These people are not our friends
Weekend freebie edition
Hello! Here’s this week’s freebie edition of More Than A Feilding which begins in the customary way with an invitation to become a paying subscriber.
I’d love to be able to give it all away, but sadly New World and the bookshop and Hammer Hardware continue to put their stuff behind a paywall, so I’m forced to follow suit. Trust you understand.
In a moment, this week's free edition, These people are not our friends plus a preview of other recent editions.
But first, the button.
These people are not our friends
Morning in London
Mother hugs beloved daughter outside the converted shoe factory in which she is living.
Afternoon in London
Travelling writer takes himself and his wrist down to A&E, just to be sure. (Short story: took a fall in Singapore, wrist bore the brunt, looked like trouble, long story here.)
The triage nurse asks are you having any difficulty gripping or rotating? I say none.
On a scale of 1 to 10, what pain do I have? I say none.
She says, there’s no swelling, no bruising, that’s a pretty good sign.
She says take a seat and wait for the doctor to call you.
Many doctors come out over the next few hours and they call many names. At one point, a flashing light and alarm go off and I have never seen so many doctors and nurses hurry down a corridor so fast. It is not, of course, to see my wrist.
The focus of the pain was neither on the scaphoid area nor the ulnar, I have assessed for myself. There’s no pain now at all. At the end of the afternoon I thank them at the desk and set off back up the road.
Evening in London
Dinner with our daughter and her partner. Eight months they’ve been gone now. Mitch says that until recently he’d been listening to RNZ in the mornings but lately it’s just been too discouraging. Mary-Margaret says you should see the Fast Track submission she did, full of sound and fury.
We talk about Shane Jones along the lines of what the actual fuck? Likewise Brooke van Velden.
And we talk about the dismality of the coalition and its dismal leader, this man who flexes and preens about his extensive international business experience but somehow never manages to be anything but trite and facile and empty.
Gratifying to see his NZ is open for business bullshit smacked down by a seasoned exporter who actually knows the score: that we have always been open for business, that the previous government did plenty to advance our interests. (Including protecting us and 20,000 lives from a pandemic. Misrepresenting that as inward looking and closed off is a reprehensible rewriting of history. )
I don’t know if it’s Luxon or his seven TikTok experts who have been writing the lines that inform us, like we’re gormless idiots, that getting more trade with the world is super valuable because selling more stuff helps us get a better standard of living.
Do tell! Here’s another insight: if you put potatoes in boiling water and wait twenty minutes they will be much nicer to eat.
It’s not that we don’t know the reality of all this; that's the simple bit. The harder bit is actually coming up with the goods, being genuinely inventive and innovative.
And because this is the party that has forever preferred the shortcut and the easy option, their idea of being innovative and inventive is to go back to people who had been trying to make a buck by digging stuff up or drilling for it or in some other way trashing the environment and saying hey do you guys want to have another go, we’ll change the rules to make it easy for youse.
These people are not our friends. This guy is not our leader.
