Island Life by David Slack

In my observation, the Internet is composed of two groups of users: the ones who like pictures of kittens and the ones who like pictures of porn. Remarkably, someone has produced one that will find favour with both groups. here it is. Probably SFW unless you work in a vet clinic.

So cute, and yet so carnal. So feline and yet so filthy. So adorable and yet [Okay, we get it. RB]

Meanwhile in America, here's a lesson for us all about tidiness. People who collect their corks should pay special attention.

The Matariki Kiwi award will probably be going to Mark Inglis at this rate, so if you have someone else in mind, now would be the time to make your nomination.

Thank you very much for all the kind thoughts and good wishes about the looming face-carving. Not everyone thinks I have the right idea, though. Susan sent a message of just two words: "Adrian Brody".

Unless you are planning to get yourself smacked in the face with a piece of four by two this Thursday, I predict that I will be waking up on Friday morning feeling less comfortable than you. Elective surgery; upon the nose.

I have broken it twice, but being broken is only half the story. Huge, it is. In all but the fiercest storm, a small family could huddle safely in its shelter.

You may or may not be aware that certain parts of your body keep growing until the day you die. I can still recall the dismal day I learned that the nose is one of those body parts.

From time to time I would come across an article about rhinoplasty and wonder if it might be for me. I would say to friends : I've been thinking about getting my nose done. And without exception they would say in the polite way people do: no, no, it's fine, you don't need to do that, and I would say No, really. I want them to make it bigger. That would pierce their diplomatic guard; they couldn't help themselves. Embarrassed laughter.

But I would never act on it. It would be vain to get it corrected. Vain and shallow. I chose to wear my big, broken, twisted, hooked and still-growing nose with grace and forbearance.

Never say never. One day about six weeks ago, I happened to hear Michael Laws interviewing the very doctor who examines me once a year for moles, melanomas and other dangerous entities. The topic was cosmetic surgery, the lines were open and the callers could not get enough of him. He's very good at it. He took us through minor blemishes, major disfigurements and everything you have ever wanted to ask about the business of nipping and tucking.

Inevitably, there was a caller who wanted to discuss her nose. She hated it. She had hated it all her life, and she would dearly love to see it changed. The car radio now had my full attention. Dr Grey explained the practicalities of rhinoplasty, and then turned to the emotional dimension. He had seen such procedures bring much joy to people. He probably didn't use the words "Change your life" but you certainly filled yourself with the conviction that, dammit, vanity or not, this warranted further exploration.

Before you could say ear nose and throat specialist, I had an appointment. I was still a tyre-kicker at this point. For one thing, I was of the view that a general anaesthetic was something to be had only when it was completely unavoidable. In that respect, I may have been unduly cautious. Our neighbour, who's an anaesthetist, says that would have been sound thinking twenty years ago. Back then, people underestimated the risk; today, he says, it's far safer and they exaggerate the danger. Anyway, off I went to Mr Rhinoplasty Surgeon.

He had me sold at the first sentence. "I love it when people like you walk in," he said. It seems there are young women who will undergo procedures for which their need is, at most, slight. Inevitably, the results of the surgery may not be readily discernible, leading to disgruntlement. The customer is always right, especially at these rates.

In the nicest possible way, he told me there would be no danger of the difference being imperceptible in my case. He took photos, he described the procedure, and to my great delight, he informed me that there'd be no need for a general anaesthetic. It's done under intravenous sedation. One may even wear one's iPod, if one wishes.

I was sold. I returned a week later to see the indicative photos with some excitement. There on the screen of his laptop was a picture of me with a simple, regular nose. Vanity be fucked, I was having that.

Earlier this year we were on holiday with friends. The four year old said to his mother, pointing at me - Mummy, you know what he looks like? He looks like a goblin! She smiled weakly in my direction, a little flustered, I gave her a reassuring grin. And truly, I was amused, not stung. But should a man have a nose that frightens small children?

No, it would not do. Not when I could have a nose like that one there in the perdy pitcher.

So that's that. Thursday morning, I go under the knife. Christie, if you think these pictures are gory, wait until you see what I've got coming.

All I have to do now is make a playlist. I fancy the likes of Jane's Addiction, Alejandro Escovedo, Champion Jack Dupree, The Damnwells, and Charlie Robison would work well, but this is fresh territory for me, so feel free to make suggestions. What's good to listen to while you're under sedation and having a chisel taken to the middle of your face?

What can you say about a dog that died? That he liked Beethoven, licking his private parts, and me.

Oh, it's so hard to put it into words when the dreadful day comes. And yet the Marlborough District Council, among others, wants to charge you a hundred bucks if you don't tell them your dog is dead. Really. We live in hard, callous times.

I heard the man from the council giving it a good defence on the radio the other morning. He thinks people are lazy. They're having to chase all over the show for unpaid registration fees.

It's a reality that money talks. A hundred dollars isn't a lot, but to most people it's a lot to make them sit up and think and actually take responsibility for what is a requirement by law, to let us know that their dog has died.

The kennel club people suggested he look into his heart and ask himself if the problem might not be that the owners are beside themselves with grief.

I ask myself a different question. As someone with a web site that automatically writes things for people, I see nothing but opportunity here. I ask myself: I wonder if they could use a hand writing the letter?

The kennel club people are bound to be right: you can't think clearly when you're stricken with grief. But the council people are right too - time is money. They need to know where they stand and a letter must be forthcoming.

Dear council, oh how I hate to write.

I might even do this for free, now that I think about the pain, anguish etc. I would offer a selection of styles to suit individual taste, like any good funeral parlour.

A cold, perfunctory acknowledgement, for instance:

Spot dead. Stop sending bills.

Perhaps something a little gentler:

Our dear little Damian turned up his toes last night, We won't be needing another collar, thank you.
Kind regards, Andrew.

You could pour your heart out - no point living in denial, after all.

And then when Che was five, he did the sweetest thing….
….And a few years later when the children had stopped tormenting him, he really became quite placid for a Rottweiler.

You could use the same script you delivered at the pet memorial service

Russell - a loyal and faithful hound,
a lifelong friend,
a footstool of just the right dimension.

Sometimes being frank and honest helps you ease your burden.

I never liked the bloody thing, and once Adolf was gone, I honestly couldn't see the point in spending good money on meat. He had a collar with the name DPF in diamonds. I suppose you want that too???

Some call this a moment of anguish, but in country music, the term is "golden opportunity". I don't know if I could run to a song, but I promise you this guy could do you a beauty, and quite possibly even throw in a memorial web site.

I see the really big money, though, in the one style that truly makes my toes curl. You would not believe how many times I used to get requests for a "wedding poem" before I turned off the facility for bespoke speeches on the site. There is a huge market for it, although the correct description, which is even more accurate in this context is ... doggerel.

Here's the note I cannot write
My life was once in clover
But now my dog has breathed his last
My happy days are over

As well as that, my prostate's crook
And each time I bend over
I wonder, as the Doctor probes,
If I might soon join Rover.

I know you blokes are busy there, and
Life's just one big battle,
But spare a thought for me out here
With ninety head of cattle

I know you say your rules make sense
But I can't help but think
That if the show was run by Don
I wouldn't need a drink.

Some people have mocked Alex Swney for daring to ask the question: what has the Great Blackout of 06 done for Auckland's reputation as a first-world city?

"Are we heading for Sydney or Suva?" he asks.

Laugh at your peril. The signs are there, if you're prepared to look. I have prepared a little photo essay to make my point.

Prime Minister dresses like Mao

Hyperinflation makes everyday items unaffordable

Education available only to elite

Critics silenced

Life expectancy falls

Muldoon rises from dead, alerts nation to danger.

I found myself in a hotel in Rotorua one night last winter. There are few better places to be. I love to open the windows as I motor into town and breathe deeply of the sulphur. At that moment I know I'm just minutes away from soaking my weary bones in a hot pool. You think that's no big deal? Maybe you didn't have to wait until you were 21 years old to acquire a pair of contact lenses and discover that your enjoyment of many of life's purest pleasures is amplified when you don't have to contend with your spectacles fogging up.

Yes, including that one.

So after the soak in the generously appointed hot pools at the Millennium hotel, I carted my substantial appetite across the lobby to their generously appointed dining room. To digress for a moment, if you happened to be reading the Herald's travel section today you would have found two interesting pieces.

One, by Jim Eagles, describes a clever little website that enables you to avoid the unspeakable discomfort of having a large and sweaty body wedged into the seat next to yours on a ten hour flight. The website will help you locate a suitable companion traveller on your scheduled flight. Seeking traveller of average health, average build. Prefer perfunctory conversations, expect cooperation re ingress and egress from aisle, open to possibility of 'mile-high' encounter if hot. No time-wasters.

The other piece, by this site's own award-winning travel writer takes us to Savannah, Georgia where Graham describes a restaurant of a type which I humbly suggest is a great idea just waiting to happen here in this land of hospitable farming types. Go read it and see if you don't agree.

Anyway, alongside these two fine pieces of writing were a couple of items which carried the ominous footnote: editorial supplied. Just in case you might miss the clue that you were entering the dreaded zone of the advertorial, it was also set in a different face.

In the bleaker of them, you found the work of some poor bastard who had been ordered to prepare a puff piece for one of the big Rotorua hotels. Inevitably we were informed that the hotel was iconic, or something of that sort. I'm quoting from memory because I really don't care to go back and read it again. I feel too much empathy for the writer.

There followed a full and frank description of the hotel's long-term business strategy that might at some colossal stretch have had some interest to the audience in the business section, but surely not the reader who might be thinking of booking a weekend in Geyserland.

These are the most miserable and wretched of things to write. The client can be quite incapable of comprehending that the names of the senior managers and the quantum of capital they have invested making the curtains match the carpets might reflect well on their business acumen, but will have absolutely no relevance to the business of getting punters into rooms. The guy who just flew in from LA and is getting on really well with the hotty who ended up in the seat next to him, could not care less about your strategic plan. He wants to know how far it is from the room to the hot pool, and how fast you can deliver a chilled bottle of champagne.

So there I am at the door of the restaurant in the Millenium and I see there is a special menu for Matariki. Enjoy the Maori New Year with a special menu, the poster invites the guest. Don't mind if I do, I say, and in the following hour I eat and drink my way through one of the best meals of my long and relatively bacchanalian life. Maori bread, naturally; ingenious combinations of horopito, pork, venison, berries and all manner of other items from the bush, all matched with very nice wines. I retired alone, but deeply contented.

Another winter, another New Year. Last night Karren and I were at the annual Matariki dinner which Tohu Wines stage at the Waipapa Marae at Auckland University.

It was beautifully done. Each and every event organiser in Auckland who makes it their tacky business to stuff a room full of banners, bodypainted models and ice sculptures megaphoning the name of the hosts and/or their brand should go and talk to Tohu Wines to learn how to do it with grace and understatement. In the course of the evening you heard about the wine, you heard about the food and how it's prepared, and in the process you were impressed by the knowledge and the dedication of people who never once proclaimed themselves to be passionate about what they did, even though they demonstrably were, in a way that a hundred other people who make that claim will never be.

A couple of years ago I wrote that our friend Adrian was going to prepare some muttonbird for us. That hasn't happened yet, but last night the Tiiti risottos gave me my first taste and I liked it. It was a smart idea; a risotto gives you just a subtle sense of the flavour, and subtlety is probably a prudent place to begin with your muttonbird. There were horopito smoked mussels; there was a mussel and watercress omelette that you and I would fight over if there were only one between us. There was a kawakawa meringue, a pikopiko pesto, organic venison. The food was marvellous and the wines were even better, but I'm a drunk, so I would say that.

Anyway it's the Maori New Year, and what's a new year without resolutions and a retrospective of the last 12 months? Every man and his dog does it in December. As a hip Public Address reader, you get to do it in June. We could go through all the categories and make a meal of it, but in the end it's the big award everyone cares about, so let's copy Time magazine and just choose the New Zealand person of the year. Anyone can win this - good or evil. Time gave it to Hitler, for instance, so the bar really goes all the way down.

Let's have your nominations. Tell us the name of the person who has had the most influence on our little country in the past twelve months. Send me your names, and we should have a New Zealander of the year by the end of next week.

Anticipating a question from a reader in Thorndon: yes David, you can nominate yourself.

I'll suggest one to get the ball rolling. I nominate the hapless burger-fuelled pilot Rayed Mohammed Abdullah Ali. Try as he might, he just didn't manage to blend into the landscape. I suspect his big mistake was attaching these joke balloons to his ute.

I grew up round there and I can tell you this for nothing: you don't have to do anything very much to stand out in Feilding.