A night to remember - for some of us

A phone call in the middle of the night can be quite scary; I was reluctant to pick up the receiver. I needn’t have been. On the other end of the line was a pleasant sounding American woman who told me she was the secretary of the NZ-US Council and was calling from Washington DC. It seems my invitation to the gala evening with President Obama in Auckland had got mislaid; she found it behind her desk and was distressed that I hadn’t received...

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Why golfers should never smoke

As I recall, Ted Douglas was a softly spoken Scottish gentleman. And he was a pretty good golfer too. Actually that’s an understatement. He won the New Zealand Open on four occasions. In 1913 and 1914; and then again in 1919 and 1921. In 1922 he was employed by the Masterton Golf Club as their resident professional. Later he returned to his homeland where he won a number of major tournaments, though never the British Open, and then...

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There is virtue in thinking before speaking

A new phrase to enter the lexicon, apart from “at the end of the day” and “going forward,” is “virtue-signalling.” I used it in a column recently and a number of people asked me, “What does it mean?” It appears to have been coined by James Bartholomew writing in the Spectator in April 2015. He defined virtue-signalling as an act that does not require actually doing anything virtuous. He maintains that it “does not involve delivering lunch...

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Dare we let boys be boys?

It’s pretty daunting to know after all these years that you have now become one of the most despised components of the human race. Elderly white Anglo-Saxon men are blamed for most of the evils of the world which include among other things racism and misogyny. The ‘me too’ and ‘times up’ brigade have us well in their sights, particularly if we’re heterosexual. Even the old conservative party we once relied on to perpetuate our orthodox...

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Economic systems up for scrutiny

I thought it was a bit rich for Jacinda Ardern managing to buy her third house over the last year (the most recent one costing $1.7 million) when she said before and after her election that “homelessness proves capitalism was a blatant failure.” In his bestselling book Eat the Rich witty American author P.J. O’Rourke endeavors to answer the question: “What is wealth and how do you get it?” He wanted to know why some countries prosper...

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Flying in where angels fear to tread

When George W. Bush marched his troops into Iraq I tentatively applauded the move. After all they had weapons of mass destruction didn’t they? Well actually, no they didn’t, but nonetheless Saddam was a tyrant and surely he deserved to be removed. I was probably influenced somewhat by childhood memories of folk saying back then if only someone had got rid of Hitler in 1938 we could have avoided the terrible catastrophe that was World...

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