What is happening to my world?

Many years ago an old family friend said to me: “I feel sorry for you young guys today; I reckon your father and I have lived through the best of times.” I expressed surprise at the claim. I reminded him that he and dad had lived through two world wars and a depression, how on earth could they be described as the best of times?

I’m not certain what prompted his remark. Thinking back it might have been when we were going through the so-called first oil shock, circa 1973, when the OPEC countries banded together to raise the price of oil from $3 a barrel to $12. Or perhaps it was the second oil shock in 1979 when our government panicked, believing the doomsayers’ warnings that oil would soon run out, and introduced carless days to reduce demand.

Those two events triggered severe recessions, but thirty-five years on we now know the world is still awash with oil to such an extent that in America petrol is less than three dollars a gallon.

Nevertheless today we might well be facing the worst of times.

For instance there is a life and death struggle going on to ensure a large section of the African continent doesn’t succumb to Ebola.

Meanwhile Mr Putin is perilously close to initiating a European war and potentially a third world war with his foray into the Ukraine with a downed passenger airliner already a casualty.

I do have some sympathy for his stance. The democratically elected president of Ukraine, who was pro-Russian, was overthrown by a street mob that was tacitly encouraged by the West. In previous decades we saw America’s reaction when right wing dictators in South America, financed into office by Uncle Sam, were overthrown by the rank and file. It was swift and ruthless, not unlike Mr Putin’s.

Western interests also encouraged others to topple their rulers during the “Arab Spring.” Egypt is now under military rule after its disastrous coup, Iraq has never recovered from America and its “coalition of the willing” pursuing its strong-man leader and in Syria a rebellious section of the populous, supplied with western weaponry, spawned ISIS which is now challenging world peace with frightening brutality.

Our hypocrisy over who we support and don’t support is breath-taking.

We recently put out a red carpet for the Chinese Premier conveniently forgetting that their human rights practices don’t sit well with twenty-first century ethos. For instance they execute thousands of murderers and drug dealers every year.

The brief Brazilian tourist Philip Traynor-Smith can thank his lucky stars he’s not domiciled in China.

But the worst human rights practices are undoubtedly being displayed by those fundamentalist Muslims assembled under various nomenclatures such as The Taliban, Boko Haram, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and Isis. Their very existence threatens us all and their terrorist tentacles have the propensity to reach into the uttermost ends of the earth.

Many of their Imams and clerics have apparently declared a holy jihad against the “infidels of the world” and their followers are told that by killing an infidel they are assured a place in heaven.

Incidentally an “Infidel” is a non-believer.

The contrast between Islam and Christianity is stark. My conversation with a fundamentalist Muslim might go something like this: “Does Allah really ask you to kill me in order for you to go to heaven while Jesus tells me to love you because I am going to heaven and he wants you to be there with me?”

But there are no onward Christian soldiers to fight the good fight. We have mortally mitigated the strength we once had. Our churches are rendered almost powerless by a population who have largely chosen the wide path to bypass them. Even the Pope has had to water down some of the tenets of his faith to maintain momentum.

And don’t look for any sustenance from our leaders. Our great cornerstone religion is under further assault. The latest incursion in to its very existence is coming from the New Zealand’s legislative chamber. The Speaker of the house is proposing that in future, prayers are only offered up to Almighty God.

Every religion, every civilisation, believes in God or a god.

Only Christianity believes in Christ.

Not daring to offend anybody, the Speaker wants Jesus name expunged.

If they can eliminate the founder of Christianity from the prayers in parliament, where will He be removed from next, Christmas and Easter?

“Go in through the narrow gate, because the gate to hell is wide and the road that leads to it is easy, and there are many who travel it. But the gate to life is narrow and the way that leads to it is hard, and there are few people who find it.” – Matthew 7:13-14

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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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Trying to make sense of dress

I was at the Palmerston North Plaza shopping centre a couple of weeks ago looking at the directory sign that describes the shops and their location. The premises are colour coded and I counted the womenswear outlets and there were nineteen.

There were just three menswear shops.

So nineteen to three is apparently the ratio of importance the genders place on their outward appearance.

I noticed however that department stores were separately coded. The Farmers store in the Plaza is huge. As you walk in the door you encounter a gleaming white tiled floor that announces the makeup, perfumes and jewellery section. The goddesses behind the counters with redder than red lipstick and blushed cheeks smell and look gorgeous.

You hurry past them in case your own dowdiness presents too great a contrast.

The women’s clothing section takes up most of the rest of the vast store with a wee corner set aside for apparel for the mere male; so you can alter that ratio to twenty and three and a half.

The women’s underwear section in The Farmers has to be seen to be believed. Now I don’t want to paint the wrong picture here. I am in this area traipsing behind my wife and my daughter carefully averting my eyes away from the racks and racks and rows and rows of women’s bras and other undergarments in various sizes, shapes, colours and designs. Lace in its element and then there’s the exotic and erotic lingerie section with raiment of shimmering transparency.

I am eternally embarrassed when the female section of my family repair to the changing rooms and I am left the only male within a thousand square metres. I look around desperately for another member of my gender, but there are none.

Of course these are not the only shops set aside for female exclusivity. There are hair salons and manicurists and fashionable shoe shops where women can acquire high heels that look agonisingly difficult to wear, but admittedly enhance the appearance of the wearer.

The chemist shops compete with The Farmers and have a myriad of shelves devoted to makeup and perfumes and there are now shops that sell a product that was virtually unheard of a decade or so ago called “bling.”

Women feel obliged to be dedicated followers of fashion and yet on some occasions it works against them.

In an interview with Susan Wood on Q and A last week Australia’s immediate-past Prime Minister Julia Gillard talked of the misogyny she encountered in Australian politics and the news media’s concentration on what she wore and her hair style rather than the substance of what she was saying and doing. Her male counterparts, she said, have a constant uniform that never changes and attracts neither comment nor criticism.

So have our womenfolk fallen hook, line and sinker for the clever marketing ploys of the fashion designers?

Do the skeletal models that walk the catwalks of the western world have the rest of the sisterhood under such a spell that regular wardrobe upgrades are mandatory?

Have our fairer sex in fact made a rod for their own backs?

I was still standing by the directory when I endeavoured to envisage a shopping mall in a male-dominated Islamic country. I imagined just one dress shop with racks and racks of dull blue/grey burka’s purportedly designed to diminish the desire of the menfolk. No need for a hair salon, but a shoe shop with a modest range of sensible sandals - and that’s about it really.

Surprisingly, Islamic women appear to willingly accept these enforced dress codes and when westerners have sought to overturn these seemingly repressive customs those under apparent subjugation have spurned their succour.

This alien society would also be devoid of any liquor stores and so retailing would hardly play a part in their economy. Shopping malls I presume would be few and far between.

Julia Gillard in a burka perhaps?

No worse I suppose than Tony Abbott in speedos.

“I love to shop after a bad relationship. I buy a new outfit and it makes me feel better. Sometimes when I see a really great outfit, I’ll break up with someone on purpose.” – Rita Rudner

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A majestic house with memories

The grand old two-storey brick and reinforced concrete Prior homestead and one-time doctors’ surgery in Perry Street is no more. In its place, almost as a complete about-face to the days of old, is a modern single-storey office block purpose-built for a computer software company.

The Prior family have produced generations of doctor’s for our town, but the imposing dwelling hadn’t been in the Prior family hands for some time.

I think Stan Lane will have purchased the property perhaps in the late 1950s. It was directly behind his Lincoln Road car parts business and no doubt he saw an advantage in ownership by being able to step across the back fence to go to work.

Stan was one of natures’ gentlemen. He was a devoutly religious man, an elder in the Seventh Day Adventist Church and a non-drinker. His business involved dismantling cars that had either passed their used-by date or had been written-off after an accident. The parts were carefully removed to be used again in those halcyon days when we didn’t waste a thing and hub caps, carburettors, distributors, bumpers and the like were made available at a modest price for vehicles where one or more of these parts had failed.

These businesses have been replaced today by the likes of Repco and Super Cheap Autos where we can buy new parts probably more cheaply than it would cost to remove them from a wreck. Meanwhile abandoned cars are stacked one on top of another in a mountainous pile in Ngaumutawa Road, having been bought as scrap metal.

We call this progress.

Stan Lane was extremely community-minded and was at one stage president of the Riversdale Surf Lifesaving Club and was the inaugural chairman of Greater Masterton Incorporated. Greater Masterton had morphed from the Twenty Thousand Club and was itself morphed in to Go Wairarapa and then eventually Destination Wairarapa.

In the early 1960s Greater Masterton came up with a cunning plan to raise some money. They invited arguably the world’s most popular pianist at the time to come to Masterton and perform in the Regent Theatre. Winifred Atwell was on an Australasian tour and was intending to appear only at the main centres. However, somewhat surprisingly, she accepted the invitation.

Miss Atwell was born in Trinidad, but moved to London where she gained a place at The Royal Academy of Music. She signed a contract with Decca records and had a string of hits including The Black and White Rag which started a craze for the honky-tonk style of playing.

She was selling around 30,000 discs a week and was the first black artist in the UK to sell a million records. On one occasion she performed at a private party for the Queen and Prince Phillip and was called back for an encore by the monarch herself.

Masterton’s Regent Theatre which seated 1080 people was booked out weeks before the show and Stan Lane decided that after her performance she should be invited around to the Perry Street home for a cup of tea and some supper.

Back then chemist friend Wayne Snowsill and I used to do a comedy routine at local cabarets and dances based around miming Stan Freberg’s musical parodies; specifically The Great Pretender, The Banana Boat Song and A Dear John and Marsha Letter. Stan Lane insisted that we come around to his home after the Atwell concert and perform for the great lady herself.

He invited two other local characters, twins Clive and Colin Thorne. These two, better known as ace topdressing pilots, also did a comedy act where one of them told a story, quite lengthy and a shade risqué, while his twin brother stood behind him, put his arms through under his armpits and did the gesticulations; straightening his brothers tie, picking his nose and scratching his head etc.

It was a hilarious routine, but I have no doubt that Miss Atwell would have regularly seen far more sophisticated and humorous performances than what we four were offering up.

Now Stan was not a wealthy man and not to put too finer point on it his furnishings were not flash. In fact the word that comes to mind is “quaint.” So here was a world renowned artiste, sitting in an unpretentious parlour in an ageing dwelling in Perry Street having tea and cucumber sandwiches and being entertained by a butcher, a chemist and two daredevil aviators.

She was gracious enough to pretend she enjoyed the interlude though I note she didn’t suggest we make the Royal Variety Performance our next goal.

As far as I can recall Winifred Atwell was the first and only international celebrity entertainer to ever appear in Masterton. She only had a small entourage with her; she needed just a piano and a stage to perform.

Local developer David Borman has used some of the bricks carefully dismantled from the once grand old home to construct wall sections and a splendid fence around the perimeter of the replacement property. Those bricks will hold many pleasant memories, for me anyway. However I suspect Winifred Atwell would have forgotten all about the place even before she left the confines of perhaps one of the smallest towns she had ever performed in.

“The crowds cheered me as I passed by, but they would be just as noisy if they were going to see me hanged.” - Oliver Cromwell

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Facing up to the inevitable

Having passed my allotted three score years and ten I self-consciously realise I am now a continual liability on the long-suffering taxpayer and may potentially become a burden on the health system. Retirees tend to believe that having paid taxes all their lives they deserve to live off the fat of the land - or at least the lean pickings that the state allows.

The pension is no doubt an encumbrance on the treasury coffers, but is hardly generous enough to allow superannuitants to live in the kind of comfort they may have experienced during their working lives. As one dear old lady expressed it, “Retirement means twice as much husband on half as much money.”

The truth of the matter is that successive governments never did put aside a percentage of our taxes to pay back out to us when we reached retirement. They frivolously spent every penny they received on ongoing projects and now have to borrow from frugal overseas moneylenders to pay the unemployment benefits, the DPB and old-age pensions.

Dear old Winston, observing his own greying hair, did come up with the Gold Card granting recipients the use of public transport in off-peak hours. This allows elderly locals to take a train to Wellington, have a few minutes to stride along windswept Lambton Quay, a few more minutes to sit on the world’s coldest railway platform and then come home. Aucklander’s are slightly better off. Apparently they can get to Waiheke Island and back and experience seasickness.

When I first started earning we understood that one and sixpence out of every pound we paid in tax was put aside to pay our pensions. Social Security it was called. Back then we were encouraged to retire at sixty.

Such prudence was halted in1975 when Mr Muldoon scrapped Labour’s contributory scheme based on Singapore’s Central Provident Plan and introduced his National Superannuation Fund, assuring us that there would always be enough money in the kitty to pay out old-age pensions.

He hadn’t factored in advances in medical science and the canny drug companies subsequent surfeit of expensive elixirs that the government is reluctantly obliged to pay for to extend our lives.

Talk about Catch 22.

Benjamin Franklin once said that in this world nothing can be certain except death and taxes. So having paid the taxes apparently we now can only look forward to death.

It’s a sobering fact that at Masterton’s Men’s Shed, where male retirees regularly gather to learn or enhance their carpentry skills during their golden years, some are building their own coffins.

And then nightly on primetime TV either Gary McCormick or Keith Quinn plead with me in the nicest possible way to take out insurance to pay for my funeral. I suspect my children are hoping I will heed their advice, but I intend my will to be one of the shortest: “Being of sound mind, I spent all my money.”

As we approach the inevitable there are all manner of alternatives open to us; not all of course of our own choosing. I’m hoping to die of old age. I want to live to 120 and by then I reckon the government will have paid me back all the taxes I begrudgingly paid them.

The least desirable option is death by a terminal illness. There are a number of maladies in this category and we recently added Ebola to that sordid list. During my working life I handled lots of pork and poultry, skilfully avoiding swine flu and bird flu. But I have got aids; fortunately of the hearing variety and not HIV, so hopefully I’ll hear of any external danger that may creep up on me. Mr Key has warned us of the possibility of beheadings and given the inexplicably high price of hearing devices my severed head may be quite valuable.

An English academic writing in a medical journal said last week that climate change is a bigger threat to humanity than the Ebola virus. I’m glad I live in an inland town so rising sea levels won’t engulf me and I intend limiting my visits to the coast. I will also discard my speedos to ensure I don’t die from over-exposure to the sun’s rays.

I can’t think of any other precautions I should take to maintain my longevity in the face of an excess of CO2 in the atmosphere; though in the thirty years since we were first warned of the danger of global warming I’m not aware of any widespread fatalities.

But I’ve really only skimmed the surface on ways we can die.

There was this fellow who was a karate expert, then he joined the army. The first time he saluted, he killed himself.

“We’ve seen them all on street corners, many of them smoking, many of them on drugs: they’ve got no jobs to go to and once a week we see them queuing for state hand-outs - or pensions as we call them.” - Harry Hill

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