was also the added attraction
of our local community Facebook page, which along with an annoyingly high
number of cat pictures contains many hidden gems in local xenophobia and naked
racism.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I came to Twitter for different
reasons. When it launched, I was hesitant to sign up. I’m a master in coming up
with a witty retort days after it was needed. Twitter seemed to require instant
smart and clever responses. But over the years, I noticed that the mainstream media
I was consuming had become simply a conduit to Twitter. Journalists no longer
researched stories independently. They simply scrolled through Twitter and published
the best of what they found there. This accelerated in the age of Trump when
entire articles would be based on his Twitter rants.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I would read articles in the
Guardian that would link to a Twitter account. I could look at it but not see
the replies or reply myself. I knew this was Twitter trying to tease me in and
eventually I succumbed.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">So, how are things now in the bright
new dawn of 2021?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">This morning I deactivated my
Facebook account. It turns out there a lot of other ways to find out what’s
going on and even though I only “Friended” three groups, I was inundated with nonsense
about what people I hardly knew were having for lunch. It was like peering into
the diary of a five-year-old with similar grammar and spelling capabilities.
These were ordinary people, living ordinary lives and I had no interest in
them. The people I’m genuinely interested in, stay in touch with Whatsapp and
email and other ways of direct communication. I had no desire to seek them out on
Facebook. And I’m far too settled into domestic life to need to seek out ex-lovers
or long forgotten schoolfriends. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Facebook is a social network, but
I didn’t find it very friendly. My brief visits were peppered with hostility
and anger. In the end, we drifted apart. But like all those relationships were
you still have to share the house because you can’t afford to pay the mortgage
on your own, Facebook will always be living in the back room. Deleting it completely
is almost impossible.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Twitter on the other hand has become
invaluable. I check it five or six times a day. It’s the quickest way of getting
news and because I’ve followed smart and witty people, my timeline is filled
with clever commentary and sharp-witted responses. Facebook is full of the awful
detritus of daily life. Twitter is a window into the minds of people you like
and are interested in.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">There are downsides, the need to
trawl through lots of chaff to find the wheat, the disappointment of following somebody
who turns out to be crushingly boring and the risk of being called an
anti-semite after making a badly structured joke. But if this blogging business
doesn’t make me famous, there is always the chance that micro-blogging on
Twitter will.<o:p></o:p></p>The Mojo Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02203843302127597492noreply@blogger.com0