Back to Black
Joanne Black
Atext from a friend told me that Opposition Leader Bill English, for whom I was a press secretary when he was Minister of Finance, was about to hold a press conference. I did not even have time to grab a hanky.
Watching him behind that cluster of microphones brought back the anxiety I used to feel when he was in front of the media, and as usual, my worries were needless. He knew what he wanted to say and said it clearly. He treated the media with respect, which was the same way he treated the Opposition when he was in government and the same way he treated the cleaners, late at night in his office.
In the Beehive, the tone of each office is set by its minister. Ours was happy and productive. English knew the names of everyone’s children, and all were welcome at work. He was a multi-tasker, available to staff, other ministers and his family.
In the midst of some crisis or another and awaiting a call from then Prime Minister John Key, English might get a text, look at his phone and say, “Oh, bugger.” “What’s happened,” one of us would ask, worried. “Xavier’s lost his rugby boots again,” English would reply.
Trying to get back to surplus was an important aim by which the National Government set great store, but it was making the public service more effective at helping the most vulnerable New Zealanders that I saw as the reason English came to work each day. He was proud of being from Dipton, but I often thought he had done too good a job of portraying himself as a southern man. That persona disguised an original thinker, an immense compassion and an unceasing determination to use the Government’s time in office to improve the lives of those who most needed help.
The rich could look after themselves. It was the vulnerable – his most-used word – who needed attention. He will be a great loss to politics as well as a great gain to his next employer and, at long last, to his family.
Arecent British study found that 30% of evening meals in the UK in the 12 weeks to January contained no meat or fish. That is consistent with predictions that meat-eating will become rare. Reasons include the unsustainability of intensive farming, the animal rights lobby and a greater interest in the health benefits of vegetarianism.
As someone who eats vegetarian dinners almost every night, I think the literature overlooks a fourth reason: the pain in the posterior it is for cooks in liberal households to prepare different meals for vegetarians and meat-eaters.
When I was a kid, the common response to teenagers declaring themselves vegetarian was “don’t eat the meat, then”. Now, we seem more indulgent, and since you cannot reasonably serve beef nachos to a vegetarian but can reasonably serve vegetarian ones to a meat-eater, it takes only one vegetarian to influence the diet of the household. That is the case in our home where our daughter is a vegetarian, so my husband and I eat the same meals as she does.
One side effect is that watching the winter Olympics on TV, I am more entranced by the ads for Big Macs than the 1500m snowboard gymnastics. Forget the figure skaters – true beauty is the grease sliding off that beef patty in the ad.
Yet, oddly, when eating out and choosing meat, I have not found it as good as I expected. Perhaps I am turning vegetarian. It would be disconcerting if, for the first time ever, I was on-trend.
Now, we seem more indulgent, and it takes only one vegetarian to influence the diet of the household.