Wednesday 26 March 2014

Did I perhaps miss my vocation?

Leave a Comment






Back in the days when I was single belonging to a sporting club was a necessary adjunct to life given that the pubs closed at six. The clubs adhered to no such closing regime and stayed open till late so you could refresh yourself after a gruelling game of whatever it was you were playing. The police tended to turn a blind eye to after-hours trading most of the time, but had to make a raid on the odd occasion to keep their hands in.

My chosen sport was squash and we often visited other squash clubs to play in weekend competitions and would invariably join them in a social cabaret on the Saturday night of the tournament. One such outing was to occur in Palmerston North and a friend and I and our girlfriends decided to give the tournament itself a miss, but attend the Saturday night function.

The event was to be a fancy dress. No doubt an illegal bar would be in full swing and we thought if we were to arrive dressed as policemen we would cause quite a stir. There were no costume-hire companies in town in those days so on Friday night I went cap-in-hand to the Masterton Police station and asked if I could borrow a couple of uniforms for the following evening.

Back then the tiny police station was on the corner of Lincoln Road and Chapel Street. I think the total complement of police personnel was about seven or eight and the CIB section served the whole Wairarapa. I was politely told by the pleasant gendarmes manning the station that it was illegal for them to lend out uniforms. This was Brian Maude and Geoff Russell and they seemed genuinely sorry they couldn’t help. I was about to walk out when they had a curious change of heart.

Over the road a Wairarapa Car Club rally was leaving from the old H. J. Jones Garage premises and had drawn a crowd of well over a 100 people who were overcrowding the footpath adjacent to where the cars were leaving from. Passers-by were having great difficulty passing by. My two gregarious police persons said I could have the uniforms if I put one on now and went over the road and dispersed the crowd.

It seemed like a fair swap to me, so I donned a navy great-coat (it was raining) put on the helmet and feeling somewhat drunk with power marched over to the madding crowd. “Move on” I said in the best PC Plod manner I could muster and moved the crowd back from the gutters edge allowing those wanting to use the footpath an uninterrupted passage.

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

I looked back at the station and saw constables Russell and Maude peeping over the half white frosted windows showing sheer admiration and all would have gone swimmingly to plan if someone hadn’t recognised me.

That someone was my old scoutmaster and he told me later he would not have known it was me except I was wearing shoes with pointed toes. We used to call them winkle pickers, fashionable for young men at the time, but hardly the attire for a policeman on duty.

Using blasphemous language that would have made Lord Baden-Powell blush he blurted out who I was for all to hear and the crowd instantly lost respect for the uniform and swarmed back to their previous untenable positions.

Mob rule returned to the streets.

Sole Times-Age photographer at the time was Norman Daken and he shot a picture as I turned to grin at his greeting. I rushed back to the sanctuary of the police station and found my two policemen in fits of laughter, well pleased with my performance and agreeing wholeheartedly to lend me the two uniforms. 

“By the way,” they wanted to know, “Who was it that took the photo?”

When I told them it was the Times-Age photographer the colour drained visibly from their cheeks. Lending a police uniform was a sackable offence. If the picture was published they could both lose their jobs. I was reminded too that my own role was a hangable felony, or something akin to that.

I was sorry I had placed us all in such a position. They invited me back to the station at nine the next morning to see if the three of us could somehow convince Norm that it would be in everyone’s best interests not to publish the photo. 

By the time I got there the hapless photographer had been interrogated under a powerful white light in a darkened backroom that didn’t really exist and had reluctantly handed over the negative and the print. There were no distinguishing marks on his person to suggest that the photos had been beaten out of him. I suspect he had probably been promised an exclusive scoop on the next major crime in the town as a reward for his co-operation.

This would likely have been someone caught drinking after hours.

Anyway, Norm was his usual cheerful self as he left the station and seemed not too fazed at having lost the opportunity to print the picture.

Messrs. Maude and Russell will have been well-retired by now or perhaps have even gone to that great police station in the sky so I doubt there is any risk of Police Minister Ann Tolley withholding their pensions.

Meanwhile I’m relying on the likelihood that the statute of limitations for being charged with impersonating a police officer will have well passed.



“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” 
- Margaret Thatcher.

Read More...

Wednesday 19 March 2014

On Flagellation and flags

Leave a Comment





Is it just me or are there other people out there wondering just what it was that Judith Collins did wrong?

Alright, if the cabinet manual says that cabinet ministers shouldn’t be seen promoting business then the cabinet manual is in ass, particularly if the manual doesn’t allow ministers to promote New Zealand-made goods in another country.

What sort of madness is this?

Even better, the Minister of Justice had dinner with a man from customs; hopefully she was able to talk to him about ensuring a smooth ride for New Zealand merchandise past the petulant Chinese border officials.

Oravida is a New Zealand-owned company that exports New Zealand meat, wines, seafood, fruit and dairy products to China. And Judith tried their milk – actually our milk – and praised it.

What was she supposed to do, pull a face and spit it out?
Mrs Collins spouse is a director of the company.
Give her a medal for a great choice of husband.
But not in “tall poppy syndrome” New Zealand.

We’ve always been taught the path to New Zealand’s prosperity is to make commodities we can export. Surely then a major role of all politicians and ministers in particular is to encourage exporters. And anyway isn’t wining and dining with international business executives what Trade Minister Tim Groser does on a regular basis?

That’s what annoys me about the nutty Greens. Their whole role in life it seems is to stifle economic growth hence their opposition to dairying, mining and oil exploration. A host of countries have lifted their living standards dramatically on finding oil and natural gas within their borders and their economic zones; think Great Britain and North Sea oil and the energy stranglehold Russia now has over Europe.

The Greens want multi-million dollar cycle-ways, extended maternity leave and a liveable wage, but offer no way to pay for these except the extra tax revenue from legalising cannabis.

And the Prime Minister was reported as being angry with his Justice Minister; if he really was, then he’s as silly as the Greens. Herr Clark smoothed the way for the free trade agreement with China and the Key government and all of us are reaping the benefit of this, thanks in part to Mrs Collins and her entrepreneurial husband.

Anyway I’m beginning to think the PM is losing the plot. Do we really need a costly referendum to decide if we want a new flag when surveys have clearly shown that the vast majority of us are perfectly happy with the one we’ve got?

We don’t need a new flag, but we could certainly do with a new national anthem.

The words of the current anthem defy rational explanation. They were written for another era and I suspect the lyricist will have even confused his own generation.

Never mind, I have come to the rescue and have the answer.


The government needs to buy the exclusive rights and ownership of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s classic hit The Southern Cross. This will be expensive; about half the cost of the nonsensical and totally unnecessary referendum.

The music is hauntingly beautiful, but the words will need to be altered to suit a national song. You would certainly leave in the heart-stirring line: “When you see the Southern Cross for the first time, you understand now why you came this way.” You could even contemplate using the ensuing lines: “Because the truth you may be running from is so small, but it’s big as the promise, the promise of a coming day.”

I’m happy to re-write the rest of the lyrics, but there are undoubtedly greater pens than mine.

We keep the current flag; the anthem and the flag will become a matching pair.

At international sporting events other country’s athletes will hold back from winning just so they can experience the thrill of hearing the New Zealand national anthem!

By now the Prime Minister will be ecstatic, unless of course it’s not allowed in the cabinet manual.

“All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.” - Edmund Burke

Read More...

Wednesday 12 March 2014

Examining the high cost of dying

Leave a Comment




Two of New Zealand’s favourite sons strut the television stage most nights extolling the virtues of taking out an insurance cover for your funeral. With the ageing demographic of the country I suppose it makes good sense. Gary McCormack represents AA Life and says if you take out their cover you’ll get twenty cents per litre off your fuel bill every month for a year and Keith Quinn reckons “a Cigna funeral plan allows you to celebrate the things that really matter” though I don’t think things would have mattered much after you were dead.

Given the propensity for so many of our cherished institutions to die themselves over time it might be a bit risky for say a twenty-year-old to take out funeral insurance cover with these two companies in case when you eventually popped your clogs Cigna and AA Life had ceased to exist.

But we learnt recently that grieving Waikanae pensioner Ken Allen hadn’t heeded Mr McCormack’s or Mr Quinn’s advice and was seriously out of pocket when his 81 year old wife Rona died in November.

The couple’s only asset was $8617 in a joint account and Mr Allen chose a modest version for her funeral which cost $7367. This included the casket, service at the cemetery and a burial plot. He paid Kapiti Coast Funeral Homes $5396 up front and applied to Work and Income for a funeral grant to cover the rest. His application was declined on the ground that his savings were well above the asset limit for the grant.

As of April the 1st last year the grant was only available to those with savings below $1720. It’s probably no coincidence that it was about April last year when Mr McCormack and Mr Quinn started invading our living rooms with their genial hype.

In a strange defence Kapiti Coast Funeral Homes said the average cost of their funerals was around $9000 to $10,000.

I have had some involvement in three funerals recently; one cost $5000 another $7500 and the third $11,000. All three involved cremations and I’m curious to know why the discrepancy. Not all the blame lies with the funeral directors who will tell you that their charges only represent about 40% of the total cost.

Burials are more expensive with the local councils making a small fortune on land they own and would have paid for decades ago.

For instance the Masterton District Council charge $1931 for a funeral plot; this includes digging the hole and filling it in afterwards. That means a casket-size area of ground in Masterton’s least expensive suburb is charged out at about $1200. Not a bad return on land bounding a rubbish dump.

It tends to make Donald Trump look like a novice.

Carterton District Council charge $1000 for the plot and $665 for the internment. At least the rising dead there get to overlook a golf course.

Some of the extra costs for funerals these days have come about by families preferring a funeral home service rather than one in a church. In the good old days, when most people had some religious affiliation, services were almost always held in churches which allowed for unpretentious outcomes. A modest offering to the minister and the organist and the church itself was not charged for, although a donation might be given.

It’s no surprise then that the $5000 funeral was held in a Catholic church in Taupo.

Masterton now boasts three splendid funeral homes and the directors will justifiably require a return on their investments.

The equally splendid churches remain tantalisingly empty.



Trying to avoid my own funeral and its attendant cost I have decided to eat more judiciously. In the weight-gain field sugar has suddenly emerged as public enemy number one. Chocolate has all but disappeared from our pantry and when we heard that breakfast cereals are chock full of sugar we decided to take stock.

There was one brand of muesli we were reliably told that had only the tiniest amount of the demon sweetener. It was called Vogel’s All Good. A quick search on the supermarket shelves and we found the potentially heavenly food which proudly announced on the packet: only 7% sugar. The product looked good through a cellophane peephole on the bottom half of the box and we hastily purchased it imagining svelte bodies in the not too distant future.


We were amazed when we opened it to find the packet inside was only half the size of the box outside. What looked like a one kilo box only had a 500gram packet within. Perhaps the answer to weight loss in this instance is that you can only eat the tiniest amount to remain solvent.

So I’ve decided my best option is to book the church and pay the minister, the organist and the District Council in instalments. The trouble is they’ll all want to know an exact date.

Someone asked me recently, “Have you lived in Masterton all your life?

I said, “Not yet.”

“I want to die peacefully, in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming and terrified like his passengers.” – Stephen Arnott

Read More...

Wednesday 5 March 2014

My education was sadly lacking

Leave a Comment





Oh to be young again and know what I know now has been a constant saying over the years, but I’m beginning to think the today’s young probably know more than I do.

Last week it was reported that explicit sex education at a West Coast primary school has sparked a flurry of complaints from shocked parents with at least one family withdrawing their children in protest.

The concerns at Blaketown School centred on the actions of a woman teacher who taught the class of year seven and eight with children apparently aged as young as 11 about some graphic sex topics, going far beyond what the parents had given consent for.

On the first day of the three-day programme she taught pupils about body parts pointing out the pleasure points on women and men. The following day she answered questions the students had put in a “question box” including information about anal and oral sex, “hand jobs,” sexually transmitted diseases and flavoured condoms.

Crikey, in my day we thought oral sex was just talking about it.

Of course in those dim dark ages there was no sex education in schools – or at home for that matter – and by the time we were fully conversant with this aspect of life we were old enough to cope with it.

In another news item we learnt that a parent from a primary school in the leafy Auckland suburb of St Heliers complained to The Human Rights Commission about Bible studies in the classroom.

“Christian-based lessons discriminated against non-Christian families and should not be part of the secular school programme,” said Maheen Mudannayake, a Buddhist, and despite the vast majority of the St. Helier’s parents wanting the religious studies programme to be maintained the school board capitulated, much to Mr Mudannayake’s delight.

“When in Rome do as the Romans do,” might have been my heartless response to the complainant, but then I never have been much of a follower of the politically correct format.

And so religious studies are out and explicit sex education is in. You can’t help but be envious of the today’s younger generation and their liberal school curriculum.

The problem is the outcomes don’t match the good intentions. Teenage pregnancies and abortions increase, a conscience-less group called the Roastbusters emerge, crime is rampant while the churches face declining congregations and we build more prisons.

Masterton has had three police stations in my lifetime. The population has barely risen over time but the police headquarters have got bigger and bigger. The original station was on the corner of Lincoln Road and Chapel Street and was only a fraction of the size of the corrugated-iron-encrusted ANZ bank which now stands on the site. As a kid I was regular visitor there because the head of the CIB at the time was Detective-sergeant Frank Gordon who was a neighbour of ours in Opaki Road and I was good friends with his son Malcolm.


Mr Gordon would often take us out in his Vauxhall as he investigated the major crimes in the area. These could include jay-walking, double-parking or having an overdue library book.

Back then we didn’t lock our vehicles or our houses, we walked to and from school without fear of being run over by a car or molested by a stranger and we came home when it got dark after playing with our friends and our parents had no concerns for our safety or our wellbeing.

The pubs closed at six o’clock and there was full employment because as a rule mums tended not to work and kept the home fires burning.

And it was healthy little town too. I remember when the Borough Council built the new graveyard complex in River Road nobody died. In the end they had to shoot a bloke to get the cemetery started!

The only person who died that year was the undertaker and he died of starvation.

Alright, I admit I’m starting to exaggerate now, but with the benefit of a hindsight that only remembers what it wants to remember, they were good times.

Masterton’s third police station, built to cater for a static population, is three stories high and dwarfs the ANZ bank that stands on the site where the first one stood. The cells have thick plate glass doors dispensing with the need for bars which finally trivialises Richard Lovelace’s poetic intonation: “Stone walls do not a prison make; nor iron bars a cage.”

For my money I’d have left the Bible in the schools, let kids find out for themselves how to procreate, continued closing the pubs at six and left the police station where it was.

I’ve got to go now; I’m going to enrol at the Blaketown primary school and get up to speed.

“I sent a telegram to my friends saying: FLEE AT ONCE – ALL IS DISCOVERED. They all left town immediately.” –Mark Twain

Read More...