Up Front by Emma Hart

My First was Tom Baker. He had a sweet, mischievous smile, big hair, a big coat, a long scarf, and a tendency to offer lollies to strangers. To this day, I can never see a Bassett’s Jelly Baby without thinking of him.

He had the most wonderful companions. Leela. Romana. K-9. Some shit ones too, but I don’t remember them. And an episode in which the Big Bad turned out to be an enormous, ridiculous puppet snake. Alright, so my memory is cloudy, but the basic point remains. You never forget your First.

Eventually, this long-serving and much-loved doctor was replaced by a younger actor and a less self-assured characterisation. After a couple of episodes I forgave this. The antique cricketing whites helped. In time I came to love Peter Davison in his own right. He just wasn’t the First.

After Davison, I stopped watching. Like everyone else. I do understand there are some people so unfortunately aged that Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy was their First, and for them I can only grieve. We’re sorry, kind of. In a ‘rather you than us’ kind of way.

My daughter’s First was David Tennant. Well, yeah, there was Christopher Ecclestone, but that doesn’t count. Over too fast, and though occasionally fondly remembered, never with the visceral attachment of the First. Basically, Tennant was her doctor from ages ten to thirteen.

So I was intrigued on two levels to watch this much-loved long-serving drop-dead-gorgeous doctor being replaced by a younger actor, and it seems a less self-assured characterisation. Would I like this new guy, and more to the point, would she?

Surprisingly, it turned out I barely noticed him. It seemed very important that I notice the legs of this hot, spirited red-headed chick, and when you put it like that (i.e. you frame a shot so it contains his face, and the back of her seamed-stocking-clad thigh) who am I to refuse? And that’s pretty much been my impression: that Matt Smith’s been blown off the small screen by Karen Gillan. Feel free to disagree.

And my daughter? Like pretty much every time I worry about formative experiences for her, she’s unphased. She likes her new Doctor. She doesn’t mind that the old one’s gone. (I’m still buying her a door poster of David Tennant for her birthday. Yes, it’s for her.) The only thing that seemed to make a major impression on the kids was the sight of Weeping Angels in the series trailer at the end, which made even my fifteen year old boy spontaneously gasp. Bless you, Steven Moffat, you really know how to scare the crap out of children.

So much for bringing you a new generation of deep thinking on Doctor Who. My son did comment that Matt Smith’s Doctor seems gentler, softer. The word going through my head was “doughy”. I am currently reserving judgement until we’ve seen some more of him. With Steven Moffat writing him (killer shadows, gas masks, statues, AND Captain Jack Harkness) how far wrong could it possibly go? And no matter how bad it gets, there’s always Amy Pond.

In a move which has further horrified front-line welfare agencies, Social Development Minister Paula Bennett has announced that, as of April 1st next year, National Superannuation payments will be work-tested.

In a document which was at first thought to be a leaked internal memo, Ms Bennett lays out her reasoning. “Any way you look at it, this only seems fair. Most Unemployment Benefit recipients only bludge off us for less than a year, maybe two at the outside. Most people on the DPB, it’s only a couple of years longer and let’s face it, what sane person is going to argue that raising kids on your own isn’t working?

“But old people? Jesus. They turn sixty-five and they expect a free ride for the rest of their freaking lives? Decades! Lying around in caravans out the back of their kids’ place drinking and spending all our money at the TAB. Hey, that’s another thing, you know what? Let’s ban old people from having phone accounts with the TAB. That’s our fucking money, you know. And the pub. It’s not like old people are hard to spot, and if they can walk down the pub and lift a handle, they can work in a bloody call centre.”

When it was pointed out to Ms Bennett that traditionally, retired people are considered to have made their contribution to society and earned their ‘free ride’, she exploded in a leopard-skin paroxysm of righteousness. “Nuh-uh! UB, DPB, those people still have contributions to make, so it makes sense to help them out. You get pay-back. But old people, fuck me, what are they going to do, come up with a more efficient possum-fur tea-cosy? Provide free child-care in the school holidays so their slutty daughters can be made to work for a dollar an hour? If they can do that, they can do forty hours driving a mining truck.

“Plus, plus! Working is good for you! It’ll keep ‘em sharp, stop ‘em getting all depressed and ill and shit. And moving around will help keep them warm, they’re always whining about being cold. Really, we’re helping the lazy little fuckers. It’s for their own good, but am I going to get any gratitude? Am I fuck.”

When questioned about this latest outburst, Prime Minister John Key said he was “relaxed about it”. “I mean, why wouldn’t I be? We’ll be retiring to the place in Maui anyway. It’s not my bum getting kicked up. And hey, let’s be positive, it’s already got people working. There was some old guy in Tauranga saying this would bring him out of retirement just this morning. Nice suit, too.”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Bennett further condescended. “If they genuinely can’t work, and they can prove it to the satisfaction of a bunch of people with no medical expertise who’ve been given a quota to get off the Bludge, they’ll continue to receive their beer and horse money no problems. But if they’ve been planning to put their feet up and sponge off the state while they’ve still got the strength to use a trowel – and don’t think we won’t have private detectives parked outside their houses watching – then I’m afraid the dream is over.”

In some role-playing games, there’s an advantage called Machine Empathy. It lets a character instinctively understand how to operate and repair anything mechanical or electronic. My partner and my brothers all apparently spent points on it.

I have whatever the complete opposite of Machine Empathy is. Since I was a small child, machines have intimidated and confused me. (This could be down to spending too much time out the back of butcher shops as a kid and seeing a man lose a thumb-tip to a bone-saw, but let’s not over-analyse this.)

Given this, I’ve always thought that, rather than surprise and mild derision, I should receive some kind of reward for not driving. I’m making the world a safer place, believe me.

The main inconvenience from not driving is not having any photo ID. I can’t easily prove who I am. For a brief period, I was supposed to need to produce photo ID to fly domestically – because apparently someone smuggling a concealed home-made bomb in their hand-luggage would be unable to produce a driver’s licence. Airline staff nearly always forgot this during the argument over my feet. These days the Magic Check-In Kiosk doesn’t give a rat’s arse who I am. I look forward to the day an android is telling me to put some fucking shoes on.

I did get asked for ID buying wine at the supermarket last year, but I think my incredulous laughter was convincing enough, given I'm 18+ another 18 and a little bit more.

Turns out, though, that you also need photo ID to buy a house. Our lawyer didn’t quite know what to do when I didn’t have any, but we’d go over and he’d sort something out. My partner and I joked that we should take a photo of me, with “this is Emma” written on the back.

My inherent facetiousness probably didn’t help, to be fair. Because when asked “Do you have anything with your photo on it?” the two responses that leapt to mind were, “The internet?” and “Well… not my head.”

We ended up printing out a photograph of me from the internet, and writing “this is Emma” on it. If I’d taken my glasses off, we could equally well have done this with a photo of my friend Karla. (I think, technically, this makes me the Clark Kent to her Superman. Which means I didn’t get her to carry nearly enough boxes when we moved.)

Anyway (to use a totally unconvincing segue), I’m celebrating being all settled into our new house by leaving it. I’m repacking some of my unpacking and heading to Wellington tonight. For anyone who missed the announcement on Hadyn’s blog, he and Keith and I will be at the Basin for the first day of the First Test against Australia tomorrow (Friday), and at Hooch for drinks from 5pm onwards. Come on down if you can and join the disreputable bunch of media and Public Address types lounging about in the balmy late summer weather Wellington is bound to lay on for me. Why yes, I am taking my coat.

At the start of this year, I decided to consciously take a new, experimental approach to my internet interactions. No Safeties ’10 meant being less paranoid (or ‘cautious’) and accepting any ‘friend’ or ‘follower’ except the most obvious spam. It also meant making more of an effort to remember to reply to emails, even if they could be construed as a bit dodgy. That second bit been a little less successful, as some of you will know from personal experience.

As I report to the small number of (always female usually American) friends constantly astonished that I’m not dead in a ditch yet, this experiment has had mixed results. On the one hand, I garnered a selection of increasingly young male Pakistani, Indian and Turkish Facebook friends. On the other, I had coffee with a very nice German man here on holiday.

That, and the not turning up in a ditch, was pretty much what I was expecting. Those friends were, after all, wrong when they thought David Haywood was going to murder me. What I wasn’t expecting was the attention from businesses.

At first it was just a very helpful nice man deducing my home phone number from my Twitter account so he could give me some information I’d asked for. (Yes, you may. It’s an experiment, after all.) Then it was a blog comment causing some instant action in an area where that action should have been happening anyway. And then, a business we were dealing with over our house purchase picked up on a Tweet of mine, from the middle of a conversation with someone else, worked out who I was and leaned on the person we were dealing with to make the problem go away.

Brilliant, right? Somebody searching tweets for their company’s name and getting customer service reps to deal with complaints so the bad publicity goes away. It doesn’t always work: there was no amount of Tweet-plaining, it seemed, that was going to fix a Prominent Tweeter’s Orcon connection. But if you’re currently experiencing service intractability, it’s got to be worth a try.

And what could possibly go wrong? One keyworded 140-character tweet will give you all the context and nuance you could possibly want, right?

As advantageous as this has been to me personally, it gives me the chills. I work in customer service, you see. And if our company was big enough to make a decision like this, I know just what would happen.

For a start, most of the customers complaining about us on Twitter/Facebook/blogs would be the ones we already put the most time into. The ones that get pissed off because we can’t rupture the time-space continuum for them. The ones who, when you tell them what they want is completely impossible, bounce round every single other admin trying to get a different answer, then start on the second lap.

Ergo, the person who goes through the Tweets and brings us their whining and demands that we make it go away? Becomes the Most Hated Person in the Building, and we don’t even have a building. We have to take time away from other customers to explain that, no, actually, that wasn’t what happened, that wasn’t what we said, and the reason that thing hasn’t been done is that nobody got bitten by a radioactive spider last night. All in all, I’d rather have Person Who Goes Through Tweets working on the team, and maybe we could do more for the less squeaky wheels.

Anyway, the big change in my net habits so far has been that, after tweeting the dreadful experience we had with Jetstar and the brilliant service we got from the Christchurch City Council (srsly), I intend to never mention a business again. Otherwise one day someone’s going to push a customer representative too far, and I’ll end up dead in a ditch.

For those curious about my (for me) prolonged absence from Public Address, this blog may go some way to explaining it – both in its content, and the shitty shitty quality of the writing.

It’s been a heck of a start to the year for our family. I’ve been slogging my way through a job which has allowed me to categorically state that the most boring place in the country is Clive. Sorry, Clive. Incidentally, we’ve discovered the way in which hunting down and then bagging, tagging and weighing a house consumes your entire existence. And then you look at a calendar and think, “Oh my goodness gracious me*, we leave for Foo Camp in two days!”

And you know, I’d had such good intentions for being useful, and what I foresee happening now is, “Hi, I’m… wait, I know this one. Does anyone know a good moving company?”

Public Address has been working its arse off lately, so it’s only fair that somebody lets the side down. So I apologise for the way I have neglected Up Front, and I can promise you both ragey sarcasm and weird news from the world of erotic publishing later in the month. Or after our possession date, or something.

In the meantime, I have not so much a column as a question I want to ask, sparked by the discussion around the Big Aussie Small Breast Controversy.

See, what Graeme says here is quite correct:

Our laws ban material that encourages the sexual exploitation of children. If pornography involving only actresses aged 18+ encourages the sexual exploitation of children (for example, by using actresses that look younger than 18, in situations that suggest they are younger than 18), then it will fall foul of the law.

It’s interesting, I think, to consider the idea that what the DIA insists on calling “child sexual abuse images” don’t have to involve children, or sexual abuse, or be images.

So here’s the question I want to consider. If you could phrase your answers so they could be cribbed directly into a discussion on internet filtering, I promise to try to remember to mention your name. Probably to my building inspector.

Under what circumstances should it be illegal to look at a picture of something it is legal to do?

*paraphrasing, obviously