COLIN HOGG

COLIN DOESN’T RECOMMEND READING HIS LATEST BOOK

Where do I know you from?” people ask me sometimes. Usually, I haven’t met them before and often they insist I identify myself to their full satisfaction, which can be tricky because I’ve long led a double life. Possibly triple.

Writing for a living in a small country like New Zealand involves a certain amount of cunning, not to mention diversification, which is easier to spell than it is to do.

For years, when I was younger and keener on staying out late at night, I made a living writing about rock music and the bands of the time. I probably made more money writing about them than some of the local ones made from playing, but I met a few rock stars too and that was interesting, though rarely surprising.

Tina Turner was shorter than I expected and Iggy Pop more amiable, thank goodness. Then I drifted away from all that and got into writing shows for television – documentaries, book shows and talk shows. I was also a newspaper lonely hearts columnist for a while and I was on a TV advice show with several proper TV stars, including Kerre on the opposite page, for a couple of years.

But all that came and went, as things like that tend to. Two things, though, have remained constant – this column, which made its first appearance back in the ‘80s, and the books I’ve written off and on over the years.

This column connected me with another world from my usual one – a gentler world of family, the funny things kids say and do, growing up, growing older and maybe wiser, love, loss – all the human stuff that connects us.

But this column wasn’t really connected to the other parts of my writing life, the tougher, rougher, noisier stuff. That’s the place most of my books have come from. Sometimes they tackle tricky topics. My new one, for instance, isn’t one I’ll be sending my mother to read.

It’s about cannabis and a journey I took to the US to see what happens when the much-argued-about stuff is legalised, and what we might be in for if we did such a thing here. To make matters even more challenging, my book is written in a lighthearted way. It’s called TheHigh Road and I don’t recommend that any of you read it.

I’ve already given my mother the same advice. “It’s not the sort of thing you want to be looking at, Mum,” I told her. “It’s full of foolishness you’d be better off not knowing about.”

There was another book I wrote, quite a while back, that my father wouldn’t let Mum read, which was probably for the best. Now that Dad’s not around to look after her, I thought I should take up the role of protecting Mum from me. In the nicest possible way, of course.

But I’m not sure it’s going to work this time. Mum’s friends are bound to mention to her that her boy has put out a new book on a topic they’re not sure they want to be reading about and what does Mum think about that?

And I might be in trouble.