Learning from our mistakes

Diary of the last 26 hours

Yesterday, 5.30 pm

Dash off the newsletter late because it's been quite the interrupted day. Get in a few notes about The Nightmare On Ponsonby Road before I press send but now I’m watching the coverage and thinking Suffering Jesus. Really?

Imagine for a moment, even if it’s not easy if you try, that you might put your Walkabout fate in the hands of a welcome party that looks like this.

Wunderkind - hold the wunder, hold the kind - Hamish Price has been getting stooges planted along the route so that his leader can be greeted with hand-pumping enthusiasm and gushing of the Ponsonby kind that makes people in the rest of the nation dislike us Aucklanders so very much. 

But it appears Hamish hasn't been able to scrape up quite enough for a quorum so he himself is all at once being organ grinder and monkey and nuts in this particular circus. He greets  the pop up leader warmly, and as the cameras roll she delivers a note-perfect performance of delight at encountering this complete stranger and his warm praise for her shouting and barking in the debate and her party’s policies. And how’s he voting? You bet it’s two ticks blue. What luck! The campaign has descended into panto and she’s performing like an absolute trouper. We all know when she says in an exaggerated stage voice: WHERE’S MY CAREER that it's our job to roar back: BEHIND YOU!!

Sadly the panto now starts to lose its fizz as the media looks poor old Hamish up and down,   and all praise to TVNZ’s Benedict Collins, who collars him and invites him to explain what he's just been up to and, well, back on the farm anything that lame would get the old knock to the back of the head, I’m sorry to say. Will Judith be true to her state house farmer roots and deliver the mercy blow? Or will it be more like the cars she didn't crush? The election goes on and the panto never ends.

7.45 pm

Out for dinner, we’re talking about the cannabis referendum and the poll yesterday that showed things looking hopeful for sanity. Michael is disappointed, and we all agree that the debate has been more or less submerged by this 2020 shitshow. We also all agree that what we’ve seen is an unwillingness to give something new a try and that’s the way here so often.  That, and a willingness to absolutely clobber anyone for trying and failing. In his field, he’s involved in a lot of experiments and theory. He knows the promise of trial and error. It's how you move ahead. 

We agree, something like this is surely worth a try: you can tune it, you can adjust it, it’s not as though you're committing to something that can't be changed or reversed.

If we legalise, there’s a good prospect of diminishing the harm cannabis is doing. There's a prospect of ending injustices for people who aren't white and prosperous. There's a prospect that people will do what the meme says: if a group of friends drinks alcohol they start a fight.   If they smoke weed they start a band.

Even if I'm wholly wrong and the experts are wholly mistaken when they say this will make things safer, it will be by no means hard to change the rules, or do a U turn, like they did with oh, say prohibition of alcohol.

Hold that thought, I have a feeling that tomorrow morning the radio will be talking about border protection and managing Covid and there will be some pertinence to this.

7.20 am

The radio is talking about border protection and managing covid, and it’s quite pertinent.  In a long interview with health minister Chris Hipkins, Corin Dann is not looking for scalps or gotchas. It’s a productive questioning about how to protect ourselves best, now that we're back at zero cases in the community.

Hopkins says the aim is to be continuously  improving the border protection, and the testing there, to have plenty of testing in the community, to have people scanning so they can be contacted. He's not so worried about which devices are doing that, just as long as people are actually doing it. Any option you choose, you're still relying on people to act. If, for example, it were a dongle that automatically gets picked up as you come and go, you're still relying on people to wear them. I sometimes have decided not to go into a place because I couldn't be bothered getting out the phone to scan. But you drop into the rhythm and then it's really just the same as pulling on the seat belt. The more you do it, the smoother it goes. Let’s hope we’ll all do our job. 

Elsewhere today there's an Ashley Bloomfield interview with John Kirwan where he says: If something hasn't gone right, we'll say how can we go and fix it. It's not going to go 100 per cent right. But we can't afford to let every little thing that isn't perfect become a failure... because we'll stop learning and stop adapting.

This is what has worked for us so far and will work best for us: keep learning from what goes wrong, keep tightening up, keep improving.

Gerry Brownlee and Judith Collins want to cast it as a matter of staunchness and rigour. They want us to imagine you can  build a perfect new border protection operation up from the ground. They’re promising an illusion of accomplishment. It's a dangerous deception. The worst kind of pantomime.

8.45 am

I’m getting my haircut and I'm Kim's first cut at level 1 which  means there's coffee again. 

I tell her it's the swiping of the signs I’m putting my faith in, I’m going to keep on doing it. She says, yep, same. 

And she says but man you get some people. One, a friend of a client, has been saying she's not using anything on her phone, it lets the government look at what she's doing. Her friend asked her: did you know the government can see what you're doing with your EFTPOS card?Do you want to stop using that too? She wasn't sure how to deal with that.

11.15 am

Sitting in the doctor's reception, trying not to listen, but overhearing one side of phone conversations with patients and feeling sympathy for the receptionist. There's a recurring theme: people seem to have trouble grasping that they need to make appointments not only to see the doctor or nurse but also to talk to them on the phone.

I’m here for an annual cardiovascular check. This is new. I assumed I'd been invited to come in because of my risk profile, but I'm getting the feeling it might be because of my age profile, because my heart attacks and hypertension are news to the nurse. But all good, I like to stay in touch about this stuff. I warn her the blood pressure can do some wild things. She says well  let’s see.

130/70. She says that's good blood pressure. I say I've had a lot worse than that. It's almost as though this not drinking is doing me good.

12.15 pm

The nurse in the blood lab next door asks what’s brought me in and I explain about the checkup and the heart attacks and she says: if you're still alive after the first one you’ll live to 100 and I tell you what, I'm getting old but I’m feeling pretty good. You might even say I’ve been learning from my mistakes. 

4.00 pm

Have you been enjoying the music, More Than A Feilding readers? Here - have something lovely, we all deserve something nice. Even poor old Hamish.