Issue 172

When
I was fourteen or fifteen I suffered a bout of glandular
fever that I cunningly managed to extend by five or six
months. Yes, months. As a background to this outrageous
liberty I should explain that I was prone to bronchitis
as a child, to the point that my mother became so tired
of constantly having me at home she had my tonsils and
adenoids removed. My brother Richard, who wasn’t
sickly in the slightest, had his tonsils and adenoids
removed at the same time – maybe there was a two-for-one
deal at Christchurch’s St George’s Hospital.
Modern medicine now helpfully tells us we would’ve
been better off keeping our tonsils and adenoids intact,
but in any case it didn’t stop me getting glandular
fever.
My reluctance to go back to the daily grind at school
(as well as my chorister duties at the Christchurch Cathedral)
rebounded on me, particularly in my math’s education,
as I missed the crucial introduction to geometry, trigonometry
and algebra and never caught up for the rest of my scholastic
career. It’s sheer luck that in my seventy-three
years on this planet I’ve never been confronted
with an algebraic equation needing my interpretation.
As a budding young malingerer I was exposed to seemingly
endless days staring at the ceiling, staring at the walls
and then back to the ceiling again, where the only entertainment
at hand was the green plastic radio that had superseded
the black bakelite version we used to own. There were
two stations in Christchurch I recall, 3YA, the classically
orientated government station, (poison!) and 3ZB, the
bit-of-everything, commercial station (i.e. with advertising)
but also government owned.
First thing in the week-day morning there was the John
Doremus version of John Nesbitt’s The Passing
Parade, presented by a Canadian ex-pat Happy Hill
and sponsored by Bayer Aspirin and/or Fisherman’s
Friend. The Passing Parade was a terse three
minutes (without incidental music or effects) that delivered
bizarre and baffling stories drawn from ‘real’
life. I still remember one story about a crashed airman
discovering a farmhouse in Serbia (or somewhere really
cold) filled with ice with the bodies of the peasant couple
inhabitants floating in the ice near the roof along with
their rustic furniture.
3ZB also had soap operas for the bored housewife (or indolent
student) on the week-day mornings, with serials like Doctor
Paul and Portia Faces Life, made in the
US more than a decade before – pretty up-to-date
for New Zealand now that I think of it. I was intrigued
with the schmaltzy Wurlitzer theme music for Portia,
but the innuendo-ridden story-line was totally impenetrable
to this pubescent patient and so held no thrills at all.
But here’s the rub. The bane of my radio-centric
life was one Aunt Daisy, otherwise known as The Mighty
Atom, due to her tiny stature. Her show was syndicated
all over New Zealand and began with the song.. read
more

It is
apparent that people will believe anything. Sometimes
this is a good thing when we all consent to believe that
bits of coloured paper, plastic, metal tokens or electronic
data can be swapped for real objects like food, cars or
overseas trips. But when you think about it for more than
a few seconds you realise that it is strange that we accept
this. Conveniently strange that this is the one thing
that we trust that will work anywhere most of the time.

Internationally strange too, for when I have travelled
overseas I find that once I have swapped my bits of coloured
paper for their coloured bits of paper the world proceeds
as pretty much as normal. Well that is until you come
to a supermarket checkout in Prague and wonder what koruna
ceská are. And so you stand there with your hand
full of loose change and the cashier smiles somewhat contemptuously
with teeth left over from the cold war and takes what
you hope is the right amount.
Yuval Noah Harari in his excellent book ‘Sapiens’
describes money as ‘..…. an inter-subjective
reality that exists solely in peoples shared imagination.
Money is not coins and banknotes. Money is anything that
people are prepared to use in order to represent systematically
the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging
goods and services. It works only because we trust that
everybody else thinks the same.’
And eminently more convenient that carting around cowrie
shells, barley or lumps of precious metal.
Which, perhaps, makes you wonder why gold is so precious
given that, apart from its conductivity, malleability
and non-tarnishing properties, it’s pretty useless?
Scarcity maybe, but like silver it is probably more a
social value than anything else. But not only has everybody
agreed that it is worth a great deal but I am digressing.
So let me digress even more on to another silver hearted
tangent.
Did you know that it was traditional for the heart of
French kings to be removed after death? What makes this
interesting is that the heart of Louis XIV was lost during
the Revolution and eventually turned up, preserved in
a silver casket, at Nuneham House in Oxfordshire where,
according to Augustus Hare, resided the worthy Dr William
Buckland. Buckland, who died in 1856 was, apart from being
Dean of Westminster, also a founding father of geology
and palaeontology. He pioneered the use of fossilised
faeces in reconstructing ecosystems, coining the term
coprolites. He got to the bottom of things obviously.
Wikipedia continues: ”Not only was William Buckland’s
home filled with specimens – animal as well as mineral,
live as well as dead – but he claimed to have eaten
his way through the animal kingdom: zoöphagy. The
most distasteful items were mole and bluebottle fly; although
panther, crocodile and mouse were among the other dishes
noted by guests.
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Wazza’s
Trans-Tasman Tales – Ah
– men!