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Christmas is a traditional time of gift giving in countries influenced by Christianity. Such gift giving has grown out of any proportions that any Jesus Christ that might have existed is likely to approve of. Sarah knitted us ear warmers and dish cloths for Christmas, which is my favourite sort of present – made by the giver. Not quite true. My other favourite sort of present is a book, which she also gave us and Chris and I gave each other. Mum’s favourite present is a donation to the Fred Hollows Foundation, so that’s what I gave her. It was great, we all got what we wanted and in some cases other people got things too.

I am inherently predisposed towards planning and preparing well in advance. I was the type of kid who started their homework when they were given it and have turned into the sort of adult who does the same – I have my songwriting class on a Tuesday and I start my homework on a Wednesday (occasionally on a Tuesday night if I feel inspired). Life feels so much more manageable when I am actively reducing the number of items in my inbox and when deadlines are out in the future.

Ten days into the traffic light system and I am getting accustomed to scanning my vaccine passport when I go into a variety of venues. I have put my Apple wallet app on the top screen of my phone to prevent the embarrassing hold-up when you are asked for your passport and have to trawl through a number of levels on your phone screen. Businesses are getting organised to have someone out the front to scan people, rather than dealing with them at the counter where you order and/or pay. There will be lots of jobs for students this summer; being a vaccine pass scanner might be a sinecure or might be a nightmare if people behave badly when asked for their pass.

One’s perspective can change by the day or by the minute and the nature of the view is all in the perspective. Today I am trying to get my ahead above the Omicron parapet; two days ago I had never heard of Omicron – the latest COVID-19 variant – and I was definitely the happier for it. In fact, I was thinking excitedly about where in the world we might be able to go come February 2022 with MIQ no longer required for New Zealanders returning home. And four days ago I was definitely very happy because we were camping in the back country (yes again) and the views were superb.

I have realised that a significant part of my internal purpose is to learn new things. This came up in digital conversation, around the role of science in society. A commentator made the point that science is a useful vehicle for asking and answering questions about the world, but that science is problematic if it becomes the world view. I thought this a very valid observation – science for information is essential, but science as personal purpose is insufficient. Which threw me into the internal reflection of what one deems one’s purpose in life to be, and back to one of my strong drivers being to learn.

The current COVID-19 situation is paralleling one of my recent songs in my brain. The song is called ‘Knitting Zombies’. You could ask, ‘Why has Jane written a song called Knitting Zombies’, and you could also ask ‘Why would a song about knitting zombies have anything to do with COVID-19?’, both are valid questions.

Testing of wastewater for COVID-19 has become a routine method for identifying spread of the virus. I was pondering on the challenges of sampling the very large amounts of wastewater that are produced in New Zealand – 1.5B litres per day which is managed through around 320 wastewater treatment plants. From this we need manageable samples that are representative of the wastewater coming out of people’s houses. In Christchurch, for example, there would be around 11.4 million litres of wastewater (I figured out on a pro rata basis across the population as I can’t find accurate figures on line). From this wastewater a sample of 1 litre is collected that is sent to ESR for analysis!

In a week I feel I have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous – from fantastic mountain views and solitude to being a participant in an opaque traffic light system. Based on the cartoons and media commentary yesterday, I appeared to be in good company thinking “Huh, what?” as our COVID traffic light system was revealed.

I have taken to heart my own message of doing more of what I love, which includes tramping. So this week I took myself off for 3 nights in the back country in South Westland on the basis of an excellent forecast, a rare thing in a South Westland spring. I have rarely felt more in need of a complete tech break and huts with no reception are the ideal place for a tech break. Included in a tech break was a break from COVID-19 news – such news tends to be an oppressing weight at present (despite the government’s excited announcements about numbers of vaccines administered). I told Chris that if the South Island went into lockdown I did not want to know, I would deal with it when I returned. In retrospect, I should have told him to let me know if there was a lockdown, so I could escape from it for longer in the back country!

Sarah is in New Zealand MIQ, enjoying the hospitality of the New Zealand government and the selection of meals at the Grand Mercure in Auckland. So we sent her pictures of us going for a mountain bike ride and having lunch in Arrowtown – we are very kind, I know. Sarah said she liked Chris’s mountain bike shorts. I was a bit hurt – my unicorn mountain bike shorts are much more spectacular than Chris’s green shorts, they are just smaller in the picture. So I mentioned that I bought Chris those green shorts to go on our cycle tour October 2020, but he had to mail them home again because his butt was too soft for unlined shorts, so he bought padded shorts in Hokitika. Chris countered by saying that he had to sit on the sofa for 6 weeks when he broke his ribs (walking on the Grade 1 Millenium Track in Wanaka), therefore his butt got soft; I think my case stands. Chris had a sting in his tail.

We were pretty darn lucky this week and had a beautiful day heli-skiing in the vicinity of Mt Cook with friends Nic and Andy. I wasn’t sure whether to mention this and share pictures with people in other parts of New Zealand as, if I was in Auckland, I am not sure I would want to see pictures of people having lots of fun in stunning mountain scenery. One part of me says that, it is better to see that other people are enjoying their freedom because if other people have freedom not available to you, it would be pretty darned annoying if they weren’t making the most of it. The other part of me says that I don’t want to see movies of great overseas travel destinations because I can’t go there at present, so why torture myself with looking at potential that is unattainable. Anyhow, you have already seen the pictures.

I thought I had better take my own words to heart and get out there. During lockdown I thought about what I wanted to do that I hadn’t been doing. The answer was, spend time in the backcountry. Even more specifically, my answer was spend time in the backcountry by myself.

When you get to Alert Level 2 you go do things that you couldn’t previously. Who knows how long you will be in Level 2? Therefore we headed to Wanaka on Wednesday to have dinner and go cycling with friends. We were hoping to ski but the weather gods took away the promised snow and sent rain instead.

There’s nothing like unexpected lockdowns to make you think that you should do what you can, when you can do it. Is there someone you haven’t seen lately? Give them a call or, far better, go visit them. You don’t know when a lockdown might get in the way. Want to spend some time in the outdoors but don’t know how to fit it into your schedule? Just shove those meetings to the side and make it happen – you could be in Level 4 and stuck in your house (everyone in Auckland is). Meaning to learn a musical instrument? Go buy one, and a stand, so the instrument can sit in the corner glaring balefully at you when you haven’t made time in the day to practice (although, if it stares at you balefully for too long, sell it, because it’s obviously something that you aren’t actually going to do).

The best thing about scarcity is the period of time when you anticipate an end to the scarcity, and then the fulfilment when scarcity turns into availability. Humans’ very simple internal chemical mechanism for feeling a reward (a shot of dopamine) means that the hit when you get your needs fulfilled doesn’t last long – so enjoy every second while you can!

The future is looking brighter for those outside Auckland, given that Ashley Bloomfield today talked about a new and improved COVID Alert Level 2 that will be proposed to Cabinet tomorrow. Cabinet will make its decision tomorrow afternoon as to what Alert Levels the country will be in when our current levels expire at midnight on Tuesday. Auckland will almost certainly have to continue to do the ‘heavy lifting’ for the country, given that there are still 20 new cases on each of the last two days, although only a small proportion of those were in the community while infectious.

I have been discussing vaccination issues with my friend Phil, including debating whether people act in their own best interests, or not. Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2017, for his work demonstrating that limited rationality, social preferences, and lack of self-control systematically affect human decisions, and thus market outcomes. Thaler is a proponent of ‘behavioural economics’, where the actual behaviours of humans are incorporated in economic models, rather than a traditional set of assumptions about human beings, which do not necessarily describe human behaviour very well. When asked what his most important contribution to economics was, Thaler said “…the recognition that economic agents are human, and that economic models have to incorporate that”.

I love it when someone tells me about a paradigm that I haven’t previously heard of. New paradigms are always good for challenging your thinking. Paradoxes are particularly interesting, given that they put two things together that seem mutually incompatible, like Determinism and Free Will that I wrote about earlier this year. So today’s new paradigm/paradox for me is the Stockdale Paradox, which is:

I have been writing material for the annual report of one of New Zealand’s science institutions. There have been some particularly interesting nuggets of information; the one that has stood out for me is that provision of facts can sometimes polarise opinions further, rather than leading to agreement. For some of you this may seem obvious, for some of you it may seem ridiculous. However, this is what researchers investigating acceptance of different forms of invasive pest control in New Zealand found. They were interested in what forms of pest control people found acceptable, and particularly what new or developing forms of control might be acceptable e.g. sterility through feeding mRNA or use of gene drives. The researchers found that, rather than wanting a barrage of information, the most successful approach was discussion to reach a consensus. People wanted to feel included and heard, and to trust the people with whom they were interacting.

Today reminded me of a post I wrote last year entitled “ Are we nearly there yet? “.; it turns out I wrote it nearly exactly a year ago. How did that year, and the last 1.5 years, go by so slowly and quickly all at the same time? When I wrote my post a year ago I wasn’t sure where ‘there’ might be, and I’m still not sure. I heard a radio commentator today say, ‘When we are back to nearly normal tourism it would be best if our MIQ facilities were not in a major city’. I wondered how anyone can equate ‘MIQ’ and our 2019 ‘normal’. The whole COVID experience, and day by day lockdown experience, sometimes feels like a perverse game of SNAKES and LADDERS – you never know when your trajectory will change between up and down.

Our government’s reluctance to set a vaccine target doesn’t sit well with me. The current mantra is to set targets for everything, so that you can see if you have achieved them or not and to encourage people to reach them. Whether one should have a target for everything is questionable, but whether one should identify targets for really important things like vaccination seems obvious.

Jane hanging out with a trio of mice who can't speak or hear

Lockdown ennui is starting to set in and I thought about reading tea leaves to get a steer on what Cabinet might say tomorrow. Of course, I could just wait and find out when they say it. However, it is in the nature of human beings, and particularly this human being, to try and guess what will happen before it happens. Its not just being prepared, its like a betting game, seeing if you can pick how the die will fall.

There are some key descriptors that tell you the potential of a virus, like COVID-19, to spread. I thought I would have a go at elucidating these numbers using the analogy of fireworks.

This week the New Zealand academic world has seen a flurry of debate about the intersection between mātauranga Māori – the knowledge base of and created by Māori, past present and future – and the philosophy/method that is science. A group of seven academics from the University of Auckland wrote a letter to the Royal Society of New Zealand (RSNZ -a body which supports advances and promotes research and scholarly activity in the pursuit of knowledge ). The academics expressed their concerns about proposed changes to the Māori portion of the school curriculum. Particular aspects of the curriculum they took exception to are:

I had a minor light bulb moment yesterday when talking with Chris’s sister, Lindie. I have offered pondered the problem of drivers of change for major issues – how much can or should the government do and how much change should be instigated and driven at the community level. In relation to climate change, I hear the argument frequently made that this is such a big problem, with so many parts which are out of reach of individuals, that the responsibility lies at government scale. This has never sat well with me, because I have a fundamental belief that we should all demonstrate the type of change we want to see. Governments are made up of people (not aliens, as far as I know, though I do think Winston Peters might be a vampire who is brought out of his coffin each election looking essentially similar in the same brown suit). However, I have never managed to come up with a substantive argument about why change at community scale is as essential as government scale. So, for the argument, read on…

It was time to pull out my crystal ball to contemplate the future of interest rates and inflation in New Zealand. I actually pulled it out a few times in the last 2 months, and meant to document my prediction of interest rate rises by the end of the year, but more other interesting things to blog about took precedence. Honest, I really did predict them, because the necessity of such rises has been dead obvious – no crystal ball required. My prediction was that the country would hit a sticky patch by the end of 2021 in regard to rapidly rising inflation and the associated need to raise interest rates to curb inflation.

I found myself fuming today when I read about the Ministry for Business, Innovation Employment (MBIE) being a ‘telly offy’, in regard to people using software innovations to book slots in Managed Isolation Facilities (MIQ). A ‘telly offy’ (as defined by our household early in COVID times) is someone who comes from a rules-based perspective and tells others what they should be doing, without thinking as to whether those actions make sense or don’t make sense, beyond the rules. Isn’t it funny how ‘MIQ’ is now a household acronym…a year ago we were just learning how an MIQ system would work for our country and two years ago it was unthinkable that one might have to quarantine for 2 weeks in a monitored facility before entering New Zealand.

This week saw me variably succeeding and failing in some of those difficult personal conversations that happen all the time in close relationships. The COVID world has taken its toll on all our brains, as well as many bodies, and stress and anxiety are rampant. I was reminded of a first aid class in which we were told, “First take a bite of your hamburger”. The first aid tutor was an ex-fireman who was in one of the New York fire crews which attended the Twin Towers bombing fires. His very memorable principle was that, before moving into an emergency scene, one should have a metaphorical hamburger bite, calming down, assessing the scene, pausing before acting and separating emotion from action.

I hate insurance companies. That is not too strong a word. One could ask why I even get insurance because the very thought of dealing with an insurance company makes me feel stressed. My abhorrence of insurance companies stems from the Canterbury earthquakes. Up till that time, I thought of insurance as a generally expensive necessity to cover major risk, and had made the odd claim for stolen items, mostly when travelling.

Perverse incentives are incentives that have unintended, negative effects that are contrary to the intention of their designers. The ‘cobra effect’ is famous; the British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi , offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a success and large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income, resulting in the reward program being scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population increased beyond its original size!

In music, variations are commonly used to create new musical pieces – a set of notes are played and then repeated with changes in them. Variations are used at all scales of composition and in many forms of music. The changes to the original piece of music may involve variations in melody, rhythm or harmony. The writer of variations may have created the original piece of music, or be varying someone else’s musical theme. In western classical music, there are many famous composers and musical variation compositions, including those of Bach (I remember well trying to learn his challenging unaccompanied cello variations ) and Mozart . The fundament of jazz improvisation is variation.

I don’t know when I first heard about the day the world would end. There certainly was no government announcement; in future days it seemed like it was a topic the government shied away from. The knowledge seeped through social media quietly, infiltrating our collective consciousness until there was no doubt about something that we didn’t want to know. The date was far enough away at that point to not seem imminent; perhaps someone or something would intervene. It was scheduled for late autumn, which did feel like an appropriate time for the world to end, if that was what was going to happen. But it was only early spring, how could one believe in the end of the world when the daffodils and tulips were blooming, the kowhai were bright yellow and the magpies were dive bombing me on bike rides, to protect their fledglings?

There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that the COVID-year has driven more couples to separate than normal. Family lawyers say that they have never been busier. They were already reporting a deluge back in August 2020 and it hasn’t ended yet. This doesn’t seem too surprising, for a whole lot of reasons:

When I started at the University of Canterbury in 1983, I underwent a minor rebellion and took philosophy instead of chemistry. I went to a couple of chemistry labs, didn’t find them very exciting at all, and thought that philosophy sounded like an interesting option to combine with geology, botany and zoology first year courses. Philosophy ended up being my favourite subject by far that year (though geology was my choice of future profession, decided upon when I was around 7…that’s another topic altogether). All the science subjects told you the answers and made you learn them off by heart to regurgitate in exams. However, in philosophy there were no right or wrong answers, your mark depended on the strength of your argument for your position. This was much more fun! My favourite of the six topics we studied, was free will vs determinism.

As far as I was concerned this week’s news of the week (in a less than good way) was the restating of the risk of an Alpine Fault earthquake event. From talking with other people, it seems this news flew under the radar for many. This is probably a good thing, because there isn’t anything we can do to prevent an earthquake, however probable or improbable it may be. Moreover, any advice on managing stress will likely tell you to focus on the things that you have power over, and earthquakes are well outside that category.

I spent my work in COVID-ville, otherwise known as the City of Sails. The purpose of my visit was to run or facilitate a variety of workshops for different parts of the University. Running workshops is always a high energy and interesting experience, meeting a variety of people and attempting to use a wide set of skills to help people to work together successfully.

I was looking at masks when I flew up to Auckland this week, and wondering how people decided to select the mask they were wearing that day. Mask selection is not something that anyone in New Zealand thought about until 2020. The lack of practice at mask wearing makes mask selection all the harder. However, there is a mental fall back position, in that humans are very accustomed to selecting the clothes they put on every day, and masks are pretty much clothing. Or are they adornment?

Upon finishing our 3 week cycling trip I suddenly felt flat. Dead flat. Perhaps as flat as a frog we saw on the roadside while cycling uphill on the Forgotten Highway. The squashed frog inspired me to write a song, on which I am currently working. The planned chorus runs something like:

A year ago tomorrow I posted the start of this blog , prompted by Jacinda Ardern’s announcement on March 21 2020 that New Zealand was going into COVID Alert Level 2 and the knowledge that, for the first time ever, New Zealand’s borders were closed to anyone not a citizen or permanent resident. The government’s immediate rationale was that we knew community transmission of COVID-19 was happening and we had seen the rapid and catastrophic rise in cases in China and in Italy, and the effects on their local health systems.

I have been visualising carrying a swimming noodle so I can whip it out and hit people over the head when they say, yet again, “Are you on an e-bike”. My mental swimming noodle is seeing lots of action, but I haven’t seen anyone flinch yet so I must be keeping it well within my brain. Pretty much every person we have talked with who isn’t on a bikepacking trip has asked us this same question. Are these people asking the question because they can’t imagine doing your trip on a normal bike, so they imagine it is only possible on an e-bike? Are they asking the question because they are on an e-bike themselves? Are they that stupid that they can’t look at your bike and figure out that there is no battery in it (ok, to be fair, the batteries are getting less visible but e-bikes usually have a lot more blingy tech on the handlebars than ours do). Or they making the assumption that because you no longer look what they would think of as young, you must be in need of an e-bike?

At one time I aspired to be like Marie Stopes. Who is she, you might ask. If you are a coal geologist you will know, but most of you probably are not coal geologists. I was a coal geologist in an earlier life; today it is fairly embarassing to explain to people that your PhD was about a material that is now seen as the devil, or something close to evil. At the time I did my PhD the number one consideration was that there was a scholarship to do it and the number two consideration was that the scholarship was about something vaguely useful to human beings – I did not want a topic that was completely removed from reality. So I embarked on a study of the geology, chemistry and petrology of the coal seams at Ohai, in the south of New Zealand.

I constantly find I am behind the times; I ascribe this to times moving rapidly. Recently I noticed Chris’s sister’s email signature included her preferred personal pronoun (which was ‘she’). When I mentioned this, Ximena said she had done it for about a year (I guess I wasn’t reading her emails very carefully) and other people at the University of Canterbury had been doing the same for several years. There was an opinion piece in Stuff about this yesterday, answering the question – Why would one put a pronoun in an email signature?

This week there was a kerfuffle in the New Zealand Parliament over a tie, or the lack of one. The Maori Party co-leader, Rawiri Waititi refused to wear a tie. He argued he was wearing Maori business attire with a hei tiki around his neck. Trevor Mallard, Speaker of the House and enforcer of the dress rules, amongst other rules, said this dress was not appropriate and prevented Waititi from asking questions on two occasions. This wasn’t the first time Waititi has raised the issue – last year he was also told he would be ejected from the Debating Chamber if he did not wear a tie. Waititi called ties ‘a colonial noose’. Following this confrontation, Green Party leader James Shaw suggested the rule should be changed, but Mallard decided to leave the rule in place, after minor changes, on the basis that there was ‘very little support for a change’. He did note that his personal preference would be to do away with ties which he ‘personally loathes’.

Back in June I found my brain inventing conspiracy theories all by itself . Interestingly, back in June 2020, New Zealand was contemplating that a trans-Tasman travel bubble might open up in the last quarter of 2020, while the ski fields were hoping it might come sometime sooner. The National Party was demanding a timeline in the interests of tourism businesses. Now we are being told by Jacinda Ardern that there won’t be a bubble happening any time soon . This isn’t too surprising, though disappointing – open borders are highly unlikely until countries have COVID-19 under control at mutually agreed levels and for New Zealand and Australia that level is pretty much no community cases. Australia has had COVID flare-ups in Melbourne and Sydney, with a scare in Brisbane, and New Zealand has had its own Northland scare , with the full outcome from that still not 100% certain, though signs are relatively promising that this won’t be our next outbreak. Perhaps we can hope for a travel bubble with one or more Australian states, rather than the whole country, if we can keep COVID under control here.

What do you see in this picture? Is your reaction immediately positive, negative or neither? Do you see a bunch of cute little furry animals, or a bunch of born killers? Do you see something different if you think versus if you just react?

In the New Year I suddenly realised how long it is likely to be until we see Sarah again, given that she currently lives in the UK. This shouldn’t have come as a startling revelation, but her Christmas card expressing the hope that we might meet up somewhere in the world in 2021 brought it home to me. I also know that, a generation ago, I left home for an indeterminate amount of time with no plan to coming back until I was coming back to stay. That was normal, and my parents coped because they had no choice. It is the loss of choice that one notices, not the loss of future prospects that one never knew one had.

When you are mountaineering or ski touring on a glacier, you need to be prepared for the inevitable crevasses. Crevasses form as the result of differential rates of movement in the ice – such as when the glacier goes over an edge and falls down a steep section of the valley. When you look down crevasses you often can’t see the bottom, although you know one is there. In the case above there was little risk to me because I was on a bridge on a walk created for tourists on the Franz Joseph Glacier that we had arrived at, after ski touring down from higher on the glacier. However, if you aren’t on such a path, the general principle is that you rope up with the members of your party such that, if one of you falls in a glacier, they are attached to the other people who can then help them get out.