A terrible day

As it happened, we were coming over to the Wairarapa from Wellington today. Just before we left, we saw the news of the hot-air ballooning tragedy. We passed the road leading to the site of it at about 1pm. We had stopped in Carterton, which the TV1 report tonight described as a town in shock, but of course many people were going about their business as usual. What else do you do? Life goes on, as Auden memorably told us, even while terrible things are happening close by. I was also sorry to see TV1's reporter call Carterton a 'close-knit community,' because this silly cliche is wheeled out every time there's a tragedy in any place smaller than a big city. But it's petty of me to quibble about things like that at this time. Out of a clear blue sky, something unbearable to imagine happened in a field outside Carterton early this morning; and I think, like everyone, I am in shock about it. In Masterton we talked to a woman who has family in Somerset Rd, where the burning balloon came down, and I heard enough then to make me not want to know more. This is a terrible, terrible day.

Wise up

'Holiday misery drags on as more storms loom': thus the Herald this morning, rubbing in the point made here five days ago. Many holidaymakers have reportedly abandoned camp and gone home, and Weather Watch head analyst Philip Duncan says there'll be rain and cloud for at least another couple of weeks.

Further confirmation, if it was needed, that the true New Zealand summer has abandoned its washed-out camp in December-January and relocated in a drier, sunnier spot a few weeks further on. This actually happened some years ago and the pattern is well established now. Yet the insistence on starting the school year at the end of January condemns families to take their holidays just when the summer weather is worst.

'Keep in mind,' Duncan advises Herald readers, 'that February and March are often very settled.' QED. He knows, we know it. When is the Department of Education going to wise up?

Hard done by

In industrial disputes like the current one at the Ports of Auckland the media are almost always at pains to tell us how much it costs the employers when workers strike. We learn today, for instance, that the industrial action at the Ports of Auckland 'has cost the port $2.82 million in lost revenue.' Quite how such figures—usually supplied by management —are arrived at is never explained, but let's take them in good faith. If normal businesses is impeded for whatever reason, naturally you're going to lose money.

But how come we never, never hear how much money the workers lose by going on strike? Reporters should ask. It would not be so hard, I imagine, for a union to provide the total amount of pay lost by its members over a given time. (Maybe in this case the Maritime Union has an arrangement whereby its members still get paid when they go on strike, and if so, I'd happily stand corrected; but I doubt it very much. They certainly lose pay when they get locked out, as has happened at the ports).

The net effect of this imbalance in reporting is to put the weight of sympathy on management's side. They're losing income, they're inconvenienced, they can't get on with what they want to do. What about the other side? Workers' incomes in the first place are lower and more vulnerable to depletion, and by striking, they also jeopardize their employment prospects. One doesn't have to take sides in the ports dispute to feel that there's something wrong about a scenario in which only the employers are portrayed as being hard done by.

Anarchy from the UK

The death of Ronald Searle, announced today, brings memories not so much of the St Trinian's illustrations for which he was perhaps most famous but of the Molesworth books he illustrated for Geoffrey Willans. For a boy like me growing up in the 195os they were part of a staple diet of British schoolboy fiction; others on the menu included the Jennings series by Anthony Buckeridge, Richmal Crompton's William and of course Billy Bunter, who though dated by then still did the business for me anyway. I believe I read dozens of these kinds of books, which in their own way probably did for my generation what the Harry Potter series (another variation on schoolboy fiction) does for its.

The Molesworth books were more anarchic, though. Nigel Molesworth was a brute of a child who took no prisoners and was forever plotting evil schemes aimed at the downfall of teachers or fellow pupils. His withering characterization of the hapless Fotheringay ('He is utterly wet and a weed') stays with me still. He was also a shamelessly bad speller, as any fule kno. Searle captured his essential thuggishness brilliantly with a savage spiky style of drawing that was clearly a big subsequent influence on Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman.

When I read in the news what I hadn't know before, that Searle was imprisoned by the Japanese at Changi during the Second World War and worked on the Burma railway, I remembered that someone else with an extraordinarily anarchic imagination—Mervyn Peake, author of the Gormenghast books—was one of the first civilians to enter Belsen concentration camp in 1945, and his mind was seared by what he saw. On the same spectrum would be the ultimate anarchist, Spike Milligan, whose Goon Show creations were very much a product of his wartime experience. There is no pattern here. Millions of men went to war and didn't create brilliant works and memorable characters as a result. But these three did, and I thank them for it.

Light years

It is a truth universally acknowledged among the Patagomanian people (an alien species who monitor the human race's antics from a distant planet) that the New Zealand fixation on the road toll is a form of psychological substitution. Unable to cope with addressing truly complex social problems—so the Patagomanian reasoning goes—the New Zealanders find satisfaction and even pleasure in simple numerical reduction. A falling road toll signifies progress, suggests collective responsibility, conveys a sense of the nation working together to save lives. Fair enough, as far as that goes (as an old Patagomanian proverb has it). Yet on that planet, where life is lived in an indeterminate, oblique fashion, they reckon the New Zealanders have no idea what to do about the problem they call 'child abuse,' and would rather, for the sake of not having to think too hard, reduce the number of road deaths than reduce the number of children's deaths at the hands of violent adults.

Actually, the Patagamonians are troubled by the very term 'child abuse.' On the planet where they live, the name of which is never the same two days running, to define something is essentially to destroy the meaning of it. To them, the term 'child abuse,' while useful in some respects, has come to be a convenient catch-all for a wide range of behaviours and conditions, enabling it to be isolated from the ever-changing activity systems that give rise to it and shape it. The term even has the curious effect of seeming to diminish the worst crimes of all—murder and torture—by lumping them in with everything from bullying to bad language.

Leaving that aside, however, what mainly disturbs the Patagomanians, among whom no hand is ever raised to a child, is the inability of the New Zealanders to recognize the economic connection with 'child abuse.' They would roll their eyes (if they had them) at the idea that the murder and torture and beating of children could be 'solved' by setting up a committee or commissioning an inquiry or putting more resources into frontline programs. They marvel at the wilful refusal to perceive that the way an economy operates is inseparable from the way the people who are part of it live. Though they hold no particular brief for the New Zealanders, many of them wish that perception could be politically acknowledged and acted on. As one Patagomanian elder (her words are translated) has said, 'The day I hear a New Zealand politician mention GDP growth and child abuse in the same breath, that's when I'll believe they're beginning to understand.' In fact, incredible as it may seem, one team of Patagomanian observers has traced a connection between the selling-off of state forests in the late 1980s and the brutally violent death of an Auckland toddler 20 years later.

Incredible. Patagomania is light years away from New Zealand.

He sleeps across the sea

All that summer, the people of Aotearoa New Zealand—a proud, fierce, independent people—waited for him to come. They knew he would. He had come before, and moved among them, offering opchunities, and it was good. But now he had flown away to the ancestral home of Hawaii-key. 'He sleeps across the sea,' mothers told their children. 'He is at peace with his ancestors. But one day, when the white foam is flying, and the godwits skim the ocean, in search of their hunting grounds, he will come.'

And so it will be. One morning he will awake at dawn, go down to the beach and push his canoe out into the surf. He knows that, far to the south, there is work to be done. Through the pounding breakers the canoe will lift and surge, driven forward by the muscular arms of the Young Nats, powering their leader towards a destiny greater than will ever be known by those who have served one term only. There is a second term, and he will serve it.

From Hawaii-key he will come, the redeemer, the smiling one, the welder of coalitions, the prophet of the mixed ownership model. And the great volcano of Media-o-Brouhaha will rumble and smoke, celebrating his return. And the people of Aotearoa New Zealand will go forth and seek the opchunities he offers; and if they are not there, great will be the lamentation thereof. But he will be quite relaxed about that.

Here comes summer

Every year, without fail, between Christmas and New Year campgrounds are flooded, wind wrecks tents, sodden holidaymakers pack up and go home, festivals turn into seas of mud. Yet still the plucky New Zealanders set out on their holidays at this time, headed like lemmings straight for the cliff. Some hereditary instinct, deeply implanted, tells them that once the last of the Christmas dinner has been slept off, and the kids have exhausted the novelty of their new toys, then it must be Summer. And Summer means Holidays. Long spells of Glorious Hot Weather. Not a drop of rain in sight. Get in the car and go.

Probably, eventually, by a Darwinian process of natural selection, a new kind of New Zealand holidaymaker will emerge who realizes that true summer has shifted. Maybe once those long spells of GHW did happen around Christmas/New Year—in fact, my memories of a 1950s childhood tell me they started even earlier—but for at least 15 or 20 years now it has been plain that the weather in late December is more likely to be wet and even cold than warm and dry. Even early January can be moody with cloud. The better summer weather (azure sky, baking heat) rarely kicks in before the middle of the month, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that the really hot stuff these days happens in February and even March.

Something's out of whack. The summer solstice may be fixed at 22 December but true summer peaks in February now. Just when the kids are back in school.

There is a way to fix this, and it will take the same kind of boldness Samoa has just shown by arbitrarily shifting its time zone west of the international dateline. It goes like this:

(a) Treat Christmas as a long weekend, like Easter.

(b) Everyone goes back to work and school after that.

(c) New Year's Day could be a one-day holiday but not necessarily: in many countries it's an ordinary working day.

(d) School breaks up mid-January and the school holidays run from then to the end of February (that's when universities already resume: why not primary and secondary schools?).

This way, everyone, especially children, gets to enjoy the best summer weather, instead of gazing longingly out of classroom and office windows during the burning heat of February. And (by the way) stop starting Super 15 rugby in February when the grounds are at their hardest. No wonder so many players get injured. Happy New Year.