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Inauspicious | Jan 05, 2007 07:41

The craziest part of the shambolic execution of Saddam Hussein must surely be that the former tyrant was hailed at his end by sectarian chanting from supporters (or actually members) of the militias that the White House is considering sending another few tens of thousands of troops to Iraq to put down.

It comes on the heels of the incident in which British forces in Basra were obliged to stage an assault on a police station to retrieve captives being routinely tortured by a police force set up (and apparently co-operated with since) by the same British forces in 2003.

The other issue, as Nir Rosen explains, is that its clearly sectarian nature established Saddam's martydom in a particularly dangerous way. It's hard to imagine this event taking place in a less auspicious way.

The Listener let itself down with its 'Get the Most from Your Mind: The Secrets of Learning' cover this week. The slim story it relates to is an interview with Eric Jensen, an American who has built a publishing and seminar business around the idea of "brain-based learning".

By shopping it to us thus, the magazine effectively placed its authority behind Jensen's advice, which is unfortunate, given this detailed critique of Jensen's work, which notes a string of "disappointing" citations (most of them from other "pop books") and quotes some withering expert opinion on the whole basis of Jensen's pitch. There are further resources here, and a cognitive scientist's view (dismissing "any prospect of a brain-based learning program of any substance in the near future") published recently on the American Federation of Teachers' website.

Self-help sells off the newsstand, but in the long term, I think credibility is important too.

Oddly enough, it's otherwise a strong issue. The "How To" feature is a good holiday season concept, and would have made a good cover (I thought of something like a coloured tag cloud). The interviews with Scott Dixon, Flight of the Conchords, Martina Cole and Toby Young (I still have the famous swansong issue of the Modern Review somewhere) are also excellent.

A new blog by Mark Lillico, a human rights lawyer in Wellington, discusses the report on Liam Ashley's death and contends that it "reveals a contrast in regard for human rights between state and private sector agencies." (Hat tip: No Right Turn.)

Paul Litterick has been positively humming with his new(ish) fully-fledged Fundy Post blog. Of particular note in the he-does-it-so-you-don't-have-to department, see his post The Investigate Literary Supplement. Corker.

I've linked to Urban Dictionary a number of times - it's quite a fun project. But reader Jeff LePoidevin pointed out the dictionary's entry for "Maori", which consists of pages of racist drivel. Written, clearly, by New Zealanders. That'll be the Tragedy of the Commons.

And, in a completely different vein, I was sorting through on old box of papers from when I lived in London, and came across a fax I had completely forgotten about. I'm pretty sure it's Run DMC's rider, picked up when I interviewed them at the BBC studios, before they played Top of the Pops in 1989. It reads in part, and in original spelling:

NOTE 15 TOWLES ARE REQUIRED FOR STAGE!!!!!!

THERE SHALL BE COMPLIMENTARY BEVERAGE FOR ARTIST AND CREW

2 TWENTY-FOUR PIECE BUCKET KENTUCKY FIRED CHICKEN (ORIGINAL RECIPE)

12 BISCUITS WITH BUTTER, JELLY AND HONEY

8 EARS OF CORN ON THE COB

1 LARGE ASSORTED FRUIT TRAY

1 CASE ASSORTED SODAS (WITH CUPS AND ICE)

1 GALLON OF BOTTLED WATER

1 QUART OF ORANGE JUICE

2 DOZEN CONDOMS

--

6 HOT MEALS - ITALIAN FOOD (CHOICE OF MANCIOTII OR LASAGNA, PLEASE NO MEAT!!!!)

ALL CONDIMENTS AND PROPER UNTENSILS MUST BE PROVIDED.

1 CASE OF OLD ENGLISH 800 MALT LIQUOR

(NOTE: THE KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN MUST ALSO BE PROVIE IN ADDITION TO ITALIAN FOOD LISTED ABOVE.)

I remember the asbestos readings in the dressing rooms, and how authoritative Russell Simmons was, despite his girlyman voice, but I'd forgotten I ever had that. By the time I'd been through the box, I realised I don't know a lot of things I used to know.

Anyway, I trust your holiday season is serving you well, even if you've copped the El Nino thing in Wellington (feel free to file a report). Our New Year's Eve was family-friendly, and quite the most sober I've spent in years. My special Christmas whisky took a bit of a thrashing in erudite company the following evening, but that, of course, was precisely the reason it was acquired.

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The true meaning of Tutaekuri | Dec 28, 2006 10:03

Getting Richard Dawkins for Christmas might seem to lack a certain sentiment, but the big book of The God Delusion isn't bad holiday reading. Dawkins is still the energiser bunny of atheism, but he writes beautifully and argues conscientiously.

I was amazed to learn the way a "mere word game" such as the ontological argument has been wielded by fine minds as a proof of God's existence (short version: if we can conceive of God, then God exists).

I really liked Dawkins' wife's contribution to a discussion about the Argument from Beauty (or the divine inspiration of great art): yes, Bach, Michaelangelo and Raphael made great beauty in the service of the church, but: "what if … Shakespeare had been obliged to work on commissions from the Church? We'd surely have lost Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth."

Dawkins is really a bit of a snob, but I'm very comfortable with his positive point: that it is quite rational to be awestruck by the scale, complexity and mystery of the universe, and that nature is a better fit for awe than the gods of men's doctrine, and, more so, than the tawdry men who claim God's agency on earth.

(Doctrine can get you some bad places. Witness the Catholic Church's latest jape: refusing to bury a longtime sufferer of muscular dystrophy who convinced his doctor that, in light of his having spent two decades paralysed and the past five years unable to even breathe on his own, the machines should be mercifully switched off. You might argue that 60 year-old Piergiorgio Welby had no call to be serviced by a church whose rulebook he flouted, but really, where is the love?)

I've written elsewhere about how nature tends to crowd out God in New Zealand's holy days, drawing on Keith Sinclair's 1986 book about New Zealand identity, A Destiny Apart in the introduction to the Great New Zealand Argument book:

Anzac Day, a day named to commemorate not just the sacrifice of New Zealanders in the first world war, but all the fallen, found purchase where a general day of national pride could not. And, said Sinclair, it was not an affair of the church. The Dawn Service "might, indeed, have been some pagan ceremony" and the memorials to the fallen eschewed the cross in favour of cenotaphs and symbols that looked back to ancient Greece and Egypt.

Few New Zealanders would readily identify themselves as pagans, of course. But the derived adjective of the original Latin "paganus" means "rustic" or "of the country", and many more of us would answer to that. We can far more comfortably define ourselves through the land and the sea than through churches at which we have historically been indifferent attenders.

Christmas in New Zealand, by the same token, is a largely secular family festival that functions as a gateway to nature (and away from a degree of material care - there's no intrinsic reason we should feel so much more relaxed on Boxing Day than Christmas Eve, but nearly everybody does - we work ourselves up to the release). Such spiritual significance of place was the binding theme of the highly enjoyable Outrageous Fortune: The Movie on Boxing Day. Even if we do not all have a Tutaekuri Bay to which to run, we go there in our minds.

(Reassuringly, other themes included male genital injury, boozing and girl-wrestling. And "tutaekuri" means dog shit in te reo.)

I'm not entirely unburdened at the moment - I should probably do some invoicing this morning, and there are leftover jobs I don't want to think about - but I got out on my bike on Boxing Day (and made more casual work of that nasty little return slope up to Carrington Road on the northwestern cycle path than the bloke I passed on the way down), I have the distinctly secular pleasure of being bought lunch at Prego later today, and our family will be conducting barbecue worship with the Slack-Beanlands tomorrow.

I'm figuring we'll head up and see friends in Matakana in the first couple of days of the new year, and at some point I'd like to be standing on a beach on a clear night. Fifteen years ago, having just come back to New Zealand to settle, I excused myself for a solitary walk down a South Island beach at night, had a quiet toke, looked upwards - and was awestruck.

It wasn't simply that there were so many stars - although after five years in London I think I'd forgotten there were so many - but the sudden, clear sense that the stars were not simply painted on the inside of an equidistant dome, but lay throughout a vast, deep space. I could see I was both impossibly small, and part of something impossibly big. And it was beautiful.

PS: On which tip, please be filing reports for our Holiday Stories forum.

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Grandpa | Dec 22, 2006 10:50

The Christmas of 1986, 20 years ago, was my first away from home. I had been in London for seven months and, as young New Zealanders do, I had arranged to spend the day with other Kiwis. I stayed Christmas Eve at my friend James' place on the Rockingham Estate, Elephant and Castle.

We placed our bottle each of cheap French bubbly outside on the windowsill to cool (I don't think James had a fridge). Later on in the evening, I went down to the payphone by the Duke of Wellington to make a call home.

My grandmother, my Dad's Mum, answered the phone. I greeted her cheerily, and she answered gravely. Grandpa Saulbrey, my Mum's Dad, was in hospital. He was dying, and it would be soon. I can't remember if I spoke to anyone else. I was shattered. I loved Grandpa. I hadn't expected this.

As I walked back in the gloom, I wondered what I'd do. And I decided I'd go on as planned. If Jack Saulbrey had been anything, it was a man of good cheer. I'd have a great Christmas Day and I'd drink a toast to his name.

Christmas Day, as it sometimes seems to be in London, was unseasonably mild. James and I joined the other expats at Phil and Kathleen's place and cracked our bubbly and ate special scones. Later in the day, we walked over to the Oval where there was a mad party for foreigners away from home: Kiwis, Spaniards, an excitable Italian boot girl.

But the thing I really remember is sitting down outside the Nigerian Church of the White Star, on the edge of Rockingham, and listening to the singing. It remains one of the most extraordinary things I have heard. The men set up a low, rolling chant and the women and girls shrieked and soared over the top, their voices darting like penny rockets.

That night, I caught a bus back to where I was living, out in New Cross. My English flatmates were with their families, so I had the place to myself. I turned on the gas fire, sat down and just cried. When I'd done crying, I wrote a poem. The poem has been lost somewhere, but I think it wasn't bad. The heart of it was red: red hair, red bricks, buckets of plump tomatoes.

Grandpa died on the 27th, aged 75 years. I never got to say goodbye. But I think handling it, alone on the other side of the world of the world was the first really mature thing I ever did.

I've written here before about my Saulbrey side. It's the part of me given to singing and speechifying and displays of emotion; to parties and a drink or two. You may not have come across the family name before: it's an Anglicisation. The original name was Saurbrey, and the family came from Germany via Denmark (where I still seem to have a cuzziebro) to London, where they became bakers of some note.

I'm not exactly clear when the anglicisation took place, but a bunch of Saurbreys/Saulbreys embarked for a new life in New Zealand and Australia in the 19th century.

John Cecil Saulbrey - Jack, to all the world - was born January 13th 1911, in Aratapu, the eighth of nine children, to Thomas Lewis Saulbrey, a baker born in London, and Margaret Saulbrey (nee Dalton), born in Pukekohe. His younger sister was magnificently christened Mahala Victoria Diamantina. His older brother, Charles, enlisted in the Army, but died in 1916, before leaving New Zealand. The family was poor and moved frequently, but settled to milk someone's cows in the Hutt Valley.

In 1927, Jack secured an apprenticeship with Hugh G. McGill, setting him off on his life's trade: bricklaying. He was well suited for the trade: a strong, broad-shouldered young man with huge hands that a brick might have disappeared into.

In 1933, he applied to join the police, presenting among other things a reference from the secretary of the Hutt Rugby Football Club, which read in part:

"Saulbrey has always impressed me as a man who is a credit to the Club and the Town, both on and off the field.

Rugby Football brings out many good qualities, and in particular tests a man's courage and his ability to keep cool in a hard game. As a member of our Senior A team. Saulbrey has proved that he possesses these necessary qualities which I know are required of a member of the Police Force.

We didn't know this until after he was gone, and we still don't know whether he was turned down, or simply thought the better of it.

On February 9th, 1937, he married Hannah Mary Hayes at the Church of St Peter and St Paul, Lower Hutt. They lived in Point Howard and had one child, Annette (my mother) before, in 1941, he and his brothers subdivided part of the old family farm into what became Saulbrey Grove, off White's Line West in Lower Hutt. (Because he was a brickie, he was directed to join the Home Guard, rather than go off to war, and there was a sense later on that perhaps he felt deprived of the honour of fighting for his country.)

Jack was successful enough as a bricklayer to raise the finance, and skilled enough to build most of the houses in the street, including the trophy of them all, his own house, on the huge dog-leg section in the bottom of the cul de sac at No.9.

It's a remarkable house: all in double brick, with two living rooms, curved glass windows and a flat roof to allow for an upward extension that never took place.

They lived well there, with their children, Annette, Glenys, and John, and the house was a hub for the extended family. There would be frequent parties, with singing, someone on the piano, and Jack, as he would all his life, playing piano accordion. In summer, he would pile everyone onto the back of his truck and drive over to the Wairarapa for picnics. Everyone in town knew Jack Saulbrey.

Things, however, were harder than they looked. Hannah was mentally ill, and in an increasingly bad way. My mother remembers her cooking the family a roast dinner and having cheese and crackers for herself, and, increasingly frequently, being away for treatment at Ashburn Hall, the private treatment facility in Dunedin. When she was home, Jack would dilute the sedatives she had been prescribed and she would sit up in bed and smoke Craven A cigarettes. She attempted suicide twice.

Inevitably, there was stigma. My mother, as a young teller at the local bank (where she met my father), would quickly process the cheques that came through from Ashburn Hall, so no one else would see them.

On July the 29th, 1956, Hannah took her own life. She threw herself off the Hutt River bridge. My Uncle John found out in a way that will probably always trouble him. It was two days before my mother's 16th birthday, and they found her presents hidden under the bed.

There was more sadness to come. In 1959, Glenys, who suffered badly from asthma, died of an attack that probably would have been preventable today. The doctor Jack called refused to come (years later, my mother had to serve him regularly in her catering job) and they were at the gates of the hospital when Glenys passed away in his arms.

Jack took to the drink. He got together with an unpleasant woman who stole from him and whose brothers once beat him badly. People didn't come to the house so much any more. It wasn't until he found Eileen Johnston - "Johnnie" - an unpretentious, caring divorcee, who became his housekeeper, that things turned around. In 1967, he announced that Johnnie was to become his wife, and travelled to where we lived in Hamilton to tell us. (My mother, to her eternal embarrassment, didn't take the news well at first.)

This is where it starts to light up for me. I can remember visiting: the huge glasshouse strung with tomatoes; the chooks at the end of the garden, and strung in the kitchen; the rough, unfiltered rollie cigarettes; Jack bringing me raspberry and lemonades as I sat outside the Bellevue in his famous green truck (just once, I was old enough to come in and meet his mates, at the pub where he drank for 40 or 50 years). I remember the parties where people would sing the old songs, and deciding one year that I was old enough to shake his huge hand, rather than receive a kiss. He laughed and obliged.

He had a thought or two in his head, did Jack. He always spoke well of Mickey Savage, and he never forgave Harry Holland for something he said. He also - and this still intrigues me - gave me Robert A. Heinlen's libertarian sci-fi classic Stranger in a Strange Land: "I thought this might interest you," he said. It did.

Jack wasn't one to throw away paperwork, and I remember a couple of big boxes of old rugby almanacs, programmes and tour books that sat in the huge, brick double garage for years. It is one of the great regrets of my life (and I'm officially letting go of it here) that by the time I spoke to my parents after he'd passed away, they'd already been through the house and thrown that treasure away.

Jack was always very proud of the family name, which lives on through John and my brilliant cousins. And it lives on in my heart too. I never got to say goodbye, but that Christmas 20 years ago was probably the day I began to grow up. We're all a composite of our forebears, and I still feel his heritage keenly. And I guess, a grown man myself now, I'm saying goodbye this way.

Jack Saulbrey, my grandpa, was a fine man.

--

Finally, I'd just like to thank everyone involved in Public Address, and especially you, the readers. We've always enjoyed your feedback and after I finally got Public Address System to air, you turned up and made it what it is. So thanks, Merry Christmas - and look out for some interesting things in the new year.

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