One way to blank out the world is to de-clutter, and downstairs, 25 years of papers awaited the shredder. Up first, old letters, some humbling, others hateful. I’d written a column for the Listener which upset those who, to put it mildly, disliked Jews - and the confluence of dog-eared hate mail along with the slaughter in a Pittsburgh synagogue was disturbing. Worse was to come. The Otago Daily Times reported a racist taunt aimed at a Southland Philipino family visiting Wellington. A woman greeted them by saying: ‘This country is for white people only…" So 1950s, but then racism, like rust, never sleeps.
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?”
Who’d have thought that toilet paper would become a preoccupation on our travels? In most of the countries we visited we were instructed not to throw toilet paper down the toilet. We got used to this, sort of…
Things don’t always go according to plan.
No wonder John Lennon, and some wise people before him have said, “Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.”
And yet when the unexpected happens, it invariably throws us and we react.
In the world of politics it cannot be denied, he is a breath of fresh air. What he says in public may be nonsense, but I wish some of our politicians would say what they really think occasionally, instead of being afraid of the media response.
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:
A baker refused, very politely apparently, to provide a wedding cake to a gay couple because he was against same sex marriage.
I am moved to comment on this after listening to aghast responses on the topic from panellists on Radio New Zealand: ‘Stupid.’ and ‘Homophobic.’ And ‘It’s the same as refusing to serve a coloured person in a cafe.’ Is it?
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.
My mother once told me in a hushed voice that one of our neighbours might have TB. My mother-in-law spoke behind her hand about epilepsy (“E-P”). Then, it was considered poor practise to tell people they had cancer (they gave up hope) and of course we never mentioned people with that “condition”, homosexuality! Things have changed. So what makes it so hard in the twenty-first century to talk about dementia?