It cheers me up no end to know I’m not the only person who literally buries their nose in a nice bit of literature. The smell and feel of books and magazines –weight, shape, paper, ink – is so much a part of it I’d argue we read with fingers and nose like butterflies taste with their feet. When I fall in love properly with a book, it seems a kind of miracle that you can hold hours and days of pleasure so easily in two hands.

Not that I don’t also occasionally look at my laptop with love (fickle girl) as it navigates me off to websites where someone, somewhere, has written something I would never have found in my bookshop or letterbox. I have a vague fancy to own a kobo or iPad which can hold more virtual books than I currently have cascading out of the real bookcases in my house. Though I am waiting for someone to invent an application that slow-releases a book-smell first.

On a per capita basis, Kiwis are the highest consumers of magazines in the world. My entirely unscientific theory to explain this is that, for people who live so much in the backyard and at the beach, we choose a reading medium that won’t be ruined by sand or tomato sauce.

No doubt that’s whimsical nonsense and I look forward to your emails. Because my experience of Kiwi readers over the past couple of years is that you treat what you read in print as part of a conversation.

It has been decided that this will be the last time we will chat on these pages and the thing I am going to miss is not so much what I write, as what you write back - your crazy ideas in response to my crazy ideas about car cricket, ACC, gang patches, flash mobs and the new feminism.

There’s been the odd correction (the location of Marton, Fergie’s correct title, the proper spelling of Mark “Rigor” Richardson) and stories from readers with parallel – or perpendicular - experiences and opinions to my own.

There have been letters, too (I’ve noticed angry people write letters, not emails) and cards (only happy people write cards). I’ve kept all the cards. I use them as bookmarks.

By far and away the biggest response was to this year’s column celebrating solo mothers which inspired a delightful and enlightening backwards-and-forwards with one non-custodial dad, and sufficient heartbreaking, heart-warming personal stories from women raising kids alone to fill a book. As I said to them, and now to you, it has been a pleasure.

Knowing that was on the agenda, I’d be tempted to say I was busy that night washing my hair. Not that I am expecting the phone to ring – he probably knows as well as I do that half of my house-minus-mortgage isn’t going to make a ha’penny difference, even if you threw in my six-month term deposit and the emergency money in grandma’s teapot.

But it is different for the rich – giving away half what you’re worth is do-able if the leftover half is still heaps. And fascinatingly, it seems that while people like us daydream about what we would buy if we had lots of money, wealthy people daydream about how they might best give it away. I’ve read over and over a quote from Pierre and Pam Omidyar (“Mr & Mrs eBay”) who wrote in their Giving Pledge: "We have more money than our family will ever need.” I like trying to imagine what that feels like. It makes me dizzy.

Part of the philosophy of the Giving Pledge is that donors should make a noise about what they give – as opposed to being private and discreet – to encourage others to get on board, irrespective of their means.

But in awe of this grand-scale philanthropy, you might wonder what you could possibly do to make a difference with your available cash – that bit left over after bills and responsibilities and the odd bit of fancy. Because we’re all driven to feel we’re making a difference somewhere, contributing to a greater good beyond our own letterbox.

Happily, the other part of the Gates/Buffett philosophy is that you get to see what your money does and that much, at least, translates. I’ve felt inordinately lucky to have been involved in the kind of fundraisers (often contributing jokes rather than cash) where you get a photo later that shows what you all did – a kitchen for some midwives or a school for Burmese kids – something tangible you can stick on your fridge and stare at, and know your world is bigger than the actual space you inhabit.

As much as we can’t help but admire billionaires who funnel funds into impressive projects and research, we can also admire charities who take our spare tens-of-dollars and turn them into something you can photograph. Pick one or two and give what you can. We are all, in our own way, as influential as Bill Gates. And most of us have a better haircut and sexier specs, bless him.

“Back in the 1960s,” I said (and gosh, I do go on), “you wouldn’t have been allowed to work here. Barmaids, as they were called then, had to be over 25-years-old and married. I’m never sure if that was about protecting some young slip of thing from the perils of blokes en masse tossing back lagers en masse before 6 o’clock closing, or if it was about protecting unaccompanied gentlemen from youthful feminine wiles.

“And until 1972,” I continued, on a roll now, “you would have been paid a lower hourly rate than young Nigel standing there beside you, simply because you were a woman. Fortunately, your mum and your gran and women like them, they fixed that.”

“So,” she countered, “that’s all done, then.” Well, yes and no. Every win in social justice requires constant vigilance. And while we may have come a long way, baby, there’s still a way to go.

Right now in NZ, women on average earn 12 per cent less than men – for every dollar he earns, she earns 88 cents. Globally, the pattern is the same - although fresh research from the States suggests childless women are catching up with men while the wage gap grows for working mothers.

But let’s not get too gloomy, sisters. I like to be as much about finding solutions as about highlighting problems. Here’s a creative way of bridging the wage gap – if women are earning 12 per cent less, we should simply work 12 per cent less. Huzzah!

So if you work an eight hour day, take 57.6 minutes for yourself – or almost half a day each week. Taking all that time off at once might be too obvious, so break it up. Maybe ten times a day you should sit at your desk and stare into space for six minutes. Call it “thinking time”, though we could officially rename it “lady time” amongst ourselves.

Only pick up the phone every 8.8 times out of 10 that it rings. Delete twelve emails out of every hundred without reading them, and write over every eighth line in internal memos with a black vivid.

Help out 12 per cent less. Leave one cup unwashed, one aisle unswept, or one rubbish bin un-emptied. Refuse to file anything that begins with the three letters of the alphabet you’ve chosen to ignore.

If anyone pulls you up on your new regime, explain the twelve per cent wage rule and tell them if you’re earning nothing twelve per cent of the time, they can expect to get what they pay for.

Which is exactly where, from time to time, you would like them to be. This may sound like heresy to parents of the little cute ones who smell nice and worship you, but will make perfect sense to parents of the other kind of children - the big ones who look half-finished, smell like an old sock and think you are a moron.

Teenagers clearly regard adults as a pack of gibbering fools who either never knew anything or must have forgotten it with the passing of the years. Similarly, adults have constructed a pretty negative image of adolescents. Have you read the papers? They’re all knife-wielding binge drinkers who knick stuff and race cars.

What teenagers need - more than boot-camp or a war or a good hard smack – is a PR consultant. Because really, they are tremendously skilled at many very handy things. I’m not talking about those odd, rare kids who do things that adults usually do, like sail the world single-handed or compose a concerto. I’m suggesting we celebrate our ordinary teenagers for doing the usual extraordinary teenage stuff.

Even the non-geek ones seem to know everything about how a computer works and, with only minimal sighing and eye-rolling, will show you how to perform IT functions you only dream of. You have to put up with a bit of, “Jeez, mum, why don’t you do it properly?” while you choke on their air of disdain, but you’ll be defragged and bookmarking before you can say, “Don’t talk to me like... Oh, I didn’t know it could do that.”

A decent PR consultant would have them teaching us networking, lobbying and negotiating skills. While grown-ups weakly apologise for not being in touch with each other outside of Christmas cards, teens manage to track the minutiae of friends’ lives in real time, ready to drop everything when a tearful girlfriend gets dropped by some boy, running to the rescue in a car they’ve borrowed from someone’s reluctant mother, using the twin-pronged negotiating technique of doggedness and whining. Sit the leaders of Israel and Palestine in a room of teens and you’d have a resolution in no time. Both of them would surrender.

They’re great at photography (every teenage girl manages to have a facebook photo that makes her look like a supermodel with a touch of skank) and design (those fake I.D.s look so real). They have multi-tasking superpowers (doing homework while texting and watching TV) yet they can switch it all off with the bedroom light, fall asleep and stay asleep till a week on Tuesday. Remember that?

Like any mountain, teenagers are challenging, prone to slips and occasionally unreachable. But if you take a step back, you can appreciate the view.

It can, therefore, be a shock to find that what you thought of as a self-evident truth is being diddled about with while you weren’t looking. These are the moments when you suddenly wonder where you are – did you move, or did the world move while you stayed still?

Up until this moment, I regarded it as a self-evident truth that our best and brightest young minds went off to university to learn. Tertiary Education Minister, Stephen Joyce, however, is pretty firm on the idea that you go to university to get a job.

These aren’t mutually exclusive goals – a higher education may well lead to better job prospects. But also, it may not. A profound appreciation of the Lake Poets or Cubism might give you a rich interior life but have little impact on your post-graduate employment. And I seriously, deeply, passionately don’t believe that matters. I simply want to know that I live in a society where someone knows something about literature and art history, even if they don’t use it nine-to-five, and even if it’s not me.

Joyce is floating the concept of funding universities based, not on how many students want to study, or on their academic outcomes, but on how many of the previous year's students found work as a result of their qualification.

Float it by all means, Minister, but I hope it sinks. There’s something Sir Ed Hillary said that I love and have quoted here before: “That we must take time to read and dream.” This gets harder to do when you have a job and kids – we grab our Big Thinking Moments when we can while we’re waiting for the lights to change or to fall asleep or lying on the physio’s table, god help us.

But when you are a student – no longer “the child” and not yet “the adult with complex responsibilities”- that’s pretty much what your life is all about. Reading, dreaming, engaging with your community and the world and finding your place in it, breaking hearts and having your heart broken, taking on the impossible before you know enough to know it is impossible, risking failure, failing and learning to celebrate every success. None of which is covered in any course outline or earns a grade or ticks a box on a job application.

Since the advent of student loans, we have already condemned two generations of students to believing that living in debt is acceptable. Let’s not condemn the next generations to never climbing mountains.

The fully equipped ward apparently lay fallow – there had been money once to buy the gear but, later, insufficient money to pay medical staff to use it. Some clever boffin hit on the idea of renting it out as a working movie set and, voila, “ER” became “Oo Er”.

I’m making that last part up – news reports don’t mention the actual name of the porno. It may have been titled, “Chicago Poke”. You should keep an eye out for a blue version of “Scrubs” called “Scrubbers”. Possibly, “Dr Quinn, Medicine Slapper”. Or, if was something a bit rough, “Graze Anatomy”.

The point is, the London hospital in question (also unnamed – St John-Thomas? Right-Up-Your-Middlesex?) reportedly generated “substantial income” from the movie which was reinvested in primary care. There may have been secondary benefits, too, for the sexual dysfunction clinic. Again, I’m making that last part up because it amuses me.

I’m not suggesting we make all our public facilities available for the production of porn, but we could find useful things to do with other buildings we might have lying about. Schools, for example, which sit unused for long hours after the last afternoon bell.

What about using them for, I don’t know, night classes? Adult education. An opportunity in this recession for workers to use their spare time to up-skill, broaden their minds and become lifelong learners? Oh, bother. We just chopped eighty per cent of the budget for adult education because it sounded too much like the government was funding our hobbies. How embarrassing that would be. And it’s so much more cost-effective to let those rooms sit idle.

Right now, central and local government are finding it hard to agree on finding one big, empty space for next year’s RWC Party Central. Surely we have something lying about? All it takes is a little bit of thinking outside the square – and the waterfront.

Instead of one big booze barn, what about several smaller places? One of my favourite big bashes was a grand ball which used many differently themed spaces, each within walking distance - you could move around from one to the other, depending on your mood and what you felt like eating or drinking at any particular time.

So how about we hold Party Central, not in one building, but in one general location and then use the existing little spaces – let’s call them “city bars and restaurants” – usually only one-third full on an ordinary night, and let people move around between them? Call it optimum use of existing resources. Shut up and let them get on with it.

This was despite the fact the room was packed almost to the rafters with politicians. Yes, they who, according to a recent survey, we trust less than almost anyone else. It seems we have more confidence in tow truck drivers or the kid who says, “Would you like fries with that?” than our democratically elected representatives.

And yet it never occurred to me that one of them might try to nick something out of my handbag. A cynic may suggest that’s because if they fancy something they don’t have, they can always pick one up while passing through duty free after a taxpayer funded flight and charge it to their ministerial credit card.

I wouldn’t suggest that. Some of my fondest acquaintances are MPs and, with notable exceptions I won’t note here, I largely find them intelligent, driven and passionate people.

Yet as a group, they are constantly derided. And as individuals, they don’t even make it into the top half of a list of people we trust, falling well behind famous TV and film faces, writers, fashion designers and comedians.

Fascinatingly, our most trusted NZer is Corporal Willie Apiata, a man about whom we know very little except that he’d be handy in a scrape, and if they ever make his biopic the women of NZ would like him to play himself and for there to be at least one scene where he is required to get his shirt off. Hard to think of a politician you would say that about.

The problem with politicians is that what you see is not entirely what you get – democracy requires that they are not just themselves, they are also their party which means sometimes sublimating their personal views (and electoral loyalties) to toe a party line. This must be like being married to someone who is an occasional fool and having to sweetly say, “Yes, darling” rather too much at dinner parties.

Democracy also requires they represent “us” rather than “me”. Ask three people why they dislike a politician and you’re likely to get at least three different answers, some of them conflicting. They live unnatural lives in hotels and airplanes with a job that must be the equivalent of entering a never-ending popularity contest in which you privately know the winner isn’t really popular, just slightly less unpopular than the guy who loses.

Next time you see one, don’t lobby – just give them a hug. Or at least do them the honour of letting them watch your handbag. It might be good practice for being responsible with the public purse.

Admittedly, it wasn’t me who caused the fracas, such as it was. I was out by the fire chatting to old friends when the actual tossing-out occurred, but it seemed polite to stick with my group when they were ousted. Loyalty matters more and more as the years go by.

But I had been inside to witness the initial flashpoint. In town for a run of shows, we hadn’t planned on a night of carousing. Instead, we’d found a quiet wine bar where those inclined could sample local pinots while various pregnant partners (there seem to be a lot of them about right now) sipped soda water and shared antipasto platters. More than once, we noted how impressed we were with our maturity and sophistication.

Overwhelmed with the conviviality of it all, one of our number enveloped another in a manly bear-hug. The bouncer, mistaking this for a fight, dashed inside to break it up. Realising his mistake, he quickly looked for something else to be cross about and chanced upon the bear-hugger’s hat, insisting it be removed. Apparently, in some quarters, grey woolly hats are some kind of gang insignia and therefore contravene a reputable wine bar’s house rules.

Fair enough. If it’s your job to look out for trouble, you’re likely to find it. Best advice to my young friend was a) Bouncers can be unreasonable, so b) Never try to reason with them.

It’s not that I don’t respect the Bouncer. Indeed, when I consider alternative occupations, bouncing is on my list. It would make good use of the skills developed as a mother – the “I don’t care who started it, I’m finishing it” attitude, and “don’t argue with me” tone of voice.

Instead of big, burly blokes, maybe bars should hire Nanas to staff their doors. Most men, deep in their soul, remain terrified of being growled by their mum. Why not stick her – or someone like her - on the door, wooden spoon at the ready.

I’ve tested this on an informal basis with some success. Bored one night at a city bar, a friend and I turned away several groups for being “way too casual”. They apologised and asked for directions to the nearest taxi rank.

More usefully, I recently marched four young men out of my local who, despite IDs, were clearly both underage and under the weather. Impressed, the venue manager asked how this had been achieved so efficiently. All it took was a mother’s hand to the back in a baby-burping pat-pat motion, and a gentle whisper in the alpha male’s ear: “Your mum phoned. She wants you home. Off you go, love.”

Other aspiring curmudgeons sent emails agreeing with the notion of being disagreeable in the face of meaningless pleasantries. And a few fully-fledged curmudgeons sent hot tips on useful retorts. “How’s ya day going?” “Ghastly. I had to have the cat put down. And yourself?”

While I wouldn’t really want to set my default position at “bad tempered”, occasionally I would like to let a bit of that ill-temper out for a run to nip at the heels of fools who say stupid things.

Generally, we’re disposed to meet bad manners with good ones – there can be pleasure in taking the higher moral ground. If someone toots and flips the bird at my driving, I find an effective response is to wind down the window, place my hand on my heart and witter, “You’re right, I’m crap and I am so, so sorry.”

But now and then, I would like to let rip. When making a hurried purchase and the assistant asks if I have a loyalty card with them and if not would I like to fill out this convoluted form, I’d like to try: “No and no. I don’t usually like the stuff you sell. This is pretty much a one-off.”

I’d like to walk into a petrol station and say, “Pump number five. And no, I don’t want a carwash or one of the stale chocolate bars you’re currently two-for-one discounting, or a coffee or some gum. Wouldn’t have minded some help back there with my tyre pressure but I guess you can’t leave the counter, what with all this impulse-purchase treasure on display that someone might nick when you weren’t looking. Just pump number five. Cheers.”

Next time someone meets me and says, “You’re much shorter than you look on the TV. I thought you’d be taller,” I’d be keen to respond: “Yeah? And I thought you’d be more socially adept. I’m not sure we’re going to get on.”

Just once, I’d like to have the courage to read a long-winded, angry email, hit reply and type: “Your spelling is awful. Best regards.” And I’m going to work up to: “Thank you for your kind invitation but I am unable to attend because I don’t want to.”

A writer I greatly admire, Alan Bennett, once wrote: “Cheek, though not quite a virtue, belongs in the other ranks of courage.” If I ever get brave enough to do any of these things, or perhaps wave a Tibetan flag and call for democracy in front of a Chinese politician, I hope my Prime Minister doesn’t apologise for me. Instead, I would hope there’d be a collective sigh of relief that someone said it out loud.

Though a story about kids behaving well might just have enough novelty value to catch your eye here on page 6. Still with me? Excellent. Because if we are to believe everything we read, we should probably read everything - the good news as well as the “news” news - to give us a sense of perspective.

Here’s my kids-fail-to-run-amok story. Let’s call it: “School After-Ball Goes Off Without A Hitch”. Not nearly as juicy as “Police Promise Tough Line On After-Ball Booze Ups” or “After-Ball Cancelled Over Expletive-Filled Facebook Page”, but true, nonetheless.

Senior students at our local college booked transport, hired a venue, paid for security, and sold tickets to an after-ball. A grim letter from the school emphasised this was not sanctioned or condoned by them, and discouraged parents from allowing their kids to attend. Crikey, one thought, what kind of booze-fuelled orgy of excess were our little darlings planning? Would they all be buzzed and crunk? And what do buzzed and crunk mean?

We envisioned the kind of thing that might make it to a prime-time current affairs programme. So imagine our confusion and bewilderment when Nothing Bad Happened. Chartered buses took our kids to and from a previously undisclosed location. Any fears that a rash of text madness would bring gatecrashers pouring in from all over town were rendered baseless – strict security meant no-one got in without a ticket, plus a cold-snap fogged up bus windows so none of the kids could accurately report where they were.

Security guards confiscated BYO liquor at the door – motivated by something other than good parenting, but achieving the same result. Inside, students under 18 were cordoned off into a separate area where only non-alcoholic drinks were sold. Security was so tight, guards reportedly took to sniffing drinks to ensure “mocktails” remained “mock”.

Biggest dramas of the night? Charlie had his drink confiscated “for no reason when he hadn’t actually put anything in it and it cost five bucks!”; Sophie had to go home early because she threw up (she’s the size of a pin so she may have just caught a whiff of cork); and... No, that’s it.

It wouldn’t make a lead story. But it was something to write home about. Literally. I got several texts from my daughter saying she was having an awesome night.

Sometime I’d love to tell you about all the supportive messages my daughter got from her friends during a rough patch last year. It was a powerful example of “text-comforting”. Ah, kids these days.

Whether we admit it or not, somewhere in the back of our heads parents are totting up the cost of ball gown and matching shoes, after-ball dress and more matching shoes, ticket, limo, pre-ball drinks and canapés, and realising for about the same price plus a milking cow you could marry them off to the local squire and let them be someone else’s responsibility forever. Harrumph.

Kids are disarmingly enthusiastic about becoming grown-ups. I am already a grown-up. I know this because in my handbag I carry painkillers, tissues, hand sanitiser, a functioning credit card, comb, several pens and something to write on. If pressed, I could also come up with two hairclips and a safety pin. You could be sick, dirty, unkempt, torn, bewildered, hungry and miles from home, and I would have the means to fix it.

Being a grown-up is not just about having a large handbag. You must also know a good shoe mender. This is because grown-ups understand some things aren’t disposable and get more comfortable with age. Mending shoes is about respecting the ageing process.

You also know a dressmaker who alters your clothes because you’ve reached a point where you’ve stopped blaming your body for not fitting the stuff on the rack, and started adjusting your clothes instead.

You know a good mechanic and call him by his first name. You’ve accepted that you can’t be an expert on everything but you take responsibility for finding someone who is. And you’re smart enough to know he is more likely to source good retreads if you say nice things about his hobby car tucked round the side of his garage.

And you know you’re a grown-up when you can introduce an old friend to a new one by saying, “This is Judy, she’s been my best friend for... gosh... thirty-five years,” and then you both giggle like school girls to prove it.

What I want to be now is a curmudgeon. I find I am making a good start by being easily annoyed by meaningless pleasantries from young male shop assistants. It seems someone has trained them to ask, “Doing anything special this weekend?” which I find overly inquisitive from a total stranger. Do they want to know when I’m out so they can come round and nick stuff? I shall start responding with something equally over-familiar like, “Waxing my bikini line,” or “Worming the cat.”

Or I might freak them out by smiling coyly and replying: “Not much – my kid is going to her school ball... What did you have in mind?”

Having chatted with him (he was extremely diplomatic about making time for the kid with the hors d’oeuvres) I was enthralled with the idea of travelling the world to go to parties and say nice things about the place you represent.

But the idea lost its shine before dinner was served. By then I’d noted Mr Ambassador was charming to smart and dull guests in equal measure (unbearable!) and limited his conversation to constantly Saying The Right Thing almost like it was his job. Which it was. I already knew the fun to be had from Saying The Wrong Thing and had perfected the art of faking urgent errands to get away from bores. “Please excuse me, we seem to be out of smoked oysters.” An ambassadorship was off my list of career options fairly smartly.

Andy Haden probably should have come to the same conclusion. Long before the “three darkies, no more” brouhaha erupted, his bio on the official All Blacks website referred several times to his propensity to polarise, cause upset and create anger. Rather than an ambassador for the Rugby World Cup, he’s possibly more suited to hanging out with me and passing around the sausage rolls.

Not that he hasn’t been an excellent conversation starter - which is always handy at a party. Some of the ensuing debate has raised useful ideas like the danger of assigning attributes on racial grounds when we might mean other things - socio-economic background or education.

To make a point, someone cutely suggested that, using ethnic profiling, the problem with the Black Caps right now was having too many Pakeha players. Best of all, I heard social commentator David Slack point out white people were more likely to trash finance companies than any other ethnic group. Bear that in mind next time you’re looking to invest your life savings.

Though Haden should be skilled at making introductions. Since retiring as a lock, Haden has made his living out of representing celebrities through his “Sporting Contacts” agency – named, no doubt, with a nod to his infamous Cavaliers tour of South Africa in 1986.

I had a look at the Sporting Contacts website and feel moved to note that of the fifty speakers and entertainers on his team, there are only three redheads. One wonders if this is coincidence or the result of some policy for a quota of “three gingers, no more.”

Easily remedied – I’d like to see him join forces with my favourite ginger-de-jour, the Duchess of York. Apparently she also has access to famous people and a propensity for saying the wrong thing.

What really caught my ear was when the interviewer asked something about her husband. Before she answered the question, there was a brief pause. “We’re not actually married,” she said. Then another beat before she added: “Though after 8 years, two kids, a mortgage and running a business together...”

She didn’t need to finish the sentence. We hear you, sister. She probably didn’t need to get hung up on providing a legal definition of her relationship either. But I also like it that she didn’t let the misnomer slide.

In New Zealand, one in four couples aren’t married. Yet the default assumption is that people who arrange themselves in families either are, or should be. If it turns out they’re not, the next assumption is they either forgot, or haven’t got around to it yet, or – at worst – aren’t really all that committed.

In some minds, a relationship is not real if you haven’t celebrated it publically. I fancy applying that philosophy to birthdays – if you don’t have a party, you don’t actually get a year older. Plan it carefully and you could be forever twenty-two.

What we should acknowledge is that some of us put more thought into not getting married than some couples put into marrying. There are those who choose not to involve lawyers in their romantic life, or who are averse to religious tradition and social convention, or who find joy in constantly “opting in”. No doubt there are many who are simply bitten and shy.

Having dallied with the custom, I now find myself allergic to ever being described again as someone’s “wi... wif...” See, I can’t even type it. It implies more shirt-ironing and curried-sausage-cooking than I’m prepared to bear.

Though words are also problem to the not-married/not-single. “Partner” is easily confused with a business arrangement and “de facto” sounds - to bohemian ears - as pompous as the holy state of legal matrimony you’re eschewing.

I quite like to refer to “my boyfriend” despite the fact (or because) it suggests we hold hands and skip, and write each other’s names on our pencil cases. My new favourite, though, comes from a novel I just read which refers to your “One In Particular”. It’s a futuristic fantasy so there’s still time for it to catch on.

After more than a decade together, friends occasionally ask us for a wedding. But we’ve made a solemn promise to stay unmarried forever. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we won’t get drunk in Vegas and find an Asian Elvis-Impersonator when I’m seventy. Everybody makes mistakes.

As someone who works mostly alone, it’s fascinating to spend three days hosting a conference for engineers or accountants. My apologies – financial advisors. (See, that’s the kind of stuff you learn.)

Already this year, I have a new appreciation of the relationship between human behaviour and traffic flow, and know more about the difference between plasma and LED/LCD TV screens than anyone needs to know unless they’re actually knocking one out in the garage. After two days focusing on child safety in car seats, I refused to drive my daughter anywhere without super gluing her into a rear-facing backseat capsule, despite the fact she is now seventeen.

And then, once a year, it’s my turn to immerse myself in my own industry. “Industry” might sound over-inflated, but the NZ International Comedy Festival is a pretty big event. Generally, only the opening night Gala ends up on TV – leading to some confusion out in the heartland. “The Comedy Festival – yeah, I saw it on the tele. Is it the same show every night?”

In fact, now in its 18th year, the Comedy Festival presents 174 shows at 34 venues in Wellington and Auckland. Lasting 25 days, it features 250 comedians from ten countries. There is also a road show that visits 13 towns throughout NZ.

For comedians, it’s very much like having a baby. In the months leading up to it, your show is all-consuming. You feel sick when you wake up, and can’t eat or sleep properly as you anxiously focus on creating something new and exciting inside your tiny self.

People ask if you know what you’re having – are you hoping for Whimsy? Or Satire? You smile and say you really don’t mind so long as it’s funny.

And then it’s your opening night, and this creature is finally born. There may be tears. You will most certainly wet the baby’s head. For a brief moment of exhilaration and relief, you think you’ve finished but this is just the beginning. Long, late nights follow, doing the same thing over and over again, while dealing with the inevitable criticism from family, friends and total strangers – that you’ve made it too big or too small; they expected something darker or fairer; that you’re giving it too much attention or not enough.

By the end of the Festival, you long to spend three straight days in the company of people who do something simpler, like nuclear fission. And then by next year you’ve forgotten the pain and you do it all again.

These days we are often told that, down here at the bottom of the world, NZ can’t make a difference; that we’re too small to effect change or have an influence – we’re an ant nibbling at an elephant.

Right now, we’re encouraged to be socially and economically conservative and not try any mad ideas about saving the planet or taking risks with the way we make our living in the global market. And we’re discouraged from being critical of those who are bigger and more powerful, especially the ones who buy our lamb chops.

Somewhere along the way, as a small person working in a tiny industry in this little country, I formed precisely the opposite attitude. I figured if it didn’t matter what I did on a global scale, I might as well do what I want, in the way I want to do it. So I cheerfully chuck mad ideas out there – on stage or on the page – in the hope they will find agreement or inspire debate.

Clearly, the idea that small people and countries should be loud and opinionated is one of these mad ideas. And I know exactly where it came from. I can trace it back specifically to 1973 when my government sent two navy frigates with a Cabinet Minister onboard to Mururoa to protest French nuclear testing. It’s hard to picture that happening now – a Prime Minister drawing a name out of hat to send one of his team off on a protest, and using our military to make a political point.

As a school girl, I thought that’s what governments did. I got used to the idea that NZ did things before other countries – grant women the right to vote; adopt an 8-hour working day; take a stand against apartheid; declare that gay men and prostitutes weren’t criminals; allow anyone, regardless of gender, to make their family a legal entity.

That historically we have been among the first to make social changes shouldn’t be a surprise. We are, at our roots, pioneers, descended from people who upped sticks and travelled halfway round the world - first by waka, then by ship - with the same plan in mind: to build a better life than the one they left behind in those bigger, more powerful countries.

This is why I find it odd that while the rest of the world is turning to renewables, we’re heading back down the mines; and that we’re being shushed on social and environmental issues - losing, without really discussing it, our next opportunity to lead the world. Because really, that’s what small countries should do.

First, would you do me a favour and distract any non-smoking readers in the vicinity with a gluten-free muffin so they don’t read this. They’ll only email me with some variation on “tut-tut” and I already have sufficient subscribers praying for my soul for one reason or another.

A couple of weeks ago, the government passed a bill under urgency to raise the price of tobacco by 10% three times over the next two years. Urgency was possibly required to ensure any smoking members (delightful phrase) had nipped out for a fag. People like us can only admire an ability to accomplish anything with urgency – we tend to do things at a leisurely pace, generally over a long black with fascinatingly circuitous chatter.

So after being kicked out of bars and restaurants we’ve taken another hit, this time to our wallets. Not surprising – someone needed a telling-off and they’d already decided that week not to have a proper crack at the drunks. I believe it was our turn again.

But there is an upside to this. As tobacco becomes more expensive, smoking may become a status symbol. “You’re having a cigarette? Wow, you must be rich.” Instead of a tiny colony of nouveau lepers, we could become an elite. We might even start referring to a ciggie as our Louis Vuitton hand-fag.

And with the extra $205 million we’ll be contributing in tax – substantially more than we cost in terms of health care – we could be lauded as significant philanthropists.

Though let’s not kid ourselves. There is a grander plan to save us from ourselves and our bad personal choices. I suspect in our lifetime (shorter of course than a non-smoker’s) tobacco will be declared illegal. And why not? That’s worked so well with the other drugs.

Plus, it may provide a certain frisson of excitement for those of us who otherwise live well inside the law. A little brush with society’s underbelly as we furtively arrange the drop for our weekly stash might be invigorating for someone who sticks to the speed limit and has never, even when young, nicked a lipstick.

And you never know – in our golden years we might toy with the idea of getting our tobacco dealer to chuck in a starter sample of cocaine. May as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, right?

Let’s talk more when we meet on the footpath about this delightful possibility that even a cloud of smoke may have a silver lining.

Celebrating the Solo Mother isn’t something we do all that much. If we handed out a packet of crayons and some butcher’s paper to the nation and asked people to draw a picture of a solo mum, we’d probably get several variations on a promiscuous trollop in track-pants, filthy with her own lack of ambition, smoking a fag and watching Oprah while her kids scoff instant noodles and run with scissors.

That’s certainly the image our politicians rely on when beneficiary bashing is in season, most recently in March when Paula Bennett announced new benefit rules with a line so catchy you could hum it: “The dream is over”.

I’ve never met anyone whose dream was to not make a living or not find a life-partner, though I assume they must exist if only to justify the coining of the phrase “lifestyle beneficiaries”. But I have met many good women who have had to make the hard choice – or had the choice made for them - to be the sole adult in their household.

You do an amazing job. You make every decision alone – about what the rules are, when something is appropriate, what is acceptable behaviour, which school they go to, when is bedtime, whether broccoli matters – without either a sounding board or backup. When you’re exhausted, you can’t tag-team – there’s no, “You sleep in on Saturday morning and I’ll grab a nap in the afternoon”. The buck stops with you for energy, ideas, money, transport, discipline and for attending to scraped knees, middle-of-night sick-ups, bad dreams and sad hearts.

On Mother’s Day, it is highly unlikely that your children’s father will turn up with some fabulous gift for the kids to give you. You will take your kids to school on Monday and overhear reports about the great day “the kids and their dad” put on for other mothers – a coffee machine or a necklace or a cafe brunch - and you’ll have a crack at talking up the card your kid’s teacher got them to make which is now in pride of place on your fridge.

The best gift we could give you is that, next time we need someone to vilify for being lazy and immoral, we skip the solo mums and instead get all pointy-fingered at the 64,824 fathers who either pay child support late or not at all. Currently, they owe $1.7 billion (yes, that’s a “b”) to some of the 277,000 Kiwi kids whose absent fathers are supposed to contribute to their welfare. And imagine what a fine Mother’s Day gift those kids could buy with just a tiny bit of that.

Meanwhile, you have my admiration and respect.

As a movement, it started small. A ukulele here, a knitting group there – what began as a handful of nostalgic souls rediscovering lost arts & crafts has seeped into our political and economic thinking. We’re bottling and scrapbooking at home – and now our government has embraced the retro craze.

Mining? Sure! Haven’t done it in a substantial way for years (and the global trend is against it) but let’s give it a crack in some of our prettiest places. Whaling? Why not! As the rest of the world adopts a tougher line, let’s talk about softening our stance and consider a compromise on Japanese commercial whaling. Next up: kids up chimneys, a little witch-burning and the return of village stocks – which will, of course, be privately run.

Out there in the world, everyone else is catching up with our old nuclear-free vision. What do we do? Start muttering about indeterminately-armed ships in our harbours and power-plants in the pretty places we’re not planning to mine yet. After all, we got what we wanted – a nice thank you from the US for staying pluckily nuke-free all that time. Though that moment lost some of its gloss given it was the equivalent of complimenting your mate’s new wife on how nice the house looks when we all know it was actually his first wife who picked those particular carpets and drapes.

Retro local government, too. Hosting a Rugby World Cup? Ok, we’ll whack up a tent for the party. It’ll be awesome, like a good old-fashioned knees-up in the garage. Could have used the sheds already there but some fool referred to them as “Edwardian” and that sounded a bit posh. Nah, a big tent, though with proper windows so they can’t call it a tent in a bad way. Maybe some caravans for the cooking. Or ladies-a-plate. Blokes can bring a slab. Don’t want to look like a bunch of try-hards.

Running up against deadlines to get all these stadia ready in time? Weekend working bees, mate. Get Mavis to activate the phone tree and Barry and Dave to organise hammers and roller brushes. If we’re still short of seating come show time, get everyone to bring a couple of those plastic garden chairs on special at the Warehouse. Though we’ll have to decide on either white or green, or it’ll look like a bloody dog’s breakfast.

Hotels getting a bit pricey? Mavis can sort billets for the players with some nice families near the games. She’ll be right, honest. Because in our nation’s much-promised step-change, backward is the new forward.

One thing led to another until we found ourselves passionately discussing the ethics of assisted suicide. Most of us who have been present at a loved one’s death or who are cognisant of the fact we might possibly die ourselves one day have given the subject a modicum of thought. If you’d been in the waiting room, you would probably have felt qualified to chip in.

We need to talk about it to each other more – what we might want at the end of our lives. Because the zeitgeist suggests we all simply want to live forever. Maintaining health and faking youth are our current obsessions. We celebrate our improved life expectancy (78 for men, 82 for women) and only stop the party briefly to do something sensible and boring about retirement income. Snore. Pass me a form for KiwiSaver.

But it is possible that there is something worse than dying, and that might be not dying when you want to. Folklore suggests our ancestors wandered off into a desert or the snow when “their time came” but that’s not so easy if you’re bedridden in an aged care facility in Gore.

So we’re struggling with the laws and ethics involved in what to do at life’s end – specifically, what to do for people who have had enough of their struggle and want to die. As the law stands, you can let someone end their life but you can’t help them do it. Options are limited for helping us die with less pain and more dignity.

This is odd, if you stand well back and take the long view of life’s bookends: birth and death. Both can be painful, protracted, and nothing like an experience you would choose. If we use everything we have to ease babies – new people - into life, why can’t we be eased out of life, too? Medical intervention defines many birthdays. It seems not unreasonable that it could also define death dates.

Fine lines - palliative care, yes; assisted suicide, no. At the heart of it is fear of euthanasia that’s not voluntary. We like to make our own choices and putting that particular choice on the table might, on a bad day, lead to the opposite of what we intended. Plus those who believe in god heartily disapprove of anyone else playing god. Some of us don’t even like it when god plays god.

But we should talk about it more. I recommend my gynaecologist’s receptionist. She shares my preference for living well rather than forever, and she’s a great listener.

Men don’t dust. At least, I’ve never seen it. Certainly, they cook and wash and iron shirts. Just between us, I adore watching a man vacuum – I’d buy tickets to that kind of show. Seriously, if men knew how sexy it is to see them on the end of a vacuum cleaner, they’d be hoovering three times a week in their boxers.

But dusting? I don’t think they can see it – possibly they’re Big Picture people and a fine layer of dirt simply doesn’t register on the male retina. I realise it is tremendously “second-wave feminist” of me to suggest any innate gender difference, but I’m not quite up with post-feminism. From where I’m sitting, a “post-feminist” is just a slapper with the morals of a feral cat who looks like she left the house without putting her pants on. I’m all for celebrating one’s sexuality but, instead of doing that in a bar with a stranger, couldn’t you do it at home with someone you know? That’s where the vacuum cleaner is.

Thirty-two years ago, Susie Orbach convincingly argued fat was a feminist issue and she’s still arguing the point today. Women – and now, increasingly, men – have an unhealthy relationship with food because of how society insists we look and behave. Unrealistic expectations lead to self-loathing and our bodies become not something we live in, but something we present to the world - a work-in-progress, constantly needing improvement.

Kind of like our houses. Our current taste for minimalist decor demands we constantly put away and make things shine. Despite the reality that we’re both working and both raising the kids, it’s still women who feel the guilt and self-loathing about their house not looking like it’s ready for its close-up in a home decorating magazine.

“The house is filthy,” she’ll say. “Is it?” he’ll reply, casting about, bewildered. “Looks fine to me.” What she means is that she’s a bad person, plus she’s drowning and he just refused to reach out a hand. He feels like he just failed another one of those does-my-bum-look-big-in-this tests but he’s not sure why.

In legal terms, we have equal pay, equal opportunity and equal rights. What we need now is equal expectations of household neatness. Which means, sisters, learning to live with a little more clutter and dust.

Ok, not precisely equal pay. NZ women still earn 12% less than men. Which suggests maybe we should actually do 12% less. Start with only doing the dusting every 28 days.

It promptly inspired a deluge of emails, messages and stop-you-in-the-street conversations. Overwhelmingly they were in agreement, although one reader suggested my listening habits had left me “brainwashed”. That’s possible, but I like to think this means my brain is both clean and well-informed.

And it seems I’m not the only person who is so familiar with the Nat Rad schedule, they use it like a clock. Phil Kafcaloudes reminding us why we haven’t moved to Australia yet? Welcome to Monday. Book review? Must be morning tea. Link Three? It’s Wednesday afternoon already. Talk back for people who aren’t thick? That’s the Panel, and it’s almost time to knock off.

I’m hearing radical fighting talk about “informed democracy”, “sending clear messages”, “taking it to the streets” and “not taking this lying down”. With a little personal information from correspondents, I’ve constructed a profile of what this putative revolution might look like.

The Revolutionary Army would organise in secrecy, hiding in plain sight as office workers, boaties, grandmothers, students, intellectuals, taxi drivers, retailers and artists. Meetings would be held under cover of wine clubs, scrapbooking groups, staff-room lunches and in the odd garden shed.

Discipline within the ranks would be maintained by threatening any loose units with questioning by Checkpoint’s Mary Wilson. And while government ministers would have translators frantically searching He Rourou broadcasts for encoded messages, comrades would in fact be called to action whenever they heard Katriona McLeod perfectly enunciate the revolutionary rallying cry, “And for the Chatham Islands – rain.”

Radio NZ would cover the revolution in a fair and unbiased way – Geoff Robinson having a crack at the Minister of Broadcasting, followed by Sean having a similar crack at the Opposition’s Broadcasting Spokesperson, followed by Kathryn Ryan’s searing interview with the Revolution’s leadership for either not having a clear vision or having too narrow a vision, or both. Kim Hill would interview a novelist, an astrophysicist and a theologian about the place of radio in contemporary society. One will be charmed, another will take offence and the other will learn something from Kim that they didn’t know previously about their own field of expertise.

NZ Live would feature Don McGlashen and Liam Finn’s collaborative album of protest music, and John Hawkesby would find the right wine to go with it. Finally, Media Watch would cover the coverage and be particularly critical of how RNZ is reporting on itself.

Meanwhile, over on commercial radio, there’d be a competition for the most interesting thing you’ve ever caught in your pants zipper, and an ad for erectile dysfunction.

Add to that the change of seasons which makes the chance of rain reach Chatham Islands-level certainty and you may need to strap yourself in for a bumpy ride.

But there’s a more dismal calendar clash on the horizon. Later this month, when the school holidays will be but a distant memory (aside from the blip in household expenditure) Anzac weekend will see a trio of heartland towns simultaneously play host to Dawn Parades and “Boobs on Bikes”.

Returned servicemen are understandably offended at having to share the spotlight with porn stars when the focus should be less about chests and more about the medals that are pinned on them.

Pornographer Steve Crowe (I wish I didn’t know his name without having to look it up) claimed in an interview that: “Our soldiers fought for freedoms... One of those freedoms is to be able to do things like Boobs on Bikes or Erotica Expo”.

My Great Uncle Frank refused to speak of his experiences as a soldier in World War II but, even if he had been verbose on the subject, I doubt he would have listed the freedom to get your boobs out as a valuable outcome and well worth his effort in Guadalcanal.

Not that there’s anything wrong with breasts. Indeed, there is something strangely adolescent about a country that gets either excited or offended about catching a glimpse of them.

Years ago, I would have protested against Boobs On Bikes because it objectified women, and presented them as one-dimensional dollies who existed only for the titillation of men. I would have wanted to make the point that women are clever and capable and intelligent, and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect for who they are, not how they look. I might also have felt moved to point out that just taking your shirt off doesn’t make a “parade”.

But at this point in history, I think we know that most women are clever, capable and intelligent people. But here’s something else I have come to realise: some women really are one-dimensional dollies who exist only for the titillation of men. I’m ok with them getting their boobs out on the back of a bike. Especially in winter.

Here’s the parade I would like to see: topless women with real breasts – the way they look after raising kids, surviving illness, living a life – marching down main street to raise money and awareness for breast cancer research and treatment. Drooping, scarred, missing, reconstructed. The bikes would be optional. But we would definitely do it in summer.

I couldn’t think of one then, but I reckon I’ve spotted one now – messing about with Radio New Zealand. Nothing has struck at many of our hearts like Broadcasting Minister Jonathon Coleman’s insistence that the National and Concert programmes must cut costs as they deal with a funding freeze for the next few years. This is despite a government-initiated review in 2007 which said RNZ was operating efficiently and recommended a funding increase of more than 20 percent to ensure existing services were sustained.

No more commercial-free classical music? Dead air from midnight to 6am? No stereo sound in the provinces? Smaller newsrooms? Less breadth and depth? To the barricades! Because here is passion for our public service broadcaster that I don’t think this government yet appreciates.

Here’s how it works in my house: kitchen, living-room, bedrooms, office and car are all tuned to RNZ National. There used to be a radio in the shower till water-damage stopped it picking up “Nat Rad” (as I like to call it) so I chucked it out.

My day starts with Morning Report and finishes with Checkpoint. By the time 6pm comes I know more about the issues than any TV journalist can tell me and all I need is pictures. Pre-dawn starts are made bearable by Lloyd Scott or Vicki McKay. Saturday afternoon housework is jollied along by Simon Morton foraging for edible weeds. If I miss Media Watch or Arts on Sunday or a Kim Hill interview, I listen to them on-line.

As a new mother in a new place17 years ago, Radio NZ was my principal way of engaging with the world. The only changes since are that I know more people (all of whom listen to Nat Rad) and occasionally I’m lucky enough to do a bit of work there. It’s where I earn the least money and get the most satisfaction.

Perhaps MPs only listen to their own news interviews. What they’re missing, then, is the sense of community and understanding of humanity that comes with the full package. This is the only place you will find 20, 30, even 50 minute conversations (you know, as long as real ones) that reveal more – and enrich more – than interviewer, subject or listener expected before they began. Not just news, sometimes wisdom.

I don’t put a lot of store in Facebook – Radio NZ listeners probably don’t. But when I started writing this, the Facebook group, “Save Radio New Zealand” had 18,973 fans – more than John Key. As I stop writing, it has gathered another 76. Jonathon Coleman doesn’t have a page.

So standing on stage at Wellington’s Opera House was never part of a grand plan but when it happened last December – two different shows on two nights in the same week – it felt like arriving somewhere I didn’t know I was headed. If I did have a list of goals, one of them would have been given a large tick.

I first met the Opera House in the 1960s when she was already half-a-century old. My mother would take me there to see the ballet and eat liquorice allsorts, and I would be sick out of the sheer excitement of it all on the long drive home.

She was my first big theatre, a grown-up version of the Levin Little Theatre where I’d discovered that as much as I loved to watch, the real magic was backstage in the dressing rooms and wings. Since then, my favourite view of any theatre is from the stage, looking out.

At university, I would slip into the Opera House to see productions on student standby, a gatecrasher at a fancy party where other people, properly dressed and holding full-price tickets, wafted up marble stairs into that warm, red womb-like auditorium under its ceiling dome. I remember thinking if I was very lucky, one day I could see it properly, from the stage.

And I was lucky. In 2003, I spent three nights at the Opera House in a touring production of “Mum’s The Word”; then luckier still, with these two recent shows doing what I most love – stand-up comedy.

The foyer is the same sophisticated black-and-white affair I remember and the auditorium has been refurbished to look as it always did. Happily, no-one has thought to rip out the backstage area and tart it up with something easy-clean and functional. Rows of dressing rooms in shades of pink or yellow look, one assumes, much as they did at the beginning, only slightly smaller in dimension after almost a hundred years of slapping on new coats of paint.

It smells like a proper theatre – old powder, new sweat, dust, paint, and oil for the pulley system which is spectacular even when it’s not doing anything, like a giant’s harp. And a wooden stage so vast it is hard to imagine a ballet or opera big enough to use it all. Our shows use a tiny portion in front of a black, with sufficient space behind – if you are very quiet while the show is on – to play in the darkness, like a child hiding on the other side of the door at a grownups’ party.

It feels as a theatre should – packed to the rafters with characters and personas created here for each production, and left behind after it closes. As much as I love theatres, I would never come here alone at night for fear of bumping into all those spirits who, I imagine, carry on without us once the lights are out.

But I am thrilled to bump into characters from my own past: Peter Gare, the Opera House technician who was there my first time; John Harrison, now Front-of-House, who I worked with 25 years ago in television; and Peter Frater guarding the Stage Door, who I met when I started with my first paid work as a performer in Wellington’s “Summer City” programme 30 years ago. Three fine people from different moments gathered now in my favourite building. It couldn’t have been better if I’d planned it.

I haven’t though deeply about whether this restriction should be applied to sons. From a distance, I’ve observed that many of them voluntarily lock themselves in a room playing X-Box till they’re at least 25 anyway.

But on my non-curmudgeonly days, I appreciate that Young People Today mature earlier, and that they’re more worldly and confident than we were. Which is just as well – they’re not tootling meekly out onto gentle roads, sans traffic lights, in a Morris Minor that might get up to 30miles per hour if you’re going downhill in a tailwind.

We lived (sigh) in simpler times and travelled a straighter road. We could leave school and learn to drive at 15; legally have sex and/or marry at 16; vote and learn to use firearms at 18; and wash it all down with a beer in the pub at 20. Now, they seem to do everything when they’re about 12.

Suggesting to a kid they can’t do something because they’re legally “too young” is like telling a galloping horse that, back home, you were thinking about putting a lock on the stable door sometime soon.

So our teenagers are trying stuff sooner and arguing about it with us more effectively. But they’re still idiots. Most 15 year olds can’t navigate a dirty plate from their bedroom to the kitchen. Which is a good argument for waiting till they’re a year older and slightly less stupid.

Child psychologist Nigel Latta encourages parents to think of adolescence less as a developmental stage, more as a mental illness – meant with no disrespect to those with bi-polar or multiple personality disorder who are generally more rational. And at least there’s a treatment. With kids, all you can do is hold your breath and wait.

On the upside, once your kids are driving themselves to dance and sport and the mall, you can retire your chauffeur’s cap and spend your evenings at home. Which you will fill, obviously, with worrying about where they are and if you will ever see them – or your high-performance family car – in one piece again.

Alternatively, you could pass the chauffeur’s cap to them – fill their lives with picking you up from work, being your sober-driver, and generally ferrying you about while you relax in the back, texting your friends.

And perhaps there’s a way you can track them with some kind of remote GPS. I’m not sure how you would hook this up. But your kids will know.

After Chile was rocked by a magnitude 8.8-earthquake two weeks ago, international scientists predicted a possible killer tidal surge in the Pacific. Determined not to repeat the mistakes of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami that killed thousands of people who didn’t get enough warning, they told us to get out of the water.

Naturally, Kiwi surfers immediately waxed their boards and sightseers headed to the coast for a good seat. The logic of that response washes right over my head because, seriously, here’s a story I’ve never heard someone tell: “There was a tsunami alert so I went to see what the fuss was about. It was the best fun I’ve ever had.” That’d be because either the tsunami turned up and the putative storyteller drowned; or it was a false alarm - boo, hiss, boring.

In the wake of half-marathons cancelled and nude photo shoots postponed, Civil Defence copped it two ways – first, for “over-reacting” (according to event organisers who may or may not be seismologists) and secondly, for not delivering on the threat.

“There seem to be a lot of tsunami warnings,” one weekend fisher moaned on the evening news, looking miserable, “but nothing ever eventuates.” Yeah, Civil Defence, lift your game. For every three warnings, we want at least one actual disaster, preferably with a body-count that justifies you ruining my day off.

According to their critics, Civil Defence is “crying wolf” after two alerts in six months (except they didn’t say they’d actually spotted a wolf, just that wolves might be about) and if CD doesn’t watch it, we won’t to listen to them ever again, and then one day there will be one and we’ll all drown, and that’ll teach them.

This isn’t genius thinking. It’s right up there with driving drunk, not having an accident, and then suing traffic cops for false advertising on TV.

To counteract “alert fatigue”, some suggest a new law so we can arrest people who don’t comply. Others suggest leaving them to it – if you’re dumb enough to try surfing a tidal wave, you may not be the kind of citizen we’re going to miss. It’s unlikely that, back on dry land, you’re the one who will find a cure for cancer.

Next time there’s a tsunami warning, I’m heading to higher ground with the nana I saw on the TV news. “We didn’t panic,” she said. “We thought, well, this is what you do, so this is what we’ve done.” I reckon she probably had a thermos and some scones. And a couple of good stories to tell while they waited for the all-clear.

We seem to agree that what we’ve got is a bit naff. I’m basing this on various polls conducted over the last decade which have asked us what we think of the current NZ flag, to which we have responded (I’m paraphrasing here): “It’s a bit naff.”

We’ve been waving this flag since 1902. From the look of it, I suspect the design committee process went something like this: “What’ll we have, Barry?” “Dunno, Steve, but let’s start with something we know. How about a tiny version of someone else’s flag? We can stick that in the corner.” “Nice. But I reckon it needs something more.” (Steve and Barry look about and spot the American flag.) “How about stars, Barry?” “Could do, Steve. How many do you reckon?” “They’ve got fifty...Give us four.”

It was a similar process, I believe, across the Tasman except that on their otherwise identical flag, Aussies gilded the lily with six stars. This was an early indication of what a bunch of try-hards our neighbours would turn out to be.

So the first part of our flag debate is sorted – we want a new one. Ok, not all of us – the very old and very young are less enthusiastic about a change - the former, perhaps, because of the “old-dogs-new-tricks” rule; and the latter because they want to stick with something that’s easy to draw on a school project with a ruler.

Aucklanders, it should be noted, also seem less keen on a new flag but that may be because they’re too busy dreaming up a Supercity logo. Though really, that shouldn’t take much thought. I’m thinking a stylised traffic jam of SUVs in front of a leaky building.

Last time the debate raged in 2004, government was advised any new design should come from the public rather than parliament. Nice idea, but faced with a gallery of choices, our collective response is, “Yeah, nah. Dunno, eh? Maybe.” Once we’ve got a new flag, that could be our motto.

Someone needs to pick something and get on with it. No-one seems tremendously fussed about the specifics. A sporty fern, a culturally-sensitive koru, a sparkly Southern Cross, whatever – just so long as it’s easy to spot and can show a bit of dignity on formal occasions.

You wouldn’t want it so flash you could be easily talked into dying for it, or mind too much if someone burnt it on the odd occasion to make a point. I’ve always quite fancied NZ represented as a long white cloud on a blue background. That way it serves a triple purpose as a flag, a map and – this summer - a weather forecast.

Maybe there’s never a great time to shout “Viva La France” but I have been muttering it quietly this month while examining the wisdom of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to include happiness and well-being in measurements of economic progress.

Last September, Sarkozy said we need to give leisure, sport and culture some kind of accounting value or we’ll end up putting economic productivity above human fulfilment.

He argued that: “For years, people said that finance was a formidable creator of wealth, only to discover one day that it accumulated so many risks that the world almost plunged into chaos... The [global economic] crisis doesn't only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so."

Round these parts, it elicited a general response of, “Yeah, right.” The French economy is famous for its short workweek and generous social benefits, but also for lagging according to standard measures. This could be a cunning way of bridging that gap without actually working harder. Plus the French are a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys who spent thirty years testing nukes in our backyard before knocking the All Blacks into 4th place in the 1999 Rugby World Cup semi-final and handing the cup to Australia. Good one, mon frère.

Nevertheless, I am experimenting with living French. A freelancer with a “portfolio career”, I recently lost a page – a regular gig that represented 7.5% of my annual nett income. On Sarkozy’s advice, I decided to try replacing that work time with leisure time, thereby reducing my weekly work hours by 8.5%. (I have time now to work that kind of thing out.)

By leisure, I mean exercise – actually visiting the gym I pay membership fees to. Already I’m saving money by not completely wasting that monthly fee (0.88% of income) plus I’m using less lipstick, buying less coffee, and the parking and filtered water there are free. Yoga has reduced my usual responses to stress – shopping and drinking (probably 50% of income) - and has also proved to be a gateway-drug to the harder stuff – Zumba which I attend with my daughter for shared quality time. I am calmer. She says I’m nicer.

So merci, Nicolas. I feel happier. And also lucky that I can afford to work less, earn less and still feel rich – not rich like Bill Gates, more like a gateau.

Secondly, thanks awfully but no, I don’t especially want to see the fabulous application you have just downloaded. And as remarkable as it is - this light sabre or eternal flame or virtual mouth you can hold in front of your real face - may I respectfully observe that you didn’t actually invent it. You just downloaded it. Well done you.

And thirdly, please don’t assume that I don’t own one because I am a) uncool or b) thick. You may freely assume, however, that I haven’t joined the ranks of iPhone-owners at this point because I’m not sure I want to be part of your gang. So shoot me with your .22 calibre gunfire app.

iPhoners display an evangelical passion which occasionally presents itself as disdain for non-iPhoners. In more than one recent meeting, I’ve pulled out my hand-tooled leather diary to check a date and been met with derisory howls of, “Ooh, old school!” I’m tempted to push the envelope and start carrying a slate.

“What would you do if lost your silly book?” they say. “What would you do if I pushed you in the river with your iPhone?” I counter. “I have an app that automatically updates my iPhone info to my laptop whenever I walk past it,” they declare. “Yeah? Well, I back up my diary on my wall-planner.” Booyah.

A friend refers to her partner’s iPhone as “The Other Woman” given that it gets the kind of attention he used to give her when they first met. “Look what happens when I touch there! I wonder what happens when I turn it the other way... Oh, that’s even better!” And, disturbing to watch, there’s a “Bump” app that swaps your details with another iPhoner if you touch them together. I imagine if you keep bumping, you make a little pager.

I’m not saying I don’t admire the ability to do almost everything techno with one small gadget. I like gadgets. I want one of those battery-operated jar openers. Though I wouldn’t necessarily carry it round and show it off to people like I’d made it myself. No doubt there’s an iPhone app for tight lids. I’m afraid to ask.

There is an application that whistles your dog for you. Begging this question: Why would you need your phone to whistle your dog? Perhaps because, as an iPhoner, your mouth is set so smugly you can’t purse your lips.

I’m not saying I won’t ever get one. What would sell me is an application that picks up when someone is showing me an application and it automatically responds, “Yes darling, that’s awesome.”

Cougars – in case you’ve been living under a rock with mountain lions and missed it – are variously defined as older women in long-term relationships with younger men (à la Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher) or 35-plus women who frequent bars in search of one-night-stands with men under 25.

After seven years together – the equivalent of mating-for-life in Hollywood terms - Demi remains the poster-woman for this phenomenon (she’s 47, Ashton’s 32). In the interests of full disclosure, my partner and I share a similar May-to-December age gap. We’ve been together ten years.

But it’s the latter definition of serial liaisons with younger men that people think of now when they hiss “Cougar Alert!” at their local watering hole. Last month, our national airline got all the publicity it could want from an on-line advertisement for flights to the Rugby Sevens aimed at filling seats with Cougars seeking fresh young prey at this Wellington sports event. And crikey, did the fur fly? Yes, yes it did.

It sparked considerable debate. In one corner, women in their thirties howled at the moon over being depicted as sexual predators when really, they said, Cougars are just sexually confident, liberated women who know what they want, and go out and get it. Depicting them in an inaccurately negative light was just plain old-fashioned sexism.

In another corner, male victims of sexual abuse said they felt re-victimised by the mocumentary which too accurately reflected their experience – an issue rarely discussed and largely misunderstood, and which still didn’t gain sufficient traction in this context.

What I miss is plain old-fashioned feminism. When I signed up, it was about equal rights, equal pay and equal opportunity in work, governance and life choices. When Kate Sheppard argued for women’s right to vote, she asked, “Is it right that while the the loafer, the gambler, the drunkard, and even the wife-beater has a vote, earnest, educated and refined women are denied it?”

I’m fairly certain that our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers weren’t fighting for a woman’s right to get equally hammered and engage in random, meaningless sex with strangers. They wouldn’t have been thrilled about their sons doing it either.

Meanwhile, somewhere on the sidelines, someone should have been pondering the parlous state of rugby in this country if we’re openly promoting sex in the hope it will get people to a game. It used to be that “going on a sports trip” might lead to random sex with strangers. Suddenly, we’re selling “random sex with strangers” in the hope that it might also lead us to a weekend sports fixture.

I got quite shouty a couple of times lately. There was the promo for a doco about the world’s fattest kid, with shots of him with his shirt off looking lonely. And another about people who like to pretend monkeys are their human babies. That one inspired quite a lot of yelling, given it played shortly after newsreaders announced there are a million orphans in Haiti, who could no doubt do with a pretty frock and a cuddle. Though once the yelling subsided, I also noted you probably don’t want real children being adopted by people who think it’s cute to put chimps in highchairs and call them Brian. I didn’t watch either programme. Instead I pondered the popularity of putting freaks and weirdoes on TV. It’s not a million miles from the carnival Freak Show of old – the Bearded Lady! World’s Tallest Man! The Human Cannonball! – and yet it is.

Records of touring Freak Shows go back hundreds of years. Put “freak” into your search engine and you will find the story of Lazarus Colloredo who toured Europe in the 17th Century with his conjoined twin, John Baptista. Later, the Victorians were particularly fond of getting a good look at the world’s smallest, tallest or strongest, and up until recently no American circus was complete without a deformed baby in a jar or a two-headed cow.

The kindest explanation for this fascination with the “not normal” is that it slates our thirst for stories of struggle and hardship, and surviving against the odds to live a dignified life. Less generously, it simply makes us feel better about our own oddities. “I’m a bit weird, but not weird enough for the circus.”

One of the strengths of television is that it’s an intensely personal experience for the viewer. One of the weaknesses of television is that it’s an intensely impersonal experience for those who are viewed. There’s no audience there to offer sympathy, respect or encouragement, and no community of fellow freak show travellers to wrap you in their three arms once the show is over and the voyeurs have gone home.

This is why I won’t watch freak-of-the-week documentaries. I prefer my freaks live and in the flesh at festivals and comedy clubs. I know a guy who puts a scorpion down his pants and kicks a flaming bowling ball with a knife sticking out of it onto his face. Lovely man. Makes me feel almost normal.

Go to: www.christchurchnz.com and hit "blog".

And thank you, Christchurch

No doubt in the last six weeks there have been tears, tantrums, nagging, sulks, and fights to deal with. Plus whatever the kids have been up to. My partner and I work from home so we’re used to this 24/7 business, but I’ve received the odd emergency call from other couples, shocked at the sudden strain of being under the same roof day in, day out. “She never stops talking,” or “He breathes all the time,” they tell me.

Give yourself credit if you haven’t entirely lost the plot – or the will to live - during this season of familial over-familiarity. In the final throes of these school holidays, police issued a statement saying they were “frustrated with the number of ridiculous calls being made to the emergency centre”. Like the woman in Wairoa who dialled 111 when her husband didn’t spray air freshener after using the toilet.

Yes, that really happened. As did another 111 call taken by the southern police communications centre from a woman who demanded police help to get her brother's wife-to-be off her back about attending their wedding.

As frustrating as this is for emergency workers, my heart goes out to anyone driven so mad by minor domestic irritations that phoning the cops seems a sane solution. “Quick, send the paramedics – it appears my husband is stuck to the couch.”

Our reasons for living together as families is self-evident, but the way we actually arrange our living arrangements can seem bizarre when you take a step back and look at them with fresh eyes.

Like that whole sleeping together business. Sleep, it’s fair to say, is best achieved in a still, silent place. Therefore the wisdom of attempting it on a bouncy thing with another person every night is doubtful. This is something many of us have contemplated into the wee small hours as our partner appears to dream of chasing rabbits while simultaneously performing a passable impersonation of the Massey Ferguson tractor.

Romance can be hard to hold on to in amongst picking up the kids and the milk and keeping track of recycling day and paying the phone bill and deciding whose turn is it to be the sober driver. So with the kids back at school, set aside time for a romantic candlelit dinner so you can gaze deep into each other’s eyes and say, “Now, who are you again?”

If you do look at the numbers, and they scare you, relax – you have considerable company. In their festive media release, Treasury announced “the number of Kiwis vulnerable to high debt doubled in the last four years, with one in five families spending almost a third of their income on debt repayments”. And a Happy New Year to you, too, Treasury. If the mistletoe was still up, I’d kiss you, you constant old thing.

We may be broke this month, but very few of us are properly poor. I am often comforted by the wise words of American comic, Maria Bamford: “I’m rich. By which I mean I own a lot of stuff I don’t need.” Most of us have a bunch of junk round the house that, according to Ms Bamford, defines us as surpremely well-to-do.

I understand being broke - paralysingly poor and hungry with no immediate change, loose or otherwise, in sight. As a brief moment in your larger history, this can be good for you – anyone who has ever been really poor puts things in place to keep that ugly wolf from ever approaching the door again. Myself, I make it a rule to always have the pantry stocked with sufficient baked beans for a week. And one tin of smoked oysters, for my soul.

So on the back of the envelope your credit card bill came in, write down your responses to this “Are You Loaded?” litmus test.

You are rich if you own books you haven’t even read yet, and some you might read again if there’s ever time. You have, in your music collection, stuff that takes you back to a special time in your life, another album you are still getting to know, and a song that always makes you cry.

You are rich if you have enough clothes that make you feel good to wear for a week without doing the laundry. And more wine than you and your favourite people could drink in one high-spirited night.

And you are rich if you know that, worst case scenario, you have friends who would rally round; and that – boot on the other foot - you could afford to take a friend in and cheerfully give them houseroom if they needed it.

Send the results and a photo of your bountiful life to the bank, along with your minimum payment. And copy it to Treasury. They need chearing up.

So it is with equal measures of excitement and relief that I can report on a new game for making time fly on the road: Car Cricket.

You don’t have to be a cricket fan, though as it happens, I am. Ian “Tubs” Smith and Mark “Rigor” Richardson are my voices of summer, droning on (I mean that in a loving way) like cicadas humming the backing-track for a song about a hot day. I adore cricket because it’s a long mind-game about bowlers’ trickery and batsmen’s mental fortitude; and because nothing much happens for ages so you can get on with other stuff and when something does happen they’ll replay it at various speeds and angles in case you missed it.

We’re not sure who invented Car Cricket but it was brought to us by a comedian who played his debut match on the road from Adelaide to Melbourne - 725km of boredom relieved only by this game and occasionally running over a kangaroo. And so it was that an English woman, an Irish man and six kiwi comics got into a van and played a five-day test of Car Cricket from Auckland to Queenstown.

Here are the rules: travellers bat individually, earning points according to the vehicles that pass in the opposite direction. One run for cars, two for vans; a truck is a boundary worth four and a bus is a six.

A batsman is out when motorcycles, utes, or cars pulling trailers pass by, or when their own vehicle is overtaken. (This is one of the reasons the driver can’t play. He or she is left, like an umpire in neutral solitude, to concentrate on the overall game and announce drinks breaks.)

Each player gets ten turns, or “wickets”. Sledging is encouraged, as is gentlemanly applause for 50 runs and a century. Feel free to tweak the rules - in Marton, we decided a mobility-scooter was worthy of five runs, representing a no-ball and four lame overthrows.

Like the real thing, Car Cricket is frenzied at times – pulling into a new town or city – and then sufficiently languorous on country roads to allow for conversational distraction.

Despite the elation of a really good knock, you can’t forget for long that Car Cricket has everything to do with random luck and nothing to do with personal skill. So unless you’re playing with Ricky Ponting, there’s not a lot of room for crowing about a win or whinging about a loss. Howzat.

This is based on a fascinating piece of scientific research I have just conducted. Ok, I flicked off an email to a dozen people. But they were a pretty good cross-section of ages (30 to 60), locations (Otago to Northland) and occupations (relatives and friends).

The results may not stand up to a full parliamentary review but I’ve always been more interested in truth than in facts. So if any of the following resonates with you, let’s assume it is bang-on.

I asked people to describe their Best Meal Ever, and to tell me why it was so good. No-one sent a recipe. Some hardly described the food. What I got was a dozen stories about a time and place, and the people they had shared it with.

Twelve very different stories, but with recurring themes and satisfying symmetry. On one side of the table were tales of magnificent simplicity – Stephen’s brown trout, caught and cooked on a fishing trip to Lake Waikaremoana with his best mate; Irene’s homemade sandwiches and flask of coffee with her husband on the steps of the British museum on a day which marked a turning point in their lives.

On the other side of the table: extravagance. Jeremy’s nine-course degustation at a famous restaurant – though he couldn’t recall the food as much as the mood – indulgence, hedonism and pride. And as a centrepiece, a combination of both – Karen’s simple bangers and mash at London’s extravagant Ivy when Joan Collins dropped by the table for a chat.

Then there are the firsts: Max’s Cypriot haloumi cheese and Japanese raw beef (separate meals) and Lorraine’s first taste of poison cru in as a teenager visiting Tahiti, and barbecued horse in France. Or discovering that, contrary to childhood experience, Brussels sprouts could taste nice.

Location plays a part: either far from home, as in Pinky’s picnic of bread, cheese and grapes from the village dairy beside a river in France; or actually at home with Louise’s surprise “no special reason” dinner her husband cooked after she’d had a particularly hard day at the office.

No-one mentioned a Christmas meal, which you can take either as a challenge or a free-pass. But in all the stories, everyone always talked about who was there. Which suggests the best ingredients for a great meal are the people you share it with. So focus on the guests as much as the menu. And if you have to invite some Brussels sprouts to dinner this Friday, make sure you also invite some butter.

Failing that, you could always make this Christmas memorable by barbecuing some horse.

Right now, I am once again where I’ve been for much of this year – away from home. Sitting in an airport two weeks ago, I became aware I was feeling an almost constant sense of déjà vu. And so in that moment, encouraged by yet another “flight delayed” announcement, I decided to spend a little of my travel time working out exactly how much time I’d spent travelling.

I waded through my diary and counted no less than 109 days and nights spent on the road. My carbon footprint is the size of a clown’s shoe and a “good day” is defined by whether I set off a metal detector or not.

The more you do things, the better you are supposed to get, yet I have become less efficient. I no longer travel light, packing two of everything I once forgot (socks, hats, tweezers) and luxury items intended to lend a bland hotel room a little home-comfort: aromatherapy candle, framed family photo, a transistor that will pick up Radio NZ anywhere, and a proper sized mug. I’d pack a cow if I could, for easy access to real milk.

So yes, a lot of time travelling this year, but a different kind of time travel this last weekend. It involved a plane and a hotel but really, the journey went back thirty years – a reunion of the journalism students I graduated with in 1979.

I promised my old friends I wouldn’t write a word about our reunion though I will happily observe that people who turn up to that kind of carry-on are both interested and interesting. I’m already looking forward to next year’s dinner.

But for a couple of hours alone, I wandered Cuba St – much as I did 30 years ago – and imagined bumping into my 18-year-old-self. What would she think of me? And what would I tell her?

I can answer both those questions in surprising detail – I stopped at a cafe and made two long lists. All I’ll say here is that what looks like the journey and what appears to be the destination seem just fine.

Christmas is a bit like a reunion – a moment when you can stand back and reflect on what happened since the last time you stood on this spot. Try fitting in a moment to do that in the next 12 days. Though if you’re already wishing you had a time machine to get everything done by then, Boxing Day will do. I’ve asked my six-year-old self and she’s pretty certain this is all just supposed to be fun.

So it matters to me that, each week, readers feel sufficiently moved to flick me an email saying what they think about the ideas on this page. Emails generally fall somewhere on a continuum between “Bravo! Just what I thought!” and “Rubbish! You are a fool!”

For several lonely weeks now, I thought the nation wasn’t speaking to me. I tried to guess which column had engendered the silence: was it the one about Labour Day, climate change or Botox?

Turns out it was an internet glitch that had me living in Coventry. I understand the technology involved only enough to visualise that a string broke between two tin cans; or the postie was off with the flu and her delivery bag lay abandoned with her bike.

Some messages may be lost forever, but a few have survived and been forwarded to my inbox. These include an invitation to coffee from an old friend, two unrelated messages from people who claim to be my cousin and one proposal of marriage.

There were several supportive emails about my column on ACC. To Bill, Peter and John, I can report that the blackbird chicks in the roses by my door are doing well. Thanks to their mother’s placement of the nest just under our first floor deck, we have a bird’s eye view of their progress and can see they are almost ready to fly. Unlike ACC which looks about to have its wings well and truly clipped.

Obviously, I am disappointed that the government isn’t basing its policy decisions on my recommendations. Similarly shocked are the people behind the smacking referendum who can’t quite believe the government isn’t engaging in their conversation about Section 59.

I didn’t join them on their march. I don’t believe in smacking kids and I thought the referendum question was stupid. Most referenda questions – including the proposals for referenda on MMP – are a variation on that old chestnut, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet – yes or no?” Less a conversation, more an interrogation leading to a predetermined answer. Though I could go with, “How about we give MMP a bit of a tweak?”

Aside from our three-yearly electoral conversation, I’d suggest a better alternative for taking the pulse of society is heaps of emails. Hot tip for citizens: If you want to ruin someone’s week, send a terse email late on Sunday night so it’s the first thing they read Monday morning. Hot tip for politicians: Use my rule - don’t reply to anything with bad spelling or grammar. That should leave you with just the calmly written words of kindness, and the odd invitation to coffee.

Doubtless some women will be itching to see the scratchy things go and a few may weep quietly on Tuesday if he looks in the mirror and announces, “You know what? I think I might keep it.” Others, however, may be converts to their man’s newly acquired Trucker or Fu Manchu and tempt him to keep the ’tache till Christmas, or seal the deal with a gift pot of wax for his Salvador Dali or Hercule Poirot.

Either way it has been fun, this month long affair when Kiwi blokes ask us to put our money where their mouth is, to sponsor spouses and friends in a moustache growing charity event that raises funds and awareness for men’s health.

As a fan of anything well-groomed, I’ve adored seeing virtually every man I know produce some variation on the much-maligned mouth-brow. Though it took a moment to relax into it. Weirdly, Movember coincided this year with enforcement of our strict cellphone-driving laws which meant as I came to terms with new road rules, pretty much everyone looked like a traffic cop.

An interested observer, I’d venture Movember offers more than just lip service to men’s better health. It’s a startlingly clever concept that brings together many of the things men enjoy – a spot of machismo, a touch of competitive spirit, a trace of non-conformist bravado and a bit of a laugh, all done with magnificent camaraderie.

And it belongs specifically to men – growing a mo’ is one of the few things men can do that women can’t, and possibly the only one that can be done legally in public. Yet in a delightful irony, it’s also men’s one chance to do something women do all the time – play around with their appearance and impress each other with a fancy new look without opening themselves up to anything other than good-natured ribbing.

Not everyone can sign on. John Key supported the cause but didn’t grow a mo because he didn’t want to look stupid. Quite right. That’s what Coalition Partners and appearances on “Letterman” are for. Women were able to sign up as “Mo Sistas” – I would have preferred “Ms Taches” – to do supportive fundraising while sticking with their usual grooming routine and avoid offending Paul Henry. I bought a Mo necklace in case I bumped into him at some point.

But really, it’s a guy thing. Anything that gets men talking about depression or asking for prostate exams is to be warmly applauded and it doesn’t matter if, when they do talk, it’s through facial hair. And Movember is oodles better than another suggestion to hold an annual fundraising “Mullet March”.

It’s an unsought reward for a winter of putting out bread and keeping the feeder filled with seed. And for my patience when the birds steal make-up sponges I leave out in the sun to dry. I’m hoping she took some of them – I like to think her little ones will be snuggled up in a nest made of things I had lying around and can afford to contribute to their comfort.

This may be hogwash. Black birds possibly lay eggs in old boots on the side of busy roads in industrial areas, and in the gardens of murderers and wife-beaters. All the same, I check on her from a safe distance and keep the cat at bay. It makes me happy that she’s happy.

Let me make what might appear to be a great leap. On our better days, as members of a community and a democracy, this is what we do for each other, and why. On a small scale, we bake muffins for friends in need. On a grand scale, we built a welfare state based on the notion that we would all be happier if none of us were homeless or sick or hungry.

When the Accident Compensation Scheme was implemented in 1974, it was built on principals of community responsibility for accidents and support of victims. ACC’s architect, Sir Owen Wilson, now 93, blasts proposed changes – double and triple levies for some, victims forced back to work sooner and on lower incomes – as “uncaring and predatory”. People who do our dangerous jobs, he says, shouldn’t pay higher levies. We all benefit equally from the work they do, and that’s the way we should pay - equally.

Somewhere in the last 35 years, we’ve lost some of that sense of a grand community. We’ve been encouraged to focus on the care of our own nest which is commendable but, simultaneously, we’ve adopted the view that if someone’s nest collapses, it was probably their fault. When bad things happen now, we ask, “What did you do wrong?”

Which doesn’t match up with our old “no-fault” attitude to accidents at the heart of the ACC scheme. If it keeps going this way, I fully expect the black bird in my garden to sue me if her eggs don’t hatch and there’ll be a carrion bird on my doorstep dressed as a lawyer.

This is not to say there’s nothing worth saying about my cat. At 18 years old, Jimmy is a magnificent ginger tom and my relationship with him is the longest, most amicable non-biological liaison I have ever enjoyed. Jim has recently taken to affecting Alzheimer’s in order to evade responsibility for using the cat-flap, demanding instead we open doors which don’t actually exist. He sleeps in a variety of both expected and unexpected positions, all of which make you sigh contentedly and go, “Awww...”. Jim has decided of late that cat food is quite unsuitable and he would much prefer either bacon and eggs or tuna pasta.

I can tell you this now because my editor is currently on leave and won’t read this till you do. And also because it is in response to news from Victoria University researchers who suggest we should stop keeping pets we won’t ultimately eat.

It’s one of those “measure the carbon-footprint” exercises in which we are made to be aware of, and feel guilty about, the things we love which are contributing to the end of the world. Owning a dog is as bad as driving an SUV. A cat is as environmentally unfriendly as a Volkswagon Golf. If we need a pet, they suggest, make it a chicken or a pig so at least you can offset the carbon emissions by eating it later.

Green weekends should start in bed with the paper and a chook – presumably a good layer. Then a game of fetch in the garden with Daisy and a night on the couch with a movie and your kunikuni on your lap. Bad news for vegetarians who will be left to take their evening walk with a carrot.

I find myself having a Charlton Heston moment, vowing that eco-purists can prise my cat from my cold dead hand. In truth, I have struggled to find the correct shade of green ever since my use of cloth nappies as an environmental stand 16 years ago was pooh-poohed by a zealot who insisted my use of water, electricity and detergent did far greater harm to Mother Earth than landfills choked with disposables.

She didn’t mention the appalling carbon emissions involved in having kids – and there’s a reason for that. Instinctively, we know we need to factor more into the environmental equation than just land use and greenhouse gases. Factors like joy, pleasure and contentment. If you don’t know what that means, take a long look at a sleeping cat.

NZ and Australian men are the highest users of Botox in the world. That’s according to an Aussie plastic surgeon attending the NZ College of Appearance Medicine's recent annual conference.

Really? I’m frowning so hard in disbelief, I’ve just made two new wrinkles. Maybe it’s simply that those who sell snake oil like to talk-up the popularity of snake oil. And yes, I realise Botox isn’t snake oil – it’s pig botulin - but the principal may still apply.

Because at first glance, there’s little empirical evidence that Kiwi blokes care all that deeply about how they look. Clean pants and a striped shirt seem about as far as most men will go in terms of frocking up for a night out.

And second, who is encouraging this? Surely not us women. All we look for, according to received wisdom, is a sense of humour. Of course, truck loads of money can also make a man attractive, so it’s not like they’re short of options. That’s two – more than enough choices to confuse most men.

And third, how long has this been going on? We’ve all assumed the stoic, expressionless thing Kiwi blokes have going on was about inner strength, confidence and masculine security. Please don’t tell me Grizz Wylie’s legendary lack of expression had anything to do with appearance medicine. And what chance do any of us have at a Texas Hold’em table now if our opponent’s poker face is chemically contrived?

Not that I have anything against men - or other people - making the best of what they’ve got. If a shot of Botox makes you look as young and fresh on the outside as you feel on the inside, stab yourself between the eyes with impunity, I say. Though it is interesting they do this less in Europe where they’re used to being surrounded by old stuff, like buildings and art and history. “Hadrian’s Wall doesn’t need a fresh lick of paint, so neither do I.”

But I’m staggered we’re embracing Botox faster than, say, the Americans, who seem to be willing to go to any lengths to look better than they are, from tooth-whitening to surgically relocating body fat, or pretending their kids fly in helium balloons.

One of my favourite American comedians, Maria Bamford, has a line I wish I had written. “If I could have any kind of surgery I wanted, I’d like to have the part of my brain removed that cares about what other people think.”

So when Dave Letterman got caught with his Worldwide Pants down round his ankles, he provided a rare model of good behaviour for men behaving badly. Dave neatly stepped right out of those offending trousers, kicked them to the side, and bared all – including his soul.

To recap the scandal, it appears Joe Halderman, an ex-boyfriend of one of Letterman’s ex-girlfriends, gave Dave a film script he’d written detailing the host’s various liaisons with “Late Show” staffers.

Apparently, it reveals Letterman has a bedroom in the Ed Sullivan Theatre known as “the Bunker” - which one hopes is not a reference to some kind of three minute warning. One also hopes the chat show host practiced safe-sex and could therefore be correctly referred to round the office water-cooler as “the French Letterman”.

Halderman offered to sell the script to Letterman - rather than to a movie studio – for $US2million. Not wanting to give in to what he saw as blackmail, Dave decided to get in first. With equal parts humour and honesty, Letterman ’fessed up to his bad behaviour on live TV, apologised to the people who deserved an apology, and started down the long road of making things right with his wife. A road which may turn out to be a cul-de-sac, but at least he’s making the journey.

It was a fine lesson in dignity and humanity. And yet despite the bomb aimed at Letterman being skilfully defused, shrapnel still flies. Late Show employees are currently hounded by reporters who want to make a complete list of Bunker guests.

Worse, a production that was often held up as a fine working environment where women were as supported and rewarded as men has lost credibility. Right now, all female employees have been made suspects. Worst of all, those women who have successfully climbed the ranks have had their integrity tainted. And all because their boss couldn’t keep his pants on.

It is a thought worth pondering this weekend. For most of us, Labour Weekend has become significant because it’s the right time to plant our tomatoes. But when we first celebrated it in NZ in 1900, it represented a hard-won victory for an eight hour working day and provided a moment to celebrate the economic and social achievements of all workers. It’s tragic that much of this progress can be undone as easily as a zip. Ok, two zips. But you’d be guessing that Dave went first.

The TV highlights package was able to feature pretty much all of the 200 second bout. There wasn’t much there for me - I only like the dancing bit between punches because I have to look away whenever someone lands a blow – but I appreciate Tua’s own description of his fighting style as “peaceful brutality”.

Proper boxing fans appeared thrilled the fight was over just 14 seconds into Round Two. I would have assumed that would be like settling down with a novel only to discover it was a short story but in boxing clearly fast is good. It seemed right that Tua wanted to celebrate his victory with a fast-food burger.

I do like a fight, though. Not the all-in brawl or barroom scrap, but a decent, civilised battle, the kind you are likely to win because you’re the only contender who still remembers there’s a war going on.

Over the years, I’ve collected those apocryphal stories about what people do to get even when they’ve been delivered a low blow. Good manners and a belief in karma have prevented me from giving it a crack myself, but I am filled with admiration for the woman who moved out after her boyfriend was unfaithful, leaving a dead fish secreted in the hem of a curtain. I like to picture him, still wondering where the hell that fishy smell is coming from.

Or the man who, similarly wounded, froze a dog poo and grated it all over the furnishings - the eye couldn’t see it, but the nose couldn’t miss it. Or even better – because it takes more time to reach full bloom - scattering grass seed on damp carpet as you leave. Revenge is a meal best served cold, and on an indoor lawn. Given the choice, most of us would prefer a punch in the head to this kind of “brutal passivity”.

Reasonable people, of course, wouldn’t dare go this far. Though I’d wager there are one or two wives out there taking the long form approach by over-salting his dinner in the fond hope that, 20 years down the track, it may lead to a hardened artery. Just quietly.

I’m most fond of 16th century poet George Herbert’s advice. A peace-loving man of the cloth, he argued that, “Living well is the best revenge.” Think of it occasionally when you indulge in some small, personal luxury and allow yourself a quiet, “Ha ha!”

Those of us who are self-employed should set aside time to do this on a regular basis. If we had proper jobs, some Human Resources manager with half a psych degree would be doing the contemplation for us, so it behoves us to honestly review our own strengths and weaknesses – or “areas for development” as I believe these are called now.

No matter how well we know us, we can still surprise ourselves from time to time. This keeps things fresh. I like to surprise myself occasionally with my own stupidity, finding these moments inordinately amusing so long as I catch myself out before anyone else does. Like when you flick on the light switch during a power-cut, briefly believing it will help you find the matches and candles. Or you consider using your cellphone to call your friend to check whether you just left your cellphone at her place.

Recently, while running the roller-brush over my clothes to remove cat hairs, I speculated for a nanosecond that it might be more efficient to run the roller-brush over my cat. Amused by the supreme foolishness of this notion, I had to try it. He liked it, though I don’t think he was fully cognoscente of my intent.

When you work for yourself, it can be doubly difficult to know what you’re like. According to the ACC, I am actually two people – simultaneously boss and employee, and therefore levied for contributions from each angle. It was while meditating on this concept that I had my moment of self-discovery: I’m a pretty good employee but a really crap boss.

Taking a dispassionate look around my office, I realised if someone else made me work under these conditions, I would go on strike. For years I’ve sat on a cheap, nasty chair which offers only a passing nod to ergonomic design. Meanwhile, I can’t nod at all - my neck is too sore.

There’s a transistor radio, a one-bar heater and office reference material consisting largely of a broken thesaurus and a dictionary printed in 1983. There are probably hundreds of new words I don’t know about - like occupational, safety and health. It’s all as charmingly retro as sending kids up chimneys.

So I’m making an effort to do unto myself as I would do unto others if they were in my employ. A plush chair is on order and there’s a new mini-system for CDs, Gregorian and otherwise. And here’s hoping this year’s office Christmas party isn’t the usual lacklustre affair.

Human beings love a pattern they can trust. A + B = C and, even if we don’t like C much, we will keep adding A to B because when C turns up in our otherwise random lives, it is comforting.

So three cheers and skull that beer for the Undie 500, another of our fabulous traditions. This annual pub crawl to Dunedin by Canterbury University engineering students earned its name because vehicles had to cost less than $500 – a test of students’ burgeoning engineering skills. Inflation and recession mean this rule has been relaxed but you’re still taking large numbers of students on a road trip and adding alcohol. A + B still equals C – what could possibly go wrong?

Think of it as a hikoi of the nation’s most practical, hands-on intellectuals as baby engineers decorate their vehicles and themselves to make the 360km pilgrimage, stopping at every bar along the way in a Zen-like triumph of journey over destination.

It’s the destination that’s problematic. Once those Canterbury students get to Dunedin, they’re joined by hundreds of Otago students who are always up for an evening of drinking and couch burning.

Couch burning is another of our fabulous cultural traditions. No-one’s sure how it started – likely they were trying to keep warm - but you have to admire them for getting their sofas lit, given how damp everything tends to be in Dunedin student flats in September.

This year, there were two nights of rioting with about 80 students arrested for disorderly behaviour when bottles and bricks were thrown at police. Possibly canned food was also involved – organisers encouraged participants to bring donations for the local food bank in an effort to give the event a community flavour.

Canterbury students blame Otago students for causing the ruckus. Otago students blame their council for not coming to the party with sufficient party plans to keep the kids amused. Someone blamed the media. The point-and-blame is unsurprising – it’s what the grown-ups have modelled – plus many of them are only a year on from using the, “But mum, she started it!” defence.

Still, I like to picture students getting home the next morning with a screaming hangover after a night of furniture burning and thinking, “Jeez, I think I’ll just have a wee lie down on the couch. Where the...? Oh, yeah... Disappointing.”

Organisers said the school “may be criticised for serving alcohol to under 18 year olds”. Since they’ve been kind enough to grant permission, here goes – though perhaps this is less a criticism, more a critique.

First: $175 a ticket? I recall my school dance. I want to say the entrance fee was a shilling, but that can’t be right – we were well decimalised by then. Perhaps 50 cents. There is, however, irrefutable photographic evidence of the pink and orange seersucker frock my mother whipped up, and I believe cheerios were served.

I’m not for a moment suggesting these were better days, just providing a baseline comparison. Though the idea of a full bar, properly stocked and staffed, makes me mourn the passing of the customary fruit punch bowl, laced with vodka brought in with only a passing nod at stealth by members of the First XV. Making that ritual redundant seems an appalling breach of tradition.

Three decades later, parents now recognise school ball season as that time of the year you spend a fortune on a new dress, hunt all over town for matching shoes, book makeup and hair appointments, arrange transport and then... sit at home. It’s like being Cinderella, if the Fairy Godmother hadn’t turned up and the stepsisters treated you like an ATM.

Christ’s College parents were at least asked to provide written permission for their children to drink alcohol at the event. Headmaster, Simon Leese, said students also agreed not to drive, or to go on to after-parties and that, really, the school is just preparing students for the future when they’ll be drinking without supervision. Clearly, they see this as a “teaching moment”.

The idea has merit – or even, as we say in this NCEA era, excellence. Learning how to party properly is surely a life skill. Perhaps we should add “Revelry” as our fourth “R” to reading, writing and arithmetic. At least that one begins with the right letter as opposed to just being a phoneme.

Revelry could be a Level 3 study option, internally assessed at weekends throughout the year, with your official exam at the School Ball. If you get through the night without punching someone or being sick: Achieved. Without generally making a twat of yourself or crying in the loos: Merit. Ending the night still able to articulate what a phoneme is: Achieved With Excellence.

I shook his hand manfully. “Nice to meet you,” I said. “Indeed,” he replied, “and what do you do?” Pointing back at the empty space I had just left on-stage, I mumbled, “Um... Pretty much... that.” “Interesting,” he said, implying the opposite. Without need for further exposition we agreed, wordlessly, to part.

I had a small taste of fame a couple of decades ago when I appeared weekly on one of the two available TV channels. My sole celebrity moment occurred at a supermarket. A family of shoppers, excited to see someone from that morning’s small screen in this afternoon’s freezer section, rifled through my trolley to establish “what you TV people eat”. They were disappointed I wasn’t vegetarian. “Chops, Brian! She eats chops! I wasn’t expecting that!” We all fell silent when they uncovered my preferred choice for personal feminine hygiene.

These days, I mostly get, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” or they think I’m Jackie Clarke. So I have to take the late John Updike’s word for it when he says, “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.” As soon as you are aware of being somebody to be watched and listened to with extra interest, normal conduct ceases.

It was an observation the American writer and critic made in his 1989 memoir about his own struggle with fame, though it seems an apt epitaph now for the late Michael Jackson. Two months after his passing, Jackson’s death was declared a homicide with investigators pointing at his doctor.

Michael, like a lot of us, suffered from insomnia. Court documents show his personal physician gave him sedatives at 1.30am, 2am, 3am, and several more times before 10.40am, when he gave him 25 milligrams of Propofol. No wonder Michael couldn’t get to sleep. “Wake up, Mr Jackson, here’s another sedative.”

There’s an upside to not being rich and famous. Ordinary people, when we can’t sleep, count sheep and drink warm milk. Or we get up and watch re-runs of local dramas we didn’t watch in prime-time and are pleasantly surprised.

Occasionally, when I can’t sleep, I’ve been known to clean out the kitchen cupboards. That’s not an option if you’ve got a personal assistant, a housekeeper, a valet and a chef. No wonder Michael couldn’t cope with insomnia – he probably didn’t know where his kitchen actually was.

Equally apt, perhaps, is this from Brad Pitt: “Fame is a bitch, man.” Which, incidentally, proves another thing – if you’re famous, even when you say something banal, someone will write it down.

I bought the house – two homes, really – with my parents who had just retired and wanted to move closer to me and my two-year-old daughter. After 17 years of living in different places, it was both a sensible and daring thing to do. We’re all still here.

On the day we moved in, I remember looking out my upstairs bedroom window, and seeing my father in the garden, pushing my daughter on the swing. Two thoughts tumbled into my head. The first was that I couldn’t recall my father ever pushing me on a swing. The second was how wonderful it was he could do that now with his granddaughter.

Born in the first year of the Great Depression, my father is of the generation that understood being a good father was about being a good provider, and indeed he was. He worked every hour god sent – at his business, around the home and in the community - and my brother and I, as the saying goes, wanted for nothing. He instilled in both of us an extraordinary work ethic which means we both survive as freelancers and have never watched daytime TV.

Post-feminist fatherhood is more complex, less easily defined by traditional roles. We’re making it up as we go along and it’s complicated – not only for the dads. My own daughter has a father for high days and holidays, and a grandfather and stepfather for everyday use.

However you organise a household, I believe there are three things that make a home: jasmine, a swing and a lemon tree. Dad planted our lemon tree the first year we were here. During our first summer, my brother took a photo of my daughter and me together on the swing. Framed, it has hung on our living room wall ever since.

Last week, I caught a plane and gave the swing to my brother. Stored for a time in the cupboard under our stairs, Dad had wrapped it carefully first in polythene and labelled it, “Holly’s Swing From Puriri Tree”. Handing it to my brother with appropriate reverence, I suggested if he wanted to maintain its value, he should keep it in the original packaging. Always the wittier of us two, he declared he’d be taking it straight to Te Papa.

Today, he sent a photo of his little girl on our swing. Whatever Father’s Day means, it is nicely traced in the arc of that image.

Turns out they’d been at a friend’s lake-house in Summerland, a tiny town four hundred kilometres east of Vancouver. While sitting under Ponderosa pines, swapping stories about kids and partners, the friend’s daughter googled me on her mobile, found my website, checked the dates and - voila – my lavish jet-setting lifestyle was exposed.

I should mention I got the exact location of Summerland from Wikipedia so please take it with a grain of salt – more citations are needed. But I believe they have a remarkably dry climate for British Columbia, and a fondness for homeschooling and locally grown wines.

I am charmed by the idea you can sit by a lake and perform a sort of cyber-twitch of lace-curtains, keeping abreast of comings and goings on another side of the world. And we twitch back – when they bought a new house last month, we checked it out on Google Street View and could tell them we liked the colour and the roof looked sound.

Like everything that’s awesome – tequila, indolence, cake – too much can be a bad thing. It’s been dubbed “hyper-connectivity” and no doubt it will be an official disease shortly so you’ll be able to make an ACC claim. You can probably diagnose yourself on-line, download a treatment plan and order the medication if you find the right website – chuck out a call through your Facebook friends or search some blogs.

The New York Times recently featured a family who virtually communicate only in virtual ways. Dad texts the kids to wake-up in the morning, saying they’re more likely to respond to that than him yelling, “Wake up!” from downstairs. Round here, we don’t take it that far – when my daughter got her first mobile, she tried texting me from her room for an orange juice. This was highly unsuccessful and remained a unique occurrence.

But I am connected to the internet in all its guises – for research, reading, personal and business communications, and for looking up the name of that guy who was in that movie with that other guy about the thing. I struggle to remember life before google but I seem to recall a lot of trips to the library and the purchase of reference books.

I do, however, have a reliable google alternative. Lacking internet access while desperate for the words to a half-remembered Denis Glover poem and the exact date of the Cuban Missile Crisis (long story) I phoned my Mum and Dad. Dad got 1962 from a book; my mother remembered the poem. Find me on Twitter and I’ll tweet you their number.

When I say I procrastinate, I don’t mean that to sound like a bad thing. If it weren’t for my two-monthly GST returns, the dusting would never get done round here. It’s only when faced with a file-box of invoices and receipts that I can really knuckle down to cleaning windows, ironing table napkins and cleaning the oven with a toothbrush.

Those of us who live from deadline-to-deadline know the best time to receive random visits from friends is just prior to said deadline, when beds are most likely to be made, fridge stocked and flowers arranged. There’s nothing like the need to focus on work to get you focused on something else.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, when I really should have been thinking about other things. I’ve mulled over the maxim that, if you want a job done, give it to a busy person. Perhaps it’s less about them being energetic and efficient, and more about them wanting a distraction from their already-too-long “To Do” list.

So while I am supposed to be filling out income and expenditure spreadsheets, I’m pondering how many of the world’s great things have happened when the creator really should have been doing something else.

Did Jane Austin, for example, bang off some novels to avoid finishing a petit-point footstool? Did Alexander Graham Bell invent the telephone when he should have been mowing the lawn and clearing gutters? And where would we be if Archimedes had stayed in his office writing maths formulae for measuring the volume of irregular shaped objects instead of deciding, “Bugger it, I’m off for a hot bath.”

These are the things I am burning to know, when really I should be off-setting mileage and depreciation costs from my out-of-town entertainment fees. That, and I’m letting my mind wander in other directions with interesting results, like the possibility of housing our members of Parliament in shipping containers along the Capital’s waterfront – easy walking distance from the Beehive, and a highly democratic response to suggestions that prisoners, who also serve at Her Majesty’s pleasure, might fairly be accommodated this way.

I’m not saying that by putting off filing your tax return you might accidentally find the cure for cancer. But it is worth noting that Sir Isaac Newton wasn’t sitting at his laptop when that apple bonked him on the head.

So, in the interests of human development, put “Procrastinate” on your “To Do” list. You don’t have to do it right now. Just whenever you get round to it. Maybe read a magazine first.

That’s “Law” as in statute, but also as in Michael (the “h” is silent), mayor of Whanganui. In May, Parliament granted his district the power to suspend the Bill of Rights Act where it relates to “the personal expression of individuals and their clothes” so, by the end of this month, the District Council should have a new bylaw in place that makes the wearing of gang patches illegal.

Law’s law is aimed at reducing gang intimidation and hindering their efforts to recruit impressionable youth. Other district councils have identified themselves as prospects for ganging up on the gangs – Taranaki, Horowhenua and Timaru say they’re watching with interest to see how it goes.

Me, too. Because if we’re going to make some forms of dress illegal for being intimidating and/or offensive, there are other things we could stick on that list. White pants, for starters. You think they’re going to be all summery and fun but, from behind, most women in white pants look like something you could project movies on – most likely a home-movie documenting the years of barbecues and birthday parties which have directly led to your bum being of sufficient stature upon which to screen a film.

I’m also offended by track pants unless you’re actually at the track, gym shoes outside the gym, and polar fleece worn outside the Arctic Circle. Trousers that reveal bum-cleavage, camel-toe and muffin tops should surely incur instant fines.

High-heeled evening jandals should be outlawed on the grounds that it’s never wise to wear an oxymoron. Criminalise ponytails on middle-aged men, the accepted symbol for blokes who refuse to grow up and make decisions, like what kind of haircut might suit them.

I am intimidated by chic women in designer couture and drag queens, both of whom make me feel that, somewhere between breakfast and leaving the house, I didn’t try hard enough. Also, despite (or perhaps because of) having due respect for the law, uniformed police officers fill me instantly with guilt about things I have never done. Force them all into plain clothes, I say.

And large groups of men in suits are intensely intimidating in bars. More so, now they and their ilk have been revealed as responsible for inflicting economic pain on good families and the elderly with their sub-prime mortgages and investment scams, while they themselves profit from our misery. It might not have been them personally, but they all look the same when they dress like that. Stick a law on that.

And really, much of life is like this. Moments of pure joy show themselves only occasionally amongst the ordinary and mundane. You just have to know where to look. So during the last of these long, dark winter nights, let me suggest a family evening in front of YouTube.

Because that’s where you will find “Jill and Kevin’s wedding entrance”, danced to Chris Brown’s “Forever”, filmed on handycam at a church in Minnesota and viewed nine million times on the internet in the first week after it was posted.

Largely less than lithe and with their own unconventional moves, these aren’t professional dancers. They’re amateurs – in the true sense of that word – doing it for love. What you see took one rehearsal, a heap of courage and, for that moment, one hundred per cent commitment from every member of the bridal party. There’s never a second when any of them appears to think they’re looking stupid, therefore none of them ever do.

That’s what you see. What you get is a feeling of absolute joy and a powerful sense of community. Throw it out there, it tells you, and the rest of the room will catch it, right down to nana clapping along up front. A cynic I know who hates weddings watched this and was moved to happy tears.

We seem to want this – stepping out briefly from the banal to dance together, or even to watch other people do it. Sure, this pretty face of the flash-mob has been facilitated by mobile technology and its ad agencies, but it’s inspired by something else. This is our post-modern version of Saturday nights at the village hall, or line-dancing, or being swept up against our better judgement into performing the Chicken Dance or the chorus to “YMCA”. An unheralded moment of shared consciousness.

So on your YouTube night, try “Thriller Prison” to be inspired by 1,500 Filipino inmates – tough people in a tough place managing to find their groove. Or “Sound of Music Train Station” starring two hundred Belgians rocking out to “Do-re-mi” or find London’s T-Mobile dance medley. You’ll ask yourself these things: Who is performer? Who is audience? Who is waiting for a late cue, and who is randomly joining in the fun? And you’ll also ask, Why can’t all of life be like this?

Some of it can. Rest up till Spring, wait for that call, go dancing, and give it everything.

Let me be clear, before you tighten your facemask, that what I have is just an ordinary “snotty-nose, bit-of-a-cough” cold. Not the flu. No fever, no body ache, certainly not the Swine. Though try telling that to anyone I meet. My brother, a recent survivor of the actual Swine Flu, said the experience gave him an insight into what it might have been like to be gay in the 80s when we discovered Aids. Indeed, you could easily update one of that era’s jokes: What’s the difference between Aids and cancer? Visitors.

Certainly, random visits are no longer acceptable. An email from one of the people I work for asks clients to phone before they come by, and don’t come at all if you have “flu-like symptoms”. Given that this covers anything from a cold to a hangover, I’m barely leaving the house.

When I do, I’m struck by the plethora of hand-sanitising pumps in public places – and confused about whether I’m supposed to use them when I arrive (to protect them from me) or as I leave (to protect me from them). Our local health centre has gone as far as removing all magazines from the waiting room, replacing them with an easy-wipe laminated sign explaining shared reading material is a top source of contagion. Consequently, I no longer have any idea about the state of Brad and Ange’s marriage, and I’m completely out of the loop on Wills and Kate.

I should take some responsibility for this fashion of fear – not as an instigator, but for riding the first wave. Back in the 80s, as a junior journalist working for the Society of Master Plumbers, one of my regular tasks was to write a little piece called, “Plumbing Talk” distributed free to the nation’s papers. In a deadline-induced fever, I once banged off a nightmarish essay entitled, “How Clean Is Your Flush Button?”, an ode to the filth that, I posited, surely clings to the one thing we touch before washing our hands but never think to clean. According to our clippings service, it was the most successful, frequently published column in “Plumbing Talk” history.

Though I didn’t mean a word of it, I had inadvertently struck a chord. Despite this, I have rarely cleaned my own flush button. Perhaps this is why I have a cold. So, having placed myself in voluntary quarantine, I now have time to see to it - once I’ve disinfected my keyboard, wet-wiped my hands and pushed “send”.

Many things. For starters, how much I missed having regular access to a washing machine, though I discovered when it’s really cold you can wear the same socks more than once so long as you don’t take your boots off in public. It’s also wise not to actually mention in polite company that you’re currently on Day Four of rotating your smalls.

When you’re constantly a stranger in every town, it’s the small things that make a difference. Asked to recall the best experiences, it’s not always the shows that come to mind, but the hospitality that surrounded them – Daisy’s welcome plate of ginger crunch in Reefton, pre-show steak and post-show cheese puffs in Takaka, greenroom platters in Tauranga, and backstage chocolate bars in Oamaru.

Not that I’m only about cupboard love. There’s something about someone being pleased to see you that makes you lift your game and show them your most sparkling self. It was the overwhelming kindness and enthusiasm of local hosts which put places like Karamea, Riverton, Gisborne and Fairlie on the map with a shiny gold star.

Good manners prevent me from mentioning the names of places where we struck bad manners. They were mercifully few. Once, during a bitter rain storm, we huddled round a borrowed heater in the theatre’s toilets because no-one thought it necessary to turn the backstage heating on; and there was one town that just... disapproved.

I love that social journey any frequent guest or host will understand – shaking hands as strangers saying hello one day, then warmly hugging and kissing goodbye as old friends the next. We remember the compliments – backhanded or otherwise – like the woman who told us, “You say out loud all the things the rest of us only think... And then, gosh, you have to live with yourselves.”

Since I wasn’t distracted by doing my laundry, I had the time to ponder some aspects of the natural world I hadn’t previously paid much attention. It wasn’t until I saw them growing in the snow that I realised mandarins and wild roses belong to winter. After embarrassing myself by squealing with delight at the fruits and blooms, I spent the rest of the tour seeing them grow everywhere, mocking me with their brilliant winter colour.

Every journey needs an end. You know it’s time when you find yourself encouraging stray cats into your motel unit with leftover takeaways just to make the place look a little more homey. Happy to be home now with the real thing, and clean socks.

As well as an evening performance, visiting artists were also encouraged to spend time with the after-school drama students. In Sam’s case, our workshop concluded fairly swiftly with him suggesting we all nip down to the pub for a beer and a game of pool. Too self-conscious to explain I was 16 and had never been to the local pub before, I faked bravado and drove Sam and a couple of classmates there in my mother’s Mini.

Sadly, my part in the adventure ended before we’d racked up a game. The barman, who knew my parents, stood over me with folded arms and asked meaningfully after their health. I took the hint and hit the road.

Visiting players were billeted with committee members and I recall initial concern that Sam – in his “Foxton Straight” jeans with dog Minstrel in tow - might be a little too earthy for his hosts. Tom and Barbara were fine English folk, directly related to the actual Worthingtons of “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage” fame. Tom arguably had a touch of the Noel Cowards about him, often proclaiming that, when things were going well, they were “tickety-boo”.

So it was a great relief to the committee that, after Sam’s weekend with Mine Hosts, they pronounced him a perfect gentleman. Apparently, they stayed up all night drinking cognac and swapping stories, and couldn’t wait for him to come stay again.

Thirty years later, I’m on tour and driving through the Buller Gorge listening to David Kilgour sing Sam Hunt’s poems. At each town, we’re hosted by the community arts people and, even though I’ve never met them before, they’re familiar to me. These are the same vibrant, engaged women I remember from another time and place who delight in welcoming travelling players to their towns.

Other comedians worry about seeing more gray heads than you’d see at our usual comedy gigs. But as much as I was blessed to watch Sam perform back then – and many times since – I believe I was also blessed to watch the audience watch him. It was a revelation to see people who, to my adolescent eyes, appeared conventional, conservative and old (I swear some were over fifty) being totally taken with Sam’s work. Even when he used words not usually permitted in polite company.

When you live in a small community, it seems you are more likely to consciously engage with the world, its news and its issues. I also believe that, if you’re at all familiar with what needs to be done to assist a cow during a breach birth, there’s not much a poet or a bunch of comedians can say that will shock you.

Being an audience demands its own particular skills. Earlier in our social history, we had a clear path for learning those skills. Before television, we took our entertainment in communal doses - Elizabethan kids, for example, might cut their teeth on village pantos before graduating to travelling minstrel shows, then stand-by tickets at the Globe during their gap-year. By the time they were raising opera glasses to check out goings-on in the Royal Box, they knew the audience rules.

Now, we watch TV and can forget that our job is to respond. (“It’s behind you!”) It’s an interesting phenomena that people don’t laugh out loud when they watch a comedy DVD alone, but will guffaw loudly at the same gags when they have company. It seems that if a tree falls in the forest and it amuses you but there’s no-one there to hear it, you don’t make a sound.

Respond, yes, but not distract. (“Hey, isn’t that chick on the right in Shortland Street?”). People unused to live performance are shocked when they break off into discussion groups and the player, standing just two feet away, can actually hear them. (“Yup, I have a small, recurring role as the head of the DHB.”)

Maybe you can’t entirely blame television. Even before entertainment was piped into our homes, entertainers complained about lack of response or too much distraction. When “Lady Windemere’s Fan” debuted in 1892, Oscar Wilde reported the play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster. Post-Black Death and pre-Swine Flu, Austrian pianist Artur Schnabel noted there were only two kinds of audiences for classical music – coughing and not coughing.

I’m with Truman’s Vice President, Alben Barkley, who insisted the best audience is intelligent, well-educated and a little drunk. It’s also nice if they live in a small town surrounded by hills, with no cellphone coverage.

In fact, give me a small audience in a small town in this small country any day, because I love it best when you can turn a show into a conversation. Recently, I told a story on-stage about Kumara’s Empire Hotel getting shut down due to various shenanigans, including one customer with his pants off and another riding a quad bike through the front door. All of which, to me, sounded like a jolly good night out.

Only in NZ could you then discover that the actual quad bike driver - let’s call him Richard - was currently sitting in the audience. (Note: pants on.) You can’t help thinking that, when Shakespeare wrote that we’re all players on a stage, this moment was precisely what he had in mind.

South Island winters are brutal, and I’d take my hat off to Mainlanders for their fortitude if I wasn’t so damn cold. I’ve lived through a few winters in Central Otago and Canterbury and somehow I continue to spend large chunks of every winter well south of Cook Strait.

When you fly into winter – as opposed to being lulled into it by a languorous autumn – it’s a shocker. You spend half your day putting on or taking off hat-gloves-scarf-coat, and the other half whinging about it.

Though if you shut up and listen to the locals, you start to see the upside of living with the seasons. Arriving in Akaroa a few weeks ago to perform, we found the town fizzing with excitement because their tourist season had just ended and, with visitors out of the way, they had planned this evening as celebration just for themselves.

It was Boxing Day after the in-laws leave –shoes off, belts loosened, and fistfuls of ham with no “family hold back”. Tables at the Gaiety Theatre strained under the weight of lavish picnic dinners and BYO wine. The local ukulele orchestra (“We’re more about enthusiasm than talent,” they suggested – too modestly) warmed up our audience better than a sunny day in January.

We’ve begun to understand that if you’re driving in a snowfall and marvelling that there are no other cars on the road, you probably shouldn’t be either. And when a farmer called Nelson stops to help with your snow chains, you will wish they weren’t purple plastic ones that look like Barbie’s “My First Snow Chains”. Also, Nelson will have a better idea of how to get to Riverton from Alexandra than your GPS does.

We’ve also learnt that the cheese roll (Southland delicacy, also available in Otago) is at its finest made with white bread, crusts on, extra knob of butter. Best cheese roll this trip goes to Oamaru, closely followed by Kurow, Gore and Invercargill. The Supreme Award, however, goes to the DVD documentary I bought at the Riverton Arts Centre toasting the cheese roll’s history.

Now that I’m as fat as a winter squirrel and struggling to find the will to get out of my pyjamas in the morning, I’m tempted to scurry back to Akaroa and join them in their off-season. Though right now as I sit in Karamea, there’s word the only road out may be closed due to snow and ice. One can only hope.

My inbox has since been filled with many kind offers of maps, geography lessons and general admonishments from the citizens of Marton and the wider Rangitikei – all of which I deserve, but shouldn’t have needed. I know Marton well – as a child with a tendency towards car-sickness, Marton was “almost home” on a trip back from Taupo, with only Bulls and Foxton left to survive before reaching the comfort of my Levin bed.

So there are no excuses for my appalling error. All I can say is that my brain broke and somehow, even as I wrote “Marton”, I was visualising “Masterton”, hence the mad mental leap across a winding Manawatu gorge and down into the Wairarapa. For this insanity, I unreservedly apologise and withdraw.

As it happens, I am currently on my own William Stewart walkabout of the South Island with a comedy show, keeping one step ahead of the cops and carving “thank you” into tables whenever we have an especially good time. On the day my inbox fairly burst with geographic instructions for Marton, I was getting my head around the idea that I was staying in Oamaru (North Otago) but performing just a few minutes up the road in Waimate (South Canterbury).

Even more than you don’t want to get that kind of thing wrong on paper, you don’t want to get it wrong on stage. Heaven help a travelling performer who begins, “Good evening, Fairlie,” when, in fact, you were in Fairlie last Thursday and now it’s Sunday and you’re in Bannockburn.

Part of feeling good about yourself as a town is this pride in a clear and distinct identity. The other vital part is having a crack at the neighbours. In Fairlie, they made us promise to remind the “Waimos” they’d lost to them at rugby the week before. They also advised us not to drink Waimate water, and to shut the gate when we left – all some local reference to inbreeding, it seems. Duly reporting all this to the Waimos, any ensuing tension was relieved by suggesting it was all a bit rich, coming from a town whose local paper was titled, “Fairlie Accessible”. Happily, we left town in one piece.

Since my first small-town tour 17 years ago, I’ve believed you can measure a town’s self-assurance and collective happiness by its willingness to laugh at itself. So far, I calculate five out of our first six towns are dead chuffed with who they are. And I dearly wish we were also visiting Marton.

Transport Minister, Steven Joyce, feels the same way about driving and texting – one at a time, people - so we’re on the road to a new law making it illegal to use your mobile while you’re mobile in your automobile.

Fair call. Though without any swanky new legislation, this same friend has already adopted a strict, self-imposed car-cellphone ban. That’s because Nina (name changed till she gets her next WOF) drives a mature VW with manual gears, no heater, and unreliable indicators. In between doubling the clutch, mopping the windscreen and getting her kids to stick their hands out an appropriate window when she wants to make a turn, there just isn’t time.

Back in the days when we didn’t have cellphones, none of us had the kind of cars that would have allowed us to use them. But fancy-pants automatic gears, electric windows and cruise control have all made driving less demanding and sometimes, quite frankly, there’s not enough to do. Add traffic light tedium and rush-hour boredom and, clearly, drivers have been left with idle hands. Which the devil has found work for in the form of dialling and texting.

So we got bored and a little bit stupid. Research suggests using cellphones is so distracting, it impairs motorists as much as being drunk. Which is why the AA isn’t keen on allowing “hands-free” phones either because “all phone conversations are distracting”.

Just phone conversations? I can see where this is headed. Whack that thought into overdrive and see where the road takes us. We should ban all “talk-driving” like we’ve banned drink-driving – even if the person you’re chatting to is actually in the car. Imagine the joy of ferrying the kids around in a Zen-like state. “Shush, darling, don’t speak or the nice policeman will arrest you... No, I can’t see him, but I’m sure there’s a Sound Camera just up ahead.”

While we’re at it, we could deal with those other driver-distractions – pies, cigarettes and changing CDs - all of which are cited as causes for road accidents. No need for separate “eat-driving”, “smoke-driving” or “DJ-driving” legislation – just one law to rule them all: the “Don’t Be Stupid Act 2009”.

Then when you’re caught applying your lipstick in the rear-view mirror while simultaneously peeling an orange, changing your cardy, searching for a song you know the words to and making dinner plans with George and/or Daniel, they’ve got you. Unless you’ve got one of those magic signs in the back window that absolves you from any wrongdoing: “Idiot on Board”.

Something in our national psyche holds us back from embracing someone too quickly as a top bloke just in case, on closer inspection, they turn out to be a bit of dork. It’s as though we all have some collective memory of meeting a charmer at the pub and shouting him a beer, only to discover three jugs later he’s been shagging your sister and stealing your mate’s sheep. I swear that’s never actually happened to me, but for some reason I can imagine exactly how that feels.

And yet we can be hasty in conferring the title of “folk hero”. For “folk”, you can read “rural” and “anti”, with the bar set a lot lower than climbing Mt Everest or winning Academy Awards. I’m still tickled that, a couple of years ago, Rangitikei residents insisted they had Lord Lucan living in a landrover outside Marton. Evidence to the contrary (he was too short and looked nothing like him) was easily trumped by the overwhelming evidence for – he talked a bit plumby and read books from the library. Clearly not a local.

And now, William Stewart. After one hundred days on the run, “Billy the Hunted One” – that’s how he signs the notes he carves into your dining table after he’s nicked the steak out of your freezer – was arrested and charged with offences including dangerous driving, possession of cannabis and “possession of utensils”. Which sounds, to be honest, like your average Kiwi on a camping holiday.

Over those 100 days, Billy was immortalised in song, with T-Shirts and a Facebook page. It’s an interesting post-modern thought that, had he been born in another time, Ned Kelly might have had his own website.

I’ve spent enough time in rural bars to know there’s a colourful wag at almost every leaner, deserving of a starring role in a good yarn or ditty, so I’m intrigued that Billy was the one who scored. Possibly, it’s simply that we like people who get away with it, against the odds. Billy didn’t have a particular cause (unless you count cigarettes,and other people vehicles) or even a Robin Hood ethos. Billy, for a time, just got away with getting away with it.

For my money, the real star in all this is Timaru freezing worker, Robbie Robertson, whose ballad to the Hunted One manages to scan perfectly, even when making reference to police scanners. It includes the genius lyric (all together now): “You missed me on the river, I didn’t travel far; Cos I know the Rangitata and surrounding area”. There’s my folk hero.

One of my more poignant moments as a child involved investing all my pocket money at a Lion’s Club picnic on tickets for the chicken wheel. On the sole occasion my number came up, I was rendered so completely speechless with excitement that, unable to claim my prize, it was assumed the winner had wandered off to buy a hotdog and the wheel was spun again. I came to an early understanding that there are people who win frozen chooks, and I am not them.

So when I hear that a Cambridge man has lucky-dipped his way into $16.3 million from Lotto, or a Rotorua gas station proprietor has similarly lucky-dipped $10 million from Westpac, you won’t find me muttering, “It could have been me.” It’s never me – and not just because I don’t buy Lotto tickets or apply for overdrafts. It’s just not my thing.

My name has never even come up for jury duty. Some would say that’s a special kind of lucky, but honestly, I wouldn’t mind a crack. I’m usually one step ahead of the “Cold Case” team and would be happy to second-chair an occasional “Law & Order”. Admittedly, I’m mostly using the (spoiler alert) “Casting Rule” – biggest name/most recognisable actor did it – which doesn’t always apply in real life. But I’m lucky with my guesses in Ian Rankin novels, too.

Also, I believe that serving on a jury is an important part of living in a democracy. Being judged by a jury of your peers shouldn’t mean winning the hearts of the elderly and unemployed while everyone else writes a letter saying they’re a bit busy with work and kids.

In an effort to have the wheels of justice grind a little less “exceeding slow”, Justice Minister Simon Powers proposes judge-only trials for charges punishable by less than three years in prison. He points the finger at lawyers for “gaming” the system. They point theirs at police for taking too long to disclose evidence. No-one is pleading guilty.

There are good arguments for raising the threshold for jury trials; not least that Canada, Australia and England have done it. But as a fan of “Boston Legal”, I’ll always think it’s better for 12 people to decide than a single judge who might be entrenched, cynical, or any less wise than Solomon.

I vote for a Night Court. Make it evening entertainment with an opportunity during recess for jurors to approach an open bar. And for a return to the original meaning of “jury of peers” by which farmers were judged by farmers, landowners by landowners. If I’m accused of any wrong-doing, I’d be happy to put my case to a dozen freelance entertainers. I reckon I’d get lucky.

We’re not just talking about theatre and film lovies - many NZ industries now hold their own Oscars to publically recognise and reward top performers. Maybe it’s cheaper than a cash bonus, or a new understanding that getting your team together and saying thank you reaps productivity rewards.

I prefer not to be cynical. Once, I was moved to tears by a woman who was moved to tears when she was presented with a certificate for doing something clever at a staff training course. In her forties, she explained she had never been awarded anything before – not even School C or a Calf Day ribbon – and it was the first time she knew what it was like to hear a room give her a round of applause, and to hold something in her hand that showed she had been noticed.

I get to see these things from every angle. In recent weeks I’ve hosted two awards evenings, attended one as a guest and another as a judge. At the best events there are tears, laughter, hysterical cheering, vicious heckling, at least one speech that would offend all right-thinking people, two brawls and some take-home rumours about inappropriate romantic encounters.

You don’t always get the whole goody bag. Sometimes our low-key Kiwi sensibilities drown the desire to make a fuss. Cue eloquent speech from a sponsor, drum roll and announcement, followed by the recipient’s, “Yeah, ta.”

Sometimes the desire to make a fuss isn’t there in the first place – which seems odd at a celebration. At the dullest of my recent awards evenings, hosts ripped through the list of winners, skipping many, and winners were refused the microphone. At evening’s end, we were commended for keeping “the noise level marvellously subdued”. Which is like praising a race car driver for taking corners like a nana. Hoorah, shhh.

Perhaps my benchmark is too high. I was at the 1987 GOFTA Awards – the infamous show hosted by Leeza Gibbons in tinfoil – which descended into drunken anarchy when the audience of highly strung creatives, locked-in for the TV cameras, was denied food and left with nothing to do but drink. We haven’t had a live broadcast of an awards show in this country since.

More’s the pity. As an unknown new TV presenter from Christchurch, I was abandoned side-of-stage, soberly waiting to present an award - a flower-child with her nose pressed against Woodstock’s window, if you will. It was awesome. The kind of drama they now say you couldn’t script, and call “Reality TV Drama”. It might be remembered for all the wrong reasons, but at least it was memorable. We should do that more.

Because people really are wearing them. Spend sufficient time in our airports right now – about five minutes should do it – and you will easily spot clusters of travellers wearing masks as an expression of their concern about H1N1 Influenza A.

But it’s an expressionless expression – an eerily blank half-face that tells you nothing about the person on the other side. It’s easy to assume an insult. “What? You don’t trust our air? You think we’re all infected? Unclean?!” Until you remind yourself that maybe they’re protecting us from them – they’ve left home with a sniffle and are kind enough to try not to pass it on.

That’s the thing about a blank canvas – it leaves us free to project our own scared and scary thoughts. Jason’s hockey mask in “Friday the 13th” and Hannibal Lecter’s muzzle are way more chilling than any face you or I could make in the mirror, and it’s not just limp jokes and naff tricks that send little kids running in terror from white-faced clowns. Though their slightly perished rubbery doves don’t help.

So the question on fashionable lips (if you can see them) is how to decorate your anti-swine-flu face mask. If we have to spend winter with our faces covered, why don’t we treat the mask as an opportunity to accessorise?

Reportedly, international fashion designers think this is nothing to sneeze at and elaborate face masks are catching on like a virus. You can get jewel encrusted Gucci and cute “Hello Kitty” masks – though a kitty may be the wrong approach to Swine Flu. Surely a wolf?

In this, as in many other things, Kiwis may be uniquely placed to find some better options. We’re a creative nation, at our best finding new ways to be artful with fashion, wine, food, books, magazines, and movies. We like to say that sport is our thing, but we’ve won a lot more Academy Awards than we’ve won Rugby World Cups in the last decade.

So let’s see a run of fancy face masks. My personal pick would be to take a photograph of my very own face on a good day, nicely lit then airbrushed back a few years, and print that on a mask so I’d look like me, but so much better. Cheaper and less painful, surely, than a thread-facelift and possibly more natural-looking.

Failing that, a picture of the Briscoes lady – she’s everywhere anyway. Or a series of “Paul Henry Tributes” consisting of masks with moustaches for the ladies, in a range of styles including, but not limited to, “the Mark Sainsbury”.

Someone – Tom Scott, I think – coined the phrase “freelance grief”. It resonated as a fine description of people who had a bit of weeping to do and who had finally found an opportunity to get it done in a pleasantly communal way.

And so it is that Swine Flu looks to me like freelance fear. We’re all a bit afraid of death and loss but you can’t go around saying that without looking weird and being left to cry alone into your gin. Talking about H1N1 is, however, not just socially acceptable at the water-cooler but currently required, and the purchase of face masks looks way less hysterical than wearing a sandwich board declaring, “The End Is Nigh”.

And we love to be afraid. Never underestimate the human appetite for fear. Horror movies, swimming with sharks and bungy jumping were specifically invented to scare the bejeezus out of us. The first game we play with tiny babies is to hide behind a blanket and pop out saying, “Boo!” We’re born knowing that fear is a thrill and that the moment after it is pleasure.

The tricky bit now is that “the moment after” never comes. Front pages need new fears to replace the old ones very quickly – no-one’s flogging an edition that declares, “It’s all good.” In my lifetime, we’ve stumbled quickly from one apocalyptic threat to another: nuclear annihilation, cold wars, real wars, AIDs, bird flu, global warming, terrorism and financial crisis.

Frankly, round here Swine Flu has been light relief after months of apparently imminent economic doom - at least for this there’s a diagnosis and a pill. I’d even embrace the conspiracy theories about it arriving just in time to make use of Tamiflu stockpiled during the bird flu scare and about to hit its use-by date, except I find it hard to believe anyone’s really that organised.

The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2020, anxiety and depression will be a leading cause of illness, second only to heart disease. So not a viral pandemic, obesity, diabetes or any of the other things we’re anxious about, but... the anxiety itself. Now that’s terrifying.

Clearly, we need cheering up and to regain perspective. Allow me to observe, then, that so far in NZ, this Swine Flu is far less scary than regular Man Flu, a.k.a. a bloke with a cold. “I have a sniffle so I’m going to flop about like I’m dying.” That’s Freelance Flu and it’s a killer.

No breakfast in bed for me, given my fervent eschewing of this modern capitalist invention, lately imported from America, which surely has less to do with celebrating the glorious state of motherhood than with shifting greeting cards and synthetic slippers off shop shelves. And you can’t eschew with integrity when your mouth is full of your kid’s burnt toast and lukewarm tea.

The day’s inventor would, ironically, have joined me in my humbuggery if she were still about. West Virginian Anna Jarvis trademarked “Mother’s Day” in 1912, hoping it would become an annual homage to maternity but, according to legend, spent the rest of her life railing against its rapid and vapid commercialisation. Miss Jarvis had some quite sharp things to say about the kind of ingrates who thought buying a card and posting it constituted honouring their mother. Not what she had envisaged at all.

My great-grandmother, Lieutenant Edith Cocker (Salvation Army rather than infantry) fired similar shots on the subject. Anyone who needed a special day to remind them to be nice to their mum wasn’t much chop in her book – proper maternal respect was about helping weekly with the groceries and nipping round with soup when you were feeling a bit off.

She also deeply lamented the rise of Mother’s Day at the expense of giving Mothering Sunday it’s proper due. To 21st Century ears, Mothering Sunday sounds like something a student might call the day you spend having a quiet hair-of-the-dog after getting properly mothered on Saturday night.

Oh, how quickly we forget - for more than four hundred years, Mothering Sunday was the highlight of Lent (remember Lent?) when families came together, austerity was momentarily relaxed, and members of the congregation were given flowers to present to their mothers, and mothers were given thanks.

The tricky thing now, of course, is that if gifts aren’t given, offence can be taken. Sticking to your principals can look like lack of generosity. So the women in my family have found a way to think outside the gift box: we’ve established a new tradition of an annual outing to a show - one of us on stage, the rest in the audience.

Being a mother and a daughter is a rich source of comedy material, though the socially conservative may not appreciate the warm place it comes from. A reviewer recently inferred from my mother-daughter jokes that I didn’t like my daughter very much. When I showed her the review, she gave the perfect teenage sneer. “Doesn’t he understand the difference between a comedy and a documentary? Doh!”

Best gift a mother could get. Stick a bow on that.

The theory seems to be that while someone still has to break an egg to make an omelette, for heaven’s sake, it doesn’t have to be you. Embroider that on a sampler and hang it underneath the one your kid made at school, “Home, sugar-free home”.

As an indicator of the new indolence, a British company recently scrambled onto the market selling cartons of “liquid eggs” - ten yolks and whites per half litre, removed from their shells before you buy them. These are expected to be popular with home shoppers who are “massively lazy, massively into convenience.” Seriously, that’s what their marketing guy said.

I don’t know exactly how lazy you have to be to buy liquid eggs, but I’m guessing probably as slack as a boneless chicken. Ditto the target market for perforated cling-film aimed at saving you the Herculean effort of ripping micro-thin plastic across the edge of the box. Lord knows, after wrapping a couple of sandwiches, most of us can barely lift our arms for the rest of the day. No energy left for weights at the gym.

The principle behind labour-saving products was, of course, a jolly good one. Hoorah for the vacuum cleaner and dishwasher, those blessed appliances that do boring things faster and better than any human can. Most blessed, according to the Vatican, is the washing machine which apparently “did more to liberate women than the oral contraceptive or the right to work” by allowing women to “put in the detergent, close the lid and relax.”

Except we didn’t. Relax, that is. “Labour-saving” is a frightful misnomer, given that whatever time and effort we save, we appear to immediately spend on getting busy with other stuff as opposed to lolling about being serene. Despite the marketing hoopla, there is no household appliance that can save us from ourselves.

I’m not saying I’ll be tossing out my top-loader any time soon – though occasionally, the idea of taking the sheets down to the nearest stream to bang them on rocks while gossiping with other women of the village sounds inordinately peaceful and romantic.

But I won’t be going “new lazy” by buying a vibrating three-blade razor, aerosol cheese or an armchair with built in beer fridge stocked with pre-mixed drinks. If I save all that time and effort on shaving my legs, slicing cheddar and getting half-cut, heaven knows what other domestic drudgery I’ll find to do.

About the only “new lazy” product I’d be keen on is one I saw in Punch cartoon many years ago – a bottle with the top shaped like a wine glass. Saves on pouring and on washing. I’d love one of those.

This is not entirely fair, and the good people of Levin have occasionally let me know it. Asked back for a fundraising debate a few years ago, I stood on stage in a converted dairy factory and opened with, “Nice to be here. Over the years, I’ve told some awful jokes about Levin -” at which point a gentlemen near the front said with perfect timing and little humour, “We know.”

Fair call. It’s easy to make jokes about small town boredom, inbreeding and kids running round shouting, “Hey, give me six!” And it’s not as though Levin has anything in particular to be ridiculed about apart from being awarded “NZ’s Most Boring Town”. Twice. There are worse headlines - near-neighbour, Whanganui, for example, with a mayor who won’t fix an old spelling mistake and can’t grasp the concept of a silent “h”. Which is odd for a man whose name is “Michael”.

There is an awful paradox about growing up in a small town. On the one hand, you get the kind of nurturing, opportunity and confidence that makes you hungry for a bigger world. On the other hand, now you’re hungry for a bigger world, the small town that made you is too small. You grow out of it and go.

But there are other ways I could tell my home town story. I could tell it as a play. There’d be an opening scene at the Levin Little Theatre with me, too young for school, hiding in the wings watching my mother on stage. Later scenes would have me on that same stage or in another country hall. Or I’d be there in the audience, watching Bruce Mason perform his one-man masterpieces, pausing occasionally to admonish noisy sheep in the paddock outside.

Or I could tell it as a dance. There’s a story in here this week about Levin hosting Miss Universe NZ. Bizarrely, it was my second place in the Miss Levin North School contest more than 40 years ago that led directly to years of ballet classes and a useful understanding that I’d never be a dancer, but I might be something else. “Lovely arms, lovely expression,” Miss Scott would say ruefully, “but oh, Mrs A’Court, her feet!”

Or I could tell it as a dream. Whatever else I say, the truth is that at night my best, most peaceful dreams are always set in the remembered streets and houses of my childhood, filled with our garden’s fragrance and surely signifying something.

Naturally, this has been inspired by the concept that workers are now able to sell their fourth week of annual leave back to the boss. It’s a terrific idea. We’ve all got stuff lying about that we’re not really using so why not swap that dusty, useless week of family time and travel – you know, the one you’re always tripping over in the garage – for cold, hard cash.

The whole notion is enchanting. My partner suggests we think of it as an existential pawn shop opening up just across the road from the casino of the soul. Imagine the possibilities – sell your time and put it towards something you really want like an overseas holiday. You may no longer have time to take it, but that’s the gamble.

Cash in enough spare time and you could invest in a holiday home where your friends, who didn’t sell their holidays, can go and say things like, “We never see Barry anymore, but what a great bach”.

Sadly, I don’t have the option. I’m self-employed and my boss, quite frankly, is a tough old stick – no annual leave, no sick-pay and my annual review is always a tense affair with a lot of, “I’m not asking you to do anything I wouldn’t do myself,” and “You haven’t just let me down, you’ve let yourself down”.

So while other people sell their holidays back to their employer, I can only try hocking mine off on the open market. Fingers crossed it doesn’t catch on too widely or there’ll be a glut of free days and suddenly a week will only be worth a long weekend. It may require some creative marketing, like packaging up a month of Sundays.

People with time to reflect may regard the option to flog off your holidays as a curious move, coming as it did hard on the heels of a proposed nine-day-week. First we’re encouraged to work a little less, earn a little less and enrich our lives and communities a little more. Then we’re tempted away from hearth and home by the lure of double-pay.

If you do hang on to your holidays, don’t throw away the evidence. In a couple of decades, you could take your holiday snaps and passport stamps along to Antiques Roadshow and find out how much they would have been worth if you’d cashed in and invested the dosh in a finance company that didn’t fall over.

I’m reminded of something Sir Ed Hillary said in one of his last interviews – that more than anything else, we must all take time to read and dream. Give me a minute and I’ll cancel my Easter Monday auction. Given time to think, I realise it’s priceless.

Kiwis, tending more to the prosaic than poetic as a rule, have whipped up giant carrots in Ohakune, giant stone-fruit in Cromwell and a giant trout in Gore. Language lovers in the Capital hit pay dirt with “Absolutely, Positively Wellington” while awkward Aucklanders still struggle to find something that sticks. Some suggest if you can’t say who you are in two words or less (or with giant produce) you don’t know who you are yet.

Meanwhile, other places are blessed with an embarrassment of riches. Rotorua has a fine history of marketing slogans, starting 160 years ago with “Rotorua – Thermal Wonderland”. “Sanatorium of the World” from the 1900s may sound dated, but “Cureland”, “The Hottest Centre in NZ” and “Lovely Lakeland” might still be worth a marketing guru’s day’s pay.

And now they have another branding opportunity. Scientists in Italy have just discovered a link between hydrogen sulphide – the gas that gives Rotorua its eggy smell – and male sexual arousal.

As an aside, I am constantly surprised by what turns men on. Women quite like candlelight and Clarence Carter. For men, apparently all it takes is for someone to break wind. No wonder they’re so fond of that “pull my finger” carry on - turns out this is foreplay.

Back in Italy, scientists are keen to encapsulate the hydrogen sulphide in an actual capsule to treat erectile dysfunction. But why take a pill when you can take a trip? With Rotorua’s air full of natural hydrogen sulphide, surely this is a marketing boon for our thermal wonderland.

Locals are unsure how to do this in a tasteful way. But it can’t be that hard. I’m sorry, difficult. Immediately I’m picturing a logo of a geyser going whoosh. Then all you need is an appropriate slogan to reinforce the point.

They could borrow Hamilton’s “More Than You Expect” and morph it into “Rotorua – More Than You Usually Get”. Or they could play around with their current slogan, “Feel the Spirit” and suggest visitors feel something else. Or get funky and take their unofficial name – RotoVegas - and officially make it RotoViagra.

Of course, the danger is that all emails mentioning RotoViagra in the subject line will end up in spam and the city will find itself cut off electronically from the rest of the world. Though knowing tourist towns as I do after living in Queenstown (“Pure Inspiration”) this could be viewed by locals as not altogether a bad thing. It will leave them to get on with what comes naturally when your air is filled with hydrogen sulphide. The rest of us can cook our own eggs.

NZ cheese, of course. If we’re going to spend our way out of this recession, the smart money is on investing in the local economy and reducing overseas spending. I’m doing my bit by pledging to purchase fewer Italian shoes, and buying a lot more stuff by local designers.

It also means I’m not going to Poland. I had planned to be there next month for a friend’s wedding but such is my commitment to fiscal patriotism that I couldn’t bring myself to take my credit card out of the country.

Poland’s loss, however, is the NZ building industry’s gain - I’ve just used the money to redecorate the bathroom. Apparently I’m not alone in this. As previously over-inflated house prices fall, many of us are tipping any spare cash into home improvements. The house may be losing its market value but, as though it were an ageing show girl, we’re slapping on a fresh coat of paint and desperately tarting it up.

At first, I considered re-doing the bathroom in a Polish style in homage to my lost holiday. Drawing on what I know about Poland without seeing it first hand, I struggled to visualise a way of incorporating sausage and vodka into the decor. Musing on the country’s political history, I hit on the idea of partitions but worried they would fall too easily under an invasion of house guests. Next, I considered developing some kind of design that would encourage architectural solidarity, or “Solidarnosc”, between bathroom and toilet.

Ultimately, I threw my hands up in defeat. Naturally, this reminded me that I had also planned a post-wedding stopover in Paris. I plumped cheerfully for a French-style bathroom – la salle de bain, if you will.

It could have been easily achieved. Anyone who has been to Paris knows what that typically looks like – dirty, smelly, no toilet paper, with possibly a small dog smoking a Gauloise in the doorway.

But I took the true romantique approach - painted the whole thing French white (from the Arrowtown paint palette, as it turns out) and scoured neighbourhood shops for French bits and pieces. Not a difficult task – it seems while I’m at home digging for victory, local small proprietors are making regular trips to France to pick up home decorating items. Merde.

Which begs the question: wouldn’t it be better for my corner of the local economy if I cut out the middleman and nipped off to France myself? Mais oui, mes amies, I shall save my tax cuts for a Parisian summer. With a stopover in Italy for shoes.

Joel knows how much money I make and how much I owe. He also knows where I’ve been and which credit cards and ATMs I used while I was there. And he has some pretty firm opinions on what I should do about consolidating my savings and debt.

Though there were also significant gaps in his knowledge of me, like what I do for a living, how I run my business, or who else lives at my address. I filled him in a bit, but only to a point. I’ve never met Joel and, geographically speaking, have no idea where he was calling from. I’m not sure how easy it would be for us to get together and discuss it over dinner.

Because that’s how it used to happen. Growing up in a small town, my parents would go to dinner parties to welcome the new bank manager and his wife in the company of local lawyers, dentists and doctors. You made friends with the people you did business with – no guarantee of a “yes” to a loan for expansion, but it was background information that helped fill in the bits a form doesn’t cover. And I believe they all had a jolly old time.

Even if you weren’t invited to the dinner, you knew the girls at the bank. An ancient TV commercial suggested their service was so friendly, you might even end up married to “the pretty little teller who works at the bank”. Heady pre-feminist stuff.

It wasn’t always a cosy social transaction. As a student, I attempted to break a term deposit to buy a frock for a family wedding and was roundly (and publicly) growled by the manager who declared this was no way to take care of my future.

These days we get cash, buy stuff, squirrel away savings and blow it on a whim without having to make eye contact with someone who might not approve of our choices. I’m never sure whether this happened because we wanted our financial lives to be private and anonymous, or whether banks just didn’t want to pay Susie the Bank Teller anymore.

Either way, it is one of our great modern ironies that, having automated our day-to-day banking, we are suddenly forced into intimacy with strangers.

Next time Joel or someone like him calls, I’ll ask his date of birth, how much he earns and what he owes on his credit card. Just to build a relationship.

And now you can also start a job and get sacked from it, no questions asked. According to small business operators – that’s those with less than 20 staff, not short men with issues – this will open up job opportunities and encourage them to give someone a crack. According to unions, it’s an erosion of workers’ rights and encourages exploitation of the unskilled and vulnerable. “Fire at will”, they call it. As a compromise, let’s call it “hire, maybe no purchase”.

Personally, I’m still getting my head around the concept of having a job for 90 days. Good heavens, what’s that like? I’ve rarely found anything I wanted to do for that many days in a row. In my line of work, you get a probationary period of about 90 seconds before the audience lets you know if they want to keep you on.

That’s why hit shows start with a big opening number and why women wear lipstick – snap judgements and first impressions are our social stock-in-trade. Someone who knows a lot more about men than I do once told me that every man files every woman he knows on one of two mental lists – women he fancies, women he doesn’t. Once she has been placed - permanently and non-negotiably – on one of those lists, he’s about ready to find out her name.

To be fair, all of us have been focusing lately on getting things done fast. We impulse buy, we speed date, we binge drink. Though not always in that order. This is not necessarily working out well for us.

So it’s a significant admission that, actually, it might take three months to work out if someone is right for a job. We should have known. What’s that old saying? Ah yes: employ in haste, repent at leisure.

So perhaps we should be taking our time over other things, too. I think we’ve all bought a lemon, pashed the wrong guy or misjudged a book by its cover at some point.

And we need new ideas, right? Then slow down, comrade. How about a probationary period on pooh-poohing these new ideas along old party lines till we see how they work? Less jerk-of-the-knee, more suck-it-and-see.

And at the same time, let’s also make it 90 days of genuine opportunity from small business operators. I’ll start: as a self-employed worker, I promise I won’t ask more of me than I’d be prepared to do myself. I promise not to fire me before my full probationary period is up and, if I have to let myself go, I’ll take the time to tell me why. Then I’ll picket me, but not before.

Familiar with the laws of nature as he was – I’m thinking Newton’s one about equal and opposite reactions - Darwin would have been tickled pink to know his bicentennial inspired freshly fevered debate on Evolution versus Creation, science versus “intelligent design”. If you listened very carefully, you could probably hear the ghost of Darwin chuckling, “Ah, see? Cheeky monkeys!”

I’m deeply suspicious of the new marketing term for creationism, “Intelligent Design”. Because it’s not really all that clever, is it? Without wanting to blow my own trumpet, I reckon if I was omnipotent I could whip up a design for an Adam who didn’t snore and an Eve who didn’t pee when she sneezed. And don’t start me on the childbirth thing.

The fundamentalist demand to have God taught in science class astounds me. It’s not that I’m an atheist – atheism rigidly expressed sounds like any other dogma to me. And also, just quietly, I like to be open to the possibility of magic.

But science and religion seem the oddest of bedfellows – science being about testing and discarding theories with truth never set in stone; and religion insisting that truth is set in stone – literally, thank you, Moses.

Which is not to say religion has no place in schools. I miss end of year nativity plays with bewildered Wise Men shambling across the stage after a star dangling from a stick while a reluctant Joseph tries to keep his sheet on.

But the science lab is the wrong room. God belongs in English. The bible is, if not The Good Book, a good book with rich plot lines and fascinating social commentary - required reading for any understanding of symbolism and motifs in modern literature. Good luck understanding James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, Shakespeare or anything else of biblical proportions like a TV mini-series or even “Californication” without it.

How will Gen Y describe age without Methuselah, sibling rivalry without Cain and Abel, righteous victory without David and Goliath or betrayal without Judas? Surely it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to describe Christmas dinner without reference to loaves and fishes.

Granted, women could do without having their role models limited to the two New Testament Marys, or cast as weakest links like Lot’s wife, Delilah and Eve. And you might have to save much of the Old Testament for Year 12 – all that incest and plucking out of eyes is very PGR.

But for the love of god (and literature), teach our kids creation and the rest of both testaments to save us from being eternally damned to a prosaic conversational hell. Or at least give them the Cliffs Notes.

Ah, the Italians, bless them. For Kiwis in this time of recession, it seems television is our opera. Too scared to go out and spend, we’re on the couch watching record levels of TV – an average of three hours, eight minutes a day. That’s longer than it takes to watch “Madama Butterfly” and considerably more time than we probably spend on the Italian cash-strapped alternative. Though I shouldn’t make assumptions about how things happen at your place.

Media reaction to news that we’re glued to the box always covers three angles: glee from broadcasters that they’re making so many viewers so tremendously happy; concern from health experts that we’re all going to end up fat and stupid; and then a comment from some chipper soul proudly stating none of this bothers them because They Don’t Own A TV.

Not owning a television is said with a degree of pride which suggests this is a very good thing, something we should all aspire to, if only we had the self-reliance and discipline to live our lives this way, too.

It doesn’t wash with me. They might just as well be saying, “I don’t own a book”. Indeed, in a different time and in different quarters, I’ve heard young people were admonished to “put that book down and get outside in the fresh air” in the same tones current parents use as they unplug the X-Box.

I’ve never thought of television as intrinsically evil. I think of it as a library, providing access to some of the finest things human beings can create. It’s where, as a child growing up at the bottom of the world, I first saw the work of the world’s best actors, writers, comics, musicians, and dancers. These days, life is richer for “The Wire”, “The West Wing” and the magnificent “Deadwood” – television at its Shakespearean best.

All of these, of course, I watch on DVD. If the television set is a library, then broadcasters are like a really naff Book Club, run by people who keep assigning trash novels I don’t want to read while they hide the good stuff out the back at two o’clock in the morning. I’ve taken to foraging the shelves on my own. You can’t stop reading because someone wrote, “The Funniest Extreme Most Best Novel”, you just keep rummaging for something good.

So I don’t trust people who don’t watch TV as much as I deeply distrust people who don’t read books. Besides, what do they do instead? Judging by their smug grins as they say, “We don’t watch TV”, it may be something cheap and Italian.

Another friend reports that, after many nights in many different places, he woke disoriented, failed to find a light switch, and mistook his wardrobe for the bathroom – an event he wasn’t entirely aware of till he put his shoes on the next day.

Both took these as signs that they were spending too much of their lives in city hotels.

There are other ways you can tell it is time to go home. Musing on a “Give Us Your Feedback” questionnaire recently, I found myself composing the following curmudgeonly open letter.

Dear Hotel People First, let me congratulate you on the kettle-cord as macramé knot. Fabulous idea and I don’t know why more people don’t do this at home. Hours of fun can be had untangling and attempting to straighten the flex. Double points if you actually hide the knotted cord inside the jug. Fools me every time, you big kidder.

I also adore the way the kettle only just fits under the tap over the handbasin and that, once filled, you have to tip it over to wiggle it out so all the water drains away. And hoorah for tiny teacups and thimbles of UHT milk. In a country famed for dairy production it is surely an exotic experience to drink milk that’s had all the milk taken out of it.

Also thrilling are the doll-sized slivers of soap sealed in plastic which can only be opened using the pointy end of a cork screw. There’s a fabulous sense of living life on the edge knowing that, if you drop the soap, it is likely to slip down the drain before you can get a hand to it.

Brilliant thought to put a fluorescent bulb over the bathroom mirror. When you’re feeling a bit uppity for scoring a deluxe suite, a good look at your raggedy eyebrows and uneven skin tone brings you straight back down to earth.

Bless you, too, for saving us from ourselves with your non-detachable coat-hangers. Heaven knows, we’d all be stuffing them into our suitcases along with your faded Rita Angus prints and bedside lamps if they weren’t so heartily nailed down.

And while I know you can’t take credit for the alarm clock invariably set to 5am and left on auto, I do love the way you wrap the receiver cord around the phone so wake-up calls are instantly followed by knocking everything off the bedside table.

Most of all, thank you for training all your staff to respond to the “Do Not Disturb” sign with three hard knocks and a good, kiwi-nasal, “Housekeeping!”

Yours, etc.

Here’s a question for all the single and childless people out there: Where is the cure for cancer? And why haven’t you invented the water-fuelled car yet? Or figured out a solution for peace in the Middle East?

No, seriously, what the heck are single, childless people doing all day?

I have just spent a week away from home and family. I can’t believe how much I got done. Answered all my emails, went to work, wrote scripts, essays, letters and lists, filed my GST, completed several thought processes, shaved my legs, got some sleep, took long walks, defragged my laptop, and read two-and-a-half books.

This is not how it works at home. There, like every other working parent, I run from one thing to another, squeezing my deadlines in between other people’s schedules while constantly at the mercy of two phones and a chorus of other people’s voices.

Alone in a hotel room, I get to ask a question I haven’t asked myself for sixteen years: What shall I do now? Overwhelmed one afternoon by the plethora of choices -Go out? Stay in? Watch? Read? Write? - I take a nap. I revel in the solitude, but I am also lonely and bewildered.

I catch myself behaving like a teenage boy. With no-one else’s dignity to respect, I drink milk straight from the bottle, leave towels where they fall and don’t bother making the bed. In short, I treat my hotel like a hotel and wait for Housekeeping to fix it like an invisible mother.

I am convinced that with just one more week of playing single-and-childless, I might have achieved something important. As it is, all I have is a half-baked plan for dealing with Boy Racers.

When you’re actually in the neighbourhood with them, Boy Racers are a high velocity, 8-cylinder problem, threatening not just the peace of communities, but the actual lives of citizens. The call now is for car-crushing – forcing the young hooligans to watch their motors morph into small cubes of metal - but they’ll need a law change before that can happen.

In the meantime, I suggest we take the “cool” out of car-racing. Gather up coach-loads of old age pensioners, dress them up in cheerleading outfits and deliver them street-side when doughnuts are being laid to cheer the young folk ironically on.

“Go you good thing! Oh, what a clever boy – and such a lovely clean Ford Escort. Bob’s got one of those, haven’t you Bob? Here – I’ve crocheted you a car seat cover. Have a scone.”

Maybe it won’t fly, but I only had a week. Maybe someone who is fulltime solo can do something with it. Unless they’re busy updating their status on Facebook, or staying out all night, trying to meet someone so they won’t be single or childless anymore. Or racing cars. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Much less common but no less crushing are those rare moments when some fool pays you an obscene amount of money for doing sod-all. It sounds thrilling in theory, but in practice you sweat bullets of guilt as you try to work out how to fake perfection and then double it.

Apparently you can get over this kind of angst. NZ’s highest paid public servant, for example, takes home $500,000 a year. Given that our average wage is $46,000, it suggests this person is ten times more productive and effective than your average guy. I’d love to set up a camera in their office and see what that looks like. Though possibly you can’t capture that kind of magic on film.

I’d like to suggest that, in these interesting economic times, we stop paying wages, taking salaries, sending invoices and paying bills, and simply put down a hat.

In busking circles, the hat is more than a noun, it’s a verb, as in: “We hat at half-time,”or “I hatted really hard today”. It also remains a noun, though not always in the usual sense. “How was your hat?” is not a wardrobe enquiry, but a polite way of finding out how your day went.

I’m new to busking – three festivals in a year - and totally enchanted by it. It’s not the most money I’ve ever earned, but it’s the cleanest, most honest bag of cash I’ve ever handled. I do my shtick, and people decide what that’s worth to them. Sometimes they’ll give themselves a bargain and pay less than they would for a club ticket; sometimes they’re moved to pay more. People who might not normally turn up take a punt on the night, and either give or don’t give depending on how it turns out for them. Some of it is about what they get, some of it is about what they can afford to give.

But always, at the end of the night after “the count” – a solemn ritual conducted by independent persons as performers hover respectfully nearby – you receive a surprise sum, freely given; a socially democratic measure of what you’re worth. Somehow it’s always more than you’d earn at a ticketed show, so you celebrate by buying several rounds of drinks with two-dollar coins which bar staff, surprisingly, love.

We could run our whole economy this way. It couldn’t turn out any worse than that other thing we’ve been trying.

This will surprise anyone who has ever met me, as I’m clearly not a sporty girl. About the only sporty thing about me is a touch of athlete’s foot picked up while entertaining the troops in East Timor and which, much like the Indonesian military, has never entirely retreated.

But after several decades of sitting on the couch drinking wine and eating chips, I realised last winter that This Couldn’t Go On. I’d been out dancing two weeks earlier, and still had a limp. So I joined a gym.

I don’t think I can overstate how much I hate it. Not the gym itself – this is not a flash, fancy-pants, brand-name gym like the one I used to go to in the 80s when aerobics and shiny lycra were de rigueur. Happily, I found a charmingly grungy, down-home gym, populated during the day largely by bouncers and pensioners. There are no mirrors and therefore neither posing nor poseurs. A magnifying glass is thoughtfully provided so you can fill out your card without putting your spectacles on and some of the members have walking frames. When you arrive for your orientation visit, you instantly feel more youthful and lithe.

I cherish the memory of that brief moment of happiness because it has been the only one. I’ve always hated exercise – none of the things I like doing can be done while engaged in it. You can’t eat, you can’t drink anything interesting, I haven’t mastered the treadmill-with-book skill, and it’s hard to talk when you’re lungs are on fire.

I had assumed that at some point I would take to it, embrace it, find some pleasure in it. This has not happened. I’m still cross on the cross-trainer, and during repetitions with weights I continue to chant, “1-2-3-4-5-6-7-hate...” inside my head.

But I keep going every week because – and here’s the psychological bit – I’m lazy. When I can’t face work in the morning, I go to the gym where I can make procrastination and indolence look like self-improvement. When I’m sick of thinking, I let the treadmill choose a random hill walk for me while I stare blankly into the middle-distance.

Sometimes I spend longer on the rowing machine than I have to because I can’t be bothered getting off and wiping the damn thing down. And if the guy before me is lifting heavier weights than me, do I change them? Nah, I’ll have a crack at lifting them, too.

So I hate it. About three times a week. I’m getting fit because I am too lazy to sit around eating cake. Book me now as your personal trainer.

You could call the stripper-at-the-stag-do “a tradition”. Or take the new view that you can watch strippers “in an ironic way”. Or maybe you think it’s just “a bit lame.” Whichever chorus my friends joined, I was certainly the lone voice growling, “sexist and offensive”.

I thought the smart people worked out in the 70s that paying women to take their clothes off objectified them, reducing them to less than the sum of their rude parts; that financial desperation led to sexual exploitation. I’m pretty sure I still have the memo.

And we’re still doing this? Here come the similes. I feel like an African-American discovering that all my white friends are off to see a black-and-white-minstrel show. Or a pacifist finding out my buddies spent Friday night knitting jumpers at a hanging.

My view of strip clubs is a bit like my attitude towards haggis – heard it described, thought it sounded awful, tried it and discovered I was right. Years ago, an actor friend was researching her role as a stripper and I trotted along to a lunchtime show to keep her company. I hated it – bad decor, ghastly music, furtive behaviour and the absolute lack of fun or joy in any of it. Isabelle Allende says, “Erotica is using a feather, pornography is using the whole chicken.” That felt like being thumped with a frozen chook.

Maybe I went to the wrong gig. Because I like a bit of Burlesque – spoil me with great skill, saucy costumes and a bit of narrative. I’ll look out for some at the Buskers Festival in Christchurch this week. If my daughter told me she wanted to take up Burlesque, I’d learn how to sew on sequins. If she told me she wanted to be a stripper, I’d lock her in a cupboard till she was 45.

This new wave of lad-ism is equal opportunity – there’s a whisper the hens want a stripper too, for the irony of it. I worry that your ironically-booked stripper isn’t even being objectified properly anymore with good, old-fashioned, honest leering. Surely that’s like a Society of Skeptics hiring a psychic for their Christmas function, just so they can laugh behind their hands and feel smug. And say the psychic should have seen it coming.

Once, after an awful corporate gig, I found out I’d been hired by someone specifically because she knew her audience would hate my comedy. She was leaving the firm and wanted me to be her parting shot. I never knew how to describe how dreadful that night felt. Now I do. I felt like an ironic stripper at a post-modern stag do.

First, you have to work out where “home” is. I’m one of those people who believe asking, “Where were you born?” is a much less interesting or revealing question than, “Where have you chosen to live?” Forget, “Where’s home?” and try, “Where do you feel at home?” and see if those answers are different. Call the removal trucks if necessary.

I didn’t grow up in Wellington, but I did a lot of growing up there. It was the first place I chose for myself to live, learn and work and, while my mortgage is now somewhere else, I’ve continued to pop in and out of the Capital for 30 years.

And “pop back in” I did this month, to celebrate my brother’s birthday and just hang out, unwind a little, drop back a few gears. Which is suddenly easy in a place you feel you know without having to think about it. Looking for a cocktail? Can’t name you a bar, but I know where the bars are. Fancy an enchilada? That place is still on the corner. Want to catch up with old friends? Plant yourself on the lee-side of a sidewalk cafe and wait for someone you know to pass by.

I begin to remember life lessons this city taught me - never wear long hair with sticky lip-gloss. Briefly bewildered by the plethora of proper shoe repair shops – rare as hen’s teeth in other locales - I also remember that, not only is this the Shoe Capital of our nation, but people here actually walk around in them. Crazy.

The seat of our democratic system, Wellington also puts on a good show of having a democratic culture. Seated next to two delightfully squeally 30-somethings who sip rosé and literally cheer when their curly-fries arrive, I spot one of our new, young cricket stars just a few tables over from one of our veteran theatre stars. Chat at my table includes the uplifting news that Blanket Man is back on the street after his lawyer bought him some undies from Farmers. We are all pleased for him.

On a deeply superficial level, I realise I still dress like a Wellingtonian – what my mother’s English Vogue magazines cheerfully described in the 70s as “More Dash Than Cash” – a mix of op shop, chain store and quirky local. Ain’t it grand, for a long weekend, to feel and look like you belong.

Next time someone asks where I’m from, I will eschew the tedious details of my gypsy-like existence and tell them, “I’m a Wellington girl”. Unless, of course, I happen to be in the one of the other places that feel like home.

Consequently, many of us spend the first bit of our downtime in a state of nervous anxiety as we try to hurry up and relax. Then suddenly we’re back at work, relying on muscle-memory to go through the motions, feeling like we’re swimming through glue.

So, in an effort to hold on to that holiday feeling, I suggest we all take our holiday attitude to the office for the first part of 2009. Not just the attitude, but also the apparel. I dare you to turn up at the office in togs and a sarong and ask workmates to smear your back with sunscreen at regular intervals.

Set up two lifesaving flags and insist people have to work between them. “Rescue” workers who remain outside the flags with an inner tube and perform CPR on them. Phone Human Resources and ask them what the burn-time is on your floor today and when it will be high tide.

If that’s all a bit giddy for your workplace, go the traditional English seaside experience – roll up your pants, knot your hanky, whip off your shoes and place a container of sand under your desk. For ultimate authenticity, secrete a dead fish in a filing cabinet and order egg and chips for lunch.

Or, if you’re the kind of person who prefers to “go bush”, then “take bush” to the office. Dress for the walking track and carry scroggin at all times. Insist that the slowest person in the company be pace-setter, and engage people in conversation about their pot plants. “Is this a native? When does it bloom? Can you eat these?” Climb on top of your desk and take panoramic photos.

Go exotic and pretend you’re in Europe – communicate with co-workers using only a French phrasebook. If they don’t respond, accuse them of being arrogant, snail-eating, garlic-reeking surrender monkeys. Call up Accounts and ask to have your wages deposited in Euros.

Later in the week, fake a stop-over in Bali and barter with colleagues for their stuff. “I’ll give you 40 baht for that chair. Okay, 45 if you throw in the pants. And how much for the family photos?”

And then bring it all back home near the end of your first week with a Kiwi barbie. Wheel in your gas burner and fire it up during breaks. Wear a novelty apron and shout stuff like, “Hey Bob, how do you like ‘em?” and, “Is someone keeping an eye on the kids?”

This will either ease you back into the New Year or you will be offered “mental health leave”. Take it. You need some more time off.

There is a view popular in some quarters that monogamy is something women want and men only tolerate. Chris Rock isn’t the first social observer to mine this rich vein for comedy, but certainly expresses it with masterful precision when he argues that for blokes, the difference between fidelity and adultery is “opportunity”.

The basic thesis goes like this: Men have been wired since caveman times to be with many women in order to ensure the survival of the species. As hunters with a short life expectancy, they were driven to impregnate as many women as they could - and as quickly as possible. Men who didn’t manage this would have failed to produce any progeny; ergo we are all descendants of men who put it about a lot.

Women, on the other hand, have been wired since the beginning of time to be with one man – for protection of family, security of hearth and home, and for regular access to prime cuts of mammoth steak. The assumption is that in the ensuing hundreds of thousands of years, neither of us has evolved.

As Neanderthal – literally – as the theory may be, it has its proponents. And not all of them are people caught putting it about like a caveman, desperately looking for a better excuse than, “I was drunk and it didn’t mean anything”. So let’s assume for a moment the theory has merit.

If men are driven to be with “many women”, and women are driven to be with “one man”, perhaps we can find a solution. What women need to do is pretend to be “many women” to our one man. Surely this is why we shop – the new clothes, the different hair-do, the make-up – all some primal attempt to engage our mate’s attention by appearing to be someone new. You come home after a make-over, he’s not sure for a moment you’re the same woman he was with yesterday, attraction is rekindled and fire blazes once more in our cave.

Simple really. If it can be argued that men are genetically programmed to have a wandering eye, we can also argue women are genetically programmed to go shopping. No husband should ever complain about the credit card bill again – we do it for you.

So I’ve decided not to have the 1500 thread-count Egyptian cotton bed set monogrammed with the new couple’s names. It would be hard to pretend to be some exciting new woman when you’re wrapped in a bed sheet that keeps saying, “Susan”.

It must be a delicious state of limbo, like when you’re a kid and you know you’re getting a bike for Christmas because you saw it hidden in the garage and you’re just waiting for the day you can ride it. It’s possible you could spot the almost-honoured if you kept a sharp eye out for anyone suppressing a smile while practicing their curtsey.

But really, you need to read the list to spot them. Since we adopted a totally Kiwi honour system, I’ve wondered if “Principal Companions” and “Distinguished Companions” of the NZ Order of Merit sigh nostalgically and privately try out how their name would sound with the now-defunct “Sir” or “Dame” in front of it.

Probably not. These are honourable people - in both senses – who have made significant contributions to our creative, cultural, commercial and community lives. I get oddly excited whenever I recognise a name on the list and experience a surprising frisson of shared glory when it is someone I actually know.

Which is as it should be. If someone in your field is honoured, it reflects well on the rest of you and says that, in the bigger picture, the thing you do is respected.

Also, this is “peer nominated” system – each medal is only struck because some good soul was sufficiently moved to fill out a nomination form on the Honours Secretariat website, explaining how outstanding they think someone else is. At New Year when you look at that final list, recommended by the Prime Minister and approved by the Queen, bear in mind the hundreds more fine people who started the ball rolling. Their names remain confidential.

Recognising people who do magnificent things is important. For a start, it encourages magnificence in others by putting value on things done well. And recognition also makes things real. We are social creatures – I’m told there is nothing more disappointing for a golfer than to hit a hole-in-one when they’re playing alone. If we were trees falling in a forest and there was no one there to hear us, we wouldn’t make a sound.

So there should be more of this handing out of honours, and we can do it in our own personal, informal way. Instead of yet another flaky resolution this New Year about some new self-improvement kick, try another tack. Take a moment to think about someone who has uplifted you, made you think, encouraged you to see things in a different way, or made your corner of the world a little more magnificent. You don’t have to fill out a form or give them a medal. Just say thank you.

Much is said about the deleterious effects film and TV can have on vulnerable, impressionable minds and it bothered me that everything made for her demographic seemed to be about girls who were clueless, mean or legally blonde. So in an effort to be a responsible parent, we sat down together one evening and watched a film about strippers.

It was “The Full Monty”, the 1997 Oscar and BAFTA winning comedy about unemployed steel workers who have a crack at economic and personal salvation by getting their kit off for the ladies of Sheffield. The movie is rated “M” for coarse language and sexual references. It is also funny, uplifting and well-crafted with a great plot, excellent character development and a strong sense of humanity.

I am of the belief that a movie or TV show is more than just the sum of its swearing and innuendo. Back then, as I slid the tape into the machine I said to my daughter, “I want you to see what a good movie looks like. Here’s one.”

She thought it was magnificent. I’ve continued to encourage her to watch things that are beautifully crafted and, where necessary, we self-censor by agreeing the language may be appropriate for the film but inappropriate for her, and by closing our eyes during the icky bits.

Earlier this month, a conservative lobby group released a statement claiming “family TV viewing” was saturated with foul language and sexual content. They expressed further outrage that the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) and the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) had involved kids in their latest research into TV and film violence.

It turns out the grown-ups at the BSA and OFLC who are responsible for saying what is “too violent” for young people had checked in with some actual young people to see if their classifications were on the right track. They were pleased to find that they generally were.

But lobbyists were less pleased, given that in order to classify the level of violence, the kids had been shown short clips of said-violence from movies like “Fight Club” and TV shows like “The Sopranos”. Horror was expressed that their parents had allowed them to take part.

I remember a wise thing a TV producer said to me years ago when we were making “The Video Dispatch”, a current affairs programme for kids. “Never overestimate kids’ knowledge, but never underestimate their intelligence.”

I asked my daughter what she thought about children her age being exposed to short clips of violence in order to help rate it. She says responsible kids should be involved in deciding what was or wasn’t on for their peers. And she said that without swearing or punching anyone.

This is not because I don’t like Christmas – I like it very much. I am not bah-humbugging my way through December, writing letters to Santa warning him of the dangers of obesity and Type-2 Diabetes or calculating the methane emissions of nine reindeer and a sleigh.

The reason I am not ready for Christmas is that – hold onto your mistletoe - it is not Christmas yet. This will come as a shock to retailers who put up decorations in October and to companies who served up mince pies in September. It would surely appal the woman I overheard in August, boasting to her friend that she had just finished her Christmas shopping. I can only assume she meant for 2008. And hope that none of the gifts were electronic goods – they’d be obsolete by now.

I refuse to see Christmas as a civil defence emergency that you prepare for months in advance. Certainly, the day itself can resemble a natural disaster – an uninsurable “act of god’s son” – but I’m pretty certain this only happens if you’ve whipped yourself into an hysterical frenzy for several weeks prior so that one glass of champagne, one disappointing gift plus an aunt saying the wrong thing creates an emotional tipping point.

Let’s break it down. Christmas is one day, yes? Here in the Southern Hemisphere where it also marks the end of our work year and the beginning of our summer holiday, we can end up thinking “Christmas” equals finishing everything we haven’t done at the office plus planning, packing, travelling and putting the cat in the cattery.

But really, it is one day – two meals (lunch followed by leftovers, surely) and some gifts for the people you love. How hard is that? Gift-giving is “shopping” by another name, and shopping is always splendid. I tend to use the “one-for” rule – one gift for someone, one gift for me. My preference is to buy people “experiences” – things to do or things to read. Failing that, I walk into a shop and buy whatever is shiniest. When I’m really stuck, I fall back on my fundamental belief that everyone in the world should own a Teflon pastry brush. List ticked.

The mistake we make is when we try, as grown-ups, to recreate our own childhood Christmases when - according to our Judeo-Christian-Capitalist tradition – Santa, elves, fairies, three Wise Men and the Baby Jesus made Christmas happen by magic.

Because really, if you want to experience Christmas as a child does, give yourself a sheet of bubble-wrap and an empty box – you’ll be entranced and entertained all day.

I remember travel when it was an occasion, something you dressed up for in your Sunday Best. Great-aunts would arrive by train, wearing smart coats and startling hats. Trips to Wellington with my mother were preceded by the sewing of new dresses and the polishing of patent leather shoes. Great attention was paid to the contents of handbags, and snacks were prepared to sustain us on the journey - though nothing that might stain. Yes to a box of raisins, no to an orange. And keep a clean handkerchief on your lap.

Family car trips in summer were less romantic – possibly because I usually threw up – but there was a formality about it you had to respect. None of this “chucking stuff in the back” nonsense – luggage was arranged with precision for balance and accessibility, and nothing was permitted to rattle.

I admire the notion that travel is as much about the journey as the destination because I like my holiday to start the moment I shut my front door. So I am a tiny bit cross that various parties are delivering body-blows to travel’s romantic side.

There was that vicious right cross from Al Qaeda. Still reeling, we are forced now to virtually disrobe before boarding international flights, and banned from carrying things we might need to “freshen up” midair.

Guilt over global warming has delivered a nasty left-hook to jet-setting chic – you’re no longer suave, urbane and “international”, you’re a carbon-emissions criminal who will be punished with a long-haul tax.

And now the latest sucker-punch - the automated check-in. On a recently-attempted romantic getaway to Queenstown, my partner and I discovered this new system isn’t yet sufficiently sophisticated to allow companions to actually sit together. Joining a long queue with other couples and families in the same fragmented position to “talk to someone”, we were all advised to try playing swapsies once on-board.

Indeed, the hosties did their cheerful best – which was admirable given it was the same day their employer announced 200 redundancies. Various companions were successfully reunited after take-off. Sadly, I ended up sharing a row with a nauseatingly coo-cooing couple who played travel scrabble and kissed each other’s noses. Nothing kills romance like someone else’s.

Stuck out on the aisle and constantly elbowed by Mr Cooing Dove as he smugly laid down triple word scores, I was more than usually grateful for the distraction of in-flight snacks - “sweet or savoury” being the short-haul, no-frills version of “chicken or fish”. I picked kiwi lollies in the hope that my mother and aunts would approve of their non-staining properties. And laid a clean handkerchief in my lap.

I only mention it because, as someone employed to be at other people’s work-dos, I get a special perspective shared only by recovering alcoholics, the devoutly religious and people on antibiotics – I attend them sober.

I’m also meeting party-goers for the first time, and I won’t bump into them in the tearoom the next day. You get a great snapshot of a business – the mood, the morale, the office dynamics – all wound up a notch under the influence of low-cut frocks, best suits and a wash of champagne.

In past years I have thought that, if I ever did have a job (unlikely) I could plan to take nothing but a glass of OJ and a digital camera to the office party and store up enough visual evidence to force my way through the company’s glass ceiling fairly swiftly in the New Year.

But these events no longer encourage excess as they once did. Drink-driving campaigns, “host responsibility” and straitened economic times have curtailed the open bar tabs and moved focus to food and entertainment. And while most companies have “had a great year” no-one wants to appear to be squandering profit on too many party favours.

There remain, however, pitfalls. Essentially, you’re taking the same dull, irritating people you see every day, dressing them up in something less comfortable, and watching them eat tricky things with far too many cutlery options.

You may also be meeting their partners, previously known only from desktop photos and lunch-room stories. They only know you as “Bob from Accounts” or “Sally in Reception” – though you suspect you see more detail in their eyes. Assumptions about what they do or don’t know about you – or what you might know about their partner/your colleague – can be fatal. “Ah, Susan, Terry always talks about you!” “Really? We only met last week.” Or, “Great to meet you, Brian. Linda says you two had a great time in Fiji.” “Actually, Linda did that trip alone.” “Then who was the guy in the photos? Oh...”

So here are a couple of survival tips: Pretend this a first date for all of you – ask questions instead of telling tales. No matter how relaxed the boss looks, now is not the time to share your ideas on how the company needs to “go forward”. Or tell him his wife is a “hottie”. Resist the urge to pash anyone on the payroll.

Also, your bread roll is on your left; your wine glass is on your right. And cutlery is a metaphor for office politics - start on the outside and work your way in. Merry Christmas.

There is also the letting-go of our youthful anxieties. At some point, we stop worrying about things that really don’t matter. We readjust our priorities and relax into being “who we are”. Most of us are probably unaware of the exact moment this happens, but I’m pretty certain that for me, it was on a Tuesday.

On this particular morning, I was part of a group photo and story for “Love Your Body Day”, a promotion for a charity which deals with young people’s eating disorders. Along with a sports star, two TV presenters and a jazz singer, we were to be role models for “body satisfaction” – women of different shapes and sizes feeling good about how we look, and having our picture taken while eating lunch to prove it.

A decade or two ago, I might have been reluctant to play along – like most women who aren’t Elle Macpherson, I’ve had my issues about not being Elle Macpherson. But once you’ve had a baby, collected various surgical scars and read up on Rwanda, being five-foot-two and shaped more like a cello than a flute seems small potatoes. And I like potatoes.

I’m never sure if this eventual self-acceptance is about being a grown-up and achieving genuine satisfaction, or if it’s a pragmatic response to unrealistic ambition. Or whether, after enough long days raising kids and making a living, women my age get comfortable with ourselves because we’re just too tired to give a crap anymore. Whichever it is, it’s nice to be here.

Though there was a moment that Tuesday morning when my “body satisfaction” was challenged briefly. Test polaroids revealed four tall, striking women – oh, and look! They brought their mascot! How sweet. We moved the shot to a staircase and I took the top step. Satisfaction restored. Pass the bread rolls.

But really, the epiphany came in the afternoon when some different pictures arrived. By coincidence, the results of my latest mammogram were waiting at my front door when I got home. This is something I do in the same way other people do a family studio portrait – annually - though the process is possibly less pleasant. For a fair indication of how it feels, grab hold of your favourite soft bits and slam them in your fridge door.

I won’t be sending these pictures out with my Christmas cards, but they were beautiful in a more-than-skin-deep way and they came with a lovely caption written by the radiologist. It was a grown-up reminder that loving your body isn’t so much about being pleased with the flatness of your stomach, as it is about still being here.

Shopping is my thing. I do it when I can afford it, or when I can’t afford it and therefore need cheering up – which is best achieved, I find, by buying something pretty.

Imagine my horror last Christmas when Governor of the Reserve Bank, Dr Alan Bollard, advised us to stop shopping (but then why would I get out of bed?) and, instead, put something away for our retirement. On the strength of his advice, I bought two pairs of comfortable shoes and a knee-rug and considered myself sorted for old age.

So I am relieved we are being encouraged this Christmas to get spending once again and stimulate the local economy. I stimulate economies wherever I go, largely with shoes, frocks and handbags. When I gig out of town, I ensure that I reinvest at least a portion of my fee with local businesses before I leave. If I manage to actually empty my wallet, I cheerfully congratulate myself on my way out of town for being “fiscally neutral”.

Shopping becomes more carefree the further you are, geographically, from your mortgage. And there are delightful shopping experiences to be had in fresh pastures. During a recent weekend in Gisborne I had a joyful time in a couple of shops – one filled with local designers’ work, another filled with imported labels handpicked by the local owner. Unsure about a particular frock, the owner told me to “take it home and have a play with it” and come back the next day with either the dress or my credit card. Charmed, I bought it on the spot.

It’s the “local” thing that makes it work – the opportunity to build a relationship between buyer and seller. This is the antithesis of my nightmare experience in a chain-store recently when I wanted to spend quite a lot of money on furniture but couldn’t find anyone working there who cared enough to see if they had it in stock.

Though even in a city, you can find pockets of small-town-ness, like walking into a favourite shop and hearing the proprietor say she has just unpacked something this morning she knows I would love. I’m a sucker for that sort of carry-on.

So this Christmas, I intend to be a hybrid kind of “locavore” – maybe not always buying locally-made (I like French things) but as often as possible buying from stores that are locally owned.

Though, eventually, there will be one more trip to a department store. According to consumer research, women over 50 become invisible in shops. At that point I’ll be heading down to the make-up and fragrance counters with all my 50-something friends and we’ll shoplift like fiends. None of us will ever have to pay for a lipstick again.

I should say up front that I am one of those people who is easily brought to tears. I don’t think of this as a bad thing because it’s rarely induced by self-pity. Mostly, I cry for things that happen to other people in books and movies and on the 6 o’clock news. Not just sad things, but things I find significant. When Chris Rock – in my opinion the greatest living stand-up comedian – performed in NZ recently, I laughed solidly through his two-hour show and when it was over, promptly burst into tears. In simple terms, I was moved.

And so it is in the polling booth. Putting a tick in a box is a tiny thing for an individual to do but when we all do that tiny thing, it adds up to something huge. The power of that idea – of being a small but equal part of something big – I find overwhelming. Having a tendency towards the melodramatic, I also take a moment to remember that in giving birth to democracy, people died so I could do this.

It makes me wish polling booths were more elegant. If this is our moment to be alone with our personal vision of democracy, I’d prefer something more gothic-Confessional than just a core-flute box.

My family tries to give it some flair. Without discussing it, voting day has become an outing for grandparents, parent and child, all of us travelling together to the local polling station, ice creams on the way home. Given the differing political persuasions amongst the adults, our votes probably cancel each other out, but no-one would ever suggest it might be more efficient if we just stayed home. Round here, we like giving our democratic rights a bit of exercise.

And, of course, I’m only guessing that we’re voting different ways. There may be robust dinner-table discussion about policies and politicians on any given evening but again, without discussing it, we respectfully keep our actual votes private.

In the booth with my Vivid, I’m aware that people still die because they want they want what we have – a trip every few years to the local school or church hall to make our mark. In East Timor in 2001, I visited the site of the Suai Massacre. Eighteen months before, the East Timorese overwhelmingly chose independence from Indonesia in a 1999 UN referendum. In just one of the many ensuing atrocities, a hundred civilians were shot in church at point blank range, their bodies piled high and set alight, as punishment for putting their tick in the wrong box.

So yes, I adore democracy. And part of being democratic means I don’t care how you vote, so long as you do.

Big deal, you may say, and I hope you do. As voters, I like to think Kiwis are more evolved than our American friends who are struggling to decide what they’d hate least in the White House - women or black men.

In NZ’s short history of democracy, we have managed to elect women, non-Pakeha and the odd transsexual with very little hoo-ha. And not because they were women, non-Pakeha or transsexuals, but because at the time we judged them as “good blokes”.

This is a delightful aspect of the Kiwi psyche – that we’ll give someone a crack regardless of their race or gender, rather than because of it. At its core, Kiwi culture is wonderfully feminist. Relax, I can explain.

My first real rush of feminist angst was at age 4. Playing with all the other kids in my neighbourhood, one of the mothers came outside and told me to go home. “Off you go,” she said. “The boys don’t want a girl getting in their way.”

It was a shock on two counts. First, I was really good at the game we were playing, which involved slingshots and fruit. Second, it hadn’t occurred to me till then that I was different from the rest of the group. If we had been playing “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other”, I’d have said that of Stephen, Warren, Russell, Greg and myself, the odd one out was Russell because he was a bit of cry-baby. It was his mother who sent me home.

The truth is, inside my head, I have no gender. On the odd occasion when I’ve mentioned this, people point questioningly to my comedy career. “If you don’t think of yourself as a woman, why do you give men such a hard time?” Actually, I don’t. Or I do, but I give women an equally hard time for the “girly” things. I’m fascinated almost as an outsider by the perceived differences between men and women – some of them real, some imposed – and none of them terribly important except as a parlour game. Feminism, to me, means that being a woman – or not being a man – is irrelevant.

Martin Luther King should have moved to New Zealand. Forty-five years ago he said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.” What we get – and what Americans still seem to miss – is that electing leaders because they’re black or women is the same as electing them because they’re white or men.

It would be nice if they worked that out by Tuesday. And may we continue to elect our leaders by the content of their character.

I don’t pretend to be an economic expert, though I have run a small business, managed a mortgage and raised a child over the past couple of decades, incurring a lot less proportional debt than your average government. So rather than compete for the lead role of Cassandra, I’d like to play Pollyanna for a bit.

This recession is making us kinder to each other. I’m basing this purely on anecdotal evidence –what I’ve seen as a performer over the past ten months. I realise that for people who like graphs and statistics, anecdotes hold little currency, but in a time when currency holds little currency, perhaps I can be indulged.

It has never been so easy to sell tickets to a fundraising show. Perhaps not the big, swanky $1000-a-table events, but to an ordinary comedy show with proceeds going to a bunch of midwives who need a new tearoom? Sold out over night, second show by popular demand. An evening in a Central Otago woolshed to raise money for the local school? The whole town turns up. A casual Sunday gig for one woman who wants Herceptin? Packed to the gunnels with women she’s never met.

This is not usual. In times of peace and plenty, it’s hard to get the media coverage, harder to convince punters to choose you over their myriad of entertainment options. Possibly, when you’re sitting comfortably and someone else isn’t, there’s a tiny suspicion that it might be their fault. But when we’re all hurting a little, we’re more sensitive to people who are hurting a lot.

Some of this is about getting more bang for your limited buck – justifying a night out on the grounds that it’s a donation to a worthy cause. Nothing wrong with that – even when altruism makes you feel good, it’s still altruism.

In fact, I find it more attractive when “giving” benefits the giver, too. I’ve noticed a shift in social behaviour at charity auctions from bidders virtually shouting, “Look how big my credit card is!” to “That’s a bloody bargain – oh and also, it’s for a good cause.” Showing off with your wallet is a close relative of greed, and it’s greed that got us into this mess in the first place - that and capitalism just doing what capitalism does.

This softening of our self-interest and fresh enthusiasm for making a difference – one fundraiser at time - is worth celebrating. Admittedly, being kinder to each is only a subplot in the epic economic drama but we should give credit, ahem, where credit is due. Pollyanna deserves a cameo – we could do with the light relief.

She’s not alone. Just as the bubble skirt is making a comeback, so is the tradition of women changing their name when they get married.

About five minutes ago (or back in the 1970s, depending on how good your short-term memory is) women fought pretty hard against this sort of thing. Historically, a woman was legally the property of her father and so carried his name. When she married, ownership passed to her husband and she took the new owner’s name.

As well as not wanting to be anyone’s “property”, there were social issues, too. Changing your surname wipes your history and rewrites your identity. Suddenly, you’re on a different page in the phone book and no-one from your previous life can find you unless they caught your wedding notice. Anything you achieved pre-marriage is no longer directly attributable to you.

I decided pretty early on, around Standard One, that I would have none of this. It seemed an odd practice, and I always fought against having to do anything the boys didn’t have to. Also, around that time, I had a crush on a charming boy called Mark Bell. As a six year old pondering the possibility of spending the rest of my life with him, it seemed to me then the most difficult hurdle in our life together would be being known as “Michele Bell”.

Then there was Miss Pottinger. Miss Pottinger was our school’s favourite teacher and my older brother spent a glorious year in her class. Two years later, when it was my turn to have her, she had inexplicably changed her name to Mrs McCready – to me a completely different person. My sense of betrayal was compounded when she left me before year’s end to have a baby. Clearly, these “Mrs” types were not to be trusted.

I understand the arguments from by the neo-traditionalists. That you want to be one family with one name – though why is the default position his rather than hers? Or that having parents with different names is confusing for the kids – though if you think that’s hard to explain, good luck with some of the other stuff you may have to deal with. Like divorce, and introducing them to their new step-parent.

Double-barrelling is an option – though possibly not for Bill Best and Jennifer Lay – and a couple of generations down the track, it may be tricky to fit it all on a passport.

At its heart, feminism is about being free to make all these choices, even if some of the choices women seem to be making now aren’t very... you know... feminist.

My partner and I have chosen not to marry for several reasons (full list available on request) one of which is that “Michele Elwood” sounds more like a stutter than a name. Though I'm not always against a name change. My daughter changed hers when she was six – to A’Court. She is her mother’s daughter.

When my maternal great-grandparents left England in 1913 they also tossed up between NZ and Australia, picking Option A for its reputed “sub-tropical” climate. Having given their winter coats away, they sailed into Wellington Harbour in the teeth of a southerly gale, but they also stayed.

Now, plenty of Kiwis are reversing the choice, shifting across the Tasman to have a crack at Option B. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, given we all have the “let’s-start-again-somewhere-new” gene.

Right now, I am sitting in a bar in Coffs Harbour, half way between Sydney and Brisbane. At home it is raining. Here it is hot, cloudless, loud and big. Could I move here now? And how different would I be if I had been born Australian?

We are mistaken for each other all over the world, but that’s only because strangers aren’t looking very hard. Spot the difference in our flags – basically the same, but theirs has more stars. And in our anthems: “Advance Australia Fair” is confident and ambitious - “Look out, we’re coming!” – whereas “God Defend NZ” is as close to “Oh please God, help us,” as you’ll get in a song.

In a study a couple of years ago, Australians, asked how they felt about their land said it was “big and tough and there was plenty of it”. OK, I’m paraphrasing but in the same survey, Kiwis anxiously described our environment as “fragile” and constantly in danger of being lost or destroyed.

It is symbolic that we’ve picked the kiwi to represent us – a bird so unpretentious and reticent it doesn’t bother to fly or sing or turn up in daylight, barely meeting the basic requirements of being “a bird”. Across the Tasman, I notice most birds don’t so much sing as shout, “Hey!”

I would always feel like a foreigner here. And if I was going to live forever as an outsider, I’d rather go half a world away (like my forebears) and try somewhere really different. I’m thinking Paris.

If I had been born here, I might have been a comedian, but not this one. Being a comic (or writer, painter, musician, filmmaker....) is less to do with having confidence the size of a continent, and more about needing to say something that no one else is saying. I swear you are more likely to find out what that is if you can take risks in a small place where it feels like no-one is looking.

I’ve been brought here for a week with two other Kiwis after being scouted at Christchurch’s World Buskers Festival. Over here, in this much bigger country, they say they don’t have anything like it, or anything like us.

Afterwards, I’m coming home. With a tan, sure, but coming home.

Which meant lunch could be as over-done as the new Curate’s sermon and by the time Vicar reached his Blessing & Dismissal, pots of corned beef all over town had boiled dry, potatoes were grey and the cabbage translucent. Little wonder church-going has been on the decline, just on a purely culinary basis.

There were other rules for the Day of Rest which I don’t remember, but I remember the stories my parents and grandparents told me. There was to be no reading (aside from the Scriptures), no music, no loud talking or laughter. And if women were ever permitted to wear trousers (and largely they weren’t) it certainly wasn’t on a Sunday. Listening to the transistor while gardening in slacks? Jezebel times three. I can almost feel nostalgia for a time when being outrageous took so little effort.

And yet...There is much to be said for taking a day off. Really off. I don’t just mean not doing whatever it is you do Monday to Friday. I mean all the other stuff that goes with it – the driving and parking, the purchasing and planning, the family schedules and self-imposed deadlines. Don’t you hanker after a day of peace that passes all understanding? I do.

There is also something to be said for contemplation – a day to kick back and just think rather than do. My mother has a yoga teacher who reminds her devotees we are human beings rather than human doings. It’s a touch bumper-sticker but, like a lot of what yogis say, it resonates like a tiny brass bell.

Which is an interesting thing: all religions from East to West have a bit about rest and contemplation – a fancy way of saying we need to Shut Up and Do Nothing in order to deal with the rest of our lives. Which suggests that being quiet and still is a basic human need, not a specifically religious concept. Of course, I may burn in hell for this assertion but, hey ho, I wear pants all the time.

So I have become Amish on Sundays. Ok, not strictly Amish – my pants have zips. But I am making an effort not to work, not to produce anything, just for a day. I figure if you’re a chef, at some point you have to stop cooking and start eating. I write and talk for a living, so I’m having a crack at a day spent reading and listening.

And though it can take effort to excuse ourselves – even for a day - from our deep-seated protestant work ethic, take solace in the notion that even the most fundamentalist granny would approve. Though I suggest you still cook, or invest in a crock pot.

Hello, smokers. We don’t say much these days, do we? Sure, we talk. We bond on footpaths outside bars and offices, swap names and lighters and engage in idle chit-chat. But we don’t speak up about how this social sea-change has turned us into people we don’t want to be.

In my lifetime, smoking has gone from being socially acceptable –even glamorous and romantic – to being... well, evil. Hoorah, I hear the anti-smokers cheer. (Please go back inside. This is a private discussion.)

Here’s the thing: I can’t think of any other movement for social change that hasn’t been met by some kind of resistance. Many other things that are no longer ok had at least a moment of being defended by vocal advocates. But we smokers have been remarkably silent.

So let me raise my voice on our behalf here. Not so loud that the anti-smokers will hear us - there is no point. I just think we need to talk.

I hate the kind of smoker I have been forced to become. I was raised to believe in matching shoes and handbags, and that it was bad manners to smoke in the street. I like elegant ashtrays, emptied often. Now I’m huddled in doorways with butts underfoot, searching for a polite way of extinguishing my cigarette. It’s about as well-mannered as eating dinner standing up, without a plate.

And it’s rude when we have to abandon our dinner companions between courses – particularly when the best gossip and most raucous laughter happens away from the table while they’re kept busy watching our drinks and our handbags.

We are mute even when some of the new rules offend rational thought. Chatting over a cigarette with a friend outside Wellington airport recently, we were moved on by an official concerned we may kill someone with our second-hand smoke. Given the 40 knot wind, driving rain and absence of any other humans mad enough to be outdoors, it seemed a little unnecessary. But Knowing We Are Evil And Wrong, we complied.

Not just Evil And Wrong – also ugly. Witness the Weta Workshop mock-ups of our future mouth and toe cancer. And cruel - we don’t love our kids. Apparently our car upholstery is soaked in arsenic. I would like to know more about the science of this (What about my clothes? Should smokers not hug people?) but it is hard to ask innocent questions when that thing in your hand is as guilty as a smoking gun.

There is a lot we don’t say. Here’s one of them: I love it. Still. Not least the camaraderie of fringe dwellers, and the way it is so often an indication of a rebellious spirit and a hedonistic soul. It is always nice to meet you.

Ok, I’m done. Let’s go back inside.

So it is with crime. We admire a clever heist, a long con’, a daring raid. So we should have deep concerns about the future of crime in this country – Generation Y just isn’t up to the kind of stuff they make movies about.

These 11 to 26 year olds are characterised as lacking long-term goal setting, thirsty for instant gratification, dependent on technology, and having strong loyalty to friends rather than family. These are the ones who did my home over a couple of weeks ago - a bunch of Gen Y opportunists who came, and saw, and consumed.

A perfect storm in my domestic arrangements meant my teenage daughter was left alone overnight with a couple of girlfriends for a sleep-over. During popcorn and a re-screening of “Step Up 2”, one of them sent a text. That text was forwarded. In true Amway spirit, by 11pm there were 50 drunk teenagers in the driveway who forced their way onto the deck, and into our home.

They drank everything - and we had quite a lot of stuff – except for the red wine which, one assumes, would have confused their youthful palette. They ate all the processed food, but tossed fruit and vegetables off the deck for sport. They kept their shoes on (where were their manners?) and ruined the carpet. They left an unholy mess. It still smells like a rural public bar in a flood, pre-smoking ban. On the way out, they stole my laptop.

I was furious that it happened, and relieved that no-one was hurt. I was also caught somewhere between outrage and amusement that they took things they couldn’t possibly appreciate: the magnum of French champagne and bottles of rare white port we’d been saving for “something special”, which they drank in the driveway. For the love of god, could you not wait to chill it? And use a glass?

Then there was what they didn’t take. Cheque books sitting by my laptop – apparently 18 year olds probably don’t know what they are. And none of the CDs (what’s wrong with my musical taste?) and DVDs stacked obviously and neatly in alphabetical order. You don’t carry away what you can download.

Between now and the election, we’ll hear more about Youth Crime – the violent moments that make headlines. Statistically, these are rare. Day-to-day, Gen Y Crime looks more like what happened at my place.

But here’s the kicker. The Gen Y traits that created the problem also found the solution. By the time I arrived home, broken glass was swept up, bottles and butts were binned, flowers were re-planted and a brave attempt was made at shampooing the carpet with dishwashing liquid. First thing in the morning, my daughter had organised a working bee with her classmates - using the same social networking tool that started this hell. By text.

This is the annual “parade” organised by local pornographer, Steve Crowe, to promote his Erotica Lifestyles Expo. It features topless porn stars riding on the back of Harleys. Not terribly creative – if you are heading down to Queen St to see it, don’t expect a taste of Mardi Gras or a bit of burlesque or a touch of Moulin Rouge. It’s just girls with their tops off.

Mr Crowe says it’s about freedom of speech. The Auckland City Council says it’s just free advertising and offensive. At the time of writing, the ACC is seeking an injunction to stop it. Some individual councillors feel so strongly, they’re threatening to lie on the road to stop its progress.

Twenty-five years ago, I might have joined them. Not because I think women’s breasts are offensive. I’m all for breast-feeding in public, and I wish I didn’t have to travel to the Algarve Coast to lie on the beach with my top off. There is something strangely adolescent about a country that gets all twitchy about catching a glimpse of women’s breasts.

But back in the 1980s, I would have protested against Boobs On Bikes because it objectifies women, and presents them as one-dimensional dollies who exist only for the titillation of men. I would have been worried that all men would see all women this way, and I would have wanted to make the point that women are clever and capable and intelligent, and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect for who they are, not how they look. I might also have felt moved to point out that just taking your shirt off doesn’t make a “parade”.

Twenty-five years later, I think we know that most women are clever and capable and intelligent people. But some women really are one-dimensional dollies who exist only for the titillation of men. I’m ok with them getting their tits out on the back of a bike.

Especially in this weather.

You can lead a woman to equal opportunities, but you can’t make her drink.

In general terms, I don’t believe in playing god. To quote Boston Legal’s Alan Shaw, I don’t even like it when God plays god. But we can all see that some lives end far too soon, and others end far too late.

An hour ago, Chris Kahui was found not guilty of the murder of his twin sons. Maddeningly, it’s not because he is “innocent” but because every member of that hideous family is guilty – of neglect, of cruelty, of silence, of apathy, of just not caring, of failing to protect the babies they were all responsible for. All of them are guilty of those things. We just can’t tell which one dealt the death blows.

So one man is guilty of attempted murder because he cared so much. And another man is not guilty of double murder because no-one cared.

Today, I am homesick for a world that makes sense.

There is a theory that the world is not so much going to hell in a hand-basket, as clattering towards Hades in a shopping trolley with a wonky front wheel. Consumerism, some say, has become our new religion. We acquire goods rather than aspire to spiritual goodness. We’ve turned our back on the church and flocked to the Mall. We’ve lost God and found a wide-screen plasma.

Generally, I find that the people who say this sort of thing are wearing cheap shoes and are therefore not to be trusted. Let me raise my hand – nay, both hands - in the air as a faithful apostle of the gospel of shopping. I have spent a good part of my life in the quest for The Perfect Thing which I have yet to find, but I’ve cheerfully bought a lot of other quite splendid things along the way.

And if consumerism is our new religion, then “The Joy of Shopping” is a superbly comprehensive concordance. Editor Jill Foulston has gathered together writing from some three hundred women spanning 500 years, all relating in some way to the shopping experience.

It is an eclectic mix – mostly excerpts from novels, but also poems, song lyrics, personal letters, journal entries, shopping lists from the middle-ages, blogs from last year, and a smattering of pithy quotes including this from Imelda Marcos: “Win or lose, we go shopping after the election”.

Imelda is tucked between literary greats like George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte, alongside current writers like Jenny Diski and Margaret Atwood, and shares space between the covers with Simone de Beauvoir, Katherine Mansfield and Dolly Parton.

Which makes this sound like a nasty literary jumble-sale, except that Foulston structures the anthology like a well-designed department store – everything in one place, sure, but easy to find and with a satisfying flow from one level to the next. Spending too much time in produce? Then let’s go and look at hats.

Foulston provides context for each new writer, and each chapter finds a fresh theme: iconic stores, exotic markets, bargain hunting, shopping etiquette, indulging in luxuries or just stocking up on the mundane.

Universal themes emerge – thrill, guilt, anxiety and pleasure. It also sheds some light on the “why” of women’s shopping. (It’s Virago, so men will have to publish their own shopping anthology to discover theirs - though we do learn that men spend more on impulse shopping than women, and when they’re young they steal more expensive things. Women go on nicking lipsticks and other tat into late middle-age.)

Possible “whys” arrange themselves: the Feminist Theory that shopping was the first thing to bring us personal freedom and independent choice - long before women had jobs; the Biological Theory that women are impelled “to make themselves fine”; or the Fantasy Theory that we believe each new thing will make us more beautiful, or even “more like ourselves” than we currently appear. Or it could just be a distraction from the parts of our lives we cannot control – simply put in a diary from the American Civil War: “June 3: Had the blues. I bought me a dress.”

Whichever theory resonates most, it is delightful to discover that Jane Austen was obsessive about the price of lace, and intriguing to read what could be a detailed description of a $2 Shop – “It was the deadly monotony of goodishness and cheapishness in everything that oppressed you” – except that it was written in 1891. Or to consider the cultural differences between American and British shopping attitudes, French and Italian fashion, or that post-modern on-line shopping is not so far from the pre-modern lists given to servants back when markets were an unsuitable place for a lady.

Most of all, it is a treat to read what good writers have to say about this very personal passion, and the skill and wit they bring to saying it. For a shopping apostle, the total effect is liberating and affirming – if a little too dense to devour in one go. Occasionally, you have to put the book down, pop out, and buy something.

So here’s what I love about Steve Martin’s autobiography: that it tells us as much about the art of comedy as it does about the man.

“Born Standing Up” chronicles the first 36 years of Martin’s life – his “complicated” childhood, his after-school job in the magic shop at Disneyland, and then the 18 years he dedicated to stand-up comedy – “ten years learning, four years refining, and four years spent in wild success”.

And it was “wild success” – Martin went from working four gigs a night in small comedy rooms with even smaller crowds, to audiences of twenty-five thousand in theatres so big he took to wearing a white suit so the back row would be able to pick him out on stage. All of which ended one night in Atlantic City in 1981 when he walked off-stage and never performed stand-up comedy again.

In the 27 years since that night, Martin has forged a successful second career in movies, and his Wikipedia biography suggests that was what he’d always intended. This book disputes that, more than somewhat. It is a fascinating insight into the joy of comedy and the tragedy of success for a comic who becomes so good, so skilled and so popular he becomes “a party host, presiding not over timing and ideas but over a celebratory bash”.

Martin calls this “not an autobiography but a biography” – the story of a man he used to know. And he is right about that in the best sense – while he knows everything because he was there, there is a cool-headedness in his re-telling of both the hard and the easy years, of his self-doubt and anxieties, the knocks from punters (“I loved it! My husband loved it too, and he hates you!”) and from his difficult father who once said of him publically, “Well, he’s no Charlie Chaplin”.

And like a biographer, Martin uses memorabilia to ground the story in truth – set lists, bits of comedy, photographs, touring itineraries, excerpts from his journal. His writing style has the economic, easy rhythm of someone who makes a living talking. It is hugely funny – as you’d expect – and very smart. Martin studied Philosophy at UCLA by day while performing magic and playing the banjo with a trick-arrow through his head at night. In his world, and in this book, those things are not separate events – they illuminate each other.

Which is why “civilians” too (Alan Alda’s term for people not in show business) will find things to love about this book. It’s about the delicious, human irony of working so hard and becoming so great at something that needs to be done small that you have to walk away. A story specific to the artist that tells us about the nature of art and ourselves.

Sadly, I don't like cooking.

And once again, cleavage is a feminist issue. A disgruntled patron at the Christchurch casino was asked to either cover-up her ample bosom, or leave the premises. Helen Simpson claims she was discriminated against for having large breasts and that the Casino deemed them offensive. The casino says it wasn’t the size that was the problem, it was the excessive nakedness of the aforementioned chestal area.

So now Ms Simpson is taking a different gamble – she’s going all-in with a complaint to the Human Rights Commission. And those well-known feminist commentators, Christine Rankin and Nicky Watson, are giving her their support. Not in terms of underwire, more in terms of political support.

Ms Rankin, who became famous a few years ago for wearing short skirts and big earrings, describes Ms Simpson’s naked cleavage as “courageous”. It takes courage, apparently, to wear something low-cut. Maybe Ms Simspon should get a medal for her bravery. Though heaven knows where she’d pin it.

So, bear in mind that baring your norks in 2007 is about being liberated and brave. Which possibly means that the New Feminist movement is being led by strippers.

I’ll see you at the next consciousness-raising meeting of the Sisterhood down at Showgirls, then.

I also developed a new appreciation of the meaning of “whakapapa”. This may be an odd claim, given that the specifics of my French family history are unknown. The A’Courts left France so long ago, we don’t even know when – maybe they were Protestant refugees in the 17th century, maybe they were Norman Conquerors in the 11th century... But here are some thoughts that occurred to me over the month long process of making the doco.

Before this, I’ve always been a little dismissive of the concept of “whakapapa” – that who your ancestors were inform who you are. In many ways (and without wanting to be ill-mannered) I’ve felt somewhat of a cuckoo in my extended family. My passions are very different from my paternal grandparents, aunts and cousins. I’m the odd, bohemian, unconventional one amongst a group of very fine “normal” people who have proper jobs. There have been moments at family gatherings when I’ve felt like a lap-dancer at a church picnic.

Plus, I’ve always thought that most of us in NZ are such a melting pot of cultures that you can’t pin down just one to have descended from. How far do you go back in the family tree, and which branches to do you pay most attention to? I asserted in a my “Heritage 101” show in 2005 that where our ancestors came from mattered less than the fact that they left that place, and had the courage to turn up in a new world, where they could reinvent themselves and live a new and better life.

But... now I have a sense that there are some things about me that might have a lot to do with some very old French blood. The things I love, the way I live, the way I look. I’ve always been asked about my ethnicity. For want of a better explanation of the dark hair and olive skin, I’ve pointed to my French name. So it was a joy to be told by a couple of our French interviewees that I do, indeed, look very French. According to one of the nuns at Jerusalem, I look just like Mother Suzanne Aubert’s niece who came to visit a few years ago...

So, during July, I developed a sense that I didn’t just invent myself on the day I was born. That my lifelong, inexplicable attraction and passion for French food and wine and cultural history, for the thinkers and drinkers and revolutionaries, for the music and art and style –the whole je ne sais quois - might actually be about whakapapa.

This may be an entirely romantic notion. And therefore, very French.

I have avoided it before. I've never liked a ghetto, and I've never regarded myself as a "female comedian" as opposed to a "comedian".

But I'm curious about the whole thing now. Must have been, really, for some time. Because below is an article I wrote almost six years ago on the subject. It doesn't need a lot of updating. Double any figures mentioned (except percentages - doh) and the picture is much the same. Today, I'd say one or two more things... and probably will at some point. But here's a start. If it inspires comment, hit "contacts" and email me about it.

Here's the article... Women in Stand-Up Comedy – first published in “Unified” Magazine 15.5.01

I remember a thousand years ago (okay, seven) when I started doing stand-up comedy in Auckland, that I would walk out on stage at Kitty O’Brien’s and hear the audience thinking, “Oh, it’s a girl, this won’t be funny”.

The perception was that women used comedy as a soap box to score feminist points. It could, of course, be argued that men might have been using comedy to score misogynist points, but that’s always been a whole lot more acceptable. The reality was that women had a barrier to break through every time they took the stage.

At each gig, I guessed I had about 30 seconds to win them over. Generally, this was achieved by saying something so filthy they’d be shocked into paying attention, and then get on with what it was I really wanted to say.

Times have changed (though I still enjoy moments of being filthy). Audience experience of women stand-ups over the last few years has been positive, and there’s no longer any need to apologise up-front for not having a penis. During this year’s TV2 International Laugh! Festival, the “Divas” shows - a showcase for women of the festival - saw capacity audiences over two nights in each city. Chick comedy sells tickets.

But there are still only a handful of women doing stand-up - which is why ALL the women can fit into one festival show. The NZ Comedy Guild, the union which represents stand-up comedians throughout the country, has a database of about 60 performers, only eight of whom are women.

So why is stand-up comedy still, in numerical terms at least, a boys’ domain? Inside my tiny little comedy head, I’m playing with a couple of theories.

The first is about the nature of stand-up - that it’s not naturally suited to the female psyche, and so only a few strange women would find it appealing.

It’s not a theory I entirely subscribe to, but it has some merit. Stand-up is a solo performance genre - just you, the microphone and the audience. While women have a fine history of comedy in this country, it has tended to express itself through character comedy and ensemble pieces (like the successful “Hen’s Teeth” shows or the early ‘90s “Exposed” tours), and music (Cat’s Been Spayed, Manic Opera). To put it crudely, women like playing dress-ups and our creative ventures are often inspired by the fun we have with each other.

I used to buy the idea that women are turned off by the aggressive nature of stand-up - demanding focus, taking the piss, and slamming hecklers - but not anymore. For one thing, there are plenty of male comedians here and overseas who are gentle and non-confrontational with their audiences. For another, I don’t see much evidence that women are all that shy when it comes to verbal sparring, on or off stage.

The second theory is about the nature of women - that we only stick with things we think we’re going to succeed at. A lot of young women give stand-up a shot - at the “Class Clowns” workshops run in secondary schools during this year’s Laugh! festival, most of the contenders were women, and a woman won the final competition. But chances are, the women who didn’t achieve immediately will find some other way of releasing their creativity.

It’s the same at professional level - women don’t stay if success looks unlikely. There are five women at the professional level of stand-up comedy, and you’ll have seen all of them regularly on TV2’s Pulp Comedy. Of the fifty-odd men playing the comedy circuit, less than half are of a standard that gets them regularly onto Pulp, and only about eight make their living through stand-up (not so different from the number of women). Women are well-represented in the “successful” group, but not so well-represented in the “also-rans”.

It’s also worth saying that women are fully involved in the stand-up comedy industry as promoters, publicists, producers, and venue managers. The Laugh! Festival director has always been a woman, and staff have been predominantly female. When it comes to being pro-active about getting stand-up on stage, women play a vital role.

That fact blows any theory that women aren’t welcomed into the comedy industry. Sure, you will find us bitching occasionally that venue operators will only book one female comedian per night (some strange belief that women are the carbohydrates of comedy, and you can’t have rice AND potatoes in one sitting). But comedy is a great leveller - you get support and you get gigs if you’re good.

So is there any difference between “comedy” and “women’s comedy”? The short answer is, “Don’t be so ridiculous, you patronising wanker.” There is a popular perception that women do a lot of boy-bashing and period jokes. There’s another parallel perception that men do a lot about cocks and farting. (Though women right now are doing a lot about cocks, and men have largely cornered the tampon joke market.)

Whatever the perceptions, the reality is that ALL comedians talk about life from their own perspective - the things that make them angry, the things they find absurd, their personal experience, whatever occupies their mind. A fair amount of my material written during my marriage, the birth of my daughter, and my divorce was about exactly those things. Some of it was also about television and rugby - two other passions of the time. But I remember a review of a show I did in Wellington a couple of years ago which said I was “at my funniest” when I “steered clear of tampon jokes”. I didn’t actually do a tampon joke that night - in fact, I hadn’t done one for about four years. Sometimes, people inflict their own perceptions on your work.

Women who do comedy are not an homogenous group. We have different styles, different experiences, and very different approaches. I do think it’s fair to say that women are currently often doing “micro” comedy as opposed to “macro” comedy - how crazy THEIR world is rather than how crazy THE world is, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. But I get disturbed when I see new female faces arriving on the scene with a five minute set about their boyfriend, or how they can’t get one. I’d love to see a woman do a set that makes no reference to her gender or her relationship - hell, I’d love to see ME do that! Which is why that’s the challenge I’ve set myself for 2001.

My advice to any women wanting to give stand-up a crack? Rule number one: be funny. Rule number two: there are no other rules, except the ones you choose to make for yourself.

In Auckland, there are good, safe places for anyone - male or female - to make their debut: “Raw” nights at the Classic, “Outspoken” nights at the Temple; in Dunedin there are regular comedy nights at “Fuel”; and Wellington’s comedy scene is blossoming. The NZCG has a website you can contact to find out more on www.nzcomedyguild.org.nz .

ends.

Of course, I blame the developers for a lot of things - that greedy feast in the 1980s and more recent binges when they've torn down old, low-rent buildings in the CBD and chucked up high-rent glass-and-chrome. We lost performance venues, small boho office spaces and meeting places that have never been replaced.

I remember, in 1980, being part of a coterie of Wellington actors and writers who wanted to create New Zealand's only "New Zealand only" theatre - as a balance for the imported fare being staged back then at Downstage and Circa. Somewhere where we could do experimental stuff that discussed "who we were", and give young-and-hungry playwrights and actors somewhere to work.

We found a dirt-cheap building in Courtenay Place - abandoned by all but the cockroaches - spent evenings and weekends with hammers and paint, and opened the Depot Theatre. A short time later, the bulldozers pushed it over. There was a second venue found and, I believe, a third phoenix& These days, the equivalent collectives of people still exist, but very few of them have a performance "home". Those new buildings don't lend themselves to being multi-functional - an office space looks like an office space, and no amount of imagination and black paint makes it look like anything else. Twenty-five years later, the hardest thing about putting on a show in Auckland or Wellington is finding somewhere to put it. This year, I'm doing my comedy festival show in a hotel suite. No, really. Do come along. In small groups.

So, yes, the property developers held back a wave of creativity that might have meant we'd be further ahead on our discussion of "nationhood" than Don Brash's contribution at the Orewa Rotary Club a year ago. Or not. Given that it was Don Brash. In Orewa. At the Rotary Club. Hardly a genius meeting point for fresh, big ideas.

But here's another thing. A long way off the coast of Orewa, there's a place called Europe. I like Europe. It has some very nice things. It has lots of that old stuff. You know& History. History is interesting. Nice to look at, to feel part of. It gives you a sense of perspective, makes you feel insignificant and important at the same time.

I was in Portugal (for the drink, largely) last September. It was in Lisbon, I think, that I visited two churches side by side - noted locally as the "old" one and the "new" one. The "new" church was built in the 13th century. It still had that "new church" smell, they seemed to imply.

Their beaches are old too (though, oddly, about the same age as ours) and I spent three delightful days frolicking topless on the Algarve Coast. I mention it only because I don't frolic in Orewa. Topless, or otherwise. And that's because "new" churches in NZ weren't built in the 13th century.

Because this is my theory: On my very first visit to a European city a few years ago, I was struck by two things - the way they treasured and nurtured and revered their older buildings; and the way they treasured and nurtured and revered their older women.

I did research and interviews with "women of a certain age" in Vienna who - unless it was a trick of translation - agreed with my theory. Yes, they said, it is our duty to preserve and protect the buildings that have seen so much and tell us about who we are and where we have come from. And, they said firmly, it is our duty to preserve and protect the women who have done, and do, the same. Dress well, smell good, keep the paint fresh, but don't be banging up any new facades& A 16th century castle should look like a 16th century castle, not a Miami condo. These were women who wouldn't have a bar of botox, but who made trips to the day spa like we make trips to the supermarket - weekly, and with a sense of necessity, not luxury.

I tried to sell the story idea to some of the women's mags when I got home, but without any luck. Fair enough - it's possibly not the most mind-blowing theory in the world, and even I'm not totally convinced that it's true. I just like the concept. But it certainly wasn't going to sell any products on a facing page branded, "New! Improved! Look 20 years younger!"

Because that's the thing. It's not about looking younger. It's about looking your age and good. And not ignoring an important part of the equation: beauty equals what you started with, plus time. That Lisbon church probably looked quite pretty in 1245. In 2004, it's bloody gorgeous. Partly just because it's still here. Magnificent.

Anyhoo, back to the beach in Portugal. One approaches the row of deck chairs and sun umbrellas as one always does - aware that your body tells a story. Age, children, surgery, a little of your genetics, a lot more of your "lifestyle" (mine possibly more "bar" than "gym"). After 40, you are a walking autobiography.

And then you see them. All the other volumes on the beach library. Plump, stretch-marked, pendulous, dimpled, sagging, wrinkled, wobbling& Wandering about blissfully, not only without voluminous sun-shirts to protect the world's eyes from the evidence of what life has done to them (and what they have done with their lives) but without their bikini tops! Mon Dieu!, as they might say on the Riviera, but don't.

Can I tell you how liberating that is? To completely relax under a sun with an ozone layer, SPF'd to the max, and not suck in, cover up or tense an inch? Swim and read and waddle off to the bar (yes, they sell wine at the high tide mark - it's very European in Europe) without hearing the word "waddle" resound in your head? Meanwhile, back home, 13-year-old girls swim in board-shorts and t-shirts because they don't look like Paris Hilton. (Hilton is a name that passes for history in countries that don't have a lot of it.) Many of their mothers and grandmothers don't swim at the beach at all. That's what happens when you are older than most of the architecture in your country.

Apparently, New Zealand might have some history one day, but we have to start putting things away for it now. Kind of like what we do with private superannuation. How's that going for you?

All I'm saying is, if we keep on spending tomorrow tearing down yesterday, we'll never get to the beach. We'll be alienated from our foreshore and seabed - and ourselves - more effectively than any amount of legislation could ever achieve. It's an odd theory, but I'm pleased to get it off my chest. I feel 10 kilos lighter, and 20 years younger. Or my real age and weight on the Mediterranean Coast.