What I meant to tell Soimon
Icould have given useful advice to the ashenfaced wretch approaching the central city medical practice with her hair a mess, and a cough as automatic and endless as breathing. I’m good at advice, but the people I give my nuggets of wisdom to never actually hear me, and I suspect even my own family tires of my comments on, for example, the lovely Renee’s increasingly awful dresses.
You know Renee Wright. She does the weather reports on TV when the strange little balletic man is away. They keep putting her into drab, mumsy dresses tinged with brown which do nothing for her, which is a shame because she’s a pretty woman.
You know the TV reporters too, so you’ll know that I notice when their clothes are too tight and strain at the seams. Does nobody keep an eye on these people but me? Does nobody care about the ones who wear makeup like a kabuki mask? I could help. But I only send a vibe.
I would have helped the wretched woman going to the doctor, too, if I hadn’t been so unwell. A spot of lipstick, I’d have said. And the hair. Surely a hairbrush could be found. And could nothing be done about that annoying cough?
Yet maybe we can forgive sick people. That’s what I hoped, anyway, because I do look, and feel, truly terrible this week.
The pity of it was that the politician I comment on most came into my medical practice at the same time. He wouldn’t have noticed me. I was the bag lady reading a month-old gossip mag while trying to cough into a face mask so as not to spread the flu I got in spite of the flu shot.
Nobody notices a woman who looks as awful as I did, but we all noticed Simon Bridges, in his dark blue suit, by studiously not noticing him.
We’re like that in Wellington. We don’t ask for autographs; we pretend we can’t see well-known people, but we hear them. I heard him.
Now, I spent years at a boarding school I thoroughly disliked. For some years afterward I could pick its distinctive accent across a room, for we were all marked by its yearning to make us posher than we were. He has the reverse problem.
One of the few consolations of that school were extra classes you could enrol in. You could avoid much boredom – and in particular the daily compulsory grind of sport after school – by showing a sudden interest in the piano, the cello, and elocution.
Learning music entitled you to the solitary pleasure of the practice room, while elocution meant you enjoyed the company of a nice woman who pushed you through Trinity College exams with the aid of a slim volume called Effective Speaking.
From Mrs Gibbons I learned about pitch, pace, pause and inflection, rounded vowels, and scansion in poetry. I learned to memorise poetry and deliver it aloud, an excellent trick since the school’s favoured form of punishment was forcing you to do just that while hopefully killing in you any feeling for literature.
I wish Bridges, along with his otherwise stellar education, had learned elocution, because his murder of vowels is horrible. It’s not just a Kiwi accent; we all have that; but his unique way of seeming to elaborately swallow words before they emerge. A lazy vocal style is not cool, but a drawback in a career in politics. I tell him so constantly, yet when he was right in front of me all I could do was cough. It could have been nerves on my part. But surely not.