by Last weekend when I was down in Geraldine, I saw my brother on FaceTime. Wow, what a difference. He had a horror year in New Zealand and needed at least another year to get over that, but he’s much happier now. I saw his girlfriend for the first time; it was quite disconcerting seeing someone who could easily be my sister-in-law, for the first time in that way, method, format, platform, whatever the word is. I’ll get to see her in the normal way when she and my brother come to New Zealand for three weeks in February.
On Monday I went down the North Otago coast with Mum and Dad. It was a grey old day. I’ve never seen quite so many seals as there were around Kakanui. We made several detours to look at potential real estate options. If they do buy something down there, it’ll probably be a holiday home. I asked Dad what they plan to do with their house, which will eventually be too big for them. He said to me, “Whatever happens, I know we’ll be stuck in fucking Geraldine.” He doesn’t swear that often. Mum was born in Geraldine; it would take a lot to prise her away. There was fog in Timaru on Tuesday early morning which delayed my flight to Wellington by 3½ hours, so I arrived at work at lunchtime. I didn’t mind being stuck at the airport at all; with a book and the various puzzles in the Timaru Herald I had plenty to do.
It wasn’t easy to watch my parents plan their future, which at 65 and 66, they (and especially Mum) expect to be long. Their time horizons are longer than mine at 35. From my perspective, watching them pore over real estate brochures and websites was a bit like watching the last ten minutes of the All Blacks against a crappy team like, I dunno, France, with the score delicately poised at 48-7. Look, I think the All Blacks are going to be OK. Mind if I change the channel?
I realise I never mentioned the All Blacks’ World Cup win. It was well worth celebrating, not just because that team is one of the best to ever play the game, but also because they were so gracious and sportsmanlike in victory. Other successful sports teams (cough – Aussie cricket team – cough) could take a leaf out of the All Blacks’ book.
Mum has worked hard and saved hard; she deserves to enjoy her later life. What annoys me though is her assumption that if you don’t reap the financial rewards that she has, that’s purely down to your own stupidity or even immorality. Wealth equals morality, who would have thought? She even tars a whole generation with the “stupid and immoral” brush. There are hundreds of thousands of baby boomers up and down the country who think the same way and vote the same way as Mum does, and they’ll all live to 108. (Yes I know I’m getting close to tarring a whole generation with the same brush here.) I was explaining this to my colleague on the way home from work on Friday. He’s 27, and on the face of it even more screwed by the system than me, except he’s not because he’s circumventing the system entirely. About time I did the same thing.
Thanks to my whitewash tennis win, I was able to attend yesterday’s TPP protest. The turnout was much smaller than the one in August; many people now think it’s a fait accompli. My colleague gave an impassioned speech outside Parliament, probably the best of the lot. I can barely imagine doing something like that. Someone (correctly) said that if Richie McCaw had made a speech decrying the TPP, it would have made a far bigger impact than all of yesterday’s speeches and protesters combined. I’m not very good at estimating these numbers, but I’d guess that about 1000 people turned up, along with one dreadlocked Hungarian sheepdog known as a Komondor.
I was oblivious to the atrocity in Paris until last night when my cousin and her family popped over to have pizza. Where do you even start? Tim said, “It’s Paris. What do you expect? People get shot and blown up there.” How sad that that’s what Paris means to a ten-year-old boy.
