The Bloody Newsletter (4)

S P E C
T R U M S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M

Dick’s
Toolbox
mmmWazzer’s
Trans-Tasman TalesmmmmMeet
the TBN crew

Dick’s
Toolbox – Grandparenting
I was looking back through the photographs of my grandson
wondering when you could first see the transition from pure ‘feed-me-change-me-burp-me!’
diminutive pink blob to the start of the two year old charmer he has
become. I would put the date at about five months of age, or in his
case, just in time for Christmas. The identifiable grin, the enthusiastic
exploration, general happiness and misdirected limbs are firmly evident
in the photographs.
Being a grandparent has one major advantage over being a parent and
that is it is a part-time occupation. You can reflect back to the
time of your own first baby and you cannot imagine how anybody ever
survived the stress, the lack of sleep and the demands. But all the
stages which blurred into one another with your own child are now
discrete developmental stages when you only visit for duty around
once a week. You can see almost see the neurons and synapses joining
up, reality merging from an undifferentiated mass of colour, light,
noise and music. A person emerging.
Of course despite my best efforts I am rather besotted by the youngster.
I didn’t realise that kids could develop a sense of humour at
such an early age, and given that words and sentences are still an
adventure the humour is physical. Once he had mastered walking he
experimented with silly walks which would have given John Cleese a
run for his money, and his skill on a trike shows the ability of a
young Mick Doohan. And he likes books which mean that the genetic
inheritance is running true to form.
The bad thing about being a grandparent is that your grandchild will
probably have the same apprehension of you as you had of your grandparents
which is, firstly, old. And grey. And wrinkly. I may think of myself
as forever young but there is no way that young Lachlan will. And
that is probably a good thing as one should acknowledge the truth
just once in a while.
But only once in a while.
There has been only one failure and that is the fact that his first
words were not ‘retractable undercarriage’ which would
have earned his parents a bottle of French champagne. Of course, if
Lachlan had said ‘Einziehbares Fahrwerk ‘ (which as you
know is retractable undercarriage).. read
more

Wazzer’s Trans-Tasman Tales
– How to make £4000
Astute readers will have noted that our esteemed editor
tends to update these pages according to his needs for promoting imminent/eminent
gigs, so the call for a new column that came on Friday evening (today
being Monday) was a tad unexpected as recent columns have commonly
been called for a little later thereby offering a more relaxed timeframe
within which to conceive/create/draft/revise/proof/polish etc etc
and, as we’ve been experiencing a spell of unseasonably pleasant
weather recently, my duties as garden labourer have been in high demand,
which I’m pleased to relate have seen several fruit trees added
to the grounds along with a new raised garden bed for vegetables,
not to mention the securement and spreading of two trailer loads of
excellent compost from a local supplier, whom we visit quite regularly
because they also are our main source of free-range fresh eggs, even
though the hens have been off laying the past few weeks, which has
resulted in more breakfasts comprising porridge or fruit, muesli and
yoghurt; by the way, if you’re wondering about this ever lengthening
sentence, it’s not about competing with The Editor, who has
taken lately to introducing his own monthly postings with lengthy
strings of words, it’s a nod to one Mike McCormack whose novel
Solar Bones has joined what I’ve discovered is actually a ‘genre’
known as “One-Paragraph and/or One-Sentence Books” which,
according to the article, is producing quite “An Ongoing List”
and joining this list with his one sentence spread over 270 odd pages
contribution, earned McCormack a cool €100,000 so I’m hoping
that by dragging out this pretty average recounting of the goings-on
of yours truly over recent days I might, at least, get some credit
from The Editor for delivering on his SMS missive for me to ‘prepare
to be published this coming Monday’, but then again he may well
find that the entire enterprise is just a load of old b******s, spike
it and send me a ‘reject slip’ with a demand for a more
appropriate contribution and the likelihood of meeting that will be
in strong competition with more pressing demands on my time/efforts
for my highly sought after labouring capabilities from an employer
I am much more obliged to serve than The Editor (as he well knows,
being himself similarly obligated when it comes to gardening duties)
also, I would like to add here that as the missive I received from
The Ed was an all-correspondents alert that went to our other fine
columnist, Dick of Toolbox fame, I did note that Dick’s immediate
retort read “I have reached for the whisky” and, as I
swore off the demon drink some quarter century ago, I don’t
have the benefit (if that’s the word for it) of the amber liquid’s
effect for improving creative lubricity, so if you’re finding
this tale a trifle/terribly tedious and trying I can only hope that
Dick’s imbibiously (sic) assisted contribution goes some way
towards ameliorating your dissatisfaction, furthermore I do have a
few other topics waiting in the wings for future editions (if I’m
still on the books and can overcome the creative friction brought
on by short-notice deadlines) such as: the deepening rift in trans-Tasman
governmental relations (mind you the way things are looking over your
side lately the incumbents mightn’t be there much longer for
me to whinge about); the media’s new-found fascination with
male parenting as a consequence of the popularity of Aotearoa-New
Zealand’s First Child Neve Te Aroha Ardern-Gayford (“or
Neve Gayford for short” – the Patriarchy still reigns
then!), and; the disappearance of academics from higher education
given that most now doing the job are students themselves working
part-time to subsist while they pay outrageous fees to micro-management
and macro-marketing sodden administrations to be ‘taught’
by students themselves working part-time to subsist while they pay
outrageous fees to micro-management and macro-marketing sodden administrations
to be ‘taught’ by…(to be continued)