Island Life by David Slack

I call this column Island Life for a number of reasons. Principally, it's because my working life became quite an isolated one after I set up speeches.com.

It was just me and an automated business collecting subscriptions from subscribers half a globe away, generating speeches I'd never read, for people I'd never meet, who would deliver them to an audience I'd never see.

Dad sometimes used to say he fancied the idea of being a lighthouse keeper. I thought that sounded impossibly remote and isolated. You can't be serious. Well, apple, tree etc. I ended up setting myself up in a working situation that was just about as remote. Thus Island Life.

But there's another reason for the name as well. Give me a blue sky on a warm beach, a palm tree, a deck chair and a stack of books and I might well be the happiest human being on the planet. If you right-click your windows desktop, choose Properties, then Desktop and select "Azul" you'll see the backdrop I work with each day. Warms my heart.

My first Pacific Island experience should have put me off for life. I was working at this pub, and going to this university. My girlfriend was going to spend the summer holidays with her parents who were posted in Suva.

Why don't you come, she said as she left.

Why don't I, I said, as we exchanged letters of longing.

You should, she wrote back.

I've booked the tickets! I wrote.

That's great!, she replied.

I think, she added, a week later.

No really , she said, it'll be good, when I rang, a bit uneasy.

Oh, what the hell, I thought, can't be that bad.

Just to make it more interesting, there was a 21st party the night before my flight. I flaked out at about three in the morning. The others were still going strong, and they thought it would make it a bit more interesting if I were to arrive in Nadi with a lovebite on my neck. So they installed one.

I don't know if it actually made a difference. I got there in the middle of the night for a reunion that was, well, tepid, I suppose you'd call it. The romantic temperature never really improved. So there I was on a ticket that couldn't be changed, staying for a month with my new ex-girlfriend and her family. They were all very nice to me but, you know, talk about awkward. There was the odd plainly gruesome moment too, but I really just wanted to talk about South Pacific beaches and palm trees, so let's stick with that.

I grew up with the wind and rain blowing over Manawatu paddocks and the odd trip to the beaches at Foxton, Waikanae and Paparaparumu. Fiji's coral coast was a thing of beauty. It was properly hot, properly exotic and you could fill your lungs with the sweet tropical air. In between smokes.

It would be more than a decade before I got interested in South Pacific islands again though, but once I did, I was sold. It started with a couple of weeks in Tahiti, and I swear if it hadn't been raining the day we left, I don't know if I'd have been willing to get on the plane.

Of course those were the days before we were a family. An exuberant child doesn't want to lie in a deck chair and read all day. You have to make adjustments. It's taken us a while to work out how to do that successfully, but last week in Noumea, we all had ourselves an excellent time.

I like New Caledonia for any number of reasons. The weather is always kind - the sun doesn't blaze, but when it's out, it's always warm enough to make you feel like strolling down to the beach. It's a little piece of Europe just a couple of hours away, and you can really feel as though you've been transported somewhere quite different from home. Life there doesn't completely revolve around the tourist business, so you can sort of merge into the daily life of the place. There's some great food, and there are some very convivial places to have it. And it's surrounded by the world's biggest lagoon. This is one place where the sea is as beautiful as the brochures make it look. And of the course, there are the palm trees.

It wasn't raining when we left and it was, indeed, hard to get on the plane.

When I got back here, I was describing to a friend how we'd been gradually adapting our holiday-making to accommodate our new roles as parents, and that we've been enjoying it a bit more each time as Mary-Margaret gets a little older and we get a little more adept at arranging our holiday from a child's point of view.

Zeke, who became a father in his early twenties, was reminiscing about something his kids had been talking about at the twentieth wedding anniversary party they had some years ago. They'd been reminiscing about all the great holidays they'd taken - camping holidays all over New Zealand, and how much they'd enjoyed them.

He said they deliberately arranged their holidays with their kids' interests in mind, and it felt pretty good, all those years on, to know how much it had meant to them.

And of course, they grow up very fast. Which brings me to a gratuitous plug for one of those three kids who is now all grown up and showing his own work at this year's film festival. You can click here for all the details on Stan Alley's Frodo Is Great... Who Is That?!! Two years of dedicated work, with any amount of New Zealand culture to it and of course, it has that Rings aspect to it.

You can book your ticket with confidence. Zeke says it's good. He's a fine judge of movies, and a not bad Dad either.

Tomorrow morning as the nation finally cuts its ties to the Privy Council and the Justices of the Supreme Court embark on their first sitting, my family will be packing our bags and leaving the country.

We will return ten days later. Couldn't be happier with the new arrangement; just taking a holiday.

Lawyers, eh? To hear some people talk, the whole profession is suspect. If they're not gouging you with high fees for problems created by other lawyers in the first place, they're letting lowlife-guilty-as-hell-scum walk the streets. They're conscience-free and too clever by three quarters.

I have to admit, when I drop in to the offices of some of my friends in the big firms I wonder what poor bastard is picking up the tab for the magnificent art, interior décor and Italian furniture. But some of the fairest, most decent people I know have made their careers in the law. They more than compensate for the occasional one I've met who doesn't quite fit that description.

I don't especially regret having never practiced law. I doubt that I'd have enjoyed myself as much as I have in the less conventional career path I've chosen. But from time to time when my work carries me back towards aspects of the law, I remember how much I enjoyed studying it.

Practitioners will tell you that what you dwelt on in Law School comes up a lot less often your day to day work. You spend a lot more time sorting out your client's concerns than standing at your window pondering the finer points of contemporary New Zealand jurisprudence and taking the larger view.

The larger view, though, can be quite instructive, and it was that wider context that I found especially interesting in our studies. For example: how the courts over time, ostensibly following precedent, still somehow adapted and changed laws according to the changing social and economic context.

It would be fair to say this new court has been set up in the face of less than universal acclaim. Personally, I like it. I have no real basis for judging whether there is any merit to the criticism that the Justices might not be of adequate calibre, although it wouldn't entirely surprise me to learn that a criticism of that kind was less than objective.

Is the argument that there are no lawyers in the country of sufficient ability? If it is, then this seems to be discouraging news for everyone who's been paying several hundred dollars an hour for lawyers who might be drawn from that pool. Or is the argument that there are talented lawyers here, but that they won't make themselves available under the prevailing terms and conditions? A solution to that problem seems fairly obvious.

Actually, if the Metro article this month on the state of the market for the big eight law firms is any guide, it sounds as though the shift of the economic axis from Auckland to Sydney is starting to bite for some of those firms. Maybe that shortage of cream work might free up some cream talent.

Personally I see nothing to make you fret about the calibre of the Justices who will actually taking their seats tomorrow, and I'm sure legal commentators will quickly draw our attention to any shortcomings that might arise in their decisions. Debate will no doubt follow.

A bigger issue, I think, is this question of judicial activism. Critics claim, among other things, that it undermines certainty. I think the wider view can help here. Try this from Bridled Power by Geoffrey and Matthew Palmer:

There is value in both certainty of law and in fairness of result. The balance struck by particular courts tends to ebb and flow over time and usually reflects ( sometimes with some delay) the ebb and flow of social economic cultural and political views in a society. The Privy Council and the Court of Appeal reflect different states of the tide in different societies.

I think we lose sight of the fact that courts tend to reflect what's happening in society. I think we also need to bear in mind that to the extent they indulge in judicial "activism" they tend to be doing so in a vacuum left by parliament. The interpretation of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi would be one example, and if you'd like to see that issue developed, there's, er, a helpful little book I can recommend. If you don't like the idea of the courts usurping the role of Parliament, there's one pretty useful solution available to you: legislate accordingly. When you write your legislation, make your meaning clear, specific and detailed.

I think there's quite a lot of distrust of our machinery of government, and I wonder if that's in part because we don't have the kind of civics lessons they have in schools in the US. That hasn't stopped certain "patriotic" Americans from taking some rather breathtaking liberties with that country's constitution lately, so you might argue that being better informed doesn't make you better protected. On the other hand, at least the debate that has ensued has been a pretty well-informed one.

I think we could do a much better job here of being more tolerant and accommodating of a variety of opinions and attitudes. I think there's still a strong Kiwi streak that tries to corral everyone into a single prevailing point of view. The whole point of a robust democratic process is that it allows for multiple points of view, and finds a way to accommodate different ideas, different people and different cultures.

There has to be room for debate, for give and take and for arguments to be had, and to be resolved. This new court adds one more valuable part to the structure, and I think we should be pleased to have it.

I was going to be posting this on Tuesday, and here it is Friday. Not that I’m complaining in the least, but you publish a topical book and you end up taking a lot of time out of your week for interviews. That and having a few beers in Wellington with your publisher.

Meanwhile back at home, a small technological triumph has been quietly proving itself to be the best bloody Internet service I have ever had. I don’t know anything about the people who put together the wireless service at Wired Country, but if they have to commute across water to get to work in the morning, I have every reason to believe they get there on foot.

This unalloyed enthusiasm springs from two significant periods in my Internet life: a long and harrowing experience with early Internet satellite technology, and the inevitable defeated rage you develop at having to take your high-speed Internet supply from the cosseted, monopoly-protected, bloated, imagination-challenged and chronically under-achieving “corporate” that is Telecom.

Dead right I don’t like them, and it’s not because, as some people assumed when I mentioned their profit in the Treaty quiz, that I’m some kind of corporation-hating lefty. Capitalism and free trade suit me just fine, but if Telecom is a fair representation of a vibrant corporation fighting the good economic fight in Adam Smith’s ideal world, than I have a passport to the Netherlands.

First things first. I can’t remember when I got my first satellite dish from Ihug. 1997? At any rate, whatever date it was that they launched the service, I was on the phone, with my credit card number ready. Internet at several times the speed of dial-up? You bet I was interested.

The Wood brothers were thinking up some new service every week at that time, or so it seemed. This was just one of many new services they were cooking up as the cash came rolling in, and I suspect that the quality suffered a little because of that. The idea was excellent: phone signal for the path up, and a dish to catch the signal coming down from the sky tower and into your PC. The execution, however - at least as far as the dish on our roof in Stanley Bay was concerned - proved to be less than perfect.

At the outset, it was beautiful. Blazing speeds, streaming audio, Internet just like my friends in the States with T1 connections had been describing.

But that state of grace lasted just a short while, then turned to custard. The connection would hang, the signal would drop out, and in an infinite variety of ways this delicately balanced mechanism would flip spectacularly off the highwire and plunge to its electronic death.

In the end, my daily routine would be: check email, check site, browse for about ten minutes, and then lose connectivity. Remedies then included all or any of the following: Uninstall software. Pull out card. Reinstall card. Reinstall software. Climb on to roof. Check dish. Change configuration (wide range of settings under consideration at any given day). Call Ihug, talk over problem. Go over to Ihug, pick up new card. Go over to Ihug, pick up replacement for new card. Repeat. Spend time with Ihug technician as they climb onto roof, check dish, come down, take out card, reinstall, etc, etc. Participate with Ihug technician in three-way discussion with radio frequency inspector from Ministry of Commerce (no, really) assessing whether neighbouring Navy yard may be trampling over signal. Repeat exercise re: interference from the (no really) airport. Participate with Ihug technician as we abandon taking feed from Sky Tower and install bigger satellite to receive signal from satellite. Repeat previous procedures. Participate with Ihug technician as we replace satellite dish with big-ass dish substantial enough in size to make someone like Nicky Hager look twice. Repeat previous procedures.

I learned more recently when Juha Saarinen moved into our street and we started discussing ideas for something - anything - to get an alternative to Jetstream that he had some years earlier tried to get the same Ihug service in his place elsewhere in Devonport. “Can’t help you, sorry” they’d said. “We have this customer not far from you and you wouldn’t believe how much grief we’ve been having with his setup.”

Telecom of course, took their own sweet time to come up with high-speed Internet, and when Jetstream was finally unveiled, I manfully determined to persevere with the Ihug service. But in the end, I just got weary of the trials of it all.

I called up the Telecom people and hooked up to Jetstream. By comparison to the preceding ordeal, it was pretty damn good, although in retrospect there were a good number of teething problems and inadequacies in the first couple of adsl modems they supplied. And, of course, there were data caps. Didn’t have them at Ihug; soon got to see what a pain in the arse they were. You hit your cap, and from then onwards, it becomes a bit like buying a book and then handing over another dollar for each page you turn after the fourth chapter.

You looked at the comparative pricing for broadband in other countries, and you looked at some of the rates they were charging here for frame relay and the like, and you got the clear feeling that you were being treated like the fish in the proverbial barrel. No wonder their uptake figures were, for so long, so puny.

Hoped the commissioner might fix it; didn’t happen. If 256k is broadband then I am the aforementioned Dutchman.

And yet, and yet…maybe Mr Webb had been taken on a tour of Wired Country, because when he said that wireless posed a viable alternative to broadband he wasn’t as far off the mark as I thought he was. If you were to take just Woosh into consideration, I’d say that was a weak sort of offering. As far as I can tell – and feel free to contradict me - that option is not stable enough, not fast enough and simply doesn’t represent value enough to constitute a viable competitor.

But this Wired Country one, piped into me by the most able and conscientious Craig at concept.net.nz (and do by all means drop him a line and ask them about this excellent service) is absolutely the – as they say – business.

You want speed? Blazing. You want stability? Rock solid. You want data caps? How about one you’ll never hit?

If there's anyone out there who’s been involved in developing this product, I’d be fascinated to hear from you. What did you do right? Is this a result of good management? Intelligent development? Adequate resources? Good long-term planning? Whatever you’ve done you’ve got it right, and you should take a bow.

This has been worth the wait, and Spot? Don’t come around here looking for any more Jellimeat.

Your memory can play tricks on you, so I may be mistaken in saying this: Hot Metal was an excellent comedy series. Perhaps you remember it: early 90s, I think, set in a UK newspaper vaguely resembling the Independent. It had a mild-mannered, dour editor played by Geoffrey Palmer - no not that one - and followed the paper's fortunes through a change of proprietor and staff. From memory, you had this egotistical larger-than life wealthy proprietor exerting undue influence on the organ, and sleazy hacks making up stories, interviewing their keyboard and engineering news events. Nothing like real life.

The opening episode had news of the paper's takeover making the front page on several rival broadsheets and a couple of tabloids. The paper itself (with the hapless editor out of the loop and trying to work out why his desk had been relocated to the elevator) missed the story. Or something like that.

Keen-eyed readers may have spotted a couple of parallels here. I've managed to miss my own big story. I've also had a little tabloid treatment, but you have to expect a bit of that, I guess.

The story, of course, is that my book came out last week and, I'm happy to report, it's selling well. Bullshit Backlash and Bleeding Hearts. A confused person's guide to the Great Race Row is my contribution to the post-Orewa debate. Given the most excellent media coverage, you probably already knew that.

You might also have read in the Herald that yours truly, who has been peddling $20 speeches to Americans over the internet, perhaps lacks the visionary credentials you'd expect from a person claiming to have a solution to the whole race debate and the role today of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Don't blame the reporter. He hadn't read the book when he turned up to interview me, so he was at an awful disadvantage. He did leave clutching a copy of the book, but the deadline must have come up a bit too soon for him to get to the bit on the first page where I tell readers:

Although I'm no expert, I'm familiar with, if you like, the scene of the crime. I've worked with a number of the people who have had important roles in the story. You'll hear from them - as well as a number of other authorities and important players - throughout this book. My role here really is to be your guide, and ask the questions on your behalf.

For completeness' sake, I should also warn you that you shouldn't rush out and get the book in the expectation that you'll get a solution to the whole race debate. Didn't promise it, don't offer it. So what will you get? Allow me to quote a little more from the first page:

This is really a book for my generation and my parents' generation -we're the ones who came late to this story. We're familiar with fragments of our history and we know a thing or two about the Treaty of Waitangi, but we don't often know it with great certainty. For every fact or opinion you go to offer at a dinner party, it seems there's someone ready with a contradiction. Who's right? The idea of this book is to help settle a few of those arguments by filling the gaps in the jigsaw - who did what and when, who's complaining and why, who's right, who's wrong, who's mistaken and who's just making trouble.

For the last few weeks, I've been telling radio interviewers, reporters, feature writers and photographers all about it, and having a thoroughly enjoyable time. For the most part they've been telling me how much they've enjoyed reading it, as have a few of the sources I interviewed. Plenty of Sally Field moments, then. Also very heartening to have your book endorsed on the telly.

Derek Fox interviewed me on Mana News just after I put the quiz up in February, and Russell told me I sounded surprisingly subdued. He was right - I have had this habit of parsing my words on live interviews, and so I've been remedying that. I think I've pretty much got it tidied away, and you can hear the results for yourself each Monday morning on Linda Clark's show at 11.45 am when Frances Walsh and I do the commentary slot.

Not that I have one, but very little of this is what I would have written into the year planner back in January. There's still a lot of development work I have planned for speeches.com and I thought I'd be at it for much of this year. But it can wait. This is a whole lot of fun.

Yesterday at our local gym Simon Poelman was doing leg exercises. While he walked around on his hands, for God's sake. I'm not as steady as that on my feet. Olympic decathletes can make you feel a bit inadequate.

I told him one day that he made me feel as though what I was doing was pretty feeble. He said that really wasn't the way to look at it, and he's right, of course. Some of us have the potential to be athletes, some of us just aim to stay as fit and healthy as we can manage when we're hopelessly un-co. That would be me.

Still, here I am, another birthday tucked away this month and therefore another anniversary for the old heart attack. Stop me if you've heard this before, but that's an episode in my life around which my thinking continues to pivot. A few months after the big event, I came home from Auckland Cup day for drinks with some friends. I'd taken a hammering by, I don't know, Sea Swift, I suppose. One of them said that was a bit of a hiding, mate. I said The way things went this year, I'm just glad I was here to blow it.

Of course, It wouldn't really be fair to the family to throw dough around each day as if it were your last, but I do think you should make the most of things while you can.

I'm a bit worried, then, for our good friend Mr Gordon King, who confessed a week or two ago that he sees the balance of his allotted time on earth as one long sad saga of fidgeting until death. There should be some penance to pay for being such an unredeemed Ann Coulter fan, but I'd hate to think that he'll find his days reduced to - if this story at Psychology Today is, in fact, a reliable authority on the nature of fidgeting unto death - "taking drugs, masturbating a lot, or engaging in mindless entertainment." Of course, that would be his own business. I wouldn't presume to deny anyone the impulses of their libertarian leanings. Privacy of your own home, a consenting adult and his own rubber chicken suit, etc.

What really interested me about the story is that it was exploring the Positive Psychology movement. This is a kind of development of that happy old tune Accentuate the Positive. The idea is that there's more to psychology than just cataloguing the thousand and one ways in which we can screw up. What about finding out how we can optimise the parts we get right? Why settle for happy when you can upgrade to blissed-out?

So the story asks: Can the average person learn to be happier? It introduces us to a book by a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman. In Authentic Happiness, he shows you some ways to cultivate your personality strengths and work up an optimistic approach to life.

Knowing your strengths, he says, makes it easier to achieve more meaningful forms of happiness. Your choices are: the pleasant life; the good life or the meaningful life.

The pleasant life is where you do the fidgeting. You may be happy for a bit, but at some point, he says, most people look in the mirror and ask Is this all there is?

The good life is what you get when you're deeply engaged in work, family life or other activities, and to be fair to Mr Pundit, you get the sense that he's at least that evolved.

But if you want to supersize the deal, you go for the meaningful life. That's when you get devoted to an institution or a cause greater than yourself. It might be family or friendship; it might be charity or religion. The common factor is the act of giving. It could change your outlook.

To get yourself started, you might try the gratitude visit. That involves picking a person in your life whom you'd like to thank, someone who has meant a lot to you. You write them a letter. After you've written it, you call them and ask to visit. When you're face to face, you read them the letter.

Would I do that, I wondered? Not too bloody sure, actually. But then I realised that, in a way, I had, just a couple of weeks ago.

We had a 70th birthday party for Mum at our house. And because she said it would be nice to have some speeches, we had some. The thing about a speech, I've often reminded people in the speech-writing workshops I teach from time to time, is that it's a great chance to say thank you to people - to say some things you might not otherwise say so readily. And I believe this to be true. I still can't see myself doing the letter exercise, but I was happy to do more or less the same thing in a speech.

So that's what I did. I reminisced and joked a little and then I talked about how much Mum and Dad had done for us as we grew up and how selfless they'd been, and still are, which, of course, is exactly what Professor Seligman would call a meaningful life.

It felt pretty damn good to be able to say so.