Me and My Car

Depending on how your life works out, and if you’ve had kids, and if they’ve had kids, and assuming you’re all living in the same town, you might get caught up in granny duties at some stage of your mid- or late-life years.

At 60 I thought I’d never be a grandma. Blink. A few years on there’ve been three new arrivals, all accessorised with irresistible smiles. Being on granny duty (let me amend that to ‘calling’ rather than ‘duty’) can be complicated if there’s fair distance between your house and the dwelling of the little people.

So I find myself driving. A lot.

There are two ways to cope. You can mutter darkly to yourself on the motorway about how ridiculous this is and how you’ll have to move closer before you go mad or the rising price of petrol chews up your bank account forever.

Or you can sit back, play some nice music and ponder on the fact that actually you’re so lucky to have a car to get you to the big-hug zone. And how some of your friends have grandchildren growing up 12,000 miles away who they only get to see on Skype, while your trip is only 50ks long.

And that there are some nice cafes and excellent produce shops to drop into
along the way. And that when you get there it really is worth it. Every time.

I’ve made a small video about this modern driving dilemma. Hope you enjoy…

Why China should be on your to-do list

It’s easy to think of reasons why China might not be on your places-to-see list. It’s so big and so foreign, huh? All those vast cities, language you don’t understand, food you might not warm to?
I’ve just done a quick whizz through Shanghai and Beijing and I can tell you those excuses simply don’t stack up. If there was ever a time you should dip a toe into China, it’s now.
We’re talking, after all, of the land that’s pretty much holding the world’s economy together. We need to understand it better and you can only do that by putting feet on the ground.
These are two huge cities – each of them home to more than five times New Zealand’s population. China has more than 160 cities of more than a million people. It is also arguably the country of biggest contrasts.
It’s pulsating and pushy, confronting and confusing, surprising and surreal.
You can see a Ferrari nudging past a man straining to haul a handcart loaded with bricks. Within a block of your hotel there’ll be people buying squalling fighting crickets housed in little grass cages – or choosing the upholstery colour for their Bentley.
You can wander the Forbidden City in Beijing, with its vast squares and pavilions, and be charmed by a moment with a happy modern mum and her son (see picture) all dolled up in Angry Birds T-shirts.
You can feast in an elegant Shanghai restaurant one night and next day see a man with hens in a cage on his push-bike, cutting feathered throats on the spot for customers wanting fresh birds.
But then, in moments, you’re in a beautiful shady park watching someone painting poetry on the ground. He daubs characters in water with a long brush, writing words that will quickly fade and evaporate. It’s called water calligraphy and its contemplative, ephemeral beauty is a lovely thing to see.
Here are some other things I hadn’t expected:
I felt safe. I strolled alone on busy streets at night without any qualms. Crime against westerners is almost zero. In Shanghai, the locals keep taxi receipts because they know if they leave anything in a cab they can call back and have their items returned. That says a lot in a city of 23 million (at last count).
I was charmed. Many locals are quick to give you friendly smiles, even when you’re wandering past them with camera in hand. They’ll also soon let you know if they’d rather not be photographed, but it’s usually just the wave of a hand, not a snarl. The hotels I stayed in had staff who were eager to please and their English skills were humbling.
I was beguiled. Life, at least in summer, is so much lived outside. They come out en masse in the mornings to do tai chi, keep fit, dance, sing and talk. People gather in parks to lustily belt out traditional songs, led by passionate conductors. And they sleep outdoors, everywhere, with open, vulnerable faces, confident of being left alone to dream. Check out this site for proof.
I was delighted. Modern China does city style with pizzazz, using bold graphics and art and smart design. And while its older residential tower blocks may look grim to us, its new major buildings are state-of-the-art and hotels as sassy and eco-savvy as any you’ll find anywhere.
I was impressed. It’s hard to be otherwise when you ride the train between the two cities, ripping through farmland at 300kmh. It does the 1318kms (for $NZ187 in first class) in a little under five hours. That’s further than Auckland to Invercargill – and the run is so smooth it sets up no more than a tremble of fluid in your water bottle.
And the food, oh the food! From upscale Peking Duck to cheap street eating, you’ll find eye-rollingly good tastes to savour.
Then there’s shopping with no limits, except the size of your wallet. And the chance to be naughty in ways now forbidden at home – like smoking in elegant bars or sidecar-biking without a helmet.
China, you’re big and smoggy and crowded and loud. But oh, there’s so much to like.
* Thanks, Air New Zealand, for taking me there. They're now flying direct to Shanghai five times a week, return fares from 1662.

Stand up for 'Mum and Dad'

I’m starting to get so antsy about the constant use of Mum and Dad as an adjectival phrase. You know the one. We hear about the Mum and Dad entities all the time. Mum and Dad investors. Mum and Dad retailers. Mum and Dad franchise holders. Mum and Dad ratepayers.
The Americans have their own version, as in Mom and Pop. In Australia they just call them battlers. I suppose it’s taken over from that older all-encompassing phrase ‘the man in the street’ which never worked either because it ignored women. Whatever, paternalistic words like this always come out of the mouths of people in smartly tailored suits, who work in splendid offices, drive (or get chauffeured in) gleaming new cars and who never come across as being part of any sort of family.
It always feels like they’re talking down to the rest of us. When they say Mum and Dad you know they’re referring to rest of us out here who are just members of the masses - possibly undereducated, needing advice, liable for manipulation, needing to be told what’s good for us.
I get the feeling from such authority figures that they think Mums and Dads are a bit thick and dour and very ordinary. And as we all know, that sure ain’t the truth.

Scary onscreen

These are dark times we live in, at least if you’re watching popular movies or TV.
The vampires of the Twilight saga saturated modern media for a while, and then they got booted out by the warriors of the Hunger Games, in which young people in an imaginary society not too removed from our own are selected to fight to the death.
Teenagers  flocked to Hunger Games and a friend of mine took her daughter to see it – and hated it. She hated what she saw as its glorification of death – and feared for how it might affect more sensitive teens.
I doubt you’ll have see any comments like that from professional reviewers though. I figure they’ve mostly become so immune to fictionalized violence that they can’t see any harm in it.
The mood of these movies is very dystopian. Dystopia is of course the opposite of eutopia. If an ideal society is eutopian, then a dystopian one is a place where everyone’s having a miserable time - a bit like what's happening in Spain now but with murder and monsters as well.
There’s also plenty of dystopia on TV, as in the recent Terra Nova series, and let’s not forget UK series Being Human, which features people who have an alarming tendency to turn into ravening beasts.
True Blood is back on our screens too. Shape shifters abound there, with multiple fangs slipping out of the gums of a host of Mississippi vampires, all the better to plunge into tender necks.  
The biggest new monster on the block is  Prometheus. Its director  Ridley Scott is the guy who scared the bejesus out of us with Alien, as you may recall.
It’s a long time since that ghastly critter gnawed its way out of a crewman’s chest in the first Alien movie. Want to guess how long? 1979. Can it possibly be 33 years? Sigh.
Have you noticed how dark these movies are - as in literally dark? So many deep shades and shadows and blackness. Sunlight hardly gets a look-in.
My current question is whether, at five, my grand-daughtet is too young for the latest Snow White iteration, Snow White and the Huntsman.
I just took a look at some it on YouTube. Oh yes,way too young.
I see it has an M rating - "suitable for mature audiences" but still unrestricted.
Sure, I'm mature all right, but this movie could give me nightmares…  

Lit hits

Book lovers used to talk about things literary but now the literature word itself is being chunked down into 'lit' genres... as in chick-lit, that disparaging little term used for lightweight reads aimed at women. No attention is ever paid to how hard it is to actually write an engaging, lightweight read. Never mind, also, the big money such books make for the publishers. Women are, after all the major buyers of books and popular fiction does best of all. Despite that, chick-lit is considered by critics to be fluff and therefore mockable. I hear farm-lit (also known a rural-lit)is very popular in Australia, where they love novels set in places where there’s lots of open space, grass and animals. Dinner at Rose’s – written by New Zealand vet Danielle Hawkins is a case in point, just published in Australia and new Zealand. And the other day I got introduced, via Bitch Magazine to priv-lit – standing for self-help books. Priv-lit, suggest Joshunda Sanders and Diana Barnes-Browooks, is a first-world kind of con-job because poor people in real need of help don’t have time (or money) for reading about self-help; they’re too damn busy trying to survive. Good point, gals! In other words, it’s only the privileged who have the luxury of taking time out to spend money on 'finding themselves'. For an example of priv-lit look at the immensely popular memoir Eat, Pray, Love, which Joshunda and Diana suggests could just as well have been called Wealthy, Whiny, White. Interesting that these 'lit' genres are all books for women. Nowhere yet have I seen mention of footy-lit, fish-lit or auto-lit. 'Bout time, isn't it?

How much does it help to share the pain?

When terrible things happen, how much raw pain do we want see shared in the world? How much of other people’s pain, especially strangers’ pain, is it good for us to take on?
We probably all discussed these tender topics when we saw the pictures of the beautiful Weekes triplets, killed at only two years of age in the shopping mall fire in Doha.
We cringed at the horror of it. We wondered how their parents could ever cope with such a terrible loss. How could they stand going back to their apartment to face three empty cots, all the toys, the clothes, the emptiness?
We saw staunch, stunned grandparents leaving on the first plane out to get to Qatar as fast as they could. God, what a terrible journey it must have been for them.
People are quick to speak of the parents’ loss when children die too soon, but grandparents have a dreadful burden too, grieving not only the shock absence of beloved grandchildren but having to comfort the bereaved parents as well, one of whom is your own child. Always your child, even if they’re hitting middle-age. Their pain is your pain.
That private pain spilled into our living rooms as the shattered parents sat down before TV cameras to give an interview, somehow finding in their bruised hearts the ability to be gracious about Qatar and to refrain from blaming anyone.
At least one friend told me she couldn’t bear to watch any of it.
In the same week, news bulletins showed us the wrapped bodies of children butchered in Syria. That, too, was dreadful, but we cared about this family because they’re Kiwis, part of our larger ‘family’. We are affected like we were when Pike River exploded and Christchurch crumbled, but the Weekes tragedy is unique in its poignancy.
The triplets’ very lives were miraculous, only made possible by IVF, born achingly early, born because they were so very wanted and because Jane Weekes, especially, must have gone through hell to even bring them into the world.
Journalists squirm a little (if they have a well-tuned sense of ethics) when such stories crash into our consciousness. When TV1 brought us the interview, news bosses were obviously conscious some viewers might see it as intrusive. It wasn’t our idea, they asserted. The Weekeses offered to do it, they said. News anchors talked a lot about 'paying tribute'.
On Breakfast, Petra Bagust struggled not to weep and said, a bit desperately, that it was a chance for the parents to 'celebrate their children’s lives'.
Oh, I thought, but did they really want to do that in front of the whole nation, stared at by all those millions of us who did not know them before, and now feel desperately sorry for them, but can’t really do anything to ease their pain or make it right?
A tragedy like this is utterly wrong. It will leave a wound for the longest time in the hearts of those who know the family well and love them dearly.
None of us can know what we'd do at such a time. Choose privacy or disclosure? Quiet mourning or open grief, recorded in close-up by a camera on someone’s shoulder?
I hope the interview helped Martin and Jane Weekes. I hope that the huge sorrowful sigh that went up from the whole country might, in some indefinable way, help this family and others who are grieving in a thousand ways for their own separate tragedies.
Perhaps, somehow, sharing such loss is a sort of glue that helps us stick together.
Or maybe seeing strength in others gives courage to the rest of us. It's about the only small gleam of light that can shine out of such a sad space.

A long-lost hugely useful speech mark

You know how it is when you write something that’s both amazing and baffling. There you are, bashing out an email and the only thing you can do to express surprise and wonder is to slap in a string of exclamation and question marks at the end.
You’d think there’d be one mark that says it all – and there is, the interrobang. It was invented, I’m amazed to report, a whole 40 years ago by an American advertising executive called Martin Speckter, but for some reason, the interrobang’s never taken off. It's an elegant combo of two different devices that’s just perfect to slap after all manner of sentences, such as ‘He did what?!’ or “She wrote off your mother’s new car?!”
There should be an interrobang on every keyboard if you ask me. In fact there is one in your Microsoft Office suite of fonts, but only your average geek is likely to find it there, more’s the pity. (Look in Wingdings2 if you're wondering.)