The life of Brian

The founder of Christianity told a wealthy young man who wanted to know what he needed to do to atone that “It will be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” It seemed a strange hyperbole, but many theologians believe that the needle Jesus was speaking of was the “needle gate,” an after-hours entrance found in the walls surrounding Jerusalem. A camel could only enter after...

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The great big melting pot

Let me list some typically modern Anglo-Saxon names for you. Ash Dixon, Ben May, Chris Eves, Jacob Skeen, Joe Royal, Kane Hames, Leighton Price, Reed Prinsep, Shane Christie, Tom Franklin, Billy Guyton, Brad Weber, James Lowe, Jason Emery, Marty McKenzie, Matt Proctor and Tim Bateman.The more rugby street-smart among you will recognise of course that these young men are members of the Maori rugby team that recently completed a moderately...

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Get ready for the ride

An insurance company newsletter emailed to me last week had an opening sentence that read: “No one saw this coming; no one thought it would happen” referring of course to the US election results.Well if you’d stuck with the mainstream media over the exhaustingly long election campaign that might well have been the case, but when anyone asked me who would win the US election - and very few did - I would inevitably say “Trump will bolt...

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Avoiding a regional civil war

A few years ago, when the government were keen as mustard for us to join with Wellington and its near neighbours to form a super city, those local body cadres who rule our roosts joined together to fight the Mephistophelian suggestion. They spent a small fortune on consultant’s, instructing them to discredit the concept and to particularly pour cold water on the Greater Wellington Regional Council’s claim that it spent millions more in...

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Insightful rugby analysis

Both my parents were keen tennis players and to enhance their skills they built a volley board in our back yard. It was quite an edifice; with a single tennis court size concrete pad in front and the height of the board itself was about the same as the cross bar of a rugby goal post. In the winter months I could use this to kick a football over and as a result I became a fairly proficient at goal kicking. At the commencement of the rugby...

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