At least I'm consistent

This was my first weekly column written for the Wairarapa Time-Age in January 1998. Below that is a copy of a letter I wrote to the same paper this week. In the intervening twenty years my opinions haven't changed much!

1984 came and went with a whimper. George Orwell’s dire predictions for that year never did materialise.

1998 isn’t shaping up quite so well. Big Brother’s first action was to deny tobacconists the right to have a sign above their doors advising what the shop actually sold. And New Year’s Eve saw revelers at Riversdale and Castlepoint denied the privilege of having a beer or something stronger on the beach to herald in the New Year. (Homeowners in adjacent-to-the beach sections however could imbibe as much as they liked, which puts a new spin on the expression private privilege versus public desire) 

Don’t think New Zealand alone has the “thought police” problem. As from January the first it was illegal to light up a cigarette in any bar in California. I feel for the hapless bar owners in that sunshine state who will now surely see their turnovers diminish and the receivers over the horizon. If you think about it, where better to have a drag than in a down town bar in the twilight atmosphere; a cold beer and a Cuban cigar, as you watch the Superbowl final?

Clamping down on smokers is the new prohibition yet strangely alcohol marketing is being given a free ride. Despite this alcohol still causes staggering devastation. It kills hundreds of New Zealanders a year, not only from disease but also from accidents. It creates huge economic losses and untold suffering. So too does tobacco of course, but alcohol is far more deadly than tobacco to innocent bystanders. A hard headed fact is that premature death from smoking usually occurs at the latter stages of an abusers life and is probably an economic boon to society. The money saved on pensions and health care probably far outweighs other costs incurred.

Police say that domestic violence is almost always fueled by alcohol; in N.Z. 41% of fatal road accidents are alcohol related and all ages are involved. Drunk driving kills toddlers, teenagers and whole families whereas tobacco strikes late; its victims have at least had a chance at life.

Cigarettes shortens lives, alcohol abuse can deprive people of it. Just think about it: if you knew your child was going to become addicted to either alcohol or tobacco, which one would you choose?

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not for one minute suggesting we impose the cigarette-style restrictions on alcohol. But I am curious to know why we as a society are so selective. Is the lobby of the liquor barons more powerful than their tobacco counterparts?

Despite the war against cigarettes I get the feeling that younger folk are smoking more than ever these days. Also Hollywood, which now operates in a suburb where smoking is not allowed in adjacent barrooms, seems to have its stars lighting up more than ever in the current crop of blockbusters. No doubt if you want to make something more popular give it a bad name.

What really concerns me is how many freedoms we have taken away from us each year by Orwellian legislators local and national. With the very best of intentions they may be choking us to death.

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Another friend passes on

My very close and dear friend Brian Davey died suddenly in Australia a couple of weeks ago; my wife and I went over to the funeral. Here is my tribute:

My name is Rick Long, I’m from New Zealand and live in a town called Masterton where Brian and his young wife Joyce came to settle from New Plymouth in 1963. Brian had bought a physiotherapy practice in the town.

Masterton is 90 ks north of Wellington and about the same size as Ballina with a population of around 25,000 people. Last year it was voted New Zealand’s most beautiful city.

My wife Marion got to know Joyce when they were in the maternity ward at Masterton hospital together where they had their firstborns, both sons, Gregory for the Davey’s and Brandon for the Long’s.

I had already met Brian as he had become a regular customer in our family butcher’s shop.

The Davey’s bought an imposing house looking down Masterton’s main street just around the corner from where we lived.

Their house and ours both backed on to my parents’ home which had a quite substantial in-ground swimming pool where our growing families spent lots of time together.

Brian and I became firm friends, having an occasional drink together (and I can see both Joyce’s and Marion’s eyes roll when I said the word “occasional”) and we were both invited to join the Masterton Rotary club where we were both very hard-working members.

Brian in fact made a big impact on the town with his enthusiasm and energy and besides being very active Rotarian he was also chairman of the Crippled Children’s Society and chairman of the finance committee of the local Catholic Church.

Brian and Joyce had all their children in Masterton; after Gregory there was Susan and then Fiona. A few hundred yards from where we lived was Lansdowne primary school; our kids all went to the school and Brian and I were both on the school committee.

We used to get away with murder, well almost. On one Saturday morning Brian and I took over the local radio station at gunpoint, binding and gagging the announcer and then reading out ads we had pre-sold to local businesses to raise money for the Plunket Society. You’d never get away with that today.

Few of you will know this, but in 1972 Brian and I started up a very successful business.

Some background; Masterton was dry for 40 years up until 1947. By dry I mean you couldn’t buy alcohol in the town. The citizens voted for restoration in 1947, but also decided the town would own all the liquor outlets and the profits would be returned to the community. A Licensing Trust was set up with a six man board of directors who were voted in every three years at the same time as the local body elections. Incidentally there are twenty six licensing trusts in New Zealand; many other communities followed our lead.

In 1972 the Masterton Licensing Trust built a splendid new lounge bar which they called the Elizabethan Room. It was built Tudor style with high wooden beamed ceiling and a parquet dance floor and a stage for a small band.

It was to be a ladies and escorts bar, but it never took off. A friend of ours who was an elected trustee on the licensing trust board took Brian and me in there one Friday night and we were surprised how few patrons there were. He told us the three piece band on the stage was costing the trust $37.50 a night and the takings over the bar were around $35. Charles Dickens’ Mr McCawber would have been appalled. “Nightly income $35, nightly expenditure $37.50 - result misery.”

Brian and I had had a few drinks and with our usual misplaced optimism we told our friend to tell his fellow board members to give us the room and we’d show them how to fill it.

To our amazement a few days later the trustee rang us and said he had discussed the offer with his fellow board members and they said we could have the premises every Friday and Saturday night for $5 a night, they would keep the takings over the bar, but we could set a door charge at whatever figure we considered viable and that would be ours to keep.

So now we had to put our money where our mouths were.

Discotheques had just come into being though there were few if any in New Zealand but Brian and I did some research, had a local sound technician build us a desk with two turntables, attached to a 400 watt amplifier with four huge speakers which we suspended around the dance floor. We put coloured lights that danced to the music hidden underneath the curtain pelmets, projectors that played psychedelic images on the walls and we installed a large strobe light.

We called all this The Light Fantastique (you Aussies would pronounce this fantasteek, but then again you never ever did learn to speak properly English) and invited dancers to join us every Friday and Saturday night. The fire department decreed we could only have 150 people in the room, we upped that to 200 and charged 50 cents per person at the door. I was the disc jockey playing 45 rpm records on the turntables and Brian was the genial mine host.

Thanks to Brian’s incredibly good welcoming manner at the door and my choice of the right music our enterprise really took off. After the second weekend we had to have a “house full” sign made. Closing time was ten o’clock, as required by law back then, so it wasn’t too much of an imposition. Many of our friends came to join us and in fact we were really just having a party every Friday and Saturday night and making money to boot.

We were taking $200 cash over the weekend which meant a $100 each into our pockets; good money in 1972. The only expenses we had were buying new 45 records from time to time; the trust never ever charged us the $5 a night rent. They either forgot or were so pleased with their bar takings they decided they really didn’t need to.

But all good things must come to an end. I got elected on to the board of the licensing trust at a bye-election when one of the trustees died. Four others stood against me, but Brian was my campaign committee chairman, so I couldn’t really miss.

I worried that there was a conflict of interest with being on the trust and running a business in their premises and Brian said he would like to go overseas and find a new place to settle with his family.

So we sold the business in 1973 after a year of solid trading. Six weeks later the new owner went broke which just proves butchers and physiotherapists really know how to run a disco!

Brian settled in Sydney with his family and I settled down to selling sausages.

In 1990 I rang Brian to boast that I had just been elected the national president of the New Zealand Licensing Trusts association. He countered with the fact that he had just been elected the World President of the Physiotherapists Association, so my news paled into insignificance.

Shifting to Australia didn’t mean the end of our friendship. We have regularly visited the Davey’s and them us. We have been on lots of holidays together in both Australia and New Zealand and on one occasion we took our respective families to America.

And there are constant phone calls and emails.

I rang Brian on the 4th of August, the day after his 78th birthday and a few minutes after the Crusaders had beaten the Lions in the Super 15 final just to remind just how good New Zealand rugby was. He was in high spirts then, unbelievable that he passed away two days later.

And those emails. The last one from him was just a couple of weeks ago and it typically went like this:

A Canadian walks into a New Zealand bar and there was immediately some tension among patrons thinking he might be, God forbid, an Australian. The barman served him a beer and then said, “What do you do for a living mate?”

“I’m a taxidermist,” the stranger replied.

“A taxidermist,” said the barman, “Does that mean you drive a taxi?”

“No,” said the man, “I mount animals.”

“Relax fellows;” said the barman, “He’s one of us!”

You Aussies never let up.

Rest in peace old friend.

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Aids not necessarily a death sentence

I’ve just received a letter from Joel George. Mr. George you will recall is the genial gentleman who runs our public hospital. Been there a while too; which says something about his tenacity and fortitude. It must be frustrating managing an organisation where the funder underfunds you to ensure your frugality. But I digress. Attached to his letter was a survey form which he asks me to fill in as I was, according to his records, latterly a user of his facilities.

I struggled to recall when I had been a patient at his institution in recent times. Apart from visiting the odd indisposed friend I have had no cause to use the services he administers as far as I could remember. It wasn’t always that way. Before I was married I was a regular visitor to the hospital. My sojourns at that time however were centred around the Nurse’s Home and if a survey had been thrust at me back then I would have revealed that the matron was crabby and made strenuous efforts to hamper my progress into the building, but that the nurses were wonderful. They must have been; I married one of them.

But then the penny dropped. I had visited Choice Health in Chapel Street, which is of course an outpost of the Joel George empire and no doubt his questionnaire related to that attendance. The awful truth, which I shall now reveal publicly, is that I have aids. Those of you who would look forward to the inevitable demise of the column and the columnist will be disappointed to hear that the aids are of the hearing variety and sit snugly and almost anonymously into both my ears.

I came about these appendages virtually by accident. Walking past Snowsill’s friendly chemists some years ago I spotted a sign offering free hearing tests. I marched in and demanded an appointment forthwith. I told the lady, visiting from Auckland, who conducted the tests, that I needed a credible certificate showing conclusively that my hearing was perfect. I was even willing to pay for such documentation. 

For years my family had been chiding me for having the TV turned up too loud, accusing me in the process of being deaf. My grown-up children reckoned that when they visited they could start to hear our TV three or four streets away. The little brats. During their upbringing I told them hundreds of millions of times not to exaggerate. 

It reminded me of when I was a kid and our next door neighbour bought a new radiogram. For the uninitiated ‘radiograms’ were the forerunners of ‘hi-fi’s’ which were themselves the precursor’s of ‘stereos.’ The proud purchaser suggested over the fence to my parents that perhaps they would like to come over to his place and listen to his new radiogram. Dad’s callous response was that the neighbour could just as easily come over to our place and hear his new radiogram.

But again I digress.

The friendly lady at the chemist’s shop told me after conducting the tests that she had good news and bad news. The good news was that my family was very perceptive, the bad news was that my hearing was appalling. “What do you do for a living?” she wanted to know. At the time I was endeavouring to sell real estate. She looked puzzled. “Have you ever had any other vocation?” she enquired. Well, I admitted, I had spent 36 years as a butcher. “Did you perchance use a bandsaw?” was her next probe, and I allowed that I had used one for about four hours a day during the duration of my tenure in the meat trade. 

Her examination was complete.

Using impressive alliteration she reckoned ‘butchering beef bones on a bandsaw’ was the worst thing you could do to ruin your hearing, though perhaps she really meant it was the best thing you could do to ruin your hearing, but whatever, “You’re lucky,” she gushed, “ACC will pay for your aids.”

I was glad I hadn’t told her that from about age 17 and into my early twenties I had played in a Rock’n’roll band. An unkind but not entirely uninformed music critic, writing in the Manawatu Evening Standard after a concert in Palmerston North wrote this about our performance: “What the band lacked in talent they made up for in volume.” The lead singer - and that was me- he went on to say: was “Unimpressive” and “over-amplified.”

ACC may not have been so generous had they known about the routine punishment I had given my teenage eardrums.

But the aids, state of the art seeing I didn’t have to pay for them, have put me in the class of the six million dollar man. Well, in his hearing section anyway. Eavesdropping is easy. I can now hear intimate conversations from across crowded rooms and people who want to keep confidential information from me ought to learn sign language or resort to written memos. Rather than hasten my departure from this earth they supply such clarity that I confidently expect to live to 120, an age I have worked out I will need to reach to get all my taxes back.

Meanwhile I will reply to Mr. George’s questionnaire in a positive manner. The treatment I received at the hearing clinic was exemplary and I will tick all of the boxes at the highest end of the scale. But he may not necessarily get the answers he wants from all he surveys. An acquaintance, presenting for surgery, got as far as the front door of the hospital when he saw a sign on the building saying: “Guard dogs operating.”

He hasn’t been seen since.

(First published on the 31st of January 2001)
 

“My doctor gave me six months to live, but when I couldn’t pay the bill, he gave me six months more.” - Walter Matthau 

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