Andy, my son on the occasion of his birthday

I don’t know whether you’ve ever stopped to think about it, but we enter the world in a totally undemocratic manner. Nobody gives us the right to vote for who our parents are to be. Thus,  and I want to emphasize this,  through no fault of his own, Andy was landed with me as his Dad.
Having said that, let me make one thing perfectly clear: on the whole, by and large, and to his very great credit, he has borne it remarkably bravely.
I say ‘on the whole’, ‘by and large’ because after all, like the rest of us he is only human and there was the odd occasion in his earlier years when he was tempted to take matters into his own hands. Or feet.
But I ask you to take into account that like so many children these days, Andy had to contend with two languages: English, spoken at home, and Swedish, spoken at school and by almost everyone else he came into contact with. However, he did have one or two school lessons a week with a native speaker of English. Such ‘home language tuition’ as it was called, was for children with at least one parent who spoke a tongue other than Swedish, and included something about the history and culture of the land where such parents came from.
I well remember Andy coming home one day and telling me about a lesson he’d had with his home-language teacher, a pleasant, mild-mannered young British lady, in which he had learnt about the Tower of London. As you know, the Tower was where many a prisoner was thrown in days gone by, probably to be tortured before being sent to a very sticky end. I had forgotten all about this when early the following Sunday morning while still in bed, eyes closed and barely conscious, a large, heavy, irregularly shaped object crashed down on me from what I would say must have been a considerable height. It was Andy. Sitting astride my chest he then made a very serious announcement: “You are going to be executed!” he said.
Well, as you can tell, I survived,  largely intact,  minus only a substantial part of one of my front teeth. It could have been worse. Much worse. But don’t think for a moment that, at least in retrospect, I attached any blame to my beloved young offspring. On the contrary, I saw quite clearly what was to become increasingly evident as he grew older, that he was quick and eager to learn — those things that interested him, that is. And what is more, to apply the knowledge he had acquired. It didn’t remain pure theory.
Nevertheless, I did have a quiet word with the pleasant, mild-mannered, young British lady and asked her if it might just be possible — perhaps — for her to find aspects of British history and culture that didn’t put the lives of innocent people at risk. Difficult though it might be.
This ability of Andy’s to be quick to learn, reached a peak when computers entered our lives. But it is here that he revealed another most commendable quality, tolerance, because it was immediately and glaringly evident that his Dad belonged to the school of computer-users who sweated over manuals and still got everything frustratingly wrong. He, of course, ignored the manuals and worked wonders. Oh I am aware of his conviction that I must have been the one who inspired that revised version of the well-known computer processor manufacturer’s logo to read: ‘Intel inside — idiot outside’. It was doubtless a great embarrassment to him, but he just grinned and bore it. Well, he bore it at any rate.
I can also tell you that the cause of his embarrassment didn’t disappear with time. Who else has a Dad who could obliterate his auto.exec.bat file, without which the computer behaved like a chicken that has lost its head, not knowing which way to turn, haphazardly jumbling letters and symbols and disobeying every command? I achieved that considerable feat without even trying. Naturally, I couldn’t hear his groans or sighs, or see the expression on his face when he read the SOS I faxed to him, as by then he was six thousand miles away, a paid professional in Silicon Valley.
But did he publicly disown me? Did he privately tell me to adopt a child somewhere else and get off his back? Not at all. He may have gritted his teeth, he may have asked himself what terrible sins he had committed to deserve such a terrible fate, I can’t be sure, but for half-an-hour he instructed me on the phone how to reconstruct the file, pressing this key and that, giving for me entirely unexpected results, until all was as it should be once more. It must have been like playing chess without seeing the board.
And so it has continued. An innocent victim in at any rate the paternal part of the parental stakes, he has shown courage and forbearance above and beyond the call of duty. So I had not the slightest doubt he would come riding to the rescue once more when a virus wormed its wicked way into my computer and infected hundreds of files. He didn’t know about it straight away because of the nine-hour time difference, but found out first thing the next morning. Not perhaps the best way to start the day, but I had every confidence in him.
All suggestions that he deliberately planted the infection to put me out of action, I treat with the contempt they deserve. No, he is a knight in shining armour, so if perchance you have a glass handy and there happens to be something in it, I ask you to raise it and join with me in drinking a toast to Andy, my son.
Skål!

Think tanks

‘What do people do all day?’ is the title of one of Richard Scarry’s children’s books, but also a question I ask myself with regard to certain occupations. In particular, I wonder about employees of so-called ‘think tanks’. Do they sit Rodin-style in their offices from nine to five pondering who knows what, before going home, having done their thinking for the day?

This has been on my mind since hearing an item on the BBC World Service about the recent youth riots in some of the Stockholm suburbs. The Beeb had sent their main correspondent in Germany here and he introduced an interviewee as a member of some think tank or other, without any further comment or explanation.

“Sweden is a country with ‘income compression’,” this thinker stated. Asked to clarify the term, he said there was no great difference between high and low incomes. Hmm. The BBC man was clearly unaware of the report issued only very shortly before showing that the income gap has been growing faster in Sweden than in any of the 34 OECD countries, and again made no comment. (New Zealand was said to be in the number one spot when I was there earlier in the year – both countries formerly known for their relative egalitarianism!) But if the thinking gentleman was unaware of the OECD report, he must have been shut away up in his tank for several days with no news from the outside world, or thinking such profound thoughts that nothing could penetrate the walls of his mind.

The interviewer also quoted a headline in one of the evening papers, which said in translation ‘Stockholm is not burning’, and took it as evidence that there were people in denial. Had he understood the language or had the whole article translated or summarised for him he would have known that the newspaper was criticising local media for naming the suburbs where cars were being set on fire, stones thrown at police etc, as though they were not part of the Swedish capital but somewhere else. At the other extreme, Britain and the US warned their nationals visiting Stockholm to take extra care, which was laughable as tourists would never have known what was going on in these suburbs, which are well off the tourist track, if they didn’t have access to the news and besides, what was happening was taking place at night and not in any way aimed at them.

The debate since then has ranged around the causes of the disturbances. On one side of the argument the finger is pointed at alarmingly high youth unemployment, low incomes, run-down welfare services, poor housing, overburdened schools and segregation in areas with a high concentration of immigrant families. On the other side of the fence, the emphasis is on firmer police action to prevent vandalism, on getting parents to exercise greater responsibility and control, on the media not providing a platform for the vandals and finding excuses for such criminal activity.

Where the ‘tank’ man stood on these issues is not hard to guess, even without any indication of what his agenda might be. There are after all thousands of these organisations, and although some are independent and highly respected, a large percentage are little more than pressure groups or lobbyists with a particular slant on life and society, their aim being to influence policy. Nevertheless, introducing someone simply as a member of such an organisation without specifying who or what lies behind it can seem like saying, “Here is someone you should listen to.”

It all makes you think.

Weekend away - 2

Back to the fair in the neighbouring township. Alan drove me there at about ten in the morning and arranged to meet me in the early afternoon, when he would return with Joan. I walked the last part of the way as the central area was crammed with stalls selling everything from pottery to tapa cloth, by way of other arts and crafts from around the country and the Pacific islands.

The sun was hot and rising high. Only the small, round grassy section in the main square gave any shade. A pipe band stood close by, sometimes marching while they played, with a woman banging the big drum strapped to her, while youngsters with side drums wielded their sticks adroitly, in unison.

Eventually, I found a seat at the sole picnic table. Someone else sat down too, and said something to me. “That’s a fine Scottish accent you have,” I commented, not quite sure what he had said.

“I’ve been here forty-two years,” he replied without a trace of anything south of Glasgow in his voice.

He told me he’d been back to Scotland recently and was mistaken by a phone caller for his brother, who had never left the land of his birth. The caller refused to believe he was just visiting from New Zealand, convinced the brother was trying to pull his leg.

When I returned to Alan and Joan’s house that evening after a walk and a picnic meal, Joan was sitting at a table on the patio with a young couple who had moved in next door, but who I initially took for paying guests. The man, I later found out, was of Fijian descent and was armed with a number of cans of beer, one of which he offered me, prompting my usual explanation that it was on my banned list, along with coffee and dairy products.

There was also a young man and woman from the Czech Republic. She was not yet twenty-one. Her name was Jana, but in New Zealand she called herself Jane. He was David, and much taller than his slender girlfriend. They had come to the area to pick apples for three months, but were going to stay for a year.

Two other guests were at a wedding in Wellington and didn’t return until the rest of us had gone to bed. Long before then we were joined by Alan — and his bottle of home distilled rum, or whiskey. I asked innocently whether it was legal to have your own still and was assured, not only by Neil but also the Fijian neighbour, that it was perfectly OK. Of course, it isn’t. Alan produces firewater with an alcohol content of eighty-six per cent (!), then dilutes it to forty-three.

David, the young Czech, had a half-full bottle of Irish whiskey on the table and Jana drank not only from that but also accepted some of Neil’s brew when offered. Joan had told me earlier that Neil had to drink — and smoke — because of a serious injury as a helicopter pilot. And with quite a lot of alcohol inside him, he became very talkative, telling me in a low voice across the table about his past career.

He was brought up on a local farm, evidently a large and flourishing one for it had its own Tiger Moth plane, which Alan learnt to fly at the age of twelve! Flying on your own property was not covered by the regulations, which anyway seemed to be extremely lax. He went on to tell me about the time when he was flying DC3s in Canada, spraying crops in formation with others, who did everything wrong until he pointed out their errors to the man in charge, a former Spitfire pilot in the Second World War.

He also spoke at length about his time flying helicopters, hunting deer in dangerous country, flying low in deep ravines. He called it ‘the wild west’. Farmers could fire shotguns at them and shatter the windscreen. Neil had a ‘shooter’ on board and a winch-man, with an extremely hazardous job. When deer were shot, he was lowered to gut the carcasses before getting them winched up. Neil said they lost I think it was four men and two pilots during his time in this most precarious occupation before he came a cropper himself.

Apart from taking potshots at them, farmers might stretch a wire across the gully and one day he flew straight into one, losing or severely damaging the rotor blades and coming down with a crash. Joan told me he had been put in a body bag and it was a miracle that he survived. But the misadventure hadn’t cured him from wanting to fly helicopters again, albeit for the less hazardous task of showing visitors the surrounding countryside.

Weekend away

A few years back I gave the rugby sevens weekend a miss to spend a couple of days at a tiny township about an hour’s train journey away, staying bed and breakfast at a private home that took paying guests.

My host, lets call him Alan, a lean man in upper middle age, was waiting for me at the station, though there was not very far to go and I had little luggage with me. His wife, we can call her Joan, as talkative as they come, welcomed me with tea in the garden and then offered to show me round the area.

Our first stop was the library, where she introduced me to the librarian. After that came the most chaotic bookshop I have ever seen, with books heaped higgledy piggledy on tables as well as lining the shelves. It was run by a friend of Joan’s, who offered to take me to the country fair in a township some twenty miles away the next day, a major biannual event in the local calender. We would leave at seven in the morning and be back by ten. There was a little discussion about breakfast. “We can have it when we get back,” the woman said.

Next was the art gallery and another introduction. Surprisingly, they had a number of impressive works by well-known New Zealand artists. We continued past the local Information Centre, which was closed. Joan said it was only open in the morning and manned by volunteers. The Heritage Museum was shut too, so we crossed the road and said hello to the local estate agent.

The township, Featherstone, has but one main road. Travelling by car I suppose you could be out of it almost before you knew you were in it. Many of the buildings are old, almost all are timber-built and it is evident that little has changed for decades. The hills are very close on one side of the wide valley, which is wine country, with tour operators offering wine-tasting trips to the vineyards.

We proceeded a little farther along the road before turning back, Joan talking all the time. By then I felt in need of more exercise than I’d got from our slow, stop-and-start stroll and decided to explore a little for myself. With unexpected consequences. This is what happened:

On the outskirts of town is a short bushwalk that I decided to investigate. I got there after taking some wrong turns and went just a little way along the path. It was rather steep, but I could already see that there was a good view to be had. Nearby was a timber-built house. A couple were sitting at a table outside it, drinking a glass of white wine, doubtless from one of the local vineyards.

I walked a little farther uphill. ‘I must take some pictures,’ I told myself. But I had to find the right spot for there were lots of trees and bushes in the way. Perhaps I had passed the best point. OK, I’d take the photos on the way down. The path was getting steeper and steeper. And darker. It was now five o’clock in the evening and the sun wasn’t sufficiently high to penetrate. I was also worried about my knee, which I’d hurt earlier in Auckland so I turned round and went back, now with camera in hand.

Reaching a point where there wasn’t much vegetation to hide the view, I took a few shots, continued almost to the starting point of the path, raised the camera, pressed the release, then repeated the process. The couple were still sitting at their table. I carried on.

“Have you taken any good pictures?” the man suddenly asks, and I realise they have been aware of my presence all the time. He is now standing up, looking towards me.

“I hope so,” I reply.

He says something else, which I don’t quite catch, so I take a few steps in his direction.

“You get a better view from here,” he says. “Go up behind the house. But be careful. It’s rather steep.”

So I walk onto their property, say hello to the man’s wife, and see that they have an enchanting view across the valley to the hills on the far side, now almost golden brown in the early evening sunlight. I see too, that there is also quite a large lake lower down the valley.

I explain that I hurt my knee a couple of months before and he tells me to go slowly and be very careful. Which I am. I take my photos and come down again.

“Have a seat,” he says, and offers me a glass of wine. I thank him, but explain that alcohol, coffee and dairy products are on my banned list. Whereupon his wife gets up, goes into the house and comes back with something both alcohol- and sugar-free. Which I drink, after we have introduced ourselves. He is Neal and she is Val.

We talk. After a while Val gets up again and returns with maps so that I can better see the lie of the land. They also hand me a rather large pair of binoculars. We stay at the table, and talk much more until Neal suggests we go in. He is a member of a threatened species in the modern communications world, an amateur radio operator, a HAM, and will try to contact Sweden.

They rise and I follow them into the house, admiring the view from the lounge and also Neal’s study, which is full of different kinds of apparatus. He looks up a catalogue of radio codes for cities around the world and we find some from Sweden, fail to make contact. It may be because of the time difference. It is seven in the evening here, seven in the morning in Sweden.

I see that Neal is somewhat disappointed. But just then Val comes in and puts a plate of freshly cooked fish, green beans, tomato and half a lemon in front of me. Neal gets a similar plate. I am almost embarrassed by their hospitality. They have grown the beans and tomatoes themselves, Val explains. She understands full well how I feel, but waves it aside.

When I eventually leave it is pitch dark outside and the air is much colder. I am wearing a short-sleeved shirt without a sweater, but decline the jacket they offer to lend me.

“I’ll walk fast,” I state and we say goodbye after exchanging e-mail addresses.

Back at the little guest house where I am staying I tell Alan where I have been and ask Joan if her friend is serious about going to the fair at seven in the morning.

“She wants us to be ready at half-past-six,” Joan replies. I wasn’t sure who the ‘us’ referred to. “But we don’t have to go then,” she adds. “We can go later. We’ll take you.”

Which they did. But that’s another story.

Postscript
I can add, however, that Alan phoned me in Wellington four or five days later. What are you doing at the weekend?” he asked.

A little taken aback, I told him I was busy on the Saturday but wasn’t doing anything on the Sunday.

“I’ll pick you up,” he said.

And he did, though it meant driving over a range of hills. But that too, is another story.

Wellington invasion

The city was invaded this past weekend by countless monks, nuns, bishops, nurses, native Americans, cowboys, aviators, polo players, jockeys, apparitions, braying beasts, bears, outsize birds, even walking talking cream cakes, beer bottles, wads of multi-coloured flounce and much else straight from the world of the weird and wonderful. Yes, it was the weekend of the annual Wellington leg of the international rugby sevens series, which here is always the signal for a fancy dress binge that brings in hordes of revellers and many warmly welcome dollars.

This time there were some differences, however. Never before has a section of the stadium been set aside for those actually interested in what goes on on the pitch. Special tickets were issued for aisles 24-28, called the ‘rugby zone’. Then those under 25, or looking under 25, had to offer proof of their age to get the wristband entitling them to buy beer. You never have been allowed to bring your own booze to the stadium, or any other drinks for that matter, hot or cold, but in the past it was primarily to maintain a monopoly on sales within. (Of course, the pubs in town have done excellent business. As usual.)

Why the sudden change? Well, the international rugby authorities have their eye on Wellington now that this form of the game has acquired Olympic status and is due to be included in the 2016 Games. They certainly don’t want it to gain a bacchanalian reputation and risk being kicked out. So Wellington was warned.

Costume restrictions are not so new. Complete or near-nudity is out - I don’t know whether a fig-leaf bedecked Adam and Eve got in but they did have quite a few leaves between them - so is anything that can be used as, or looks like, a weapon. Costumes that overlap the seat or obstruct the view of others are likewise banned, as are flagpoles more than a metre long, picnic baskets, commercially prepared food (not a mouthful may stand in the way of arena sales), prams and pushchairs. But you can bring an empty water bottle provided it doesn’t hold more than a litre, and fill it inside. Anything in it when you arrive will be tipped out.

There was clearly some improvement. The police say crowds were on the whole well-behaved. There were slightly fewer arrests than usual, fewer people ejected from the stadium, fewer helpless beings needing assistance, though much of the time thousands of seats remained empty while those who should have been keeping them warm were out on the town, where the party always continues after the last whistle has been blown.

So most people were happy.

Postscript. If you happen to care about the result of the 16-nation tournament, England won, edging past Kenya in the final, while a disappointed New Zealand side won the play-off for third place.

King Dick

That you have to be a mountain goat to walk about in Wellington is simply not true. But if like me, you go almost everywhere on foot, it would certainly help. Built on and around the hills that almost dip into the sea here, the only really flat area in the central city area is land reclaimed from the deep, albeit assisted by an earthquake in 1855.

It is hardly surprising therefore that a prime attraction in the city is a cable car that elevates you from the busy thoroughfare of Lambton Quay to a lookout in the heights high above, just inside the upper entrance to the botanical gardens, (called here the Botanic Garden despite undeniable evidence that the plural form would be more accurate). It is a rare visitor to the capital city who has not stared out over the broad deep-sea harbour and its surroundings from this impressive vantage point.

But let’s forget the cable car and other vehicles and walk uphill from the farther end of Lambton Quay, along the memorial trail that takes you through the old cemetery where the early European (predominantly British) settlers are buried. Their resting place has been sacrilegiously cut in two by a motorway, but the path continues across it as an inclined footbridge before winding steeply upwards again until you eventually reach the tombs of two former Prime Ministers. The larger of these edifices as you leave the memorial park, with a bronze figure atop a tall pillar, is that of King Dick.

Richard John Seddon was born in 1854, was apprenticed to an engineer, joined the gold rush to the South Island of New Zealand in 1866 after first trying his luck in Australia, became mayor of a small town in 1877, was elected to Parliament in 1879 – and became Prime Minister 14 years later. Not bad for a lad from Lancashire who left school at the age of 12. His Government set the pace for social welfare legislation in the West in the last decade of the century. New Zealand women were first in the world to be given the vote, in 1893, (although he wasn’t in favour of the move himself); old age pensions were introduced, the penny post, the coalmines were nationalised, and so on.

Yes, King Dick achieved a lot and might have achieved still more had he not died in office. Inscribed on his tomb are the words, “A strong and resolute personality with an indomitable will enabled Richard John Seddon to carry out the humane and progressive legislation which characterised the 13 years of his administration.”

More than a century on I can’t help thinking what he would make of more recent reforms that have led to the country having the fastest growing gap between the incomes of rich and poor in the OECD area. But then his smiling current counterpart is a former successful currency trader, also with an indomitable will – to sell off large chunks of state-owned assets to private investors.

I wonder whether he is resting in peace, King Dick.

The Stockholm Winter

The Stockholm winter struck early this time, in the dull, dark days of November, growing invreasingly severe, albeit somewhat brightening the December darkness. Friends with living space at ground level complained of being blocked in, of having to shovel aside great mounds of snow, and then when the temperature rose and the rain fell only to freeze, of the bone-breaking hazard of stepping out of the front door. The hospitals are overworked when it's like that.


All this I have noted with great sympathy and understanding while contemplating the blue-green waters of the Waitemata Harbour in Auckland, and now the gently rippling surface of Lake Taupo on the central plateau of New Zealand’s North Island. The temperature is in the mid-20s Celsius, the sun bright, the sky blue, while a bellbird in the shade of a nearby tree provides a wondrous musical background to my thoughts. I can put words to his song. ‘Do you know how well-off you are?’ he warbles.

Listen! There he goes again.

Postscript: I have been to Auckland many times before but not until this latest visit have I seen people begging in Queen Street, the main commercial thoroughfare in the country’s largest city by very far. No bellbirds there.

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