Heartsick for the south

Each week on my TV show, Let's Talk, I have a minute or two to voice an opinion piece. I write it on Tuesday, record it on Wednesday and it gets aired on Friday. I can't even remember now what I was sitting down to write when I first heard the news about Christchurch. Something, I think, about how the media had so comprehensively ignored Auckland's lovely Chinese Lantern Festival.
The earthquake wiped all normal preoccupations from my mind. From everyone's minds. Those of us who don’t live in Canterbury could only gaze in shock at the TV, listen to the radio, and be so, so grateful that we were not ourselves involved.
The whole country came to a standstill as everyone struggled to absorb the scale of the destruction and injury and death that had struck so suddenly on an otherwise so- average Tuesday afternoon.
The human casualties were the worst but the symbolic toppling of the cathedral spire must have been like a knife in the heart for those who love that city.
But then something else happened. For good things do come out of times like this. Love rises. Compassion swells. Ordinary people discover what extraordinary strengths they possess. And everybody, just everybody, wants to help.
As New Zealanders we sometimes feel that we live in a little country where not much happens. Something really big happened last Tuesday. Lots of terrible things are happening on Planet Earth right now, but we don’t have time to pay much attention to anything else. For this is our country’s pain. Our country’s challenge. Our country’s current mountain of trouble.
When all we can hear are the voices of pain and loss, no one wants to hear about lessons learnt, but I guess there’s just one small one – the pictures we're seeing might at least prompt some more of us to finally take serious and sober notice of those television civil defence ads in case, sometime, it’s our turn.

Ignore the oval ball

I’ve recently met people who were planning big events towards the end of this year but are thinking they’ll pull the plug. Because, hurtling down the track is the all-consuming Rugby World Cup.
I know some of you can hardly wait. But me, come September, I’d rather be outta here. I know I’m not alone. Even Martin Snedden, the RWC chief executive, thinks about 40% of us are either indifferent to rugby or actively dislike it. But you’ll never know that in September when it will be severely unpatriotic to refuse to haul on an AB shirt and paint your face black.
I was therefore overjoyed to discover a Melbourne group that detests all the feverish hype surrounding Aussie Rules - run by the AFL, short for Australian Football League.
To poke fun at footy hysteria these rebels formed a different AFL, the Anti Football League.
It’s 41 years old and has 1000 members, 60% female.
I’ve been having a giggle reading their website.
It declares members are united by the common understanding that there is more to life than the ability to kick a pigskin between two white posts. They also hand out an annual medal to 'the person who does the least for football in a given year'.
It’s all done in good humour. They periodically destroy a football – by explosion, for instance, by fire or by burial at sea. They meet away from TV sets to enjoy alternative amusements on cup final days.
Members can even buy a badge, Madge, in the shape of a square, unkickable football. Stickers are available too – that’s how it looks (above). And, bless ‘em, they raise lots of funds for charity (despite which they get lots of hate mail).
Great idea, I reckon. We could sure do with an alternative world cup event. Not easy, though, to dream up a suitable name with the initials RWC. I’m working on it, but given the power of rugby I’ll probably find the boys have already slapped copyright on it.

Hungry for a good blog

How obsessed with food we’ve become. The telly is full of it. Nigella, Jamie, Rick, Annabel and Gordon (see, you don’t even need their surnames to know who they are) and all the reality-show wannabe chefs are everywhere. So it’s no wonder the web is also brimming with edibles.
In my mum’s day, neighbours used to swap recipes over the fence. Now the food universe is both enormous and local, all at the same time. Keen cooks are launching blogs, taking their own photos of their lovely dishes, and sharing their creations with the world. I love it.
Emma Galloway’s blog is a delight. It’s about “my family, food and recipes, my vege garden and how we cope living with food allergies”. Based in Raglan, but soon moving to Perth, Emma is a vegetarian (except for fish) and trained chef. She has a wide range of yummy-looking recipes that include lots of sweet treats, such as chocolate afghans free of dairy and gluten. And I can’t wait to try her grapefruit curd.
Emma’s work is included at Foodgawker, a San Francisco-online gallery jammed with thousands of treats cooked up and photographed by ardent foodies.
That’s one of Emma’s photos above – a platter of grilled courgette with parsley, olives & garlic crumbs Anyone can submit dishes; if you’re keen, look up the rules and have a go.
Of course, a big international site like Foodgawker doesn’t take account of topsy-turvy seasons and regional preferences – for that you need to look closer to home.
Example: Plum-kitchen, created by Auckland accountant Kristina Douglas. She loves it when people try her recipes and comment on them. “How cool is that,” she says.
UK-trained chef Allison Pirrie Mawer of Muriwai, where she runs the Gourmet Gannet cooking school, also has a beguiling blog. At her site, I found a link to Nigel Olsen’s blog.
He’s even made gorse useful by concocting a pale yellow gorseflower cocktail, made from equal parts vodka, dry vermouth and gorseflower cordial. That is derived from boiling handfuls of flowers in water, caster sugar, lemon juice and orange rind. How does it taste? Apparently, like "mangoes", "cut grass", "spring" and with "herby notes".
If tackling gorse sounds too hard, you may just need someone to point you to great places to shop. If so, MrsCake is a good port of call. Rosa Wakefield lives in Wellington but loves reporting on culinary explorations all over the place. Her Twitter account (also under the MrsCake name) says she is “working to explore the world one meal at a time”. Aren’t we all.

Unfurl something new

Here's my rant for my TV show this week - Let's Talk, Stratos TV...
Listener magazine editorial writer waved the flag this week for a new flag. A flag for us in New Zealand, not one with Britain’s flag still stuck in the corner. A flag that says something about us as an independent Pacific nation. One that means you’d no longer have to pause and think, now is that ours with the four stars on the blue or is it the Australian one?
Of course this sort of talk instantly gets people shouting and grumbling. Half of us cry, "Don’t change it’, soldiers have died for it, it’s our history, how can you even think of ditching it!"
Me, I’m in the "yes, let’s change it' camp. I reckon Britain stopped loving us long ago, but still we cling to this tiny little remnant of the time when world maps were scattered with the pink landa of the dear old British Empire.
Canada woke up, dropped the ensign and opted for its bright maple leaf flag more than 45 years ago. Not without pain, mind, because diehards there scrapped like pitbulls to retain the old design.
You probably don’t know what it used to look like. It was kind of like ours, though red rather than blue. That's it at top right...boring, huh, when you compare it with the current blazing maple-leaf design.
There was a Union Jack in the corner, and a shield with a mish-mash of symbols in the middle. Completely blah. A few million maple leaves later, the queen is still the Queen of Canada. I don’t think she’ll have conniptions if we run something new up our flag poles. We just need to do what the Canadians did – appoint a design-savvy team and get on with it. And just imagine how much fun it would be to get in ahead of the Aussies.