A holiday is no excuse for lax column-writing
Iam on holiday but, after scrambling through the trash file on my laptop and pouring over scraps of paper and notebook entries, I’ve compiled a number of column-leading paragraphs which, so far, have failed to blossom. Such is the life of a column-writing publican.
1. I was hauled up Catholic and as an adult I’m not particularly religious, beyond a general idea that most of these systems have some decent advice about how to operate human relations.
You know the stuff: Don’t kill or steal, don’t covet your neighbour’s Lawnmaster, and in your dealings with other people, think how you’d like to be treated. That one’s the one which impels me to pick up the toilet brush after the old number twos and give the bowl a good scrub and rinse.
There are places you just don’t want to leave your mark on the world and I know that if it was someone else’s, I wouldn’t want to face it.
2. With the less clement months upon us, my mind lingers over memories of running bars inside buildings, out of the wind and rain, with a roof and windows and doors and heaters. We are coming into the time when, after climbing the steps to our bar and studying the tap beer offerings, people often ask me to recommend a good place to meet friends for a drink.
3. Nobody likes to admit they aren’t perfect but I have a confession to make: Since the earthquakes, I have become terribly homeownerphobic. Even though I had a flat in a building that was partwrecked, I couldn’t stand the way people went on and on and on and on about their ‘‘lifestyle’’, about the prejudice they were suffering under from EQC and insurers and people who weren’t like them on one hand, and gloating on the other hand about how much the value of their choices was paying off. I wanted to strangle them all.
4. When do young people become adults? I was watching a programme on the television recently and an item came on about an old guy in the United States, a former concentration camp inmate in Nazi Germany who had taken into his home a younger person as a flatmate. This was apparently after the man’s wife had had to go into a home. It didn’t say if she, the wife, had subsequently died but that’s not the point. The flatmate was 31 and referred to herself at least once as a young girl. Thirty-one!
5. There’s a guy who comes into the bar who has a theory of moustaches. He thinks they are a distinct organism which operates in a similar way to those tree vines which grow without hurting the host tree, and he claims that when a person with a moustache dies or shaves off their whiskers, the moustache spirit flits away to land on someone else’s lip and that person immediately starts growing a moustache and thinking that they will look very attractive with a moustache.
So it’s not really epibiontic, he says, because it has this mind-controlling aspect. I’ve asked him to consider the recent popularity of the Brazilian, and whether he thinks there are now millions of lower-body body hair spirits flitting around trying to find somewhere to alight, but he won’t bite. Like the different types of human lice, he’s only interested in the head.
Readers are invited to say which ideas, if any, show promise and Johnny will reassess them upon returning to Godzone.