Blog Archive 2020
Blog Archive
2020
December
We got to do my favourite thing on Christmas day – ride our bicycles. We rode our bicycles from home over the Crown Range to Wanaka to have lunch with some of our extended whānau. Our ‘whānau’ is quite extensive, that’s the way we like it. There are many people who come and stay with us, or live in our house while we aren’t in it, and I feel like I have a broad raft of people in my life who help keep us afloat, all in different ways.
Our toilet cistern was running continuously the other day, which reminded me of the Hubble Space Telescope . While you might find it a stretch to compare our malfunctioning toilet cistern with a telescope located in low earth orbit (about 540km above the earth), there is a relationship between the performance of the two. The Hubble Telescope was launched into space in 1990 and remains functional today. It was not the first space telescope, but is one of the largest and most versatile, resulting in it recording highly detailed images of deep space. Many of its observations have led to breakthroughs in astrophysics, including determining the rate of expansion of the universe – it grows at about 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec (3 million light years).
The approach of Christmas takes me back to feeling like I am at primary school and we have been told that Folk Dancing is today’s special activity. Oh how I hated Folk Dancing. Folk Dancing came into the category of ‘enforced fun’, you were supposed to be having fun, except you were not remotely having fun, which made it all the worse. Folk Dancing involved the boys choosing girls for partners, a ridiculous pressure to put on children of that age when sex isn’t hormonally in the picture. Not to mention that, in a society where male dominance is no longer assumed (for the most part!) and varied relationships are possible, why should boys and girls have been paired up and why should the boys have been the ones to choose partners?
I alternate between being hugely impressed by the scale of human endeavour and terminally frustrated by human failings. We cycled into the back country behind where we live in Gibbston to have a night away from connectivity. Two hours of cycling and nearly another two hours of walking got us to this little hut, in which a raceman once lived. A raceman was not a very fast person, he (and it most likely was a he in times of sex segregated roles in New Zealand) maintained the water race which traverses the slope just above the hut.
November
Known as the ‘ Matthew effect ‘ in honour of the Gospel of Matthew from whence it comes, the principle of those who have much being the recipients of more, has been embedded in society since the times of the Bible, and probably before. The Matthew effect is very much in force in the New Zealand property market at present, as in many countries in the world. The effect appears to have been exacerbated by monetary policy in the era of COVID-19. New Zealand house prices have risen an average 20% over the last year and the initial deposit is becoming ever more unaffordable for first time home buyers. While those who have houses can borrow against them and leverage their wealth ever upwards, first time buyers have to save for ever longer. Dropping interest rates are currently being blamed for the increases. This week our Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, wrote to Adrian Orr, Governor of the Reserve Bank, asking him to be part of the solution, rather than the problem. Here are my imaginings of some of the correspondence.
As usual, when life is feeling a bit scratchy around the edges, it is amazing how a bike ride can put things into perspective. I reckon that world peace could be massively advanced by people finding ‘their’ activity and engaging in it. There is an incredible sense of ‘rightness’ when one manoeuvres the bike through a tricky section of rocks. Surfing has the same sort of feeling – you catch the wave, your timing is right, you angle the board right and you are sliding down the slippery water surface which both perfect and pure fun. Writing has the same effect for me too. You work at a piece of writing (most time’s someone else’s document, given that is what I do for a living) and suddenly you can see that the words are in their right places and the meaning of the text has fallen into place; the puzzle is solved.
I admit it, I am a storage junkie. I love getting matching storage containers in different sizes and then optimising which item goes in which container. Yes, our spices are all in identical labelled jars in a drawer, so you can see the labels on the lids, and yes they are in alphabetical order. Also, just in case you wanted to know, our fiction books are in alphabetical order too. Storage Box is a premises I enjoy visiting, and I am not one for physical shopping at all.
Everyone, including me, was dusting off their crystal balls this week as the American election moved to its zenith. The continuous commentary regarding what might happen and what is happening, and around that loop again, gets somewhat tiresome. It makes me want to say, “Forget about it, just go to sleep and wake up in the morning and you will know the answer.” That’s what I used to say when my parents wanted to listen to the weather on the television every night, which I thought was supremely boring and pointless. To tell the truth, actually what I wanted to do was talk over the weather report because I thought I had something more interesting to say than the weather person. Unfortunately, we can’t just go to sleep and wake up to the US election answer in the morning, because the answer to who will be in the next US President is going to be a lot longer coming.
I happily avoided thinking too much about COVID-19 while cycle touring, as a mental break. Upon returning to the COVID-world, it feels like it is making about as much sense as sailing in a sieve. However, the Jumblies enjoyed their trip, saw lots and everyone was jealous when they got back. So perhaps sailing in a sieve can be a positive experience.
All good things must come to an end. As must all mediocre and undesirable things, but our trip completed yesterday was in the excellent category. The end of a cycle tour allows one a brief moment of feeling chuffed at the kilometres and vertical metres covered. My body can do that – really? when cycle touring there are always people going faster than you, as well as those going slower. It is very easy to forget about the slower ones and wish that one was got enough, or strong enough, or fast enough, to keep up with the faster people. At such points one needs to re-remember to enjoy the journey, and be grateful that you have the legs, time and money to do it.
October
Jacinda Ardern’s quote “They are us”, spoken in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque attacks, was voted the Massey University quote of the year for 2019 . Ardern has reiterated the same sentiments many times since, including in reference to the COVID ‘Team of 5 Million’ fighting the virus together, and in her election night speech, where she emphasised that the new government needs to deliver to all New Zealanders. We can feel lucky to have a politician voicing the need for the country and its people to be united if we take a look at some alternatives, such as America where Trump uses divisions between groups to stoke his own popularity. In contrast, Trump was selected as the most divisive US president ever by political scientists in 2017. However, I figure Trump might be quite pleased by this finding as it places him as the best at something, no matter what that something might be.
One of the great challenges when cycle touring is how to mentally cope with the scale of the task. One end of the scale for this trip is cycle 1300km. Big chunk and a bit depressing to start counting kilometres from number 1, waiting to reach 1300. We will revolve our pedals approximately 650,000 times. Pedal revolutions would be quite unbearably small chunks to count. Not to mention that, if one started counting pedal revolutions, it would be very easy to lose track. Then, if you are like me, if you aren’t sure if you countered 12 or 13, you have to go with 12, so I could be stuck at a count of 12 revolutions all day, making no progress.
The hardest step of the journey is the one you take out your front door. After that it’s all downhill (or uphill, or into the wind), you are going . That’s what I love about cycling journeys, you aren’t leaving, you are going, somewhere. All the time you are travelling, the movement itself is a large part of the point of the journey. Many have written of the difference when travel is the destination, rather than the journey itself. For me, the act of self propulsion, whether on foot or on bicycle, makes the journey the reason.
September
I have recently been exposed to the degree of need in our community, a degree that reinforces my belief that society is reaching its limits in a whole lot of ways. I am a member of the inaugural Impact100 Wakatipu grants committee. Impact100 is a global philanthropy model where 100 women (or more) donate $1000 each and then collectively decide on a recipient charity. Impact100 was founded by Wendy Steele in 2001 to expand women’s roles in philanthropy. I have some reservations about philanthropy and its ability to pervert the course of a country – the Guardian published an interesting article regarding philanthropy benefitting elite causes and its ability to divert government and community funds. However, their concerns about the related power of the super rich and the ability for individuals to influence is mitigated where it is a group of 100 or more reasonably diverse people involved and where the cause must be a registered charity (I can already hear people yelling that religions are registered charities).
Yesterday (September 22) was another happy day in New Zealand, as the majority of the country returned to Alert Level 1 conditions, with Auckland to drop back from Level 2.5 to Level 2 at midnight tonight. As usual, some health professionals think the reduction in Alert Levels has come too soon, while some business people think it has come too late. Such visible differences of opinion and resultant tensions are inevitable, and necessary, so that our country can balance out the competing ideas and needs. A country where everyone expresses the same opinion is not likely to be one that is comfortable to live in.
Of the many things that I don’t understand, the vast majority relate to human nature. I have questions like, why don’t people act in their own best interests? That’s a rather big question, let’s step in down a level.
When I was a child I really loved fairy stories. I read every single one that was in the library and was excited when a new book arrived. I moved on to fantasy literature, of which fairy stories (as short tales which include magic and magical beings) are a subset. I read the Narnia series multiple times (these days I find the religious undertones a little hard to ignore). I don’t know how many times I read the Lord of the Rings, for a while I read it annually. To me, the Harry Potter tales are a modern equivalent of the Lord of the Rings – they have captivated a generation of young fantasy readers.
There is something incredibly cathartic about the acts of planting and caring for plants. For me, it was a seminal moment when we put the first plants in at our ‘city’ house in Christchurch recently. Planting embodies hope because it implies a belief in a future into which the plants will grow. It is a hope for a future in which we may, or may not, participate – many plants outlast their owners and carers. I have an underpinning belief that I should leave properties I occupy a better place than when I took them on, and planting is a very important part of that.
A new Chinese proverb could read, “Beware Chinese sending fake gifts”. Chris received a present in the mail from China this week. At least that is what he initially thought. It was Fathers’ Day at the weekend and his suggestion was that Sarah might have sent him an unexpected gift. Exactly why she would have sent Chris fake Versace ankle socks isn’t so clear. Nor is it likely that she wouldn’t have mentioned sending him a present when we talked at weekend (unless she was so embarrassed by her choice that she didn’t want to mention it?!). A final nail in the present-from-Sarah coffin was that the socks are three different sizes – large, medium and small. It really is quite unlikely that Sarah would be so unsure of Chris’s sock size that she would send him a selection of socks in the hope that one of the three pairs would fit him.
So, with the New Zealand government throwing money right, left and centre (or possibly more left and centre) preparatory to elections, I would like to make the case for more money being sifted over artisan bakeries. “Why”, you might ask. It turns out there are a number of good reasons, but first I have to tell you a story.
My earring turned up in the washing machine. Chris found it in there, many weeks after I lost it, which was somewhat mysterious. I don’t imagine you remember that I lost an earring, a lost earring isn’t that important in the scheme of things. However, one can choose to regard such an incident as a portent of good things to come. In the same way that it seems like a bad day when you lose your earring, it can seem like a good day when you find it again. First off, I congratulated myself on not being excessively tidy and throwing the single earring away. As a little aside, Chileans have a specific word for a single thing that no longer has its pair, it is called a ‘Huacha’. There must be many socks in the world that could be named ‘Huacha’.
August
A discussion that got a little out-of-hand at my book club prompted me to think about how we make decisions regarding ‘conventional’ and ‘alternative medical’ practices. I should note here that book club discussions getting out-of-hand are not really the norm. Book clubs seem to largely comprise of women and groups of women generally do their very best to keep the social fabric intact. I will therefore blame the ongoing stresses of COVID-19 for this incident!
I am not a great fan of roller coasters, probably because I get motion sick. It might also be because I like a degree of skill to be associated with my terror. My early memory of a rollercoaster type experiences was at the local A&P show where Mum put my brother and me on a ride as a treat. We started screaming as the ride commenced and screamed constantly for the entire remainder while Mum watched helpless from the ground. The badness of rollercoasters was then reemphasised for me when the Edmonton rollercoaster derailed in 1986 and decapitated 3 punters. I remember this event because that same year I visited the shopping centre in which the rollercoaster was now being dismantled (that was something for a New Zealander…a rollercoaster in a shopping mall!) and imagined the people’s heads being chopped off.
Vaccines are coming up to the top of everyone’s minds again as we contemplate the length of the COVID-19 road ahead – it’s starting to feel more like a marathon than a sprint. As long as people are getting widely infected and sick as a result, COVID-19 will be a big issue. Our treatments for seriously ill people have improved, and will improve further, but getting sick isn’t desirable and lots of sick people are a weight on the health system. To be able to stop the disease before it starts requires a vaccine. I had a look at at progress on vaccines on April 4th and June 17th , how far have things moved since then?
If you were hoping for a run-down on vaccines you will have to wait a little while longer as I am going to take this opportunity to tell you about our water woes. I mentioned earlier how we employed a water diviner to ‘tell us’ where we should drill for water. I have been asked to report on how accurate the diviner was but can’t yet report on that either as we are still waiting for a resource consent to drill a hole. Hopefully I will be able to tell you something within a month, and very hopefully it will be positive news!
I am feeling like we have headed back around a loop, with the return to Level 3 Alert in Auckland and Level 2 Alert across the country. We have seen in other countries how the reinstitution of lockdowns initiates the same sorts of behaviours as the first time they happened…buying up of toilet paper, general hoarding of food supplies, rushing to another preferable location despite this being the last thing that the country needs in regard to spread of disease. It makes one wonder whether anyone learns anything new, or whether we are doomed to live the same experiences repeatedly. In the face of a virus that is certainly going to recur, the prospect of living the same experiences over and over is distinctly depressing.
July
We sent daughter Sarah pictures of Loki every day during lockdown, it helped both us and her. Sarah is a student in Cambridge, United Kingdom, so having her own cat is not an option at present as pets are a long term commitment (her lockdown was several weeks longer than ours too). Occasionally Sarah harbours visions of cat napping. We envisaged one scenario (generated early in lockdown when even stroking the pets of others was dangerous territory) in which she would lure a cat into a cardboard box using cat food, and then scurry off with it. Luckily, Sarah has managed so far with a mix of WhatsApped cat images combined with encounters with random local cats and has kept her cat-thieving instincts at bay.
It is surprisingly hard to remember that there are 8 billion people in the world all with their own stories, in which they are the principal character. One’s own story is paramount in one’s own brain, with oneself at the centre and everyone else as players at various degrees of remove. To really listen to, and hear, other people’s stories takes time and time is often at a premium in the world of today. Lockdown caused a brief hiatus but the pace of life doesn’t seem to have slowed too much overall for most.
It turns out that water diviners no longer necessarily use bisected wooden sticks, No. 8 fencing wire will also perform . The question, however, is…what is a household of scientists doing employing a water diviner?
One of my favourite recent quotes was from Cameron Bagrie , economic consultant and previously Chief Economist at ANZ. A series of economists was asked to predict house prices in New Zealand in the new reality framed by the global pandemic. They all gave their considered opinions, mostly predicting falls of various magnitudes which they compared with the massive falls predicted early in the COVID-19 lockdown. Cameron Bagrie said “Heck, I don’t know”! To be fair, he qualified that by pointing out the multiplicity of conflicting drivers, together with the unprecedented (heard that term a lot lately?) nature of the current situation. Some of the drivers push towards higher prices, such as large numbers of returning New Zealanders and a housing market that already had trouble supplying the needs in locations with jobs. Some of the drivers push towards lower prices, such as lots of unemployed people and job losses in areas dependent on tourism.
Todd Muller, ex-man of the week, has not been one of my heroes. He probably hasn’t been leader of his party long enough to be anyone else’s hero either. Anyhow, most of my heroes have been women. This could be sexist of me, but that’s the way it is. I thought that today I would tell you about some of them.
I was pondering as to the degree of behavioural elasticity people have demonstrated throughout COVID-19 changes in New Zealand. People are frequently elastic in the sense that you push them hard in one direction and their behaviour shifts, until they are released, then they bounce back to their original state. Elasticity seems like a desirable trait in that it is hard to push people off kilter in a permanent way. However, the resultant reversion to the norm means that it is also hard to achieve lasting change in behaviours if a behavioural change is desired.
It goes without saying that politics is fraught with people; my thinking on this has been driven by yesterday’s political fiasco around the disclosure of names of COVID-19 sufferers. Politics is no simple matter, just for a start there are many definitions of the word. They include “who gets what, when and how” ( Lasswell ), “the concentrated expression of economics” ( Lenin ) or “Politics comprises all the activities of co-operation, negotiation and conflict within and between societies, whereby people go about organising the use, production or distribution of human, natural and other resources in the course of the production and reproduction of their biological and social life” ( Leftwich ).
COVID news of this week was that three eminent New Zealanders think we should reopen the border and abandon our elimination strategy. Reactions, and reactions to the reactions, rebounded around the air and social media waves. However, what was reported wasn’t necessarily in the actual conversation piece provided by the previous Chief Science Advisor Peter Gluckman, ex Prime Minister Helen Clark and ex CEO of AirNZ Rob Fyfe. Headlines were even more inaccurate than the text of articles, with Newshub saying “ New Zealand must consider opening borders soon ”. “Soon” was a word also used in the NZ Herald article on the matter, in reference to timeframes for opening borders. But Gluckman, Clark and Fyfe said nothing about a requirement to open borders soon, just that New Zealand needs to consider when and how it might open its borders. We need to remain part of the world, on our own terms; I am sure it isn’t just me that is thinking that we could be living in a Fool’s Paradise and happily holidaying domestically while the world crumbles around us.
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June
Everyday events are highlighting my post lockdown levels of reactivity. Perhaps an earthquake doesn’t quite count as an every day event (though in Canterbury it certainly was an every day event for some number of years), but a slight shuddering type earthquake is hardly cataclysmic. My nervous system did not agree with the former statement, however, when a 5.9 Richter scale quake hit off the coast of Milford Sound a couple of days ago. The quake started, kept going, my phone rang and I answered it and sounded sufficiently discombobulated that the caller asked if I would like to ring back. I said I would hang on and see if the earthquake stopped and, after about 30 seconds, thankfully it did. By the 20 second mark I had been wondering if I should move to under my desk, though the vibrations never got strong enough to even register with Chris who was walking across the driveway outside my office window. Finally the earthquake subsided, but it took my jangled nerves a whole lot longer to calm down.
There are many ways COVID-19 has affected the trajectories of people’s lives. One way is that a whole lot of people have got a first, or a a second pet. There is nothing like a civil emergency to make people want cute, fluffy animals. I am not alone in surmising that there will be a crop of corona-babies turning up over the next year or so. There’s also nothing like a civil emergency for making people want to propagate.
My brain took a loose turn this week when considering the New Zealand quarantine issues…
I, like many other New Zealanders, was pretty unhappy to hear yesterday about two new cases of COVID-19 in the country. It is expected that we will import cases as Kiwis return home, and people are granted special exemptions to come into the country. But it certainly isn’t expected that those people will get to travel around New Zealand while infectious. I found it ironic that on Saturday I wrote about the need for humanity, when these two people were released on ‘compassionate grounds’ but entirely improperly.
We are subject to a constant barrage of war analogies, particularly in the face of the current COVID-19 pandemic, and ongoing in relation to climate change. We must ‘fight the pandemic’ and ‘fight climate change’. Associated sentiments are that we must ‘save the economy’ and ‘save the planet’. Language is powerful and sways our thoughts, influencing our actions (there are many times in my life I hark back to George Orwell’s 1984 and his concepts of language controlling thought). War language seems appropriate in that it will spur us to action, but is it really leading us to any desired state?
I lost an earring yesterday. I would hazard a guess that any male reading this statement is completely puzzled as to why I have bothered to write it. More women might understand the degree of annoyance that ensues from losing a favourite earring. I pondered why I can feel so annoyed at such a minor thing. Earrings can carry significant memories of the place where it was bought, or the person who gave it to you. They can carry memories of the times you wore them. They are intrinsically attractive objects that one can simply like observing. Importantly, the remaining earring serves as a reminder that you lost the first one (I tend to get rid of the lone earring quickly to avoid this result). Life might be much easier if I liked wearing earrings that don’t match; unfortunately I have not yet achieved that state.
Barry Crump, of New Zealand-scale fame, wrote a book entitled “Wild Pork & Watercress” in 1997. It was written in standard Crumpian style, a little rough around the edges like its author, and was about Ricky and his Uncle Hector taking to the Uruwera Ranges to escape child protection services who wanted to take Ricky into care. Ricky learned to navigate and survive under the tuition of his uncle, becoming independently capable and able to do things he had never dreamed of when he was a city boy. Crump’s tales were semi-autobiographical; he was a confirmed bush-man who worked as a deer culler for many years.
Chris loves a good fire. This is probably one of his quintessential ‘bloke’ characteristics as I have noticed that there are quite a few New Zealand males who love fires. There are plenty of women who like fires too, but it seems rare that women have the same visceral love of accumulating wood, preparing and lighting fires that men do. There is much written about that visceral appeal of fire, taking us back to our cave person days. For my part, I am not sure that cave person days sound very appealing and something one would want to relive, however fires will definitely have been one of the brighter aspects of the caves.
May
The finding of two lost trampers in northwest Nelson this week was a relief and an irritation. It is great that two young people were found and didn’t die. However, it is really annoying that two young people couldn’t navigate sufficiently well in order to save themselves (or not get lost in the first place), rather than requiring a rescue costly in time and money.
I have a new love. Don’t worry about Chris though, my love is not an animate being. It is surfing, of the sea variety (as opposed to ‘doom surfing’, which is uncontrollable surfing of pandemic information and misinformation on the web). We have been in Christchurch for over a week, after dropping Mum back at her retirement village, and the surf has been great. Sumner Beach can have good waves, though they aren’t always reliable. However, the sea and weather have taken pity on lockdown recoverees and put on excellent surf for many days in a row.
“The lucky country’ was the title of a book published in 1964 by Donald Horne , used there as a negative description of Australia. It has become an Australian nickname and is generally used favourably about the country, describing its natural resources, weather, distance from other global problems and other sorts of supposed prosperity. However, Horne’s intent was actually to portray Australia’s climb to power and wealth as based on luck, rather than the strength of its political or economic system, which Horne believed was ‘second rate’! He also considered that Australia lacked innovation, ambition and art.
In general, people want to live at the highest level. In a building, the penthouse is the most desirable place to be. If there’s a slope with a view, people would like to be at the top for the best views. An exception to this is the city of La Paz, where people want to live at the bottom. The altiplano above La Paz is at 4000m and the city drops away down the canyon in which it lies to 2800m elevation. Living at the bottom of the city is warmer and has more water and oxygen. The people who service the city live in ‘El Alto’, on the windy, cold plateau that stretches away to Lake Titicaca.
Level 2 arrived and I finally got my drink of water . On Thursday we had lunch with our friends Cleone and Peter at their house in Queenstown. And on Friday night, so exciting, we spent the night away from home! We got to have dinner and breakfast with our friends John and Diana and Nina (and Baxter the dog) in Hawea Flat, as well as chatting to their neighbours in the morning. Diana said the same thing, she had walked up Isthmus Peak in the morning with two friends. They talked the whole way up, not even noticing the 1000m climb and the drizzle, and she realised how much she had missed just catching up with people.
The feeling in the air following the government’s May 11th announcement of New Zealand’s move to Alert Level 2, has made me think of springs and release of energy. In the 1970s I badly wanted a pogo stick, like many of my generation. George Herrington of Wichita, Kansas, patented the pogo stick concept in 1891. Its purpose was to leap great distances and heights. The modern pogo stick was invented by two Germans ( Po hlig and Go ttschall) who registered a patent in 1920 – it is thought that the Pogo name was derived from their surnames. The two handle pogo stick was patented in the USA in 1957, but its popularity exponentially increased in the 1970s due to a marketing scheme promoting its design and versatility.
Our bubble, like the rest of New Zealand, is champing at the bit (and chomping at each other) in the face of the promises of Alert Level 2. On Thursday the Prime Minister announced the conditions of Level 2, with a resonating proviso at the end of her message saying that we might not achieve all the Level 2 freedoms in one go. This was both expected, and confusing – which freedoms might we get first? And how will Cabinet decide on Monday? Businesses are calling foul – how can they plan for Level 2 if they don’t know what the Level 2 conditions will be? It strikes me that the government ‘locked itself down’ on the Alert Level system when they announced four levels and set broad terms of Level 2 in the very early days of our response to the pandemic. We need some intermediate level which can’t easily be created, given the wide leap to freedom between Level 3 to Level 2.
Chris, Mum and I were talking about the saintly behaviour by some under lockdown (not referring to any of ourselves). All of us have our quirks, but in some cases it appears that people might truly deserve canonisation for remaining calm and cheerful in the face of their bubbles. Canonisation is the interesting process through which people are pronounced saints. It is important to note that people are not ‘made into’ saints, but the process recognises their inherent saintliness, which has been expressed during their lives.
April
We have been listening to the Messiah of late, for no particular reason other than that it makes a nice background at dinner time. For me it brings back happy memories of going to the sing along Messiah concerts at the Christchurch town hall. One learned the score of the sing along songs to some degree beforehand and then everyone belted out the music, following the professional choir, standing in the Christchurch Town Hall auditorium (recently rebuilt following the Canterbury earthquakes). It might have hurt the ears of the choristers and the orchestra, but it was great fun.
On March 22nd I wrote my first COVID-19 post, the day after Jacinda Ardern announced New Zealand was on Level 2 Alert and the third day after the New Zealand borders were closed, on March 20th (after people entering being required to self quarantine from March 16th). On March 23rd it was announced that New Zealand would go into lockdown, starting midnight March 25th. We were following hot on the heels of Italy, which went into quarantine March 21st, as COVID-19 raged through Lombardy.
There is no doubt that New Zealand, and all countries, are going to increase the amount of public debt they hold because governments are borrowing heavily to pay money to those who are not earning, or whose businesses cannot function, during lockdown to slow the spread of COVID-19. Debt has always seemed to me to be the antithesis of freedom. If you are locked into a debt, your set of choices is limited by the extent to which you have to earn money to repay that debt. Obviously one needs to eat and have a roof over one’s head as well, both of which require some degree of income. However, it is possible to minimise the costs of both for yourself, through choosing where you live and how much of your own food you can grow/acquire, but repayment of debt is controlled by someone else.
I would like to talk with some non-bubble members in person in the same way that one imagines a tall, cool glass of water when cycling through a desert with no oasis in sight. I try to argue myself out of this need – I have intelligent and interesting people to talk to in my bubble, I can talk to other people on the phone, or through a myriad of electronic methods. However, I do not appear to be sufficiently convincing, as my need for that drink of water is not abating.
We learned early that living on a lifestyle block involved quite a bit of death and killing and that had to get used to it – growing your own food results in a resource war with other living organisms competing for the same resources. I still remember the day that I felt like the slugs were eating the vegetables, Porina moth (grass grub) beetles were eating the trees, hedgehogs were falling in the pond and floating around like surface-dwelling puffer fish, a rabbit had to be dispatched because it fell down the long drop and couldn’t climb out even with assistance, and I had a vendetta against ferrets because one had killed my 8 new chickens, less than 8 hours after I had brought them home.
Today was a less good lockdown day. I was glooming my way through a rebuild of a drawer unit this afternoon. I had managed to make the drawers the wrong way round, which meant they were 24mm too narrow. That didn’t seem too problematic until I also discovered I had made the drawers 24mm too long in the perpendicular dimension! The consequence was I had to add strips on two sides, cut 24mm off the ends and put the drawers back together. By the time I had completed this I was having no fun at all, and that was about the time that the afternoon programme on Radio New Zealand starting playing Peggy Lee music.
The pushmi-pullyus of Doctor Dolittle were two-headed beasts who were impossible to creep up on, and who looked very reminiscent of a llama with no rear end. Hugh Lofting wrote Doctor Dolittle stories for his children in wartime letters, when the scenes of war were either ‘too horrible or too dull to describe’. The Doctor can speak to animals, and thus creates understanding between species. Lofting’s consistent theme was that, by reaching out to one another through the offer of communication and friendship, anything is possible. Lofting fervently hoped that, with the right attitude and the right tools, living together in harmony was not such an outlandish idea; it isn’t surprising that someone surviving the WWI trenches would hope to avoid a repeat.
Human beings are quite amazingly adaptable, while harbouring constant illusions that their current state of being is normal. I don’t generally wear a tea cosy, nor purple (or indeed any) lipstick, particularly not while ski touring in the middle of the Southern Alps. However neither state felt that odd at the moment of the photograph.
March
I remember this feeling from the time of the Canterbury earthquakes. For the last few years, when someone talked about the potential for an Alpine Fault earthquake, I used to joke that one civil emergency is enough for a life time so I really hoped I would be dead before it happened again. That doesn’t seem like a funny joke at all now, though it still feels very true. My mother is onto her third civil emergency as she got to experience World War II; as a child I remember handling the spiky shrapnel that she collected from their garden following a bombing raid. See how easily I have been distracted? What does shrapnel have to do with earthquakes? Actually, I am figuring that people probably got WWII-brain, when the enormity of their situation got the better of their mental faculties while they were off guard, and their brains went all fuzzy.
On the subject of ‘contentment’, my Dad has to get another mention. In one of our many, possibly heated, debates, we discussed happiness. Dad was clear that contentment is the higher goal. “You can’t be happy all the time, but you can always be content.” I think many of us have to live quite a bit of our lives to really embed that thought. Happiness is a counterpoint to unhappiness. But contentment can be a constant and, in times of crisis, a constant is much more welcome than a pinball of emotional ricochets . Dad was a remarkably contented person and I can imagine him, in this crisis, calmly continuing to work in his garden and have his one sherry in the evenings before dinner. There are also two other shining examples of contentment with whom I have had the pleasure of spending much time, and to whom I would like to introduce you.
If Menace was not from your bubble you might be quite concerned about her point of origin and her degree of sanitation. I know how I felt when I encountered my first ‘bubble-foreigner’ since last Saturday, when we went out for a bike ride today (have I really stayed home for the whole of the last week?). We were cycling up Coal Pit Road near our house and, when I looked up, I realised that there was another cyclist between Chris and me. My heart rate actually rose, although I knew this was quite ridiculous. A person on a bike represents a very low degree of infection threat level. My next feeling of stress was related to how to get past the cyclist, while keeping an appropriate distance, and not giving him a fright because I was coming up from behind (in the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I was on an e-bike, while he was on a ‘normal’ bike). I called out, “Hi, passing on your right.”, and gave him a very wide berth. He said a brief “Hello”, but showed no inclination to engage further, and I didn’t recognise him. I then engaged in some internal contemplation of whether he really wasn’t very friendly, or whether he was just behaving in a very neutral manner to deal properly with bubble-foreigners.
When I started to think about kindness, and what I could write about its practice, here are some photos that immediately came into my mind.
My mate Toti from Taupo presents different faces to the world (please note, he is a confirmed bubble member, present from midnight on Tuesday). I feel like I am cycling through those faces at a rapid rate during the days. I wake up and feel reasonably calm, particularly if I pick up my current book, which is an adaptation of a fairy story by Neal Gaiman (a great writer if you like science/imaginary fiction). But there’s only so long I can keep myself away from checking on what happened overnight; I think everyone is struggling with this right now – how much news is enough? I read the news, and I rapidly shift down the Toti column to the bottom of the emotional pile. It then requires a concerted effort to take myself for a walk, dig a plant hole, or talk to the chickens in order to work my way back up. I am not forgetting to use my breathing exercises, either – part of my new routine is using them to clear my brain before starting writing each day.
Our household is dominated by scientists (sorry, Mum) which means that we oscillate between being interested in the progress of a set of enormous, international COVID-19 management experiments, and being concerned for all the people who are the subjects of these experiments. I might be stretching things here, I am very interested in the experiments and discuss them ( ad nauseam ?) with Chris, who does his best to be keep his interest levels up.
As a country we are about to collectively hold our breath for the next four weeks; on an individual scale it is definitely time I return to some meditation techniques. Meditation or yoga is in that category of things that I think I will do when I have a bit of time, though when I have a bit of time it doesn’t seem nearly as necessary. Strange, that. However, there’s no time like the present, or any time other than the present, for that matter. Therefore, before starting writing today I managed 10 repeats of, breathe in for 4 counts, hold for 4 counts, breathe out for 4 counts. I will aspire to increasing my numbers of meditative breaths day by day, aspiration being good for both breathing and for self-improvement.
Today I am already hunkered down at home, preserving some more of the fruit that is falling off the trees. Chris is doing a last run to Cromwell, 25 minutes away, to stock up on hardware supplies so that we have plenty of woodworking projects to keep us occupied when the cold keeps us out of the garden. As I correspond with my friends around the country they tell me they are closing down their businesses, laying off staff, and organising safely-spaced essential workplaces. Our country is racing against the clock to our Level 4 lockdown.