Fretful sleeping

Diary of the last 20 hours

7.20am

Wake, late, for the fifth time since midnight.

But never mind my convalescence problems of exercise deficit and excess coffee intake. I’m a bit better each day. There are plenty of people with much more to worry about:

• Local builders having an absolute ‘mare trying to order timber in Aotearoa, land of countless hectares of  Pinus Radiata but not all that many mills any more bro

• Global capitalism feeling miserably constipated by a single giant container ship jammed  up its supply canal and you'd imagine that getting it out would be elementary but no

• People who actually take the time to write comments on the NZ Herald facebook page

• People who inadvertently read some of those comments on the NZ Herald facebook page

• The poor old trans Tasman Bubble

• Everyone in Romania, especially the  ones who have misfortune to go to hospital

Hello loyal readers! You will doubtless recall that when I began this newsletter I made it a diary that unfolded by the hour because, honestly, the  hit was flying so fast and furiously, the only way I could see to get on top of it was to comment minute by minute on each great boulder of manure as it came hurtling past.

Things have calmed down a bit since then. We have a vaccine now; Trump has been regurgitated, for the moment. 

Many of the rhythms of daily life have returned to their old certainties. Once again I can walk down to the pedestrian crossing and know without even needing to look up that there will be some prick in an Audi hurtling towards the crossing and throwing out the anchors at the last second and looking affronted that he has had to stop. Old familiar ways.

But occasionally the sense of chaos seems to assert itself again, and this would be one of those mornings, especially with that whole sleep derivation business.

Let's take it minute by minute and try to make some sense of it.

7.21am

The radio is telling me: In Aotearoa, land of countless hectares of Pinus Radiata but not all that many mills any more bro, local builders are having an absolute ‘mare trying to get hold of  timber 

Most of what I know about this I know from talking to MTAF reader Karren.

She went to plantation forests around the world with Fletcher Challenge and worked with all kinds of industry veterans and I would keep hearing about the giddying scale of the cyclical markets for pulp and paper and timber and plantation forestry. Huge money at the top of the cycle, despair at the bottom.

I would hear it all and think: you'd probably sleep less fitfully if you were in the airline business.

So you need to factor that into any discussion about all this: big swings can be at work.

And you also need to factor in: the logs tend to go where the money is best, and right now that would be China.

How might we ensure an adequate supply of timber here? How might we ensure a decent number of mills here to be buying those logs and processing them? 

How about we make it a job for the government? In these new uncertain times, could we be more open to the idea that the global market is something you need to layer up against, with local protections?

Say you’re needing to build more infrastructure, URGENTLY, but you can't, because you've been exporting all your logs.

Could you maybe benefit from a more interventionist State that - oh, let's say - owned forests, and timber mills and a Ministry of Works and did a shitload of building at enormous scale and didn’t require a financial return and could therefore say, yes we could make more from those logs by selling them all to China but here's the thing: we’ll be a bit rooted if we don't have enough infrastructure so how about we do a little bit of State intervention, like they do in ….er, China?

7.35am

How are we doing, readers, do we think sleep deprivation has pushed old Dave completely off the commie deep end?

Or is it possible that a reborn Ministry of Works and Ministry of Forestry might be just what we want after all these years of the invisible hand being so invisible you really wonder if it’s just complete mystical bullshit?

These things can and do go completely out of style. Maybe its time is passing.

7.45am

Online, and reading all the serious and not so serious suggestions about getting the enormous Ever Given container ship dislodged and thinking: maybe this is a very big deal indeed and much more than just a perfect meme for a little digger.

Buckle up your spacesuit and make sure you have your safety tether hooked up, things are about to get as cerebral as fuck up in here.

You know how in 2001: A Space Odyssey, there's that monolith? And it keeps appearing?

You know how the first time we see it, we see the leader of a group of apes, in the shadow of the monolith, pick up a bone and use it to smash other bones? And how he now sees he’s got a weapon that he can use to take ownership of the water hole?

This is a moment. He grasps its potency. It’s a graduation of sorts. And so just as today’s graduates fling their mortar boards, the ape flings his bone into the air, and over and over it turns for a million years and morphs into a piece of space technology.

There's an interpretation you can make of this and it is: each time the monolith is shown, man transcends to a higher level of cognition.

Here’s Stanley Kubrick:

Somebody said man is the missing link between primitive apes and civilized human beings...We are semicivilised, capable of cooperation and affection, but needing some sort of transfiguration into a higher form of life. Man is really in a very unstable condition

You could say then, that when the monolith appears, it is our moment to leap forward. In the movie we only see one side of the monolith, butI’m just wondering if the other side had some very significant writing on it.  Like, say, this:

Because if it did, well, maybe that’s a big clue, as we rgard the same words on the side of the boat. Could some truly momentous shit be taking place in the Suez Canal? is what I’m asking.

What if this is the moment we move - from semicivilised, capable of cooperation and affection, but needing some sort of transfiguration -  into a higher form of life?

What if?

11.35am

Let us now read a Facebook comments section and consider the awesome promise of transfiguration into a higher form of life.

MTAF reader Paul Brislen - hi Paul! - is in touch to say: found this in the Herald comments section and thought of you.

Yes we're back on a pet topic: the Auckland Harbour Bridge

Correspondent Will McKenzie has posted that while we wait for a more permanent solution, we could right now be creating a footpath cycleway wide enough for bikes, without taking away a car lane at all.

Oh hell yes I’d like to hear more.

A 2.4 metre wide footpath can be accommodated on the east clipon and a 2.4 metre wide cycle path on the west clipon, without reducing the number of traffic lanes, with the addition of 300mm wide barriers, a la the barriers on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. 

Is this for real? The numbers seem to work. He says the clip ons are wider than the centre lanes, so there's some room you can carve off by putting up a skinny barrier. 

That is 3.2 m per lane, more than the 3.05 m per lane provided on the centre lanes. 

That sounds right, actually. You do feel like you need to breathe in a little as you ride your tight way up the middle lanes.

But wait! Will has more: 

The necessary connecting footpaths are already in place on the east. All that would be needed on the west is two short connecting cycle paths.

He gives us other projects for cost reference and suggests it could be done for 20 mill, and done by the end of the year. 

What do I say? I say giddy up. This is the sort of constructive imaginative thrifty Kiwi thinking we need. And there it is: in a Herald reader comments section of all places. Go Will!

But oh man, what a buzzkill reading the rest of them.

They’re all there to comment on a great column last week by reader Simon - hi Simon! who made compelling comparisons with other cities who have taken roads out of action and given them over to cycling.

One might imagine that would put pressure on the remaining routes but no. The reverse has happened and volumes have lightened up as delighted  riders take to the roads, unmolested by vehicles, and love the experience. As we too will do when we get to ride our bikes over the bridge every day and at will. 

People doubt this. They are just wrong. There are throngs of us right across the shore waiting for this.

Needless to say this cuts no mustard at all with a certain kind of reader who stops typing only to massage the enormous chip on their shoulder.

Another out-of touch elitist lecturing the peons writes one.

Others are even more unapologetic in sharing the sorry limitations of their reasoning powers.

Also check out the tragic whose actual avatar is a motor vehicle.

12.44pm

Reading about the virus seizing its chance in Queensland, bolting out the window and into the community. Don't want to be a buzzkill but do we think the Trans Tasman Bubble will be quite the vast success its fond boosters imagine?

2.35pm

Falling asleep at my desk, slugging another coffee and thinking about the doco we watched on Saturday night.

Collectiv is about unbelievable failings in medical treatment given victims of a Bucharest nightclub fire. Let’s just say you would absolutely not believe how corrupt a hospital system and medical profession could ever be.

Painful, wholly avoidable deaths, and the reason: corruption, including, improbably but for real, fatal dilution of disinfectant leaving deadly bacteria to run barefoot through operating theatres.

Notwithstanding the Pinko arguments up there at the top of the newsletter, I'm also prepared to acknowledge that communism in Romania left it ransacked and beaten down with a broken moral landscape. Deeply in need of some sort of transfiguration.

It makes a bit of sleep deprivation look like a walk in the park.