Doesn’t seem to matter where you are in the world, there’s often another Kiwi close at hand. Even in the ‘60s long before mass travel a friend arrived in London and, walking down Earl’s Court Road one day, bumped into the last person he expected to see – a high school classmate.
Does anybody else out there wonder why drooping business confidence matters? Okay, business is important but it represents just one part of the economy.
Spotted: Not the sort of thing you’d expect in a suburban Street. Certainly not in a nobby Epsom avenue. But things change. After another day’s downpour in this waterlogged Spring, a Gypsy woman emerged from one of the street’s impeccable gardens.
She’s already been humbled and now, as a new homeless person, she’s about to be humiliated. Living in the streets she has no money and so tries her luck at the nearest shop.
“I’m homeless today – can you give me a dollar for a coffee?”
Oscar Wilde once observed that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. So let’s talk about it, that unprecedented threat to our health and well-being – public service television.
Never mind that we’ve never had it, the mere mention of it makes some in the commentariat fume. Take Mike Hoskings. Nice bloke. Shame about the rash he’s developed over this issue, though he’s not alone. Here’s a take from his comments:
Good news for Enzed: we came eighth in World Happiness, one ahead of Australia and Sweden, according to the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the UN.
Happiest country of all was Norway, followed by Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland in a tightly packed bunch. All of the top four countries rank highly on all the main factors found to support happiness: caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income and good governance. Norway has insulated itself from the boom and bust cycle of many other resource-rich economies.
As a 
presidential candidate Trump dissed reporters as being ‘slime, ‘dishonest slime’, unfair’, ‘not good people’ – and much more. In the land where free speech is a constitutional guarantee, he threatened to open up libel laws and added: “…we’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before.” Much of this must have been shrugged off by reporters covering his campaign as Trump’s bog standard rhetoric.
But then the Candidate became the President and over his 18 months in office, intensified his attacks on the media.
Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, if you’re young at heart, sang the late great Frank Sinatra. But sometimes being young at heart isn’t always the fairy tale you want, or need. At a certain age you forget the boomer body you’ve inherited over the years. You flip back multiple decades to those never-ending summers of youth, when anything was possible. It’s then that the less cautious resort to daredevilry, attempt things the boomer body would never allow except that… the teen brain has briefly taken charge.
The Coalition was just five months old when commentators began their refrain: Stop whingeing about the defects of the last Government they said, as if these were minor failings. They most certainly are not and the licence given by them to Sir John Key to lambast Labour was very liberal – he was still at it in his third term as prime minister.