The pitfalls of penmanship

Back in 2006 David Hedley from Hedley’s renowned Masterton bookshop approached me and suggested that perhaps I might like to put a selection of my newspaper columns together in a book. He thought it would sell well and once produced he would arrange a book launch evening to start the ball rolling. 

Naturally I was keen. After all, didn’t people become millionaires overnight writing best sellers and surely my book would be a best seller. I must have misinterpreted “sell well” for “best seller!”

And so I agreed.

He put me in touch with owners of Fraser Books, Ian and Diane Grant, and they told me to sort out what I considered to be my best 150 columns and they would go through them and probably reduce that number to around 100 for the book.

They said I should choose columns that didn’t date, some that were autobiographical and particularly those that were humorous. By 2006 I had been writing my weekly column in the Times-Age for nine years so I had about 450 columns to choose 150 from. So I took what I considered to be the best 150 columns to the Grants and they reduced these down to 110 which they thought would make a saleable book.

And so now we needed a title.

When I was a kid I had read a book which was on my parent’s bookshelf called tales of a Bond Street Jeweller. It was a famous book in its day and I’d always thought that if I was ever to write a book about my experiences I would call it “Tales of a Queen Street Butcher.”

The Grant’s had never heard of “Tales of a Bond Street Jeweller” and they looked it up on Google and Google had never heard of it either.

So they weren’t impressed with that title option.

“How about “One man’s meat?” I then suggested, “And if there is to be a second book after the world-wide acclaim from the first it could be called ..Is another man’s poison.”

The Grant’s liked this option though in hindsight I doubt that they thought there would be any likelihood of a sequel.

Now we needed someone to design the cover they said.

Well since closing the butchers shop I had become a graphic designer of sorts in the Sign Factory which I owned with my eldest son. I suggested I could design the cover, which I did.

I went to school with a fellow named Jim Field who used to draw a regular cartoon in the Times-Age about the exploits of a character called Bill Goodie. On one occasion I featured in one of his cartoons resplendent in my butcher’s apron and boater hat.

So I used this image, which was initially was in black and white so I coloured it up, took the knives out of the butchers pouch an replaced these with a pen and brush. I then chose a quirky letter style that I particularly liked and use this for the title. The Grants seemed happy with this. The Grant’s then wanted photos to back up the claims made, especially to confirm some of the seemingly outrageous I had made in the autobiographical section.

I had plenty of these and they took all of this information to Printcraft who laid out the book which was then sent to book printers in Auckland for the final link in the chain.

Now I am sure you have heard of famous authors being given sometimes millions of dollars upfront for books they are yet to write.

Well for unknowns like me, exactly the opposite occurs.

You have to pay up front - every step of the way.

It was agreed between David Hedley, the Grants and me that the first print run should be 600 books.

My total upfront cost for the 600 books was $10,000. In round figures it was $3500 to the Grants, $6000 to the printer in Auckland and another $500 in incidental costs. I didn’t consider any of these costs to be excessive

The recommended retail price on the book was $32.50. So I multiplied $32.50 by 600 and I came up with $19,500 which looked like I pretty well going to double my money.

Well actually, that’s not how it worked out.

For a kick-off you give the first 100 books away. You send one to every library and by law two to the National Library. Then you send a copy to all the newspapers and magazines around the country hoping they will review the book - and review it favourably. If this happens then the chances are that there will be a big demand for the book and the second and third printings are much cheaper than the first because all the start-up costs have been paid for.

It’s about here that authors start to make some real money.

Also I hadn’t factored in the distribution costs or the booksellers margin. In the end the net profit per book coming to me was ten dollars a book.  So I had 500 books to sell at ten dollars and if they all sold that comes to $5000. Rather than doubling my money I had actually halved it.

David Hedley organised a marvellous launch evening at Solway Park Copthorne and over 250 people attended. There was a hugely entertaining debate that night that included Lyn of Tawa, Michael Wilson and Karl DuFresne.

Great sales that night, but now we waited for the reviews. In the end there were only two. And they were better than I could have dreamed of, but there were only two.

Writing in the Wairarapa Times-Age Marlene Ditchfield said among things: Such is the literary magic of this book. This is high praise and I do not give it lightly. Rick Long is a talented man. His writing is insightful, sincere and warm, but above all very very funny.

And writing in the Northern Advocate, the Whangarei paper, Graham Barrow said: The columns are interesting and chatty and given that New Zealand being short of quality columnists as it is I’m surprised they haven’t had a wider circulation.

But that was it; superb reviews, but just two of them.

I had a phone call from the editor of the Timaru Herald. He said, “I have just read your book and I loved it." I was thrilled, “Are you is going to review it?” I asked. “Oh no, I’m not going to review it,” he said “This is a book for the Wairarapa; I don’t think people would understand it or appreciate it down here. It’s just that back in the early 1970’s I used to be a reporter on the Times Age so I knew you and your butcher’s shop and all the tricks you used to get up to.”

I was disappointed of course that he wasn’t going to review the book.

And so fame was fleeting and fortune never came. The 500 books all sold, but there was no demand for a second printing.

But I had no regrets. In a way it was $5000 well spent. It’s a great history for future generations of our family and I had some wonderful letters and phone calls from people all over the country that had enjoyed reading it.

I was even invited to an all-female book club in Wellington which I duly attended and had a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

So the message here I guess it you want to lose money in large dollopfulls, write a book.

But actually this wasn’t my first book. I published my first book thirty years earlier - in 1976 - and that one made money, lots of it.

In the early 1970’s I was involved in setting up a New Zealand-wide company called Mastercut Meat Promotions Ltd. This was a forerunner to the Mitre 10 style of franchising for retailers – independently owned, but trading under the one name: Mastercut Meat.

At age 32 I was the national chairman of the company and there were 110 butchers’ shops in New Zealand flying the Mastercut banner and we all put 1% of out turnover into a pool and this money was received by advertising agency Carlton, Carruthers Du Chateau who designed and placed all our advertising. I was flown by the directors of Carlton Carruthers Du Chateau all over the country to encourage more members to join and I found out to my surprise that the retail prices of meat were all over the place.

Every Sunday evening the meat board would put out a schedule of what the wholesale price of meat would be for the week, but the retail prices were different wherever you went.

So I decided that butcher’s needed a book to show them how to calculate their sale prices based on what it was costing to land the meat into their shops. This wasn’t an original idea. I had seen something similar some years prior in Australia.

To help me I need to harness someone who had better mathematical brains than I had and so I approached my accountant, Colin Croskery, and he agreed to assist.

So I had to cut up the various carcasses and slice and then weigh each cut separately and weigh the waste like the fat and bones and Colin worked on all this information and we came up with graduated cost prices to match the popularity of the cut, and finally came up with a number of options for the retail price based on the businesses known overheads.

I wrote some editorial to pad out the pages and we went to Printcraft, then owned by Alec Niven and Wally Seville. I told them we need a book with pages almost as thick as cardboard so they were long lasting and they needed to have a glossy finish because butchers had greasy hands and would regularly need to wipe the book clean. The book also needed to lie flat.

All of this was no problem to the two genial printers and they worked out a price per book at $7.50. Now back in 1976 $7.50 was quite a lot of money; in fact we had intended a selling price of $7.50 and so it looked like our efforts profit-wise would be in vain.

It then occurred to me that perhaps we could sell advertising in the book. I knew this book was going to popular among butchers and in those days there were lots of butcher’s shops in this country. There were 15 in Masterton alone.

So I went and saw all the suppliers to the meat trade, people who sold us string, paper, plastic bags, seasonings and machinery and told them they needed to advertise in this book as it had a clearly-defined target market. They all agreed, and we priced the advertising so the $7.50 per book was covered, and from then on our profit would be 100%.

I was on the executive council of the New Zealand Meat Retailers Federation at the time so I asked the CEO if he could give me the names and addresses of every butcher in New Zealand. He said he would do better than that, he would print out sticky labels from his addressograph machine and all we had to do was attach them to the envelopes.

So we wrote to every butcher in the country telling them this book was about to become available and if they wanted a copy they needed to send us a stamped self-addressed foolscap envelope and a cheque for $7.50 and we would send them the book.

The book hadn’t actually been printed at that stage; we didn’t want to print the book until we knew how many were going to be ordered. I think pretty well every butcher in the country ordered the book.

The checks came pouring in and as soon as Printcraft produced the books we sent them off in the stamped self-addressed envelopes.

Distribution costs: nil.

Books left unsold: nil.

Net profit for the two authors: Priceless.

So you see you can make money writing a book, you just need willing advertisers.

The great thing about this book was that these were inflationary times and the book soon went out of date because of rising meat prices. So we had to recalculate it and reprint it three times. Each time we went back to the advertisers and asked if they wanted to come on board again and they all did.

The first copy had proved lucrative for them as well as us.

Whenever I went on holiday and found myself looking in a butchers shop window in some remote town up north or down south the butcher would inevitably recognise me and come out to say hello and thank me profusely for the book.  It was amazing how many butchers told me they never started to make money in their businesses until that book came along.

In 1978 I took my wife and four young children to Disneyland and Las Vegas on the profits from that book.

On my second book, One Man’s Meat I couldn’t have afforded to take them to Eketahuna!

“Tis pleasant, sure, to see ones name in print; a books a book, altho’ there is nothing in’t.” - Lord Byron

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Contradictions in a modern world

It is somewhat surprising that in an increasingly secular world the celebration of Christmas seems to be gathering more and more momentum. The commercial world undoubtedly initiates the fervour and there are more and more houses lit up with yuletide greetings, a multitude of channels beaming Christmas shows on television, and aisles and aisles of decorative ornaments, the majority of them ironically made in atheist China, packing the shelves of our superstores to eventually adorn the trees that invade our living rooms. Some enterprising folk are selling authentic pine saplings cocking a snook at the “genuine Taiwanese plastic” versions that have been making inroads for years.

We love Christmas for a variety of reasons, few of them religious. It heralds the start of the summer holiday season which usually means inclement weather right up until it’s time to go back to the grindstone. But mostly we enjoy the reaction of children - in my case grandchildren - the wide-eyed look on their faces as we reiterate the myths that entranced us when we were kids. That Father Christmas comes down the chimney and drinks the beer and eats the mince pies on the hearth and leaves behind the colourfully wrapped presents as a kind of quid pro quo.

I’m not sure just how modern day mums and dads get the jolly fat gentlemen into the confines of the log fire and through the glass fire door with a latch on the outside. I guess they’ve embellished the story to fit the composition of a contemporary home and anyway we were always desperate to believe the impossible even when some smart-alec worldly kid in the primers awakened us to the fact that we were being mightily deceived.

The real story of Christmas is always under constant threat. More and more academics articulately reject the birth of Christ in a lowly stable and find the claim of a virgin mother and an immaculate conception harder to stomach than a sleigh riding, North Pole domiciled, deliverer of gifts to millions of waiting kids, overnight.

They offer up Jesus as simply a prophesier and a good man who brought a message of love and reconciliation, which they find easier to swallow than Jonah was for the whale. However it’s unlikely that 2000 years on we would consistently remember merely a good man.

And the world around us changes. The Apostle Paul’s miraculous conversion took place on the road to Damascus. Today he would likely be caught in the crossfire of troops loyal to Bashar al Assad and the rebels opposing his regime.

Fundamentalist Islamic revolutionaries dream of a world without Christians and by destroying them, and themselves in the process, believe a paradise awash with virgins beckons.

I suspect both Christ and Mohammed would weep at the misinterpretation of their teachings.

Despite these diversions the Christmas story still endures. Locally the churches will be gearing up for the usual influx as many choose to attend just once or twice a year. Humourists point to C of E being an acronym for Christmas and Easter, the only time many Anglicans make the pilgrimage, rather than Church of England.

Contrary to popular belief church regular attendance may not be on the wane. Arguably Masterton’s most imposing church is the newly-built Lighthouse facility in Intermediate Street and St. Andrews at Upper Plain recently celebrated the opening of a brand new hall for their junior congregation. This indicates the churches are still popular as places of worship, although many people now use secular facilities for funerals and prefer to conduct weddings in restaurants or garden settings with non-religious vows led by celebrants rather than clergy. Few women want to honour and obey their menfolk.

The church’s influence on our lives however cannot be brushed aside. Christ gave the world its calendar and our two greatest holidays, Christmas and Easter, marking His birth and His resurrection. His teachings gave us the doctrine of marriage and aroused men to abolish slavery, create orphanages, homes for the blind, the first hospitals, and the first schools. History shows that nations of the past rose and fell according to their beliefs in His teachings. Rome under Constantine, England under Alfred the Great and Queen Elizabeth the First and Queen Victoria and the United States under their Christian forefathers.

Christ inspired the world’s greatest art and music such as Michelangelo’s Pieta and Handel’s Messiah. Our doctrines of right and wrong, the morals of life, are based on His utterances. No other human being has changed so many sceptics into peace-filled believers, offered so much hope to the mentally disturbed, the physically ailing, and the spiritually lost.

The centurion at the foot of the cross said it all: “Surely this man was the Son of God.”

Have a great Christmas!

(First published on the 19th of December 2012)
 

“How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few, his precepts! O! ‘tis easier to keep holidays than commandments.” - Benjamin Franklin

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Food Banks needed because of unchecked inflation

I attended a committee meeting of the Masterton Food Bank this week and there was good news and bad news. The good news was that there are many generous individuals and businesses that add value to the Food Bank coffers on a regular basis allowing the good people that voluntarily operate the facility to buy-in and access lots of food and other household items of necessity to fill their constantly depleted shelves.

The bad news is that demand for the services is increasing exponentially.

I tried to think why in a country that should be prospering; the constant demand for food parcels for families is an ever-increasing problem.

I might have at least part of the answer. I happened upon an advertisement for our butchers shop back from 1990. Legs of lamb were $13.95 each, a leg of mutton was $9.95 and you could buy a two kilo pack of sausages for $2.95. Sausages in a smaller pack were $1.95 a kilo.

Some explanation. “Mutton” was in fact ewe mutton. The government meat inspectors at the abattoirs would give it a red stripe (first quality) if it had good conformation. We would buy around 200 ewes a week and the best 100 of these we would set aside to make into cuts and joints for retail sale. The other 100 we would bone out and trim to create lean meat. This meat would be mixed with our beef trimmings to make beef flavoured sausages.

(We also bought in weekly about 30 lambs, around 50 hoggets, plus about 25 bodies of beef and twelve porkers.)

The legs of mutton, which were half as big again as a leg of lamb, were sold (as previously mentioned) for $9.95.

We would bone the forequarters and roll them up with seasoning, wrap them in cookable netting and market them as “colonial goose” for $5.95 each.

The loins were sold for $7.95.

There was good profit in this for us, and great buying for our customers.

I looked up our old wages book and found that our senior staff were being paid $12 an hour. Checkout operators and meat packers who were invariably of the female gender were paid between 8 and 10 dollars an hour. I Googled the minimum wage in 1990 and it was $6.12 an hour.

Fast forward to today. Average wage in New Zealand, according to Google, is $50,000 a year. This equates to around $24 an hour. So wages have doubled. Now let’s look at meat prices. A full leg of lamb will set you back $50, mutton has disappeared from the market entirely, so too has hogget which was usually mid-priced between mutton and lamb.

Beef flavoured sausages, once a staple diet for many, in my New World supermarket today were selling for $9.49 a kilo!

Do the math and you can see why so many families today are, comparatively speaking, finding it hard to make ends meat.

“One part of mankind is in prison, another is starving to death; those of us who are free and fed are not awake. What will it take to rouse us?” - Saul Bellow 

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Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside...

I wrote a letter to the Dominion-Post last week, but was disappointed to see that it was not published. I have since found out however that Patrick Crewdson, Editor in chief (I kid you not, that is his title) of Stuff will not publish anything from climate-change denialists. Another blow it seems for free speech.

Anyway here is the letter:

Dear Editor,

In a front page article in the Dominion-Post on Wednesday the 28th of November Nicholas Boyack reports that parts of Lower Hutt and Petone could be under water before the end of the century, according to a damning report.

I am reminded that back in September 1988 a 'damning report' in Wellington’s Evening Post made the same dire predictions:

“As a result of global warming, across the nation temperatures are breaking records and severe southerly storms which traditionally smashed the capital three or four times a year have become a thing of the past as Wellington bathes in year round balmy weather. Spring flowers are appearing up to two months earlier than usual, heating bills are way down, skin cancer is on the rise and numerous other changes are readily observable.”

The Evening Post author was concerned that there was universal agreement that the polar ice caps were melting which could lift sea levels from three to twelve feet. “As a result nations like the Maldives and Bangladesh would be wiped out, which in the latter case, given its huge population, raised unprecedented re-settlement and refugee problems.”

The writer thought that most of New Zealand’s concerns could be solved building sea walls, but felt that cities like Wanganui and Lower Hutt, with sizeable river outlets, may have some special difficulties.

Other towns, such as Raglan, the article went on to say, were probably doomed, being not of sufficient size and importance to justify saving.

As an occasional visitor to Wellington I must say I am blissfully unaware of the year-round balmy weather; perhaps I visit on the wrong days. Meanwhile sea walls are conspicuous by their absence and I’m fairly certain that, thirty years on, the dear hearts and gentle people of Raglan still live and love in their home town.

Not to worry, didn’t I read somewhere that Al gore recently bought a house by the sea?

Yours faithfully,

Rick Long

“Now there sits a man with an open mind. You can feel the draught from here.” - Groucho Marx. 

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When will they ever learn?

The nutty Greens are craftily convincing the gullible New Zealand public into allowing them to legislate to decriminalise cannabis for recreational use. “Decriminalise” and “recreational” are buzz words for open slather for anyone who wants to partake of the psychotic substance known as THC, but surveys show the Greens may well succeed while the sleeping giant of the so-called silent majority slumbers.

Green MP Chloe Swarbrick wants to take an even greater leap forward for mankind. She proposes decriminalising all drugs and if she has her way this means heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine will be readily available on acquiescent streets of ‘Godzone.’

Inexplicably The New Zealand Drug Foundation, whom I naively assumed where there to dramatically reduce drug habitude, agree with Ms Swarbrick’s potty proposal. And then, to complete the unholy trifecta, in weighs regularly-quoted economic commentator Shamubeel Eaqub who reckons if Chloe’s ambitions are realised the New Zealand government stands to make tens of millions of dollars of savings.

Conspicuous by their absence to mount any form of opposition to all of this are the Ministry of Health and their attendant District Health Boards (DHB’s) who have been striving for years to reduce smoking to an eventual zero tolerance goal by 2025 and will now have to deal a whole new raft of inhalers passing around ‘roll-your-owns’ with higher-rated carcinogenic elements than tobacco.

DHB’s have more cause to worry. Most are already struggling with crippling deficits, but these are likely to blow out even further. According to the Colorado Department of Public Safety (Colorado has legalised the sale of marijuana) hospitalisation rates (per 100,000 hospitalisations) with possible marijuana exposures, diagnosis or billing codes increased from 803 per 100,000 before commercialisation (2001-2009) to 2,696 per 100,000 after commercialisation (January 2014-September 2015.)

I do however sense some method in the left’s madness. The Green Party make no attempt to disguise their socialist roots and the only way to install socialism in an otherwise successful society is to drag down that society to such an extent it is willing to try something new. They will be ably abetted by comrade Jacinda who before entering parliament was the president of the International Union of Socialist Youth and was reported as saying during the election campaign that ‘capitalism was past its use-by-date,’ or words to that effect.

Jacinda and Chloe then are deadly bedfellows and these two kids are too young to know the terrible past tragedies of communism and appear to have little knowledge of the pernicious experiences of Eastern Europe, Cuba and North Korea. Nonetheless they need look no further than across the ocean where the dispirited citizens of Venezuela are wallowing in yet another failed socialist experiment.

Ageing and conservative, and perhaps even a conspiracy theorist, I’m probably past my own use by date. Leaving the planet (by natural causes) before all that I fear comes to pass, may be a Godsend.

“Marxist socialism must always remain portent to historians of opinion – how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and an enduring influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.” - John Maynard Keynes 

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A sermon for Saint Luke

I was a tad surprised when I got a call from Reverend Dashfield  asking me to do the sermon tonight. His reasoning being that this was a time to celebrate the feast Saint Luke and as he was a physician and as I was on the District Health Board it seemed entirely appropriate.

On the health board yes, but I am not a doctor, though in a previous vocation I did call myself a heart, liver and kidney specialist. When customers came into the shop and asked me how much kidneys were, I’d tell them sixpence each or five for half a crown.

Now those old enough among you who remember the old imperial currency, and who can also do the math, you will see that there was no real bargain in that offer.You’d surprised however, just how many people bought five at a time.

There were other tenuous connections. Most of you probably wouldn’t know that the Reverend Dashfield’s late great father-in-law was a doctor, a general practitioner. He was Dr Berney- and as a youngster he was our family doctor.

Doctors were much venerated in those days and they deserved to be. If you were perchance to fall ill and rang your doctor, he would jump in his car and come to you. These were known as “house calls” and it’s an expression that has completely disappeared from the lexicon. If you asked today’s generation - the generation Xers or a millennials - what a ‘house call’ was they wouldn’t have a clue, any more than they’d know what a half a crown was.

My sister and my mother and I referred to him as Dr Berney, but my father called him Hugh. This was because they both belonged to the Masterton Rotary Club, and a tenet of membership is that you must call your fellow members by their Christian names. Today of course we have to call them first names, rather than Christian names, in case we cause offence.

So next I went to Google to see if in fact I was a fit and proper person to be making this address tonight. And Google sent me to Wikipedia, another 21st century name, and there I found some pretty startling information about Saint Luke.

I’m going to read what it said, word for word, and I took a screenshot of it on my iPhone to prove to those skeptics among you as to the veracity of my claims. (Screenshots, Google, Wikipedia, IPhone. If dad and Hugh Berney were still alive - and here tonight - they would think I was talking in a completely different language.)

Anyway, here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Saint Luke. Word for word remember, The Roman Catholic Church and other major denominations venerate him as Saint Luke the Evangelist and as a patron saint of artists, physicians, bachelors, surgeons, students and butchers. And I’m not kidding.

Artists, physicians, bachelors, surgeons, students and butchers. That’s a fairly eclectic mix!

So, at last I feel justified and at home in this pulpit.

And so now to the reading about Jesus and the rich man.

One of my favourite songs is “If I were a rich man” from that wonderful musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” I even have it in my iPhone, and the version I chose to download is by Roger Whittaker.

It cost me a $1.94 to download the song - and if Mr Whittaker’s version is popular worldwide, as I suspect it is, then collectively we will have made him a very rich man.

You all know the words. The lead character in the play, Tevye, is pleading with God to make him a rich man. He wants a big tall house with rooms by the dozen with three staircases. One for going up, one for coming down, and a third one, going nowhere just for show.  And the final plea, which ends the song perfectly: “Lord who made the lion and the lamb, you decreed I should be what I am, would it spoil some vast eternal plan, if I were a wealthy man.

He’s taking a risk here of course if he wants to receive eternal life.

Now I am not a rich man and my bank manager would confirm that.

But wealth is subjective. Someone in South Auckland sleeping on the streets or in their car, might well consider that comparatively speaking, I am rich. But looking for a real rich man I might point to the immediate past CEO of Fonterra, a Mr Spierings, and suggest that he’s taking a risk if he’s longing for eternal life, but to extricate himself from that accusation he might well point to Bill Gates and say “Now that’s a rich man!”

Bill Gates can’t go any further up the chain because he’s the richest man in the world.

But I reckon Bill must have read Luke chapter 18 verses 18 to 26 because he and his wife have determined that they’re going to give away all their money through the Bill and Melinda Gates Charitable Foundation.

Rotary International, the head office of the Rotary club that my father and Dr Berney belonged to, resolved in the mid 1980’s that, as an international project, they would rid the world of polio, and in recent years the Gates Foundation has given tens of millions of dollars to Rotary to ensure they complete the task - and they’re almost there.

There are just a few pockets on earth where poliomyelitis has not been completely eradicated.

Incidentally, in Dr Berney’s day, polio was more often referred to as infantile paralysis.

Now Luke tells us that Jesus said it is going to be much harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Which on the surface seems like a rather unusual declaration.

But Jesus was not prone to say things that didn’t make sense.

I was going to bring a needle along tonight, to expose just how small the eye is, but needles are notoriously hard to find, particularly, I understand if they’re in haystacks. Incidentally when did you last see a haystack? Haystacks were abandoned long ago, along with half crowns and house calls. Now the hay is rolled up in unattractive green plastic wrapping and left out in the paddock. The plastic eventually blows away and gets caught up the fences, despoiling the environment.

Anyway, I’m sure you would have some difficulty in imagining a camel going through the eye of a needle, so this needs to be more fully explored.

In Christ’s time, the cities were walled. Jerusalem was a walled city and even today I understand Damascus still is. The main wall had a huge double-doored front gate so people and carts and donkeys and all manner of commerce could go in and out freely during the day. But at nightfall the gate was closed and locked securely so marauders could not enter and plunder and pillage the city.
The problem was, folk often needed to leave the city at night or alternatively seek entrance when arriving after dusk. So when they built the wall they created an entrance, a building block wide, so that people could slip in and out of the city at will.

Now some travelers arrived after dark on camels and the entrance, which was known as the needle, was barely wide enough for a camel. I’ve seen some wonderful illustrations in old bibles of camel owners pushing and shoving their animals, endeavouring to get them through the needle gate.

Camels of course had saddles - and saddle bags, and in the saddle bag was usually all the owners worldly goods. In an effort to shove the camel through the needle gate the owner needed to take off the saddle and the saddle bags and therefore dispose of all his worldly goods.

Therefore Jesus’s explanation was in fact perfectly illustrative.

And so I left the needle at home.

And so that just leaves me to somehow work in hospitals with Saint Luke.

In fact hospitals were originally established by the church. Not just hospitals, but all our learning institutions. The great universities - Oxford, Cambridge Harvard and Princeton were all established by the Christian Church.

But about century or so ago men started to leave the church and sought camaraderie and fellowship in organisations like Rotary Clubs, Lions, Freemasonry and a host of other secular associations where they could do their good works.

In fact one wag said: "Rotarians are a bunch of self-made men who gather together once a week to worship their maker."

There’s a bit of self-deprecation here, as, like my father and Dr Berney, I am a Rotarian.

And so eventually the government had to take over these places and whenever the government gets involved there tends to be a little bit of inefficiency, and of course you lose the volunteer aspect that was a hallmark of church involvement.

However Saint Luke the physician would be amazed to see the advances in medical science today, and our magnificent hospitals and the wonderful staff who care for our sick. You might be surprised to know that the Wairarapa hospital has 300 nurses and 45 doctors, plus a host of ancillary staff to care for the 40,000 people that live in our wider environs.

Doctors and nurses, camels and needles, and rich men and poor men. I think I have probably covered the gamut of subject material Saint Luke might have expected of me.

And so the moral of the story is this:

When you leave here tonight, before you go out the narrow front door, I want you to leave your wallets, credit cards and jewelry on the table in the foyer.

Just kidding; the government’s going to tax you to death anyway!

As for me, I’m hugely disappointed that I spent 38 years behind a butcher’s shop counter - and didn’t know that I had a patron saint!

Jesus saw that he was sad and said, It is much harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. –Luke 18 verses 25 -25

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The towns biggest enterprise

My very earliest recollection of life is visiting my father in the Masterton Hospital when I was two-and-a-half years old. I vividly remember this for two reasons. First we weren’t allowed to go into the hospital proper because he had diphtheria and was therefore isolated. I clearly recall my mother holding me up to the window where I could talk to my father from the wide concrete window ledge above the solid brick wall.

The main reason the memory lingers however was that my father told us of a disturbance during the night when a large contingent of Japanese prisoners-of-war had been admitted who were seriously wounded. The word Japanese, given the state of the world at the time, struck terror into the heart of an impressionable two-and-a-half year old.

The Japanese had come from the POW camp at Featherston. The Japanese never did invade New Zealand despite widespread fears that they would, but around 800 prisoners who had been captured at Guadalcanal were brought to Featherston in 1942.

They were mostly civilians who had been drafted into the Japanese navy, but later captured military personnel were also interned at Featherston. These military prisoners regarded capture as the ultimate disgrace and some wanted to commit suicide. In February 1943 there was a sit-down strike and a subsequent riot that saw the guards open fire, although there had apparently been no order to shoot.

Although the one-sided altercation only lasted about thirty seconds 31 Japanese were killed instantly, 17 died later and about 74 were wounded. If 91 wounded and dying Japanese had been admitted to the Masterton hospital the night before I was taken to visit my father perhaps I had good reason to be alarmed.

Of the historical accounts I have been able to read on the subject there is no disclosure about where the wounded prisoners were taken. The whole incident was hushed up at the time in case there was retaliation in the Japanese camps on Kiwi POW’s.

It’s entirely possible then that I was the only infant in the country to have been briefed about the episode.

Having lived in Lansdowne for the greater part of my life, to some extent the hospital has tended to loom large. Various visits for minor ailments; having my tonsils and adenoids and then my appendix removed causing my older sister to taunt me by saying that “I wasn’t all there.” A cruel description back then of someone who was mentally deficient. She was probably quite right on that count, but it was unfair to blame the extraction of body parts.

I’ve always wondered if the medical profession will one day discover that there is a vital role for the appendix and advocate to have them all put back again.

Later I did my courting – now there’s an old-fashioned word - at the hospital; eventually marrying a nurse whom I constantly remind is the luckiest woman in the world; though I suspect that she does not necessarily share this view.

In 2006 the government presented the town with a  brand spanking new hospital, now renamed Wairarapa rather than Masterton, despite being contained within the same grounds as the original infirmary. Perhaps the government "presenting" is a misnomer. Actually the Wairarapa District Health Board (WrDHB) have to pay back the cost out of the population-based funds the government meagerly provides.

Solid brick walls have been supplanted by a temporary-looking Hardiplank structure and outwardly the single-storey fabrication looks considerably less imposing than its predecessor which still lingers forlornly in the background.

One option was to upgrade the existing hospital however the WrDHB's resolution to go for a totally new structure was probably the sensible decision. It is exceptionally well configured and is filled with hi-tech equipment, no doubt some of it manufactured by the Japanese.

The wards contain a number of single rooms with en-suites and lead to a centralised nursing station and this looks suitably efficient. There are accessible, well equipped out-patient facilities set in bright and airy corridors and the well-planted courtyards which provide a healing outlook from most corners of the building.

You almost wish you were sick so that you could experience the place first hand. 

Back in 2006 when I first visited the new edifice I asked where the entrance to the nurse’s home was, hoping one day to be able to pass on this vital information to my growing grandsons. Sadly, I was told these institutions are a thing of the past. No wonder dating apps are so popular.

The old hospital had over 300 beds with about 12 doctors and 100 nurses to cope with the infirm. Despite a massive increase in population since the original hospital was established the new institution has only 94 beds, but is staffed by 45 doctors and 300 nurses plus the usual plethora of administration people. There a message here somewhere, but I haven't a clue what it is.

If my appendix had been kept in formalin no doubt it will have been lost in transit during the shift from the old to the new. So if modern medical science does decree that reinstating this once non-vital organ is now essential for your ongoing good health I'm probably going to have to miss out.

“After two days in hospital, I took a turn for the nurse.” - W. C. Fields.

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