Grey heads having a gay old time

My father’s hobby was breeding and racing thoroughbred racehorses. This could prove both lucrative and costly. One positive feature however was that he got to meet and befriend a host of interesting people and one of these was a man named Lou Fisher. Lou Fisher was an Australian and managed a theatrical company for David Nathan Martin. Martin was an Englishman who had settled in Australia and produced a great many stage shows that toured Australasia. Both men were Jewish.

Fisher was regular guest at our home whenever one of the Martin shows came to Wellington. On the odd occasion they were even staged in Masterton’s Regent Theatre. I recall he brought both English comedian Tommy Trinder and later pianist Winifred Atwell to Masterton. The upshot of all this was that our family always got the best seats in the house to these productions, I assume for gratis, and we were always invited backstage either at intermission or after the performance to meet and mingle with the cast.

On one occasion we had front seats in the dress circle at The Follies Bergere on Ice staged in Wellington’s grand Opera House. On that occasion I found myself sitting next to Walter Nash, at the time New Zealand’s Finance Minister and later to become the Labour Prime Minister. During the performance I noted that neither he nor his wife smiled, laughed or clapped like the rest of us did in the full-to-capacity theatre. He was perhaps the most dour man I had ever encountered.

On the journey home I talked about Mr Nash’s surprising lack of joviality with my parents. Dad said he was a deeply religious man and the risqué jokes and scantily clad young ladies would not have been to his taste. In the 1950’s risqué jokes weren’t really that risky and there was absolutely no profanity. In fact in David Martin’s biography he was quoted as saying that there were two things he couldn’t abide and they were “off-colour comedians and overweight chorus girls.”

Backstage, after the show, as a pimply pubescent teenager, I certainly enjoyed meeting the perfectly-proportioned female cast!

This has been a long prologue to where I’m heading, but I thought about all this last Wednesday night when I saw those who had inherited Walter Nash’s political party laughing, dancing in the aisles and clapping at the passing of the marriage equality bill. I tried to imagine Walter Nash, whose framed picture is still a feature on most Labour party office walls, sitting in the gallery with the predominantly gay crowd and wondered just what he would have thought about the surprising turn of events.

Earlier in the evening I had watched Campbell Live where a poll of viewers voted against same-sex marriage 78 per cent to 22. Hardly scientific I admit, but you could argue that many members of parliament chose not to vote the way the constituents might have wanted.

Somewhat surprisingly, the gay marriage debate was set alight by three unlikely heroes, Dr. Paul Hutchinson, Chris Auchinvole and Maurice Williamson - all of them grey-haired, conservative MPs.

Williamson became an overnight celebrity....well overnight really. The New York Times called him a gay icon which came as a bit of a shock to his wife and Ellen DeGeneres is desperate for him to appear on her show. He could even consider resigning from parliament and go on the lucrative world-wide speaking circuit. It’s made a small fortune for Sarah Palin.

In hindsight the three National MPs were probably wise to tread the course they did. Liberal causes inevitably become mainstream and those who oppose them are sometimes made to look foolish years later when the imagined moral degradation and other dire consequences predicted simply don’t eventuate.

Sanctioning same-sex marriage is all very well, but I am fearful of legalising so-called “recreational” drugs which I suspect is the next raft of permissive legislation on the horizon.

It is more than likely that our next government will be a coalition between Labour and the Greens and with that unholy alliance, anything could happen.

A couple of weeks ago Green Party Co-leader Metiria Turei claimed on Maori TV’s Native Affairs programme that Maori growing marijuana are developing entrepreneurial and horticultural proficiencies. She said growing the illegal drug helps develop “real skills” among Maori, particularly in disadvantaged areas.

Decriminalising marijuana is a Green Party policy and is certain to be a condition of their coalescing with Labour, so we’d better start steeling ourselves for the degrading affect this will have on society.

However I tend to agree with Mr Williamson that the sky won’t fall with the passing of the gay marriage legislation.

From 1840 to 1867 homosexual activity amongst the male population wasn’t only illegal in New Zealand, it was punishable by death. It was finally legalised in Fran Wilde led legislation in 1986.

I’m happy, just as long as they don’t make it compulsory.

“Many years ago I chased a woman for almost two years, only to discover her tastes were exactly the same as mine: we were both crazy about girls.” - Groucho Marx 

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Things aren’t always as they seem

The chairperson of the Greater Windytown Regional Council, Frangipani Wildflower, walked the walk. On this occasion the walk was the one named in her honour on the concourse leading to the vast entrance to the Eastpac Stadium on Windytown’s waterfront. She was holding the report from the consultants commissioned by the Wire-Wrapper Governance Review Working Party and she was not happy with it contents.

“Smoke and mirrors” Martyrdom Laud-Mare Garrick Darnwell had once said about her claim that annually her council spent eleven million more dollars in Wire-Wrapper than they received in rates, and now the report seemed to confirm his treasonous utterances.

Ms Wildflower was fuming over the inaccuracies in the data used and the assumptions made, particularly as the consultants had not bothered to meet with her people to discuss the details. The report might just have well have been written by Lewis Carroll, she considered.

Meanwhile in Carleton, the Laud-Mare, Kim-Jong Maka, was grinning like a Cheshire cat. All the ducks were falling nicely in a row. He looked proudly out of his office window on to Holy-way Street and noted that it was looking more and more like Pennsylvania Avenue every day, despite the contractors, Newfield’s, taking an age to complete the transformation.

There was no doubt the new Ventilation Centre had an air of Washington’s Capitol about it and over the road the old Moronic Hall, shifted back to make way for the new boulevard and once the site of that pesky upstart Henry Paul’s radio station Tomorrow FU, bore a strong resemblance the White House. Perhaps his council could purchase the residence, he mused, and allow it to be the Laud-Mares abode.

He must check up with his Chief Executive Colon Wrong and find out when the new signs planned for each end of the town proudly declaring Carleton “The Heart of the Wire-wrapper” would be put in place. That he reckoned would be the piece-de-résistance; daffodils were after all, a relic of the past.

His inauguration and the swearing-in ceremony was now just months away.

Meanwhile Ms Wildflower had stopped her power-walking and looked down on Quarterloo Quay just in time to see Windytown’s Laud-Mare Cecelia Wade-Green ride past on her bicycle. Ms Wade-Green gave her a cheery wave which infuriated Frangipani even more. No wonder the good people of Wire-wrapper were wary about linking with Windytown to form a super city, she determined.

Windytown’s daily newspaper The Dumb-Post had recently castigated Ms Wade-Green and her council for falling asleep at the wheel. “Wakey, Wakey” screamed the front page headline after her somnambulant councillors belatedly discovered that somewhere along the line a large number of council staff had lost their jobs and Ms Wade-Green’s new temporary office accommodation was going to cost ratepayers $350,000.

Going to sleep on the job was scarcely going to encourage the hard-working folk in the Wire-wrapper to join forces with Das Kapital, Ms Wildflower conceded.

And yet there were persuasive linkages. Frangipani and her husband owned a substantial dwelling on the outskirts of Graton and Cecelia had a batch nestled in the picturesque bush in the Monger-too-weary Valley. Ironically Ms Wildflower’s council was planning to flood the area to create one of the new irrigation dams and in so doing, blocking the Wade-Greens’ access.

Despite this impasse, to all intents and purposes Cecelia and she were Wire-wrapper people themselves so surely it would be their destiny to rule the roost.

“Over my dead body,” said Kim-Jong Maka.

“The one thing that saves us from bureaucracy is its inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to freedom.” - Eugene McCarthy. 

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Losing the battle of the sexes

Two news items caught my eye last week. In one we were told that surveys have shown that people over 60 are overwhelmingly opposed to gay marriage compared to their younger counterparts who are more liberal. The message implied being that the older generation are more straitlaced than their subsequent offspring.

But then on the same day we were informed of the dubious deeds of a Slovakian bike rider named Peter Sagan. The runner-up in the 2013 Tour of Flanders, Mr Sagan, standing aside on the winner’s podium, dared to pinch the backside of one of the two women who were busying themselves planting kisses on victor Fabian Cancellara’s cheeks.

Despite the symbolism of being kissed by scantily clad women and then spraying champagne all over the place, groping them beforehand is strictly off-limits and a grovelling apology was demanded and shown worldwide on television. Fair enough; I was naturally mortified to see Sagan defame the dignified and completely non-sexist tradition of Podium Girls.

I am therefore loath to admit that in my “straitlaced generation” days, pinching women’s bottoms was not uncommon. There were generally two responses. The recipient would either turn around and say, “Cut that out” with a grin on her face, or turn around and say, “Cut that out” with a face as black as thunder. I’d have to concede that the latter reaction was more common. However retribution, as far as I am aware, was never called for and so it was worth taking the risk.

This reminded me of a (true) story that perhaps best illustrates the gap between the generations.

Amelia Langdon - not her real name - was one of life’s great characters. She would have been in her seventies when I first met her, which was back in the 1960s, and she was diminutive, bespectacled, grey haired and always, when the occasion arose, the life of the party. Her husband Arthur was more circumspect. Upright and sartorially elegant he was intensely proud of his wife, despite her gregarious nature compared to his own.

I caught up with them very every year at the Meat Retailer’s conventions. Arthur was a Master butcher of good standing in a provincial North Island city. “Amy,” as she was fondly known, enjoyed a tipple and would kick up her heels at the various social functions that tended to be an integral part of our conferences. Having expended all her energies however she would often be one of the first to retire.

Such was the case one night when the convention was held at the Chateau Tongariro. A grand hotel for a conference and a party. With Amy and many of the wives tucked up in bed at about midnight the rest of us sat around the guests lounge with Arthur Langdon sitting thoughtfully at the bar nursing a whisky and a cigarette.

I don’t know why or how, but someone was describing the colour of something which they said was “nipple pink.” Without shifting his stance Arthur quietly told those of us present that there was no such thing as nipple pink. Nipples, he claimed with quiet authority, were brown. We all assured Arthur that this was not the case. Everyone knew that nipples were pink. But Arthur was insistent. He was willing to bet his last sausage that nipples were brown. The term “nipple pink”, he espoused, although regularly used, was a complete and utter misnomer.

There were a number of women in the bar, most of them not connected to the conference at all, who started to show an interest in the claim. They furtively checked out their own nipples by quietly pulling the top of their garments forward, peering privately breastwards and without exception all came up with the same startling conclusion; that Arthur was absolutely right: nipples are brown.

The least surprised in the bar was Arthur and while we looked on with new admiration for his worldly wisdom he dropped another bombshell. There was one exception, well two if you think about it, he told us, Amy’s nipples were pink. Now Amy was not an Albino, but according to Arthur, due to some minor pigment abnormality, her nipples really were pink. It was astounding fact that just a few minutes previously we were arguing that all nipples were pink, yet we now didn’t believe Arthur that Amy’s weren’t brown.

Given that we were all still in shock from the first disclosure, Mr A. S. F. Langdon, purveyor of fine meats, found himself surrounded by a bar full of unbelievers. The proof however was readily available. “Come upstairs,” said Arthur, “And I’ll show you.”

You’re never going to believe this, but we all trouped upstairs, women included, to the Langdon bedroom and arranged ourselves around the bed upon which Amy was lying sound asleep and snoring softly. “No need to wake her,” Arthur assured us, quietly pulling back the covers. He gently eased the straps of the nightdress off his wife’s shoulders, and sensitively lowered the top to reveal her breasts, resplendent with their distinctly pink nipples.

Now I need to remind you here that Amy is in her seventies, tiny, small boned, grey haired and lying on her back. Without wanting to put too fine a point on it, and hopefully without giving offence, this was no erotic scene. But it was dramatic evidence of the claim made.

We all assembled back at the bar and admitted that Arthur had indeed proved a couple of points. It was drinks all round and Arthur was the toast of what was left of the evening.

If you thought that Amy would have been furious at this invasion of her privacy you couldn’t be more wrong. But then this all took place before feminism was established; when women were still able to laugh at themselves. Arthur must have confessed to her when they woke up next morning because at breakfast she was busy going around the dining room telling all those who had missed the action what had happened.

Typically, she thought it was a huge joke.

Now, just remind me again, which is the straitlaced generation?

The Danube isn’t Blue, its Green – The title of a Spike Jones song from the 1950s

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Church and state drifting apart

When I was about 13 years of age I was a choirboy - cassock, surplice, boy soprano et al. It was quite a commitment. Choir practice was on Tuesday and Thursday evenings; attendance at church was at 10 am on Sunday for Holy Communion and then again at 7 pm for Evensong. The venue was the St Matthews Anglican church in Masterton’s aptly named Church Street and as I recall the congregations were evenly divided gender-wise.

I’m not sure what brought on this burst of piety which only lasted a year or two and probably ended when my voice broke and hormonal temptations in keeping with that experience made other options more appealing. Whatever, I have never regretted the episode as it seemed to herald the possibility of an extraordinary life. Tabloid newspaper headlines of the day would regularly scream: “One time choirboy now feared gangland boss,” or: “Britain’s biggest brothel proprietor was once a choirboy,” or even: “Wealthy playboy started out life as pious choirboy,” although it’s possible I dreamt up that last one.

In his autobiography, My Life, David Lange reckoned the Methodist church was the Labour party at prayer and in Britain it is claimed that the Church of England is the Tory party at worship. I’m not convinced that these categorisations were ever really applicable, though while I was hitting the high notes at St Matthews the Methodists were congregating, literally just down the road, and certainly one of their clergy, the Reverend Russell Marshall, became a minister of the crown in Lange’s fourth Labour government.

Last weekend Easter came and went with much of the populous completely ignoring the death and resurrection and probably spent a good deal of the time lazing about in near perfect weather gorging chocolate eggs.

These days religion seems not to feature hugely in our mainstream media or in the annals of parliament. For our political masters this is undoubtedly an outcome of an oft-quoted, but slightly skewed slogan that religion and politics don’t mix.

But like it or not, politics and religion are inextricably linked. Religion is taken seriously and practised regularly by more than a quarter of all New Zealanders and attracts more players than rugby, yet our mainstream politicians seem to believe that its dictums ought not be seen nor heard. The religious traditions that affect and mould our lives are conspicuous by their absence in most of the speeches and debates that take place in the corridors of power.

And yet there are whole rafts of moral issues that are of direct concern for people of a religious persuasion and these include same-sex marriage, broadcasting standards, holiday trading hours, the integration of church schools and alcohol reform.

There was a time of course when the church and government were virtually interchangeable. The first schools and hospitals were church initiatives, as was social security. The great universities - Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton, Yale and Harvard were established by the church and history shows that nations of the past rose and fell according to their adherence or otherwise to the Ten Commandments.

Politicians who are agnostics and atheists could scarcely argue against the premise that Christianity is the essential foundation of Western civilisation. Most Western art, much Western literature and a good chunk of Western philosophy becomes fairly incomprehensible without at least some acquaintance with the Bible.

However, perhaps as a direct result of their Christian-inspired good natures, New Zealander’s have also been pretty receptive to other religious influences. Mosques now dot the landscapes of some of our larger cities and the diversity they bring is generally welcomed. Even the Maori renaissance, with its gods and taniwhas, totally contradictory to the good news the early missionaries implanted, is given more than a modicum of tolerance.

And yet when the cardinal links between our religious tradition and political progress that are pivotal to this country’s understanding of itself are ignored, the human story that fused them together remains untold and leaves the field wide open for extremists to set the agenda. The end result is the worst kind of tyranny, directed by opportunistic charismatic leaders who claim with frightening audacity that God speaks to them exclusively. The inevitable outcome is that the positive part of what faith has to offer a community and a country is totally misunderstood and to some extent ridiculed.

Canny politicians, sensing the confusion, sidestep the issues altogether and the vacuum remains.

From my limited observations it would seem that church congregations today are predominantly female. As in so many institutions, the male members of the species seem to have abdicated their responsibilities to seek other more pleasurable pursuits.

Perhaps their voices broke.

“When a man talks loudly against religion, - always suspect that it is not his reason, but his passions which have got the better of his creed.” - Laurence Sterne

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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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