Man would be a damn fool to leave all this

Diary of the last 10 hours

8.40am

The house has a warm wonderful aroma  of fresh beautiful cheese puffs. Not our house, Adrian Field’s house.

Adrian runs a blog in search of the nation’s best cheese scone and the answer hands down for the last year at least is: Bacio on Jervois Rd. 

He liked the look of the cheese puff recipe I put up the other day to go with the cosy chat Kim Hill had with the pop-up leader of the opposition. Sharing is good for the soul.

Look what Amber May made this morning

The Nanas cheese puffs recipe comes from Helen Jackson’s Foodlovers site. I used to see her sometimes in the Radio Live studio and let me tell you, she knows her onions, and her Nana Havill, she clearly knew how to make a tray of golden goodness.

10.40 am 

You can fool some of the people some of the time but if you're making a website don’t try to fool James Guthrie. He had a look under the hood of the National Party website and well blow me down if they haven't been doing a bit of the old copy and paste and cut out the hard-working middleman.

You copy the coding of someone else’s website, change the name from Kim for Utah to New Zealand National Party, and Bob's your uncle, a shiny new election campaign waving the flag for free enterprise and individual responsibility and giving small businesses the chance to just get on with it.

It's what you might call Eminemently explainable: you're busy, you need to do a website, why pay for it when you can take a shortcut?

Perhaps this is what they have in mind for setting up a border protection agency from scratch. Will it be comprehensive and effective? Or might it entail shortcuts and a bit of the old copy and paste? And might it maybe be something like Novopay or perhaps more like CERA?

11.05 am

Kim for Utah, sorry, the New Zealand National Party takes a well-earned break from mocking and deriding the government for convening working groups, honestly what losers, to, er announce they will be forming a working group.

11.30am

The way you come to learn of a death, so often now, is at your desk, looking at a screen, between tweets and emails and memes and an excel spreadsheet. Sometimes it means not much and sometimes it stops you in your tracks.

I remember when Townes Van Zandt died and the screen told me and that was one of the first times I got stopped in my tracks by a computer. 

I remember when Justin Townes Earle was just “here’s my teenage kid” playing alongside his father Steve, who he didn't really know growing up, in the Wellington Town Hall. Me and Skinny and Flash rolled down from Brooklyn in Skinny’s old Valiant to see something magic and it was. When people like that go, the gap is huge. And Flash is gone now too and that’s a whole lot of empty as well.

There's a larger shadow of lost souls over the whole day as well, same as it was the day of the shootings, and how do you absorb all of it, and what’s something, anything can you do? 

Plant a tree?  I had a suggestion last year, an idea that at the foot of each tree you could put a nameplate, and maybe you get every single name you can find, every person who ever lived here. And then you hook that up to a website where you can add any info about them. Here's one for your great-great-grandmother, and here's her story on the app, so you can look her up as you stand at her tree and reflect on the life she lived.

Trees That Count aims to get millions of native trees planted. You can be a funder, a gifter, a planter. It’s something.

1.00 pm

At the Ministry of Dr Bloomfield says: we need a high, or reasonable, level of testing from here out. Meaning: we foresee leaving Level 3 and not going back, and that would be great but clearly we’re going to need to be really onto testing and keeping this thing under control.

Mask time, eh? Changing, adapting, being a bit different in order to hold on to what we prize.

We can manage that, can’t we?

Is there fatigue the second time around? Is Level 3 actually harder to live in than 4, when there was less of a sense of missing out on anything?

We can keep adapting our thinking to what we’ve got and dealing with it, it’s what the stoics would do. It's not a bad way to go.

3.00pm

In the Beehive theatrette the PM says 

here's what we know, here's the reasoning we’re working to and here’s how we've come to decide what happens next,

The spokesperson for every impatient mansplainer in the nation tweets 

Just tell us the decision and skip the propaganda 

Laila Harré has his number

Because getting the full story makes it so much harder to knee jerk.

What comes next? Level 3 for a bit longer, mandatory masks on public transport, working it out, adapting as we go along, still comparatively the safest place you'd want to be.

I’m not waiting around to hear the questions, life’s too short to hear them for the 94th time. I’ll be in the kitchen making Level 3 soup

4.10pm House has rich aroma of french onion soup. Here's the recipe that says it will give your house a wonderful rich aroma of french onion soup. A journo friend arriving at our place once said I had no idea it would be so bougie.

4.20pm

Words to live by, if you have to  - if you’re having to adapt to a new normal, say -  from the very first episode of the Beverly Hillbillies from Jed Clampett who was not, and never became, bougie.

Cousin Pearl: Jed! you're a millionaire!

Jed: A millionaire! Yeah that's what the fella kept calling me. I didn't know just how to take it. 

Pearl:I t meant you're rich.

Jed: Me!? 

Pearl: The richest man in these hills, maybe in the whole state. Oh Jed you can have anything you want do anything you want go anyplace you want. 

Jed: Yeah that's another thing he kept saying. He said he reckon I'd be moving away from here soon. What do you think, Pearl? Do you think I ought to move?

Pearl: Jed how can you even ask? Look around you. 

You're eight miles from your nearest neighbour. 

You're overrun with skunks, possums, cats, wildcats. 

You use kerosene lamps for lights. 

You cook on a wood stove summer and winter.

You're drinking homemade moonshine, washing with homemade lye soap and your 

bathroom is fifty feet from the house 

and you ask should you move !?

Jed: Yeah I reckon you're right. Man would be a damn fool to leave all this.