Eat, Cry, Swim

Look, I’ll spare you the gory details, break-up stories are all the same − suffice it to say, after ticking along in a perfectly predictable, blissfully happy manner, a couple of months ago my relationship of 15 years went up like an unattended chip pan. Yes, that’s right. Reader, I did not marry him.

Thin (as thin as a short, curvy girl can get) and wretched, with a face like a dropped pie, I packed my tattered self-esteem into a tiny suitcase and flew to Rarotonga to spend two weeks with friends who run the island’s SPCA, reasoning they’d know what to do with a sick animal. I must have been giving off palpable rays of devastation on the flight over, because the man seated next to me was practically limbo-ing into the aisle. No man on earth wants to rub elbows with a sad lady.

Which is why turning to female friends in times of crisis is vital. I’d forgotten how lovely it can be to share a house with other women, if you’re not students and nobody’s washing their oversized dingy grey bras in the kitchen sink. We drank coffee in our nighties in the morning, drank wine in the evening, hugged freely and made frangipani flower crowns for our hair – simple, unchallenging, lady-time things. They’d both lived through it: that punched-in-the-stomach state of near-death hopelessness that follows the end of long relationship. They knew what it was like to be so lonely you turn the radio on just for company, so emotionally squished you weep until the pillow is soggy or dehydration sets in. So when they said, ‘things will get better,’ I tended to believe them.

Another great thing about female friends (apart from the fact that they let you ‘whaaaa’ all over them, leaving damp patches on their clothes, and never tell you how ugly you look when you cry) is that they provide clarity, sooth a tumultuous inner world, remind you who you really are and what you’re capable of. Rather than be overwhelmed by that terrible list: buy a car, find somewhere to live … and all the things you now don’t have: economic security (or an economist), a partner for rest home wheelchair races … they help you see the possibilities, the things you do have: aptitude, brains, courage. Taking each problem one at a time, they solve it, and come up with a way forward. “You’ve got a plan now,” said the SPCA ladies, using the special voice that calms anxious horses and distempered dogs. “You’re going to be fabulous.” I felt like I couldn’t find fabulous if it arrived on a Pride float and covered me in glitter, but at least I had a plan.

And, oh, how they fed me: ika mata (raw fish), pan fried mahi mahi, fresh albacore tuna, coconut, banana, papaya. Fact: it’s very hard to maintain a state of constant misery with your toes in the sand, the sun on your face and mango juice running down your arm. Tell you what doesn’t help, though, and that’s taro. Even adding things: salt, chilli flakes, chocolate, Bloody Mary sauce, couldn’t make this tasteless purple fibroid appetizing. Quite frankly taro, I don’t think you are food, I think you are a building material mistaken for provisions.

Speaking of provisioning, this is exactly what I felt I was doing during my tropical fortnight of respite from real life. Like the Maori canoeists on the their great migration to New Zealand, making the most of Rarotonga’s plenteous bounty before the great journey ahead, I too had a long, long, long way to go before I’d be somewhere I could call home.

And you know what? After years of self-prescribed regulations around food, eating whatever you want is nothing short of miraculously freeing, literally chicken soup for the soul, albeit in the form of fresh sashimi, lobster, “another glass of rose?” (Yes, please) and then a nap. While you can’t actually eat away the heartache, you can buy a dress a size up, which gives you a marvellous sense of having achieved something that day. Every night I went to bed full and slept dreamless, every morning I swam in the sea or snorkelled out to the reef, floating above the coral houses of silly little fish with long beaky noses. Round and brown after two weeks in the hands of animal welfare experts, sporting a lovely glossy coat, I was so tranquilised I completely forgot what day it was, and missed my flight home.

Death & Weirdness in the Friendship Zone

The end of a long-term relationship is a hard road: unwinding and unravelling what was formerly twinned and mingled takes time. Rending asunder (as no man should let, the Bible says, which is probably why women end up doing it all), you go through a lot of packing tape. And tissues. After 15 years, you haven’t just amassed an amazing collection of lidless plastic pottles and guarantees for devices that broke long ago, you share a tonne of friends. Friends he brought to the relationship, friends you brought, friends you made along the way, and just like matrimonial property, they’ll be divided too. “You keep Dave, I’ll keep Tammy…” Guest lists become super-awkward, sides get taken – even if neither of you is an ass hat − however, coffee klatch collateral is the least of it.

The truly weird stuff starts happening not long after you break up. First, you discover just how many colossal numpties you know, and (spoiler alert) that some of them never liked you anyway. People you’ve been friends with for years will say the most astonishingly stupid things. “You’ll be on the Tinder,” they’ll declare, seeming to believe you’ll bounce back when you can hardly put lipstick on, look like an unmade bed and have convinced yourself you’ll never have sex again in your life.

Now you are single and the protective cloak of coupledom formerly shielding you from the slings and arrows of outrageous perverts has fallen from your shoulders, other women’s husbands will offer you more than a shoulder to cry on and accidentally pocket dial you while in the car with their wives. Friends will decide, despite your clear penchant for hot blonde men, they can fix you up with their strange uncle Pete who has brown teeth and no hair and a million conspiracy theories. Hey, you’re single, you should just be grateful for the attention.

Smug marrieds will shun you, thinking divorce is contagious (actually, Brad and Angelina were perfectly OK before my relationship broke up) and because they think their husbands are pocket dialling you, you round-heeled slapper.

If you are mad enough to accept an invitation to a party at a time when you should be avoiding all social obligations because you cry at the drop of a hat and this makes your eyes all puffy, guests possessing the emotional intelligence of an uncooked potato, will ask ‘How are you?’ in tones reserved for news of terminal illness. This is a lot like the reporter who asks the homeowner how they’re feeling as they stand in front of the smoking ruin of their house. Unsurprisingly, “Just peachy” isn’t the answer. Then there are the friends you have to comfort, reassure love still exists. “But I held you up as an example of a great relationship, how could you do this to me?” Um…sorry?

Rubberneckers, gossip hounds and the secretly-pleased-to-see-you-miserable-because-your-non-stop-loved-up-happiness-was-getting-on-their-tits will lust after the juicy details, pop over with a bunch of rhubarb, a ‘How are you?’ and an expectant pause. Don’t give them anything. Provide absolutely zero salacious details. It will KILL them.

You’ll need some wins, because studies show we lose 8 friends when a long-term relationship ends. Three of those are most likely to have been friends of your ex first, so fairly painless. The others will hurt though, but you can avoid significant losses by not trash-talking or making your friends pledge allegiance: “He’s dead to me. Dead, I say.” They don’t want to act as a go-between either. In international relations this is called ‘shuttle diplomacy,’ in real life it’s called ‘starting shit.’ Yes, it might always have been ‘uteruses before duderuses,’ however it ain’t easy being Switzerland, and your girlfriends will still like your ex. So they should: you wouldn’t have fallen for him if wasn’t completely awesome.

Another Twilight Zone thing is receiving more kindness from complete strangers: Facebook friends you’ve never met, exes not seen for years (anyone really, outside the inner circle of pain), than your real friends. The reason for this is that it’s quite tiresome, listening to hours of venting and being embarrassed by you dissolving into tears at the pub and after a month or two or four, your friends will justifiably feel like throwing in the towel. Which is why you need to be the best-est friend there is. Bring wine. Be jolly (within reason, there’s nothing scarier than brittle hilarity). Ask them if they’ve lost weight. Tell them their hair looks lovely. Because you’re going to need all the friends you can get.

A Brush with Fury

For reasons that I won’t go into here (although when has discretion ever stopped me before?), I spent all of last week in a state of extreme rage. Not a cut-off-in-traffic fume. Not the rocketing blood pressure caused by the blatant non-cooperation of your children. No. Angrier than that.

I’m not talking about anger’s limp nutritional sister ‘hanger’, either, which I witnessed in the Tamster when I took my super-ire to her house in an attempt to win the seldom-coveted title of Worst House Guest Ever (hosts just love it when you dispense with the niceties and argue with everything they say). Dinner delayed by an hour and a half while I perched on the ledge of wrath, hunched like a prehistoric carrion bird, ripping fluffy things to pieces with my talons and shrieking at the sky, Tammy changed from the kind of person who signs up for fundraising walks and bakes muffins for the infirm to a starving shrew faster than you could say ‘my carrots are getting cold.’

As the room developed a sudden poltergeist chill, a look of complete terror flitted across the face of her fiancé, who leapt to his feet to cook her a steak touts-bloody-suite. “Does this happen often?” I inquired. We were both whispering. Frankly, the Tamster had scared the piss out of us. “Yes,” he said. “You’re usually OK once the only sound you can hear is her knife and fork against the plate.”

This, as I said, is NOT the kind of angry I have been. I have been much, much, much angrier than that. Blow the buttons off your blouse and turn your skin a nasty shade of green angry. Possessed by a fury so incredibly potent, nuclear fission, Rutherford old chap, is small beer in comparison. Fearing an explosion would leave me with naught but tattered stumps, I did what anyone would do: let my fingers do the talking and Googled ‘anger management’.

Anger the emotion is neither good nor bad, say the experts. Like any emotion, it’s conveying a message, telling you that a situation is upsetting, or unjust, or threatening. If your kneejerk reaction is to go code red, however, that message never has a chance to be communicated. So, while it’s perfectly normal to feel angry when you’ve been mistreated or wronged, anger becomes a problem when you start fantasizing about holding someone’s head under the water using a paddleboard paddle and leaving their body for the sharks.

“Come over,” said Tall Gorgeous Blonde, “we’ll do Drunk Angry Painting.” I’d never heard of this, but Drunk Angry Painting is actually a thing. Having now experienced it, I believe it should be offered as a form of therapy alongside Lacanian psychoanalysis and Gestalt psychology.

Here, roughly (I’m no expert), is a beginner’s guide to this incredibly restorative past time: first, at a dining room table or an equally long, large space, lay out some blank canvases, tubes of paint in every colour, a glass of water to clean your brushes and brushes themselves in a variety of sizes. Open the first bottle of red wine. Slap paint onto a canvas while simultaneously shouting and swearing, or shouting swear words. You might briefly be reminded of Rolf Harris-style pictures made up of random swathes and squiggles: “it’s the Queen!” Further contemplation would be inappropriate. You are not a pervert, you are an angry person.

Should you be the silent angry type, perhaps you might like to express yourself in violent dabs and splashes, press your brush so hard against the canvas the wee metal thing holding the bristles together splits. This is not a judging place, this is an art space. Open the second bottle of wine. Remember to drink from your wine glass not the brush water glass, whose contents are now a similar colour.

Still lives are the best subjects for Drunk Angry Painting, as life models can be confronting. To this end, Tall Gorgeous Blonde set up a vase of fresh lilies on the table, and we both attempted a rendering. Hers was a symphony of loveliness in white and pink, executed by a hand with real talent. Mine was acid green and black and resembled cancer cells painted in absinthe and tar. To look at it was to catch a glimpse of something rotten and ancient, something truly awful, like a clown that lives in the sewer and is really a giant spider. But my god did I feel better.

Unhappy Ending

Julian Barnes’ Sense of an Ending won the Man Booker in 2011. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it (obviously I understood the words, they just weren’t linked up in a way that made such an accolade rational) plus, it was boring. I don’t need wizard schools or dragons, but shouldn’t something happen in a book? Isn’t that what ‘plot’ means? Don’t you hate worthy books that make you feel like a thickie? There’s something Emperor’s new clothes about them: “Everyone else understands this astonishing work of fiction, except you, you low-brow gimp.”

Critical reception only served to underscore my stupidity. “Do not be misled by its brevity,” said Anna Brookner of The Telegraph, “its mystery is as deeply embedded as the most archaic of memories.” I don’t know what that means either. Sense of an Ending is however, being rather wee, perfect for stabilizing a wonky desk.

Anyway, I’m no Jim Flynn − far be it for me to suggest anyone’s torchlight list, it’s just that I am currently experiencing my own sense of an ending, packing up the house where I have lived for 15 years. It seems you can only leave the Crime Triangle in a police car, a coffin or a divorce. Either way, you’re going to go through a lot of tissues.

Putting your life in boxes is hard. I find its best to just look at things out of the corner of your eye, lest you be overwhelmed by the recollection of when and where you bought them (as a side note, what is up with Facebook Memories? Every single bloody morning Facebook says, ‘We care about you Lisa,’ and then whacks me in the head with a picture taken in happier times. I’m starting to feel that you do NOT care about me, Facebook. I think you might be a frenemy, and if a person, the kind who tells you you’d look awesome if you dyed your hair red using henna, because they want to ugly you up with some permanency.

Anyone who’s been through this knows it’s the most miserable thing in the world (not the henna, although that is regrettable and almost impossible to get rid of, short of shaving your head) apart from a death. And it is a death really, you become a ghost in your own life. A haggard one, because the end of a long-term relationship is dreadfully ageing. Your face looks like an unmade bed, yet friends (breaking up is a great way to find out how many colossal numpties you know, and that some of them − spoiler alert − never liked you anyway) will declare, “You’ll be on the Tinder” when you can hardly manage to apply lipstick.

In recent years there has being a growing trend for house-cooling parties and divorce parties, even mid-life crisis parties. Given how fleeting our passage through this world, how short our beautiful butterfly lives, it’s only human to celebrate things: beginnings, endings. My wise friend Alex G said in some ways all celebrations are commiserations. Funerals: everyone gets to eat those fabulous little sandwiches while you lie there with the wrong makeup on, rotting. Weddings: a public commitment to only have sex with one other person for the rest of your life. Birthdays: hahaha you’re older. Anniversaries: congratulations, you’ve left the toilet seat up for forty years. Retirement: welcome to end-times levels of boredom, here’s a watch.

Life is naturally full of endings and beginnings as we change and grow, shed our skins and emerge new creatures time and time again. Of course, beginnings are a lot less scary when you’re young; finding yourself far from the finish line in your forties (as if a giant hand had plucked you off the chessboard and tossed you on the carpet) is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish. Beginnings are wonderful, soap operas and sagas waiting to be written. Endings are a different story entirely, and the end of something very, very good is the saddest story ever. But that’s the thing about fairy tales: sometimes you don’t get a happily-ever-after, sometimes the witch gets her way.

So take one last look at the place where so many happy memories were made. Raise a mental toast. Leave your key on the kitchen windowsill and pull the front door closed. You’re not coming back. There’s nothing more to be said here than, “The End.”

Poor But Nice

Last year, a reader wrote in the comments section beneath an article of mine posted online, that I was ‘a smug and entitled farkety fark fark.’ Well, that’s not exactly what she wrote but journalism standards prevent a verbatim repetition. I’d been having a whinge about getting jailed by the Americans: “orange isn’t the new black, in fact orange doesn’t suit anyone, blah de blah blah” … when the truth was I had little to complain about, being middle class with a rich boyfriend and all my own teeth. The Americans let me out, after all.

Twelve months later, single and poor, I’ve realised that particular reader, while clearly dealing with an anger problem, had a point: I was being an arse-hat, maybe not in that article but definitely in life, where I had become a bit of a mean girl. And this is the problem with having money: it becomes easy to mock those who don’t have it, harder to be compassionate. I’m not saying the wealthy are dicks, maybe it’s just me.

Material comfort is like a blanket, good for hiding under. Have it for long enough, you’ll forget the years without two cents to rub together. You might even, in your arrogance of disregard, pick up an impoverished hitchhiker and make fun of him later at a dinner party for being whiffy.

I was reminded of this yesterday at the nice warm library (where the internet is free), after biking into town through a rain storm from the one-room cabin in the woods where I now live, when I realised there was little to distinguish me from the other homeless people. I too, was soaked through and ponged a tad, I too talked to myself occasionally. More of a thoughtful ‘hummm’ than out-and-out ranting, if you know what I mean − the point is nothing but luck separates us from the less fortunate, and this is a very good thing to be forced to remember. Over our lifetime, if we are blessed, we go up and down in status, have stuff and lose stuff, and what’s really important, rich or poor, is not the new-fangled-ness of the white ware you’ve accumulated, but that you are a good person.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been poor, but after 15 years of double income bliss, fair to say it’s come as an unwelcome surprise. I’m broke. I’m so broke I have negative money. That’s less than no money. The bank called me to complain that I had insufficient funds. “I couldn’t agree with you more,” I said. “My current level of fiscal insecurity is shocking.” They seemed to think I was doing it on purpose. That I was being broke just to annoy them.

To begin with there is a kind of nobility in poverty, a Mary Tyler Moore, ‘I’m going to make it after all’ will to survive, a Gloria Gaynor soundtrack. This wears thin the first time you realise it’s going to be a petrol-or-food situation this week. And everything is so expensive. Like an old person rocking on the porch, reminiscing, fondly do I recall the days when I went to the supermarket and bought whatever I wanted. Such disgusting prolificacy: $24 bottles of wine! $8 cheeses! It’s true what they say: two really do live cheaper than one. Especially if one of the two is a man with a large salary.

It is with a sob and a sigh and a gluttonous look in my eye that I farewell those years of plenty. Did I mention I’m a writer? The average New Zealand writer makes $12.50 a year. Before taxes. Because of which, some of the things I now cannot afford include: pedicures, pride, bikini waxes (things are dire down there) and the dentist. It seems I am destined to be a toothless crone with gnarly toes and pubes to her knees. Currently living in the country, after months of sawing wood, my right arm is absolutely massive, making me look lop-sided. On a positive note, I’ve almost completely stopped accidentally sawing my hand and leg in the process and will soon be strong enough to start the lawn mower. So at least one overgrown jungle will be getting a trim.

When the sheep noises get too much, I come into town, my enormous arm hanging out the car window, and marvel at the modern conveniences: bath tubs, flush toilets, washing machines and best of all: television. Tell you what, if you haven’t had a TV for a while, even sport is interesting. Sometimes, watching the news at a friend’s house, I swear that lovely Peter Williams is smiling right at me. I wonder if he has a girlfriend? Tell him I’m poor, but nice.

Bridget Jones of Cold Mountain

Remember Renee Zellweger in Cold Mountain? You should, she was awesome. So awesome, she won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award for her portrayal of hard-scrabble Ruby Thewes, who saves pathetic gentlewoman Ada’s (played by Nicole Kidman) life by teaching her how to run her North Carolina farm during the American Civil War. In one particular scene, Ada is hiding under the porch from a bolshie rooster. Ruby wrings its neck and cooks it.

Now, I’d like you to imagine, if you will, another character made famous by Miss Zellweger: Bridget Jones. Let’s say, that after her life went all Samsung Note 7, Bridget found herself Darcy-less and living in a one-room bach, a single woman of significant uselessness, surrounded by trees, not a modern convenience in sight, falling over a lot. Are you imagining? Good, because that is my life at the moment.

Living in the country requires a practical mind. I do not have one. You need to have a plan, and candles. And be able to dig a deep hole. Lessons are often learnt the hard way: holding down bits of wood with your bare feet while sawing them on the back steps is not a super idea, given there’s no cell phone coverage and an ambulance, should you be able call one, takes 35 minutes from town. Could I tie a tourniquet? I don’t think so. I can do a lovely table napkin, though, and make a face towel look like a slightly flaccid swan. Best get to know the neighbours.

You need mental fortitude and muscles to live in the country. After months of sawing wood, my right arm is absolutely massive, making me look like Popeye after only one can of spinach. While this means I tend to paddle in circles, I will soon be strong enough to start the lawn mower, a man job if ever there was one. Things you also need a man for: opening jars, climbing on the roof to discourage blackbirds from nesting in the chimney and doing something about the decomposing possum slumped face down, white nubs of vertebrae exposed, at the bottom of the old water tank.

I briefly thought about going on Tinder, because you never know what people have a kink for: there might be someone out there who gets off on manual labour, some kind of horticultural BDSM type, and all I’d have to do would be go out into the garden every now and then and shout at them while they pushed the lawn mower around in a ball gag and leather shorts. But women are currently leaping off balconies to get away from Tinder dates and a friend told me she went on one where the guy said, after she started hysterically crying about the end of her marriage, “Shall we just have sex anyway?” so I did the man-things myself. Cue Gloria Gaynor soundtrack.

Speaking of surviving, the Tamster has some wacky idea I’ll grow my own salad greens and wee pots of herbs to save on the groceries, but she comes from Winton. Although, there are spring lambs in the back paddock, and they look delicious. Their mothers make a heck lot of noise, perhaps they read my meat-loving mind.

When the sheep noises get too much, I come into town, my enormous arm hanging out the car window, and marvel at the modern conveniences: bath tubs, flush toilets, washing machines and best of all: television. Tell you what, if you haven’t had a TV for a while, even sport is interesting. Sometimes, watching the news at a friend’s house, I swear that lovely Peter Williams is smiling right at me.

Inside the nice warm library (where the internet is free) on a rainy day last week, I suddenly realised there was little to distinguish me from the other homeless people. I too, was soaked through and ponged a bit, I too talked to myself occasionally. More of a thoughtful ‘hummm’ than out-and-out ranting, if you know what I mean – and of course I’m not homeless, I have a roof over my head, a nice warm bed to sleep in and yesterday connected the gas bottle to the hose thingie without help from anyone. I might be the Bridget Jones of Cold Mountain right now, but one day soon I might be a Ruby Thewes. A danger to chickens. A strong, independent woman. Who probably shouldn’t light any matches.

Is there a Doctor in the house? who Cares?

Last weekend I was MC for the 43rd Annual Conference of the Perioperative Nurses College of NZNO. I practiced saying ‘perioperative’ about a hundred times beforehand, even though, to begin with, I really had no idea what it meant: I just thought it would be nice to swap jeans and gumboots for frocks and heels, a transition not without glamour-associated side effects. Hair and makeup done, driving to the venue, I kept catching sight of myself in the rear-view mirror and freaking out. Who is that woman?! It’s you, you dozy mare.

Perioperative nurses are theatre nurses, Florence Nightingales doling out a kind smile, a reassuring pat on the hand to patients about to undergo a traumatic life experience. While the 12-year-old surgeon is telling you how awesome what he’s about to do to you is, medically, perioperative nurses are the ones who make you feel that, within reason, nobody’s going to laugh at your bits or draw a moustache on your face while you’re unconscious. Doing all the literal and metaphorical heavy lifting, they put up with shite pay, long nights staying awake eating crap food and drinking worse coffee and you never hear of them striking. They are the unsung heroes of our healthcare system.

The conference was attended by nurses of many stripes and specialities, and I’ll tell you what, they have very strong stomachs. Unflinching, they watched a presentation on endoscopic scoliosis surgery from Dunedin Hospital’s world-beating dream team of Alan Carsten, Ginny Martin and Jason Henwood which had me staring at the wall, thinking Halloween had come early and breathing heavily, much to the amusement of those seated next to me. I was tempted to put my head between my legs but, wearing borrowed Charmaine Reveley and about to field questions from the audience, I thought it might muffle my voice.

The exhibitor stands were filled with objects that looked like they could clear drains, mix concrete or rescue a wedding ring from the back of the dryer. There were enough beds and clamps and needles and things to easily set up a wee Botox clinic as a side line − for some reason they didn’t. I wandered the trade floor picking things up and asking what they were (this initially caused some confusion, as everybody knows what a ureteral access sheath is, apparently) however my curiosity peaked after someone mimed hammering something long and pointy into a hip bone. Anaesthesia was invented for a reason. Sometimes it’s better not to know.

Nurses are a tight knit bunch, mostly, I think, because they speak a language the public don’t, can toss off: ‘neuromodulation in homeostasis’ without blinking, and because they see some truly awful stuff. They can hardly rock up to a dinner party and share work stories in a getting-it-off-your-chest manner (people are eating). Hospital work stories aren’t ‘weird Jenny from Sales is copying my outfits’ more: ‘we had to amputate the leg’ − which can put you off your prosciutto-wrapped asparagus; meaning nurses tend to keep the secrets of the operating theatre to themselves. It’s a very stressful occupation. Not like in the 1970s, when the first perioperative nurses conference was held in Dunedin. Back then, nurses wore the white uniforms and stockings of a thousand schoolboy fantasies, the job was by all accounts rather fun and, if you were of a mind to, you could smoke INSIDE the hospital.

Maybe this pressure is why nurses inhabit an alternate reality when it comes to a sense of humour. An example of this is the fact that the perioperative nurses’ college magazine is called the Dissector. The first, second and third time I heard this, I nearly wet myself. Nobody else seemed to find this remotely funny yet they were in bits over Wellington having the highest number of patients presenting with foreign objects inserted inside them this year (Dunedin had the fewest, in case you’re wondering. We just have better things to do, I guess).

So, whether you’ve ‘fallen’ on a bust of Beethoven or chopped off all your toes not looking where you’re shovelling (and there, but for the grace of God, go I) know that in your moment of need, the lovely nurse telling you that everything’s going to be alright has just spent three days topping up the skills to keep that promise. Worry instead about what you’re going to tell your mum.

Eat, Cry, Swim

Look, I’ll spare you the gory details, break-up stories are all the same − suffice it to say, after ticking along in a perfectly predictable, blissfully happy manner, a couple of months ago my relationship of 15 years went up like an unattended chip pan. Yes, that’s right. Reader, I did not marry him.

Thin (as thin as a short, curvy girl can get) and wretched, with a face like a dropped pie, I packed my tattered self-esteem into a tiny suitcase and flew to Rarotonga to spend two weeks with friends who run the island’s SPCA, reasoning they’d know what to do with a sick animal. I must have been giving off palpable rays of devastation on the flight over, because the man seated next to me was practically limbo-ing into the aisle. No man on earth wants to rub elbows with a sad lady.

Which is why turning to female friends in times of crisis is vital. I’d forgotten how lovely it can be to share a house with other women, if you’re not students and nobody’s washing their oversized dingy grey bras in the kitchen sink. We drank coffee in our nighties in the morning, drank wine in the evening, hugged freely and made frangipani flower crowns for our hair – simple, unchallenging, lady-time things. They’d both lived through it: that punched-in-the-stomach state of near-death hopelessness that follows the end of long relationship. They knew what it was like to be so lonely you turn the radio on just for company, so emotionally squished you weep until the pillow is soggy or dehydration sets in. So when they said, ‘things will get better,’ I tended to believe them.

Another great thing about female friends (apart from the fact that they let you ‘whaaaa’ all over them, leaving damp patches on their clothes, and never tell you how ugly you look when you cry) is that they provide clarity, sooth a tumultuous inner world, remind you who you really are and what you’re capable of. Rather than be overwhelmed by that terrible list: buy a car, find somewhere to live … and all the things you now don’t have: economic security (or an economist), a partner for rest home wheelchair races … they help you see the possibilities, the things you do have: aptitude, brains, courage. Taking each problem one at a time, they solve it, and come up with a way forward. “You’ve got a plan now,” said the SPCA ladies, using the special voice that calms anxious horses and distempered dogs. “You’re going to be fabulous.” I felt like I couldn’t find fabulous if it arrived on a Pride float and covered me in glitter, but at least I had a plan.

And, oh, how they fed me: ika mata (raw fish), pan fried mahi mahi, fresh albacore tuna, coconut, banana, papaya. Fact: it’s very hard to maintain a state of constant misery with your toes in the sand, the sun on your face and mango juice running down your arm. Tell you what doesn’t help, though, and that’s taro. Even adding things: salt, chilli flakes, chocolate, Bloody Mary sauce, couldn’t make this tasteless purple fibroid appetizing. Quite frankly taro, I don’t think you are food, I think you are a building material mistaken for provisions.

Speaking of provisioning, this is exactly what I felt I was doing during my tropical fortnight of respite from real life. Like the Maori canoeists on the their great migration to New Zealand, making the most of Rarotonga’s plenteous bounty before the great journey ahead, I too had a long, long, long way to go before I’d be somewhere I could call home.

And you know what? After years of self-prescribed regulations around food, eating whatever you want is nothing short of miraculously freeing, literally chicken soup for the soul, albeit in the form of fresh sashimi, lobster, “another glass of rose?” (Yes, please) and then a nap. While you can’t actually eat away the heartache, you can buy a dress a size up, which gives you a marvellous sense of having achieved something that day. Every night I went to bed full and slept dreamless, every morning I swam in the sea or snorkelled out to the reef, floating above the coral houses of silly little fish with long beaky noses. Round and brown after two weeks in the hands of animal welfare experts, sporting a lovely glossy coat, I was so tranquilised I completely forgot what day it was, and missed my flight home.

Bingle Struthers

2016 local body elections: it’s been exhausting. Although that might just be me, life is pretty tiring at the moment and one of my arms is bigger than the other from sawing so much firewood. Still, mustn’t grumble.

2016 local body elections: the dirt thrown, the promises made, those pesky hoardings everywhere, leaning over the grass like top-heavy daffodils, plastered with the faces of people you’ve never heard of and won’t again after today. Like billboards of the disappeared.

2016 local body elections: the candidates are weary. Every morning they pluck new greys. It’s been a gruelling three months on the hustings and their partners are sick to death of all the smiling, it’s like living with the Joker. They look forward to sitting on the couch in red wine-stained trackies, retiring from social obligations and snubbing the neighbours.

2016… ah, f*** it. Voting closes at noon. Who will be the mayor of this fine almost-metropolis? Who will park their bottoms in the seats of power for hours and hours, gradually going numb with making the important decisions about mud tank hoovering, shifting the Delta debt around and where to bury the sand sausages?

We must all do our bit for democracy − but sometimes it’s hard to give a stuff and, quite frankly, there seem to be a lot of candidates who would suck at it or use public office as a platform for alien abduction stories. Well, that’s freedom though, isn’t it: the egalitarian, unalterable right of the loonies to inherit the earth should someone vote for them. As the Americans say, anyone can grow up to be president. I bet they’re regretting that.

In a race where voter apathy is usually the only winner, last weekend a new contender emerged while the sleeping city slept. Perched atop the old post office, brooding, chin on fist, like a giant bat or an undertaker with flappy lapels: Bingle Struthers. Who is this mystery man bringing up the rear; long of face, funeral of suit? Uncommonly handsome, if you have a thing for cadavers, Bingle is a former navy man with a love of ska. Granted an exclusive interview, I asked him if there were any skeletons in his closet. Despite rumours he would often start drinking his own urine before the ship had even left port, did his years of seamanship end in an honourable discharge? “With respect, the over-inquisitive media shouldn’t enquire about one’s closet or discharge,” said Bingle, remaining hereafter aloof, a virtue in politicians, if you ask me.

Bingle’s campaign staff of soccer hooligans and anarchic design graduates have painstakingly condensed his 500 page, at-times-rambling manifesto into a series of bite-sized slogans containing the wisdom of proactive solutions and the comfort of empty pandering:

·        Sludge tanks or slush funds? Your choice with Bingle.

·        When times are hard, Bingle is really hard.

·        Let’s make Mosgiel great.

·        Hearts and heads up moving in an agreed direction.

·        Not derision but vision for erosion.

·        Transparency, accountability, rather nice upholstery and washing taken in.

You wouldn’t let him get close enough to kiss a baby, if you cared for it, but one has to agree some of these sound just vague enough to be mistaken for quasi-philosophical Facebook memes. While you might think it’s down to the strength of both your pelvic floor and morning coffee, actually, local government shapes pretty much every aspect of our daily lives. If, God forbid, you fell ill and had to go to Dunedin Public Hospital, you’d see just where ignorance of that fact gets you: 1960s healthcare, complete with gruel.

I don’t have the time to do something about yucky patient food or half-finished cycle ways or backyards that look like swim-up bars because I’m trying to build muscle in my other arm so I don’t look so lopsided, but someone has to. And while you, maybe, have to admire his tenacity in standing for council in 2006, 2010 and 2011, not to mention this year, a tick for Bingle will definitely invalidate your voting paper, because he isn’t on the ballot, and because you’re supposed to number the candidates in order of preference. Bingle, Bingle, Bingle … it’s almost as if you don’t exist.

Drunk Angry Painting

For reasons that I won’t go into in a newspaper published in the town I live in (although when has good taste or discretion ever stopped me before?), I spent all of last week in a state of extreme rage. Not a cut-off-in-traffic fume. Not the rocketing blood pressure caused by the blatant non-cooperation of your children. No. Angrier than that.

I’m not talking about anger’s limp nutritional sister ‘hanger’, either, which I witnessed in the Tamster when I took my super-ire to her house in an attempt to win the seldom-coveted title of Worst House Guest Ever (hosts just love it when you dispense with the niceties and argue with everything they say). Dinner delayed by an hour and a half while I perched on the ledge of wrath, hunched like a prehistoric carrion bird, ripping fluffy things to pieces with my talons and shrieking at the sky, Tammy changed from the kind of person who signs up for fundraising walks and bakes muffins for the infirm to a starving shrew faster than you could say ‘my carrots are getting cold.’

As the room developed a sudden poltergeist chill, a look of complete terror flitted across the face of her fiancé, who leapt to his feet to cook her a steak touts-bloody-suite. “Does this happen often?” I inquired. We were both whispering. Frankly, the Tamster had scared the piss out of us. “Yes,” he said. “You’re usually OK once the only sound you can hear is her knife and fork against the plate.”

This, as I said, is NOT the kind of angry I have been. I have been much, much, much angrier than that. Blow the buttons off your blouse and turn your skin a nasty shade of green angry. Possessed by a fury so incredibly potent, nuclear fission, Rutherford old chap, is small beer in comparison. Fearing an explosion would leave me with naught but tattered stumps, I did what anyone would do: let my fingers do the talking and Googled ‘anger management’.

Anger the emotion is neither good nor bad, say the experts. Like any emotion, it’s conveying a message, telling you that a situation is upsetting, or unjust, or threatening. If your kneejerk reaction is to go code red, however, that message never has a chance to be communicated. So, while it’s perfectly normal to feel angry when you’ve been mistreated or wronged, anger becomes a problem when you start fantasizing about holding someone’s head under the water using a paddleboard paddle and leaving their body for the sharks.

“Come over,” said Tall Gorgeous Blonde, “we’ll do Drunk Angry Painting.” I’d never heard of this, but Drunk Angry Painting is actually a thing. Having now experienced it, I believe it should be offered as a form of therapy alongside Lacanian psychoanalysis and Gestalt psychology.

Here, roughly (I’m no expert), is a beginner’s guide to this incredibly restorative past time: first, at a dining room table or an equally long, large space, lay out some blank canvases, tubes of paint in every colour, a glass of water to clean your brushes and brushes themselves in a variety of sizes. Open the first bottle of red wine. Slap paint onto a canvas while simultaneously shouting and swearing, or shouting swear words. You might briefly be reminded of Rolf Harris-style pictures made up of random swathes and squiggles: “it’s the Queen!” Further contemplation would be inappropriate. You are not a pervert, you are an angry person.

Should you be the silent angry type, perhaps you might like to express yourself in violent dabs and splashes, press your brush so hard against the canvas the wee metal thing holding the bristles together splits. This is not a judging place, this is an art space. Open the second bottle of wine. Remember to drink from your wine glass not the brush water glass, whose contents are now a similar colour.

Still lives are the best subjects for Drunk Angry Painting, as life models can be confronting. To this end, Tall Gorgeous Blonde set up a vase of fresh lilies on the table, and we both attempted a rendering. Hers was a symphony of loveliness in white and pink, executed by a hand with real talent. Mine was acid green and black and resembled cancer cells painted in absinthe and tar. To look at it was to catch a glimpse of something rotten and ancient, something truly awful, like a clown that lives in the sewer and is really a giant spider. But my god did I feel better.

Fell the Fear and... No, That'll do

Everyone has something they’re afraid of; a particular panic-button pushing phobia that just thinking about causes unsightly sweat circles. Some fears are completely rational: I am afraid of a shark eating me, ever since a surfer friend told me you’re never less than a kilometre from one in the ocean. “One!” scoffed the economist. “You’ll be lucky if there’s only (seeing my face) won…derful thing, Mother Nature.”

As an aside − come over here by the arras for a moment − I’ve noticed that when you say you’re afraid of sharks; at a dinner party for instance, someone always pipes up: “It’s the ones on land you’ve got to look out for!” As if a poker cheat/internet fraudster is going to rip your arm off.

Anyway, a quick poll of friends revels some pretty weird fears: black toilet seats (fairly uncommon, I would think), balloons (potential for popping), commercial radio, coins, Mike Hosking. One otherwise sound gentleman has an irrational fear of Komodo dragons. There’s absolutely no chance he’ll ever see one, but he freaks out about them anyway. He’s afraid of them in theory. A sensible lady broadcaster confessed ET gives her the absolute heebeegeebees. She’s dreading the day her children discover this ‘classic’ film.

Most women fear spiders and anything with too many legs and an ability to skitter. Skittering is creepy. That the poor spider in the bath being shrieked at and appearance-judged, “It’s big, black and hairy! Get in here now!” (spiders can’t hear, just sense vibrations, so he’s experiencing an earthquake on porcelain tundra and hoping it will soon end) has no desire to run up your leg is of no consequence. He could. A lack of symmetry is also intolerable to the point of anguish for some ladies. Makes sense. Furniture out of alignment can be tripped over on your way to the toilet in the middle of the night. Thus it might be for reasons of safety that our whole house is so neat it wants to scream: Hitler corners, pathological pillow plumping − or a deeply unflattering reflection of my mental state.

The economist, like many men, is afraid of flat pack furniture. It takes a great deal of pre-assembly swearing and beer consumption before he can even approach the box it came in. He also has a thing about unhappy women. “I don’t know what I can do about it,” he says, displaying a staggering ignorance of cause + effect, “except stay away from them.”

Both of us were, until a few weeks ago, terrified of the chainsaw. Not without good reason. “Do you like meat?” the salesman asked when we bought it up to the counter. Oh goodie, I thought, he’s going to invite us to a Stihl-owners-only BBQ. No. “This baby will make a kilo of mince per second,” he said. By the time it dawned on us townies that we were made out of meat, it was too late and the transaction had gone through. “I still thought about handing it back,” said the economist.

For months, the chainsaw was the bane of our existence. Started once, it unleashed a terrible blood-thirsty roar (“I need my fingers to play the piano!” I lied, sprinting for the house) and hereafter remained the cleanest chainsaw in New Zealand. You could have mounted it on a plinth in the foyer of a law firm and called it modern art. The pile of dead tree limbs requiring chopping into smaller, burnable pieces increased exponentially until it resembled a Wicker Man pyre. Not only was winter coming, but, sensing weakness, random men had started dropping by the house and mansplaining for hours. Something had to be done.

Psychologists tell us fear is evolution’s way of keeping us safe in the face of danger. That when awakened, it can let loose abilities we never knew we had, unlock reserves of strength otherwise hidden. But I didn’t want to lift an automobile off a small child, I just wanted the firewood chopped. Rather than ‘feel the fear and do it anyway,’ − I think you’ll find you can eliminate worries, fears and anxieties by simply getting a man in. He used our chainsaw, by the way, and spoke very highly of it.

We all have our own personal chainsaw. The secret is to acknowledge the fear. Freely admit it. Say ‘hello’ to it. Learn more about what makes it special: “Without sharks, you take away the apex predator of the ocean and you destroy the whole food chain,” said Peter Benchley. So special.

Sh*tfight

Several times now well-meaning, if misguided, people have suggested I stand for council. I know. When my mother-in-law heard about this, the first time it happened, she almost broke a hip laughing. Because I simply do not have the temperament for it. Can you imagine me coping with long boring meetings, misogynist old farts or the tedious minutiae of engineering reports: “Is it going to flood? It’s not? Excellent, let’s all go home then.”

Such were my thoughts last Saturday as I sat through a three hour meeting that made Brexit look straightforward, held at a school in a seaside community just outside Dunedin. There were the usual pitfalls: technological failures, reading out entire reports instead of just handing copies around, a bewildering focus on the cost of tea towels and whether it should be put in the general expenses column.

That took care of the first hour. Next, to the reason for the great number of permanent and part time residents who’d turned out in the freezing rain for a meeting they’d normally sleep through: plans to install a toilet on the reserve of this quiet seaside village. A poo had been seen (sadly not photographically documented − as Councillor Andrew Noone later intimated, poo hearsay isn’t good enough) and on the basis of this single fouling, events had been set in motion resulting in the most frightening phrase in the English language being uttered: “Hello, I’m from the council, and I’m here to help.”

A toilet expert ran through the various considerations, three of which were purposefully completely absurd (“let’s put it in the cemetery,” oh, how culturally sensitive) in order to make the bad thing look less bad. “He really knows his shit,” said the economist, looking a little flushed. The room was getting hot, with impatience. We had come to bury Caesar but were being forced instead to listen to digressions on odour dispersal, bird bathing (something tourists do when there is water in a public facility involving washing their smalls and having a quick sluice of their stinky parts, the solution being a dry waste system) and the notorious difficulty of keeping public toilets clean. Security would be provided by the DCC to stop vandalism and antisocial behaviour. Good lord! This was really selling it.

Strangely polite, while child-size chairs crushed our spines to powder we listened and listened as the manifold intricacies of the thing we had absolutely no interest in having were explained at length. However, someone had pooped and someone had complained and now it was a public health matter, the council involved. Unfortunately there was no way to back out of their presence, or hypnotise them to ambivalence with, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” No diverting the great meddling eye of Sauron now.

Sweet old duffers inadvertently spoke great truths. “We don’t have busloads of people coming here,” they said. Yes, because there isn’t a toilet. “Wouldn’t a toilet attract more people to the area?” By Jove, I think you’ve got it! We could decide how much information we wanted listed on the council website, said the nice lady from Planning and Gravel (I think). Nothing could be done about Lonely Planet, obviously. Lonely Planet! What century were they living in? The only thing Lonely Planets were good for these days was shoring up the walls of Pakistani high rises, in lieu of bricks.

The economist demonstrated the Camping NZ app he had downloaded on his phone that morning, showing every toilet in the vicinity. “What is your point!?” thundered a local. Things fell apart. The centre could not hold, nor the veneer of civility. Freedom campers! Warrington! Last summer! Councillor Noone was of the opinion tourists were great for the economy. It was Nimby-ism to try to stop the toilet, and by extension, tourists. Well, yes, that’s exactly what it was. It was our backyard and we did not want it.

A toilet wouldn’t attract freedom campers − that was a ridiculous idea, apparently. I said I thought it was ridiculous to think it wouldn’t attract them. That if we built it, they would come. I was told on no uncertain terms that I was wrong. Something I will be delighted to be in the fullness of time, if it means no white campers cluttering up the foreshore for months on end, no rubbish or empty cockle beds. “Stop talking,” whispered the economist. “We have to live with these people.” But we also have to live with the consequences of the decisions we make, just as Great Britain now has to live with Boris’s.

Signs of the Times

The end of the world is nigh. Portents of doom abound, although it’s not locusts and boils this time. First, all the really good people have started dying. Bowie, Prince. Why isn’t it ever somebody like Gene Simmons from Kiss? Next, avocados cost $6 EACH. Soon, robots will take our jobs. Humans are to robots what horses were at the dawn of the automobile, complete with the same level of cynicism: “Think it’ll affect us?” “Neigh.” A bot may already be doing my job – I’m not sure you’d notice the difference, apart from a marked improvement in spelling and grammar.

The point being, things are stink and getting stinker. Folks are living in their cars. Not living in their cars like I did during Girlfriend Suitability Test holidays with the economist; where (and most women will identify with this) one puts up with mild indignities such as gritty coffee and sleeping in the back of a Holden Commodore for the chance to shag a hot bloke. No, New Zealanders are taking up residence in cars because they have nowhere else to go. This, in a country where the first Labour Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage, once carried tenants’ furniture into the first state home while people looked on, shouting ‘Hooray!’ A country that practically invented social welfare (actually, it was the Song dynasty in 1000AD, followed by the Holy Roman Empire, but by golly we were quick to get on board, in 1935). A place known for a love of fairness, men who cry at sheep dog trials, Telethons.

Today’s Kiwis are brilliant travellers, only too happy to shower the beggars of the world with spare change; wholly without sympathy when poverty clutters up the footpath at home. Because then it becomes, not an example of the roulette-like vagaries of Third World life: “Mate, you won’t believe the bloody shambles over there,” but someone who looks like us/talks like us/supports our team. In other words, our responsibility, our problem.

The first time I saw a beggar on the streets of Dunedin, I was astonished. I mentioned it later that night at a dinner party and heard him denounced as lazy, a bum. Someone making an (apparently) incredible amount of money doing nothing. Because it’s much more comforting to think a grimy, gap-toothed man surrounded by plastic bags has brought it on himself. Because just thinking about the financial knife edge most of us walk every day, the insurance-less, savings-less sliver of fingers-crossed that losing your job/husband/getting cancer could knock us off − the hairs-breadth separating respectability and destitution − is so frightening we’d rather not contemplate it. Better to see the homeless as shiftless losers. Wilful jumpers, not the fallen.

At dusk tonight, the Real Homeless of Auckland (many not beneficiaries but full-time employed) will begin gathering in Bruce Pullman Park, preparing to sleep in their cars while across town at the Pullman Hotel the stiletto-shod Real Housewives of Auckland wobble out to the Merc after a divine high tea spread (a mere $68 per person) of blueberry macarons, citrus tea cake, smoked salmon sandwiches and spinach tart topped with goat cheese foam; toasting their good fortune with a glass of Moet et Chandon ($18) or sharing a bottle: “Let’s push the boat out.” “We can’t, Binky’s taken it down the Sounds. Hahaha!” for only $90. Guess which group Matchbox Pictures are making a TV show about.

Norm Kirk (incidentally also a Labour PM − is there a pattern emerging?), who built his own house, right down to casting the bricks, after paying £40 for a Kaiapoi section, famously said people don’t want much just, “Someone to love, somewhere to work and something to hope for.” Now, if The Bachelor’s anything to go by, you’ll be lucky to find someone to love and a job that isn’t a complete waste of 4 years and a $50,000 loan. There’s still something to hope for, as long as it’s not owning your own home. Hope Trump doesn’t win.

The ‘nots’ vastly outnumbering the ‘haves,’ and the haves disinclined to share, this a good time to mention Jesus. “The poor are always with us,” he said, which politicians love to repeat as a verbal shrug, a way of saying, ‘Yeah, nah, it’s inevitable,’ conveniently forgetting the second half of this quote from the Gospel of Mark, which is ‘… and you can help them anytime you want.”

The robots haven’t yet taken over, but the heartless seem to be in power. Here, at the Apocalypse of decency, you’d better pray. Pray it doesn’t happen to you.

My Life with Dr Doolittle

There was a bustle in the hedgerow. It wasn’t a spring clean for the May Queen but a young mouse, lost, having taken the road less traveled only to come face-to-toe with a couple of pink giants. The boy giant bent down − the girl had fled − and extended a massive, rodent-squashing hand. Mousie feared the worst. Would he ever see his 200 brothers and sisters again? “Hey there, little fella,” said the giant, giving him wee pat across his back and neck.

The boatshed deck was covered with the effluvium of two of the world’s worst freedom campers. Australian blow-ins with loud squawking voices, legendarily messy nesters: a pair of white-faced herons. “Excellent guard birds, if you don’t mind a bit of poo,” said the economist (which, as recently discussed, I do) “and only 17 million left on the planet.”

‘My life with Doctor Doolittle,’ I thought.

“You’re welcome here!” he shouted at the circling herons − giving us the stink eye as they waited for us to relinquish the boatshed. They were desperate to go to the loo.

“For the love of Mike,” I muttered.

“What was that, darling?”

“For as long as you like,” I said.

“That’s my girl.”

The economist is an animal lover. Not like that guy out Mosgiel who was bothering ponies and not merely a dog person (needing the adoration of simpletons) or a cat person (masochistically requiring disdain). Not the kind of Animal Lover sung about by Brett Anderson, the lead singer of Brit-pop Indie band Suede, after his girlfriend came home with red scratches down her back from sleeping with Damon Albarn.

No. All creatures great and small amuse and endear themselves to the economist, make him say “Aww,” just by going about their business. From the alpacas we pass on our morning commute to the king cobra we almost stood on in Bangalore and the carpet shark sinuously swimming the sea bottom on Saturday; the economist’s relationship with the animal kingdom is one of unconditional love. Mine is conditional on how delicious they are.

Sometimes he reminds me of Disney’s Snow White, standing in the forest going “Tra-la-la” while bunnies, baby deer and bluebirds flock to her side. Except for the fact that he’s extremely manly, of course. Maybe St. Francis of Assisi, then, with considerably more hair. Sadly, there aren’t many like him in this country.

Because if we could talk to the animals they’d tell us New Zealanders are horribly cruel: whether its bobby calves, rodeo bulls or chooks in colony cages, our dominion over the beasts of earth and the birds of the sky is one of terror. Hitler was nicer to dogs then we are.

Yearly the SPCA releases a list of shame that would make you puke: tales of starvation, mutilation, torture and neglect. Whangarei man Joshua Heka filmed himself nailing possums to trees and hacking off their limbs, Canterbury farmer Clayton Dovey beat pigs in the head with an iron bar and bludgeoned 13 chickens to death. Puppies are cooked alive, kittens thrown against walls. “We have some of the strongest animal welfare laws in the world,” said minister for primary industries Nathan Guy. Fat lot of good they’re doing: animal cruelty is on the rise, with 14,000 abuse complaints last year, 6500 involving dogs alone.

Also cruel: raising a dog to be a tough sticker. Dogs just want to chase sticks and lift a leg against a lamppost, not bite children’s faces off. A dog doesn’t want to be called ‘dangerous’ it wants to be called a ‘good boy.’

I was once rushed by a ridgeback/pitbull-cross called Nail. It belonged to the (now ex) husband of a friend and did exactly what it said on the box. When people came over it had to be chained to a rowing machine in the spare room, visits punctuated by the thump of its shovel-shaped head battering the wall. Amazingly nimble in the face of certain death, I leapt out of the way just as its jaws snapped together in the spot where my leg had been, milliseconds before. One fang tore a bloody great hole in my jeans and left a fist-sized bruise on my thigh. My friend was pregnant at the time. I had nightmares about what Nail might do to the baby for weeks. Luckily he died soon after. Nobody went to the funeral.

Poor Nail had been trained to be monstrous. Left to his own devices, he might have done nothing more threatening than lie in the sun, farting and hoping someone would rub his tummy. Who are the real animals here? To quote Helen Clark: it is people, it is people, it is people.

Fat is a Fashion Issue

A bitch-fest erupted recently over comments made by 70s cover girl Cheryl Tiegs concerning Sports Illustrated’s choice of plus-size model Ashley Graham for February’s Swimsuit Issue, despite the fact that Sports Illustrated is a magazine dedicated to promoting the epitome of athleticism (clue’s in the title) and Graham looks like the most exercise she’s had lately is rolling around on satin sheets searching for the Tim Tam she dropped. I should be so lucky.

“I don’t think it’s healthy,” said cocaine-era Cheryl of the ‘full figured’ model phenomenon, and boy, did the reactionary masses come down on her like a ton of hot bricks. Tiegs was accused of fat-shamming, equating beauty with weight and forced to pen an apology. Canadian comedian Nicole Arbour, whose YouTube monologue, Dear Fat People went viral because everyone hated it so much, says there’s no such thing as fat-shamming. That fat people made it up, that it’s a race card with no race. “It doesn’t matter if you’re size 2 or 22,” said Graham, who weighs 77kgs (the average New Zealand woman is 72), in response to the furore, “every woman needs to love themselves.”

OK, let’s just breathe for a moment. Of course beauty is not an equation requiring a set weight or specific facial characteristics and Sports Illustrated covers have become more diverse since Cheryl’s time, to include models outside the norm such as Kate Upton (captured in zero gravity at Cape Canaveral) and Rhonda Rousey. “She’s hot,” said the economist, “even though she looks like she’d knock you out.” Hotness sell magazines and these women are proof you can be sexy at any size.

Well, almost any. There’s no denying Ashley Graham is totally gorgeous, and I admire the va va voom she stands for, but I think it matters enormously if you’re a size 22. If you’re a size 22, you can love yourself as much as you want but your family aren’t going to have you around for much longer, and that doesn’t show much love for them. Ha! Fooled you. That’s some fat-shamming right there. ‘Health’ is a common work-around for society’s intolerance, and in some cases, hatred, of fat people. So long as individuals can indulge in ‘concern trolling’ – harassing and threatening under the guise of worry for wellbeing: ‘Oh, I just care about you SO MUCH … please stop doing/being that thing I don’t like,’ they’re able to equate fatness with moral weakness, badness. And isn’t it hypocritical to be preaching faux anxiety about a larger model’s BMI when the really skinny ones are smoking their heads off and eating a box of tissues for dinner?

Actually, I do indulge in a little private fat shamming, most mornings. I might even give my fat a wee poke and call it names. It doesn’t give a monkeys. My fat was made by sauvignon blanc and love. Of pasta. It is, as the economist puts it, “all bought and paid for.”

While fat (the word itself just a descriptor like ‘heavyset’ and not inherently pejorative) models and body acceptance have become mainstream, the issue of fatness is still so loaded it is almost impossible to talk about. “Don’t write about fat shamming!” I was warned, “You’re not fat, it will look bad.” Bog off. Obesity now an epidemic, like cholera with a side order of fries, does the call to embrace your curves and love your body translate to an ambivalence towards looking after it? Are super-sized models sending a message that heart disease, diabetes and cancer are but trifles? I’m all about self-compassion but I grew up in the 1980s, when Kentucky Fried Chicken ads featured two fat redhead twins: ‘and Hugo said you go, and I said no, you go …’ Today that would be a devastating public health announcement featuring Valarie Adams – Hugo and Holly removed from their abusive parents.

How can society hate fat people while fashion loves them? Well, do you remember flares? Ra Ra skirts, double denim and poodle perms? All fashion’s idea. The fashion industry is filled with the world’s meanest mean girls, made nastier by constant hunger and brittle bones. If you think they aren’t laughing behind their hands every time they see Ashley Graham on the cover of something, you’re insane. Do you really think one of the world’s shallowest and most toxic industries has suddenly become a beacon of inclusivity and harmony? There are 78.6 million obese adults in America alone. The plus-size clothing industry, while still in its infancy, is already worth 17.5 billion a year. Fat is in fashion because, just like in the junk food industry, making money is. 

Death to Freedom Crappers

The economist greeted the young Scandihoovian couple at the next table. “Pooing your way around the country?” he asked. “New Zealand’s just one big toilet to you people, isn’t it?” It’s completely unlike him to be so rude (he usually leaves that to me) but he hates freedom crappers. So do I. Time for the death penalty, I think. Or, if you’re going to be all bleeding heart about it, a law change.

Unless there are signs expressly forbidding it, the Freedom Camping Act allows camping in public places, with no designated time limit − meaning those white maggots (the camper vans, not the tourists) can clutter up the shorelines and access points of our country’s most beautiful places for weeks at a time. Shitting into the sunset.

But hang on a minute my little Nimbys. Isn’t freedom camping a quintessentially Kiwi activity? Didn’t we all grow up toodling around the country in caravans with our grandparents? Yes, however, I don’t seem to remember crapping all over bushes and carparks being a part of it. ‘Take only pictures, leave only footprints’ was the mantra, and, “here’s the shovel, make sure you bury it deep,” parental instructions. Which, incidentally, is what I’d like to do to the freedom campers. I’m not alone in coming over all vigilante. Locals in the South Taranaki surf spot of Stent Road have started moving freedom campers on, incensed by the fact that, even though there is a toilet provided, some campers are too lazy to walk to it, and simply drop a cable right next to their vans.

What is wrong with these people? Obviously their English is terrible, or they wouldn’t rent from Wicked, but where are their manners? How would they like me to rock up to the Eiffel Tower and pop a squat? Lean out over the Grand Canyon? They wouldn’t. Mind you, I wouldn’t either, because it comes down to decency, and respect for the country you are a visitor in.

Maybe there needs to be a set of guidelines drawn up. Just as we must educate Asian tourists about driving on the correct side of our roads to stop them killing us, perhaps we also need to have a little handbook made for freedom campers, with the first rule being ‘don’t leave faeces everywhere’ and the second ‘if you’re going to go 30 in the 80kph zone, for God’s sake pull over before that woman behind driving the Camry rams you in a fit of rage’. Or we could issue them a week’s worth of Imodium when they enter the country, and a laxative upon leaving. Sure, they might have sore tummies for the duration, but it’s a small price to pay, I think.

“Oh, but we need them,” people say. “They contribute to the economy.” Well I don’t call a bottle of wine and a packet of potato chips bought at Pak n Save a windfall for the national coffers. Particularly if it’s at the cost of the only thing worth preserving. Sure, they’re buying petrol, but how does that benefit me when I’m tip-toeing through the poop tulips on my way to the cockle bed? What is it about New Zealanders that we’re always so weak and fawning when it comes to tourists, prepared to sell our birth right in the hopes strangers will like us? Could we be more pathetic?

After a summer which saw large crowds overwhelm sites and stretch facilities and patience across Otago, where freedom campers: up to 100 vehicles a night − carrying more than 200 campers at a time − descended on Warrington domain and a DOC riverside site next to the Kawarau River, turning it into, as one observer put it, something akin to “a Syrian refugee camp,” freedom camping has become unsustainable, untenable and unwanted.

I say we change the law so the only vehicles allowed in non-toileted areas are those self-contained, and everyone else has to pay $10 a night to stay somewhere with toilets and showers. It wouldn’t be a dreadful hardship to factor that into your travel expenses, and (with co-operation of council) farmers or land-owners with a flat paddock prepared to offer facilities could stand to make some much-needed money, especially now their cows aren’t doing it for them.

Everybody wins, nobody dies.

Full Car-tastrophe

For once the Camry had both warrant and registration. All the signal lights were working (although the left indicator was a bit flickety-floo − you had to click it twice to make it stop over-blinking, like a terrible liar). The great big dent in the boot didn’t even seem to faze him and I couldn’t remember how it happened, parallel parking between a Porsche and a Mercedes in Wanaka, I think.

“Identify the hazards,” said the instructor, as we set off through the suburbs. “That jogger isn’t wearing a bra,” I said. He didn’t laugh. Wasn’t the laughing type, apparently. We went into a roundabout, around the block and into another one, and then another, doing a pensioner 30kph the whole time, super alert, hands at ten and two. The instructor seemed to be jotting an awful lot down. Maybe he was writing about how awesome I was. The test took 15 minutes, instead of 30, still, I was hopeful. But no. Of course it was the roundabouts that did for me. I forgot to indicate coming off them. Twice. Which is now the number of times I have failed my driver’s license.

The last attempt was ten years ago. I was working at Dunedin’s Fortune Theatre at the time and turned up in the promo car; a little blue Ford Focus decorated with a pair of less-than-pert naked bottoms advertising Roger Hall’s Spreading Out. Everything had been going swimmingly until we drove up the hill towards the start of the motorway. From the top, I spied the 100 sign and sped up to meet it. “That’s an automatic fail,” shouted the instructor. “Abort! Abort! Return to base, return to base.” I burst into tears. He, unhardened of heart, stared straight ahead, an Easter Island statue in nubby grey slacks.

Sadly, official statistics show repeat candidates are more likely to fail, the pass rate falling with the more times people sit their drivers’ test a clear sign, ‘If at first you don’t succeed try, try again,’ simply does not ring true for some. ‘Pack it in before you embarrass yourself,’ much better advice. Interestingly, men are more likely to pass after repeat attempts than women, however, women show the greatest determination to persevere no matter how many times they fail, which says everything, really, about our sex and the triumph of hope over experience.

Some people are simply not cut out to get behind the wheel of a car, and they know it. Lena Dunham, American actress and writer says, “I don’t drive. It’s not going to happen. Some women are not meant to be mothers, and some people are not meant to drive.” The question of whether particular humans are congenitally unsuited to control a clutch is one oft-pondered by road safety campaigners, psychologists, and the economist. “Oh dear,” he said of my twofer, sensibly keeping his voice neutral (which, incidentally, is what I should have been in when I started the engine).

While this is turning into an expensive and long-drawn-out series of driving lessons − wonder what I’ll learn next time − I just find there’s so much going on, what with the steering wheel, the pedals, gear stick and everything else happening on the road: getting the finger from other motorists, everything flying off the passenger seat when I slam on the brakes, and missing the lights changing when I bend down to pick stuff up.

Luckily, for my dented pride (nothing worse than sucking at something a 15-year-old boy can do), it doesn’t mean I’m a dummy. Albert Einstein never learned how to drive, saying it was far too complicated, and anecdotal evidence suggests a number of highly intelligent people are similarly afflicted. During her test, Spectator columnist Mary Killen arrived at a T junction, and not knowing what to do, took both hands off the wheel to cover her eyes. And it’s all so primitive: sitting in box belching toxic fumes, using your feet and hands … futurist and host of Tomorrow’s World, Chris Riddell, believes we are the last generation to drive a car; automobiles the smelly successor to the more stinky horse, we are currently living in the motorised Middle Ages.

With driverless cars rapidly on their way, if I just hold out for another 15 years, chances are I won’t have to go through the humiliation of failing my full ever again. “You are so ahead of your time,” said the economist. “You’re actually avant-garde. Avant car.” In your face, VTNZ.

Peak Richie?

Looks like we’ve finally reached peak Richie. Yes, he-who-can-do-no-wrong, our New Zealander of the Year was slammed this week for lending his voice to the flag debate, declaring the silver fern an ideal symbol of the country because it’s on the All Blacks jersey and everyone loves that. ‘F*ck off Richie,’ was the general consensus of comments on his Facebook page, and it’s hard to disagree. You don’t see Wayne Rooney giving it some on subjects outside his sphere. ‘Wayne Rooney weighs in on Germany’s immigrant problem’ said no headline, ever. Yet here in this much-mocked little country, not only do we go out of our way to embarrass ourselves for the benefit of satirical news shows (like a dog that lets its owner dress it in a wee striped jumper because it’s lost the will to live), we hold rugby uber allas. Rugby is more important than science, education, feeding the kids, not hitting women, inventing things and drugs to ease the pain of cancer sufferers.

As part of their 150th celebrations, the NZ Herald listed the ten greatest New Zealanders, of all time, ever: Kate Sheppard, Apirana Ngata, Jean Batten, Whina Cooper, Wiremu Tamihana, Ernest Rutherford, Katherine Mansfield, Michael Joseph Savage, Edmund Hillary and Richie McCaw − the only one on the list not pushing up daisies. Meaning there isn’t a single living New Zealander whose outputs and efforts stand up to those of a man who played sport for a living. Seriously? Laugh or cry, your choice.

Prime Minister John Key has said Richie, the salt-of-the-earth two-time winning World Cup captain and near-God would be welcome in the national party if he ever decided to enter politics. Ummm … don’t you have to build up some political clout first? Know stuff about stuff? Do good works in your community? Kiss a few babies, have an agenda for social change? Nevermind, that does sound boring. How about Richie just opens parliament every year by kicking a ball at the leader of the opposition. No need for fancy speeches.

Still, it’s easy to get sick of people, isn’t it? One minute you love them, next they’re getting on your tits. I just had a visitor from the Gold Coast who talked non-stop the whole time, absolute crap and nonsense, rewriting rapists and thieves into good old boys surfing together under a summer halo of never-ending mateship in a desperate homesickness for a past self that never existed, just vomiting words without pausing for breath or the other side of the conversation and it was quite wearying, despite the anaesthetic effects of sea water in my ears and red wine. It went a bit like: takes a drink, noise continues, drinks some more, waka wakka wakka ... similar to having a two-year-old around. They never stop talking. Until they’re 13. Then they stop talking, to you at least.

Not that Richie is as annoying as a two-year-old. He’s perfectly nice, I’m sure, with his hedgehog hair and the marks of other people’s shoes marring what would otherwise be a suspiciously too-handsome face. It’s just that when he was the captain of the All Blacks I tended to give him the benefit of the doubt, imagining he was shanghaied into his comments by the wicked, wicked media who are always printing things out of context and putting words in people’s mouths, the bastards. Turns out he was making these ‘this is a message from the national party’ statements of this own free will. He really does think we need a flag that looks like a Weetbix box had sex with an entry for a colouring-in competition for the bewildered.

But don’t worry about the flag referendum. If the current packaging of export apples in China is anything to go by, it’s a done deal. Focus instead on the New Zealander of the Year award being a complete joke. Can you imagine how Rob Fenwick feels, a man who struggled and failed to get greenness its go-ahead. If he’d only been on the right team, he wouldn’t have had to wait 20 years to see his environmental dreams become a reality. And what about Helen Kelly, the former trade unions boss who has lung cancer, fighting for the rights of others with her dying breath; Lesley Elliot, whose daughter was viciously murdered and yet finds the strength to campaign for the safety of everyone else’s daughters; Paul Cleave, an internationally bestselling author and the biggest thing to come out of Christchurch since Gerry Brownlee left it to its own devices. Anybody really. Anybody else.

Woe is the Yoof of Today

It’s that time of year again. When the tar seal winces and lounge suites start looking nervous. Yes, the students are trickling back into town, wandering the streets brown and skinny − without the lard overcoat they’ll have by November after 10 months of burgers and binge-drinking − buying sheets at Briscoes with Mum and cleaning the mould off their bedroom ceilings with a sweet, pathetic house-proudness soon to vanish. Not sure what the clothing trend is this year. Last year it was denim cut-offs and stripy t-shirts, in the past it’s been Ugg boots, mini-skirts, Dayglow orange spray tans. Blonde hair remains a staple.

Whatever you think of the student population of Dunedin, and, as Karl Du Fresne wrote in the Dominion Post, “the campus produces self-righteous finger wagers the way Ethiopia produces marathon runners (especially amongst the non-academic residents of the city)” – these entitled millennials aren’t super-sensitive souls. Every year without fail Critic will produce a guide to date rape or something equally sensational and international students will Skype home in a state of shock after walking past the ambulance-tipping Children of the Corn debauchery.

Not so overseas, where students are far more serious, if not very sensible: witness the recent successful campaign to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oxford, led by a Rhodes Scholar and smacking of Orwellian ‘blackwhite’ in its determination to purify the past lest it offend the sensitivities of the present. If racism and brutality in the name of colonialism are reasons for statue toppling, then Winston Churchill must surely be next. “I hate Indians,” he said, blaming them for the Bengal famine (which he caused by diverting grain to his soldiers), claiming they were starving because they “breed like rabbits.”

Stupid in the extreme is the notion you can give history a bit of a spit and polish, scrub the smuts off its more famous characters and restore them to a bright and shiny innocence, or pull them from their plinths to erase their murkier contributions. Yet something even stupider, bordering the surreal, is happening at America’s universities, where in the name of emotional well-being, students are demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like, subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.

Law students at Harvard have asked professors not to teach rape law or use the word ‘violate’ (as in that violates the law) lest it cause distress, and liberal arts lecturers are expected to issue ‘trigger warnings’ before teaching courses that might elicit a strong emotional response, for example Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which describes racial violence and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (misogyny, physical abuse and sentimental rich men), so that students who have previously been victimised by racism or domestic abuse can choose to avoid works which might ‘trigger’ a reoccurrence of past trauma.

As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt wrote in their September 2015 cover story for The Atlantic, ‘The Coddling of the American Mind,’ this is disastrous for both education and mental health. Rather than a resurgence of political correctness, this goes much further than the ‘herstory’ days of the 80s and 90s, towards presuming an extraordinary fragility in young people, nurturing hyper-sensitivity by making campuses into ‘safe spaces’ that police unintentional slights, place warnings on classic literature and encourage students to develop an extra-thin skin − just before they go out into the real world.

Lukianoff and Haidt believe that, because there is a broad ban on ‘blaming the victim,’ it is considered unreasonable to question the validity of someone’s emotional state, meaning ‘I’m offended’ is an unbeatable trump card; leading to what The Atlantic’s editor calls an ‘offendedness sweepstakes.’ Once you find something hateful, it is easy to believe, in a world of emotional feebletons, that you know how others will react and that their reactions might be devastating. Preventing that devastation then becomes a moral obligation for the whole community. But pressuring professors to avoid the subject of rape law in order to protect your fellow students from potential distress is comparable, as Jeannie Suk puts it in her essay for the New Yorker, “to trying to teach a medical student training to be a surgeon who fears he’ll become distressed if he sees or handles blood.”

Universities should always be about exploring the limitless freedom of the human mind, a place to try ideas on for size and listen, in fairness and freedom, to the other side. But don’t worry. Otago students being some of the freeist in the world, I think they’ll be OK.

Just the Way you Are

You would have to be even vaguer and fluffier than me not to have noticed that, weirdly in tandem with the rise of reality home improvement shows, people are madly doing themselves up. The catch being, rather than minimising pores and reducing cellulite, now the (perceived) faults are on the inside. God help us. Bad enough there exists such a thing as a ‘thigh gap,’ (formerly only seen as the effect of rickets on cats and a reason for pity) − these days your psyche needs tweaking too.

We live in an era of mass negative self-esteem, globally talking ourselves into a funk: I’m not OK, you’re not OK; giving rise to the publishing phenomena that is the Self Help book, the ideal gift for the person who feels they don’t have it all. Really, these have been around for a while, in the 1600s ‘Conduct’ books instructed men in how to behave in polite society, covering topics such as Loathsome and Filthy Things, Hair Cut Round like a Bowl and Beards of Frightful Lengths. In 1913, the English writer and philosopher GK Chesterton said, of the screed of ‘Success’ titles then doing the rounds, “Let us hope we shall live to see these absurd books covered with derision and neglect.”

Poor Chesty, he must be spinning in his grave. While a small group of anti-self-helpers attempt to fight back the tide with moderating assertions such as, “I was thrashed within an inch of my life every morning before sitting down to cold gruel and it never did me any harm,” these straight-talking failure-embracers don’t stand a chance and today’s titles range from the puerile to the astonishing, especially when it comes to the bread and butter of Self Help genre, relationship advice. There’s Men who Hate Women and the Women who Love Them, How to get your Husband to Talk to You (having married a man who hates woman, one presumes) Self Help for the Bleak and my personal favourite: The Problem is You (actually, I made that one up, but I bet it would be a bestseller).

Publishing figures indicate 80% of Self Help book buyers are repeat customers. Some suggest the mere act of purchasing makes people feel better and readers don’t often get past the first 20 pages. As Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian points out, most of the titles are wooden-headed tripe written by mountebanks and halfwits, making it difficult to sift the good advice from the twonkery. Yet Fix Thyself tomes continue to soar in popularity. Which begs the question: are we turning into a bunch of feebletons, wallowing in our emotions?

Steve Salerno, author of Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless reckons not, but thinks a society in which everyone seeks the unicorn of self-actualisation, while simultaneously eradicating the notion of personal responsibility, might naturally have a hard time holding together.

“No man is an island,” said dear dead old John Donne, but I have never felt more like an island amidst the current battering ram of blame-shifting hocus pocus. It being on-trend to have problems coping with life, I’m happy to admit to a fundamental inner shabbiness and occasional self-loathing. Like everyone else, I sometimes get the morbs (a state of melancholy, of feeling wretched and in the dumps, caused by swimwear-shop lighting and your friends getting engaged) and have to lie on the floor for a while going ‘woe,’ but I don’t consider it reason for Prozac and 12 sessions on the couch at $200 an hour because I know that it’s part of being human and, like bad haircuts and double denim, this too will pass.

I don’t want to take away from the truly depressed, who, by the way, do not go around announcing, “God! I’m so depressed!” but as Billy Bragg so perceptively sang, the only way to disarm is to disarm. Do you have friends, a roof over your head, food to eat and clothes to wear? Are your children still speaking to you? You’re successful beyond the imaginings of many. Stop creating drama where none exists. Everything is fine, or it will be. Go about your business, maybe eat something with cream on it. And the next time it all seems too much and you’re tempted to wave your arms around like C3PO flagging down a passing psychoanalyst, pause for a moment. Just breathe. There you go. You are awesome. Love you, just the way you are.