A house with bells and whistles

You can’t help but have sympathy for young couples today hoping to buy their first home. In our neck of the woods it must be difficult enough, but in Auckland and to a slightly lesser extent Christchurch, it must be nigh on impossible. I looked up the Auckland real estate websites and found the most basic home will set you back $350,000. Using Sorted’s website calculator I discovered that a $350,000 mortgage, paying back the principal...

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In praise of two magical nights

At the age of thirteen I appeared in a Masterton Amateur Theatrical Society production called “Our Miss Gibbs.” It was presented over eight nights in Masterton’s grand old Regent Theatre. Monday to Thursday one week, then again Monday to Thursday the following week. Back in those halcyon days the Regent 3 Cinemas was just one cinema and owners Kerridge-Odeon wouldn’t give up the lucrative Friday and Saturday night screenings. The...

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Leaky boats and jet airliners

Last August I wrote a column about how back in 1980 I employed a Vietnamese couple in my meat retailing business. Hoa and My Van Nguyen were “boat people” and had a nine month old daughter named Dyung when they arrived in Masterton. They had been sponsored by our local Rotary club and as I was president of the club at the time I felt that it was my responsibility to find them employment. However it’s not easy to place people when English...

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A cynical look back to the future

I dusted off the jacket of a book that has been sitting in my bookshelf for years and browsed through its pages. The book is Wimp Walloping, written by Bob Jones. It is a collection of columns Jones composed for Wellington’s now discontinued daily newspaper The Evening Post some years back. Jones’s columns were always worth a read. Outrageous but entertaining; he mixed extreme right wing views with the odd sprinkling of uncharacteristic...

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