Another letter from hospital. Really.

Diary of the last however many hours, with a lot of help from my friends

Hello once more from Auckland City hospital.

Yes, really. It seems like just yesterday I was writing:

the reduction procedure has worked extremely well; the bleeding has stopped and has no reason to return so long as I take care for a while longer; the pathology results show no cancer whatsoever

because it, er, was yesterday.

Early this morning there was more bleeding and why? I’m not sure, but possibly it’s because a truck was blocking the footpath on my walk home yesterday so I just swung my legs high to get over the roadside railings and skirt around, and as I walked on I thought was that a bad idea?

Possibly. Details will follow in due course.

In short, I’m hooked up again

and being irrigated again.

Today’s newsletter was going to go full noise about closed minds running all the way from Simon Bridges’ church friends to the position being fashioned by his Pop-Up leader on Maori and the health reforms and all the way on to hateful Republicans framing Black Lives Matter as domestic terrorism; but that’ll all have to wait.

Instead I am going to take maximum advantage of matesourcing. Yesterday’s newsletter had a mighty contribution from my mate Finlay Macdonald answering the call of the invalid, and because today is Free Thursday newsletter day, I’m going to run it again for those of you who don’t take the paid version.

And for you wonderful paying customers I’m going to add a further contribution from the also-mighty Paul Brislen.

Their contributions are more or less self explanatory, and because I’m writing this on an iPhone, I’ll let their words do the work.

Meanwhile how am I doing? Thanks for asking, not a hundred. However at this point still able to raise a Dad joke.

VIP GUEST WRITER PAUL BRISLEN

Write about your favourite track when you were in the fourth form, he said. It’ll be easy, he said. 

Well buster, it’s not as straightforward as all that is it because I was arriving on a jet plane and the only radio station the rental car (A “Hold On” I think it was called) could pick up was 1ZB and the songs … they were few and far between.

Plus it was so bloody long ago I have to resort to Wikipedia and LinkedIn to try to remember what we were doing then.

The USS Texas arrived in Auckland the same time we did and we got to watch one determined deck hand sit in the McDonald’s on Queen Street sucking down his Big Mac and refusing to be intimidated by the dozens of people just staring at him. DD Smash won big at the music awards with Outlook for Thursday but damned if I’m going to pick that or Maxine (Sorry, Sharon) because they were just on every radio that year and every one of the team of only 3,264,800 as we were then could sing them off by heart.

Plus it wasn’t my music, you know? I’d just left a school in the old country that once taught several members of Duran Duran. I owned one album (by Frankie Goes to Hollywood) and one single (Video Killed the Radio Star) and the perm/mullet combo of Sir Dave Dobbyn wasn’t going to sway my auditory canals. 

No, I’m going to pretend I’m younger and go instead for the Bard of Dominion Road, Don McGlashan and that good bloke Harry Sinclair and the album I insisted my mates back home listen to (they didn’t because how could you in 1989) Songs from the Front Lawn.

This is New Zealand music at its finest – songs you can sing to, stories being told, places being pinned to the map in a way that said “We are here”. 

But what to choose?

David needs cheering up so maybe it should be How You Doing? so he can sing along with the bit about Hamilton. Or the Theme from the Lounge Bar because it has that awesome line about the blood changing direction in your veins which is so good. Or Claude Rains, because the nuclear war stuff was pretty fucking real back then. 

There can be only one, so I shall opt for Tomorrow Night, that ode to the great OE, that fucking perfect song from its opening notes on a melodica to the girl from the Hutt Valley talking loud in a Kiwi accent all the way to Oriental Bay standing there in the sunlight…

If anything can get you out of bed and pissing in the wind it’s this song.

Get well, mate!

VIP GUEST WRITER FINLAY MACDONALD

Uncle Dave has been poorly and has called for help with his newsletter. “Nurse!” he cried. Instead, he got me. Why he couldn’t type lying down with a catheter in his bladder and a drip in his arm is a mystery, he should harden up. Or not, perhaps. Anyway, having blithely volunteered to step into the breach I awaited the brief. Uncle Dave addresses matters of weight in this newsletter, and I anticipated he would want the same from his understudies: pandemic responses, bike lanes, pop-up leaders, who is dismal and who is not … Eventually it arrived. “If it were , for example nominate your favourite song of  your fourth form year, is that something you might be interested in?’ Reader, I have left the punctuation and sentence structure as it was, in deference to the house style herein. I repeated, “Sure, look forward to the brief.’ He responded, “Well then, how about precisely that…” 

Turns out, this isn’t as simple as shouting about Mike Hosking or recounting tales of yore from the damp-carpeted lounge bars of the mighty DB hotel empire. (“None taken,” I hear the proprietor mutter.) First of all, I’d have to do some research. When the hell was I in the fourth form? So long ago it wasn’t called Year 10 for starters. Turns out it was 1976 – don’t do the maths – and once I got thinking and googling it all came rushing back at me like the kind of dream you have at that age. I dug around in the back of a storage cupboard and found the boxes of vinyl I’ve kept, even though most of it has long been unplayable due to accretions of dust, blunt needle damage, beer and probably the residue of a thousand Rizla papers. Thank you, Uncle Dave, for this trip down turntable lane.

My God, though, the 1970s were a good time to be a teenager discovering music. I try to remember what it was actually like back then – no internet obviously, nothing digital, not even much money with which to buy records, which made every trip to the record store a heavy-duty mission. Armed with whatever I’d read in Creem magazine or some rock encyclopedia I’d been reading like a novel, or with some track still etched in my synapses from Hauraki or, what, The Grunt Machine or Radio with Pictures? Whatever was on. Hours flipping through the albums in alphabetically arranged bins, poring over the cover art, reading the liner notes, fretting lest my few hard-saved dollars might be wasted on something that didn’t really and truly and fully and uncompromisingly rock. At 14, such a good age, it was about all that mattered.

Anyway, ’76 was a pretty fucking vintage year, I have to say. We’d really only just graduated from intermediate school, when Ziggy-era Bowie jostled with 20 Solid Gold Hits for our eardrums and pocket money. Great training. By the fourth form we were ready. We were critics, fans, air guitar virtuosos, all that. It was a wonderful year, a transition period from great old school rockers to a next generation of cool kids and then the glimmering dawn of punk. The Steve Miller Band released Fly Like An Eagle, the first Ramones album landed, Bob Seger’s teen angst masterpiece Night Moves hit us where it hurt, Rastaman Vibration throbbed from older siblings’ bedrooms, Tom Petty debuted, so did Blondie, so did Joan Armatrading, Lynyrd Skynyrd came out with their incredible live One More From the Road, Hotel Californiafought More Than a Feilding (sorry, Feeling) for control of AM radio ridge, and Bowie returned with Station to Station. I mean, come on. There was tons more (Graham Parker! Patti Smith!) as there is every year, but it felt like an embarrassment of riches, even at the time.

But this is a cop out, right? Uncle Dave wants me to name one song. One song that evokes a sense of time and place and age and, if I’m honest, stupidity and naivety and proper uncoolness. Well, there was one song that, in retrospect, pretty much summed the year up. It was so ubiquitous it might as well have been handed out on street corners and distributed by government decree to every home. The weird thing, though, was that until it hit the radio we’d never even heard of the artist, even though it came from a live album, which even idiots like us knew is what you release when you’re already famous. But Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do” from Frampton Comes Alive pretty much sums up the fourth form for me. A question without a question mark. My 1976 in a song. Surprising, ridiculous, thrilling, joyous, long, live …you didn’t want it to end.