Laughter is the best medicine

When I was youngster and needed pocket money my father would initially seek to deny his monetary responsibilities by tracing my parentage back to the milkman. Dad had a warped sense of humour, but I was savvy enough to know that the milkman wasn’t really my father; I didn’t even look like him. Not that I would have minded. Our milkman was one of the funniest men I have ever known and I would have been more than happy to have inherited his infectious sense of humour.

The man in question was Ron Matthews, and my father used to reckon that he missed his vocation as a milkman and should have been on the stage. He certainly was a natural raconteur. Dad likened him to Will Rogers; not that I ever knew Will Rogers. Before I was born he had died, like so many American entertainers, in a light aeroplane crash. I have seen some grainy, black and white film footage of him and from these I would have, perhaps unfairly, judged our milkman to be more talented.

Delivering milk to suburban Lansdowne where we lived was a relatively simple operation. Mr. Matthews owned and operated a small dairy farm a couple of miles away, as the crow flies, at Te Ore Ore. My best friend was his youngest son Donald, so I knew the property well. We would regularly go out to watch the cows having their fortifying liquid extracted. With milking machines; I am not talking dim dark ages here.

The milk destined for town supply was poured into large cans and taken in an old Bedford truck to the Matthews’ home at the top of Opaki Road where it was placed in the cool concrete shed at the back of the house. The milk sat in large vats immersed in cold water.

Some was separated to produce cream, but the unadulterated creamy milk was decanted into trendy cans and loaded into the yellow Morris Eight van and then off down the road with the bell ringing alerting customers to the fresh supply. Folk would come to their gates with billy’s in hand and Mr. Matthews would dispense the milk by ladling it out generously, offering homilies and humorous monologues in the process, and extracting a few pennies for his wares.

He worked in a competitive environment. Around the corner, in Totara Street, Mrs. Haxton kept cows in the paddocks behind her house. Those fields now form Lansdowne Crescent. She and her family milked the animals by hand and offered a gate supply at a slightly keener price.

I’ll swear the Walton family lived just down the road.

It was too good to last of course. What madness was this? Fresh milk and cream, still warm from the cow, being delivered daily to your door. Milk with cream on top that meant Creamota really was the breakfast of champions and extremely palatable. Cream that could be whipped up in less than a minute, was still fresh in the frig days later, and didn’t turn to water. How churlish of us to expect such luxuries to continue.

Greater minds prevailed and now they’ve got it all sorted. Wairarapa’s town milk suppliers have the milk picked up in giant tandem-tankers, every second day. These 40,000 litre juggernauts plough their way through the Manawatu Gorge, skirt the back streets of Palmerston North and then head out to Longburn to disperse the raw milk for further processing and refining so that it becomes an unrecognisable shadow of its former self.

At a time when our government borrows millions from overseas money-lenders to maintain our standard of living it makes good sense that the Swedish trucks, lit up like Christmas trees, crafted of American sourced stainless steel and riding on Japanese tyres, fueled by imported diesel should weave their way around the country, occasionally scattering motorists in their wake, so that you and I can have near-fresh milk eventually delivered to our supermarkets.

The old way, while giving the impression of sheer efficiency, could not possibly have been so. Otherwise, why would they change it?

Now packed in triple-skinned, non-biodegradable plastic containers that cause all sorts of havoc at the recycling centres, with clever caps and locking rings designed to choke your dog, the colourless, odourless, fatless, tasteless product is a triumph for those who regard blandness as a virtue.

There will be defenders of the modern way who will point out that the today’s product is more hygienic; sterilised and pasteurised. And yet the government dispensing agency, Pharmac, concluded a while back that too much sterilisation and the over-prescription of antibiotics have turned us into a nation of wuss’s, with no natural anti-bodies to ward off even the most minor of illnesses.

We can’t stop progress, but online shopping, without the imposition of 15 percent GST, could mean that retailers will soon be as scarce as milkmen.

Mr. Matthews used to drop his fresh milk off daily to the Masterton hospital. I can’t say of course that as far as I know, no-one died. Hundreds will have, but not because of the untreated milk, unless I am very much mistaken.

If he had been able to take time out to speak to some of the terminally ill, at least they would have died laughing.

Good night, John-Boy.

“It takes one hen to lay an egg, but seven men to sell it.” – C. J. Dennis

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The old cleric's unbelievable story

The year is 2050. Two clerics are sitting in the shade of the mosque. The old cleric is being pestered by the young cleric to tell him about the rise and fall of the Western Empire. The old cleric was a young cleric himself back in 2013 and he had a clear recollection of the times.

“It all started when the great infidel decided to supply weaponry to the rebel army in Syria” mused the old man, “Although the Syrian leader was something of an oppressor, those who opposed his rule were a mixed bunch which included sincere revolutionaries, but also varying groups of radical terrorists who were really just spoiling for a fight against officialdom.

“The westerners meanwhile had an uneasy alliance with the Middle East. They were hugely dependant on petroleum. Although they had the technology at the time to produce fuel cell motors that ran on hydrogen, big business, politics and the oil industry were so inextricably linked they had always put off the giant step to free themselves from their dependence on the combustion engine.

“On the surface America appeared to be very wealthy country, but its government ran current account deficits to the tune of trillions of dollars annually and the nation was morally bankrupt. When the oil ran out, so did their resolve.”

The young cleric wondered about the decline in morals.

“Historians trace it back to a time in the 1950’s when a woman named Madeline Murray O’Hare convinced the United States supreme court that it should ban prayer in schools. Mrs O’Hare was later murdered by one of her associates, but by then moral teachings had been well and truly abandoned.

“Researchers also talk of another guru called Dr Spock who persuaded them not to discipline their children when they misbehaved in case it damaged their self esteem. After Dr Spock’s own son committed suicide he recanted this advice, but by then it was too late.  Whole generations grew up without any self control.

“They decided young girls could have abortions without telling their parents, condom machines were placed in high schools, magazines were printed showing undressed females and young children were placed on the internet in provocative poses. They broadcast music with satanic themes that encouraged rape, drug taking, murder, and suicide. Young people killed strangers, their classmates and themselves. Their film industry distributed films worldwide that were profane, violent and encouraged illicit sex.

“Even one of their presidents set new low standards. A married man, he was found out doing unmentionable things with a young Jewish girl at his place of work, but when some of his colleagues endeavoured to have him thrown out of office the general populace rose up in support saying whatever is done in private was no one else’s business.

“Apparently their God saw only what they did in public.

“One country, New Zealand, was known as “God’s own” and indeed it was a blessed place. A temperate climate meant pastures grew like weeds and they produced an abundance of food, most of which they exported to the world. Yet despite this, many of its citizens had to access food banks to feed their starving families.

“The westerners had an economic grouping they called the OECD which they used to measure their performances against each other. It revealed that New Zealand had the highest rate of juvenile theft, youth suicide and cannabis use.

“In 2003 they legalised prostitution despite the fact that European countries, specifically France, passed laws that very same year, banning it. They had already passed legislation encouraging young people to drink alcohol.”

“But surely,” persisted the young cleric, “The women of this blessed country would have stood firm and demanded that these law changes did not take place.”

“That was the perplexing part,” said the old cleric, “At the time the country was run by women. They had a woman prime minister, a woman governor-general, a woman attorney-general and a woman chief justice.”

“What about their clerics and their ayatollahs?” said the younger of the two,

“Wouldn’t they have protested?”

“Their silence was deafening,” said the older man, “I suspect they were suppressed by their own communion wine. It was known that some of their lot, mercifully only a few, even found solace in young boys.”

The young cleric decided enough was enough and picked up his prayer mat and proceeded into the Mosque to bow to the east and pray to Allah. He passed the huge statue of Osama bin Laden and briefly enjoyed the cool shadow it cast. Arabia was full of such statues and all of them bore the same inscription: “The Power of One.”

He knew the senior cleric was prone to exaggeration and inclined to embellish his stories. Most of what he had just told him, he decided, could not possibly be kosher.

But he loved the old man’s entertaining way with words; perhaps one day he would be told the real truth.

“By our own act we were drained of morality, of volition, of responsibility, like dead leaves in the wind.”                                            -  T. E. Lawrence - Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

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Looking a gift horse in the mouth

An old schoolboy friend came to visit recently. Malcolm used to live over the road from our place and we went to primary school together. The family left Masterton when his father was transferred to Auckland. Malcolm at the time was in the third form at Wairarapa College. I had only seen him once since then, and that was about 40 years ago when I was being shown through Auckland’s Southdown freezing works. Malcolm left the chain and approached me wearing white overalls, matching gumboots and one of these silly hats workers in some food industries are obliged to wear. I didn’t recognise him at first, but we shook hands and were only able to exchange a few words before my hosts hurried me on to the next section of that vast meat-processing plant.

So I was delighted when a few months ago he turned up on our doorstep with his charming wife and over dinner we were able to catch up over the direction our paths had taken in the intervening sixty years. One interesting aspect of Malcolm’s life was that he is a firm friend of Sir Owen Glenn. I was a little surprised given the disparity of incomes; the freezing worker and the multi-millionaire seemed like an unlikely mix.

It turns out Malcolm and Owen played hockey together at Mount Roskill Grammar and following that with the college’s old boys’ team. Owen then did the big OE to Europe and went on to make his fame and fortune establishing a freight-forwarding business. But he never forgot his old friend. Thanks to Owen’s generosity Malcolm has seen most of the world courtesy of Owen’s luxury super-yacht. Whenever Owen planned a voyage of some significance he would send Malcolm air tickets to wherever the vessel was anchored and Malcolm would join him on the various jaunts. South America, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean; wherever Owen’s whim would take them.

Malcolm sent me a copy of Sir Owen’s book Making a Difference. He needn’t have; I had bought a copy the day after Malcolm left; I was so interested about what he had told me about Glenn. Autobiography’s, unlike unauthorised biographies, are always going to show the author in a good light and certainly in this book, of which I now have two copies, Sir Owen looks like the thoroughly nice person that Malcolm described him as. There are lots of photos in the book and Malcolm appears in many of them.

Glenn of course had shown huge generosity to this country which incidentally was not the country of his birth. He was born in Calcutta and his family emigrated to New Zealand when he was 12.

His altruism knows no bounds particularly when you consider that he gave an ungrateful Winston Peters $100,000 to pay legal expenses and picked up a part-ownership of the struggling Warriors Rugby League team.

And then there was the S7.5 million dollars to build the Business School premises on the campus of the Auckland University and a half a million dollar a year matching scholarship to go with it.

He has given generously to the Christchurch earthquake recovery programme, the National Aquatic Centre and a host of sporting bodies.

He set up the Glenn Family Foundation with an initial donation of $8 million to build stronger communities in South Auckland where he used to live and more importantly he has pledged $80 million to an organisation of his own making, intent on improving the lot of children and families and reversing New Zealand’s horrific child abuse and domestic violence statistics.

All this came tumbling down last week when a disputed revelation mischievously came to light disclosing that Sir Owen was charged with physically abusing a young woman, apparently a member of his family, in Hawaii in 2002. Culpable or not, Glenn took his lawyer’s advice and entered a plea of no contest and when a probationary period expired the charge was dismissed.

Violence by men against women is inexcusable, but the tone of his autobiography strongly suggests this is a man with a hard business heart, but a soft personal one.

Whether or not he was guilty as charged may never be known. However the subsequent petulant behaviour of some of those he originally selected to aid him in his desire to survey the symptoms and chart a course to reduce the incidence of New Zealand’s appalling family violence statistics, means the programme is now in jeopardy.

Sir Owen’s generosity to this country was surprising when by my reckoning he only lived here for about seven years as a teenager.

He currently resides in Australia; if only Russell Crowe was as philanthropic.

“How far that little candle throws its beams. So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” - William Shakespeare

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An analysis of the ties that bind

My father once told me that there was an old saying that went: “Never trust a man who wears a bow tie.” I considered this to be a bit dubious particularly when some years later we resolved to wear bow ties and boater hats in our butcher’s shop. I suggested to dad that did this now mean we couldn't be trusted? 

But he reckoned the adage didn't apply when the bow tie was part of a uniform.

I thought about this when parliament’s most principled man Peter Dunne, who has latterly taken to wearing bow ties, was recently found to be untrustworthy. There’s some confusion as to whether or not he leaked a sacred government document, but he subsequently lost the trust of his leader and as a consequence his position of cabinet minister outside of cabinet.

Back in his four-in-hand days, the worm turned favourably for Peter Dunne when a studio audience in a televised political debate deemed his contribution to be the most sensible. He became New Zealand’s most trusted politician overnight.

But that was yesteryear.

Winston Peters in a cruel insight suggested “there’s no fool like an old fool” and certainly it looked as though Mr Dunne may have had a crush on the lovely Andrea Vance and was possibly showing-off his unfettered access to secret cabinet papers to attract her attention.

I suspect at this point Mrs Dunne will have lost trust in him as well.

Meanwhile Ms Vance disappeared from her post at the Dominion-Post, apparently taking up a scholarship on some distant shore, away from the pestiferous pens of those who follow her craft, but work for rival organisations.

All of this proved, if indeed we needed any proof, of the sheer stupidity of the MMP system of government. Peter Dunne leads a non-existent party called United Future. It’s not united and it has no future.

It was formed to contest the 2002 election when United New Zealand and Future New Zealand resolved to join forces. United New Zealand was originally formed as a centrist party by a group of moderate Labour and National MP’s and held just one seat in parliament, that of Mr Dunne.

Future New Zealand, which was not represented in parliament, was a “secularised” evolution of the Christian Democrats, following the same basic principles as the Christian Democrats, but abandoning the explicit religious connection. I’ll swear I heard a cock crow three times when they initially proffered that explanation.

United Future attracted a good deal of cynicism when in 2004, in an attempt to widen its voting base, it partnered with Outdoor Recreation New Zealand, another minor party that had received only 1.28 per cent of the vote in the 2002 election and sought representation via the coat-tails of Mr Dunne’s popularity in Ohariu-Belmont.

Coat-tails - not the bow tie.

Outdoor Recreation New Zealand was, I gather, basically a group of deer hunters who vehemently opposed the laying of 1080 poison.

But surely the most damning aspect of our flawed system of governance came when we learnt that Mr Dunne, by not having an actual party to represent, loses $122,000 in funding and by losing his seat outside cabinet a salary reduction of $13,900 now giving him a somewhat reduced annual income of $140,000, give or take a few dollars.

Compare that with your own take-home pay and I’m sure you’ll conclude that he will still be able to live the high life with or without his wavering wardrobe. But for one man, trustworthy or otherwise, to be able to channel so much taxpayer money into his questionable coffers shows that stewardship of our treasures is not something our representatives are skilled at.

I looked through my modest clothes cabinet and could discern only one bow tie; a black one to be worn on the very odd formal occasion when I might don a dinner suit. 

If you should encounter me in this garb on some rare occurrence, give me a wide berth. Under those circumstances, clearly I cannot be trusted.

“Those who make their dress a principle part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.”– William Hazlitt

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