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DAILY DIARY - outages

They say that when there's a volcano in Auckland that you have about twelve hours to head for the hills. Well that's a moot point really, as about fifty of the hills are volcanoes. The idea is to head north, away from the molten lava and grimey ash. A volcanologist when asked on national television where it was likely to happen, gleefully declared some time back that it would be somewhere central like Queen Street. Her Royal Highness was not amused. If it means nothing to you, dear diary, or reader from afar, that would be any main street in any large city of the world. West Street for example, in Durban. Now that is an interesting analogy, considering that West Street has a more exotic name these days, in the form of Dr Pixley KaSeme Street. I wonder how they fit all that on those little street name signs… And of course the well-known Moore road is now Che Guevara Road, which in the local lingo (English with a thick Zulu accent and no sense of history) is lovingly called Gua Va street. I digress…
So back to Auckland City, or for the purists - Tāmaki-makau-rau. We love the fact that the earthquakes here are not too powerful. Who can forget the dramatic photograph of the last one we actually felt – of four plastic garden chairs, with one toppled over by the sheer power of the shake.
The volcanoes give you twelve hours. Which on a day like yesterday would have been a bit of a stretch. Let me start at the beginning…
Some weeks ago, in the midst of hundreds of spam emails trying to sell various medications appropriate to my age and stage, was an innocuous missive intimating that Vector, our national power coordinator, would be switching off the power on 22 June from 9am to 4pm for maintenance. I dutifully forwarded this exciting news to my co-dwellers, neither of whom really read that news, Verbal reminders exhorted them to be prepared for this outage by an early shower (you need power to fire the gas) and the engagement of their cognitive skills in considering lunch out as it was our youngest son’s 28th birthday. I don’t really thing anyone believed me. We did the shower thing though, and boiled a kettle. And even shut down mother’s PC which is allergic to such collapses in energy supply, as I got ready for work. Clunk – and down she went, as we were left in the relative darkness of the morning after the winter solstice in the southern hemisphere. I dutifully left for the “office’, and met the visiting insurance evaluator who needed to enter every room in the church and Family Centre complex, me being one of the primary keeper of the keys of that kingdom.
Things unraveled quite quickly after that. No one had considered the electric garage door. The birthday boy decided to take himself to the cinema. Transformers part XCIV or the like was a better option than sitting in the dark. Mother would hit the shops. But of course, they were not present when the installer of the new garage door motor last year demonstrated how to open the door when the power fails.
After giving assurances, dear diary, of the simple click and pull motion, I was summoned home to demonstrate. It soon became very apparent that the door was in no mood to go anywhere. And neither could anyone else. And here’s my point. When the volcano erupts, it will be helpful to be able to get in a car and head for the hills. Read: travel north. 
I will spare you all the agony of the chastisement I received. Auckland garage doors, after three phone calls over three hours, finally made it clear that there were 30 people in the queue ahead of me, and they would get to us on the afternoon of the next day. That would probably not help everyone get to work tomorrow, I explained to the very nice lady, never mind today.
My job description quickly morphed into taxi driver of the year, and off I sped. How is it possible that your family can physically wreck a garage door? - was my immediate thought. I saw the man pull the red rip-cord with my own eyes and - boom – the thing was raised in a flash.
The birthday festivities were wonderful, all things considered. The movie proved to be long enough to allow the exhausted parents of the celebrant to have lunch out on a two-for-one voucher, get home so mum could put her boots on, and ferry her to work. Fourteen texts later and the birthday boy emerged from the cinema with a bucket of coca cola in hand. When we got home later, the garage door man was there, and showed us that the Jerry-built slider had a dodgy bit that folded back on itself when you opened it a few feet manually, thus making it scientifically impossible to budge the door further. Designer fault, he declared, offering to make new bits for $150 plus GST.
Gleefully I opened the recovered door for a quick ride to the Asian Wok. The happy birthday boy had ordered volumes of nosh, and we settled into a recovery mode for the evening. Now that our youngest son is 28, it seemed appropriate for mother to knit more squares for blankets for the poor (a project at work that everyone engages in), while I watched James Bond for old time’s sake – Goldeneye was interspersed with daft advertisements none of which gave any useful advice on what to do in a volcano or when there is a power outage and you have a dicky door, but did provide time for various age and stage activities including coffee-making with real hot water, and a well-deserved family night. 
The birthday boy, exhausted from the day’s activities, had retired early. On top of having to entertain the garage door man, the poor child had a team of fixer-uppers from the church board who invaded and spent an hour or two completing the demise of the kitchen water mixer, and reconnecting kitchen cupboard hinges so that the doors no longer scraped on the floor tiles like the chalk of a rookie teacher attempting to use a blackboard. 
When the volcano erupts, head north then…

DAILY DIARY – 800 words

I don’t watch much television. I can’t really see the point. The same narrow points of view called “editorial comments”. The mindless propaganda reflecting what a friend terms the Zeitgeist - the “time spirit” of the age (Do we thank Thomas Carlyle for the term or not?) – that endless agenda without moral compass or objective truths we once held dear… the incessant bashing of all things American or at least their beleaguered leader… well actually it’s just depressing. Entertainment means violence. News means mindless repetition of - I mean seriously, have you actually listened to Patrick Gower’s analysis of anything and everything?
And then there’s 800 Words. It’s a great story of an Australian widower with two children who moves to these wobbly islands to a fictitious coastal dorpie (a little village) called “Weld”. I’m not sure what genre it’s supposed to reflect. But the cumulative effect of the nutty but lovable characters and their small-town kiwi antics is the craziest of comedies. They say it’s comedy-drama. It certainly is comic.
We did the sensible thing that you can do these days. We recorded the series. The main protagonist – George – is a journalist who writes a column of 800 words. You’ve guessed it – I’m having a go at that now. (Oh bother, this is only about 204). And the machinations, okay that’s a bit strong, the antics of the locals are a brilliant tonic in the face of my challenges at this particular time of life. And of course - record the series, and you can fast forward the adverts AND not wait a week to see what happens next. As I write of course, at 6.00am on a Saturday, my thoughts are drowned out again by a RNZAF plane flying over my roof to the local military airfield. Good grief, with so few planes that fly, do they have to shake the house so early in the morning?
So back to Weld. We all need a Woody and a Constable Tom in our lives. And we need a lot more comedy. The intriguing thing is whether anyone in America or Finland actually laughed when the series was broadcast there. Comedy, like sermon humour, is lost entirely when your listeners have no idea what normal is in your culture – thus making the funny seem uneventful. Which reminds me of a John Cleese interview I watched. He and his side-kick tell the story of how they left the UK on a visit to New Zealand in 1968, and arrived in 1868. The account of an audience full of ladies with clinking cups in a Dunedin hall (which clinking he erroneously ascribes to Parkinsons) – is quite hysterical (in the humorist sense of the word). Naturally no one laughed at all during those early Monty-python sketches. And of course, the ladies with their clinking cups were probably just manifesting what is known as essential tremor. You can’t blame Dunedin for that, or can you? On the other hand, it may have been cold and with all those Presbyterians saving on heating expenses on the mainland, well it could have been the winter shakes.
I don’t blame John Cleese for miss-blaming Parkinsons. Now Billy Connelly would have understood. Like the script writer of that other comic cleric, the Vicar of Dibley, who like Connelly is doing battle with Parkinsons, you have to find something funny about it every day. Paul Mayhew-Archer tells the story of his neurologist who explains that with PD you get about five good years. ‘Great” he replies (in words to that effect) – I haven’t had one good year yet!” (Don’t confuse him with New Zealand born co-writer Richard Curtis). Mayhew-Archer muses that you can get arrested for Parkinsons (on the assumption you are drunk) which Billy Connelly would enjoy. The challenges of a movement disorder indeed. Connelly makes a joke of the drugs that have risky side effects – like becoming more addictive to your addictions (like sex). He refused those on the grounds that he had enough trouble with that already!
Well John Cleese couldn’t get a laugh from his Dunedin tea-drinking ladies at the matinee. And I suppose some of his humour isn’t very funny when it is off the page. But you can’t criticize the genius of Fawlty Towers. And Fawlty Towers neatly sums up my week. Assuming things about the health system and how it works. Trying to explain things to people who have made more assumptions and don’t actually understand anything you are trying to say to them at all.
800 Words is a tonic. We have yet to finish the series. But there are moments when the painful yet redemptive realities of this family in Weld are far too close to the bone. Friends save the day, and save me too.