Southerly by David Haywood

So Alan Bollard phones me, and he's like: "I'm totally ready to sort out the Briscoes lady once and for all."

And I'm like: "Too right, mate!". Then I go: "But I'll just have to phone Jennifer first. Not that I need to ask permission or anything, but just 'cause I like to treat my lady right."

Five minutes later I hear Bollard's ute in the driveway. I get in the passenger seat and he just looks at me, and asks: "Dude, why are you so totally pussy-whipped?"

He floors it, and I'm about to broach the subject of demand-driven fiscal policy, when he tells me that he's just sunk a dozen bottles of DB Brown. I'm like: "Dude, should you be running the economy when you're totally wasted?" And he's like: "Fuck off, are you my mother or something?"

So we arrive at Briscoes and Bollard gets out. He lifts the tarp on the back of the ute and takes out a softball bat. I'm like: "Dude, I don't think violence is necessary -- and I bet the Briscoes lady doesn't either." And Bollard goes: "She should've thought of that before she got on my fuckin' nerves."

He marches into Briscoes, and goes up to the counter. "Where is she?" he says. The shop-assistant guy goes: "Who?" And Bollard goes: "That fuckin' perky bitch from the telly, who else?"

And the shop-assistant guy is like: "Why do you think she'd be here?" And Bollard goes: "She's the fuckin' Briscoes lady -- where else would she fuckin' live?"

And the shop-assistant goes: "She lives at her own house. She just an actress, you dick."

And Bollard and I are totally embarrassed because, of course, that hadn't occurred to either of us.

So Bollard thinks about it for a second, and before I can stop him he gets the softball bat, and smacks the shop-assistant guy on the side of the head. I'm like: "Dude, what the fuck did you do that for?" And Bollard yells: "He shouldn't have called me a dick."

Next thing the cops turn up, and Bollard's still yelling. But now he's going: "You can't arrest me! I'm Alan Bollard! I'm the governor of the Reserve Bank!" And the cops are like: "Well govern this, you bitch." And they cuff him, and shove him in the police van.

So I catch the bus home, and as soon as I walk in Jennifer asks: "Where's Bollard?" And I'm like: "He's in jail."

And Jennifer goes: "What is it with you and people called Alan? Didn't you learn anything from that time you went to K-mart with Alan Greenspan?"

And she hardly talks to me for the rest of the night.

Note:
David Haywood is willing to sell the exclusive rights to this true story to New Idea, Investigate Magazine, or similar publications.

The abruptness with which the seasons change in Christchurch is always a surprise to me. Last Tuesday we were having pleasant winter weather. There was a frost in the morning, the day was clear and sunny, and the wind was icy. I wore my thermal jacket and felt cold. On Friday the Nor'wester blew in -- and summer arrived.

For many Cantabrians the Nor'westers of summer are an absolute torment. The Föhn effect over the Southern Alps produces a sweltering wind that roars across the Canterbury Plains like air from a gigantic hairdryer. It shakes pollen from the grass, and brings 'Nor'wester sickness' to the citizens of Christchurch. The heat is stifling. During a Nor'wester, nurses snap irritably at their patients, and fraught school-teachers put their whole class on detention.

By mid-morning on Friday the Nor'wester was raising a chop on the normally-placid surface of the Avon. It was an unusually high tide. The whitebait were migrating upriver, and -- comparatively speaking -- the tow-paths had become a frenzy of activity. I counted more than a dozen whitebaiters on the riverbank in the immediate vicinity of our house. Each of them stood alone in a Zen-like trance, with their net held hopefully in their hands. No-one was moving. No-one was catching any whitebait.

According to Wikipedia, the Nor'wester has been "statistically linked to increases in suicide and domestic violence", but there was no sign of this among the fishermen. You need a calm disposition to enjoy whitebaiting as an activity. In my lifetime, I have only once seen a display of temper from a whitebaiter, and that was when he fell into the Avon. He looked slightly annoyed, and said: "Oh heck".

But domestic violence can be just around the corner in a Nor'wester. As I walked along the tow-path I heard a child crying, and went to investigate. It was a little girl, about four years old, and her father was trying to quell her tears with an interesting technique. He was smacking her. "Stop crying," he hissed at his daughter, "or I'll smack you again." The little girl was trying to gulp back her tears, but was having difficulty under the onslaught of blows. She let out another sob. "Shut up," her father said, and slapped her face.

It wasn't a very hard slap, but I could hear it from where I was standing on the opposite bank of the river. Her father looked up, and saw me watching. "Right, we're going now," he said. He picked up his sobbing daughter, and with rapid strides carried her off into the hot dry wind.

By lunchtime it was getting on for 30 degrees. The washing we'd hung on the clothesline was bone dry within an hour. Opening the front door was like stepping into a fan-oven.

Around two o'clock we heard shouting and screaming. The phrase "I'm going to kill you" was repeated several times. I looked out the sitting room window, and saw two people wrestling in the middle of the road. By the time I'd raced outside they had separated -- and a chase was in progress down the footpath.

I use the word 'chase' advisedly. One of the protagonists appeared to be a teenage girl. Her pursuer was an elderly chap in slippers and a dressing-gown. It was hardly a high-speed pursuit -- the old bloke shuffled along at perhaps two kilometres per hour. "Come back here," he rasped, shaking his walking stick. "I'm going to throttle the life out of you!"

My presence seemed to diffuse the conflict immediately. The old chap hobbled off muttering threats, and the teenage girl -- who on closer inspection turned out to be a teenage boy wearing a dress -- sat down on the footpath and started to weep.

I asked if he was all right. He answered with a tearful request: "Could I please use your telephone?". We walked back to the house. He paused at the front door, and peered into the gloom of our hallway. "Have you had this place exorcised?" Our disintegrating residence bears a remarkable resemblance to a haunted house, so this is not an uncommon question.

He perked up when we gave him some biscuits and a cup of tea. Between biscuits he told Jennifer a long rambling story about buying a handbag. Jennifer hasn't owned a handbag since she was fourteen, but she did a masterful job of pretending to be interested.

Eventually we discovered that the old chap was his step-grandfather. They'd been having a conversation about lifestyle choices, and the dialogue had got out of hand. His step-grandfather had offered to resolve their differences by administering a beating with a lump of wood.

The boy's family was a dizzying confusion of aunties, uncles, step-siblings, and foster-parents. Unfortunately he didn't really get along with any of them except his sister. "My sister isn't narrow-minded," he said. "She lets me live my own life."

He telephoned his sister, but she took forever to arrive. In the meantime we chatted about the size of our television set, which -- as he pointed out -- is much too small. Eventually the sister turned up, and gave him a consoling hug. He looked quite cheerful as they drove away in her car.

Jennifer and I went back indoors, and poured ourselves a cold drink.

Outside it was hot and dry. The trees threshed and swayed, the power-lines thrummed like guitar strings, and the Nor'wester howled on.

When I was a lad, my great-uncle Bob would often greet me with the words: "Hello, young shaver."

Personally, I never cared for his usage of the word 'shaver'. I didn't know what it meant (and still don't), but I have always suspected that it was some sort of insult. Unfortunately, however, in the twenty or so years before he became ex-great-uncle Bob, I was never able to think of a snappy rejoinder, and was forced to express my disapproval by merely glowering at him in resentful silence.

A few years back I acquired a nephew of my own. In a playful mood one day, I greeted him in the manner of my late great-uncle.

"I'm not a shaver," replied my nephew indignantly.

So simple! If only I'd thought of that.

My nephew, Zeno (appropriately named after the brainy Greek philosopher), was four years old at the time. Since then I have regarded him with a certain awe. It seems to me that he is bound to go on to great things.

On this basis, I am always ready to augment his 'official' education with an inexhaustible supply of avuncular anecdotes and edifying homilies. Principally, I admit, in the hope that he won't forget me -- particularly in the financial sense -- when he becomes the prime minister and/or a multi-billionaire.

On such occasions I light a metaphorical cigar, pour myself a metaphorical brandy, get myself comfortable on my metaphorical wing-backed armchair, fold my hands contentedly across my not-at-all metaphorical paunch, and dispense pearls of wisdom to his tender young ears.

Zeno is eleven now. His recently-developed interest in guitars has -- perhaps inevitably -- given these philosophical discussions a slight musical flavour. Nevertheless, as you will observe, I generally manage to fit in an instructive homily or two.

"Uncle David, what's that twiddly chord in the guitar riff from the song Ziggy Stardust on the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars?"

"Well, Zeno, your question reminds me of a little story I've been meaning to tell you for some time. Sit down on this metaphorical horsehair sofa, and listen carefully to what I'm about to say.

"When your Uncle David was a teenager (as recently as the early 1990s) he lived here in West Auckland. And, in those days, the suburb of Mt Roskill was home to three beautiful sisters, who -- for the sake of your uncle's future legal bills -- we'll call the Bertons.

"Susan was the youngest of the Berton sisters, Sarah was the eldest, and Judith was in the middle. I didn't really know Judith, so my educational monologue will limit itself to the allures of Susan and Sarah.

"Susan was not only extremely cute, but she also had copious quantities of X-factor. Men used to fall for her like they'd been pole-axed. She worked in a pizza shop, and on one single day she had three different men profess their love for her -- a delivery boy, a co-worker, and a guy in Wellington that phoned about a yeast order. That's right, Zeno, she had so much X-factor that it could travel down telephone lines as far as the lower North Island.

"Her older sister Sarah was just as lovely -- perhaps not quite as much X-factor, but better hair. In fact, before meeting Sarah I had never entertained the possibility of marrying someone solely on account of their hair. After meeting Sarah it wouldn't have struck me as an unreasonable suggestion.

"To cut a long story short the entire situation bore a remarkable similarity to that DVD we watched about the princess and the handsome stable-boy. I had no more thought of marrying one of the beautiful Berton sisters than I did of flying to the moon. They were not only in a different league -- they were in an entirely different sporting code. The possibility of a romantic relationship simply never occurred to me. And I hope it won't ruin the story by mentioning at this point that I never did have a romantic relationship with any of them.

"But around this same time I had a friend called Jonathan -- a humble woodcutter's son from Totara North. He bore little resemblance to Brad Pitt. He didn't drive a sports car. He wasn't even an international spy. In fact, Jonathan was a linguist who specialized in the languages of the Papua New Guinea highlands.

"I happened to introduce him to Sarah one day, and the next thing I knew they were going out. I couldn't have been more surprised if I'd discovered that Jonathan had been elected as Pope, or recruited to replace Joey Santiago in the Pixies

"Zeno, I know that my concluding point will make practically no sense to you. But consider this astonishing fact: your Aunt Jennifer once repeated my interpretation of these events to one of her uber-feminist friends, and after hearing it, the uber-feminist said she no longer hated men -- she just pitied them.

"Where I saw an insurmountable barrier of beauty, intelligence, and charm, Jonathan saw (I suppose) just another human being with really great hair. It was a revelation for me, Zeno. An event that made me look at the world with new eyes.

"If an ordinary mortal human being like Jonathan -- a run-of-the-mill bloke just like you or me -- could date a goddess with magnificent hair like Sarah Berton then practically anything is possible. There are virtually no limits to what the human race can achieve. We could bring an end to war, hunger, and disease. We could live in bubble-dome cities on the moon. We could teach the ordinary citizens of this proud nation to use apostrophes correctly. And you, personally, could become as good at playing the guitar as Mick ‘Ronno’ Ronson from The Spiders from Mars.

"So go forth and change the world, young shaver. The chord is D major with a suspended 4th -- and don't forget me when you make your first billion."

If proof was ever wanted that I am bone-idle lazy, then this is it. Yes, I have a bad back. But it is not your normal sort of bad back which hurts when you pick things up, or when you do physical exercise. I can cycle and kayak and even drink beer -- all the things I enjoy -- without a twinge. No, I have the sort of bad back that is normally associated with dodgy ACC claimants. As soon as I try to do paid work I am crippled. Sitting at my computer has me writhing with pain. As Jennifer says, with a certain amount of spousal scepticism: "It seems like a funny co-incidence."

It has been my observation that there are mild illnesses and serious illnesses, but that I usually end up with the serious ones. A bad back is a serious illness in my opinion. Some illnesses, however, are positively light-hearted. There are few of us, for example, who haven't derived innocent amusement from seeing someone drop a cannonball on their gouty foot. Gout is quite a humorous condition -- as, I imagine, gout sufferers will readily acknowledge. But a bad back isn't remotely funny. Television programmes which show back-sufferers falling down staircases are in poor taste. In fact, back pain humour is perhaps the lowest form of amusement.

To be honest, I don't deal with pain very well. It makes me crabby and irritable, and leads me to do things that I wouldn't normally countenance. Last week, in my professional capacity as an energy engineer, I not only accused the venerable CC-Amatil business executive Carl Crowley of being on drugs, but I also implied that he was a dwarf. Mind you -- as the Hopi Indians believe -- it's possible that intense pain can give you flashes of deep insight that you wouldn't normally attain.

Actually, I think illness was much simpler back in Carl's time. You got ill, then you died. End of story. People were more accepting then. My grandfather was occasionally crippled with sciatica, but all he ever needed was a dab of Fiery Jack and then he got back to work. Fiery Jack -- if you have never encountered it before -- is an unusual treatment. The back of the Fiery Jack box depicts the devil sticking his pitchfork into a man's back. The man has an astonishingly realistic expression of anguish on his face, and I have long considered this image to be one of humankind's great artistic triumphs.

Before I tried Fiery Jack I assumed that the depiction of the devil represented back pain. After I used Fiery Jack I understood that the devil represented the treatment. Roughly speaking, Fiery Jack operates on the same principle that prevents forestry-workers from noticing their toothache after they have chain-sawed off their foot. It contains 96 per cent of the same ingredients used to manufacture Napalm. My brother and I used to smear it over my little sister to make her cry.

The doctor suggested that deep tissue massage might be a suitable treatment for my bad back. The only problem with this is that I'm not too keen on strangers rubbing their hands all over me. Not unless they're particularly attractive strangers, which -- in my experience -- they never are. Of course I wouldn't mind if Jennifer rubbed my back. The only difficulty with this concept is that Jennifer (as she puts it herself) "can't be arsed."

I think my aversion to being pawed by strangers is probably the result of coming from a non-hugging family. I have never hugged my brother or sister, and I have only once been hugged by my father. The incident with my father is explained by the fact that he had just come back from four years in California.

Being a non-hugger makes travel in Europe difficult. I am fully fluent in two foreign phrases: "N'embarassez pas s'il vous plait" and "Nein! Nicht umarmen!", but unfortunately they never seem to work. My friend, Malibu Katie, is horrified by my reluctance to hug. Malibu Katie -- and I'm not making this up -- is the real-life sister of the famous Malibu Bomber. She thinks hug-deprivation will have wrought irreparable psychological harm on my siblings and me. Possibly. But on the other hand, unlike her family, none of us have ever been the subject of a police manhunt.

It is a measure of my back pain that I did indeed pay a visit to a massage therapist yesterday. The first thing that she did was to ask me to get undressed. The possibility of this had never previously occurred to me. I thought I would be massaged through my clothes. You feel so defenceless when you're in the nude. The masseuse got me to lie down naked, and then poked her fingers into my sore back as hard as she could. For an hour. Then she charged me $60.

As I limped from her studio, the masseuse told me that she believed her work would make a huge difference to my back. She was right. Everything had changed when I got up this morning. Previously I was in pain, but now I am in agony.

I believe I heard the first episode of Hard News ever to be broadcast. I was still a spotty teenager at the time, sitting in my girlfriend's Ford Anglia as we drove through Grey Lynn. Hard News was so astonishing that -- in order to listen properly -- we stopped the car in Williamson Avenue. Although we both followed the news, this was the first time we had heard anything presented in our particular frame of reference. Serious news analysis was usually for other people. People who were older, more sedate, and far more conservative. Hard News was serious analysis for people like us. We were both spellbound. As my girlfriend put it: "I never knew Bill Ralston was so clever."

Later on, we discovered that Bill Ralston was only as clever as we had always suspected. The intelligent bloke on Hard News was actually a journalist called Russell Brown. By this time Hard News had become an important part of my information diet, and when I moved to Christchurch the first thing I did with my new email address was to subscribe to the Hard News transcript.

I read Hard News almost every week until September 20th 2002 -- a tragic day for New Zealand's mediaphiles -- when it was broadcast on bFM for the last time. It seemed like the end of an era. But then, miraculously, much like a religious figure nearly 2,000 years previously (but without the sandals), Hard News rose from the dead, and was resurrected onto a new website called Public Address. Hallelujah! And, not only that, but Russell Brown was joined by a bunch of other clever people. And you could read their entertaining and intelligent opinions nearly every day.

It seemed like mediaphile paradise. And for a while it was. But then it happened. Russell Brown mentioned his gout. Gout? It was the beginning of a terrible downward spiral. Russell soon became a man obsessed. He could write about nothing but gout. Page after page. Post after post. Gout, gout, gout. People emailed him: "Russell, enough with the gout already." But it made no difference. And then David Slack started. He had leg pains. He was accident prone. The ACC wouldn't give their real names when they replied to his letters. He had a sore toe.

Soon Damian Christie was moaning about his ear ache. Keith Ng started complaining about a sore shoulder. Tze Ming Mok embarked on a long discourse about her bruised fist. Fiona Rae described her spinal injuries in minute detail. And Jolisa Gracewood harped on about her so-called 'women’s problems'. Public Address began to read like a series of entries from the Merck Manual.

Something had to be done, and (eventually) I felt compelled to do it. I wrote to Russell Brown: "Russell -- please -- this has got to stop. I may not be clever. I may not be witty. I may not have anything worthwhile to say. But, by God, I've got my health. Give me my own web-log, and let's get Public Address back on the straight and narrow. Let's work together to overcome this whole valetudinarian thing."

So here I am. And for years I've been wanting to use the word valetudinarian in a proper sentence. And now I have. It seems like a good start.

Another good start might be to make use of those pointless management courses that have been foisted upon me over the years. I have learnt that one of the most important rules -- perhaps the only really important rule -- of management is that you should begin every new enterprise with a mission statement. This should preferably be quite unachievable, and should be prominently displayed so that all your customers can laugh at it.

My favourite mission statement is at a local sawdust merchant who intends not only to become "the world's leading supplier of sawdust" but also to "delight our customers." Now there's a real mission for you. I'd put money on the fact that there has never been anyone in the history of human civilization who has ever been delighted by purchasing a pile of sawdust. And, if you ask me, there never will be. I think my own mission statement might aim a little lower. In fact, I have been toying with the following one-word mission statement beloved of teenagers everywhere: 'Whatever'. This seems to suit the random and -- thus far -- aimless direction of my life.

However, given the medical basis for my appearance on Public Address, it is probably fitting that physical health should be given prominent mention. Although, to be entirely honest with you, my health is not perfect. I have a bad back. So I suppose I would describe myself as stoic rather than healthy. In fact, on the days when my back is really painful, I sometimes think that my life is like the story of the Spartan boy who stole a fox. Except without the fox. Or, of course, any stealing. But alas -- even without the fox or stealing -- this is far too long for a mission statement.

So I have decided that the most appropriate mission statement for this weblog is the following: "I shall not be seeking the baubles of valetudinarianism."

That is my bottom line.