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.

Egypt's neverending cycle

I am riveted to TV's news channels as the Egyptian revolution unfolds. It's too soon to tell how it will go, but my mind is full of Egyptian memories from nearly 10 years ago. It was 2002, just after 9/11, and it was a good time to visit as Americans were too scared to visit - wary of anywhere Islamic - and many of the great sites were virtually empty of other tourists. I loved it. The wonderful temples in the south, the fabulous statuary, art and sculpture, the stupendous skills of its pyramid builders, and the profound myths and legends.
Here's a papyrus painting I bought then, of Nut (pronounced Noot), the sky goddess.
The Egyptians were fond of painting ceilings inside temples a deep rich blue, sprinkled with stars - a design theme copied much later by medieval church builders in Europe. Nut was in charge, giving birth to the sun each morning and swallowing it each night in an endless round of light and darkness. The idea was that her great body arched protectively over the earth and all its inhabitants. So here she is carrying out her neverending duties with the starry sky above, and the busy earth below.
If Nut was still worshipped she'd sure be busy now, struggling to protect the land below as her country stumbles towards a new, uncertain future.
Even in '02 the poverty was plain to see, the infrastructure crumbling. Even then it was a bit dodgy. Fully armed tourist police accompanied us everywhere. The authorities were desperate to maintain tourism as a foreign exchange earner.
That cash flow must already have plummeted. Jobs will be disappearing. Food supplies must be running low. Cairo, always a tough city, will be an ever harder place in which to survive. Cairo is huge. Nearly 8 million are crowded in there, most of them scrabbling a life together on tiny incomes.
Even 10 years ago, people we met were derisive of their leader, Mubarak, but he had an iron grip. But it seems his time has finally come. He's just not admitting it yet...probably too busy with his hairstylist, ensuring that at 83 his hair is still black as kohl. It's as if he pretends, like the ancient mummy makers, that he can stay youthful for ever.
But one of these mornings, as Nut gives birth to the Sun yet again, the old man's reign will end. Even the pharoahs lost their power in the end.

Door knocks after midnight

I have a new TV show up and running,Let's Talk", running weekly on Stratos TV, 5pm Mondays. Haven't had time yet to put a clip from it up on YouTube but here's a chunk of script I used in the show. It's something I really wanted to say...

After yet another horrendous car crash last weekend, killing two teenage boys, maiming two more and also killing a man who had the terrible luck to be in the way, all of us must be asking ourselves if there isn’t more we can do to stop this happening so often.

It was, as usual, all about booze, speed and bad driving and the kids who died were just 16 and 17. The man in the other car, who was 45, was on his way home after work to his wife and three kids.

Once again we’ve seen the ripped up cars at the roadside, so totalled they look like a monster has torn them apart.

We’ve seen pictures of shocked relatives clinging to each other. We’ve heard again how it looked like a war zone.

And a police sergeant told a reporter how he’d had to knock on the doors of four separate sets of parents and the wife of a dead man in the middle of the night, to deliver the bad news.

A friend of mine who was a police officer once told me how that feels – to stand at a door with your fist up, knuckles ready to go, hearing calm and happy sounds or peaceful silence inside and knowing that in just a moment you will blow these people’s lives apart.

We still don’t have it right, it seems, when it comes to tragedies like this. The license age is still too low, the drinking age is still too low, driving skills aren’t good, and of course you can never underestimate the desire in teenagers for the sheer thrill of speed, no matter how often parents say ‘drive carefully’.

Apparently there was a beer box and alcopop cans littering the scene of the last disaster… and that’s something we can at least try to get right. In California they have a simple rule about alcohol and vehicles. Having any drink inside the car at all, whether opened or unopened, is forbidden. If you’re carrying booze it has be out of reach, locked in the rear compartment.

We can’t tell what happened in that car at Waihi but over and over again we hear of accidents where booze was being knocked back even as drivers and passengers rode to oblivion. We can’t stop people drinking either before they get behind the wheel.

But at least we could do more to discourage anyone from drinking while the car’s in motion, and thus cut down the yahooing and the egging on. It’s such a simple idea. And wouldn’t it be worth if it at least it prevents just one more family from hearing that knock on the door after midnight?

Join the chorus

I've been writing a piece on Twitter for people who aren't on Twitter. Here it is...

When I hear this summer’s tuis going squawk, rasp and whistle, it seems like Twitter has somehow taken over my garden. But when the mini-blog site was invented back in 2006 its name was merely “twttr” – a five-letter code partly inspired by the picture-sharing website, Flickr.
An American called Jack Dorsey and some friends were messing about with the idea of being able to contact small groups of friends via SMS messaging. It was only when they spotted the global potential of their idea that Twitter, the brand, came to life complete with its little bird logo.
Five years on the avian chorus is deafening, with tweets breaking out all across the virtual arena that some call the Twitterverse.
Twitter is smaller than Facebook and YouTube but is still enormous at around 100 million users. Million, schmillion… it’s just one slice of the vast social-media pie, but more and more of us are taking flight there.
Many will start out like me. You open a free account (my name there is @lindseyoutloud) at www.twitter.com, do one cautious tweet, find a few people to ‘follow’, then just sit back and watch. Once the world starts streaming in you begin to ‘get it’. Soon you too will be itching to tweet – using no more than 140 characters at a time, please. It’s interesting how inventive you can become.
Unbelievers will tell you that reading celebrity prattle is a big yawn. But tick the right ‘follow’ boxes and you’ll be well entertained. By following Vanity Fair, for instance, I can get early alerts to top story links on that magazine’s website so I can read tasty pieces way before the actual issue gets here.
I follow comedians, writers, politicians, monks, big thinkers, artists and activists – and a bunch of friends old and new. It’s great for new thoughts and ideas and video links and, as with Facebook, you can direct-message your contacts as well.
Aucklander Linda Coles, of Blue Banana Ltd, is making her living training business people in how to build relationships online. “All that stuff about what people are having for breakfast is just boring,” she says. “It’s really about letting people you want to do business with know you exist. “ Linking Twitter with business site LinkedIn, she’s constantly interacting with existing customers and new prospects and sees it as an essential business tool.
For the rest of us, it offers fleeting fun as often as you want. And here’s an unexpected upside – if you become a tweeter you’ll find yourself mostly amongst grownups – teenagers don’t like it much. One recent survey found only four percent of Twitter users are under 18. Average age: a nicely mellow 31. n
* This article appears in the Jan issue of Next magazine.