A new decade flies in

It seems like such a short time ago that we were all hyped up over the end of the 90s. The new millennium was coming! A brave new age! That is, if we could get over the spectre of Y2K and all the world’s computers crashing and dying. How quaint it all was.
So where were you on that fateful New Year’s Eve? I stood on the balcony of a little apartment we then had in Auckland, trying to spot the fireworks display through the murk. It rained and rained and rained.
Then I went to Okahu Bay to watch a fleet of Maori canoes welcome in the dawn. Had to park miles away. Sat on the beach with friends. The day dawned a bit pallid and dull. We were all exhausted by then. Trudged back to the car, went home, slept, got up – and the world went on.
A lot has happened since those celebrations around the globe, much of it nasty and bewildering. TIME magazine recently declared it a ‘toxic decade’. And suddenly this first decade of the 21st century has almost gone. We’re all ten years older. We’ve either leapt or been dragged into the digital world, which continues to spin ever faster.
Time itself seems to spin faster – and not just because we’re getting older. There’s so much going on that your brain hurts.
I recall, a decade ago, having conversations about what we would call this decade, for the ‘zero’ years did not make for easy contractions like seventies, eighties and nineties.
Some reckoned we’d label them the noughties, but that hasn’t really happened yet. Instead, we just talk about, for instance, 05 or 06. And soon we’ll be referring to 2-10 and 2-11, booting the middle zero out of the way. Or maybe we’ll say twenty-ten or twenty-11. Whatever, the next lot of numbers is roaring down the freeway at us.
In the last decade, TVs grew skinny while people grew large; we talked less and texted more; financial bubbles grew and burst; the web went more viral; gossip grew more global; and mankind kept on chopping down rain forests and firing guns at each other.
So what’s likely to happen next? Who knows. But here are ten little expectations from me. I reckon we’ll see:
1 MORE DRAMA over climate change, and also more talk about limiting the number of people on the planet. Expect to hear from groups pushing a ‘Stop At Two’ agenda.
2. MORE ANGST about geopolitics. So what’s new!? Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan (which is now apparently being tagged ‘Afpak’ in strategic-thinking circles), Israel, Palestine: all such a mess.
3. MORE RUSH and excitement about bright sparks inventing clever new things to improve our lives. Today’s young people, who’ve grown up with computers, will produce marvels the world has never seen before.
4. MORE APPRECIATION of old-fashioned values like friendship, caring, community spirit. With so much going on in the digital world, human interaction will be all the more valued and yearned for.
5. MORE SOCIAL NETWORKING and digital media to both delight us and baffle us until we get the hang of it. Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr; Ning, Bing and Jing – they may sound like Santa’s reindeer but there are hundreds of sites and tools to discover and use.
6. MORE NEED (as a consequence of the point above) to pay attention to body maintenance – with better eating, exercise and de-stressing activities to balance up this stressful world.
7. MORE ADDICTION to the things we use to get away from it all – such as iTunes and You Tube and mountains of pills and liquids, including those endless cups of coffee – the stimulating drug that so many of us simply can’t do without.
8. MORE ADMIRATION of truth, honesty, compassion and moral magnificence.
9. MORE MAGNIFICENCE in performing and visual arts. We don’t want everything brought to us on-screen. It’s glorious to see real live people producing sights and sounds that makes the heart sing.
10. MORE YEARNING for simplicity. Life is now so very complex that it’s the small things we’ll love even more: summer sand beneath our feet; the sound of birds, waves and rippling streams; hugs from loved ones; artless prattle from small children; smiles from strangers; and beautiful, useful things made by hand.
Happy Christmas, all.

Night Horrors

Are we witnessing the decline and fall of our civilization? Sometimes, when I look at TV, I think so.
Slowly, subtly – and not so subtly – the box has become a very scary place to spend time with. Oddly, most of the truly awful stuff comes from England. It’s an strange state of affairs considering that for years we idolised the UK’s quality dramas. They’re still there. I hear, for instance, that the recently screened Bleak House was great.
But most British fare is now pretty yucky. I couldn’t believe my eyes a week or two ago when I stumbled over something on Prime called Three Fat Brides and One Thin Dress. The idea of this ‘reality’ show is for three chubby women to diet furiously in the hope of squeezing themselves into a strapless, bejewelled slip of a gown fit for a princess. This show is really just another version of Cinderella, only there’s no need now for Cinders to be sweet or brave or long-suffering, but merely to be skinny.
We’ve seen lots of dieting on the telly, but this was the first time I’d seen the judge demand that participants bring along a fecal sample for discussion. The judge is, naturally, blonde and skinny and issues her orders like a trainer calling sheep dogs to heel.
‘Whose poo is this?’ she shrieked, picking up a plastic lidded box with a dark turd inside. A chart on the wall behind her indicated the look and shape of the perfect poo. Smooth and snake-like is how they’re supposed to be, apparently.
One of the brides-to-be confessed shamefacedly that in fact the lumpy offering had been produced by her fiancé, Gareth. Judge Lady thought as much. With an expression of disgust she lifted the lid and snapped it shut again. ‘It stinks!’ she shrilled, outraged that the bride-to-be had been too shy to produce a sample which might somehow have been more fragrant.
I could barely believe that this was going on in my living room. But still, I shouldn’t have been surprised as evening TV is now largely a swamp of nightly murder, mayhem and gooey forensics as floods of crime shows swallow up prime time.
Some nights I switch instead to the History Channel (uh-oh, soldiers being machine-gunned); Animal Planet (crikey dick, another animal-cruelty show); E! (how many Botoxed starlets can there be in the world?); the Documentary Channel (oops, it’s Fat Doctor with surgeons up to their elbows inside the torsos of the super-obese); and Fox News, where all the gals look like ex-Miss Americas and most of the men seem to hate Democrats.
And yet, every now and again, something wonderful shimmers on the screen. Just today I caught a brief documentary on Al Jazeera about South Africa’s Miagi Youth Orchestra, a classical-music ensemble of young and hugely talented players from right across the race and income spectrum. I watched a slender black boy lost in the magic of wringing music from his viola, his whole body trembling with the sound and passion of it, his face glowing with the pleasure and power of creating beauty. Aah, sometimes, even now, it’s really worth sitting down in front of the telly.

Green shoots you can believe in

We keep on reading about ‘green shoots’ of recovery as the world struggles out of recession. Some of them seem a bit illusory, but seeing real green shoots does your heart good.

I was in Melbourne last month, catching up with my old friend Mary, who took me, appropriately enough, to Marysville. The name sounds familiar? It should, because it was one of the country towns almost wiped out in Victoria’s terrible black Saturday fires last February. Thirty-three of its citizens died.

The disaster scene is still a surreal sight. You drive the winding road through miles and miles of blackened trees, along that stretch where, in the midst of hot panic, some people perished in their cars as they fled, blinded by the smoke, overwhelmed by the speed of the flames.

Now you can stop along that road, get out and listen...to total silence. All these months later, the stink of burning still drifts through the darkened forest. If you touch the black charcoal that coats a roadside trunk, it feels as fragile and brittle as the top of a burnt pavlova cake.

The town is a sad sight. There are just a few remaining shops and a grid of empty streets with blank spaces laid bare where bulldozers have been in and scraped ruined houses away. Oddly, there are some undamaged wooden signs still hanging between posts where front fences or hedges must have been, advertising the rates for cosy weekend accommodation in cottages that no longer exist.

But there are signs of new life. A big marquee fills the space where a hotel once stood, with two temporary cafes inside offering food and coffee. Workers in orange vests are busy as re-building gets under way around the village.

And the marvellous thing is that all the tall black tree trunks in the forest are just beginning now to shed charcoal-coated bark to reveal bright, fresh, healthy timber. Springing from the vertical trunks are clumps of beautiful, bright green tiny leaves, like explosions of green feather dusters. Some of the trees, from a distance, look to be sporting a coat of green down, like new feathers on the skin of a baby bird. Tree ferns too, have somehow survived and are sprouting elegant new fronds.

And as spring arrives in Marysville, daffodils are blooming – dots of sunny yellow in otherwise empty gardens. Of course, when the fires roared over and scorched the land any bulbs still tucked underground from previous years slept safely on, untouched by the heat, ready to do their thing next time Nature sent out whatever subtle signal it is that motivates a daffodil to stand up and sing. So there they are, blooming like crazy, semaphoring hope.

Rain of terror

Oh, such care people are taking not to offend. So fragile have we become. How thin our skins are. How easy it is to wound with a careless word or two. It must be so, or we wouldn’t be scolded for using what seem to be essentially harmless terms. A friend who runs seminars for a living tells me she was berated recently for asking the attendees to do some brain-storming. A fine phrase, I’d have thought, full of the electricity and imagery that suggests the zipping and zapping of lively debate. But... no.
Brainstorming is no longer allowed less it be deemed to refer to the electrical disturbances that are a part of epilepsy. The approved phrase to use now to describe a hectic exchange of ideas is ‘thought shower’. How pallid. How wet that sounds. Let’s not get excited, folks. Let’s just sit and hear the drip, drip, drip of opinions wafting down from above.
Not long after hearing that, I noticed a couple of terms that are supposed to be now out of bounds in business circles, lest women be outraged. Surely, I thought, surely, after something like 40 years of feminism, there can’t be any ways left to get it wrong? But yes.
Be advised that it’s possibly offensive today refer to anyone as your ‘right-hand man’ (even, or maybe especially, if she’s a girl). And that something personally affirmed by two parties should not now be called a ‘gentleman’s agreement’.
Of course, because we get so much news in mere sound bites and headlines, clever manipulation of words is now mandatory in politics and business. Some people make a good living out of telling people how to do it. Thus we hear about oil companies benignly ‘exploring for energy’, not wantonly ‘drilling for oil’. Some expressions have become famous in themselves – and not in a good way. When we hear, for instance, of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ the phrase is no more appealing than ‘torture’ ever was.
I just read an article by one of America’s most influential word wranglers, Frank Luntz, author of a book called Words that Work: It’s Not What You Say, it’s What People Hear.
Frank says that if you’re a leader of a country or a business, there are five words you should be using. They are: consequences (because people think there should be consequences); impact (because we want to know what’s really happening); reliability (because we’re sick of things not working); mission (because we want to know our leaders care); and commitment (because we care that leaders are personally committed to things, and are not just making empty promises).
Being on a mission, says Frank, is different from dreaming up some cold corporate mission statement. I remember those from my corporate years. What a crock they all were.
There are a few more words I’d add to the good-words-for-leaders list that. Like truth, authenticity, and honesty. Though if someone in charge says they’re giving us the ‘honest truth’ it’s just the sort of statement to make me imagine every shade of dishonesty possible. It’s got to the point where I hardly believe anything I hear on the news.
These days, I’m more interested in real, everyday people and their rich, juicy, tender, amazing stories of real life.
• Give yourself time out to write about your life. Do it for you and your family – for memories not kept are memories forgotten. I'm running workshops in Orewa and Auckland in October and November. All you need for an intriguing and uplifting day is a pen and your personal storehouse of experience. For info go to www.storyofmylife.co.nz

All shopped out

I think that in future we’ll look back at the designer carrier bag as a symbol of the era just past. Think of every TV ad you ever see that reflects city lifestyle or tries to promote the joys of destination shopping. Every one features at least a few seconds of some babe sashaying along with bags swinging from each hand.
There’s an ad on New Zealand TV right now (for Tower Insurance) where two guys are standing talking outside a house while, in the background, a woman is unpacking a shiny SUV. She lifts up the rear door to reveal a sea of bags like the one I’ve drawn here.
Her man looks on glumly as she carries them into the house. They are rectangular, sharp edged and prettified with logos – because, of course, that’s the whole point of these bags. They’re not just for putting stuff in. As you carry them along, they also turn you into a walking, free advertisement for the store or designer to whom you’ve just handed cash or card.
Thus encumbered, you are proclaiming, ‘I shop. I consume with a capital C. I am playing my part by buying stuff that others make, therefore ensuring enduring employment for everyone involved in the manufacture, packaging and transport of these consumables. Not only that, but I’m smart and I’m loaded and can afford the latest gear and am therefore to be admired.’ There’s a whole lotta snobby yada-yada embodied in every paper carry bag.
There’s been a feeling abroad for a long time that not only must you tote shopping bags to keep the economy spinning, you should also see shopping as leisure because everyone knows (don’t they?) that shopping is fun, fun, fun. Tell that to someone who’d love to buy lovely things that nestle in bags like that, but can’t afford them. For them it’s yearn, yearn, yearn.
We forget about the newness of shopping culture for the masses. Time was when those with the money to enjoy top-ending shopping would never have consented to carrying their own purchases. Things were delivered. At the tradesmen’s entrance – if you had such a thing.
More recently, stores would let trusted customers take things home ‘on appro’ so you could try on clothes in the privacy of your own home, or check if those cushions really did match the drapes. There was no deposit, no taking of credit card details. The merchant would know the customer would return them in good order if they were not wanted. The customer would know that if they failed to do that, or failed to pay on time, their name would be mud. The system worked on trust.
But now we have little trust. Now it’s, ‘Show me the money’. Or at least, ‘Show me your gold card’. Only then can you walk out with that thousand-dollar suit wrapped in tissue in a loopy-handled, ego-booster bag. Which you’ll chuck away as soon as you get home.
As the world struggles to climb out of recession, economists everywhere are desperate for us to go back to the mall with the same old devil-may-care ease. But I think the mindless-shopping era is over. We may not be going back to brown paper parcels, wrapped up in string. But all of that just-put-it-on-the-card, got-to-have-it attitude? It’s feeling very 20th century.

THE CHARMED OR UNCHARMED LIFE

I’m having trouble thinking about blogging and all things digital right now because my head is back in the 19th century. I’m writing a new novel set around 1880 and the more I read letters from that era that end in flourishing signatures, preceded by phrases like “I am, your affectionate brother" or "yours very truly”, the harder it is to wrench myself back into today.
Look at this signature by my great-grandfather, Joe Buddle, laid down by him in Tauranga in 1879. It’s so elegant and practised that it would seem it was obligatory then to develop a ‘hand’ that said something about you - assuming you could actually read and write.
We don’t care now. Who’s writing letters with a pen? People aren’t even bothering to say “Hi Joe” at the start of emails, let alone “Dear Joe”. We just launch right into the message. Our sign-offs are just “cheers”, or “regards” if we’re being extra polite. Affection doesn't get a look in. And business emails don’t even carry a name as a sign-off because the automatic signature does it for you. Texting requires no goodbyes at all, except perhaps a CU.
Perhaps it’s all this impersonal communicating that is making big events seem much more profound now. Half the planet must have stopped to watch Michael Jackson’s memorial service, with all of its tributes. When Michael’s brother Germaine sang Smile, and his daughter Paris showed us her breaking heart, they revealed how important it is in this crazy world for us to stop, listen and feel.
We’ve come in 130 years from a world where it was important to write 'very truly’ to one where we care mostly about speed and instant fame.
Michael’s life may have been all too speedy and a bit manic, especially in his later years, but in his going he’s somehow touched a lot of lives.
His whole career was all about exposure and visibility (and the opposite as well - made up of secrecy and shadows). In a way, he was a human example of the power of advertising, that peculiarly 20th century art form.
The entire world knew his music and his moves and his face. Whether admired or despised, he was a massive global brand.
But I’ve found that advertising’s power began to get a hold on us much earlier than the 20th century. In reading old issues of the Bay of Plenty Times I’ve come across an 1880 ditty that was already shouting to the world that if you wanted to be KNOWN, if you wanted to SUCCEED, then you had to advertise, you had to be SEEN. Here’s how it goes – read and ponder:

THE CHARM OF LIFE
Tell me not that advertising
Is at best an empty dream,
For its charm is more surprising
That its base traducers deem.

And whichever way thou turnest
Thou wilt find upon the whole,
Those who advertise in earnest
Soonest reach the wished for goal.

Wouldst thou save regret and sorrow
For good prospects thrown away?
Never wait, then, till tomorrow;
Always advertise today.

Advertise then! Time is fleeting!
All the wealth this side the grave
That is ever worth the meeting
It will bring if thou be brave.

Try the charm of advertising,
And avert a meaner fate;
Be ye ever enterprising,
Learn to advertise and wait.
(Author unknown)

Feeling a touch of grumpy coming on

I guess the time may come for all of us to get to the grumpy old woman (or man) stage. Women have menopause to contend with, of course. And Dr Frances Pitsilis told Paul Henry on TV1’s Breakfast show that male menopause really can happen. It’s all because a bloke’s testosterone levels drop throughout life.
At 70, your average guy apparently has only half as much of the t-hormone as he had at 20. And as it wanes, from middle age onwards, men can lose their potency and enjoyment of life – not just in the sexual sense but also in terms of general perkiness, curiosity and liveliness of thought, possibly leading to glumness, depression and even a shorter life span.
Not to worry though, she said. Once your GP has ascertained your testosterone status through blood tests (and you might need more than one as the results aren’t always exact), he or she can prescribe hormone boosters. One such little helper comes in the form of a cream.
“Where do you apply it?” asked Henry innocently as he picked up a jar of the wonder ointment. ‘Behind your testicles,” said the good doctor, thus perhaps becoming the only person to ever utter the word on Breakfast. Henry dropped the jar so fast it was as if she’d told him he was holding a scorpion.
It was just about the best chuckly moment of the morning. But as a grumpy old woman in the making, I’d already had my share of droll moments. One was hearing a Newstalk ZB newsreader inform me that the recent loss of an Air France jet may have been partly caused by a “fierce equilateral storm”.
“Equatorial, you fool!” I said into the early morning darkness, feeling guilty that I could find any humour at all in anything to do with such a ghastly event. Perhaps it was that very earliness that addled the brain of the journalist who wrote the sentence for her to read.
And perhaps it was the same only-half-awake person who put a piece of paper in front of Kate Hawkesby recently, requiring her to read in another bulletin that the Pope had beatified someone (thus proclaiming that the person was blessed and worthy of veneration). Only the word that came out of Hawkesby’s mouth was “beautified”.
But even the grand and the famous can have foot-in-mouth moments. British PM Gordon Brown dropped a lovely clanger in a speech about D-Day when he referred not to Omaha Beach, but Obama Beach. Just one more reason for the beleaguered PM to feel like a total grumpy old man right now.

The instant book machine

I'm intrigued by this video, showing the workings of a newish gizmo called the Espresso Book Machine. It's not exactly mass production, but in book shops you can use it to order up out-of-print or hard-to-find books, if you can find what you want in the retailer's database. I am not sure how this will work in terms of author's copyright. This is becoming a very complicated world.
However, self-publishers are intrigued by this idea (print your family history,with pictures, for instance), though if you want a thousand copies of something, getting it bulk-printed is still far cheaper. It is of course a great way to make instant books look good, no matter how tedious or unreadable the content may be.(Yay! The world still needs editors, designers and proof readers.)
This video shows the machine in action with book retailer Blackwell's UK, and Angus & Robertson are also doing it in Australia, with eventual plans to put 50 of these machines in shops across Oz and New Zealand.
It's funny, though, that while it's undoubtedly clever, there's something about this machine's whirring noises and moving parts that make it seem kind of steam age - a throw-back rather than a step forward, and more akin to Gutenberg than Digital Age. It takes 15 minutes to print an average book, and costs the same as buying one ready-made.

Check it out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIq0VqF0MnA

The clack of the keys

The newspaper paragraph that slayed me lately was the one in which writer and satirist P J O’Rourke admitted to not being able to “work a computer”.
Best-selling author (14 books), top-rated speaker, mocker of presidents and governments, and former foreign desk chief at Rolling Stone , the guy’s been an ace communicator for 30-something years. Now 61, he comes to New Zealand for a full-on round of speechmaking and interviews and tells the Herald’s Karyn Scherer that he’s computer-illiterate.
I am astonished.
He told her, “I can't imagine how I would manage with email. It's just such a massive distraction with email, and BlackBerries, and Twitter, and so on. I have somebody input the stuff and off it goes.”
He excuses himself by saying that if he had a computer he would play with it. He might find himself looking up “exactly what was Rwanda's GDP in 1954, and other such distractions”. He does enough of that already, he says, “just with the books that are sitting around”. And he is nervous that that sort of activity would “soon devolve into playing Battleships with someone, or whatever”.
He has a cell phone but declares that its number is known only to his family, so he and his wife can co-ordinate childminding schedules. Scherer wasn’t brazen enough to ask him if he knows how to text.
He has no interest in blogging. “The only thing that makes writing worth anything is that people put some time and thought into it, and you just can't do that on a blog,” says O’Rourke. (Tell that to some of the best bloggers around.)
He sees the computer not as a useful tool but a distraction, and prefers his outmoded typewriter because all he wants to do is have time to think about something, and not be “constantly distracted and interrupted”. He seems not to consider that cell phones can be switched off, doors can be closed, and email can be checked as often or as rarely as you like.
He sounds like a man who is very easily distracted.
Typewriters. Ye gods. The miles my fingers must have done. I once prized my turquoise Olivetti Lettera portable like I now treasure my laptop. I’ve battered keys on Imperials, Royals, Underwoods and Smith Coronas. I’ve clacked away for hours, furiously typing xxxxx over errors when I couldn’t be bothered using that special eraser (a round, hard, thin rubber disc) or wielding a Wite-Out brush. I’ve faffed around with sheets of carbon paper and once possessed a now long-lost office vocab. Hands up who can remember what a platen is.
O’Rourke apparently uses an IBM Selectric, invented in 1961 and gradually improved over the years until IBM ditched the whole idea when everyone shifted to computers around 1990. Everyone, that is, but O’Rourke. Amazingly, for all his wit and intelligence, he has become an old fogey. Still, whoever it is who “inputs the stuff” must be pleased. At least the job will be there for as long as PJ keeps writing.

Stress in the kitchen

Everyone wants to cook well, but we forget how CRUCIAL a good home-baked cake was in great-grandma's times for women's self esteem. At least, that's what advertisers tried to tell them.
This word-packed ad, from 1922, tells a tale headed "From Failure to Success: The Story of a Young Wife Who Thought She Couldn't Cook."
Its chapters describe the terrible food served up by a new bride to her long-suffering husband. How shocking this was then. Working women were expected to leave their jobs when they wed. Housewifery was far more important.
The story coyly begins, "When the friends of Miss Office heard that she was to become Mrs Cook, they began to crack the age-old jokes about newly-wed wives. 'Jack will have indigestion for the first month,' they said."
And so it goes. Her first cake is "very heavy", followed by a doughy Madeira, leaden scones and pastry that is "simply waste of good butter".
Then, oh joy, she discovers "sure to rise" Edmonds Baking Powder. "Oh!" she exclaims. "I've not been using Edmonds! No wonder my cooking was a failure!"
Brimming with exclamation marks and proud smiles, she is shown in her pinny at the ad's end as simpering Jack assures her that her cooking is "just as good as Mother's - and better."
Tradition like this is what makes for enduring brands. This is how old slogans make for mindsets that do not change for years and years and years. This is why, when Edmonds was attacked this month by professional cooks for the inadequacy of its Hot Cross Bun recipe, the brand's owners would not admit to any problems at all.
Just like Jack's wife, they had a "sure to rise" reputation to uphold, even when the buns weren't rising.
But they should beware of wives in pinnies. Put-upon women have a habit of flinging aprons off, going back to work and buying store-bought cakes instead. Or not eating cake at all for health reasons. Or coaxing Jack to do some baking instead.

Tick tock bye-bye watch

Preparing to make a speech to staff at a media company, I trawled through some old magazines I’d once edited and came across a full-page ad from 20 years ago starring the coolest new accessory from those times, the Swatch watch. The guy in the ad was delirious with glee over the prospect of having on his wrist something so sexy, so slender, so very ‘now’.
I’d forgotten about the Swatch. Did a Google. Discovered the brand is very alive and kicking. But it got me thinking about the wristwatch. Years ago in a British museum I was delighted to spot, in a glass case, an example of an early watch from the late 1800s. A fat, clunky thing it was, with a leather strap rendered fragile by use and age.
They became so ubiquitous that a good watch became the gift of choice in the 20th century – the pretty one for a girl’s 21st birthday, the ideal anniversary gift (with a few dinky diamonds), the gold-plated one on retirement. That was a weird idea, actually, given that it’s the very time when clock-watching loses importance.
The Swiss originally cornered the market for watches, along with cuckoo clocks and anything else that ticked. But then something bad happened, at least from the Swiss point of view. The Japanese got inventive. Once they’d got over just copying Swiss cleverness, they began to make watches that were just as good, and cheaper, than timepieces put together in Europe.
Yikes, said the Swiss. What to do? And so they invented the Swatch. Cheap, thin, bright, smart and colourful, they were an instant success in a brand-hungry world.
But now something else bad is happening. People are going off them altogether. Timepiece sales have dropped off every year since 2001. I asked my audience yesterday how many of them go watch-less. Close to half the room raised their hands.
Instead, they rely on cell phones, PDAs, in-car digital displays, the computers they sit in front of all day and the clocks that still adorn public buildings around town. It’s the cell phone that’s really done the damage of course. Everyone has one available at all times.
And yet what a funny turnaround that is. Apparently the first flush of enthusiasm for wrist watches came in the women’s fashion accessory market. A hundred years ago men carried pocket watches. Ladies’ gowns didn’t have handy pockets, so a dainty wristwatch was a boon for them.
World War 1 changed that. Blokes about to let loose the artillery or urge the troops out of the trench didn’t have time to be digging into pockets to find out if the moment had come. A flicking glance at the wrist was so much easier.
And now here we, hurtling into the digital future and, at the same time, returning to the past and fumbling in pockets and bags to find a time display not attached to our persons. These must be worrying times at Rolex. And at Swatch.

Recession's alphabet soup

Once it was acronyms that drove us nuts. Well, they still do. I’m forever stumbling over clumps of letters that mean nothing to me.

Now we’re also being faced with the challenge of understanding itty-bitty letters. The first time I heard economists debating the likely look of the end of the recession, I thought, ‘what the?!’ They spoke of U-curves, and V-shapes and (ohmigod) the worst shape of all... the dreaded L.
It seems that, historically, recessions have followed certain patterns – giving us those Us, Vs and Ls. It seems we all love Vs, because it means a swift descent into the depths, followed by an equally rapid upsurge – something like the woe that hits fox-trotters’ faces when criticised by judges on Dancing with the Stars , quickly followed by grins when they score the next dollop of praise.
U curves are pretty good too. We slide down, swoop around the bend and then quickly ascend once more. But the L? Bad news. It indicates a vertical drop followed by a flat line, with damn-all uptick in sight.
I keep hearing commentators rattling on about ‘green shoots’, signs of life, and evidence of better results. But it all depends on who’s talking. It seems Kiwi business people aren’t expecting a U any time soon, given that the latest survey out today (April 8) says confidence hasn’t been this low since 1974. But given that stockmarkets have done a little up-climb lately, followed by a down-slip, I’m betting it won’t be long before someone invents a W mode, with a pesky up/down jiggly bit in the middle. Maybe even a series of them.
My metaphorical soup was made even murkier last week when I heard someone use “hockey-stick” talk to describe the typical uptake pattern for new technology. I took that to mean there’s a brief, u-shaped hesitation at the bottom of any new way of doing things, followed by a swoop up the vertical handle of the stick, as more and more people come on board.
But no.
Googling revealed that the term – coined by someone debating climate records – is based on the shape of a North American ice hockey stick. It describes numbers running along from left to right on a flat line (as represented by a stick lying on its back) followed by an acutely angled upturn, like the blade of that sort of stick. Sharp angle, not U-curve.
At least acronyms do have meanings you can easily get to grips with, unlike two types of hockey sticks. Why, only today I’ve been reading about a NASA project called THEMIS, which stands, as I’m sure you know, for Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms. Yes, well. It is interesting. Really.
NB As there’s nothing we can do about economics or outer space, the best thing to do is work on our own wellbeing. Which means getting out, having fun and being creative. Here are four ways of doing that (all Auckland events). I’ve done courses with all the women mentioned below and know they can give you a good, powerful and even life-changing time.

You can:

FEEL EMPOWERED at Sally Mabelle’s uplifting range of classes covering singing, speaking, relating, and creating. http://sallymabelle.com/events

FIND THE COURAGE TO BE YOURSELF by attending six evening sessions with visionary trainer Amanda Fleming, beginning mid June. Here's the info on this, and her other courses. www.amandafleming.co.nz/courses

DANCE FOR JOY at an afternoon event, April 19, with the inspiring Lizzie Haylock and unwind out of your rushing, time-stressed life. NB No dancing talent needed! As Lizzie says, however you want to move is perfect, no matter your age or shape. A creative, time-out, sensory space for women. For info email: lhaylock@xtra.co.nz

And you can also WRITE SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL, at my own weekend course on May 16-17, Call Out Your Inner Writer. It’s just as much about developing your creative confidence as your scribbling skills. www.lindseydawson.com

Silver bullets flying everywhere

Have we ever heard so much about silver bullets as in recent times? Not that anyone is being over-optimistic about the power of the famed SB. But every time someone announces the pouring of gazillions of dollars, euros or pounds into some floundering bank or other, a sombre guy in a dark suit pops up to say, “this may not be the silver bullet”.
Okay, okay, we get the picture. No matter how much cash gets shovelled into achingly deep holes, there is no guarantee it’ll do the trick of reviving the global economy.
It got me wondering where the silver bullet concept comes from. Thanks to Wikipedia, I now have a clue or two. Appropriately enough for these scary times, it goes back to the days when werewolves, vampires, monsters and other boogeymen made small children whimper and brought bad dreams in the night.
Seems that if you were going out into the dark to slay such beasts with your trusty musket, only silver ammo would do. Why silver? It’s all to do with ancient associations of silver with the moon and the human soul. With its clean, bright sheen, silver was thought to be the only metal brilliant enough to vanquish evil.
The Brothers Grimm dreamt up silver buttons for a gun used in their fairytale,‘The Two Brothers’, to do away with a bullet-proof witch.
In the 20th century a Eugene O’Neill play, ‘the Emperor Jones’, had silver bullets at the core of the story. Investors in 21st century schemes run by modern vampire Bernie Madoff might have been wishing for a silver slug or two lately, too.
But the irony of it all is that apparently they’re not actually that useful. Because silver is less dense than lead, it’s a bit sluggish when fired from a gun. P’raps it’s time for the leaders of nations and fixers of problems to dream up a different metaphor.

R.I.P. the daily paper

Newspapers are dying. It’s like watching a part of civilization sputtering and going dark. Mostly it’s happening in America. The latest was the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer (which will survive in a different form, online. At least, that’s the plan.) Before that, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News shut its doors.
In San Francisco they’re close to losing the Chronicle. On the east coast the New York Times was recently saved from bankruptcy by a Mexican billionaire. What a bitter pill it must have been for proud New Yorkers to be rescued by a super-wealthy man called Carlos from south of the border!
The thing that’s killing all these papers (and the many more also in deep doo-doo) is the internet. Everything’s going there... both readers and advertising dollars. Young people aren’t reading newspapers now. The Classifieds are shrinking. Every happens online and for free and at such great speed that by the time you read a morning paper almost everything in it is no longer news. Even if you’ve not seen it online, you’ll have sucked it up via TV or radio.
Print’s just not in the game any more.
Newspapers are ‘declining and transitioning’ according to a guy whose company recently shored up another sick-puppy newspaper, San Diego’s Union Tribune. In other words, we’re in a time of great change and no-one knows quite where thing s will end up.
Of course, papers have died here too. I often go past an empty Auckland City lot. It’s long been a car park but once contained the building that housed the Auckland Star, my first workplace. Its smoke-filled newsroom... gone. The clattering linotype machines... gone. The great presses whose thunder used to shake the Fort Street pavement and fill the air with pungent ink fumes...gone.
And yet we shouldn’t be surprised. There was something very old about many of these dead papers. It was in the way they announced themselves to the world. Their top-of-front-page titles were in heavy gothic script. Gutenberg, who invented movable type and paved the way for commercial printing, used this script in the 1400s. Even then it was old – apeing the painstaking calligraphy used by monks and nuns to hand-copy old religious texts.
A hundred years ago, newspaper proprietors took pride in that look because it stood for authority, power and heritage. Today it just looks, well, quaint.
And though it’s still used on the masthead of the newspaper I read every day (more out of habit than enthusiasm), I look at that antique font and see it not as a sign of power, but as a signal that these once-great institutions are running close to their use-by date. Sob. I don’t want papers to die. They’ve been part of my life. But then (and here’s the real killer) my local takeaway shop doesn’t even deign to wrap up fish’n’chips in dirty newsprint.

High Altitude Harbingers of Change

I last wore shoes like this when I was about 17. I remember red ones with a bow on the front, just like this sketch of mine. (Only there were no imps playing inside.) And I had some super-glam gold lamé ones. That is ‘lamé’ with an accent on the e to denote glittery fabric, which is now so out of fashion that you may not have heard of it. Without the accent you’ll think I’m writing ‘lame’ which is a whole different word. Although if you wear shoes like this for long enough you get quite lame quite fast.

I’m careful about confusion these days because I was interviewed by a journalist for Sunday magazine before Christmas for a story on optimism, and gave her a list of qualities which I thought were good to have if you wanted to live a cheerful life. I gave her words like gratitude, calm, playfulness etc and included civility in there. She wrote that down as servility. Just a little bit off the mark!

Anyhow, back to shoes. I note that in the fashion-show world, heels have never been thinner or higher than they are now. You too will have seen leggy models falling off the things on slippery runways. (Who knows why they’re called runways, because models lope, stride or teeter or but are rarely seen running. Shoes like this would, anyway, make that impossible.)

But given that it was the 1960s when heels were last like this, I begin to wonder whether women’s shoes and times of great change are not somehow connected. The last time girls wore stilettos was a pretty crazy period when old ways were crumbling and everything was shifting from post-war to new-era. And now, here they are again, just as everything seems new and challenging all over again. It’s as if the more uncertain the times, the higher the heel. I await the next few years with interest. Watch for women’s heels to go shorter and wider next year as the world strives for more balance and stability. Like the impish fellow on the slide, we are in for a ride.

Cheerleading for cellulite

It's raining here today - the first cool, grey day for a long time in a summer when we've equalled the highest Auckland temp ever recorded, back in 1872 or therabouts. Who knew there was anyone recording temperatures on this colonial shore that long ago? When it's over 32 deg C and humid as well, it feels like Singapore.
So today (when I've even had to put on socks for warmth!) there's no-one on the beach, not even any dogged dog walkers. And certainly no skinny gals in teensie bikinis. Welcome then to the kind of girl I'm happy to see on the beach any old time. She's my cheerleader for cellulite.
Someone this big is usually called obese. But let's hear it for women who are not those angular glowering colts who canter the runways at the world's fashion shows. Let us praise women who are full-bodied, rounded, laughing exemplars of beauty.
I've long despised the mantra, invented by the beauty industry, that insists women must do all in their power to get rid of cellulite or 'orange peel' thighs.
It seems we've forgotten that every society in history has admired young women who are slim of waist AND broad of hip - sure indicators (as they thought in ancient times) of a woman's ability to bear children.
Today's girls are filled with woe if they fail to possess lean and boyish thighs that, preferably, don't touch at the top. Once 'feminine' meant curvy. Now it means that most nebulous of terms, toned. Today's female body is now required to be thin, hard and sculpted. How bullied we are by the arbiters of style. Nothing wrong, I say, with flesh that's allowed to jiggle. Not a lot. But a little. Cellulite and all.

OBAMA'S BUBBLE CAR

It was a mighty fine day when Obama got inaugurated. Wahoo, we all went! Of course, the size of his task is already growing and growing - along with the dimensions of the new presidential limo. What a horrible vehicle, so very indicative of the grim and bloated condition that its maker, GM, is in. The media quickly dubbed it The Beast.
Apparently able to withstand attacks of the most grievous kind, The Beast shuts Obama off from the world so well that he might as well be in a submarine.
In olden times, emperors rode in open coaches or chariots so that their adoring people could see them. Of course, the downside of that, even in fairly modern times, has been that it's made even well-loved people horribly vulnerable to assassins. Viz Archduke Whatsit of Sarajevo and President Kennedy.
And now, Prez Obama lives in such a perilous world that he must be enclosed as often as possible inside bullet-proof glass. It is so thick, that glass, that during the great presidential parade it all but obscured the First Family. I think I spotted one of the girls, her profile so murky that it was like seeing her through green swamp water.
Apparently the president chafes at the bubble in which he must now live, and so has persuaded his minions that yes he can carry his Blackberry so he can communicate with real people and not just the government.
It all reminds me of Eisenhower. After he left the White House (back in the 50s)he picked up a telephone to make a call and wanted to know what the funny noise was. Because aides had always made his calls he'd never heard a dial tone before.
You get the feeling Obama will resist such isolation and insulation. But oh, that car. Inside The Beast he must feel like an old-time deep-sea diver in heavy helmet and thick face visor, speaking through a tube to the space out there where the sun shines and breezes flow.