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What I Believe

Something is watching out for us. I don’t know what. Call it God if you like. Why do I believe that?

First, there’s all this perfection. Examples of perfection are never more than an arm’s reach away. I had this thought as I waded through dry leaves under a great linden tree after three weeks of midsummer drought. Stressed by too little water the tree sheds its leaves, cutting down transpiration to save water. Automatically it tunes itself to the conditions, keeping its leaf surface area just right and returning the nutrients to its feet. Absent some blight or the chainsaw that tree will go on doing that for hundreds of years without our laying a hand on it. Perfection. Virtually all the organisms we see are perfected to live in their current environment.

I don’t doubt that this is the product of natural evolution but I feel sure that there is something driving it, transcendent, infinitely powerful and ubiquitous. This force inhabits and invigorates nature’s realm, set it going in the beginning and keeps it running. Extend your senses, shut down the filters which are only there, after all, to keep us safe and alive. Perception does not equal reality, not by a long stretch — this is a many times proven thing. If we reach beyond the survivalist chatter of our verbal reasoning we can feel it. Know it. And know that it is looking after us. Not gently. It permits all nature of savagery, excess and barbarism. It allows genocide and starvation in one country while other countries like Qatar hurl unimaginable profligacy into eye-popping luxury and ease.

But every now and then this divine caretaking shows up in a single, identifiable moment when it saves us from falling all the way into global darkness, evil and destruction, coming to the rescue of the good and the wholesome, sometimes through the agency of a single human at a single moment. General von Rumstedt decides to halt his panzers 15 miles short of Dunkirk, ensuring the survival of an allied army that will eventually extinguish the nightmare of Nazism. Vasili Archipov refuses to acquiesce in the decision of his two co-commanders to launch a nuclear torpedo at a critical moment of the Cuban missile crisis and literally saves the world from nuclear annihilation. Single decisions that change the entire history of the species. You could say we got lucky those times but I don’t think so. At Dunkirk the weather was critically important; calm and clear for six long days, enabling sailing dinghies and little runabouts to cross the Channel. How often is the Channel like that? In the Soviet era Arkipov’s independence of thought and courage of his convictions were virtually unknown, doubly so in the ranks of the military. Everyone followed instructions. I can’t prove it but I believe these were not rolls of the dice: we were saved.

I believe that it will often be a close-run thing but as long as there are enough good people in the world, (the ten good men of Sodom?), and most people are fundamentally good, that force of goodness will save us and the good world and, at times, show up in something that we can see and name. Jesus Christ was its epitome, the light for all to see. Reminders appear in the form of the virgin, as avatar. After three separate Papal enquiries by appointed ‘Devil’s Advocates’, deliberately chosen atheists, we still have no explanation for what happened at Fatima. We were visited, spoken to, in human language. An explicit warning was given. Either three illiterate shepherd’s children in a rural Portuguese backwater had their finger on the pulse of Russian politics or a miracle took place. The warning was ignored and Russia and peoples all the way to the middle of Germany endured 70 years of misery and death. There have been other such miracles and not only in the Christian epoch.

The question is what do I do about it. Be as good as I can, obviously. But why do I and so many others feel the need to do more, to reach out, communicate, supplicate, humble ourselves and give praise and thanks? It is certainly more than the essential homeostatic urge to bind with our neighbour and support the good and powerful among us in the interests of communal survival. It is a deep thing, a fundamental. Faith. We long for faith. Indeed if faith can be named as a thing among things, not sui generis, then it is an emotion. One of the basic emotions that we are kitted out with, along with love, hate, grief, joy and the others. Psychologists say, and they are right, that wellness requires the expression of a full range of our emotions, and every emotion contains within itself the powerful urge to share it with others. It’s why we have love songs and hate preachers. We are literally built to have, and share, the emotion of spiritual faith and without it we are incomplete, just a transport vector for water and cellphones.

Of course many, even most people are not aware of this potential for faith. But everyone who has ever asked themselves. “Is this really all there is? This the whole deal?” is feeling its absence. They just don’t know it. People of faith don’t ask themselves that question.

Which raises another question: why do we have the capacity for this emotion, faith in a higher being? Can we be furnished with with such an essential emotion as faith and it be based on an illusion? I think, emphatically not. If we are made to be creatures of faith then there is something there that is to be the object of that faith.

God. We are designed to believe in God. So I do.

 And now, for rationality

Rationalists, the Richard Dawkinses of this world, would have you believe that faith in the supernatural has been superseded by our deep understanding of the natural universe, right down to the quantum level. We start out by discovering that thunder and lightning are not displays of the wrath of gods and advance to the present day to where there is no need for divine explanations of anything: we understand the world, we see how it works.

That is a flat-out lie and they must know it.

Why is there so little anti-matter present in the universe? It is an enormous mystery. Theoretically the Big Bang should have created equal quantities of matter and anti-matter and they should have instantly annihilated each other. That it is not so is as likely as a thousand people flipping a thousand coins at the same time and every one of them coming down heads.

How does the Pauli Exclusion Principle work? We don’t know – it just does and has been shown to do so in experimental settings. Simultaneous interaction at a distance with no connection or information being transferred. It should be impossible.

And the big one: dark matter. The universe is several times denser than it should be. We don’t know, have no idea at all, what most of the stuff in the universe is or what it does and are not even capable of measuring for certain how much of it there is.

Dark matter could quite possibly, quite literally be God. All the Dawkinses in the world can’t state as a scientific fact that it is not. Of course they believe it is not. That is (wait for it) their faith.

Bottom line: nobody knows. Believe in God and nobody can authoritatively tell you that you are mistaken or deluded.

Maybe there is a reason that every society that has attempted to legislate away the belief in God has fallen apart.

Amen.

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Covid 19. Manufactured? Probably. Next, the unavoidable question.

Question: Why is Covid 19 so infectious? Answer, because of the so-called ‘furin-like cleavage site’ on the spike. This consists of an amino acid sequence grouped arginine-arginine-alanine-arganine. When this contacts the mucus membrane of the human respiratory system it basically burns a hole in it and the virus is in. This is not present in the naturally evolved version of the virus which killed three shovellers of horseshoe bat guano who died from it but gave it to no-one. You virtually had to be swimming in it for it to infect you. The new, deadly spike was, according to a professor at National Taiwan University, Fang Chi-tai “unlikely to have four amino acids added all at once.” Natural mutations were smaller and more haphazard, he argued. “From an academic point of view, it is indeed possible that the amino acids were added to COVID-19 in the lab by humans.”

When his talk was publicised he recanted and the university removed it from its server for “certain reasons”. Academics who advance the thesis that Covid-19 could have been the result of a ‘gain of function’ experiment in China are likely to see their careers stall and lose grants, in spite of the fact that the Wuhan lab of world-wide fame was involved in gain of function experiments on horseshoe bat coronaviruses.

Consider this: the nearest horseshoe bats to Wuhan are seven hundred miles away. They are not, as we were first given to believe, sold in the Wuhan wet market. So for the natural origin theory to be true, the virus had to mutate in a bat population, infect someone and then instantly die out because no-one else in the vicinity caught it at that point. Then the infected person had to somehow get to Wuhan without spreading it along the way. How likely is that? But Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute, whom Scientific American dubbed ‘the bat woman’, regularly harvests viruses from that distance bat colony and transports them to her Wuhan lab.

Looked at objectively, the human-made hypothesis seems much more probable, but no-one wants to say so, indeed the chorus of denial is loud and global. Why all the academic fear?

Because the world is scared of China. Our politicians bend over backwards to avoid offending The Middle Kingdom, and with good reason. Although China’s fall to the condition of a broken victim state, walked all over first by Western Powers and then Japan in the two hundred years prior to the mid-20th Century had more to do with its inward-looking sclerotic administration than external influences, Chinese global policy is almost openly vengeful. The country lost its face and it wants it back. If a minor South American country, for instance, engaged in world-wide open theft of intellectual property and imprisoned and oppressed whole sectors of its ethnic minorities it would at the very least be ostracised on the world stage and quite likely corrected by force. Not China. No-one wants to step on the dragon’s tail, especially when that dragon produces so much of the manufactured products the rest of the world runs on. Not when it is a huge and growing market for almost every country’s products.

This is changing. Slowly the democratic powers are starting to face the fact that Russia and China are becoming increasingly dangerous and sooner or later we are going to have to do something about it. Preferably later, much later. As our attitude becomes more realistic the so-called ‘lab-leak hypothesis’ is starting to see some air. Note the nomenclature ‘lab-leak’. No-one except those who in the next breath will tell you about Bill Gates’ microchip in the vaccine will suggest that China might, just might, have deliberately released the virus. No scientist or politician who wants to keep their job will say such a thing. I have not seen the possibility mooted at all in any medium. Unfortunately, we have to at least consider it. If they did it, we need to know. Time to wheel in the old Latin tag Cui bono? It means ‘Who won something?’or more literally ‘For the good of whom?’ and is a time-honoured way of looking into a complex or obscure misdeed.

Under Xi Jinping, who is looking more like Mao Zedong every day, China wants grow stronger by weakening the rest. Look at its artificial islands in the South China Sea which it now claims as sovereign territory – military territory. A vast fleet of its factory ships plunder the oceans at the expense of everyone else and the planet. Now imagine how the Central Committee might have reacted to a proposal to release a killer respiratory virus that would cripple democratic economies around the world but inflict only minor damage on a country that did not have to bother with personal freedoms, that was able to track and trace with very high efficiency because of the absence of concern for individual liberties, that could throw a cordon around a whole city and enforce it, that could mass-disinfect whole suburbs. Can you see them nodding and smiling? I certainly can.

Covid-19 has been a body blow to the economies of countries that China smiles at but considers enemies, as well as serving as a demonstration to their own people that their system is inherently stronger and less vulnerable than the effete democracies of the West. If it was an accident, it is one that has served Xi Jinping’s agenda fulsomely. Cui bono? China.

Consider this, for a closer. When the outbreak occurred, Shi Zhengli, lead researcher on horseshoe bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab immediately suspected that the outbreak was the result of a leak of something made in her lab. She describes how, terrified, she “checked her records and found no exact matches.” Phew.

Well, no, actually. No ‘exact’ matches, for a start. So one of her colleagues might have given the virus the last tweak, acting under the orders of the most powerful people in the institute, which would not be the head scientist, Zhengli. Not in China. The real head honchos would be the party cadres charged with keeping everyone in line, as in every sensitive organisation in that country. Or, more simply, they told her what to say and she said it.

I believe, for reasons which seem to me obvious, that Covid 19 was produced in the Wuhan Institute. I am not saying and do not necessarily believe that the Chinese government deliberately released the virus. One argument against that is the location – a covert release for the purposes I suppose would have made more sense in the vicinity of the bat population. Deliberate release is simply a possibility we need to keep in mind and we sure as hell need to be prepared for the next one.

Universal Credit – The Hidden Industrial Subsidy Making Landlords Rich

I wrote this ten years ago, pre-Brexit. Its inference is that outside the EU, Universal Credit would be replaced by the more effective, efficient and honest practice of subsidising targeted industries. Why is it not even being discussed?

The United Kingdom probably has the largest and most complex welfare system ever known. Much of its workings are the standard stuff of modern economics, revolving around the pretence that it is desirable for everyone to be in education, paid employment or retirement, a condition known as “full employment”. This in defiance of the plain fact that for more than half a century standard economic theory has held that a certain level of unemployment is both desirable and necessary as a hedge against inflation. The clear and present threat of loss of employment is the sole available brake on wage demands in those economies such as the UK still locked into the adversarial employment relations model.

The German mitbestimmung is of course an effective alternative. Germany’s experience has shown that wages can effectively be limited by mutual agreement based on open books. Workers under mitbestimmung have shown themselves well able to recognise wage thresholds beyond which the enterprise and therefore their jobs cease to be viable.

This holds little political appeal in the left-right-obsessed minds of British politicians and workers’ advocates, with each side holding the other to be unrestrainedly greedy. This is a pity and a waste, but it is business as usual, neither likely to change nor even particularly interesting, the quotidian folly of a society mired in 19th Century industrial relations philosophy.

So much for the circumstances and attitudes surrounding unemployment benefits. I am more interested in the other, larger slice of the welfare bill: payments to the poor in employment. In the mid 1980s New Zealand introduced a purer form of monetarism than that of either Britain or the United States; Thatcher was a fervent admirer of Minister of Finance Roger Douglas under the unfortunate Lange government, who swept away every single vestige of state support to the employed. Not that there were many to start with. The child benefit of around £7.50 per week per child had been around since Michael Savage’s far-reaching welfare reforms in the thirties. I part-funded the purchase of our first house by the common practice of child benefit capitalisation, which gave us 18 years’ worth of child benefit for both of our children – a substantial sum. (And yes, I felt rather smug when the child benefit was axed soon after.) The only other benefit for those in work was the ability for the employed to claim work expenses – study and training, work-related travel beyond the daily commute, clothing allowances, etc. This also went in the late 80s.

So arriving in the UK to see vast sums disbursed in welfare payments to the lower-waged was something of a shock. In my world it is now an absolute given – to go into work is to leave direct welfare behind. Free or subsidised health care is not viewed as welfare, but as a right, derived from the shared belief that access to healthcare being dependent on wealth is immoral, an anathema.

So why is it seen as necessary in the UK? On the face of it, you could call it the good old British sense of fair play, simple compassion for the strugglers. But scratch the surface and we see a deeply unpleasant underbelly: a hidden subvention for British industry and agriculture, direct support being severely constrained under the firm and ungenerous thumb of Brussels (as it stood while the UK was in the EU).

Suppose the housing benefit, the winter fuel payments, the child tax breaks and all the rest of it were swept away in one fell swoop.  What would happen? Rent and mortgage payments would white ant the rest of the family budget. Then what – rent default on a huge scale, hundreds of thousands of simultaneous evictions? If that were the only consequence, well, rents and mortgages would simply have to drop. So what? The consequences of that are not hard to calculate – thousands of highly geared landlords going bankrupt, for a start.

But that would not happen, or at least not quickly, because experience shows that most people will freeze and starve before they give up their home to go – where?

If there were any slack in the system, the lowly paid might stand some chance of enduring the shock. But there isn’t any, at least not nearly enough. My partner’s son and his family simply could not survive on their meagre earnings alone, in spite of the fact that he is a hard-working and successful bed salesman. Most people would simply choose unemployment and the dole and it would be a valid choice. You can’t hold your job if you can’t afford to get there. You can’t put in a day’s work if you’re constantly hungry. You can’t show up to a retail or office job in shabby old clothes. Of course the first to go would be the Smiths, the Perkins, the Jameses. The Wronskis, the Odungas and Wachikes would hang on longer, the ones who will live six to a room and subsist on rice and beans, a dynamic already observable under the current system. Cue deepening hatreds, the oppressed turning on the oppressed.  So often ‘taking our jobs’ really means doing our jobs for low wages we refuse to accept and should not have to accept.

Such scything cuts to workers’ welfare could not be made without declaring the whole plan, being an intention to divert those billions into supporting capacity and advancement in agriculture and industry, research and development, and where necessary direct price support. The British public has become so used to ubiquitous welfare it is likely that, even if the scheme were openly described as a reallocation of resources, the reaction from the street, the pulpit and the leader page would still be to flay the heartlessness of the politicians driving them. The British sense of entitlement to welfare has become endemic. From the other side of the fence, the beneficiaries of these hidden subsidies would howl about the unavoidable wage increases which would follow, ignoring or not trusting the intention to replace them in a more open and targeted manner.

It is a fact that failing that strategy forbidden by the EU many British products and services would become more expensive than those of their competitors. So we see what this really is all about – international competitiveness. A deeply dishonourable covert subvention that reduces workers to the role of part-time beggars on their knees before the armies of bureaucrats employed to administer their welfare. Their day-to-day existence haunted by the spectre of The Cuts. Perfectly honest hard-working employees who deserve decent wages and the respect due to those who thrive by their efforts are often driven to become cheats, sharing with their mates every new wrinkle to work the system, escape deductions, drive up entitlements through falsehood and secrecy. Absolute loss of belief in the political process and the law.

It is (was) a terrible price to pay for staying in Europe and exalting the Holy Grail of free trade.

This is (was) the hidden cost of Europe: the humiliation of the British worker.

So why, now the UK is no longer subject to Brussels, does it continue?

Mrs Bevan Looks Bad

A Very Short Story

Mrs Bevan next door puts out the recycling. Joanna sees her. Mrs Bevan waves and says hello dear like always but Joanna, 4, notices she looks different. She tries to tell her mother but can’t explain. All she knows is that it’s bad. Mrs Bevan’s face looked bad.

“No dear, Mrs Bevan’s not bad. She’s a nice lady. Now go and play with Ninni and Rabbit.”

Joanna fetches the dolls and puts them on the windowsill, so she can talk to them and watch Mrs Bevan’s house as well.

Time passes. She brings her dolls a blanket in case they get cold. Nothing happens at Mrs Bevan’s. The light in the snug doesn’t go out and the kitchen light doesn’t come on.

Danny, her father, comes home. After the usual ‘how’s my girl’ she tells him Mrs Bevan looked bad. Again, she can’t explain why she looked bad. Danny persists.

Did she look sad?

A … a bit.

Was she sick, do you think?

Maybe… I don’t know.

Danny looks out the window.

Well that was probably it. She might be a bit under the weather. Don’t worry about it. What’s Mummy made for dinner?

Later Kirstin comes to tuck Joanna in to bed. Joanna repeats her worry. Kristin reassures her again and turns out the light.

As Kirstin is going down the stairs she glances next door. She notices that the lights are still on at the back. But Mrs Bevan goes to bed before Joanna, every night.

She mentions it to Danny. Perhaps we should check?

No. From what Jojo says, she’s a bit sick.  Probably couldn’t be bothered.

Let’s go to bed and watch telly.

OK.

Danny stands up and turns to receive the full brunt of the clearly insane Mrs Bevan wielding a bloodied axe.

If this made you laugh, read https://playwithstrangers.com/?s=Simon%27s+skill

From the Autobiography: Weirdness in NZ Public Life

In 1995 I was hired as the Communications Manager for the new office of the Health & Disability Commissioner. I was now a highly-paid civil servant. It was a not entirely agreeable and often bizarre experience.

The office politics could become toxic, perhaps inevitably with a CEO with an out-of-control ego. Further stress arose out of the politically correct environment, with far too much time wasted on Maori ceremonies that were meaningless to most of us. We had a kaiwhakahere, or Maori affairs manager, in the form of Moe Milne. That made good sense as the health status of Maori in New Zealand is well below that of the general population. I liked Moe, a thoroughly good sort who taught me a great deal about the iwi (tribes) and hapu (subtribes) of the areas we visited. At the time and to some degree even today I could point at any location on a map of New Zealand and tell you which iwi held tangata whenua status (hegemony) there. I learned a lot of te Reo, necessary because both Robyn and Moe were women so on marae I was the one who had to respond to the mihi (greeting). We also learned a number of Maori songs which I enjoyed because I love singing and Maori is a beautiful language for song.

Not so agreeable was the fact that Robyn had arranged for a Commissioner’s kaumatua (elder), an elderly Maori of no particular distinction whom, when special occasions called for it, we would fly to Auckland or Wellington and put up in a hotel so he could deliver a speech which only Moe could understand. He showed no interest in us as people and happily toddled off after getting his cheque. Whenever we hired someone new, a frequent event in the first year, they would be presented with (or subjected to) a powhiri (welcoming ceremony). Both I and Tina, the investigations manager, were particularly vocal behind the scenes about the absurdity of welcoming a new non-Maori staff member with a powhiri attended by over-whelmingly non-Maori employees when the traditional Kiwi cake and cup of tea would have been much more welcome. What rankled most was the hypocrisy entailed in the karakia. Tina and I and various other staff members objected bitterly to having to bow our heads in prayer as civil servants in a supposedly secular state. This was enforced religious observance in an office that had been set up to define and protect people’s rights, an odious farce.

Then there was the Treaty of Waitangi workshop, conducted in the Wellington office by a milquetoast with a huge bone carving dangling from his scrawny neck. Tina, myself and others curled our toes and gritted our teeth through a day openly designed to underscore the irredeemable inferiority entailed in not being a Maori, garnished with a liberal serving of imposed guilt. Of course it achieved the exact opposite effect. Tina was a middle-aged woman with a lifetime of experience in the health service who suffered fools not at all. I admired her courage in saying exactly what she thought of the so-called workshop when the ‘facilitator’ outlined a map of New Zealand on the floor and told everyone to stand where they had been born. Those who had been born outside the country were supposed to stand some distance from the map, driving an egregious point home with a sledgehammer. Tina flat-out refused to participate. I took part reluctantly but my patience was almost gone.

Next we were instructed to take our positions on the spot where we or our ashes would be buried. I returned to my seat. Challenged, I simply declared that I would not be buried anywhere because I would certainly not tolerate such a thing while alive and had no intention of dying.

“But you have to die someday,” came the predictable objection.

“Sorry, but to indicate where I supposedly wish to be buried when I have no such wish is absurd. Besides, in my culture such matters are personal and private.”

Tina and a couple of the braver souls actually applauded. By the time the farrago of misinformation and brow-beating ground to a close no-one was happy. Moe, Robyn and the milquetoast could see that no hearts had been won and the usual feedback session that closes most workshops was silently dropped.

Working closely with the Department of Health and to a lesser degree with Te Puni Kokiri and the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs brought home the disturbing realisation that New Zealand is losing its status as a secular state. It is no exaggeration to say that the Treaty of Waitangi has become an object of worship in the offices of the bureaucracy. It was quite common to enter an office and see a huge framed image of the Treaty draped with flags, flowers and Maori symbols. Certain self-evident truths, for instance the fact that New Zealand has no indigenous people, that every single one of us is descended from immigrants, could cost you your job if spoken aloud. A peculiar version of Maori traditional culture was being enshrined as the official religion, that version being the state of Maori culture and beliefs as it stood in, say, the year 1890. Christian prayers, obviously not an historic component of the original culture of the Maori, played a big part. Our being forced to sing a Christian hymn such as How Great Thou Art at an office event would have rightly provoked an outcry. But translate it into Maori and suddenly we were obliged to join in.

Such a slant celebrates colonialism as much as Maori culture. If you give it a moment’s thought you must acknowledge that if this country were to truly honour the authentic culture of the Maori we would hold annual tribal wars – with real weapons. We would allow utu (payback)as a defence for murder. In fact there actually are quite sizeable and significant organisations living out the true culture of the Maori: the Mongrel Mob, Black Power and the Filthy Few, among others. They not only embody the drawbacks to society resulting from gang activity, they also hold fast to the values of family, of tribal loyalty, of territory. No wonder they attract so many young Maori.

Don’t get me wrong – I personally enjoy participating in Maori cultural events. I loved returning the mihi in the Maori that Moe taught me. My family has a multi-generational association with Ngati Whatua o Orakei, a treasured privilege. But enforced submission to any culture under the threat of losing one’s job and the abandonment of the strict secularity of the state are evils that must be called out.

At this point I could very easily launch into a diversion on the appalling erosion of personal freedom in this country. We have more laws and regulations allowing various officials to enter our homes than any comparable democracy. We allow the police to stop us from going about our business to perform any check they please, be it a breath test or to check that we have paid our road tax. No other first-world country I have lived in would tolerate such a thing. I believe I understand the reason for this national lack of spine: it is because we have never had to defend ourselves, never had a revolution. We remain only loosely attached to a freedom that we have never had to defend.

It All Started a Long Time Ago

Hi. To my astonishment it seems that people have stumbled across this blog and are reading what I post. Right now I should probably be posting caustic opinions about the parties competing in the imminent NZ national parliamentary elections but they hardly seem worthy of my attention. In a few weeks we will have a new government, either slightly left-of-centre or slightly right-of-centre. Yawn. But the rest of the world should be so lucky.

So now, the beginning of the autobiography which is my current obsession. Do let me know if you want more.

Before I Forget

It was apt that most movies we watched in the 50s were still in black and white even though colour cinematography had been around for decades, because the actual world was still in some essential way black and white. I was born in 1948 into a world that was monochromatically, crushingly dull. Our parents were popping us out in record numbers into a drearily conventional world. They thought we would be the blessed heirs of the grey, tasteless fruit of their struggle. To their horror, we tore it all down.

Dullsville

If we rose up in the 60s and smashed the old society to bits, the obvious question is why? So let me describe the world I was born into and by the time I’ve finished you will agree with me, with us. It just had to go.

The bulk of my childhood filled the 1950s, the last decade in this cycle of history with the social qualities that had made the industrialised nations great. Uniformity. Christianity, in name at least. Public order, although the incidence of drunken violence in the streets and in the homes was off today’s chart but we didn’t talk about that. Stability. Predictability. Durability. Manners, and the big one, Authority. No distinction was made between the law and moral standards and the cops enforced both as if they were the same thing. Clear gender roles. Missing, the two things we would come to want most and would make damn sure we got – fun, and the freedom of personal choice. I guess fun sounds superficial. That’s how we felt about it as children and teenagers, but it was in fact deeper than that. What we really wanted was happiness. The older generation didn’t seem happy, in the main, and they didn’t want us to be happy either, not really. They conformed, they gritted their teeth through what were in many cases obviously unhappy marriages and worked at lifelong jobs that were often demeaning and monotonous. And they did their level best to make sure we signed up to the same dreary life plan. We all know what happened to that.

Now we have not homogeneity but diversity. Now you are free to embrace whatever faith or superstition you choose, or nothing at all. Free to dress how you choose, go where you choose, marry whom you choose or don’t bother marrying at all. For all that you can thank, or blame, us. We broke the mould, probably forever, in the seismic upheaval of the 60s. In a bitter twist, our revolutionary ideas have now become an orthodoxy enforced just as vindictively as the old one. Corporations, schools and government departments can be, and are, punished and shamed for falling short of diversity targets. Who would have guessed the forces of darkness would take our glorious peacock dance of 60s-style diversity and turn it into a tyranny?

That was not the only tyranny it engendered either. It also produced the 21st century nightmare, the Islamic jihad.

Think about it. What is it about Western society that has so incensed conservative Muslims that many subscribe to the idea that that society must be wiped out, violently if necessary? Hedonistic alcohol and drug use. (Emphasis on hedonistic – there was little hedonism in the way our parents drank. A lot. They were drinking away the memories of a depression and a war.) Uninhibited sexual activity of every stripe – heterosexual, gay, lesbian, trans, you name it, liberated to the point that those who vary from the heterosexual norm demand, and get, rights to respect for who they are. People, and women in particular, dressing to enhance their sexual appeal and, when the temperature allows, exposing what is for Muslims (and conservative Christians) an outrageous expanse of flesh. Feminism, the utter rejection of the idea that male authority over the female is at the heart of Allah’s plan for humanity. And finally, many people, perhaps the majority, blithely ditching belief in any God as superstition rooted in an unenlightened past. Our fault, all of it.

In the English-speaking world of the 50s you professed Christianity, dressed in a narrow range of styles dictated by the occasion, travelled little if at all and held yourself to be contented with where you were both physically and in your station in life. That’s what they called it: a station. Visible discontent was a betrayal of the social contract. Sex (at least sex that was seen) was largely penned into the cage of marriage, permanent and often joyless marriage.

And that was the way it was supposed to stay. No-one wanted any kind of social change. Things were good by the frozen standards of the 30s at last and they wanted them to stay exactly the way they were, next week, next year, next lifetime.  It’s understandable. They had lived through a hideous depression and an even worse war, all the time dreaming of the day when everything would come right. They knew exactly what that would look like and, at last, here it was. Unfortunately what we saw with our young, fresh eyes was racism, homophobia, over-bearing patriarchy, contempt and condemnation for unmarried mothers, nepotism in business and government, jingoistic patriotism and in our case colonial cringe towards the historic Home country and now America. Conformity and acerbic judgement ruled. No thanks. It wasn’t going to rule us.

The Life

The scarcity years had taught people thrift. In a time when the electricity bill was a trifle my father would yell at us if we walked out of a room and left the light on. Like most women my mother had a sewing machine, bought patterns and fabric and sewed clothes for us and herself. Although jam and tinned fruit were cheap, Elaine, like most women, made preserves. She had the time to do it because wives, of course, didn’t have paid jobs.

Everything you bought was made to last as long as possible; if it looked like it wasn’t you didn’t buy it. When the electric kettle burned out you replaced the element, not the kettle. The kettle itself and all the other kitchen appliances were expected to last the lifetime of the housewife who owned them. The lifetime of a car ran into decades. Although America was carving out a new aesthetic of wealthy exuberance, in what had been the British dominions the aesthetics of design were an afterthought, or nothing. When we first heard of planned obsolescence in the 60s we were shocked. Now people just shrug and buy a new one. There was little plastic. Most useful items were made of metal and wood, ceramics, glass and that unlovely material bakelite.

We ate everything on our plates and for snacks were given, or stole when Mum was out of sight, the biscuits and cakes she baked every morning. Yes, every morning except Sundays I woke to the smell of baking, not bacon and eggs.

A packet of potato crisps was a rare treat and came in one flavour – potato – sweets were small, plain and precious. Soft drink bottles were tiny, perhaps 200 cc. We would have regarded buying a litre of Coke and drinking it all ourselves as hellish gluttony, even if we could have afforded it.

Kids lived active, outdoor lives. Adults didn’t want kids hanging around the house and playing outside meant exposure to every kind of germ and bug imaginable. Bouts of sickness were common, every one of them another building block in a heroic immune system. Of course everyone got the measles, mumps and chickenpox at some point, and sundry other infections. In summer every scratch infected with what we called H-bug, causing crusty scabs which we kids made worse by picking at them because they itched. We didn’t mind that much. It was compulsive, picking at scabs, and almost an entertainment. I recently discovered the cause – a New Zealand epidemic of penicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus in the mid-50s, a warning flag waving unnoticed about the consequences of profligate, thoughtless use of antibiotics. There were no obese kids. None. Campbell and I were considered fat, and mocked, but looking at our school photos you would not be able to see why. Most kids were as lean as sheepdogs, but Campbell and I were endomorphs, slightly softer round the edges, enough to get us called Piggy and Little Piggy respectively.

Perhaps two kids at my high school of maybe six hundred pupils had asthma and everyone knew who they were. I believe there was not a single diabetic.

We played in industrial dumps, common in a time when every factory threw its rubbish over the back fence. So much interesting, useful stuff to find and make things out of. Pollution? We didn’t even know the word. Dad used to publicise his shows by driving us around in his car while we hurled bunches of handbills out the windows. No-one objected.

I bless these aspects of my childhood every day. They have given me the ability to cobble almost anything out of anything else and the constitution of a draught horse. I rarely fall ill and survived, as you will see, two bouts of untreated tropical disease that could have and from a medical perspective probably should have killed me. Even at 72 I almost died of septic shock but fully recovered within six weeks from a fortnight of the brutal insults to the system intensive care requires. It usually takes six months to a year and some never fully recover, indeed about forty per cent of people my age admitted to and discharged alive from ICU are dead within a year. Yet here I still am. Genes surely have something to do with it but I am convinced my young days rollicking in the mud and bugs have kept me alive more than once.

Good health, yes, but bad teeth. Parents paid little attention to whether or not kids brushed their teeth because they assumed that, like everyone, when fully grown they would have them removed and replaced by dentures. Especially in farming communities parents were expected to give away their daughters as brides with a mouth full of shining plastic, a great advantage in far-flung districts where the wife had to be in the kitchen every day of their lives.

Only the wealthy or the naturally endowed had their own, good teeth. Toothache was common, treated by trips to the Murderhouse, the dental school in Edenvale Rd where dental nurses received their training, going on to become what the Chinese might have called barefoot dentists, posted to rural school dental clinics where they drilled and filled the carious gnashers of farmers’ kids. We didn’t call it the Murderhouse for nothing; without so much as an aspirin, on the business end of a grinding, foot-cranked drill, we writhed in agony as they slowly hollowed out and stuffed our teeth with mercury amalgam. The only consolation came from nestling our imaginative little heads against the breasts of nubile young women. It’s a wonder we did not grow into a generation of masochists, recapitulating that unique blend of pain and erotic pleasure.

Home entertainment was the radiogram, board games, cards, marbles, books and comics (if you were allowed them) and things we made ourselves, like stilts, kites and of course, trolleys. I recently spent a couple of weeks sleeping in the bedroom of a friend’s ten-year-old while he was overseas. Overseas, with his Mum. A kid. If you had told me at his age that I would live to see kids commonly taking overseas holidays I would have scoffed. He has literally hundreds of toys and pieces of toys, and they are far from wealthy. At his age I had perhaps ten.

In the matter of dress there was no such thing as a look. Everybody dressed ‘decently,’ which meant the same as everyone else. Women wore frocks, men wore proper trousers they called strides, shirts and ties and sports jackets, although hats had mostly gone by then.  When the bikini came in in the late 50s only the most daring would be seen in one, even though they were really just women’s swimming togs with the middle bit missing.

Kids were expected to be, forced to be respectful to their elders. And patriotic. The first film on any movie programme was ‘God Save the Queen’ and any kid cheeky enough to remain seated would be dragged to a stand by the scruff of his neck by a man in the row behind and probably given a clip over the ear for his trouble, to general approval.

On Saturdays everyone listened to the races. New Zealand has to this day a Minister of Racing, a ludicrously out-dated appointment one rank above the Minister for Clocks. Pop quiz: name him or her. Exactly. Everything was closed on Saturday except the pubs, which closed at six o’clock every evening and didn’t open at all on Sundays, and the TAB – the Totalisator Agency Board, the government bookie where you could place a bet on anything as long as it was a horse. I would go for long walks on those achingly dull Saturday afternoons and as I wandered from street to street, suburb to suburb, the sound of commentator Sid Tonks calling the current race rang from the houses and along the empty streets. He was famous, of course.

With the exception of the heaven-sent Goon Show at eight o’clock every Sunday night radio was starchy and dull, too, all of it run by the government. At six o’clock on Sundays, a big radio evening after the dullest day of the week when the whole world keeled over dead, the flagship show was Brass Band Parade, hosted by Lloyd Thorne. He too was famous. Brass band music. God help us.

Are you getting the picture? The 50s were, and not just by today’s standards, crushingly dull. Deliberately so. Our parents’ generation had had quite enough excitement in their lives, thank you very much.

Little did they dream that the teeming horde of frequently smacked kids out in the streets and back yards were coming to get them. The silent vow of every kid who is beaten by his father – one day I’ll be bigger than you – was to come true en masse and blow up in their faces. Because not only, better nourished, would we be bigger than them, we would outnumber them. As we have gone on outnumbering the other age groups till this very day, and getting our own way because of it. It has all turned rather ugly, that.

So we changed the world. In the social explosion of the 60s, culminating in the Summer of Love in ’68 and Woodstock, we pushed the Western world permanently off its authoritarian axis in the direction of liberalism, freedom and perpetual peace. In doing so the baby boom generation revelled in the most outrageously anarchic and downright joyous period of youth the world has ever seen. Unfortunately, for reasons that will soon become apparent, it didn’t quite work like that for young Christopher Hegan.