A dam fun piece of work
Attention all psychology-wallahs, chinstroking analysts, couch-adjacent pokeskulls. I want you to explain something. My subject is drains. I live on the side of a hill where the bellbirds chime, the fantails flutter and the harriers soar. But the nub of the place, as I’ve learned over years, is the drains.
When the rains come, the water pours off the hill in torrents and will get to the sea one way or another. A drain is a good way. Any other way isn’t.
My greenhouse has a summer floor of baked clay.
But in winter the rain seeps in and turns it to the battlefield of the Somme. So last summer I hired a drainlayer to drain it. He turned out to be a former pupil.
In the 25 years since I taught him English he’s laid drains by the thousand and prospered. He now has a truck with his name and slogan on the side, impeccably spelt and punctuated.
It is always good to watch a master of a trade, one who is at ease in his vocation. So I admired the practised way he selected a long-handled shovel from a rack on his truck and leant on it while his apprentice dug.
It was too hot, however, to watch work for long, so I took my former pupil on a sight-seeing tour of my demesnes. I pointed out the fluttering fantails, the chiming bellbirds, the soaring harriers. But a sight-seeing drainlayer looks down not up. ‘‘Tut,’’ he said, pointing at a half-blocked culvert, ‘‘tut and tut again. You need to get that cleared.’’
There’s a pleasure in being told off by a former pupil. ‘‘Sorry,’’ I said, ‘‘I’ll get it done, I promise.’’
But it was a schoolboy promise, spoken only to appease. I spoke and I forgot. Forgot, that is, until this last weekend when the big rains came. Sunday morning I opened the curtains on a lake.
There’s a pleasure in being told off by a former pupil.
The dog was stretched before the altar of the log burner. He barely stirred as I stepped out into the rain, as bare of head as the mad King Lear. No bellbird chimed. No fantail fluttered. Only the roar of the Antarctic wind and the rain hitting my skull like thrown nails.
I waded into the lake and felt with my gumboot for the channel that led to the culvert. With a bare hand I reached into the icy water, clawed out a glob of mud and silt, flung it to one side then clawed and clawed again. My hand grew numb. I cut my flesh. The blood was a pale wash. Still I clawed, down through the sedimentary layers until whoosh, all of a sudden, suction. And the drain drained. In less than a minute it had swallowed the lake.
I was relieved, of course, to clear the blockage, but also thrilled. I ran like a puppy to watch the water gush from the culvert into another drain. Then I went back up to drop a twig in and race it down, and rejoiced to see it emerge.
And half a dozen times that morning I came back out to admire the channelling of water and to feel a sense of power and order and pleasure. The same feeling as when as a kid I used to dam streams and divert them and create lakes and channels and deltas. And my question for the psych-wallahs and the poke-skulls is why. Why should the channelling of water give such fundamental pleasure?
Though even as I pose the question I suspect I know the answer. In archaeology programmes on television the oldest human marks on the landscape are ditches.
Why not step back from pointing the finger at parents all the time and look at wider issues . . . such as communities not being what they used to be any more. Are we OK with that?
Who would be a parent these days? During the past week, it was hard not to feel like those raising the smallest and most vulnerable among us were in the firing line. It has been caused primarily by two separate calls by coroners, which have rattled parents and caused mummy groups online to light up like an out-of-season Christmas tree.
The first was the bizarre call by Coroner Tim Scott. He found in the death of 6-year-old Carla Neems, who was hit by a rubbish truck outside her home in Gisborne in 2017, the need to make a controversial call that criticised the decisions of her grieving parents.
Scott deemed it unacceptable for Carla to walk the 450 metres to school in the company of older siblings, despite no clear law saying this was illegal.
A police spokeswoman responding to the case said although the law required a parent or guardian to ensure a child under the age of 14 years was not left without making reasonable provision for the supervision and care of the child, ‘‘for a time that is unreasonable or under conditions that are unreasonable having regard to all the circumstances’’.
‘‘However, the application of this law would typically be in extreme or unique circumstances, and by and large where the age-capability of the child did not match with the difficulty or duration of the walk. For example, an 8-year-old walking two blocks to school without having to navigate any difficult traffic situations could generally be considered reasonable circumstances. A 5-year-old walking an hour to school on a country road with no footpath could potentially be considered unreasonable,’’ she said.
So the question is then, is this the type of society we now live in? Where children walking to and from their local school now have to be hand-held up to the door of the school for fear of reprisal from authorities? To me, this case is a further example of the breakdown of communities.
Gone are the days where kids would walk in groups to school, often some of the most fun parts
of the day, waving out to locals in the community that make up their neighbourhood, causing the loud ruckus that used to accompany the ringing of the last school bell of the day.
Schools used to be the heart of communities, places of coming together and where those who lived and operated nearby knew what came with the territory. At least twice a day, before and after school, it would be reasonable to expect foot traffic would be increased and that those who were walking home would be smaller, younger and potentially distracted by after-school shenanigans.
My first reaction when reading about this case was, of course, sympathy for the parents.
As if they didn’t feel bad already?
But my secondary response was one of annoyance that little had been made of the truck driver himself, who never gave a statement, as was his right, or the circumstances that meant a large vehicle that stopped often, and in obscure positions, was doing its pickup at arguably the busiest time when operating in a school area.
Communities, in my mind, should be working together to help keep all their neighbourhood children safe.
I firmly believe that of course parents should be a key part of this, but the village needs to step up and create environments, where possible, that place the needs and behaviours of children at the centre of its values.
The second case was more complex, but no less headline-grabby, so of course created a similar uproar.
In this case, a recommendation was made that breastfeeding mothers not drink alcohol after a baby died with six times the legal drink drive limit in her blood.
Putting aside the obvious questions in the complex case – the first being that the coroner could not actually ascertain the cause of death – there seemed to me to be much bigger issues at play, but the opportunity to make a clickable call by the coroner again seems to have outweighed them.
Friends of mine began debating all the possible ways to ‘‘pump and dump’’, the exact ratio that is ‘‘acceptable’’ to drink before the effects appear to be passed on to the child, and what not.
Again, there seemed to be an opportunity to have a bigger discussion here.
Why not address the normalisation of drinking – especially in the ‘‘wine mum’’ culture that has developed as some type of misguided coping mechanism? Why not talk about the harm that alcohol abuse is causing to the mother herself and the factors causing her to drink at such a rate that it has resulted in some lack of judgment in parenting?
Why not step back from pointing the finger at parents all the time and look at wider issues – with both these cases as examples, – such as communities not being what they used to be any more. Are we OK with that?