Island Life by David Slack

1. Photographed by Soviet agent in 1974 in three-way with Selwyn Toogood and Heather Eggleton.

2. Silent partner in Jonathon Hunt's taxi company.

3. Most wounding heckler taunt: "What's in the bag, Helen?"

4. Skipped Springbok tour protests, stayed home to listen to new Kenny Rogers album.

5. Sisterhood nickname for John Key: 'strap-on'.

6. Telecom 'gift': thirty years' free text messaging.

7. Coven meets on Sunday evenings behind Premier House, gets covered in possum fat, dances naked around patio heater.

8. John Key: allergic to possums.

9. Mystery driver of Doone's car was Ruth Dyson.

10. Iraena Asher knew too much.

If a Chinese politician should ask you to explain our country’s Foreign Minister, be inscrutable. Say: “he is a hair-gelled mystery to us all; a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, tucked inside a double-breasted suit, coiffed with infinite care and as untouchable as a matinee idol. We mostly have no idea what he’s on about.”

In truth he is the Huey Long of New Zealand politics. His constituency is the little guy, afraid of the unknown; bruised and resentful at the blithe disregard shown to all the little guys by the corporate brigands and the cosseted politicians.

Peters lives comfortably amidst change, but he knows his voters are leery of it. Peters trades on everything they do not know: the people they have not met; the books they have not read; the worlds they have not walked in.

"Likee soupee?" she asked the Chinese ambassador, breaking the silence.

The diplomat nodded and continued with his meal.

Dinner concluded, he rose to speak, in eloquent English.

Taking his seat, he turned to her: "Likee speechee?"

Peters dismisses the Free Trade agreement with China for being too meagre. We could have got a lot more out of them, he says, if those fools Moore and Douglas hadn’t dropped all our tariffs 20 years ago (and they don’t want you, he says darkly, to be reminded of that.)

To put it another way, we have arrived at the banquet table too late for the oysters, so we should walk away hungry, rather than fill our plate with noodles and barbecue pork. This is, as usual, disingenuous of him, although it certainly throws some light on the thinking that gave us such protracted coalition negotiations in 1996.

China’s surely not in it for the access to our market so much as they are interested in getting this deal to work and thereby creating a stepping stone to bigger things.

When Peters talks about dropping the tariffs twenty years ago, he speaks to his disaffected constituency. He speaks to the small business people who went to the wall, the manufacturers who went out of business, the hard working blue collar wage workers whose jobs disappeared.

If you were lucky, in those turbulent days, you struck restructuring lotto. Ask the disaffected. They got nothing but debts, but there’s a bloke down the road who got redundancy. Big payout. He bought a lifestyle block, put in a spa pool and a pool room, went on a holiday, and by Christmas all the money was gone.

They tell you: Our ex-brother in law got a redundancy cheque from Telecom and the next day they they took him back on as a consultant. We got nothing. We had had to sell the house.

It was a time of capricious fortune. If you were a beneficiary who got worked over by Ruth and Jenny, Helen Clark’s party and the Alliance were campaigning for you throughout the '90s, but if you were a certain kind of small businessman or a casualty of the restructuring, it felt as though only Winston understood what had happened. It had to be some sort of con job, some evil conspiracy that had put you in this position. You were a hard worker and a proud Kiwi. How could it not be a giant scam?

This political thread reaches back further, to Social Credit and another urbane leader with another fine head of hair who nurtured distrust of the vested interests and the establishment. Peters maintains the suspicion of collusion and conspiracy; smoky, shadowy figures in rooms taking New Zealand away from New Zealanders. His words are peppered with it. “They want you to forget about..” “They don’t want you to know about...”

In Winston’s world, someone is always getting done over. We are all being royally shafted and the proceeds are going to Switzerland. Some politically-connected tycoon in a corporate box is helping himself to our birthright. And that’s all you need to know. Likee votee?

Sometimes, things go wrong and our inner cave man comes out. The movie Office Space sees the hero and his two laid off friends drag a hated printer from their office out into an open field where they set upon it with baseball bats and extreme prejudice. The South Park people did much the same thing to Isaac Hayes' chef character. Who among us has not wrestled with these murderous feelings?

I can imagine Brian Connell wanting to do such things to Chis Faafoi's microphone. Or indeed Chris Faafoi. Why stop at house cats?

John Key would probably like to haul the word slippery from the dictionary and do damage to it if he could just get his hands around it.

Somewhere in IRD, there is surely a calculator that shows the signs of having been flung quite some distance.

All around the world, people great and small battle these wrathful urges. Robert Mugabe seems a man who gives in to them with few qualms. Hillary Clinton must battle them often, especially when the tape rolls once again and everyone remarks archly upon her courage under Bosnian sniper fire.

Who among us?

In the DIY phase of my life, the combination of my imperfect coordination and a hammer was an abiding source of misery. I would damage myself and commence to hammering something nearby with the utmost vigour a dozen or so times, cursing wildly, as I waited for the initial pain to abate.

Those days are behind me now, however I am still an occasional user of Windows, so I still know the sensation of extreme exasperation and impotent rage. The sounds I make are much the same but it's unwise to take a hammer to a computer.

This is not to say that some people haven't done so. Wired magazine knows the anguish. The title of their story is self-explanatory: Destroy Your Most Hated Gadget, Take Pictures

There are moments, they write, when you wish that your cellphone -- an otherwise helpful gadget -- had nerves and self-awareness so that you could cause it pain. Now is your chance to get even. Send them your pictures of catharsis. Or take vicarious pleasure in strolling through their gallery. So much destruction! So much deep satisfaction.

I have a contribution in mind. I wrote here and here of my encounters with a fried server. I have here at the world headquarters of speechesdotcom, the three dead disks from the most recent crash, freighted here all the way from the USA just so I could make some kind of cautionary art form out of them. Here are the three innocuous disks, crammed full of fractured noughts and ones that once gave up addresses, speeches and the hopes and dreams of website customers all around the globe. In less than a moment, they became a paperweight.

Keith Ng, who is the sweetest natured and wisest of young men, nevertheless possesses a cool, perfectly evil streak. I showed the disks to him and explained my plan. There was a perceptible sadistic glint in his eye as he pondered the possibilities, before settling on extreme heat stress, in a kiln. I like that a lot, but just in case I'm overlooking something even more satisfying, what suggestions does anyone else have?

I'm also looking to borrow a kiln.

My future wife and I were out of a job on the same day in 1990. Meet the new boss. You may remember him as the eight week Prime Minister, Mike Moore. We remember him as the man whose people handed us a get out of jail card. Who would have wanted to work on that doomed election campaign?

What do you do when you're out of work in the middle of a recession? You take yourselves off on a jaunt to the United States of America.

We were an office romance. There seemed to be an implicit understanding that at a suitably romantic moment on the trip, I might, you know, do that question popping thing. There was an evening out on the water under the Golden Gate bridge that suggested itself, but there was a cold breeze. Anywhere in the French Quarter would have been good. Manhattan was mostly too noisy, Chicago too wet, Washington DC too busy. There was a moment in an Amtrak dining car when I felt on the point of it, but then the food arrived.

Weeks went by; we came back home. I was still waiting for the right moment. I voted Green in a National landslide. Clearly I was ready for a leap into the unknown.

All the same, it still took me another two months.

There is a man named Manu who lives in the USA. He and his girlfriend enjoy a blog entitled ParisDailyPhoto, which offers precisely what its title suggests.

On the Internet, nice people help other people. Eric, who curates ParisDailyPhoto, is such a man. Manu emailed him to say that he and his girlfriend were coming to Paris. What his girlfriend did not know was that Manu was planning to propose to her in front of the Eiffel Tower. Could Eric possibly be there to surreptitiously take a photo of the young lovers at the magic moment and publish the picture on his blog?

Eric is a Frenchman with a generous heart. This is what he wrote.

My romantic soul couldn't resist, so, we arranged for a time and place, and there I was last night (Monday) at 7:45 pm sharp on the Passerelle Debilly. By the way, we did not even talk. All this was to remain a secret until today! - so I don't even know if she said yes.

Click to his blog to see the beautiful picture, and the rest of the story.

And then there is death. Karren and I chose Mary-Margaret’s name because I would say to all her other suggestions, that’s nice but I still like Mary-Margaret.

There is a Nanci Griffith song. I like it because just like young Bob the baby, I like the country music. Listen to this. It's Nanci Griffith in concert introducing the song in her sweet West Texas drawl and providing some charming context to the song about her best friend Mary Margaret. It’s what streaming audio sounded like on the Internet in 1996. If anyone can help me identify its source (I think it might be a BBC recording), I’ll gladly go and buy the original.

It’s a song about shared hopes, shared lives and friendship. It's the song that gave us the name for our daughter.

Also, we liked the idea of a Mary-Margaret who could leave behind a privileged and stuffy life in Grosse Point Michigan to fly planes in Alaska and call herself Maggie. It’s fictional, but when you’re naming your child, you’re working largely with an imaginary character too.

We tell our daughter that girls can do anything and we play her the song, and I think: this is a little girl whose generosity and empathy suits the sentiments of the song and its singer.

Mary Margaret Heenie, the Mary Margaret of the song, died last month. She was 53.

I came upon her story a decade or so ago. She spoke about her illness in an interview, while she waited for a lung transplant. I feel sad for someone I only know of from a song, and whose life perhaps gave her less than she hoped of it.

Our own Mary-Margaret's life is still ahead of her. Since she was little and her cousins went there, she has had her name down for a private school, but we wonder if it's the right choice. This might seem an improbable week to be saying it, but we like the look of Takapuna Grammar. In the 90s it seemed to be in disarray, but notwithstanding one pupil going to jail for drug trafficking and now a bad bullying story, it looks like a decent sort of school these days.

We have a decision to make. On the one hand: fine facilities and excellent teaching at the private school. On the other hand, the possibly malign influence of indulged wealthy offspring. We are weighing the arguments, not the least of them being that Mary-Margaret would like to go to the local school.

The private school sent us a letter last month inviting the prospective pupil for an interview. It referred throughout the letter to “Mary-Margare”. They profess to have a place for her if she meets their standards, but it would appear that not even their database has quite enough room.

At the very least, you need to get the name right when you ask the important questions.

I know the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully. I have known this ever since candidate Bush declared it to be so in the election of 2000.

Presidents come and go, enmities accumulate. We arrived back home in December to discover that raw hostility had broken out in our neighbourhood. On one side: the car, van and SUV drivers; on the other side of a brand new strip of white roading paint, trying gamely to coexist with angry commuters: cyclists.

You could read all about it in the Flagstaff, our great little local newspaper, and more recently in a Metro article entitled The Cycleways That Ate Auckland. Watch the human being and the cyclist struggle to coexist in this Metro {live} thread.

I rode a bike to high school ten miles each way. With a good tail wind I could beat the school bus on the downhill run. I could enjoy the bracing rural morning air and the feeling of the wind in my hair because firstly you didn't have to wear a helmet in those days and secondly, I had some.

Cattle trucks and trailers would fly past doing sixty and I would grab the slipstream. We coexisted peacefully. Geffrey Erard would throw projectiles at me from the back window of the school bus, because there’s always some wanker who can’t leave well enough alone.

He wouldn't be able to hit me on the Harbour Bridge cycle lane. It will have a barrier. I gave this thing a plug on Nine to Noon earlier in the week, and mentioned a web site. GetAcross.Org. NZ is now open for viewing. It shows you precisely how a cycle lane and walkway could be added to the clip ons for not 30 or 40 million but just 3 to 5 million dollars.

The funds are already there, and the strengthening work on the clip on is going to be happening anyway, starting in just a few months. Transit New Zealand just need to know that they have the endorsement of the local authorities and popular support to use these available funds.

I fancy riding a bike to the city. I’ve run over the bridge several times now, and it’s a blast. The web site is inviting people to click their opinion: yes or no: in favour or not. Go on, have your say. Let me just throw this in for your thoughtful consideration: $2.40 a litre.