Nothing to fear, but fear itself

She had a kindly voice on the phone; I judged her to be elderly and her tone was not the least bit acrimonious. But she was not happy with me. In my last column I referred to her favourite political party as the “nutty Greens.”

“I’m a Green supporter,” she said, “And I am definitely not nutty.”

I explained that it was a play-upon-words. Most Green supporters I assumed were vegetarians and therefore ate lots of nuts to counteract a lack of protein from an animal source. Hence, the nutty Greens. I told her in a past life I despised vegetarians. She understood my churlish attitude, but assured me she was carnivorous and though previously a National supporter, she had voted for Dr Russell Norman at the last election. I suggested this was unlikely; she was not in Dr Norman’s electorate; she had probably voted for Dr Sea Rotmann. On reflection, she agreed she had.

I then propounded a theory that it was no wonder Mr Hayes had garnered such a large majority given that the surnames of his two closest rivals were Ms Rotmann and Mr Bott.

She failed to see the funny side of this somewhat facetious comment.

“But why would you vote for the Greens?” I wanted to know, “Because,” she responded, “They care for the environment.”

“How is the environment going to look when it is filled with the putrid smoke from cannabis cigarettes once the Greens get their way?” I asked.

The question seemed to throw her. She was not aware that the Greens had a policy to decriminalise cannabis and argued with me that it was not so. I pointed her in the direction of the Green Party website, but she had neither a computer nor the skills to use one.

I said it seemed somewhat ironic that the Ministry of Health through its District Health Boards and many other health-conscious organisations are spending millions of dollars annually endeavouring to get people to give up smoking, even to the extent of potentially banning it altogether by the year 2025, while the Greens want to usher in a whole new coterie of addicts.

Research, I told her, has shown that cannabis is even more carcinogenic than tobacco.

I fear I might have added insult to injury in my next effort to curb her enthusiasm. The Greens, I proposed, probably got a 10% polling because 10% of New Zealander’s are potheads.

But you have to hand it to the Greens. They have been able to convince at least some sections of the electorate that the environment is in serious trouble and needs caring for.

In my view, just another one of H. L. Menken’s “endless series of imaginary hobgoblins.”

Writing in last week’s Wall Street Journal award-winning author and economist Matt Ridley said he is sick of hearing that we humans are “using up” the world resources, “running out” of oil, “reaching the limits” of the atmosphere’s capacity to cope with pollution or “approaching the carrying capacity” of the lands ability to support a greater population.

Ridley points out that we keep improving productivity of each acre of land by applying fertilizer, mechanisation, pesticides and irrigation. Further innovation is bound to shift the ceiling upwards.

Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University calculates that the amount of land required to grow a given quantity of food has fallen by 65% over the past 50 years worldwide. Ausubel also came to the startling conclusion that even with the generous assumptions about population growth and growing affluence leading to a greater demand for meat and other luxuries we will need less farmland in 2050 than we needed in 2000 so long as we don’t grow more biofuels on land that could be growing food.

About ten years ago it was reasonable to expect that natural gas might run out in a few short decades and oil soon thereafter. If that were to happen agricultural yields would plummet and the world would be faced with a stark dilemma: plough up the rain forests to grow food, or starve. But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and gas have been postponed.

They will run out one day, but just as the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones we are sure to find cheap substitutes for fossil fuels long before they expire.

Ridley reckoned human activities actually increase the production of green vegetation in natural ecosystems. Fertiliser taken up in crops is carried into forests and rivers by wild birds and animals, where it boosts yields of wild vegetation. In places like the Nile delta wild ecosystems are more productive than they would be without human intervention, despite the fact that much of the land is used for growing food.

I’m not sure my lady caller could be convinced to change tack. She did allow however that she had given her party vote to National at the last election.

It never fails to amaze me how people completely misunderstand the strategy around voting in an MMP environment.

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” - H. L. Mencken

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The Mad Hatters tea party

It’s called the House of Representatives and indeed it is. It represents the best and worst in us and our irrational MMP style of governance has exacerbated that.

Recent events have emphasised the point.

Maurice Williamson kicked it all off. Once the darling of the liberals after a homo-erotic speech supporting same-sex marriage he let his new-found friends down by interfering with the justice system in a phone call to the police attempting to get a substantial National Party donor, who had been charged with alleged domestic violence, off the hook.

Winston Peters then promised to have the beleaguered Judith Collins sacked by her boss for not fully disclosing that the Chinese government had paid for some segments of her recent trip to the People’s Republic. “Gone by the end of the week,” he boasted. Sweating profusely, shaking like a leaf and slurring his words, his so-called “smoking gun” failed to fire.

Brendon Horan, once a favoured member of the NZ First stable, weighed in next claiming Mr Peters couldn’t talk – or even slur presumably – as he had failed to disclose that he part-owned a racehorse. Given the nags record on the track Winston was probably ashamed to admit even a part-ownership.

Horan was no doubt still licking his wounds after a sibling accused him of dipping into their mother’s estate causing Winston to dismiss him from the party with an even greater velocity than he had hoped John Key would do to Ms Collins.

An enquiry eventually cleared Mr Horan of any wrongdoing, but he still languishes almost unnoticed in one of parliament’s darkest recesses as an independent MP and is probably going to have to seek employment elsewhere come September.

However the first prize for the most disturbing behaviour of the week has to go to Jan Logie. If you’ve never heard of Jan Logie, then join the club. Jan is a Green list MP - all Green MP’s are list - and last week she totally ignored item 6 on the Green’s so-called “List of values” which states “Engage respectfully without personal attacks” when she tweeted: “John Key says Bill English has produced as many budgets as children….Begs the question who has he F&%d to produce it.”

Charming.

And so that’s a small sampling of our House of Representatives. The nutty Greens, the race-based Maori party, Labour with its gaggle of gays, United-Future and its bow-tied beau’s, the grey-underpowered NZ First, the conspirational Conservatives, the philosophically-inept Act, mana-less Mana, the rapacious Nationalists and potentially, heaven forbid, Herr Dotcom’s National Socialist leaning, Mein Kampf loving, Internet party.

The Ukraine is looking more stable by the day.

************************************



The Budget failed to address one of the major problems facing New Zealand and that is the widening gap between rich and poor. Last week two chief executives, one from the BNZ and the other from the Warehouse, admitted their multi-million-dollar remuneration packages were obscene and claimed they were embarrassed to receive such recompense.

I noticed neither offered to take a pay cut, but both conceded that those down at the coal face deserve a bigger slice of the pie.

This is not just a New Zealand phenomenon and is causing concern worldwide.

Last weeks’ Time magazine blamed globalisation which it said had created an international labour market that had heightened competition for jobs and had shifted power to employers. Add to this the fact that incestuous corporate governance tends to lavish largesse on managers over workers and there is an urgent need to reverse this alarming trend.

Those whose politics align to the right-of-centre are committed to the idea that wealth created at the top trickles down to everybody, even though a growing mountain of evidence tells us that this simply doesn’t work in the real world.

On the other side of the spectrum too many people believe that the capitalist coupling of free-trade agreements and deregulation works against the wage earner. Imported goods like clothing, footwear and appliances have never been cheaper, but internal costs like property taxes and electricity rise exponentially. The answer to the problem lies somewhere in the middle. Ideally governments need to promote business-friendly policies that allow growth while at the same time taking steps to ensure the benefits of that growth are spread more widely and equitably.

Higher wages would negate the need for the complicated working-for-families tax package that Labour introduced and National has maintained.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for a solution. There are more important things to attend to - like scoring points in the House of Representatives.

Some people use their brains to think,
Some use them to make art,
Some politicians use their brains,
To keep their ears apart.
- John Ansell

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Kids, please don't do as I do

When the Palmerston North Squash Cub held a weekend tournament with a fancy dress cabaret in their clubrooms on the Saturday evening, the good-natured Masterton Police lent me two uniforms.

A story I recounted in a column a few weeks ago.

I have to point out ‘uniforms’ is a bit of an exaggeration; all we needed on a cold winters night were two great-coats and two helmets. We could supply the dark navy pants and substantial black shoes to complete the illusion.

My partner in crime was John Booth. Older residents who want to put a face to a name would be helped by knowing John’s father was well known stock agent Randal Booth and his mother was Sister Booth, for many years the matron at Glenwood Hospital. John had joined the navy and seen the world after leaving school, but back in the early 1960s, when this tale unfolded, he was managing the Masterton Metal Company at Waingawa.

Back in those halcyon 6 o’clock closing days, although serving alcohol after hours at sporting clubs was illegal police mostly turned a blind eye to this indiscretion. From time to time however they would raid a suspicious premise to maintain some semblance of law.

We drove over on the cold wet night in my Volkswagen with our two girlfriends who later showed exceptional taste by marrying us, and when we got to the club we sent them on ahead to mingle with the party goers. The club lounge was upstairs and we wanted to carefully time our arrival to give full effect to the pandemonium we were hoping to create.

Finally we braced ourselves, ran up the stairs and burst through the doors, notebooks in hand. People recoiled at the sight of us. Glasses were hastily hidden in a variety of places and many imbibers fled into the toilets which now became unisex, and were soon full to over-flowing. Some had glass-shaped bulges in the most unlikely parts of their persons. John started to take down the particulars of those nearest the door while I marched up to the bar, slapped my notebook on the counter and said authoritatively to the ashen-faced barman: “I want names!”

To be fair, and to avoid exaggeration this all happened in less than a minute or two before a Masterton club member recognised John Booth and knocked his helmet off. When mine was forcibly removed the cry went up, “It’s Long and Booth,” and after much relief-based hilarity, the party was back in full swing.

There was a prize for best fancy dress, which we won, and the evenings revelry might have ended there save for a conversation around the bar with a couple of Dicks that revealed a new opportunity. I use the word Dick in its true sense. These coincidentally were the Christian names of the two men who feature in this story.

To protect the innocent I can reveal that one Dick was the manager of Masterton’s largest insurance company and the other was the professionally qualified registrar of Masterton’s largest institution.

These two thoughtfully considered that rather than waste the uniforms we might go in to the city centre and have some real fun. They were both competitive squash players and had not brought fancy dress over as such, but had for the occasion dressed up as a couple of larrikins. They had blackened their faces with burnt corks and wore dishevelled clothing, the complete antithesis of the type of dress they wore, commensurate with the positions they held back in Masterton.

We agreed to motor on down to Broadway where the two Dicks would create a disturbance and John and I would arrest them; a fairly simple procedure. Marion and Judy accompanied us in the Volkswagen; the two Dicks travelled in Dick Insurance’s car. It was pouring with rain, but true to the era Broadway was a busy place thanks to the Saturday night picture-goers who were all just exiting the cinemas. Broadway had two theatres quite close to each other, the State and the Regent, which shows you how much imagination the people who chose the names for New Zealand’s picture-houses had back then.

We parked the Veedub about midway between the two theatres; Dick’s car was a few spaces down. John and I walked up the street nodding to the general public with our hands clasped behind our backs and ensuring that the doors of the retail premises were locked and secure. Archetypal police behaviour back then before gendarmerie on the beat became a rare sight.

Behind us the two Dicks started an altercation and we rushed back and attempted to break them up.

Onlookers did not realise it was play-acting. In fact the performance of the two Dicks would have rivalled anything the moviegoers had seen on the screen that night. They rolled over and over on the footpath as John and I tried desperately to prise them apart. They ended up in the gutter which was streaming with rain water. The illusion was complete. We ‘policemen’ tried to elicit assistance from the onlookers who were now literally in their hundreds, lining both sides of the footpath. We got no help. Even back in those relatively law-abiding times, the larrikins were the heroes and were being egged on by the baying crowd.

Dick Insurance decided to take off and I followed in hot pursuit, while my colleague struggled with Dick Institution. I yelled to the crowd: “Stop that man!” but they parted like the Red Sea to ensure him a safe passage and actually jeered at me! One lady did try to help. She attempted to trip Dick Insurance up with the hook end of her umbrella and very nearly succeeded, but he only half fell and then regained his balance.

Finally the last man to leave the confines of the Regent - he must have been sitting in the front row - came to my aid. He was well built, probably in his seventies and possibly even a world war one veteran, who said: “I’ll get him officer” and dive tackled Dick Insurance, spreading him all over the footpath. I got him, now half stunned, in a full-nelson and dragged him back to John who was struggling to get his charge into the waiting Volkswagen. By now the crowd was cheering, not the two successful policemen, but the two larrikins, who had put up such a good fight.

All this was witnessed by Marion and Judy who had to stay on the footpath while we drove the arrestees around the corner where we hid in the backyard of a closed service station until the crowd had dispersed. When we went back for Dick’s car and to pick up our potential fiancées they told us we had fled the scene at an opportune time. As we had pulled away the real police arrived in real police cars, apparently alerted by a member of the public who would have told them that two of their colleagues were in all sorts of trouble on Broadway. Reports of the arrest, and of their fellow policemen leaving the scene in a lime green Volkswagen, must have seemed surreal.

Marion just happened to work at Dick Institution’s institution. He didn’t want to hear a word of this back at work on Monday, he cautioned her, given that discipline was an essential ingredient in the smooth running of the organisation.


As far as I know, no other nurse was ever told.

“Son, when you participate in sporting events, its not whether you win or lose, it’s how drunk you get.” - Homer Simpson.

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Endeavouring to understand Islam

Last week I listened to an address by a noted authority on Islam. He told us that this religion was growing at such a pace world-wide that in 25 years Muslims will outnumber Christians.

I’m not sure if I’ll still be here in 25 years, but I’m working on it.

The Western view of Islam has been understandably distorted by the 9/11 attack on America and reports of terrorism and suicide bombings we read about or see graphic images of most days on our television sets.

On the other side of the coin Muslims claim that Westerners are immoral, materialistic and flaunt their sexuality. They also believe we seek to undermine the political stability of the Middle East in favour of Israel.

Radicals and jihadists aside, no doubt the vast majority of the followers of Muhammad are peace-loving people and I decided to delve into the religion itself given that in time it may overwhelm us.

I could find very little reliable information about the Prophet Muhammad’s birth and formative years as a Meccan youth. The earliest accounts of his life were written at least 150 years after his death. He was born in A.D. 570 into the Hashim family of the powerful tribe of Quraysh in Mecca, a great city of commerce in the Arabian Peninsula. Muhammad’s father, Abdullah, passed away before his son’s birth and his mother Amina died when he was only six years old.

Muhammad became a wealthy trader, making caravan trading trips that took him into contact with Jews and Christians. He became interested in spending uninterrupted meditation on religious matters and during these periods he claims he heard the voice of Allah or the Archangel Gabriel who gave him messages to preach to mankind. During the following years Muhammad developed a strong regional following and his armies gradually took control of the whole of Arabia. Muhammad died in A.D. 632 at the age of sixty-two and was succeeded by Abu Bakr, one of his earliest followers.

The Qur’an is the Islamic equivalent of the Bible. It contains about the same amount of content as the New Testament. The Qur’an is divided into 114 “Surah’s” or sections. According to tradition, different parts of the Qur’an were revealed to Muhammad verbatim by the angel Gabriel over a period of 23 years.

Islam teaches that the true god is the Muslim deity, Allah. All other views of God are false. The Qur’an records: “The true religion with God is Islam.” The Qur’an also stresses that Allah is one person only: “They are unbelievers who say God is the third of three.”

Muslims mistakenly believe that Christians believe in three Gods. This idea is a clear misrepresentation of Christian belief. Christians are not polytheists, who accept three Gods, but monotheists who believe in one God.

Jesus, referred to as “Isa” in Arabic, appears in the Qur’an in a total of 93 verses scattered among fifteen Surah’s. Although the Qur’an concedes He was born of a virgin the Islamic holy book says He is not the son of God. Surah 10:68-69 states: They say: “God (Allah) has begotten a son! Glory be to Him! He is self-sufficient! His are all things in the heavens and on earth!” No warrant have you for this! Do you say about Allah what you do not know? Say: Those who say a lie against Allah will never prosper.

Muslims must adhere to a number of disciplines.

They must bow towards Mecca and say their prayers 5 times a day. This is set by tradition and is not in the Qur’an. The preferred location is in a Mosque. There are prescribed ablutions that involve washing hands, mouth, face, nostrils, arms and feet up to the ankles.

Followers are expected to give money to community welfare programmes to promote Islam. The common guideline is 2.5% of earnings.

Islamists must fast for one month each year. This is the ninth month in the Muslim lunar calendar known as Ramadan. Fasting means abstaining from all food, drink and sexual relationships during sunrise to sunset.

Every Muslim is expected to visit Mecca at least once in their lives if they are physically and financially able.

Perhaps Islam’s Achilles’ heel is that it has two opposing and often-times deadly factions.

The Shi’ites are known as “The Party of Ali” because they broke away from the main body of Muslims in the 7th century. They insisted that Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad, should have become leader after the Prophets death. They number about 10% of Muslims and are mainly in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and India.

The second group are the Sunnis. The word Sunni refers to the customary practice of the Prophet. This community includes a variety of theological attitudes and outlooks. They comprise about 90% of Muslims.

You can’t help but wonder if there might be a collision course in the offing. The Shi’ite-Sunni divide is not unlike the once bloody division between Catholic and Protestant, now thankfully in the distant past, but if the two Islamic factions can find peace amongst themselves Christians may feel threatened.


Perhaps I’ll set aside that desire to live for at least another 25 years.

“I do benefits for all religions. I’d hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality” - Bob Hope

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Changing the guard without rancour

It was probably a foregone conclusion that Alistair Scott was going to win the National party selection process as the candidate for the upcoming election. Scott signalled his intention to challenge the incumbent at least a year ago. He managed to convince the voting delegates that he was the best option despite being up against three excellent fellow aspirees and won the nomination on the first ballot.

I’m not sure why John Hayes felt he had to step down. The Wairarapa seat, totally misnamed when you consider it encompasses all of Tararua and a sizeable chunk of Hawkes Bay, is New Zealand’s second largest electorate geographically and despite spurious claims to the contrary, Hayes has served his constituents well. Certainly by increasing his majority over his three-term tenure would seem to validate that.

He is also the Parliamentary Private Secretary for Foreign Affairs reporting to Murray McCully and it has been suggested that with him opting to retire, perhaps Shane Jones is going to have to assume at least some of his responsibilities.

The National party candidate selection process is about as democratic as you could get. It contrasts utterly with Labour’s procedure where the locals have to put up with serious input from head office and a union vote. National’s candidate is chosen entirely by voting delegates who are all local financial members.

National party members wishing to participate in the voting process must attend at least one meeting where all the candidates speak as well as the final meeting where the voting takes place. On this occasion there were four pre-meeting opportunities; at Masterton, Dannevirke, Waipukarau and Greytown. Those desirous of being part of the voting process had to sign in at the commencement of at least one of those meetings before being eligible to vote at decision-making meeting in the Masterton Town Hall last Friday afternoon.

184 delegates gained eligibility to vote and their numbers were swelled by at least the same amount of non-voting members who came along to witness the process.

Once seated, the delegates were “locked in” and officials from head office manned the doors to certify no one left the building. This was to ensure no one voted without having heard all the aspirants speak. This ruling was thwarted when it was discovered some delegates had parked their cars illegally and notices placed under the windscreen wipers had inferred they were about to be towed away. About ten delegates were subsequently given permission to leave the hall which held up the proceedings somewhat.

The voting process requires that if no one gains 51% of the votes in the first ballot then the lowest polling candidate drops off and the delegates have another vote with the remainder.

This process is repeated until one of the candidates reaches the required 51%.

Mercifully, given the time the whole process was taking and the hardness of the Town Hall seats, articulate Alistair Scott gained the required number of votes on the first ballot. His winning margin is not known; the scrutineers were sworn to secrecy and it was unanimously resolved that voting papers be destroyed.

The candidates drew lots as to speaking order and were given ten minutes each to put their case and were then required to answer two questions. One submitted by the Prime Minister and the other from the party’s national president, Peter Goodfellow.

During these addresses the other three aspirants were ensconced in a soundproof room so they couldn’t hear the speeches or the questions. The prime ministers question related to the problems facing middle-class New Zealander’s and the party president asked how the candidates intended to encourage local electors to give National their party vote.

The candidates all acquitted themselves well and at another time any one of them could have been chosen to represent the Wairarapa electorate. It may be unfair to rank them, but I thought Jo Hayes probably came in second. This petite Maori lady spoke with real passion, but is already a list member in parliament and delegates probably considered that leaving her there meant they get two representatives for the price of one.

Richard Townley had stood for selection for Wairarapa 9 years ago and at the time was told by local members to go away and get some worldly experience and come back again. He did this and would have been justifiably disappointed that he missed out a second time. He did however make the curious decision not to use the microphone when he spoke in the Town Hall and given the average age of the audience and the percentage of them who would have been wearing hearing aids this could have counted against him.

Tall, dark and handsome James Perry also spoke well and looked the part. This youthful-looking John F. Kennedy type, a local young farmer currently employed by a German company selling farm machinery in Europe, appeared to be a little overwhelmed by the political process.

He and Townley are both 34 years of age; no doubt their time will come.

If the delegates had been more prudent they may well have chosen Jo Hayes to replace John Hayes. The savings in stationery and signwriting costs could have been considerable.

“If you’re in politics and you can’t tell when you walk into a room who’s for you and who’s against you, then you’re in the wrong line of work” – Lyndon Baines Johnson

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When the local lads occupied Japan

Upon the surrender of Japan which ended the combat phase of the Second World War the Americans made a request for allied forces including New Zealanders, Australians, Canadians and Indians to supply an occupying force for Japan. In February 1946 a contingent was sent to restore peace, clear up debris from the atomic blast, help rebuild and direct Japan into becoming a democratic society.

Prime Minister Peter Fraser wanted the 5000 strong New Zealand contribution to be drawn from single male volunteers from the troops destined to come home from the war in Europe. Few volunteered as most were keen to get back to family and friends after having survived the war. As a result all single non-Maori men from the 13th 14th and 15th reinforcements were conscripted for the force.

Back home however there was no shortage of volunteers to go to Japan with applications coming from returned servicemen who were having trouble readjusting to civilian life as well as from young men and women who had missed out on wartime service and wanted adventure.

Between May 1946 and August 1947 four relief drafts were dispatched from New Zealand to Japan. These relief drafts also included women in the form of nurses, shorthand typists, hostesses and welfare staff.

Known as J-Force their policing duties included monitoring black market groups and also large gatherings of people on public occasions and generally keeping law and order until a civilian government could be established. J-Force also assisted the Americans in promoting democracy in Japan by supervising local and national elections for the prefecture.

A number of local men joined up. Well-known among these were twins Colin and Clive Thorne, Jack Snowsill and Darcy Christiansen. Colin and Clive’s older brother Jim had gone in an earlier draft and in a letter home encouraged his twin brothers to join him.

Earlier this week I spoke to sprightly 87-year-old surviving identical twin Clive Thorne about his experiences in the war-torn nation. They were in an unsettled country on active service as peacekeepers, but their role as it happened was not too arduous. Clive said he and Colin played in the company brass band and so they didn’t face too many situations that might have been considered threatening.

They were issued with clarinet and a side drum rather than arms though towards the end of their tour of duty they did do a three month stint on guard duty as camp police. On that occasion they were each given a rifle with a bayonet, with just one round of ammunition in the breech to be used as a warning shot and a 38 pistol with two rounds.

Band members were also trained as stretcher bearers, but Clive said this skill was never called upon.

They got on well with their charges and most of the more dangerous situations were tackled by the American 11th Airborne Division who had been selected by General Douglas McArthur to lead the American forces that would also occupy Japan.

Clive said they were paid in pounds sterling and the exchange rate with the yen was set at an artificially low rate in an effort to slow inflation. On pay day he said they could swap a British sixpence with one of the locals for 100 yen. A jug of beer was just ten yen so you could get 10 jugs of beer for sixpence!

In April 1948 the New Zealand government made the decision to withdraw from Japan. Once back in New Zealand J-Force personnel found they were treated differently from World War II veterans. Their service went unrecognised and until 1956 they were not eligible to join the RSA or receive war pensions. It was not until 1995 that the New Zealand Service Medal 1946 – 1949 was instituted to recognise the service of J-Force veterans in Japan

Not that the local contingent minded. They hadn’t faced combat and they came home worldly-wise and subsequently made big contributions to our community.

Coincidentally, all were extremely talented musicians and in the 1950’s and beyond you could scarcely attend a dance hall or a ball without at least one or perhaps all of them being on the stage. Colin Thorne played the drums and Clive the tenor sax with older brother Jim on the clarinet. Darcy Christiansen was a trombonist and Jack Snowsill played the piano and the xylophone.

Clive and Colin took up that most dangerous of occupations - aerial topdressing. They were exceptionally skilled pilots, but weaving an aeroplane in and out of Wairarapa’s steep hill country is not for the faint-of-heart. They saw many of their colleagues in the same industry crash and burn and indeed Colin’s career came to an abrupt end after a near-fatal accident in 1966 when the tail wheel fell of his Beaver aircraft during take-off.

Jack Snowsill became a chemist in the town centre and Darcy Christiansen a builder on his own account. Clive, Jack and Darcy still play when asked and have lost none of their skills which were, and still are, considerable.

Japan survived the occupation and emerged as one of the most prosperous nations on earth. They haven’t kept inflation in check though. I noticed recently that a bottle of beer in Tokyo costs 600 yen.

“Peace with Germany and Japan on our terms will not bring much rest. As I observed last time, when the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.” – Winston Churchill

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Reflecting on that one life

Easter and the holidays that are related to it are moveable feasts in that they do not fall on a fixed date in the Gregorian or Julian calendars. Instead the date for Easter is determined on a lunisolar calendar similar to the Hebrew calendar. The First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 established the date of Easter as the first Sunday after the full moon following the March equinox.

In Western Christianity, using the Gregorian calendar, Easter always falls on the Sunday between the 22nd of March and the 25th of April inclusive, within about seven days after the astronomical full moon.

The following Easter Monday is a legal holiday in many countries with predominantly Christian traditions.

New Zealand’s shop trading restrictions for the upcoming Easter break are quite complex. Basically shops must not open on Good Friday or Easter Sunday, but there are a number of exemptions.

For instance dairies can stay open provided they only sell items “that people can’t put off buying until the next day such as baby formula or pet food, and the quantity of goods for sale is no more than needed to meet the needs of people in the area.”

Same rule for service stations, only they can also sell petrol, oil, car parts and accessories.

Takeaways bars and restaurant/cafes must sell “only cooked food ready to be eaten immediately.” Shops for cutting hair or renting videos are exempt, pharmacies can stay open, real estate agents can sell houses and garden centres can trade on Easter Sunday.

Duty Free shops and shops that sell souvenirs are also exempt, so I guess Wills and Kate won’t have to take the next step of their journey without a genuine plastic Tiki, manufactured in China.

It’s a funny old world and there are lots of people who will carry on working without anyone giving a thought to them having a break and where exemptions haven’t even been considered. I’m thinking particularly of hospitals and hotels, taxis, bus and train drivers and caregivers to the elderly and infirm.

I assume if you die on Good Friday or Easter Sunday funeral directors won’t have to seek permission to render their services either.

It was a death on Good Friday 2000 years ago that started all this and I suppose that as we idly sit agonising over not being able to shop at the supermarket it might be an opportune time for reflection.

The judicial murder of Jesus of Nazareth is not a pleasant story. He was done to death with the connivance of the religious and secular authorities and the backing of public opinion.

After a sleepless night in which he was given no food, he endured the mockery of two trials, with Pontius Pilate reluctantly agreeing to the death sentence after his body had been lacerated beyond description and to within an inch of his life with the cruel Roman cat-o-nine-tails.

A crown of thorns was embedded on his head before He bore his own cross to the crucifixion site where He endured an excruciatingly painful death in which every nerve in His body screamed with anguish.

It was clear that the Jewish priests and most of the social elite of the day hated everything about Jesus. He saw through their pontificating and their self-important determination to maintain their status as the only dependable interpreters of the scriptures. He steadfastly refused to bow to their authority. He persisted in teaching a gentle doctrine of love that wasn’t suitable to the hard-hearted old enforcers of the Mosaic laws. His teaching threatened to weaken their positions as sanctioned flunkeys of the Roman consulate.

There is something disturbingly familiar about all this. Two thousand years on, for many the world is not a better place. Television images of some sections of the Middle East today cause you to think: has anything really changed? Israel, though just a speck on the world map, receives overwhelming attention and the surrounding states live in constant conflict.

The so-called “Arab Spring” turned into a disastrous summer of discontent.

But we shouldn’t complain. Laws and human rights based on Christian teachings have served New Zealand well as a society and we can probably endure a couple of days with restricted shopping options.

Christians believe the Easter Sunday resurrection of Jesus is not a fairy tale or a product of man’s desirous imagination, but a profound truth of life foretold, foreshadowed and carried through by God, just as He planned from the beginning.

For believers, the day the Son rose is worth constantly celebrating.

But in the Ukraine, Egypt, Syria and many other parts of this tortured planet the Christian message is as elusive as ever.

I’m told the meek held a meeting recently. They’ve decided they don’t want to inherit the earth.

At the ecumenical dinner the catholic priest taunted the rabbi by asking him when he would become liberal enough to eat some of the ham. “At your wedding,” replied the rabbi. – George Coote

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