SLACKING OFF

Does the term ‘‘gentleman’’ mean anything in this vulgar age of lies and bluster, asks David Slack.

There is no such thing as a dull auction, not even the kind where no hand goes up and no bid is made. The expressions on the faces are a silent drama – the auctioneer, the vendors, the real estate agents, the neighbours. ‘‘Closing the bidding once, twice, for the last time. . .’’ Pregnant silence. ‘‘Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.’’

I grew up among sheep breeding people, and auctions. The road we lived on was called ram alley. Each summer the big pay day was the stud ram sale in Feilding.

Every stud sheep farmer from around the country would be in the Denbigh Hotel in his best sports jacket, a few beers, a few whiskies, a few more, a few after that.

The year your dad topped the sale, you were proud as punch, sitting, watching the bids fly past the old record and the auctioneer, deadpan, pausing to look over at your dad and ask: ‘‘Is it on the market, Tony?’’ and your dad giving an amused nod.

How’s the Feilding ram fair doing these days? Just fine, Jill Galloway writes in the NZ Farmer magazine. At the last one she found Duncan, a Waikato farmer, looking for quality livestock. He was checking out Dorper rams. He told her: ‘‘There are three things I hate: maggots, shearing and unproductive sheep. The Dorpers have none of those things.’’

Now I live in Auckland and there are no ram sales, but there are the weekly house auctions at Barfoot and Thompson where a young person can go to have their spirit crushed, and there are fine auction houses in places like Parnell where you might buy a work of art, or a collectible, or you might, as one house was offering last week, buy some fine wines from ‘‘The cellar of a gentleman’’.

In Feilding, your rams appear in the catalogue as lots 56, 57 and 58, but in Parnell an auction will always have an evocative title. ‘‘The cellar of a gentleman’’, for example. What does a word like ‘‘gentleman’’ mean in this vulgar, orange-faced, mauling, groping, lying, blustering age? Does it still have any meaning? Does it still imply any standing?

‘‘Gentleman’’ is the word the police officer will use to describe the guy who defiled the bar toilets, threw wild punches, said vile things to a young woman, relieved himself again in the doorway and staggered off to McDonald’s.

‘‘This gentleman is known to us,’’ the officer will say. They will have a good idea where to find him and it won’t be in his wine cellar.

Can you be a gentleman in the 21st century? Maybe. But you’re no gentleman if you tailgate. You’re no gentleman if you build someone a leaky building then fold up your $100 company and can’t be sued. And if you are the kind of oaf who wheels your supermarket trolley into the selfservice checkout area and parks it by the sign ‘‘twelve items or fewer’’, you’re no gentleman, buddy.

If you don’t trail aftershave or check your phone while your dinner companions are talking, that might make you one. You’ll know better than to play music in a shared office space. There’s no way you’ll work for Big Tobacco, and you won’t be

In Feilding, your rams appear in the catalogue as lots 56, 57 and 58, but in Parnell an auction will always have an evocative title.

marketing carbonated beverages with 14 teaspoons of sugar in them to children, or in fact to anybody.

I imagine you will open the door for your wife; and you won’t do it so rarely that she will jump, as happened to me one wedding anniversary dinner at the French Cafe where, hoping to add to the romance on the way out, I went to open the passenger door for Karren and she mistook me for a mugger.

But which of any of the waves of feminism would a gentleman recognise? Can the concept of a gentleman really exist in the same context in which women have rights equal to those of men?

Or is there some implicit patting of the sweet little head that cannot be avoided?

Perhaps the time of the gentleman has passed. Perhaps we should simply remind ourselves to be decent. And honest. And never, ever be cute with our promises.

I just don’t ever see a gentleman telling anybody that a river is swimmable if there’s a one-in-20 chance of contracting campylobacter.