Fifteen happy years of ranting
Fifteen years ago, this weekend, I filed my very first column for a brand new newspaper, The Herald on Sunday. I was one of nine columnists and had been lured over from the Sunday News.
To be fair, I didn’t take much luring. Initially the editor, Sue Chetwin, wanted me to write a girl about town kind of a column, but I pointed out that I was a teetotalling mother of one, very happily partnered up and only went out at night to go to work on the wireless. So it was decided I’d write 600 words on an issue of the week — anything that fired me up.
My first column took 24-year-old Sharee Adams to task. The daughter of United Future MP Paul Adams was appearing before a select committee hearing submissions on the Civil Union Bill, arguing that the sacrament of marriage should be the sole preserve of the heterosexual.
I didn’t, and still don’t, agree with that viewpoint and I’m glad that today all of us have the right to marry the person we love whoever that person may be.
It wasn’t a particularly well-written column, looking back. The tone was snide, and for that, I apologise to Ms Adams who is, I hope, living in happy, heterosexual harmony with her husband somewhere on the North Shore.
As fate would have it, my own daughter ended up getting married before she graduated law school and I ended up getting married myself, despite thinking it was a silly outmoded institution. So there we go.
Over time, our views change and evolve. Of the nine original columnists, I am the only one still here.
Which means over the past 15 years, I have churned out around 720 columns. That’s a lot of fish and chip paper.
For the first few years, I wrote week in, week out without a break over Christmas and New Year or when I was travelling overseas. I have filed from Tanzania, Italy, France, London, India, and Invercargill and I’ve written on the ocean and in the air.
Finding an issue generally isn’t a problem as my main job as a talkback host means we cover a lot of news stories and I know the ones people are interested in.
What can be more challenging,
HWhat’s your view? letters@hos.co.nz especially over the past few years, is finding anything new to say on topics that come up time and time again.
I’ve given up writing about our shocking child abuse. I gave that up a couple of years ago. I’d been writing about the subject for 10 years and nothing, absolutely nothing, had changed. So it seemed self-indulgent to vent my spleen when it wasn’t going to make a blind bit of difference to these babies’ lives.
I’ve been quoted in Parliament. When then-Finance Minister Michael Cullen delivered a rather bland Budget, I asked on the radio whether anyone got excited about Budgets any more. David Cunliffe was Cullen’s 2IC, and he rang in, singing the praises of his boss and lauding him as a financial savant.
I wrote a column that week in which I described Cunliffe’s effusive praise as “the most egregious example of Culleningus I had ever heard”. Sometimes I’ve been very grateful to have a forum allowing me more space to be Outraged from Grey Lynn than I would get in a letter to the editor.
I had already filed my column for the week when Grant Dalton held his memorable press conference, demanding more money for his America’s Cup team or the members of the syndicate would walk. I was incensed. These multiproperty-owning, multimillionaires were demanding more money from taxpayers and as someone who’d worked as a contract worker, I’d had enough. I wrote a furious missive in about 10 minutes flat and my then editor, Miriyana Alexander, produced the memorable headline, “Go Fund Yourselves!”
I’ve seen four editors come and go on to bigger and better things and still I’m here. Fifteen years is quite the tenure in this modern age, although I’ve got a ways to go before I beat Harry Mead of the Northern Echo in Britain who wrote a weekly column for that paper for 50 years.
Thank you to those of you who’ve told me you enjoy my column. And my apologies to those I’ve angered or hurt by going off half-cocked or trying to be a bit too clever or because I’ve been intemperate in my language. It’s a privilege to have a space where I can express my opinion and I can assure you I have never, and will never, take that privilege lightly.