The mere males Archillies heal

It seems the CERA boss may have skillfully trivialized the complaint made by one of his female staff. In a carefully staged press conference he shed tears and admitted that perhaps sometimes his jokes were a shade bawdy, that he should refrain from calling his colleagues “sweetie” and “honey” and maybe even pull back from hugging people, despite this being something he has always done.

It has subsequently been revealed that there was more to the accusation, but the real story might not ever surface due to a confidentiality clause that only one side appears to have kept.

The male of the species was in all sorts of hot water last week and perhaps David Cunliffe’s apology for being a man has some validity. In the northern hemisphere the once much-loved African-American comedian Bill Cosby is facing serious allegations which could well mean he will die in disgrace like once-equally-loved Rolf Harris.

Perhaps both of them while incarcerated.

Obviously Harris’s proven criminality and Cosby’s alleged misbehavior and to a lesser extent Roger Suttons actions were beyond the pale, but recently a New York feminist videoed men admiring the upper middle regions of her torso and then accused them, on camera, of sexual harassment. I started to feel a bit unsettled. Was admiring a women’s figure really sexual harassment?

I may be headed for a long prison sentence.

I decided to take a household survey; only two members were at home at the time, wife and daughter. Daughter agreed with the feminist. I didn’t actually seek any more information, but she offered it anyway. She said she had watched me for years observing women in an inappropriate manner. She even said that as I got older the gap between the ‘ogler’ and the ‘oglee’ was widening and was not a pretty sight.

It’s amazing how we men go through the pain of childbirth, in my case on four separate occasions, only to have our offspring needlessly exposing previously unidentified shortcomings.

My wife was more kind; that’s why I married her. She agreed I spent an inordinate amount of time, when in the company of females, observing their curvatures, but she thought I did so with a degree of sensitivity. ‘Furtive’ she thought, as opposed to ogle.

I heaved a sigh of relief. A lonely death is a cold cell was not something I was contemplating as a retiree.

I will get this next one off my chest while I’m still conscious. To the heterosexual man quietly admiring the upper half of the female torso is surely one of life’s great pleasures. It’s not as though I hadn’t checked all this out before I began my lifelong study.

I vividly remember during my mid-teens sitting on the beach at Riversdale with a group of friends, male and female, discussing this very subject. Did the girls, we asked, mind us admiring their figures? 

With only one exception, they all admitted they enjoyed the attention. The exception had rather large breasts, and said she was embarrassed by them. We men - boys actually, acne and all - gallantly told her that these were not a disadvantage, and her self-consciousness was misplaced. She said we wouldn’t say that if we saw them in the flesh.

I’ll resile from further comment here and avoid the risk of appearing prurient.

Famous American publisher Bennett Cerf, in his book “Try and Stop Me” told an amusing anecdote about a prank The New York Times, a conservative newspaper, played on its readers back in the 1940’s. They published a picture of a pair of breasts on their front page. This was way before the ‘page three girl’ regularly appeared in the racier tabloids. The photo was uncaptioned, but a flood of letters came into the paper, complaining about the picture, mostly from conservative, matronly women - Cerf called them “dowagers”- who were furious that The Times had stooped to such depths.

The next day the newspaper, which had set its readers up, apologised for the lack of captioning, and said that the breasts belonged to Johnny Weissmuller, at the time America’s greatest swimmer/turned movie actor who played the lead role in the Tarzan series.

Game, set, and match to The New York Times.

I read recently of a man who had grown breasts, apparently from eating hormone-induced chickens. His doctor told him to take poultry off his diet. He did so and the breasts disappeared. A message here surely for those contemplating expensive silicone surgery.

But isn’t that the irony of it all? Millions of women worldwide have had breast implants, presumably to attract admiring glances, the majority of these from males, one would assume. How is a bloke to know what to do?

Roger Sutton is now on “garden leave” while his wife Jo Malcolm and her sister, well-known actress Robyn Malcolm, stand stoically behind him.

I’m not entirely sure that my wife and daughter would do the same for me.

“My wife had plastic surgery. I cut up all her credit cards.” - Henry Youngman.

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Cars, shoes and other distractions

In England in 1995 I espied a pair of casual shoes that appealed to me in a London shoe shop window. I found a perfect fit, but was disappointed in the price which seemed unreasonably high. The shop assistant informed me they were made in France as though the trip across the channel, which is so insignificant that hundreds of people have actually swum it, somehow allowed for the high price tag. My wife however remarked that no one ever regretted buying quality, so I flashed my credit card and somewhat reluctantly made the purchase.

Incidentally the ‘no one ever regretted buying quality’ catch phrase reminded me of a slogan I used to use when advertising my meat wares in the distant past. My by-line was “The quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten.” The word “long”, for obvious reasons, was expressed either in capitals or italics.

I wore my new shoes intermittently for the first ten years, but over the last nine years I have worn them virtually every day. Try as I might I can’t seem to wear them out. I don’t know if they were in fashion in 1995 or are in fashion 19 years later. It’s entirely possible they went in and out of fashion at different times over this rather lengthy period. All I know is they are hardly showing any signs of wear and tear and are just as comfortable today as they were when I bought them in the closing stages of the last century.

Another surprising feature is that they still have the same laces which play a prominent part in the whole appearance of the shoe. It’s just as well; I’m not sure that I would be able to buy laces of a similar colour, length and strength down here in the antipodes.

The name of the manufacturer is still clearly shown on a sturdily attached label: Mephisto. I looked up their website and learnt that the company was established in France in 1965 which means they had 30 years of practice before they made my shoes. I scrolled down to their 2014 line of casual footwear and found nothing in the range that looked anything like my 1995 model. It could be that the company would welcome mine back to display in their archives.

So I’ve never regretted buying quality, but over the years I confess I have regularly been persuaded to unnecessarily upgrade one particular item for the newer model. I have unwittingly become a follower of fashion and on reflection this will have been a costly exercise.

For instance in the mid-1960s I bought a second-hand Wolseley Four 44. This black car was a classic in its day and was regularly seen on our grainy black and white TV screens in UK crime dramas as the police car of choice for the British constabulary. The Four-44 had a big brother, the Wolseley Six-80, which was probably the chief inspectors car.

Despite being second-hand the Four-44 had still maintained the glorious smell of the luxurious leather upholstery and the walnut burr dashboard and door trim make todays plastic versions look positively tacky.

Its only fault was that it was a tad underpowered, but I saw a Four-44 that had been lovingly maintained recently and nostalgia and more than a touch of sheer envy swept over me. I tried not to think of the tens of thousands of dollars I would have spent over the intervening year’s purchasing the latest models of whatever marque took my fancy.

The world’s car makers of course are past masters at continually adding so-called improvements to their new models which then allow the slick sales people to convince you that you desperately need to trade up or somehow live less fruitfully.

They will claim, perhaps with some justification, that some of this new gadgetry is potentially life-saving. ABS braking and front and side air bags spring to mind, but the gimmickry of a GPS navigation system where a lady of indeterminate age sits somewhere within your plasticised dashboard and demands you “make a U-turn if possible” after you’ve strayed down a lane which is not part of the circuitous route she has planned for you, is probably a distraction you could well do without.

If only I’d stuck with my Wolseley Four-44 as I have done with my Mephisto shoes the money I would have potentially saved might have meant my second car was a Rolls Royce Phantom.

Leather upholstery, walnut burr et al.

“The people recognise themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split level home, kitchen equipment.” - Herbert Marcuse

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On driving me to distraction

When I was a kid the lady over the road from where we lived had a chauffeur. Mrs Mawley was a wealthy widow who lived in a grand residence called “Sway Place” on the corner of Opaki Road and Oxford Street. Later this became the home of general practitioner Dr. Blair Harvey and then The Golden Shears Motor Inn and latterly a retirement village, or as Dame Edna Everidge would unkindly say, a home for the bewildered.

Mrs Mawley’s chauffeur was a Mr Gordon who kept her Plymouth limousine in immaculate condition which, as I recall, she used infrequently. He would park the car at her disposal at the front entrance gate facing on to Oxford Street and she would emerge to alight the splendid vehicle invariably dressed in black, looking not unlike Rose Kennedy - though of course back then we’d never heard of the Kennedy family or their matriarch.

Mrs Mawley had previously gifted a large section of her vast property to the Borough Council to use as a camping ground.

As far as I am aware, in this day and age no one in our environs has a chauffeur, though it is rumoured that Sir Peter Jackson gets flown in a helicopter from the capital to his mansion at Matahiwi from time to time.

Some years ago when I was a Wairarapa representative on the Greater Wellington Regional Council I was to have a one-on-one meeting with the then Minister for the Environment Marion Hobbs. This was set down for 9.30 in the morning and I left Masterton at 7.30 to arrive on time at the council’s multi-storeyed glass tower in Wakefield Street. Miss Hobbs was a few minutes late and as I looked down from our sixth-storey meeting room I saw her white Ford chauffeur-driven limousine drop her off at the front door.

I chided her for arriving at the venue in such grandeur. I reminded her that I had driven myself down from Masterton and she had to merely come across a small section of town. I told her that I would have thought that a modern socialist government claiming to represent the working class would immediately sell off the limousine fleet and drive themselves like the rest of the proletariat are obliged to do.

I was well acquainted with Marion Hobbs and knew she had a great sense of humour and she gave back as good as she got and reminded me that ours was not the only meeting she had to attend that day. She added that it was very helpful to be driven from venue to venue without having to find parking spaces for what was to be a very busy morning. I wanted to suggest that taxis would have been just as convenient and far less costly, but decided to leave well alone as I was asking a favour for our district.

Obviously my concerns were never passed on.

Not long after my conversation with Miss Hobbs, the socialist government, still claiming to represent the hoi polloi, sold off the Fords and purchased the even more luxurious BMW’s which are about to be upgraded for the third time.

The nutty Greens, besides petitioning the United Nations advocating homeopathy to cure Ebola, suggested that the current government should be investing in electric cars which apparently are even more expensive than the BMW’s.

It’s hard to change the perquisites of politicians of all persuasions - both national and local body. I recall a conversation around the regional council board table where it was considered our vehicle fleet should be of the hybrid kind to save fuel and set an example to the rest of our constituents. Our chairman’s self-drive car was due for renewal and chairperson at the time Margaret Shields insisted the Ford Falcon be replaced with a hybrid Toyota Prius. I was about to change my car, at my own expense of course, so to maintain the trend I bought the slightly less expensive Honda hybrid. The next vehicle that was due for replacement was the CEO’s. He opted for a four wheel drive SUV with a 3.4 V6 motor.

No more hybrid cars were purchased by either the council or the councillors.

There is nothing that smacks of elitism more than to see our cabinet ministers swanning around in chauffeur driven cars while every other citizen in this egalitarian country go about their business driving themselves. But then again what other behaviour could you expect from a dubiously chosen group of men and women who accept and revel in the title “the honourable.”

They can come up with all the excuses they like about convenience and having time to be briefed on the meetings they are about to attend, but Winston seems to have survived with or without this bogus “baubles of office” benefit.

In fact changing gears is probably the only real exercise he gets.

In her day, like most women of the time, Mrs Mawley would probably never have learnt to drive. But this is the twenty-first century; for many people times are tough and any savings that can be made by our elected representatives should be grasped with both hands.


Cabinet ministers should have both those hands on the wheel.

“There are no such things as good politicians and bad politicians. There are only politicians, which is to say, they all have personal axes to grind, and all too rarely are they honed for the public good.” - Barbara Hower

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