Dr Dolittle

 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.

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.

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^th 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The heron watched all this with barely concealed contempt and then flapped his majestic wings and took off into the afternoon sky.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

 

A Postcard from Pauanui

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Memory

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On the 1^st 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.

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.

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.

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.

It was the garden of the golden apples,
The half-way house where we had stopped a day
Before we took the west road to Drumcatton
Where the sun was always setting on the play.

  

Get a Jab!

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^th, or Paris when the maillot jaunes were in town. Or pretty much any place in the Western World where Covid restrictions are in place.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

 

Lockdown Blues

 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.”

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.

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.

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.

On the 17^th 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Gilded Cage

 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.

I also managed two trips to Ireland in that time and planned to go back once every two years in the future.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

The Four of Us

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.

“Anyone fancy a few scoops tonight? Bettys at 9 bells?”

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.’

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.

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.

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.   

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.

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.

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.  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.

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.

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.

Not long after my mate was visited by the tumour ghost, it came looking for another victim.  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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.