This story tickles all the right giggle buttons for me. Plus I hope Puddu stands up to McDonalds – nothing better than a Dave/Goliath scene, especially when Goliath is mired hopelessly in the moral low ground.
I can’t begin to express my utter distaste for the way the New Zealand press handles reporting on suicide. Articles in the press here, no matter whether it’s about someone found in a car on a remote hillside with a length of hose between tailpipe and passenger compartment, alone in the bath with a toaster or knife – are reported using one of a collection of standard euphemisms to ‘disguise’ the fact someone took his or her own life. “No suspicious circumstances,” they say “Police are not looking for anyone else in connection with the matter,” are but two of a seemingly endless database of ridiculous standards used here. Why stand on ceremony? Why not just take the whole theme to its absurd conclusion: “A Police spokesman said in connection that they had found their man.” “The killer was found at the scene.” “A Local Police source said on condition of anonymity that this was a one-man murder.” Seriously – it’s a serious matter, a fucking heartbreakingly serious matter but didn’t we discover some many decades ago that not talking about something doesn’t make it go away?
Here’s the thing: it’s not like the NZ press don’t get the opportunity to report self-inflicted deaths – in 2007, 483 people took their own lives in New Zealand and 2670 people were hospitalized as a result of self-inflicted injuries. People from low socio-economic backgrounds are 3 times more likely to be the inflicters than the ones most reporters come from. If you’re Maori, 16.1 of you per 100,000 will kill yourself vs 9.9 per 100,000 for non-Maori population. The statistics are absolutely shocking and this is just the tip of the shock. So, to underscore - people in New Zealand definitely kill themselves: more pro capita, in fact, than the U.S., The U.K., Australia and, uh, Haiti?!
One official line has it that “media reports of suicide may increase the risk of further suicides for a period of time after that suicide.”
“May” is the only word I really give any creedence to in that whole sentence. There is, to date, nothing conclusive anywhere to back this theory up apart from the supportive results of ‘discussions’ between the media and suicide stat gatherers paid by the government. I wonder whether, if the media stopped mentioning a soccer team being shit, that team would suddenly become league-toppers? Perhaps we might want to give this fantastical method a go at some other unsurmountable social ill…say, cancer?
As someone who has experienced the complete devastation that suicide leaves in its wake, I abhor the head in the sand approach whether its in the press or among friends. Believe me when I say that nobody is comfortable talking about suicide. People say “I don’t know what to say” more often than you can handle hearing it. And that is often all they say. It’s an excruciatingly hard topic to broach and so nobody really does. Even your best friends and closest family are completely useless to you in the wake of suicide. But the accompanying silence definitely does not make it any easier.
I tried the not talking about it method myself for a couple of years. Were they good times? Was suicide rendered any easier to be around for keeping schtum? They were the most difficult and gut-wrenchingly, heartbreakingly sad years of my life, to be frank about it and I wanted more than anything to talk about it with someone. Anyone. I just didn’t know anyone I thought might want to talk about it. Oh I had a million and one fucking questions I wanted to ask: mostly of the one person who would never answer any more questions, but I’d have settled for anyone at all – a stranger even. I wanted to talk and talk and talk about suicide but it was three years before I found any help. When I did find it, I also found out it was the only Government funded bereavement counselling service for survivors of suicide in the whole of New Zealand. It’s in Wellington and God bless the people who run it – each and every one of them has been affected personally by suicide. They struggle every year to retain their funding, they want to expand to Auckland and Christchurch and everywhere else but they have to struggle to keep their one little program afloat. Do you think that the press not reporting suicide might be helping their cause?
It’s despicable logic and thank God someone in power has finally challenged it and said what nobody else is saying. While the press prattles on every single long weekend about “killer roads” and “deadly traffic tolls,” the bedroom light fixtures and rooftops and razorblades and pills and high bridges of this country kill more than double the amount of every thoroughfare put together.
Might the act of suicide be sensationalized? Glamorized? Made fanciable by truthful reporting? That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. People thinking about taking their own lives need no encouragement. They don’t take their own lives because its glamorous. They’re not scouring the press looking for ideas and methodology. No depressed person needs tips on how to take their life, for Chrissakes. You can kill yourself with a screwdriver. A person that deep in darkness needs, more than anything, to be confronted with the indelible, undoable harm that their non-presence in the lives of the people who love them is going to cause. If a single suicidal person in ten years read an article featuring the heartbroken words of a parent or loved one left behind and found the strength to not go through with it as a result – that alone would be enough to justify an upturn of these backward-assed rules. Shame on the New Zealand press for not only being pretty much terrible and broadsheet-sized tabloids, quality-wise, but for not ever challenging this absurdism in its own rule book. The sooner people start talking about suicide for real, the better for everyone.
My life may appear to have been wild, windswept and interesting with all the traveling and living in foreign cultures (ahem) etc.. Oh yes, it may seem to have been quite a wild old ride altogether…unless you’re my teeth.
My pearlies are a fucking shambles, man. There, I’ve said it. They are a crumbling monument to neglect. A derelict, if functioning, series of mishap, misuse, poor care and lack of love. To be honest I never even considered my teeth until I was well into my ’20s. I took decent dental health as a given into my ’30s even. ?I went regularly in the UK, manly because it was free to do so, and mostly my teeth got a clean bill when I did go. I had a good dentist in Canada – Dr Johnson – so cool that I looked forward to going to see him. He and a Japanese chap had a clinic in a crap stripmall in the Northeast. My period in their care marks the only time in my life I felt secure in my choice of dentist – shit there were times I’d go for my 6 monthly check up and Johnson, dressed in his customary Aloha shirt, would cheerfully say “looking pretty good, man, nothing to be done here”. I even got out of one visit without paying for the checkup fee – Johnson winking at me with his wild eyes through the ’70s teardrop glasses, saying “nice work, sir”. And he understood my aversion to having to go to the hygenist every visit – I HATE that tingly, sore feeling after their gritty ministrations and Dr. J knew where I was coming from. We were fully 5 x 5 on my dental needs. Dr. Johnson, you mad looking sonofabitch, wherever you are – you are legend. These are the glory days I remember when I wonder where it all went wrong.
Then it was Japan. I was pretty much covered in Japan, it never cost me amounts I couldn’t pay out of my pocket, let’s just say. It was just that the dentists there were so damnably, worryingly rubbish that you avoided going no matter what. I went to a few, just to confirm this suspicion, and talked to any other foreigner who’d had experience and yes – they all reported grim misgivings about the state of dental things in Nippon. They always looked worried there. They had the natural Japanese aversion to dealing with foreigners, mostly, fearing that somehow foreign teeth and Japanese teeth were not equal, but it was more than that. There was a lot of under the breath talking to the hygenist or suddenly rushing out of the room after untoward noises in my mouth. The end result, anyway, is that I have half a mouthful of glittering silver caps where perfectly fillable teeth once stood. Their aversion to putting in fillings is something none of them satisfactorily explained to me, even when my Japanese was sufficient to understand them. At the mere sign of a cavity they’d simply root canal to blitz the feeling, grind off the remaining good porcelain, dig in a pin and shove a big fake on it in your choice of silver (cheap) fake white (expensive) or gold (astronomical). I went with silver. I was cheap.
A lot of it’s my fault too -for example the latter period of my time in Japan saw a period of stress unlike any other in my life and I began to grind quite hard. My teeth. While asleep mainly. My already weakened stubs weren’t fit for purpose, suddenly, and accordingly began to ache and give in something shocking. I then found myself back in Scotland which was eye deep in a dental crisis whereby local dentists had, on the stroke of graduation, apparently, gone straight to the airport for somewhere where dentists got paid and were able to live in great comfort. This meant that only the shite ones, the old ones, the weak-willed ones with no ambition whatsoever were left and they were struggling to cope with the growing crisis that 5-packs of fresh cream eclairs for 1 pound 50 at Tesco had wrought on this already dentally afflicted nation. They had decreed shortly before my return that if you were not registered on the books of a dentist by such and such a date, then you were out of luck. The result was that greedy dentists filled their books (for they get a fee for every patient per year regardless of the amount of care ministered) with hapless punters they had neither the time nor the inclination to actually do any dental work on. suddenly people talked about a dentist’s appointment as a mythological Eden – a starry-eyed dream for those on BUPA.
The government’s answer to this globalisation-made catastrophe was Poland. They started bringing in chartered plane-fulls of eager Polacks with alleged post secondary qualifications. My experience revealed that these qualifications may have been from a trade college or something because half of them seemed like they’d be better with a brickie’s hod or trowel than the expensive instruments my government was handing them to work in the tiny building site that is my gob. After being back in Scotland and in great dental discomfiture for a year and a half, I was finally enrolled as a patient at a brand new, 100% Polish dental clinic in the centre of town. It was a further 3 months before they could fit me in for an appointment. When I finally hauled my creaking jaws up those stairs, you can bet your life I was keen. I’d have let a guy with a hammer and chisel into my oral chamber in a heartbeat, so achy and niggly had things become in there. The living room door and a length of string had occurred to me in all earnestness more than once.
At the top of those stairs there were 4 practice doors: one belonged to a young, tanned, capable looking male dandy. His shoes alone made me trust he could do the business. Then there was a blonde, tanned, lithe young lady that would not have looked out of place in an Eastern Bloc special of Female Order Wives Weekly – beautiful yet again you’d have trusted her clean crisp uniform if it was empty. A 40-something lady popped in and out of the third room smiling, in a hurry, a grafter. The fourth door remained resolutely closed for the entire 45 minute wait as I read every crap, coverless magazine in the place and longed for a smoke. At length, a grunting issued forth from the staircase along with the sound of rustling nylon and heavy clumping footfalls. Barbara, my dentist, appeared with a pie in one hand and a coffee in the other the first time I saw her, and heavy makeup. She reeked of the kind of fag smoke I wished I reeked of. She disapproved of my state of dental health right from the get-go, you could tell. She huffed and shrugged and threw down her tiny mirror repeatedly. Acting with the aid of a local translator (I shit you not) she asked what my dental past was etc and shook her head silently, almost sobbing as I recounted my tale of international neglect. Finally she stormed out of the room and I was told after a ten minute wait followed by an exploratory trip outside by our translator cum vacuum operator, that our audience was over. I called repeatedly to try and get my next appointment but was unlucky for the first month. This was pretty much the end for Barbara and me. I suspect she may have been turning to the bottle for comfort whilst adjusting to the pressures of living in this new, damp world of bottomless dental decay.
Here in New Zealand I dared not go to a dentist. when I first came to see Liz, she generously took me to her dentist up the road to take care of my immediate and most painful problems. It was quality work and had I not happened to see the invoice later, may have been perfectly happy. As soon as I realized how much it would cost me, the pain diminished noticeably and there it stayed for some time. Finally working on a film job again and earning heavily, I went to a dentist in Wellington to start about getting my upper Eastside renovated. She took a ten second look and told me there was nothing for it – three teeth needed to be pulled that day, pretty much, and their replacement titanium-pinned, made in Germany replacements would cost 7 to 8 THOUSAND. EACH. I bid her a curt good morning and paid her the 4 hundred dollars or whatever she wanted to tell me this catastrophic news. I was earning but 24k was a lot of dough to me. I then found Colleen Woo in central Wellington – a cheerful, extremely short dentist. She started to give me the Johnson feeling again – she calmed me after my recent 24k quote and said only one needed to be removed, the other two could be saved. I was rapt. She hauled out the offender and started in on the other two then…she got pregnant. She immediately quit work.
And there, pretty much, it sits. I’m now in daily pain, dull though it be. And a certain itch, a certain bad taste in my mouth when I suck my teeth tells me that things are not all well. It’s no wonder – I’ve got about 3 temporary fillings – one I’m sure from the Barbara era, two from Colleen – and half-done root canals from hither and yon. If I won the Lotto and if it was enough, I would get my teeth sorted up, man. That’s my dream. To be the man I was in Dr Johnson’s care. To get a cheerful “nothing to be done” as I exit from my next 6 monthly checkup and feel that warm, taken-care-of feeling once again.
I’ll tell you something that rankles me about once a month; where did shower gel come into the picture? At what point in life’s relentless drive to meet the needs of our hunger for convenience, was it decreed that we needed another bottle of soapy nonsense on the edge of the bath? I have NEVER bought shower gel. I am not entirely sure I’d even be able to operate the endless parade of inventive dispensers it comes in. The hooks for hanging on the shower head, gewgaw lids that turn INTO hooks, little pursed-rubber-lip nozzles, anatomical rubber grips…
I’m very much aware of our mindless quest to simplify, and inject the last iota of convenience into, the most pedestrian of tasks. I make a concerted effort to ignore many of these dumb-ventions because I think some tasks in life are quite enjoyable. From tying one’s laces to brushing one’s teeth – there’s good to be had in the little figurative journeys in life’s little tasks, beauty quite apart from their destination. It’s good for the soul, for example, to roll a cigarette – that’s why hand rolling machines have come and gone in an array of designs yet failed to replace the human claw. The little rituals of life seem to have become, somewhere along the way, an enemy. Life’s routines are now something to be phased out, invented around. The mystery of just what, exactly, we’re doing with all the time they save us are another article entirely.
I recently bought an electric toothbrush after poo-pooing the idea for an age and I have to admit that at first I saw myself a fraud in the medicine cabinet mirror. I’ve been able to justify it by two things I’ve noticed:
1. I finally do not feel the inexplicable need to run the tap while brushing – a peccadillo previously addressed herein
2. I’ve made whole new little ritual out of brushing my teeth using my Braun.
I’m still a little bothered by needing to consume electricity to scrub my fucking teeth but I’m the owner of an increasingly dilapidated porcelain set and anything I can do to salvage any part of them, anything that will somehow spur me to go at them a bit more often and in a more hygenist-approved method, I’ll go after it these days.
But back to shower gel. What the fuck even is it? It appears to be sold as much in flavours as scents – I get near ravenous looking at the varieties of it on supermarket, chemist or Bodyshop shelves. You could, I often muse to myself “put that fucker on a bowl of ice cream.” I confess that this is a two part rant – the very reason I notice this soapy sauce on a regular basis is that I’m not a shower person at all. I like a bath. Boyhowdy do I like a bath? And yes I like a little bit of something in my bathwater, even. Call me delicate but I like a bubble in my bath – primarily for the fact it means you have to clean the bath less regularly (that’s as yet a little ritual I’m no way keen to get at more often) but it kind of softens your skin, too, eh? But let me tell you this – you try and find a bottle of herbal bath soak (Radox, say, or Badedas) nowadays. The best of British luck to you in your quest. Why? For its place has been usurped completely by Goddamned Coconut Cream, Bergamot and Caramel shower gel or Kiwi Lemon Ragout Enriching Shower Treatment.
I do miss Tesco for little things now and then and one is definitely the fact they have as much room for Radox powders and lotions as they have for Lynx’s most recent ridiculous incarnation of shower gel. In Japan, I loved being able to go to the chemist and get every type and level of herbal bath treatment from cheap and cheerful sachets of Lion Brand pine scented synthetic salts, to handmade high-end therapeutic salts that did actually make your skin tingle and your musculature and bones fair sing in harmony in the afterglow. The Japanese still know how to bathe, man.
It’s all connected: that we have made a rushed, entirely standing trudge out of our daily ablution that was once a relaxing, private, sensuous time-out on our back every evening. That we’ve then invented a gaudy, florid sauce to be dispensed by violent squeezing and vigorous application to accompany showering where once we had a herbal, natural salt that had some benefit, some comfort to us. This is the face of change, folks.
It’s enough to make you get into your bath and stay there until convenience disappears up its own non-drip, rubber-orifaced, upside down, hook-handled arsehole.
You know, I’m kind of surprised at myself getting all emotional over the Michael Jackson ta-ta revival yesterday morning. I think it’s being a new parent and Rory being in the room or something – I’m getting soft. Anyway, as my old pal Mon, a heavyweight Western Scots cynic like myself, points out to me on Facebook this morning – a lot of stuff is being swept under the carpet in the endless re-spins of “Billie Jean” this past week. He also points me to this article, written by yet another Western-Scots cynic in The Independent. It’s important to keep a balance and, you know, until last week I also thought of Michael as a kiddy-diddler. I need to give myself a shake here!
I walked to Food Town last evening, to get some stuff for supper. On my way back, at Grey Lynn Shops, I encountered two young Japanese, studying a map rather too intently. I asked them could I help to which they, in that peculiar Japanese way, refused, despite looking like they needed help – A LOT. I said were they sure and, in halting English, they asked me which way to go to “downtown”. I gave them the instructions, slowly and very deliberately so they would get it, I even repeated it all till I was sure they had it. They had it, they said. I said good luck and started to walk away but I noticed they were lingering, trying to form another sentence. I said in Japanese “how long? – about 30 to 40 minutes. If you’re fit…” They were so relieved and excited to find a speaker of their own language in their new neighbourhood. I felt awesome. How many times did that same thing in reverse happen to me in my first few months in Japan and how grateful was I for the passer-by.
Buoyed by my experience, I walked not another thirty feet, when I saw an elderly lady acting rather peculiarly. She stopped suddenly and started to sort of convulse. She then teetered, swayed and, with a great dramatic sigh, fell backwards her full length, cracking her noggin on the pavement as she went down. The wind fairly went out of her. I dropped my groceries (containing a full 12-sack of Mac’s Lager I might add) and rushed to her aid. In the middle of the drama I noticed that an Islander family whose van she had narrowly avoided clumping with her melon, rushed too – in the other direction, hustling their kids into their van and driving off at speed!
Anyway I asked my patient was she okay etc and could she move alright. She said just to get her a taxi, despite that I noticed her head was bleeding from the back and she was repeating herself, gibbering almost. She’d be in her 80s at least. I got her up onto her arse and, satisfied her back and neck were okay, got her a chair from the fish shop and sat her up, with the help of another unspecified Islander chap passing by (who redeemed his team instantly!). He went into the pharmacy to call her a taxi, as she requested though I had grim misgivings. Luckily Mr Bopal the pharmacist came out to see what was the matter and he recognized her as Gloria. Gloria by this time was reeling and chuntering like a monkey. Mr Bopal rushed to the surgery on the corner where luckily Gloria’s doctor was still in the house. He came out and I, the first aider, the first on the scene, was suddenly redundant. I stood down, deferring to the medical qualifications of the doctor and nurse but I don’t mind telling you I was a little miffed! I shamefully felt entitled to a thanks from someone. Instead, another doctor who had come out, an Indian gentleman said “okay, her own doctor is here, he knows her problems, you can go”. Harrumph!
In the space of ten minutes I had done a selfless thing and felt great about it then pushed it and done another good turn and revealed myself for the shallow bastard I undoubtedly am! Will I quit doing good deeds though? Not a chance. If you should happen to be the recipient of one, however, remember and thank me, or you’ll make an enemy of me, you ungrateful wretch!
“I hate Britain, and I want to move to Spain in the next couple of years, ‘cos our country’s not England anymore. It’s very rare for English people to live here anymore. When I went to Lanzarote, I felt more English there than I do here, and that’s no exaggeration.”
Wow. I mean I suspected the British Nationalist Party membership consisted of more than a few who might have struggled in school or a couple of ‘slow readers’ here and there but this article seems almost made up! Nick Griffin must be over the moon at press like this. Actually he mustn’t give much of a shite about press in general because any time I’ve heard him speak himself it’s been shamefully embarrassing to listen to. What must it feel like to spend your life denying what you believe in and pretending to be something you’re not? I’ll tell you what -some of these girls, if they spend many more hours on the tan beds, they’ll struggle to get taken for good, clean whitefolks…
I’ll tell you what, I’m heartily sick of hearing about the Swine Flu. In fact I’m listening to an expert on the radio now saying that it has no connection to pigs whatsoever and that the very name we’ve hysterically given it, is a complete error in nomenclature – Swine Flu is a completely different animal all together.
Last night I spent an hour at news time trying to find a channel that wasn’t talking about it in some way. Here in New Zealand, the press have almost made a virtue out of the fact that we were one of the first countries in the world to locate victims and are skulking about outside the homes of those in quarantine, brandishing ten foot mic booms and talking to them over cellphone as they shoot. I mean methods are being developed, to interview people with potentially fatal and highly contagious diseases here! Every news show on radio and TV has talked about it for days now, often in downright officious tones, often dismissing the possible cases in other countries as hearsay with an “of course WE have real cases here” slant to their diatribe.
Why have I posted a picture of Rory in a tartan tammy? Well, I don’t know about Swine Flu but this little boy has the Pig Squitters these past days – he’s laying heavy cable about four and five times a day and, not to put too fine a point on it, the odour of his fecum is not unlike that I’ve smelt out of our porcine friends. We’ve looked it up and yes, sadly it is normal from now on. He’s so pretty and cute – you wouldn’t believe the smell out of him, man, Jesus Christ almighty, it’s not of this earth.
As well as that, isn’t he cute in his wee tammy? We found it in an op-shop a few weeks ago and got it to take some shots for his granny.
God, you really wonder if a body cares a darn cahoot what anyone thinks of him any more when he behaves like Billy Bob Thornton behaves in this interview. It’s a totally credible music program on Canada’s CBC and not a fucking E Entertainment soundbyte jackoff interview by some gormless blonde face. And yet Billy still manages to find something to protest in the opening seconds of the interview. Well! Any respect I might have had for him as an actor (and I did) is henceforth tainted indelibly by the fact he’s a total ham-shank in real life.
You need to listen to this.
God forgive me, this gave me the best laugh I’ve had in ages. I love how the chorus just jumps out like the carny in the mask on the Ghost Train now and again – no real bar count or timing – you’re not ready for it and POW! Out it jumps at you again “It’s so CAAAAWWWLD ina D…” That gets me in the gut every time. And how the lead, er, vocalist, feels it necessary to remind us with two spindly fingers where our “mind” is every single time she says “it’s all on a niggah’s mi-hind” – that’s cash money stage presence right there.
Addendum: I’ve just discovered that TBaby here is a bit of an internet phenom. You can catch her live in a radio station here on Youtube. And you can hear someone interpret her work here. Her story is roughlky outlined in this magazine article from Detroit. Awesome. Latonya Miles. AKA TBaby – we salute you.
Sorry, I worked for two days to try and get Movable Type going but it’s so damn hard to get going that I’ve taken an executive decision and you’re now looking at a WordPress based Brand New Soup. It’s slightly less customizable but it’s enough for me and my hosting service supports it 100% which has already saved me a huge amount of to-ing and fro-ing.
Now I’ll start work on importing the old postings from Blogger stick with me folks.
I found myself today, whilst reading an article about Jade Goody’s impending date with the reaper, feeling sorry for her. I felt guilty and dirty too. It’s a huge question that deserves a lot more room than I’m going to give it here, but why? Why do I care? Why do I feel rotten about her plight.
I watched the series of Celeb Big Brother in which Jade, her raspy, haggard old mother and her posse of dimwitted co-tormenters made rather massive errors in judgment, apparently temporarily unaware that the whole nation was in the room with them, and racially bullied former Bollywood starlet Shilpa Shetty. Apart from the fact it made immensely enjoyable viewing for the likes of me – reality leches, it divided a nation. I do recall people actually defending her, saying it was just the kind of thing young people say and that the fact it was on Big Brother was the only reason to call bullshit on it etc.
Be all that as it may, Shilpa Shetty herself, right to Jade’s face and live on camera, cut right to the heart of the matter. It was only because Jade was of obviously diminished worldliness that she never got it and retired to her bed then for the rest of her natural. Shilpa Shetty, in response to a comment Jade made about her questionable “celebrity” status, said “yeah? well, you know what you’re famous for? THIS” (sweeping with her hand around the shoddy set of BB). I felt a little sad for Jade then too – because “Shilpa Poppadom” (Jade’s words) was 100% right and the truth was heartbreaking. It definitely put an unsavoury taste in my mouth for subsequent series’ of BB.
So, with a rake of cervical cancer running amok in her veins, A quick scan of the UK media sites would appear to suggest that Jade Goody is still making a show of her life. Even as it spills out of her and she counts the remaining days. I find it a little distasteful that it’s been so very public an illness but you don’t have to look too far to discover why that is. It’s what we’ve trained Jade to do – as consumers of celebrity and enhanced “reality” TV. At the moment of negative diagnosis, you can almost hear Max Clifford’s gear wheels cranking out the possible media deals and TV options.
Jade Goody is a monster almost 100% created by us – no demand, no queue of hopefuls looking to be humiliated by production teams much smarter than them and adept at editing out anything intelligent that might pass their lips. Pass the auditions by being tragic enough and your reward is carte blanche to work your tits and stupidity out live on national TV.
But anyway, yes. Affected, strangely, by Jade’s hovering mortality.
(You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to find a decent picture of Jade Goody)
There’s a dawning realization within me about the trend of re-issuing classic cars. Have you noticed that they instantly become a girl-car? The New Beetle, (which I’ve recently discovered is referred to in the US as a “Ladyug” – bearing out my theory) – how often do you see a guy driving one? I’ve noted that from the start. The original beetle was very much a people car(despite this, which is fine, and even this here) and even the ones you still see around are driven as often by men as women and young people. Why, then would he re-make instantly become a car for Triple L’s (Leathery Ladies who Lunch)? Then the same became apparent of the new Mini – I saw a few guys in the higher end ones at first but quickly they also became very largely the domain of the fairer sex.
The latest one, I’ve noted this week, is the re-issued Fiat 500 (Bambina). I’m able to actually witness the transformation here though. There’s a cafe on Ponsonby Road called Bambina that is popular with cashmere-bedecked and shirtneck-open people of a certain age. Now the Cafe predates the car release but I noticed that either the owner has bought one, perhaps as a promotional device, or a regular customer drives his there every morning. I’ve seen him, a long, tanned, bald-headed, pearly-toothed devil prizing himself out of the little red compact a few times now on my morning walks, right out front of the place. And, you know, I try and make allowances and think of the environmental good he’s doing but there’s no getting around it, he cuts a ridiculous figure. He just needs to be a woman, it’s simple, really.
and it’s a funny thing, for I don’t hate the way any of these cars look, quite admire them in fact, but I just can’t see me driving one – it’s no use, they’re down indelibly in my psyche as chick-mobiles already. And let the record show that I am a fan of the original beetle, had two, restored one, passed my driving test in one. I’ve had heaps of other small cars and never felt up nor down about it.
I read with interest that the obviously newly-formed Bambina Owners’ Club of Auckland had a drive out from Bambina Cafe whereupon “after coffee on the strip, Lynne Parker (from Occhiali Optical) and six other owners then drove to Matakana to visit Morriss and James followed by lunch at Heron’s Flight Winery. Lynne told Ponsonby News that “although the weather wasn’t great, we had a fantastic day meeting all the other Bambina owners, especially when Continental Cars had prepared a small quiz to test our knowledge on facts about this incredible small car”. Tell you what I wouldn’t mind being signed up for the next one.
But whether it’s the advertising that is targeting ladies because they control the purse strings or just the appeal of not-really-nostalgia but take a look – the re-release car becomes a girl’s car within about a month of release. You’ll see what I mean once you start to take note.
It’s gotten out of hand. Every single day in life, I see signs. They’re everywhere. cheap, nasty, hastily put together by people with absolutely no artistic credibility at all. Sometimes they’re on pieces of cardboard, the backs of egg boxes, cartons that previously contained white goods or VCRs. More often, though, they are published upon pieces of plain cloth, large pieces of plain cloth – very often thin, wore-out bedsheets or pillowcases. ‘Happy Birthday’ they say. ‘Happy 20th Craig’ or Bobby or Shelly or Brittney. The numerical figures are, more often than not, enlarged to about five times the size of the lettering containing the real message of the piece — suitably ignoring every convention of the sign writing game.
A few recently have really offended me. Not just because of their poor construction, nor their omnipresence nor the desultory two half-blown-up balloons and length of curling ribbon that invariably accompany them. The sheets they are printed on, these awful things, appear to not have been laundered beforehand. There was one today, finally, on a child’s-sized sheet. It had perhaps once been pink but now had become a washed-out, thin, nasty over-diluted puce. Most of it at any rate. Only in its middle there was a large, dark sploodge of something manmade. It was at the point in a sheet where stains tend to occur, if you understand the post-code I’m indicating here.
I felt instantly nauseated. Then I started to think about some little kid having been sick and felt sorry for him or her. Then I started, because it was in a traffic jam and I was at the same place for a while, to try and estimate the point at which a human being does not throw out a sheet that has sustained such a stain, even if they’ve tried to launder once and failed.
It’s all too much for me.
