Masterton’s most exclusive club

The following story is true, though I concede it may beggar belief. Some names have been omitted to protect the innocent, if indeed there were any.

Circa 1960; I am of course single and at a party at a house in Masterton in which four young women “flat”. Back then we called them girls and these particular females were mostly school teachers. The house was brim full of revelers of both genders and I decided to tell a joke. It wasn’t new then and it certainly isn’t now. I said that there had been a meeting of all the virgins in Masterton on the previous night. Right on cue somebody asked: “Where was it held?” and with impeccable timing I said: “In the telephone box in Roberts Road.”

Trust me, back then there was a telephone box in Roberts Road.

The young ladies present all expressed disappointment that they hadn’t been told it was on. They assured me that had they known about it, they would have all been there.

I agreed to inform them when the next meeting was going to be held. A week or so later I put an advertisement in the personal column of the daily paper which read: The annual general meeting of the “V” Club - you would never use the word “virgin” publicly back then - will be held next Thursday night in the telephone box in Roberts Road at 7.30 p.m. For those requiring transport a motor scooter will leave - and here I gave the address of the house where the party had been held - at 7.15.

To some extent I had called the bluff of the female party goers, but they responded well and confirmed that they would all legitimately attend the meeting and that I was going to have to organise bigger premises.

One young lady in the group lived with her mum in Renall Street and she offered a quite large summer house that sat in their tree clad grounds as a potential venue. I accepted the offer and enlisted the services of a good friend, chemist Wayne Snowsill, to assist me in conducting the meeting. Wayne and I both played in a rock band and although the phrase “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll” had yet to be coined we certainly had the expression in mind well before the flower power people were to later claim authorship. Wayne dispensed drugs and we played rock’n’roll and so we were two thirds of the way towards our goal, which was infrequently reached.

About twenty women, all in their early twenties, turned up to our inaugural meeting. First-off we needed office holders and I was elected patron and Wayne secretary/treasurer. Not that there was anything to treasure; it was decided quite early on in the evening that no subscription would be payable.

The sexual revolution was not even in its infancy and so the validity of the lady membership was justifiably taken for granted. It was unanimously agreed that eligibility to belong was on a neither confirm nor deny basis. Once again we were light years ahead of our time with the clichés. It would be some twenty years later that the Americans would lay claim to this one when they were requesting access for their nuclear armed ships to our ports.

The format for the next meeting was discussed and our members requested a guest speaker. Wayne and I had a friend who was a little older than us and his success with the fairer sex was legendary. For the want of a better name we shall him “John.” We decided to engage him for the next time. We knew it was entirely possible that he may be intimately aware that one or two of our members were attending under false pretenses, but if that were so, he never let on. The age of chivalry had not yet passed.

Our second meeting was held at my parent’s home. They were away on holiday. I opened up the doors between the dining room and the lounge, had chairs arranged in rows for our members with a top table for the patron and the secretary/treasurer and a lectern for the guest speaker who was hidden in one of the back bedrooms while we read the minutes of the previous meeting and went through the other necessary formalities. As I went to retrieve John from his exile in the sun-porch I heard the ladies speculate as to who the mystery speaker might be. The top contender for some unknown reason was Dr. Wyvern Cook, a local GP with a wry sense of humour, and I made a mental note to invite him next time.

John, who was widely travelled and well read, gave a wonderful dissertation on the virtues of chastity. Whatever other attributes he had, you could now add “skilled orator” and the audience hung on his every word. I wish I had recorded it for posterity; it could well have been a classic for its time. Unfortunately the speech was so all-encompassing that further meetings seemed superfluous.

So sadly the club died as quickly as it had been conceived. Our record book contained only two sets of minutes, meticulously written up by our secretary/treasurer, and I have patroned no other organisation since.

In the intervening period, Telecom has dismantled most of the town’s telephone boxes.

There was now little demand for them, they said, even as meeting venues.

“Had God consulted me on the matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them out of clay.” - Martin Luther

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Are you being served?

The district’s mayors’ are constantly on our wireless’s imploring us to buy locally, not to shop out of town and keep the money revolving in the Wairarapa. It’s a good message. I just hope that it’s a public service broadcast and not a charge on ratepayers. Ironically our radio stations are mostly run by computers domiciled I imagine in Auckland where I suspect most of the advertising revenue accumulates.

There is no doubt local businesses, particularly retailers, are having a tough time, but I can’t help but wonder if to some extent they aren’t the architects of their own misfortune.

Some years ago I attended a two-day seminar on salesmanship in Palmerston North. The course lecturer was an Auckland real estate salesman named Kevin McMahon. He was a big man and an entertaining raconteur. One story I vividly recall was when he told us of holidaying in Queensland and visiting a menswear shop in Brisbane when he needed to buy a belt. He paused at this stage and asked the course attendees: “What does a shop assistant invariably say to you when you walk into a shop in New Zealand?” There were about twenty of us in the room and we all said in unison “Can I help you.”

McMahon then wanted to know, “And what is our response?” Again in unison, almost as though we had rehearsed it: “No thanks, I’m just looking.”

This, he reckoned, was the New Zealand shopping mantra.

But things, he said, were different in Brisbane. A young male shop assistant approached and asked him if this was the first time he had visited the shop? He affirmed that indeed it was. The shop assistant then told him they had a gift for first time customers and leaned under the counter and presented him with a small exquisitely wrapped parcel. There was a visitor’s book on the counter and the shop assistant asked if he could record McMahon’s name and address. With the gift in his hand he felt obliged to reciprocate in some way so he was happy to give the information. He was even asked for his date of birth which again he gave readily.

Now the young man wanted to know what he had come into the shop to buy. Kevin said he needed a belt. The young man led him to the section of the shop where the belts were located, but on the way paused at a rack of shirts. These shirts, McMahon was told, had been specially tailored for the firm to fit the fuller figure. The company had noticed that for some unknown reason when shirt manufacturers made shirts for the larger man they made the sleeves lengthier, wrongly assuming that a large girth indicated long arms. McMahon knew this only too well; he said he always had to wear elasticised arm bands to maintain his shirt sleeves at wrist level.

He tried on one of the shirts and was so impressed he bought three. The shop assistant - McMahon was now calling him a salesman - suggested a couple of nice silk ties to go with them. McMahon eventually walked out of the shop spending over two thousand dollars. Apart from the belt, the three shirts and the two ties he also bought two beautifully tailored Italian suits which fitted him perfectly.

When he got back to his hotel he opened the gift and found two silk handkerchiefs and a card with the salesman’s name on it. This meant, said McMahon, that each salesman in the shop had his own separate set of gifts.

Every birthday he gets a card from the menswear shop and three times a year they send him a brochure about their upcoming sale. Those items they think he might consider are highlighted and he is invited to visit the shop on the Sunday before that sale starts to have first choice of the items available.

McMahon said that this may sound ridiculous, but he now feels such loyalty towards this company, whenever he wants any clothes he hops on a plane and flies to Brisbane.

A lesson for retailers in this country? I think so. I’m so old I can remember when shop assistants always used to attempt to sell you something instead of expecting you to serve yourself. Sometimes this was a nuisance, but it inevitably resulted in a sale. The rot set in when the supermarkets enticingly laid out their product and introduced checkouts and service stations became petrol retailers.

Everyone else followed suit at their peril.

Last week I was holidaying up north and went into a number of gift shops where without exception there was always a woman sitting on a tall stool behind a counter and not one of them made any attempt to leave their comfortable repositories and assist me to find the article I was specifically seeking. Two of them were actually talking on the phone.

I walked out of all of them with money still jingling in my pocket.

These would be the self-same people who would respond to those reporting on the economic pulse of this country by telling them that business was “very quiet.”

“The only reason a great many American families don’t own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.” – Mad Magazine. 

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Confessions of a confirmed peasant

Beauty, they say is in the eye of the beholder. When Ralph Hotere died I Googled his website to be beholden by the images of his art. I’m sorry to say I was sorely disappointed.

Obviously my eye has a different focus to those who revered him. Don’t misunderstand me here; I’m not suggesting for one minute that Hotere and his admirers are wrong and that I am right. Quite the opposite. I am lamenting my inadequacy to recognise and appreciate art in all its forms.

And I am a long way behind the eight ball. Writing in the Listener Gregory O’Brien said of Hotere: “As a painter he is capable of great fury. His art can smoulder and brood; it points accusingly at those who abuse power, yet often in the space of a single work can simultaneously strike an introspective or elegiac note. At other times he can be euphorically romantic and decidedly amorous. His reds can be as sensuous as they are cataclysmic.”

Who can argue against prose such as that? Reds that are sensuous and cataclysmic? I now have a whole new respect for the dye we dipped our saveloys in.

In the same publication actor-person Sam Neill told of how he and his brother went round to Hotere’s one day and were given a job sanding some charred planks from a devastating fire at a boatbuilders shed. Hotere asked them to sand a section on each piece of the blackened wood. Hotere then told the two young men that he had to slip away, something pressing had come up. He returned four hours later admitting that he had been caught up at the pub. They went back the next day to complete the task and again Hotere slipped out and went to the pub, probably “giggling all the way,” Neill thought.

The work went on to become the “masterpiece” Black Phoenix. Neill says he wants to cry every time he sees it.

So would I, but probably for a different reason.

Artistic prose is a bit like those who pontificate about wine. I heard John Hawkesby on the radio recently waxing lyrically about a wine that was “reasonably priced” at $95 a bottle! The wine he said was “tight and not flabby” – for a moment there I thought I had stumbled upon an R18 airwave – and had a hint of asparagus in the taste. Tight, not flabby with a hint of asparagus. And all this from a tart-tasting liquid made from rotting grapes!

My cousin was once the CEO of a large state owned enterprise. On one wall in his expansive penthouse office in one of Wellington’s most imposing high-rise buildings hung a Colin McCahon. Much to the disappointment of my cousin I viewed it from all angles but could perceive no beauty. He did his best to expose the mystical artistic intricacies of this taxpayer funded artwork, but to no avail.

We grew up together in Masterton and I was surprised just how much his tastes had matured and developed compared to my own, I should have sensed this when some years earlier he admitted to me that he loved going to the ballet!

I once visited the Sistine Chapel not long after the ceiling art had been restored and I thought to myself, now Michelangelo, there’s a real artist, but we are told realism has been superseded by the coloured photography. We have to move on. And yet last week I went to the opening of an art exhibition in the foyer of the Carterton Events Centre where local painters - I dare not call them artists - had done their impressions of sunflowers to highlight the upcoming production of Calendar Girls, and thoroughly enjoyed the realism of the almost photographic quality of the exhibits.

Meanwhile Ralph Hotere, whose real name was Hone Papita Raukura, has been laid to rest on Mount Zion in the Hokianga amidst great ceremony and a huge band of followers. His body was transported there from Dunedin by the Air Force’s new NH90 helicopter which reportedly costs more than $30,000 an hour to operate. In the New Year’s honours list Mr Hotere was appointed to the Order of New Zealand, our highest award.

You don’t get all that unless you deserve it.

Best-selling author John Gray says men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

I reckon I must be from Pluto.

“Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never succeeding.” - Marc Chagall

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Two dollar shops eye new venture

It was the best of times and the worst of times for the airline industry last week with  Air New Zealand announcing that it had more than doubled its half yearly profit compared to last year and then having to admit that one of its overworked pilots fell asleep at the wheel twice on a long haul flight. Meanwhile Jetstar, already plagued with problems involving well-publicised passenger dissatisfaction, refused to change the bookings for the Murawai beach shark victims mum so she could travel from Wellington to Auckland to be with her family. This must surely leave an opening for a genuine no-frills airline to challenge the existing carriers.

Asian entrepreneurs seem adept at producing cut-price retail outlets so what if a Two Dollar Shop or Uncle Bills decides to spread it wings so to speak and moved into the domestic airline business? I imagine an on board announcement for such an enterprise might sound something like this:

“This is the captain speaking. Welcome to Uncle Bills flight 486 from Auckland to Wellington. This is the inaugural flight of our no frills airline and we trust you will enjoy your journey with us this morning.

The first officer on the flight deck with me this morning is Cindy Johnson. Ms Johnson is not licensed to fly, in fact up until two days ago she was working on the checkout counter at one of our retail outlets, but we’ve put her through a crash course so that she can do her best to take over the controls in the case of an emergency.

I will be showing her a thing or two on the trip down to Wellington.

With our incredibly cheap fare regime you will appreciate that we have had to make some radical changes to the way in which we run the company compared to our overpriced competitors.

To double the 737’s passenger numbers we have removed the seats and you will notice that we have installed hand straps hanging from the ceiling, like the old trams.

We have also had to cut some of the other facilities and services that we have always deemed to be unnecessary extras anyway. Luxury items such as a navigation system, air traffic control personnel, radar and maintenance.

To burn less fuel we will be flying at an altitude of around 40,000 feet. Unfortunately we cannot afford to pressurise the cabins so if your ears start to bleed you will have to stuff them with cotton wool. You will find some of this in plastic bags sitting in what’s left of the overhead lockers.


There will be no safety instructions given either. With no seats we don’t have anything to store the lifejackets under so we sold them, along with our life rafts, to the surf lifesaving team at Piha.

Not that these presentations were of any real value anyway. 99 per cent of our flights take place over terra firma and 95 per cent of the world’s airline crashes to date have all occurred on land. No one has yet found a viable use for lifejackets in these circumstances.

Even if we did go out to sea to ditch, extensive research has shown that a fully laden 737 will sink in about two seconds flat, so there never was a snowballs chance of you ever getting out and scrambling to safety no matter how many in-flight safety demonstrations we gave you.

Without any navigational aids we will need to follow the state highway down to Wellington, probably turning left at the Bombay Hills and then following the route to Matamata and Tirau in an effort to avoid heavy traffic flows coming up the other way.

We may also hang a left at Vinegar Hill, fly through to the Wairarapa and weave our way through the Rimutaka ranges. I understand there is low cloud over Wellington so if you recognise some landmarks as we approach the Capital would you please let us know so we can see if we can work out where the airport is.

Now we appreciate that with one of your hands holding on to the ceiling straps, reading will be difficult, but we do have some periodicals on board for your amusement. You will notice that these are almost exclusively Penthouse or Playboy. This is an integral part of our security system. New Zealand First MP Richard Prosser has assured us that all hijackings are performed by Muslim men and as Muslim men are forbidden to view the naked female form they will be discouraged from flying with Uncle Bill.

On the other hand New Zealand businessmen will be queuing up once they get wind of our new magazine policy, so it’s a win-win situation for the airline.

There is of course no food or drink service on this flight. However we bought the aircraft from a bankrupt airline in America’s Deep South and to our surprise we’ve just discovered that the cocktail cabinet on the flight deck is stocked to the hilt with 12-year-old bourbon.

Cindy had the presence of mind to bring a couple of cocktail glasses with her this morning and she and I have been sampling the wares while I’ve tried to get these darn motors to fire.

Cheers!

So sit back and …oops… I mean shtand up and relaxsh and enjshoy the flight.

And shank you for flying wish Uncle Bill’sh Airlines.”

“People want economy and they will pay any price to get it.”     -Lee Iacocca

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Ignorance halts disease erasure

In 1986 I led a Rotary Group Study Exchange team to the Amazon region of Brazil. Brazil was a fairly modern country then, even more so now, but we were all taken-aback when we saw the surprising number of physically handicapped people among the population. Many of them were begging on the streets.

When we queried our hosts about this they told us that polio was rife in the community. We were shocked of course; the debilitating disease had pretty much been eliminated in the late 1950’s in first-world countries, thanks initially to the Salk injected vaccine and later the Sabin oral vaccine.

In 1979 Rotary International announced a project to wipe out the disease everywhere. There are 18,000 Rotary clubs and 850,000 members worldwide and we were all encouraged to contribute annually to advance this worthy goal.

Poliomyelitis tends to strike the young; in fact when I was a lad it was more commonly known as infantile paralysis, but as recently as 1988 the disease was endemic to 125 countries paralysing or killing 350,000 people each year, mostly children.

The disease can be carried in waterways and this is disastrous for third-world countries. A minute amount of contaminated water can introduce the virus to the mucus membranes of the mouth where it can eventually find its way to the central nervous system, destroying the motor neurons that allow the muscles to move, leading to paralysis of the legs, sometimes the arms and in the worst cases the muscles that control breathing.

The United Nations got behind the Rotary initiative as did the U.S. Centre for Disease Control and in 2007 Bill and Melinda Gates chipped in as well, spending $1 billion of their personal fortune to help Rotary battle the disease saying: “This is one of the smartest allocations of resources the world can make.”

Time magazine recently reported that thanks to the exhaustive philanthropic and political teamwork the virus has been corralled into only three countries Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan. In 2012 there were only 215 cases worldwide.

But according to Time, during a polio vaccine drive in Pakistan last December, nine field workers – six of them women or teenage girls – were killed by a motorcycle drive-by shootings linked to the Pakistani Taliban. In January, six more women and one man, all of them medical aid workers, were similarly shot to death. All of that bloodshed followed a Taliban edict last June to halt the scheduled immunisation of 161,000 children in the North Pakistan province of Waziristan until American drone strikes stop.

“In the garb of these vaccination campaigns,” said one piece of Taliban propaganda “The U.S. and its allies are running their spying networks.” This is nonsense of course, but the lie got its legs in 2011 when it was revealed that in the run-up to the killing of Osama bin Laden, a Pakistani doctor masqueraded as a hepatitis-vaccine worker in an attempt to collect cheek swabs from family members in bin Laden’s compound to try to confirm he was living there.

Other outlandish rumours are spread by the Taliban, such as the claim that the polio vaccine contains HIV, or that it’s made from pig or monkey urine, and that its real role is to sterilize children. Whether it’s because of the fear of outsiders or the general suspicion of anything being promoted by that “Great Satan” - the West - the lies gain traction.

Not being able to get to the Taliban-controlled sectors of the world with such a worthy project is monstrous. Polio unchecked moves fast. In 2003 the disease appeared to be near its end and Rotary were contemplating packing their bags and declaring victory when clerics in Northern Nigeria halted inoculations on the basis of the rumours about sterility and the HIV contamination. Two years later, polio cases, nearly all of them of the Nigerian strain, were raging across sixteen countries throughout Asia and down to Oceania.

Rotary International calculate that $1 billion spent per year over the next few years to extinguish the last fugitive strains of polio could save up to $50 billion over the next 20 years, both in treatment costs for infected children and in the perpetual hold-the-line vaccination programmes that must be maintained as long as the virus is at large.

Viruses and bacteria have had their way with humans since the dawn of history; a species versus species war we have too often lost. “We are on the brink of wiping out a virus that richly deserves extinction,” says Time correspondent Jeffrey Kluger. “The war may be slow, but there is no tonic like a big victory over a disease to ensure there will be more victories to come.”

Now, if only we could find a vaccination that would eliminate the Taliban.

“In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues” - Lord Macaulay

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Endeavouring to hold the peace

Last weekend we celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary with a modest family luncheon which included our four children, their spouses and seven grandchildren. One of our grandsons is old enough and I suspect capable enough of siring his own child so I must take him aside and talk to him about the birds and the bees and hopefully delay that inevitability. I’m not old and doddery enough yet to be a great-grandfather; a personal view that might well be disputed by the other members of the family.

My wife says I’m one in a million. The wrong one! Actually I just made that up. In fact, I suspect that even before I wake each morning she gets on her hands and knees and thanks her maker for leading her to such an inspiring choice of husbands. I must admit though that this is pure speculation, and may have no basis in fact.

The truth is she must have come close to leaving me just minutes after we were married. We tied the knot on Masterton Show day in 1963 at around 5 o’clock in the afternoon, and after the nuptials we were greeted by our butcher’s shop staff dressed as funeral directors, complete with top hats, forming a guard of honour at the church door.

They and some friends had also sent off the taxis and had replaced these with horses and gigs. We were then paraded down the main street, now full of people coming home from the show, bagpipers in front, the undertakers next and the horses and two gigs with the bridal party bringing up the rear. My new bride, who hailed from Eketahuna, didn’t know what she’d struck.

I was determined to get even at the future weddings of those who had perpetrated this and I didn’t have to wait long. Lew Milne was to marry Alison Cooke in Greytown. I was to be a groomsman. Lew was a stock agent and had organised the horses and carts for our wedding from Tom Hood at Kopuaranga. Retribution was in sight.

It had always occurred to me that it would be exceptionally funny if somebody responded when the minister intoned the words: “If anyone can show any just cause why these two should not be lawfully joined together in holy matrimony, let them now speak or hereafter forever hold their peace.” Mind you, it’s quite difficult to find anyone who will actually make a response. Locally no one was prepared to do it.

I had a friend in Wellington named Ian Dawson who owned the Sorrento coffee bar and managed The Libretto’s, New Zealand’s foremost rock band at the time, and I rang him to see if he could find an outgoing Wellingtonian who might be able to assist. He rang back and said he’d found someone, but the price would be quite high. I agreed to pay whatever it cost.

The wedding was at 4.30 p.m. at the Methodist establishment at the north end of Greytown. The groom and we groomsmen were resplendent in white ties and tails and the little church was packed; standing room only. When the minister, I’ll never forget his name, Reverend Hornblow, made the statement I was anticipating “If anyone can show any just cause etc., speak now or forever hold your peace.” there was the usual pregnant pause.

Then suddenly a dapper little chap in a dark suit and thin black tie came running up the aisle; “Stop the wedding, stop the wedding,” he cried. You could have cut the tension in the air with a knife. My expensive thespian got to the startled couple, looked them up and down and said, “Oh no. Sorry! Wrong wedding” and ran back out the other aisle.

At this juncture I assumed that the congregation would burst out laughing, the wedding would continue without further delay, and afterwards I would be congratulated by all and sundry for organising the ultimate practical joke. Not so. Close family members of the bride suffered discomfiture; some quite seriously. Nobody laughed, not the least the Reverend Hornblow, who stumbled through the rest of the ceremony as though it was his first outing. There was a pall over the breakfast and I was sent to Coventry by most of the guests, though I must say the bride and groom took it in good humour.

On the Sunday I sat down and wrote a long letter of apology to the brides’ parents. The Methodist vestry held an emergency meeting on Monday and considered taking me before a church tribunal to discourage other misguided humourists from attempting the same prank. However, they had seen the letter I had written to Mr. and Mrs. Cooke, assumed I was repentant, and asked that a similar letter be sent to them, and all would be forgiven.  I couldn’t write that second letter quickly enough.

The Sunday News ran the story, describing me as having “a curious sense of humour,” whatever that means. They asked for comment from prominent clergy in Auckland.  Most were strongly condemnatory.

I was more circumspect at future weddings of friends.

The dapper Wellingtonian who had made the foray up the church aisle was a regular patron at the Sorrento coffee bar, an Argentinean named ‘Chico.’ They never did send me the bill. I’m not sure whether they forgot or if they felt sorry for me for all the trouble I had got myself into.

I’d like to think it was the latter. Though to be fair, I probably didn’t deserve the sympathy.

“Before a marriage a man declares that he would lay down his life to serve you. After marriage he won’t even lay down his newspaper to talk to you.”  -  Helen Rowland.

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Everybody wants to go to heaven

What’s with this word Karma? It seems to have suddenly entered our vernacular and is now getting frequent usage. Hekia Parata used it recently, apparently suggesting that the Novapay debacle was “karma” for the teachers daring to challenge her and her ministry whenever they tried to institute change.

According to my trusty Chambers dictionary karma is a Buddhist and/or Hindu based word used to describe a transcendental retribution for something done that perhaps ought not to have been done; the theory of inevitable consequence generally.

Somehow in the increasingly secular world it has replaced the age-old belief that a mystical out-of-world figure, believed by many to be God, punishes you for any wrongdoing. This doctrine leads to that oft-heard exclamation: “What have I done to deserve this?” Why we have suddenly decided to apply eastern mysticism to what was once comprehended in plain English is anybody’s guess.

Although action and reaction is a scientifically proven concept I doubt that it extends to our personal misfortunes. I guess it’s not uncommon for someone who discovers they have a terminal illness to ask “why me?” but unless their diet or lifestyle has contributed in some way then surely it’s just the luck of the draw rather than retribution from a deity.

Our contemplations of this complex ideology were sharpened by the recent in-depth evaluations of the life and times of broadcaster Paul Holmes just prior to his untimely demise. In a soul-searching interview Janet McIntyre wanted to know did he believe in the afterlife and did he think he was going there. Paul said he hoped he had done enough, though he conceded that he was scared.

Later in a radio interview Pam Corkery let slip that Paul was a serial philanderer, though she herself had not succumbed. Not a good look for entry into the realm of angels. And yet on the other side of the coin he brought heart-rending stories to our attention on a nightly basis, not the least being the plight of young Eve van Grafhorst who had been pilloried in Australia for having aids. Paul’s response was to bring her to our screens, show genuine love for the little girl and expose to all of us that HIV was not a transferable disease at a time when we needed to know.

And Paul certainly reached a sainthood of sorts in the various embellished Television One accolades for his contribution to their ratings; the channel conveniently forgetting that at the peak of his popularity he had left One to launch Prime, expecting further fame and a bigger fortune. Somewhat surprisingly his audience stayed with One, and Prime had to outlay a large amount of money to release him from their contract.

Further homage was paid to him when he was knighted and arose to become Sir Paul.

I met him once at a book signing at Solway Park Copthorne. Later on in the evening I spoke to him briefly and found him to be a thoroughly nice man. His claim that he “loved people” was born out when he was prepared to talk to me, a complete stranger, and genuinely show interest.

That book, his autobiography, was a best seller, but I’m not sure some of the revelations were the kind of experiences that ought to have been aired in public. Certainly in his initial courtship of Fleur Revell a dinner date was graphically described, allowing too much information and must have embarrassed the young lady unfairly. He came across as a complete cur.

I bought his next book, the award winning Daughters of Erebus, and all the time while reading it I had to stop and wonder how this man could have written such a brilliant tome.

In my view this book alone qualified him for a Knighthood.

From cur to Sir is a giant leap for mankind.

Just who is eligible for entry into the afterlife is a moot point. Certainly it would be hard for a mortal man to pass the litmus test the Bible details for admittance. However Eve’s mother reckons her daughter will be at the Pearly Gates to receive Paul and show him around.

I guess that’s karma, in the nicest possible way.

“Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.” – Graham Greene

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