Saturday 30 September 2017

Meads point was not lost on me

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In a past life I despised vegetarians with a vengeance; and animal rights people. Once an animal rights person threw a brick through our butcher’s shop window bearing a cryptic note which questioned the veracity of my parentage and contained other uncomplimentary messages about scumbags who sell meat for a living. I publicly responded that I hoped the brick thrower wasn’t wearing leather shoes or a leather belt, but the perpetrator was never found so an evaluation of their dress code was never assessed.

Some years ago, when driving in the pouring rain to Wellington, I picked up a parka-clad hooded hitchhiker who to my surprise turned out to be an apple eating young lady who spent the remainder of the journey discoursing about the delights of being a vegetarian. I scarcely got a word in edgeways as she recounted the virtues of a meat free diet, particularly pertaining to the robust good health she had enjoyed since embarking upon this wretched lifestyle, some five years previous. I tried to stake my own claim, boasting too of an illness-free life, despite an almost obscene daily intake of red meat. In the process I offered up the argument that the Creator wouldn’t have given us carnivorous teeth if it was intended we live on a diet of bean sprouts and, in deference to her current penchant, apples. She ignored my protestations and promoted her cause with the fervour of an evangelical Christian.

Praise God for Cook Strait. Her arguments were so compelling had she been in the car any longer it’s entirely possible she would have gained the most unlikely of converts and caused a huge philosophical conflict with my inherited three generational vocation.

Colin Meads was always one of my hero’s for his exploits on the rugby field, but he went up even higher in my estimations when he came out firing on all cylinders in defense of meat eaters in general and the All Blacks in particular.


Meads reckoned the All Blacks losing streak at the time was likely caused by the pasta diet they have had to endure from Wednesday onwards before a Saturday international. In his day, he espoused, on the morning of a test, it was steak and two eggs for breakfast and then cold meat and mashed spuds for lunch. Pasta was not an option for a real man, he claimed, and that’s why Italy had never won a world cup. I wanted to give him a standing ovation but to be perfectly honest, his claim doesn’t bear close scrutiny.

Although Meads’ contribution to the team was monumental, the All Blacks weren’t exactly world beaters in his day either. If my memory serves me correctly, during his tenure we comprehensively lost three out of four tests in South Africa and in 1971 he captained the team to its first ever series loss in the British Isles. This despite the All Blacks presumably having bellies full of the finest steak and the freshest eggs.

They beat Italy, but back then so too could the Wairarapa College first fifteen.

Chris Laidlaw tells the delightful story of how the 1963 All Blacks traveled to Italy tourist class, in the back of the aeroplane, and were exhausted and hungry when they finally reached Rome. None of them could speak Italian and despite numerous attempts, were unable to acquire anything but pasta from the hotel dining room. Words like fettucini, canelloni and lasagne dominated every menu, Laidlaw claims, and Meads steadfastly refused to partake, saying that this type of food was unheard of in New Zealand. He opted to starve until an interpreter could be found to order up some real sustenance. So Meads’ anxieties were deep-rooted.

Pasta of course wasn’t unheard in New Zealand. A form of it was canned by Wattie’s and sold as Spaghetti, a much despised dish by anyone who actually had taste buds and any child who came to school with spaghetti sandwiches was to be the most pitied of infants.

So I empathised with Meads on that one. The only sensible use for flour and water that I knew of in my formative years was the makings of inexpensive glue used to paste pictures in our scrapbooks. For Wattie’s to merely add tomato sauce to this and then sell it as an edible item was, to a large extent, immoral.

(My more sophisticated family always have me sit at another table whenever we go to an Italian restaurant and I order conventional fare from the tucked-away section of the menu that allows for such plebeian tastes.)

The other problem with Meads’ argument though was that the carnivorous Kiwi’s don’t always fare well at the Olympics, despite their first world diets. On the other hand the Ethiopians, who wouldn’t recognise a steak and egg breakfast if they fell over one, and the Cubans, who only eat white meat, in the form of chicken, and even then only when the Pope visits, have often showed us what real stamina is in the fields of long distance running and boxing, respectively.

And a few years back the English rugby team managed to win a string of tests against formidable opponents at a time when you’d be mad to eat British beef and become even madder if you did.

Anyway, I’m pretty relaxed about vegetarians these days; live and let live I say, now my livelihood doesn’t depend on it. I would even break bread with the animal rights people whereas once I only wanted to break heads.

There was also of course more than a touch of self-preservation in the Meads utterances. A sheep and beef farmer it made good sense for him to be promoting the end product of his labours. Never part of the professional football era, he had to fall back on conventional agrarian pursuits to keep the wolf from the door.

Isn’t it funny how most of our prejudices are dominated by the dollar?

“Hunger is the best sauce in the world.” - Miguel de Cervantes 

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Sunday 24 September 2017

The baby and the bathwater

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I’m surprised the incumbent government didn’t trumpet the fact that the highly regarded Legatum Prosperity Institute’s index for 2016 placed New Zealand as the world’s most prosperous country. Norway came in second, Finland third, then Switzerland, with Canada and Australia fifth and sixth respectively. The United Kingdom came in tenth, and U.S. of A. was ranked at seventeen with once prosperous Japan at twenty-two.

I imagine concern will be expressed that between 2007 and 2017 America has gone from being the most prosperous nation on earth to number seventeen. As usual Scandinavian countries rated highly in the institute’s new index of prosperity, but I would have thought National’s promotional people could have highlighted the fact that New Zealand came in at number one.

The Index of Prosperity is a measure of material wealth and quality of life among 110 nations, so despite the doom and gloom that so often abounds in this country we seemed to have done remarkably well.


I also thought it unusual that there were no Asian nations in the top ten; first to feature was Singapore at nineteen. The Legatum Institute thought that Asia was where the challenge was coming from for America.

In his book Civilisation: The West and the Rest Harvard historian Niall Ferguson wrote that for 500 years Western nations have patented six killer applications that set it apart.

The first to recognise them was Japan, but since then one Asian country after another has downloaded these killer apps. These are: competition, modern science, the rule of law and private property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic.

These six things, according to Ferguson, are the secret sauce of Western civilisation.

An area where New Zealand may need to take cognisance of is the third “app”, the rule of law and private property rights particularly when you take into account the confusion over Ms Ardern’s proposed capital gains and land tax. This legislation would probably not suit our long-established and apparently successful ownership criteria, but it did have more than a modicum of support from the rank and file.

Given our current high positioning it might be prudent for any new coalition to let sleeping dogs lie.

And we must learn from history. It’s interesting how success in World War II actually hurt Britain while failure helped Germany. Following the war British society grew comfortable, complacent and rigid and its economic and political arrangements became even more elaborate and costly. Labour unions, the welfare state, protectionist policies and massive borrowing all shielded Britain from the new international competition.

Germany by contrast was almost entirely destroyed by World War II. That gave it a chance not just to rebuild its physical infrastructure, but also revise its antiquated political and bureaucratic institutions with a more modern frame of mind. Defeat made it possible to question everything and rebuild from scratch.

Some of Labour's policies looked alarmingly like the semblance of post-war Britain.

Sadly, from the top of the ladder, there is only one way to move.

“Prosperity is like the tide, being able to flood one shore only by ebbing from another.” - Xavier Herbert

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Friday 22 September 2017

Translating a language in a foreign zone

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I have a sensible arrangement with the golf club. I agree to pay a sub as long as they accept that I don’t actually have to play the game. It’s a good deal for both of us. Mark Twain reckoned that golf ruined a good walk and the club saves a small fortune on green-keepers wages by me not despoiling the carefully manicured grass they call fairways, and the tees and the greens.

Last week I unthinkingly broke the contract. I agreed to play in a twilight golf tournament. It seemed like the perfect competition. My dictionary describes twilight as “a shadowy indeterminate state” which would mean no one would see my inability to strike the ball in an athletic manner, my complete lack of co-ordination, and the committee would be blissfully unaware of the damage I was doing to the course.

There were other aspects of the competition that I found appealing apart from being conducted in the dark. The organisers said it would be played over 10 holes - in my view the perfect length for a golf course - and that they had chosen the flattest ten holes so that the mountainous section did not have to be attempted.

It’s not generally known that the young Ed Hillary did all his training on the Masterton golf course prior to his triumphant ascent of Everest in 1953. When asked why he chose Lansdowne he apparently said: “Because it is there,” and on one occasion, after he had successfully traversed the full eighteen holes of the course, he told those back at the clubhouse that he had: “Knocked the so-and-so off.” All this is anecdotal, but it has a ring of truth to it.

The organisers let me down right from the barrel-jump. A twilight tournament to them meant a 4.30 pm start. Taking daylight saving into account this is about when the sun is at its highest point and any attempt on my part to participate unnoticed was quite impossible.

They must have named the competition after the zone they are in.

To play golf successfully you have to learn a whole new bunch of words and ideally attend a special language school for a few weeks. When I arrived a formidable looking woman was standing on the clubhouse veranda and was obviously commanding the whole operation. I was told she was the “captain.” She asked me what my handicap was. I noticed, just a few feet away, a man in a wheelchair with two broken arms, a broken leg and a neck brace; the result, I presume, of a car accident. I said that comparative to him, I didn’t have one. The captain told me she would put me on a “twenty four” and I could have “fourteen shots.” She mumbled something else too, but the only words I caught were “smart” and “Alec” so I assume she wasn’t referring to me. She also said that whenever I hit a bad shot I could have a “mulligan.” I thanked her profusely, now concluding that around here English is a second language.


But I gave a good deal of thought to all this curious information and reckoned I knew what she meant. “Mulligan” must be brand of whisky, probably an Irish whiskey. I was apparently allocated fourteen “shots” of this whiskey and then for every time I sliced, hooked or had an “air shot” I was allowed to take extra swig. It’s a good thing I don’t imbibe because by the tenth hole I would have been paralytic.

Scoring is another mystery. You have “stableford” points. This sounded like a garage for a certain brand of car, but the poor man I was partnered with spent an age endeavouring to explain the intricacies of this complicated scoring process, eventually giving up. I left school with three languages: fair French, lousy Latin and great Britain, but my best subject was bookkeeping and I also had a reasonable grasp of maths. Despite these units of higher learning I’m darned if I could work out the “stableford.” In the end my partner said he would keep both our scores which I suspect would have been unacceptable to the “captain,” but I never let on.

The course is apparently in good condition because everyone we encountered as we crossed paths to access the flattest holes said how great the fairways looked. I wouldn’t know because my ball inevitably went into that section of the course they call the “rough.” The rough is cunningly placed on each side of the fairway and is cleverly configured so that if your ball lands in it, it completely disappears from sight. If you do perchance to happen upon it, it is so enveloped in the long grass that to hit it out successfully is virtually impossible. Most “mulligan’s” would be drunk, I would imagine, from these outer reaches of the course.

One day I’m going to build a golf course where the fairway is “rough” and the edges of the fairway will be mown like a bowling green. Thousands will flock to my club because they will feel good about themselves and I will make a small fortune. Unfortunately it will take a large fortune to build and maintain the course, so I will still be out of pocket.

For me to play ten holes is the equivalent to a seasoned players playing eighteen or more because I wend my way from one side of the fairway to the other. The America’s cup people would call this “tacking” but it is not a recognised feature of golf. I end up hitting twice as many balls and walking twice the distance. To confuse the issue my partner said after we had played ten holes we could go to the “nineteenth.” Try as I may I never found a tee, nor a hole, nor a green, with the number 19 on it.

We did however end up in the clubhouse; it was still broad daylight and now we were confronted with the prize-giving ceremony. An engaging young fellow with clean shaven head and the unlikely name of “Jamie” was the MC. Someone whispered to me he was the club “pro” but I dared not explore what that might mean. There was a table full of small boxed items to give out to the winners. I counted 39 prizes on the table and given there was ten teams of four participating, odds were that I was in for a trophy. Pretty well everyone had proudly gone forward when the last prize was left to present. Surely my name would come up next. The final award was for the worst round of the day and I got up out of my chair and was halfway towards the podium when I realised the intended recipient was the man in the wheelchair.

I felt like a complete mulligan.

(First published  November 20th 2002)

“Language is not an abstract construction of the learned or the dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.” - Walt Whitman. 

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Saturday 16 September 2017

The cutting edge

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Sheikh Isa Bin Sulman Al-Khalifa paid a seven day state visit to New Zealand in September 1985. He was better known as the Emir of Bahrain. He came bearing gifts; he was dishing out gold watches, including Rolex’s, pearl necklaces and money on a scale previously unknown in New Zealand. The two most prized items were for the titular heads of the country at the time, the Governor-General, David Beattie and Prime Minister, David Lange.

To the two David’s he gave ceremonial swords, both encased in gold scabbards. For the Governor-General the scabbard was encrusted in jewels, for the Prime Minister the outer casing had 40 natural pearls attached. David Beattie handed his on to the Canterbury Museum who, it is understood immediately insured it for $100,000. David Lange considered giving the gift to a museum to be an insult and took his home.

1n 1991 David’s new partner Margaret Pope described the sword as “that wretched thing” and suggested to David they get rid of it. To be fair, the sword was not particularly attractive. The scabbard was of “yellow gold” much prized in the Middle East but regarded as a shade garish by conservative western tastes.

Accordingly Mrs. Pope took the sword to Wellington jeweler’s Walker and Hall and asked them to appraise its worth. The young lady behind the counter assumed the scabbard to be gold plated and estimated the value to be around $500. Walker and Hall have always denied this appraisal ever took place, but Mrs. Pope was adamant that was the advice given and subsequently David agreed that it could be sold at auction.


It is a convention in this country that gifts given to a Prime Minister are his to keep if they are worth under $500, but for anything over that value, ownership automatically reverts to the state.

Mrs. Pope took the “wretched” sword to Dunbar Sloane allowing them to auction it with a reserve of  $500. Enter John Barlow, a Wellington insurance executive and antique collector who while browsing through Dunbar Sloane’s downtown Wellington premises, spots the sword and more particularly the gold mark on the scabbard, something both Walker and Hall and Dunbar Sloane had failed to observe, and realises that it was worth considerably more than the $500 reserve that had been placed on it.

He bought it at auction for $520, then had it valued. Wellington manufacturing jeweller William McDowell and a company called Gem Testing Laboratories both came to the same conclusion.  The scabbard was indeed solid gold, a kilo of it in fact, and the pearls were genuine and natural. The gold was worth around $15,000 and the pearls about $8000. A total melt-down value of  $23,000 but an intrinsic value way above that. William McDowell estimated that at least 200 hours of craftsmanship would have gone into its making.

John Barlow had got a bargain, but the nation was outraged. There was a public outcry. Editorials up and down the country fumed that a potential icon had been allowed to be sold for a song. Prime Minister Jim Bolger and other politicians were appalled that David Lange had relinquished what they considered to be a gift to the public of New Zealand. Diplomats in both Bahrain and New Zealand worked furiously to avoid a breakdown in relationships between the two countries.

Mr. Lange admitted that he had foolishly failed to recognise the true worth of the sword, but, he pointed out, so had many others, including knowledgeable antique dealers who had attended the auction.

John Barlow may have laughed all the way to the bank but his good humour was short lived. The Karori businessman was to be accused of the murders of Gene and Eugene Thomas. The two money lenders were found shot dead in their offices on The Terrace in February 1994.  It took three trials to convict Barlow after two hung jury’s couldn’t decide whether or not he was guilty. He never looked guilty. No grey blanket ever covered his head as he moved confidently and openly between custody and the court and rumours still float around the city suggesting that the job was done by professional “hit” people from America. John Barlow, some say, is taking the rap because not to do so would result in his own hasty demise.

Whatever, he needed to sell his valuable antique collection to help cover the costs of three expensive trials and the sword was once more up for auction. It was passed in at Dunbar Sloane’s, this time for $17,500. The Barlow’s wanted at least $20,000 for it. Broadcaster Paul Henry heard it was or sale, thought it would be a good investment, and rang me to see if I wanted to go halves. We talked to Mr. McDowell, the manufacturing jeweller, who confirmed that its melt-down value was at least $23,000, so we thought we couldn’t go wrong in buying the controversial item, not that we had any intention of melting it down.

We paid the asking price, $20,000.

We soon discovered that there are not a lot of people who actually want a ceremonial sword. We put it up for sale with a world-wide marketing company that produces a glossy catalogue that it distributes to wealthy collectors all over the globe, but the phones never rang. We had been approached by the people at Foreign Affairs who wondered if we might like to donate it back to the state, but our collective good natures didn’t extend that far.

It occurred to us that we could lend it to the Museum of New Zealand for a time to give it some exposure and perhaps make it easier to market it in a few years hence. I visited Te Papa on three occasions offering them the sword on “permanent loan” at no cost, but although they exuded enthusiasm at each visit and promised to get back to me, they never did.

Perhaps, we thought, Dunbar Sloane might like to attempt to sell it again. They seemed reluctant. What would our reserve be, they wanted to know. We thought $30,000 would be a fair return but they believed we were being too optimistic. We made two visits to them, they promised to get back to us, but like the people at Te Papa, they never did.

Our wives, who were patiently waiting for essential furnishings for both households that had been put on hold because our hard earned savings were sitting in a varnished box in the strong room at the Bank of New Zealand in Carterton, were now wondering out loud if this great investment we had assured them we had made was as gilt edged as we had claimed. We were even beginning to have doubts ourselves.

And then we saw a programme on TV One called Going..Going..Gone, featuring an auction house in Auckland called Webb’s. I rang Webb’s and asked them if they would be interested in auctioning the sword. Would they what! They nearly came through the phone line with enthusiasm. When could we get it up there? They couldn’t wait to put it on the market. Thirty thousand dollars was a most realistic reserve, they opined. They were quite sure they could get us at least that.

The rest, as they say, is history. At the auction Roger Bhatnagar, onetime owner of Bond and Bond and Noel Leeming’s and escort to Susan Wood paid forty two thousand dollars for the “wretched” sword and I congratulated Paul Henry on his foresight. We had of course also redeemed ourselves in the eyes of our wives.

The people who make the television documentary Going..Going..Gone were at the packed gallery during the auction, camera’s whirring, and I subsequently featured in the TV series trying my darndest not to look too excited as the bidding mounted.

Typically, David Lange wanted the last word. He told the Evening Post, in a story headlined “Beware the curse of the Arab sword,” that Roger Bhatnagar ought to get rid of the sword quickly. “It brings bad luck,” he suggested.

“Giving it away didn’t do the Emir a lot of good - he died.”

The sword then turned on himself: “I lost my job.”

“The next victim was antique collector John Barlow, who was later convicted of a double murder.
Then Paul Henry lost the safe National seat to a transsexual!”

But perhaps David Lange should have applied the Archimedes test. Archimedes, noting he displaced his own volume of water in his bath, put a king’s crown into water to test the amount it displaced to settle arguments over whether it was solid gold or not. Given the amount of water that he would displace in his own bathtub, and being an educated man, Lange should have been aware more than anyone of the sacred principle.

Meanwhile Paul Henry and I are still trying to work out how doubling your money in six years can possibly be construed as “bad luck.” 

(First published  January 3rd 2001)


“God’s gifts put men’s gifts to shame.” - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Saturday 9 September 2017

A highly-charged electric revolution

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An Australian friend of mine tells me he’s on the cusp of buying a brand new Tesla motor car. The $100,000 plus price tag appears not to faze him. I’m envious of course; we recently bought a more modestly priced state-of-the-art Nissan Qashqai. “State of the Art” includes technology that allows the car to park itself into a parallel parking space. Neither my wife nor I have managed to master this piece of gadgetry so it was a selling point more than a practicality.

It’s not surprising that electric cars have become so popular. In 1996 General Motors built the infamous “EV1” to meet California’s proposed stringent carbon emission standards for vehicles. They only leased the revolutionary electric car to enthusiastic customers who queued up to be involved.

Rumour has it that powerful oil company interests put paid the project and GM wrenched the cars back off the lessees, who absolutely loved the car, and crushed them mercilessly in the Mojave Desert.

So where is the oil industry’s anger this time around?

Perhaps they are aware about the true practicality of electric cars. The electric motor is older than the internal combustion engine by more than fifty years, so why should it leapfrog the more modern mechanism? Carbon monoxide emissions are seen as a factor in global warming, but the downsides to electric cars are that they must carry heavy batteries which are bulky, slow to charge and liable to explode if charged too fast.

Another negative is that building an electric car generates far more carbon than creating a comparable petrol engine because so much energy is required for the mining and processing of lithium, nickel and other materials for the battery. The battery accounts for more than half the cradle-to-grave emissions created by an electric car.

Tesla’s decision to build a “Gigafactory” to make lithium-ion batteries may establish a new improved standard for battery technology, but if Tesla gets too big and discourages other researchers from creating better designs it may mean the necessary technological breakthrough will never be achieved.

However one of the great advantages of our free enterprise system is that it reduces the cost of research by putting a financial limit to the extent of the risk of any particular venture. If one company gambles and fails then the harm is limited and the lesson is learned and a new entrepreneur in the market can pick up from where the other left off, potentially vastly improving the outcome.

This follow-on process however can be time-consuming

Next there is the vexed question as to where the extra electricity is going to come from? It’s a long time since we had power cuts in this country, but they could be on the horizon if electric cars are encouraged and new models flood the market at competitive prices.


So my advice to the oil industry would be to invest in building and operating electricity generating companies.

Meanwhile Tesla’s founder and proprietor Elon Musk, who also owns a company called Space-X, says he intends to send a manned rocket ship to Mars.

Battery powered?

Probably; and presumably it will park itself.

“Somebody actually complimented me on my driving today. They left a note on the windscreen. It said: ‘Parking Fine’,” - Tommy Cooper

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Sunday 3 September 2017

A conversation from on high

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God: “What’s all that kerfuffle going on down there Frank with all those billboards and stuff in the country they named after me?”

St Francis: “You mean Godzone Lord? They’re having a general election in a few weeks.”

God: “I know that Frank, but why are they changing the faces on some of the billboards?”

St. Francis: “Well your Grace, a couple of the leaders have suddenly pulled out of the race.”

God: “Surely you don’t mean that Jewish fellow we installed some years back?”

St. Francis: “You mean John Key? No, not him - he retired a while ago.”

God: “So who’s changed and why?”

St. Francis: “Well first off there was Metiria Turei the Green Party co-leader who resigned after confessing that she’d defrauded the Social Welfare Ministry 25 years ago.”

God: “But hang on, what happened ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us?’”

St. Francis: “Well they don’t recite your prayer as often as they once did, Lord.”

God: “Alright then, what about ‘let those among you without sin cast the first stone?’”

St. Francis: “Again, I’m sorry Lord, but your book doesn’t get as read as much either”.

God: “Wow, I really am losing My influence; so which other billboard needs a makeover?”

St. Francis: “Well Labour leader Andrew Little has belatedly stepped aside and his deputy Jacinda Ardern has eagerly taken over the reins.”

God: “Jacinda! Is that a real name?”

St. Francis: “Well Lord, some are even referring to her as “Jessiah.””

God: “Do they think she is going to lead them the Promised Land?”

St. Francis: “Yes Lord, with the help of a man named Winston, who thinks he’s you.”

God: “Jeez, what a mess!”

St. Francis: (grimacing) “I like it better when you don’t use your son’s name in vain, your Grace.”

God: “Sorry Frank, I’m so frustrated with creation I can’t even keep my own commandments.

St. Francis: “Anyway who’s going to win Lord?”

God: “Aha! I’m keeping that bit of information to myself; you’ll just have to wait and see. Now remind me Frank, who took over from the Jewish guy?”

St. Francis: “A fellow named Bill English. He’s portrayed as a farmer from Dipton, but actually he used to work for the Treasury. He was the Minister of Finance and borrowed heavily to maintain Godzone’s living standards when you created the Global Financial Crisis in an attempt to wean the world off following mammon.”

God: “Money, money, money! Enough of politics Frank, Kate you’re in charge of the entertainment, what film have you got for us tonight?”


St. Catherine: “It’s a farcical comedy called Johnny English, Lord. It’s the story of a dippy fellow who breaks into Buckingham palace…”

God: “Spare me the details Kate; I think Frank just told me about his brother, Billy.”

“When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn’t work that way, so I stole one and asked him to forgive me.” - Emo Philips

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