So you’re at the kitchen bench and acting like a 16 year old – though you know that was half a century ago. You plonk a heavy pot almost playfully and… misjudge. Its rim heads with relentless accuracy to the one part of your foot not covered by slippers.
It’s autumn so it’s timely to let a weathered leaf from the season of our life drift into the summer of another’s – in this case New Plymouth Mayor, Neil Holdom.
Some time ago he described baby boomers as ‘ the most selfish generation’. And then on Facebook and presumably a few other places, he apologised. His j’accuse was similar to comments by any of the critics of boomers, some so young they could pass for the grandchildren of the first boomer cohort.
Bumped into an old friend the other day. Goes by the name of Waiheke. Used to know the place well when the S.S. Baroona chugged into the channel and about an hour later, discharged us on to Matiatia’s humble wharf.
Were we supposed to go WOW! when the Government announced it would build a rail link to Auckland airport by… 2030? Maybe 2050?
TV3 news (sorry, Newshub) carried the story last month. And it featured something so familiar that it felt like déjà vu, yet there it was on our TV screens.
I like dancing – who doesn’t? So, one day after feeling as if I could become footloose on the dance floor again, I enrolled for a ballroom dancing class at the local grammar.A legacy of the Fifties and Sixties was that all of us could rock and roll – and even today if you listen to the original of Honky Tonk, your feel an irresistible urge to do it all over again.
First, an early morning recollection from the day before: a friend describing a short story which captured the pitiful cries of whale calves separated from their beached mothers.
Then this: on a country road where the occasional car usually dawdled, most now zipped along at highway speeds.
Waitangi weekend again – and a man was close to tears. Nothing unusual there. It’s what the place does to some. What was different this year was that the man was Pakeha – no let’s pass over that pejorative for another description: he was white.
Wonder who this could possibly be…
“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.”
– John Bright
