Island Life by David Slack

How long is it since you last put your hand in your pocket for a whip around? Would you rate yourself as the generous type? Was it notes or coins? I just pose the question to add a slight cautionary tone before we plunge on to judge others, and poke in our nose where it has not been invited.

Consider a couple of memorable moments in recent New Zealand history. In the early nineties, the Lower Hutt law firm of Renshaw Edwards came undone in the most spectacular fashion when the eponymous partners contrived to steal as much as $20 million of their clients’ money, which they poured into those two great New Zealand sinkholes: property speculation and gambling.

Hilariously - I use that term with a little hesitation, because the consequences for numerous innocent people were quite appalling; but I use it all the same because it was hard not to laugh at the sheer black comedy of the thing – each of them was busily siphoning out the funds, one race meeting at a time, entirely unaware that the other was filling his boots with the same catastrophic disregard for the consequences. Which were, of course: bankruptcy, deep and sustained public odium, despair and incarceration.

When these accidents happen, the Law Society is there, of course, with its fidelity fund to put things right, because it’s the putting right that counts, isn’t it customers? Oh yes it is.

But when she got there, the cupboard was bare. Even though the partners of the country's many law firms large and small had been diligently paying their dues and sustaining a handsome fund to reimburse any poor soul who might wander into a lawyer’s office and have his bank account set upon in a manner not condoned by the rules of the society, this one had broken the bank. The depredations of Messrs Edwards and Renshaw had been just too much to bear.

Something had to be done, and the Law Society did the only thing they could: they had a whip around. Cost per head: $8,000 from memory. (If I were MSM, I’d be obliged to look it up, but this being a blog, I’m sure someone will be happy to provide the necessary information or, as they say in the newsroom, do the work for me.)

Lawyers being such uniformly kind and generous types, this all proceeded so smoothly and with so little demur or rancour that people hardly noticed it taking place. As if. There was all kind of mutinous talk: howls of anguish from the practitioners in the small law firms who didn’t enjoy the benefits of the harbour view offices in the Auckland CBD. She’s a blunt instrument, your flat tax.

Let’s come now to more recent times. You’ll recall that with every day of the sad and sorry court case involving the low-flying police officers and their Prime Minister, the PR carnage just grew more bloody. Late in the game, when the verdicts were in, and the fines handed down, the cabinet hit on an excellent wheeze for putting things right, or as it goes these days: achieving closure. They had a whip around.

No doubt you can see where I’m going with this. In rough numbers:

Total cost of pledge cards: about $400,000.

Total number of Labour MPs – 40 or so.

“Donation” per head. $10,000

Hurt? Of course it would hurt. But they might want to consider how much more hurt they could do themselves by passing retroactive legislation of such gob-smacking self-service.

There are threads of validity in their spin. A debate about public funding of election campaigning would be a capital idea. Last time we had one, we managed to agree on a not-bad system for allocating political parties free broadcasting time. We might manage to devise an acceptable extension to that scheme. But that debate is not this one, and it should not be prodded onto the stage as the unlucky act that has to follow one that has so comprehensively bombed.

One of the sure signs that your finances are slipping out of your control is when the pile of unopened bills and letters begins to gather. You don't have to open them, because you know what they will say: Where the hell is our money, you deadbeat?

Ah, memories. I once had a job as a process server. You've seen it on the TV. A cheery type comes crashing into the hero's busy day on some friendly pretext and plants a court document on him. You've been served, buddy.

Visa, MasterCard, American Express, sundry finance houses; they all follow the same procedure: first you send the bills, then you write the letters, then you make the phone calls. Lastly, you issue dire warnings and then the file goes to the lawyers. The manure has now hit the blade, and will be flying your way as soon as the process server has been given the papers and a last known address.

The document itself is a terse, bald chronicle of the essential outrage: Eric Smarmy Whatson of 45 Cavalier Place is in default in his debt to American Express in the amount of $482,565.28. Annette Blowhard Princely of Penthouse 3, Arriviste Towers owes BNZ Visa $98,234.99. You are duly notified, blah blah etc, etc. In short, pay up, or be hauled into court where your sorry improvident arse will be toast.

My job was to carry this document to the person named therein, and having verifed their identity, bring it to their attention, ideally by stuffing it into their unwelcoming arms; an innocuous sort of bounty hunting.

What sport it was!

It's hard to remember, all these years later, but I think they paid forty dollars for a simple job, and eighty for the ones that were hard to nail. Good money, by student standards, and you were paid strictly on results. Find them, serve them, come back and swear on the Bible that you've done it, and sign a declaration to the court to that effect.

Serial debtors knew better than to answer the door, and that's assuming they'd been careless enough to keep people informed about their changes of address. But like every other kind of hunter, you learned how to stalk them. You worked out what time of day they were most likely to be home, you developed a good line in wheedling information out of the new occupants of the old address, and you learned how to tell when the "new" occupant was really the "old" occupant.

There were a few rules you had to abide by: you couldn't hit them at three in the morning, and you couldn't come calling on the Sabbath. At least, you couldn't then. In the 24/7 era, God only knows what's permissible.

Monday nights and Saturday mornings tended to be very good, though. Exceptional weather was also helpful. I called on a house in Ngaio one Saturday morning just as a sleet shower began. The owner had been especially elusive. He was home alright, but he would never open the door. Understandable, really. The papers declared that he owed Diners Club about 40,000 which was no small amount of coin in 1981. The sleet came down in a flurry, almost pretty enough to look like snow on a dull grey Wellington winter morning, and so the kids who were sprawled on the floor of the lounge sprang to their feet and hauled the ranch slider open, the better to enjoy the winter wonderland. Aghast, the father saw them, me, and the open door and came striding across the lounge in great steps to get the door closed, but too late, Ethel. He was served.

You're not allowed to serve anyone in Parliament while it's sitting either, which meant a I spent a bit of time chasing John Kirk around town before I finally managed to hand over the papers one night in the foyer of his apartment. Politicians are different from other people. He was the only one I ever served who smiled and shook my hand.

One day I had to serve papers on a guy who had stopped making the payments on his Toyota Corolla. Out I went to a cul-de-sac in Porirua. It was about four in the afternoon, and there wasn't a soul around. Every house was the same - the 1950s two-storey state house design. It made quite an effective amphitheatre, and without any trees, the sound of your car door made a loud echo as you shut it and walked to the door. You knocked, and waited. After a few minutes, someone came to the door. No, Dad wasn't home, but he might be back in a while. You went back to the car and sat and waited. While you waited, you listened to Phil O'Brien doing his entertaining drive show on 2ZM. No-one had mean things to say about his radio work in those days.

And then down the street came a car, slowly, pulling into the driveway. Dad was home. As he turned off the engine, I was at his window. He wound it down, obligingly. We established that he was the man I was looking for, and I said, as I pulled the papers from my jacket, "This is for you then", and dropped them in his lap. He biffed them back out. I put them back in. He chucked them out again. I returned them. He volleyed them back and as they fell to the ground, he said. "Do what you want, I'm not taking it." I told him that I had drawn the document to his attention, and that was all that was legally required.

At that, he flung the door open and leapt from his seat, yelling at me. I could take the fucking thing with me and fuck off out of here. At this moment, every window in every second storey floor of the entire deserted cul-de-sac flew open and heads came peering out as his voice rang around the amphitheatre. Showtime.

I swiftly calculated my options and settled on diplomacy.

I explained that if he ignored the thing, he'd still end up in court. He said he'd be fucked if he'd be going to any court. The Corolla in question was no longer working. It was stuffed. Why keep paying for a car that didn't go? It's like paying for a dead horse, man, he said. I sympathised with him. But he would need to talk to the lawyers if he wanted to get the problem fixed. Did I think they could help? I was sure they would give him a fair hearing, I promised. Of course, this was hopelessly panglossian, even for me, although on a personal basis, it certainly promised me the hope of a better tomorrow. I talked him down, got the papers in his hands, and the next day, I got my eighty dollars.

Oh it can be a sad brutal world amongst the borrowers and the lenders.

If I were you I wouldn't want to pay a lot for the tattered loan book of National Finance 2000. In essence, what's going on here - and may well repeat itself a few more times before the saga is done - is that a finance company has been lending money to all and sundry at high interest rates, to help them buy cars on a dollar down and no credit checks. And where does the finance company get the money to lend to these risky propositions? Investors in debentures that pay high interest rates. And why do people invest in such risky debentures? Because they've seen the ads for a high rate of return and, in some instances, been offered the reassurance of dependable authority figures like sports legends and venerated media personalities.

This is not the first time that people have learned the hard way that investing your money in a lender of last resort is a risky business.

As soon as the economy contracts, these things tend to get wobbly. Especially if you're lending mostly to car buyers. It can end in tears. The car stops working, they stop paying. It's like paying for a dead horse, man. People with a bad credit history can turn the corner, but they can also stay true to form.

This proliferation of easy-loan consumer finance companies might be a boon to the economy, but to my jaundiced eye, I just see people postponing judgement day. You max out all your credit cards, you consolidate those debts with one of the "Easy Loan" outfits and instead of owing a few thousand on four credit cards, you owe one big amount to one company. And then you take out more cards and off you go again. While you're paying the huge interest bills, everyone is more than willing to get a share of your pay packet. But the cycle has to stop somewhere, unless your means are unlimited, and what's potentially happening here is simply that people are digging themselves deeper holes than they once did before the boom came down and someone like me was standing at their ranchslider in the sleet.

Willing lender, willing borrower, sure. Let the borrower beware. Let people learn from the lessons of the market. If you like living in a capitalist system, you ought to be prepared to put up with the occasional bad smell. All the same, I don't think it's pretty to prey on people's weaknesses, or be oblivious to their fate.

I do like the look of this though: Prosper.com is "The online marketplace for people-to-people lending." Salon had an interesting report a while ago that explored the notion that sites like this might transform the credit industry into a fairer, more equitable business.

Trading money on the site is an intensely social activity, in which lenders sit in constant judgment of the most intimate aspects of borrowers' lives, scrutinizing their financial histories and making public guesses about their responsibility. Successful borrowers, meanwhile, must convince lenders to part with their money, not only by disclosing their finances, but by pleading their cases directly, promising to work harder at managing their money.

Of course if we're all going to be under the Islamic boot in another twenty years, this will all be academic. No usury will be permitted, and all we'll have left to remember of the moneylenders and the temples will be TV ads like this and this.

And I will always have Ngaio in Winter.

A month or two after my heart attack, I became a dedicated swimmer. A friend rang one afternoon to suggest I come down to the pool with him. He would be doing his daily forty lengths. I thanked him, but politely declined. He persisted. "But I'd be lucky to do a length" I said. "Better than nothing", he said. So down we went to the brand new Whangarei indoor swimming pool. Heated, and everything. Flash as. This is how old my heart attack is: just the other day, I read they had a ceremony for the refurbishment of the 'old swimming complex'.

Anyway, I did a length, he did forty. "How was that?" he asked, when he finished a few minutes after me. Actually, I said, it wasn't bad. "Right, come back tomorrow and do two", he said. And the next day he was on the phone to make sure it happened. Each day I did an extra length or two, and by the end of the month, I was doing forty lengths a time. I turned my attention to getting well. I read some books my sister suggested, I changed my diet, I learned to meditate and each day I went down to the pool.

One morning as I was resting between laps, one of the nurses from coronary care came swimming down the lane, pulled in alongside me, and we chatted. I described what I was doing, my pending appointment with a cardiologist, and the trip to Greenlane that might follow. I was feeling quite positive about the prospects for living well by exercising and eating better, and I told her so. She had always been more somber than the other nurses, and now, in the pool, pregnant and soon to bring new life into the world, she fixed a solemn gaze on me and said, "You know you should maybe reconcile yourself to the possibility of death".

Sweet, suffering Jesus, no. I was down for the rest of the day. But I am an irrepressible optimist. By the end of the week I had gone through however many stages there are of dealing with a death and I had let it go. As far as I was concerned, it was someone else's death we had been discussing that day, and not mine.

I had to look past the evidence for some years. It wasn't until 1993 that I could get life insurance, and even then it carried quite a loading. But I also knew from looking around that I was doing more than some of my fellow numbers in the at-risk table.

By 2006, I was quite insouciant about the whole thing. It was just a really interesting and slightly terrifying tale to regale at a table over a bottle of wine.

Fortunately I had an attack of vanity last month, which alerted various people who take these things seriously that my blood pressure was too high.

This, in a nutshell is what the cardiologist told me when I saw him last week. Take the pills, diminish the small statistical possibility of death. The heart's just fine: when I get on the treadmill, the ECG all the way to full tilt shows nothing bad. It's just the hypertension. And the cholesterol. I have stripped vast elements of fat and dairy out of my diet, but the cholesterol is still just above the acceptable level.

So I'm on medication for the rest of my natural. Cartia, Inhibace and Lipex, if you're interested.[Light-hearted reference to search engine advertising deleted here, following stern admonition from large-non-evil corporation. I mention this only in order to maintain continuity. DS.]

Those ads, small though their contribution may be, may buy another can of beans for Mr Brown and his boys which is, in family bonding terms, a fine thing. Having only a daughter, I will never, perhaps, have quite the same experience. Now that she's seven, we talk mostly of Proust. Hah! Made you look. The topics are changing, though. Yesterday, my wife had to explain the meaning of an affair to her. Karren presumed the question had been prompted by conversations with school friends, but I pointed to the Simpsons as the more likely source. Mary-Margaret has been deeply and generously immersed in them lately. We also had an interesting conversation this morning on the way back from swimming about Lil Kim and why she had to go to jail.

But back to the health; I have saved the best until last. When I last posted I was dolefully contemplating a world with little drink. "Oh no, that won't be necessary", said the cardiologist. Moderation is the trick, and moderation it shall be. Russell will be able to attest that in controlled conditions (ie the same table at Prego, yesterday, and two weeks prior, a glass or two of wine made an appreciable difference. "You were still good company", he said diplomatically yesterday, "but you did seem a bit forlorn."

I count most everyone I know as good company, and I look forward to many years of sharing a moderate glass with them. But the end comes to us all, and occasionally, we get a sharp nudge of reminder. Mine was entirely benign, and if you don't believe me, then go out and get this week's Listener and read what Matt Nippert has had to cope with lately.

I understand by intermediary email that he may be in touch to swap notes on near-death experiences of twenty-somethings. Matt, we're away on holiday for a couple of weeks, but as soon as we're back, I'll be glad to offer suggestions. How's your swimming?

Here are some things you can’t do if your blood pressure is too high and your heart is rendering the wrong kind of ECG test:

1. Go deep sea diving

2. Fly a 747

3. Get a nose job.

Of all the ways I thought yesterday might turn out, the one eventuality I had not contemplated was getting a ride to North Shore Hospital in an ambulance. The short story is: I have the same nose I had yesterday. The long one is contained in the patient’s notes:

Patient arrives at clinic, changes into gown, signs forms, gets blood pressure tested.

Patient sits, waits, gazes out window, picks up iPod.

Anaesthetist arrives, patient puts iPod back down.

Anaesthetist seems more stern than the others. Announces: “Blood pressure looks a bit high. We’ll wait five minutes and check it again.”

Five minutes elapse, check again. Higher.

Five more minutes. Anaesthetist now begins searching battery of questions about patient’s cardiac history. As questions proceed, anaesthetist’s concern about results of pre-operative ECG test emerges. Wave pattern not what he would like. Suggests heart under load.

Check blood pressure again. Now through roof.

Patient remains composed in mind, wishes to proceed with procedure. Body now rebels.

Anaesthetist continues to press matter of cardiac well-being as patient’s head begins to swim. Reluctantly discloses sensation of dizziness. Expresses need to lower head to this pillow here. Expresses apology as head falls.

Patient comes around to sea of anxious faces. Theatre now full of personnel in blue uniforms swiftly attaching patient to ECG monitor.

Patient is given oxygen mask, is informed that operation will not proceed and that ambulance has been called.

Patient is soon travelling through Takapuna on his back, looking out at the clear blue sky and feeling nauseous.

Emergency department at North Shore Hospital has full complement of junior doctors and efficient nurses who have patient swiftly attached to ECG monitor. Blood tests and X-Rays follow. House surgeon has reassuring diagnosis that troubling elements of ECG appear historical in nature – legacy of 19 year old heart attack. Patient has several hours for contemplation as tests are analysed and vital signs remain under observation.

Patient finally gets around to listening to podcasts of Ricky Gervais show. Hilarious.

Patient watches people come and go, observes noses of great variety, all interesting in their own way. Reads notes on admission board alongside patient names. Most denoted “C.P”. Later, challenge friend to translate. Sympathetic friend thinks for moment, then declares: “Complete Pussy.”

Actually stands for Chest Pain.

Consultant arrives in mid-afternoon. Declares patient safe for discharge. Patient should see cardiologist. Patient as good as word, sets events immediately in motion with trip to GP. Patient explains day’s events, wonders if blood pressure might reflect pattern of drinking. GP assesses data, concurs.

Patient reflects on lessons drawn from day of contemplation. Wonders if nose surgery really what patient needs. Asks self if nose being broken in first place in state of intoxication suggests patient could be overlooking issue as plain as nose on patient’s face.