6.45am
Wake to find that Boris Johnson is still Prime Minister of an entire nation, despite all of that endless lying. He lies when he’s on his feet, he lies when he’s sitting down, he lies when he’s asleep, he lies when he’s awake, he’s keeping it up whether in congress or in the commons, forever with trousers at his ankles, pressing forever on with his fabulist bullshit and all the while a deadly virus has been only ever limply impeded to the extent that, well, the writing is literally on the wall.
And yet there he slumps, still, now, the most dangerous sack of spuds ever to be tipped inside a 4000 quid suit.
Some data, to underscore the immensity of his neglect: England - not the UK, just England - has a population of 55 million, ten times the size of ours.
It has suffered 112,000 deaths. If we had seen loss on that scale we would have sustained not 26 deaths but 11,200.
And yes their island is different to our island, many more people come and go from it and they live in cities like, er, Auckland, and travel on confined planes and buses and trains like, er, we do, and sit in pubs and theatres at the, er, same remove we do.
The crucial unavoidable point about the virus is that if you want to get on top of it no matter how large and busy a nation you may be, to stop the virus you have to stop movement and take the economic hit. Then you resume.
Nations much larger than ours managed to do it, but this ass-hat was not having it. He wished to see the money wheels still turning, even, we now learn, if the bodies should be stacked high. His piss-weak compromise was to do just enough to protect the hospitals from collapse, the better for business to press on.
And that’s even before we get into the whole tawdry catalogue of sweetheart deals and arrangements for mates to turn a bit of private profit coin out of the whole thing. Sure enough out comes the soft hand to click for the waiter to bring another round of vested interest and class privilege and this Bullingdon prick has been airily waving it all through.
There was an urban pub legend back in simpler drinking days that what you got in your flagons was what had been put in there the night before by wiping down the beer-soaked leaners and collecting everything that came pouring off the sides and tipped into the bucket.
Boris Johnson is every worst trace of every immoral appalling Evelyn Waugh character wiped down off the side of the table into a bucket and decanted into a half gallon jar.
How is he still there? Too many people, media included, seem to like the taste.
7.25am
My radio is full of the All Blacks being sliced diced and julienned into derivatives. Not today, no, but some day, surely; and then what? Will even the world’s mightiest forward pack find they’re not solid enough in the scrum to …oh look I’m going to quit while I’m behind. I don’t know where this is going to go at all.
I do know we’re a hell of a long way now from Colin Meads doing his training by running up hills with strainer posts, and I also know from watching last month’s European football manoeuvring that you can really piss off your fans by getting too expensive and remote.
But there’s no question that of all the sports fans in the world, the ones that will accomodate whatever you’re doing as long as you keep on winning boys are the fans of the mighty ABs.
8.15am
MTAF reader Foxy - hi Foxy! - proposes a test, an ordeal, a trial.
I may regret being so frank and candid - and reader you know that’s saying a lot when you consider what I’ve written about the working of various of my body parts this last month - but here it is: I could lose all four with no great anxiety.
10.55am
There was a great column by Nesrine Malik in the Guardian earlier this week about how the arc of the moral universe bends through protestors, activists, dissenters. They change history - then their efforts are minimised, camouflaging the truth that the people had the power all along.
The uncomfortable truth is that change comes about in ways that are disruptive and, yes, occasionally unsavoury. Those events are then sanitised and their significance minimised, so we can maintain a naive trust in the arc of history and those who govern us.
I never much enjoyed doing the Panel with Michele Boag but I especially remember not enjoying one particular afternoon when she made some reference to South Africa and to the NZ nuclear position, as if this were something we all agreed upon and somehow always had. I was thinking the fuck that’s what you people were saying back then. This is maybe also what is making me bristle when I see that bloody beer ad latching the brand onto the nuclear protest movement. The fuck your brewery had their backs then, pal.
11.25am
Anyone who says that as a crisis evolves it’s not a good idea to keep recalibrating what you’re doing, come at me. Not you Steven Joyce, you just keep digging your garden.
4.20pm
Greetings, readers of the free editions. This week the Fourth Form Music reminiscences have kept right on coming. Linda Burgess! Simon Wilson! Lindsey Dawson! Man, we have been having a time.
Today, a couple of mighty contributions from MTAF readers, thanks very much Craig, thanks very much Dal. We’re having a ball with this, and we ain’t goin’ down til the sun comes up.
Reader Dallas Graham
Aaahh my fourth form year was so lucky to coincide with 1969...what a year for Rock! The film Easy Rider came out and turned a lot of people onto its excellent soundtrack featuring the Byrds "Wasn't Born to Follow" and the Band's "The Weight" (a cover version) among other gems..
Then Woodstock came along with another scorching soundtrack album with Joe Cocker, Richie Havens, Crosby Stills and Nash, Ten Years After (inspired guitar heroics from Alvin Lee) The Who and a host of others..
If that wasn't enough The Beatles recorded Get Back which came out a year later as Let It Be and the magnificent Abbey Road (possibly their finest achievement)..
Late that year Lennon brought out his controversial single "The Ballad of John & Yoko". A version was allowed on NZ radio with the word "Christ" bleeped out..
My local record shop in Marton was run by a staunch Catholic lady. Imagine my grief when I discovered all the 45s of the song ruined by her taking a nail to it with deep grooves making the song unplayable.
I bought it anyway for ten cents because the flip side was playable —George Harrison's "Old Brown Shoe"!!
Reader Vague Craig
I was supposed to be born mid-January of Wednesday's MTAF Lindsey Dawson's fourth form year but Mum stubbornly endeavoured to have me on her birthday early in March. I arrived one week early. Or five late, depending on your point of view. Time was consistently relative in 1959.
I still remember the occasion. Well, alright, I remember memories of the most traumatic event I ever experienced. A recalling of a repeated nightmare to be more completely accurate. The only nightmare I ever dreamed, yet I dreamed it many times.
I barely am, drifting in that space between asleep and awake. Colourless. Sightless. Suspended warm and weightless, a slow bass and soft susurration as of surf on a beach. Perhaps shelly or pebbled. Then comes a sudden crushing weight. A pounding like drums. Pulsing waves of pressure as if I'm in a bed so huge that I'm being crushed by the weight of the blankets. No, now it is so small that the sheets are constricting and binding me. Pendulating to and fro between those two sensations, when. Oh, cold! Sudden burning as if my entire skin is on fire and I snap awake, arms and legs struggling tangled in bedding, heart racing. It's just a dream. The nightmare. Again.
It seemed to arrive in times of stress, whenever I experienced inner conflict or confusion or when my id and my ego did battle. It first came late in 1962. I was almost four years old when my divorced mother accepted employment and would leave her only child in the care of a neighbour during the day. The other children there would, echoing their parents, label me "bastard" a weighty word in those days. It was a far more frequent visitor during the two and a half years of bed-wetting after my step father arrived when I was four (and a half). Sometimes it accompanied gifts, such as the forty six warts that grew on my hands and fingers soon after I started school. The frequency of this recurring nightmare decreased as I grew older and, I believe, my subconscious and conscious selves began to learn how to live with each other.
"Oh, wow, Rick, man, that's really heavy, man" as Nigel Planer will say in 1982 on colour TV.
There were no nightmares in 1974. I had repeated standard four when we moved to the shore from west Auckland, so I was fifteen in fourth form. It meant, while I was only two months older than Chris, on sports day when I ran second in the 100 200 & 400 metre races it was against fifth formers instead of he and my other classmates. Why do adults have weird rules just to make things suck? Chris's Dad built an extension on our house the year before so my brother Don had his own room now. The wiring was done weekends by an electrician from the Post Office Workshop through my Dad's job as a PSG chauffeur which would occasionally require him driving Piggy Muldoon between Hatfield Beach and Auckland Airport but more often involved driving mail vans and trucks. The Mellors across the roads' Dad built their extension himself. Started it in '74, completed in '75, financed with a bank loan which was repaid via 1974's brand new ACC by way of a lump sum for the fingers he removed from his left hand with his skill saw while cutting the skirting boards right at the end of it.
Cigarettes could be bought in packs of ten, or individually for 5 cents from some dairies. Sobranie Black Russians were pungent while you smoked them but left less detectable odour lingering about your person after. School dances were shunned, birthday parties were in. Parents would be banished. Everyone brought one album, and some a portion of booze, usually pilfered, for the tropical punch bowl. Could be anything. In it went, and on went the first LP. A few drinks. Chips, dips. Nuts and pretzels. Maybe a game of spin the bottle - kisses in the dark. Some dancing, mostly lounging, bean bags were frequent furniture. Someone would light a joint. The first four times that I tried marijuana nothing happened at all. The fifth had me laughing until my abdomen and face hurt. Buddha.
1974. So many wonderful albums were released that year. Casey Kasem's AT 40 countdown still filled hours of radio every weekend. Maria Muldaur sang the camels to sleep at the oasis and Jim Croce said he loved us in a song beyond the grave. Bachman-Turner Overdrive rocked me to my feet as they stammered that I ain't seen nothing yet.
I don't recall if it was the Doctor himself, Barry Jenkin, to whom I was listening through headphones on my ghettoblaster that particular night in 1974 as I was dialed into Radio Hauraki in my bedroom. I do know I tuned in to his evening shifts as often as I could throughout his tenure there and he definitely influenced my musical tastes by introducing artists years before they were mainstream and some I doubt I would ever have heard of otherwise. From the first synthesized wind gusts through my headphones to the abrupt and humorous end, this is undoubtedly the song (pair) that had the most influence upon me in 1974. It was at least 6 months before I heard it again, as it took that long to import the LP, after finding a record store that would.