Island Life by David Slack

When I say that I’m not the most coordinated person on the face of the earth, what exactly does that mean? Try this: yesterday, as I was out on my usual run, I broke a rib.

It’s a very nice course I run: around the perimeter of Devonport, past three beaches, over Mount Victoria, through parks and walkways, and around behind the Navy playing fields in Stanley Bay, bringing me back home in about forty minutes. Yesterday, at around the thirtieth minute of that run, I came across Lake Road, past the plaques to fallen soldiers, under the pohutukawa trees and up to the boardwalk that takes you onto a walking path along the edge of Ngataringa Bay.

It’s a popular spot, lined with native trees. To keep out dangerous vehicles, it has a chain looped across the entrance to the boardwalk. The chain is about ankle height.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve jumped that bloody chain without incident.

So anyway, you can probably put together the picture. Foot remains where it is, stuck behind the chain. Head, torso and legs keep going. Face hits the deck first, followed by left hand and chest. Right hand is busy letting go of mp3 player. No, that has nothing to do with it.

Immediate personal reactions:

1. Hardwood is the correct description for the timber they use on these things.

2. That’s a kid in the stroller coming along the footpath. Don’t use the language you have in mind.

3. I suppose the mp3 player’s stuffed.

4. I feel winded.

My friend Mr Macdonald has for some time been a proponent of a Denzel Washington expression which he shared with readers in his Sunday Star Times column this week. His glamorous wife is, he says, not averse to using it on him also. As I limped over to the park bench and waited for my breath to return, it occurred to me that I might also benefit from the advice: Man the Fuck Up. So I shuffled back onto the boardwalk, and jogged back home.

But damned if it didn’t keep on hurting like a son of a bitch. I got to bed and found that I could only sleep on my back. So this morning, I was down to the doctor and sure enough, I had a broken rib. The treatment turns out to be pretty simple: wait. It’ll take quite a few weeks to mend, he said. The good news is that it’s okay to go on running, if I can do it comfortably.

Just as well. This will be the fourth year in a row that I’ve set out to do the Auckland half marathon and run into complications. Not that either of us is competitive or anything, but my brother and I have firm opinions on our running ability. I take the view that I can totally bury him. He takes the view that he’s done 1.31 in a half marathon, and I haven’t.

Since Tim moved up here four years ago, the Auckland half marathon has presented us with an excellent opportunity to find out who’s right. The first year was no good. I signed up for it, and then Karren’s nephew announced he was having a wedding in Rotorua that weekend.

The next year, I ended up in the mole map place about a month before the run. The doctor saw something he didn’t like and before you could say biopsy, I was having the middle of my back stitched up. Strictly routine, I thought, and I asked as I got up if I’d have to skip running for a day or two. Er, no, he said - with that sympathetic look doctors always have ready for the wildly misinformed - you really shouldn’t be running for a month or so.

Tim ran 1.37 that year.

The next year, I was ready to line up, but Tim wasn’t going to be around. Not to worry: same course and a time to beat, no worries. A month before the race, I got a new pair of shoes and ran 24k the following morning. By the next day, the shin splints were so bad, I could barely walk. I had to lay off all the running and managed to get in just one run a week before the race. On top of that I got a cold a few days out from the big day. Yeah, yeah, excuses.

I came in two minutes behind Tim’s time. The family arrived at Victoria Park Market to pick me up. Karren said she supposed that might be what I looked like when I had my heart attack.

Rib, schmib. I refuse to accept that someone might be trying to tell me something. You can’t keep me away from that race. Not only do I want to beat Tim or his time, I also want to see if I can do a little better against, for example, the hearty looking 80 year old guy and the extremely fit schoolgirl who both buried me last year near the back of the tank farm, which incidentally is the real psychological killer in that race. You come off the bridge and along Westhaven drive towards Victoria Park and just when you think it can’t be too much further, you turn left and go way the hell up to the end. Sadists.

But that'll do; no unmanly whining. I have publicly declared that I’m running the thing, and that’s that. Training resumes tomorrow morning.

What's a reliable measure of the state of the economy? How about the degree of difficulty involved in getting someone to re-roof your house? If that's a decent indicator, I can tell you that this economy is fairly pumping.

For about a month now we've been trying to get someone, anyone, who can put a new colorsteel roof on our house to come and do the job. You ring, you leave messages, you give them all the details they need, and they say we're flat out, but we can be there in a few days. And that's the last you hear. No letter, no postcard, nothing.

We're standing here with the chequebook open, but no dice. It's not like the thing we'd most like to do in the world is get a new roof, but if you look at this little snapshot, you'll see that it's the prudent thing to do.

That iron was new seven years ago. Rust never sleeps, and it looks pretty wide awake in the photo. Seven years ago, underneath the new iron, there was a new renovated house, which cost (and I know you won't believe this, but I swear it's true) more than it should have. So I got the roof painted on the cheap. We'll get to the full story in a moment, but I should also mention that we also re-used some of the old iron from the roof we'd pulled off to make way for an extra storey. Building tip number one: don't re-use old roofing iron, even if your builder says it'll be good as new.

So we're rolling along and spending up a storm, and the project's past deadline and over budget, so, you know: pretty standard stuff. I painted the entire exterior, working my way up the scaffolding, but by the time I'd got to the roof, and was looking at this pitch, I was thinking I don't know about that.

Or some stronger equivalent that you might or might not find in the dictionary of New Zealand slang.

I'm certain that the way some people manage to walk around on roofs is a mind over matter thing. Put that roof at ground level, and every one of us can walk up and down it all day, albeit with a slight amount of difficulty. Add thirty feet, and it's a different story. It's a walk in the park if you have Earnest Hemingway's heartbeat. I don't. I'll get up there and do it, but I won't do it with any great amount of assurance or confidence. And I'll be as pleased as hell when I get back down. I'm un-co enough at ground level; on a roof, I'm just a liability. Working just under the apex in this picture one afternoon, I swung a new 10-litre pail of paint over the handrail as I was climbing back up.

I lost my balance. I remember hanging for a moment, as I weighed up whether it would be me or the pail. You'd be amazed how far 10 litres can go when you apply it from 30 feet up. Karren was.

Anyway, the roof had to be painted, and I decided it probably shouldn't be me doing it. I got quotes, and they were all pretty vigorous. Maybe I'll be doing it myself after all, I thought. But then I tried another number from the classifieds and got this guy who was keen as. He was around in an hour. His name was Hussein. He was from Iraq, and you never met a more obliging guy. Sure he could do it, he said, and up he went, slight wiry frame getting across the slopes as though it was the simplest thing in the world. His price was just a fraction of any of the other quotes. Are you sure that's enough? I asked. Oh yes, he said.

The deal was that I'd supply all the material - in fact, quite a few more materials than most painters need, but I thought, fair enough, he's got a hard immigrant's road to walk here, help him out. Back he comes the next morning, and up he goes. He's a little tentative about the process itself, and it becomes clear that he has probably done not much more painting in his life than I have. But he's at home on the roof, and that makes him the guy for the job. I go down to my office, and he sets about his work.

The morning rolls along. I go up, he's doing a great job. In bare feet. We look up at the sky. The grey clouds are gathering, and it's spitting a little. He goes back up, working on the side of the roof which has the re-used iron. It's been tricky on this side, he says. The old finish has deteriorated, and it has a dusty surface. Spits of rain fall on them as we're talking and I say: that's going to make it even harder to work on.

No trouble, he says, I keep working.

I go back down stairs to my own work. And then a few minutes later, I hear one hell of a crash. Up I go, apprehensive. Hussein has come off the roof. Fortunately, there was a garden. He only had four litres, but once again, I am amazed at the coverage. More importantly, how is the painter? Nothing broken, but he is thoroughly shaken. The look on his face says this immigration thing's not really working for him. I leave some despot's bone yard, and end up breaking my bones in another country.

He goes off to the Doctor, and rings back that afternoon. The Doctor says it's just bad bruising, and he'll be fine, but he has strongly recommended that the patient stay off roofs. I start psyching myself up again to do the paint job.

But then a most unusual thing happens. One of the painters I'd called and left a message actually rings back. No, no, he doesn't brush, he spray paints. No, no, he's not worried about the treacherous surface. He has a harness, and a mate to hook up to it who stands on the other side of the roof for ballast. No, no, he wouldn't charge anything like those other quotes. Three grand? No mate, he'd do it for three hundred.

Yes, the warning bells should have been giving me tinitis. No, I didn't listen to them.

I think his name was Barry. He and his mate turned up on a bright, sunny Saturday morning that would turn into a scorching midday heat. Perfect roof painting weather, mate, Barry told me as they strapped on their harnesses and got ready to rope themselves together. They'd be done by lunchtime, he reckoned, and then he was going home to have a beer and listen to the races at Taupo. His mates had a roughy running that afternoon that was going to piss in. He was putting three hundred on it. You can tell where this story is going. I checked the results the next morning. The horse ran down the track. Couldn't stick. Neither, it turns out, did the paint.

Since then, we've had plenty of traffic across it by people who aren't nervous of heights. Another guy from Iraq put an Ihug dish up there, and Sky guys, TV antenna guys and gas fitters have all traipsed across the old iron without coming to grief. Our builder friend Adrian put this skylight in,
and I reluctantly got up there to help. The sky was grey and it was beginning to spit as we finished the job.

Also, one warm summer night, Leo, who is probably the fattest lump of cat on the North Shore got off our bed and went out to sit on this section of the roof.

There must have been a bit of dew on the surface, though, and gravity started to do its work. We heard this scraping sound accompanied by a rising feline howl, so we got up to see what was happening, just as there was a thud. We looked out the window and Leo was off the roof, hanging on to the spouting with his two front paws, and looking completely pissed off, with several kilograms of cat hanging below him. He hung there for a minute or so, but then, gravity once more had its say. I glued the spouting join back together, but it's never been quite right since.

All in all, it's a roof that's taken a bit of a thrashing, and where it isn't rusted, it's been weakened. So we need a new one. When I say we haven't been able to get anyone around, I should qualify that. A plumber came last week to look at it on the understanding that he could maybe do a patch-up job but not an entire re-roofing. He said he thought it would be a better idea to do the whole job, and that ordinarily they'd be pleased to do it, but they were short of staff right now. As fast as we train them, they're gone, he said. We just had to let go of two guys who weren't up to it. I guess that's a partial explanation for the problem.

I also have this abiding feeling that this has a little bit to do with the way so many builders and other trades people "run" their business. They're great at their trade, but they're not so good at the rest of the process. A bit of business management help could do wonders for their productivity, I suspect.

That's not to say that all business management is of a high calibre. I look at some of the large supply businesses in the building trade, and I wonder if they're not just as much in need of some help. By the end of our renovation, I was at the end of my rope with these people who tell you they'll be delivering something and keep slipping on the date. Just before Christmas, after Carters had missed the fifth promised delivery date for some cedar panelling, I rang them up to try and get it sorted out. Just to make sure the young guy at the other end of the line knew I wasn't just some confused faceless customer having a senior moment, I completely ripped shit out of him. I told him exactly what they'd failed to do and on which occasions they'd failed to do them and underlined it with: SO WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? He suddenly sounded like a kid who was giving me his full attention. Yes sir. No sir. Very sorry about that. Not nearly good enough, no. He said he would look into it right away, and make sure that it was reported "higher up the archy." At that point, my sense of humour was restored.

I don't know what happened to Hussein. I just hope he didn't get caught up in any of those telemarketing outfits that like to hook into immigrants who can't get an opening for their real qualification. When they ring, I'm torn between sympathy for their plight and a strong desire to undermine their employer's profitability. I tend to vacillate between just politely saying no thank you, or getting subversive and tying up the phone for long enough to slow down the hit rate for the business that's actually organising this low-level harassment.

I've tried all kinds of things - many of them on this list. Presently, I'm thinking it might be a good idea to unsettle them by pointedly ignoring their: Hello Mr Slacks, how are you this evening? patter and launching straight into a recitation of something all cryptic and literary that sounds vaguely deranged: Time simply is. Part of it is cut and called history. I don't have a knife and can't cut any. That sort of thing.

I don't want to scare them, and I don't want to make life hard for them, but if it stops them from ringing our number, that will be no bad thing. I want to keep the line clear for roofers.

So you saw that speech by President Bush to the UN assembly and you're wondering what to make of it. Maybe you saw him speaking and thought that sounds reasonable enough and then thought to yourself did I just say that? It's nothing to be ashamed of. Speeches are written to get you to respond that way. If you go back later and dissect them, your initial impression doesn't always hold up.

I thought it might be interesting to take a speech writer's guided tour of the script and look a little at its construction. Standard tour guide thing: you ask the questions, I'll give you the answers. Just to save time, I'll ask your questions as well. If you've watch Donald Rumsfeld's press conferences, you'll know this is a standard technique in modern discourse. Utterly routine.

Okay. First question: Mr Speech Writer, the speech starts with a whole lot of stuff about a widening circle of liberty and security and development. It all sounded pretty hopeful.

Answer: You bet. No accident there. The last thing this President is likely to do is go up there and say that geopolitics in the 21st Century are one awful mess. That's what his critics are saying. The first thing you have to do is get people thinking you're rolling cheerfully and hopefully along some road towards a bigger brighter future. He might fancy himself as Churchill, but he's not about to tell everyone to brace themselves. This is the instant gratification generation, raised on decades of soothing TV commercials. You don't want to scare anyone.

Question: Then he goes on to say some stuff that sounded pretty gutsy in a John Wayne sort of way. What do you make of this:

Every nation that wants peace will share the benefits of a freer world. And every nation that seeks peace has an obligation to help build that world. Eventually, there is no safe isolation from terror networks, or failed states that shelter them, or outlaw regimes, or weapons of mass destruction. Eventually, there is no safety in looking away, seeking the quiet life by ignoring the struggles and oppression of others.

Answer: This is a development of the If you're not with us, you're against us line. You imply that by disagreeing with the particular direction the US has embarked upon, you're choosing to ignore the struggles and oppression of others. Of course, as we know, this is entirely correct. Those peaceniks of Germany and France and all those other unwilling citizens of the world have no concern whatsoever for what is taking place in the Middle East.

Q. Oh really? I don't like the way they're doing this either but that doesn't mean I'm not concerned about the future of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. And I'm as keen as the next vulnerable civilian to see Al Qaeda being tackled.

A. As are many others. But let's not jump to conclusions. Let's read the rest of the speech and see if the President's managed to conceive some viable, inclusive strategy to unite the free world in a campaign to deal with the people who would do them harm.

Q. Okay, then. I see he goes onto talk about security. What's this about?

In this young century, our world needs a new definition of security. Our security is not merely found in spheres of influence, or some balance of power. The security of our world is found in the advancing rights of mankind.

A. As a rhetorical device this is quite handy. You pronounce the need for something new - in this case a definition of security - and then before people have stopped to ask themselves whether that's true and whether we actually need this new definition, you're charging ahead and giving it to them, which is in this case: The security of our world is found in the advancing rights of mankind.

The idea here is to provide a little ideological support for the grand dream that you can airdrop democracy into Iraq with Daisy Cutters and just wait for the bells of freedom to ring and for a 21st century domino theory to work its way around the Middle East. When you look at the way Iraq and its neighbours have responded to the arrival of this gift from the West, you'd have to say the exercise is looking a bit shaky so far. Let's see if he develops the point.

Q. Oh. No. He doesn't. Wait a minute - now he's talking about terrorism. This might be going somewhere:

Members of the United Nations, the Russian children did nothing to deserve such awful suffering, and fright, and death. The people of Madrid and Jerusalem and Istanbul and Baghdad have done nothing to deserve sudden and random murder. These acts violate the standards of justice in all cultures, and the principles of all religions. All civilized nations are in this struggle together, and all must fight the murderers.

A. Very controversial saying you're opposed to terrorism, of course.

Q. You're being snide, I can tell. Look - now he's getting on to specifics to back it up:

We're determined to destroy terror networks wherever they operate, and the United States is grateful to every nation that is helping to seize terrorist assets, track down their operatives, and disrupt their plans. We're determined to end the state sponsorship of terror -- and my nation is grateful to all that participated in the liberation of Afghanistan. We're determined to prevent proliferation, and to enforce the demands of the world -- and my nation is grateful to the soldiers of many nations who have helped to deliver the Iraqi people from an outlaw dictator.

A. What's happening here is a standard rhetorical technique: invoke the memory of tragic victims and then wrap your policies up in that invocation to give them the blush of respectability. If you believe that busting up Iraq and aggravating ever greater numbers of the population has been the right way to diminish terror rather than foster more of it, you might think that the last sentence of that paragraph runs pretty well. If you think that tracking down Al Qaeda-supported terrorists might have had more to do with people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and various other pockets of the world, then you might not find this quite so persuasive. Still, maybe he'll get on to that in the next paragraph.

Q. Um, no, that's it. Now he's on to a checklist of issues he says the US has been supporting in the UN: AIDS, human trafficking, human cloning, economic aid, debt peacekeeping, genocide.

A. Yes. This is all building up to a pitch for something. "We've done all these things, now it's time for a little quid pro quo."

Q. I think I see it coming. He's back on to democracy again.

A. Yes. You can paraphrase it fairly succinctly: Democracy is the fairest system we know. It can flourish, and has done so, in many different cultures. It stands for freedom, and everyone deserves that. But it can take time for democracies to establish themselves. We'll you'd certainly not resist the opportunity to labour that last point when you're talking about Iraq, where the idea of democracy leaping into flower has proven to be something of an overly-optimistic expectation by the thinkers in Washington. And here we go:

Freedom is finding a way in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and we must continue to show our commitment to democracies in those nations. The liberty that many have won at a cost must be secured. As members of the United Nations, we all have a stake in the success of the world's newest democracies.
Not long ago, outlaw regimes in Baghdad and Kabul threatened the peace and sponsored terrorists. These regimes destabilized one of the world's most vital -- and most volatile -- regions. They brutalized their peoples, in defiance of all civilized norms. Today, the Iraqi and Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom. The governments that are rising will pose no threat to others. Instead of harboring terrorists, they're fighting terrorist groups. And this progress is good for the long-term security of us all.
The Afghan people are showing extraordinary courage under difficult conditions. They're fighting to defend their nation from Taliban holdouts, and helping to strike against the terrorists killers. They're reviving their economy. They've adopted a constitution that protects the rights of all, while honoring their nation's most cherished traditions. More than 10 million Afghan citizens -- over 4 million of them women -- are now registered to vote in next month's presidential election. To any who still would question whether Muslim societies can be democratic societies, the Afghan people are giving their answer.
Since the last meeting of this General Assembly, the people of Iraq have regained sovereignty. Today, in this hall, the Prime Minister of Iraq and his delegation represent a country that has rejoined the community of nations. The government of Prime Minister Allawi has earned the support of every nation that believes in self-determination and desires peace. And under Security Council resolutions 1511 and 1546, the world is providing

that support. The U.N., and its member nations, must respond to Prime Minister Allawi's request, and do more to help build an Iraq that is secure, democratic, federal, and free.

Q. This looks like the quid pro quo you were talking about.

A. Yes, in or out of the coalition of the willing, we'd appreciate your help now, if you don't mind. Another way to put it might be: this thing has taken a very discouraging turn. Terrorists are pouring into Iraq, a significant proportion of the civilian population hates us, and the whole thing is spiralling out of control. But we came in here with a mission, and by God, we're going to stick with it, no matter how many people get killed, and no matter how much further this thing spirals out of control.

Q. Wouldn't some people say that it's time to re-assess your strategy and ask if the initial one has been proven with the wisdom of hindsight to have been mistaken?

A. Oh, no. That's flip-flopping. That's what liberals do. You won't find any mea culpas or second thoughts or arguments for a pause for wise reflection in this speech. You're much better off suggesting that problem in Iraq is with the terrorists and not with the disaffected population. You liked that John Wayne start didn't you? Well you keep it simple in a Western. Good guys and bad guys - evildoers and avenging angels. No matter who else might be in this fight, you go on characterising it as one between the soldiers of the free world and the terrorists. Like this:

A democratic Iraq has ruthless enemies, because terrorists know the stakes in that country. They know that a free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a decisive blow against their ambitions for that region. So a terrorists group associated with al Qaeda is now one of the main groups killing the innocent in Iraq today -- conducting a campaign of bombings against civilians, and the beheadings of bound men. Coalition forces now serving in Iraq are confronting the terrorists and foreign fighters, so peaceful nations around the world will never have to face them within our own borders.
Our coalition is standing beside a growing Iraqi security force. The NATO Alliance is providing vital training to that force. More than 35 nations have contributed money and expertise to help rebuild Iraq's infrastructure. And as the Iraqi interim government moves toward national elections, officials from the United Nations are helping Iraqis build the infrastructure of democracy. These selfless people are doing heroic work, and are carrying on the great legacy of Sergio de Mello.
As we have seen in other countries, one of the main terrorist goals is to undermine, disrupt, and influence election outcomes. We can expect terrorist attacks to escalate as Afghanistan and Iraq approach national elections. The work ahead is demanding. But these difficulties will not shake our conviction that the future of Afghanistan and Iraq is a future of liberty. The proper response to difficulty is not to retreat, it is to prevail.
The advance of freedom always carries a cost, paid by the bravest among us. America mourns the losses to our nation, and to many others. And today, I assure every friend of Afghanistan and Iraq, and every enemy of liberty: We will stand with the people of Afghanistan and Iraq

until their hopes of freedom and security are fulfilled.

Q. There seems to be a lot missing here - why doesn't he address the fact that things seem to be getting worse all the time? Why doesn't he say more about Afghanistan? Why doesn't he say more about what he's going to do to get the terrorists?

A. All good questions. However he has other fish to fry by the look of this, because now he's moving on to get everyone on board the democratic peace train.

These two nations will be a model for the broader Middle East, a region where millions have been denied basic human rights and simple justice. For too long, many nations, including my own, tolerated, even excused, oppression in the Middle East in the name of stability. Oppression became common, but stability never arrived. We must take a different approach. We must help the reformers of the Middle East as they work for freedom, and strive to build a community of peaceful, democratic nations.

Q. What's wrong with that?

A. Nothing, in principle. But implementing that change takes skill and diplomacy. He might have explored, a little, what shape that initiative might take in the months and years ahead, given that people are pretty rattled by the way the plan has panned out so far.

Q. Well he does talk about getting a democracy fund going.

A. Yes, that's an interesting notion:

Because I believe the advance of liberty is the path to both a safer and better world, today I propose establishing a Democracy Fund within the United Nations. This is a great calling for this great organization. The fund would help countries lay the foundations of democracy by instituting the rule of law and independent courts, a free press, political parties and trade unions. Money from the fund would also help set up voter precincts and polling places, and support the work of election monitors. To show our commitment to the new Democracy Fund, the United States will make an initial contribution. I urge other nations to contribute, as well.

Q. So is it a good thing to include in the speech?

A. I guess so. You'd have to say, though, that this seems to be a way of dressing up an ill-fated excursion in international relations with the gloss of the noblest democratic ideals.

Q. So the problem with the speech isn't so much what's in it as what's been left out?

A. Right on the money, Woody.

I'm pretty scruffy at running a diary. It really is pathetic. I spend most of my day in front of a PC that could easily do the job. If were to I walk half a dozen paces away from the PC, I could enter the necessary information in a diary that Karren runs for everything else that's happening in our household.

These, of course, are options that are much too straightforward for me. Instead, I scrawl my appointments on scraps of paper as I'm talking to people on the phone, and let them drift about the desk over the ensuing weeks. For the most part, everything turns out fine. In the last few weeks, I've turned up on time to speak at a conference in Wellington; I've arrived with plenty of time to spare for a lunch time talk at Auckland University. I made it out to an appointment a couple of weeks ago with a friend of mine who tested my hearing and gave me the good news that my hearing is shot (but that's another story).

I'd like to be able to say the system - flimsy as it is - always works. But it doesn't. A couple of months ago, I got a call from someone at the Devonport Probus Club asking if I'd like to come and give them a talk. Sure, I said, happy to. I could talk about my new book on the Treaty of Waitangi. That sounds good, he said, and a couple of days later I got a polite letter confirming date, time and venue. I filed it carefully away near the other scraps of paper.

A week into September I suddenly thought to myself: when's that Probus club meeting? A few short minutes later I found the letter. 20th of September. Monday the 20th. 11.00 am to midday. If you're a regular listener to Linda Clark's programme, you will perhaps see the small problem I had created for myself. On Mondays at 11.45am, I'm on the wireless.

So I rang the good people at Penguin and asked if there might be anyone who would be kind enough to take a couple of hours out of their publicity schedule to talk to the Devonport Probus club. Well, actually Graeme Hunt's book is just about to be launched they said, Fintan Patrick Walsh - great subject for that age group.

Couldn't agree more, I said, could you ask him. And because Graeme Hunt is a good bloke, he was on the phone later that day to say sure, happy to help. We talked at length about the book and by the time we'd done, I was sorry I wouldn't be there to hear all about it. Thanks a lot, I said, really appreciate it, you should have a good time - these folks will love hearing all about it, I'm sure.

So I let the organiser know about the change of plan, gave Graeme the details, thought all's well that ends well, and thought no more of it - until I got a call from Graeme yesterday afternoon. I'm sorry to say the whole thing somehow got completely ballsed up. If I have this right, he'd asked if it would be okay with them if he came a little late. They'd said that would be fine. But then, when he arrived, he found that they'd rearranged the programme, dropped his slot, and moved straight on to the lunch. To top it off, he said, he got a reception that he thought was pretty rude.

I'm not sure if people always appreciate that a speaker makes quite a bit of time available when they come to give you an hour or so of their thoughts. The preparation and the getting there and back take quite a chunk of time. Graeme was, shall we say, nonplussed, and I don't blame him a bit. I can't help feeling (as Bart Simpson once famously said) somehow responsible. So by way of atonement I thought I'd alert you to his excellent book.

I grew up in a farming area that didn't have much sympathy for trade unions. The bloody freezing workers and the bloody wharfies and the bloody boilermakers were all greedy, lazy troublemakers. And half of them were bloody Poms.

Once I got to the High School in town, I discovered there was another way of looking at the argument. The thing that struck me most about industrial relations arguments through those years of the 70s and 80s was that there was an inability or an unwillingness on either side of the argument to listen to the other guy.

I don't know that things will ever really change when it comes to arguments over sharing the profits of an enterprise. Everyone knows how much they've done themselves; they tend to give less credit for what others have done.

Exploitation comes in all kinds of packages - show me an employer who expects too much for too little, and I'll show you an employee who thinks the company owes them money for sitting on their bum. Tackling those problems is never going to be easy: human nature's a tricky thing to deal with. One thing you can say about this with confidence is that it's never going to be enough to say that exploitation is wrong, and hope that people will do better.

Yesterday, while poor old Graeme Hunt was making a wasted trip to Devonport, we were talking on Linda Clark's show about Bonjour Paresse - the French publishing sensation of the summer that argues that you should by no means take your job in your large corporation seriously, and that in fact you should be actively subversive.

We touched on, but didn't explore, one aspect of the issue that I think is quite pertinent here, and that is that unions don't seem to figure largely in this particular discourse. People don't tend to see their plight as a modern employee in unionist or collectivist terms. You see yourself as able to fight your own battles, negotiate your own salary, and work your way up the corporate ladder on your own merit. The argument Bonjour Paresse seems to be making is: You're kidding yourself. You may not be being exploited like miners at the turn of the twentieth century, or factory workers in third world hovels, but neither do you have quite the clout you fancy you do.

But call in a union to help? Forget it. The whole notion of collective bargaining and union representation seems out of fashion with a fairly significant slice of the working population today. I heard Simon Collins last week talking on BFM about the open letter he and some other Herald journalists had written. (And no, there is not a deliberate Bag-the-Herald-on-Sunday theme to this week's blogging.) He was reminding people that you don't need a union when you're at the height of your earning powers, but by God, you might just feel grateful that there was a union looking out for all the members' interests when you find your health failing or some other circumstance pitching you prematurely out of the eligible workforce.

The argument for diminishing union powers over the past decade and a half has been ostensibly in the name of lifting productivity. Can't object to that. Productivity: good. Waste: bad. But fair shares and tolerance are part of the compact you need to get everyone working on some kind of sustainable basis. Calibrating that balance is never as simple as ideologues on either side of the argument would have you believe. What we went through in industrial relations over the twentieth century is a fascinating story, and there's plenty yet to be recalled and analysed about the whole experience.

Fintan Patrick Walsh was one of the most fascinating of all the characters in that story, ranging all the way from what he may or may not have done in the roiling North American labour struggle, on to a change of name when he fetched up here in New Zealand, all the way through to the matter of being a union leader and running one of the largest dairy herds in the southern hemisphere, and managing to negotiate the political challenge of heading the New Zealand labour movement and opposing the waterfront strike.

And that's just for starters. Get Graeme Hunt's book (Title Black Prince, Publisher: Penguin), and you'll find there's a whole lot more to the story. You should by all means go out and get a copy, and if you hear that the author is making an appearance, I can't recommend strongly enough that you get along to hear him speak. If it's at all possible, tell him I sent you.

You might be thinking that the right time to write a letter to the editor of a newspaper would be after you'd read the newspaper in question. Get with the programme, Sparky. In the cyber-age, you can start writing your letters to the editor before the thing's even been published.

If you click here, you'll see that Ms Sue Chetwin is standing by her email box at the Herald on Sunday ( first issue: October 3), ready for your words of insight and/or disgruntlement about the state of the nation, or its footpaths or its teenagers, or its morals, or its foreshore and seabed or its immigrants, or indeed anything under two hundred words that you could do with getting off your chest.

This presents some nice possibilities.

You could, for instance, launch straight into a furious denunciation of last week's editorial. There wasn't one? No problem. Just pretend there was. Plenty of letters to the editor have been written before today that betray not the slightest hint that the correspondent has absorbed a word of the editorial they're complaining about. You're in no weaker a position to comment.

It would be unfair to jump to conclusions and assume the paper will take a lefty slant of the kind so derided by Mr NZ Pundit and his friends. Nevertheless, leaping to conclusions and saddling the media with perceptions of feeble-mindedness and bias is an abiding pleasure for the pajamahadeen so here's an idea: pretend you're a neocon blogger and make your letter to the editor a sneering piece full of false humility and libertarian hauteur.

Sign your own name, though; the idea here is to pretend only that your mind - and not your identity - has been captured by a malign influence for a short time. No, really. For one thing, it's not polite to pretend to be someone else. For another, it's not lawful. Also, at least one of them claims to be a lawyer.

Another possibility might be to seize the opportunity for a bit of shameless publicity. Having trouble getting some cut-through for your local body election campaign? Send the editor a short letter making a big noise about your strongest platform. Artfully slip in a reference to your candidacy. It's worth a shot.

If you're really game, and involved in some kind of multi-level marketing, you might consider this an opportune time to dash off a letter that tells the amazing-but-true success story of your weight loss/hair-growth/energy-restorer/whatever product and the deeply- moving, amazing-but-true story of the people who were about to lose their home and now have twenty-two apartments in Surfers and are Living the Dream, thanks to the amazing MLM plan you're involved in.

And if you're the stamp collector type who likes first day covers and collects Souvenir Anythings, you'll immediately see the appeal of belting off a letter on Whatever They Might Print, just to get your name published in the very first edition of the Herald on Sunday.

Realistic odds of getting letters of such types published? Bugger-all, I'd say, although if you were to take up this challenge and succeed, you will have a salute from - and the admiration of - at least one reader who said it couldn't be done.

On the other hand, I'd suggest that if you have a good cause, this would be a not-bad time to send something off. If you're campaigning for Ahmed Zaoui, for example, why not write a letter pointing out that on the day the first Herald on Sunday is published, he will have been in jail for ( you do the maths) days. Count up the number of Sundays he's now been behind bars etc. Sometimes a good letter to the editor can encourage people to see old news from a new point of view. When a man is behind bars in such questionable circumstances, that seems like a pretty good reason to send a letter to a newspaper; even if they haven't yet printed a single edition.