Best thing I ever did

Diary of the last 29 years

11.05 am September 14 1991

Getting married in a few hours. The look on my face! What’s the problem, Dave? Most likely I am at this point composing my speech.

4.35 pm September 14 1991

Best thing I ever did.

6.40am September 14 2020

Morning Report reports the plague has reached Les Mills Takapuna. Someone has done an RPM spin class at 5pm, followed by a combat class at 6.15pm and, well, first of all: respect, and second: let me testify here as a one-time regular of that very gym class in that very room.

This is how it goes: you’re pedalling your guts out, faster, faster, more, more, and the sweat’s coming down your face, and the trainer will throw in a little motivational challenge like Can you taste your breakfast yet? and you laugh as much as you can laugh when you’re breathing that hard.

And that, right there, is the nub of the thing: it’s a hard-breathing sort of a pursuit in a relatively confined space, and I wouldn't be too keen on doing any RPM at all while enemy droplets might be in the air.

Best of luck to the 89 people who have been identified as close contacts requiring testing. Best of luck to us all as we wait for the return of the zero new cases days.

Good morning and best wishes to everyone who is putting on a mask and keeping distanced and believing the damn science. Not you, Billy the Grifter.

7.10am

On the radio everyone’s getting a mic pointed at them and asked what level they’re looking for. Either they’ve edited out the crazies, or most people actually accept it’s a pandemic to be taken seriously and differ only on the question of how confident we might feel about moving up or down.

This is not the entire picture, though, as demonstrated on Saturday in Aotea Square when a heroic attempt was made on the national record of greatest number of complete fucking morons in one spot by a sleazy discredited MP and his grifter mate. Also inserting himself in the picture over the weekend was a guy on the Waiheke ferry refusing to wear a mask thereby bringing the vessel to a halt, and thus

A: valiantly protecting humanity from Big Pharma, Gates, Soros and the pizza place with the kiddies in the cellar

or

B: making a big noise and being noticed

Mostly what these people are asserting is their right to put the rest of us at risk. Our weakest links seem to feel that by withholding their cooperation they can seize some limelight.

I’m seeing their swivel-eyed looniness washing up onto gathering numbers of Facebook pages. Clearly there’s going to be more of this. People like Billy are a lost cause, but friends can be protected.

This, from The Conversation, is one of the best most concise explanations I’ve yet seen about reading and understanding the numbers. If a friend seems in need of help, maybe try this.

What armchair COVID experts are getting wrong.

10.40am

E-biking across the North Shore because it’s the future.

Chatting with a guy at a bike shop in Takapuna. He says the e-bikes they’re the future, and he gestures towards the Harbour Bridge and says when we've got the Skypath that’ll be great.

And he says can you believe Judith Collins wants to dump it? What an idiot.

I just love it when people of commerce say to themselves I don't care what the customer might think, I’m going to get stuck in.

They announced on Friday, the National Party, that they want to see way more electric cars. Yay, I guess, but the way they’re imagining it is just so emblematic. They plan to let you drive your e-car in the bus lanes, and they propose to keep on building roads to drive them on and really isn’t that just the perfect illustration of Blue Green magical thinking that says I don’t want to be seen as selfish, or anti-dolphins (OMG aren’t dolphins so pretty) but I also don’t want things to change in any way that would inconvenience me or stop living my life in exactly the way that suits me and I’m quite incapable of grasping that doing things differently could actually be better.

The mistake is to see the car as the hero of this new story. The hill-killing e-bike is way better fitted for the role. It can carry people on a great many of their shorter trips and free up the roads for those precious cars. It’s a vastly less costly and less demanding way of achieving mass movement for us all in a carbon-free way.

But sure, let’s keep driving the beloved cars down the beloved roads and spend tens of billions more dollars sustaining a dopey and inferior status quo and saddle our kids with a debt and put off doing the transformative work our kids will have to pay for on top of this wholly unnecessary tab.

12.10pm

Crikey. They don’t pick National Party candidates the way they used to. It’s almost like they've swapped your decent older-Rotarian-type-with-a-calling-to-serve-the-public for your wide boy looking to advance his career.

The candidate for Upper Harbour is, by the look of some Business Desk reporting, going to have to answer some awkward questions about just how accomplished he is.

There have been suggestions of CV inflation.

It all sounds bit unfair. Who doesn't do that a bit eh? If you worked at the lolly factory on the jet plane line, is it so wrong to call yourself a rocket scientist? Is it so wrong to call yourself the party of business and capable management even if you have to delete all the bits about Novopay and Southern Response and hospitals with sewage seeping through the walls?

Kicking myself, though. Occasionally someone from the Labour party will ask if I might be interested in putting my name up for a completely doomed seat. A while ago I got a sounding-out email about Upper Harbour for this election, and I thought, oh probably not but what does Karren think.

She did what she always does if it looks as though I’m about to do something especially stupid. She reminded me:

1: you’d hate it

2: you’d hate it

3: do you really think you could stick at it, you don’t even like going in to an office

So I told them no, Karren won’t let me.

Just kidding. Best thing I ever did.

Also, even with all this shit flying he’d probably still take me.