Island Life by David Slack

I believe you should try to do at least one new thing each year. This year I'm going to get around to trying some muttonbird.

Our friend Adrian puts it this way: Think about it. You've got these little chicks hidden away in a secret nest in a little hole on the side of a cliff, just sitting there getting fat. Each day their parents come flying back from the southern ocean and fill them up with omega three oil from the fish they've digested. By the time the harvest season comes, those chicks are actually fatter than their parents. They haven't moved, and they're just loaded with Omega 3.

I know that elsewhere in the world they like to market tuna as the Chicken of the Sea, which is just too confusing for some people, but actually, I like the notion: chicken that actually tastes like fish.

If you're a bit brave about your eating, you can have all kinds of surprisingly good experiences.

A few years ago in Hong Kong our friend John got a bit disgruntled with us when we wouldn't try some food at a little stall in a dusty market on one of the islands. We saw cracked bowls and hepatitis, he saw the food. Okay, but I think you guys are missing out on an experience, he said, as he tucked in. He suffered no ill-effects. He also declared it to be one of the best meals he'd ever had. He would say that, of course, but I suspect we actually did miss out on a treat.

In my life I have also passed on eating snake, mountain oysters, eyeballs and probably a few others that an analyst may one day find under a blanket in the repressed memory corner of my brain. If you grow up on a sheep farm, your week starts well with a Sunday roast, but as you work your way through the animal, the standard drops a little bit each day. The low point comes at Saturday lunch time when you ask yourself which treat you're in for today: Liver? Brains? Tongue? Tripe? You tell that to the kids today and they won't believe you.

Sorry, I've made you lose your appetite. Let's get back to the mutton bird.

There's more than one right way and plenty of wrong ways to prepare any kind of meal, and I think the poor old Titi's come to grief in more than a few kitchens. My Mum says that on the day Dad came to pick her up from the maternity home along with yours truly, he was in an expansive frame of mind.

So when he spotted a sign in the fish shop window offering muttonbirds he said: I've heard they're good. Let's try one. Home they came with a nine pound baby boy and a muttonbird that for all I know may have weighed more. Mum got to cook it. She said it smelled appalling, and that things didn't get any better when they sat down to eat it.

Every other muttonbird story I've heard has been a variation on that theme, accompanied by the helpful advice: You don't want to try them, mate.

Well, I do want to try them. Adrian's promised he'll prepare them for us some time, and we're on.

Adrian thinks that if it's presented to people in the right way it could become a true delicacy. Forget about Mike Moore's lamburgers; think what the Russians have done with salted roe of sturgeon. Maybe the people who do the harvesting could talk to the people at 42 Below about getting the buzz going. I do see one guy here is doing his bit to help.

According to nzbirds.com,

The nightly homecoming of countless numbers of these birds on bird islands of southern New Zealand has been described as one of the marvels of the world. An observer seated on shore will notice before 9pm in mid-summer the birds collecting in hundreds on the water off shore. Soon they will rise and begin to circle the island or the area containing their burrows in their thousands. As one watches a thud is heard followed by a soft rustle. The first bird has arrived to be followed by countless numbers.

If you're a herbivore, you'll be picturing the beauty of that moment, but if you're a carnivore, admit it, isn't there a little bit of Homer in you that's saying Mmm. Chicken.

I could be wrong. Still it's just a thought, and I do recall that a marketing approach along those lines worked for the butcher ship in Willis St that put a sign in the window about the time Watership Down was in the movie theaters and the law on selling rabbit meat had changed.

It said: You've read the book. You've seen the movie. Now eat the cast.

Bon appetit.

When Muldoon was still Prime Minister, I became a suit in an advertising agency. I would call it an accident, and I'd rate it as one of my more regrettable ones.

I had a part-time job in a pub in Wellington and I was getting towards the end of my law degree. Young women would come into the bottle store. I would talk to them. One of them was named Mandy, and she would come in quite often to pick up supplies for the ad agency where she worked. The agency sounded glamorous, the people she worked with were glamorous and she was glamorous. See if you can guess the reason I asked her one day as she was heading for the door: "So, do you have any part-time jobs there?"

A week later I was a part-time courier for my new best friends at the advertising agency.

At that point, the idea made sense. I'd be making a bit more money; I had a nice little desk in a room full of filing cabinets; the people were fun to be around and because there was no particular code of office conduct for a young student with a motorbike helmet in an advertising agency, I could pretty much act as I liked. We all got on famously and I rode all over Wellington fetching artwork and transparencies from one building to another. The only flaw in the scheme was that I was still going to lectures a few hours each day, and that meant that your super-urgent package might be sitting on David's desk for a bit of a stretch while he was in Kelburn. No worries, though. They soon learned to call up New Zealand Couriers if they had to.

What made the job more interesting was that the offices were a couple of floors below the National Party Head Office. Their ad agency was a couple of floors below that. Being 1981, a lot of Thinking Big was going on. Being 1981, there was also a degree of civil breakdown being fomented by the Prime Minister, and there was often protest activity outside the building. I would probably be the only person filmed for TV news that winter wearing a bike helmet in the middle of a Springbok tour march who was actually on his way to deliver artwork.

They were happy, simple days.

Then I got The Offer. I was sitting at my desk by the filing cabinets one lunchtime, tucking into my slice of quiche and reading my free copy of the Listener when one of the Suits strolled in. He said "How are the studies going?"

"Fine." I said.

"When do you finish your degree?" He asked.

"Next year." I said.

"And then what happens?" He asked.

"Then I queue up with everyone else for a job as a law clerk." I said.

"Looking forward to it? He asked.

"I suppose so." I said.

"Did you ever think about working in advertising?" He asked.

You can join up the dots.

What I didn't know then but I surely know now is this: just because someone offers you a job, don't assume it's in your best interests to take it. Pretty bleedingly obvious, I'll admit, but when you're flattered to be asked, and relieved to know you don't have to go through a whole lot of interviews where they might turn you down, well, it can be a little seductive. Also, Mandy still worked there.

You can probably also join up the dots about how someone who ended up being a speechwriter enjoyed life as a suit - sorry, Account Executive - and not, let's say, a copywriter. Within 18 months I had changed careers and I knew I didn't ever want to work in advertising again.

I can see now, looking back on it, that I also got into the business because I'd been fascinated by what they did. They say it doesn't pay to watch sausages being made. In this case, I think what shocked me wasn't so much the sausages as the people making them.

I met all kinds of nice people in the business: entertaining, lively, witty people; thoughtful and considerate people. But I also encountered some human beings who just made the whole experience untenable. Sure, you'll find disagreeable people in any office. But the advertising business has some real shockers. Take your pick: self-absorbed; venal, galling; insincere; not to mention the usual pride/envy/gluttony/lust/anger/greed/sloth packages.

These were not people you would want your daughter or your marketing budget to meet.

Seeing the sausages being made left me with less respect for the business, but it didn't put me off the ads. I still liked seeing good work, and I still admired the creative talent that lay behind them.

Or at least I used to. These days, I mostly use the mute, and flick past the advertising pages.

Yes, they made ads that sucked 20 years ago too, but not so many, and the pretentiousness factor was way lower. I don't see nearly as many New Zealand ads using the wit or wry humour, or imagination they once had. In fact I see scarcely any. Some of today's ads make me wonder what the people who are making them really know about the world around them. Their image of a typical New Zealander seems to be a fashion designer living in Ponsonby.

I realise this may be a demographic issue: Of course our tragically hip ads don't appeal to you, you sad old git. You're on the other side of 40 now and you no longer count.

But I don't think that's the whole answer.

There's an absence of ideas and a degree of self-absorption in ads today that suggests to me that a lot of the people in the creative departments these days don't know all that much about, oh: life; people; places; western culture; non-western culture, or anything that happened in the world before the first episode of Friends.

That leaves them stuck with making knowing in-jokes about the process of making ads and the media in which they're being broadcast. You can dress it up as post-modern or ironic, but for the most part, it strikes me that these people don't actually have terribly much imagination or some kind of general knowledge to spark their ideas.

I think that's a problem. Ads play an influential part in our popular culture. If they're good, they'll manage to offer something worthwhile: fresh ideas, for example, or an interpretation of some aspect of life that's intelligent and interesting. Yeah, I know, they're just supposed to shift products. But they can't help but play a larger role than that. In this consumer society, any ad implies something about the things we value, or the values we hold.

I'd feel a whole lot more comfortable about the work that's being turned out if I thought it was being done by people who possessed a little more insight and perception.

I got to thinking about all this the other day because I picked up a book in Dymocks called The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR by Al and Laura Ries.

They maintain that public relations does a much better job of selling than advertising. That's what you should use, therefore, to build a brand. They offer some big examples: Starbucks; the Body Shop; Wal-Mart and Red Bull. All of them have been built with virtually no advertising. It's a theme that they appear to beat to death over 300-odd pages. I didn't see enough there to bother taking it home, but I'm persuaded by the idea.

I think it's true to say that people are more skeptical of ads today. I think it's true that advertising is losing impact. And I think that's true in part because a lot of the folks who are making them need to be a little more thoughtful about their messages.

But here's the thing that gives me pause: if Ries Snr and Jr are right, and I think they are, you can expect to see an outcome that I don't much relish. You'll see a bunch of scary human beings not unlike those from whom I fled screaming when I exited the ad business smearing their greasy mitts all over the "free" media.

Too which you might rightly say: In other late-breaking news, Hitler invades Poland. Yes, the news media already suffers the depredations of spin doctors and image handlers. But this will be as nothing compared to the onslaught you can expect if every ad-man and his wolf-hound decides to take this path.

The movie and TV and music business people have already half-strangled the media with this whole celebrity culture business. I fear it could get much worse. And I know a bit about it. I once had a job in PR.

You wouldn't call it the highlight of the holiday, but last week I took my family to the spot in Dargaville, where I once keeled over with a heart attack.

Call me sentimental, but I like to share my past with them.

'Keeled over' isn't an entirely accurate description of what happened back then, actually. If you'd been standing next to me, (and one poor guy was) you'd have watched me more or less crumple into a small pile against the front panel of the hospital reception desk.

It was a pretty surreal way to spend your 27th birthday, even before you count the morphine. In those days I had two - well, more actually; but let's start with these two - idiosyncrasies. Firstly, I spent more than the occasional Saturday at the races; secondly I didn't possess a wallet. So when the nurses helped me out of my suit and onto the bed, they also obligingly emptied my pockets. Which were fat with twenties.

The pile of bills had found their way there thanks to a horse called Modra Rua which, as it turned out, never managed to repeat the trick, and ended up costing us a lot more twenties in training fees over the next two years. But that would be getting off the point.

Anyway, one of the nurses started counting out the twenties. After she'd counted a dozen or so, she stopped and said: "Would you like me to get someone else to witness this for you?" I told her I trusted her with my life. She counted up the rest and went away to get a very big envelope.

Meanwhile I had bigger things to worry about, although I hadn't entirely registered that yet. My best guess was indigestion, so I was still approaching this in a George Costanza frame of mind. Which meant I was thinking about my underwear. You know that old line about never knowing when you might get knocked down by a bus? They're right on the money. That morning, the last pair in the drawer was an orphan from a multi-pack of briefs I'd bought on holiday a month before. Lurid doesn't start to describe the rainbow fabric, but G-string would not be a million miles off the mark if you had to describe the cut. Folks who work with the sick and needy don't tend to be judgmental, and God bless them, they didn't seem to leap to any conclusions about me.

They do make judgments about what's prudent to tell a 27 year old who's had a heart attack, though. What they decided to tell me was that they were running "tests" and they'd be keeping me there for a while. Which they did, for about twelve hours. Then, when they judged that I was stable, they told me they were sending me over to Whangarei Hospital where they could take a closer look.

Call me dense, but it wasn't until they wheeled me into an ambulance and two nurses got in, that I sussed that something might be up.

So off we rolled, out of Dargaville hospital, down the hill, and out of town to make the trip back to Whangarei and into the Coronary Care unit, where I would spend the next two weeks getting over an honest-to-goodness heart attack. Could my day get any worse? Well, in a bizarre fashion, yes. Elsewhere in Dargaville that evening the National Party were having their candidate selection meeting for the next election. They chose a really top sort for the job by the name of Meurant. You may remember him.

The road between Dargaville is quite a winding one. And a pretty long one, especially if you should try to make the drive while your chest feels as though it's being squeezed by a giant fist. That's what I'd set out to do, and if it hadn't been for the road signs saying "Hospital" that I decided to follow, that's where I would have headed. I asked my doctor later what would have happened if I'd taken that choice. He said "You'd have just got sicker and sicker." I love the way doctors choose their words.

Otherwise Mrs Lincoln, how did you like the play? I've been ambivalent about Dargaville ever since. I visited Northland quite often in the first few years afterwards, but I didn't bother going back there. But then this Christmas our friend Adrian said, as he did last year: "You should come over to the place I'm looking after in Dargaville. You'll love it."

And so after we'd had a few days in Leigh and Sandy Bay, that's what we did.

So how was Dargaville after all those years? Well, Adrian was right. We did love it. His friends have a home just out of town, surrounded by old trees and a sprawling lawn. There were chooks for Mary-Margaret to feed, a little dog for her to play with, a trampoline, a swing, and just enough of the feeling of farm life for her to get the idea of it.

But the best part was a drive to Maunganui Bluff. We drove down at about six in the evening with the sun glowing, and waded around the rocks to haul off some mussels and bring them back home for dinner. You look around on an afternoon like that and you're reminded why this is a nice place to live. The water was warm, the beach was vast and almost empty, and there were more mussels than you could count.

We even dug up a toheroa to show Mary-Margaret how they burrow their way back below the sand. She thought it was hugely entertaining.

If you drive into Dargaville when there's a strong wind blowing and it's gray and overcast and the river is its usual colour (the locals explain that it runs upside down) you can think it's a bit dismal.

When you can add to the list 'had heart attack there' you might feel inclined to leave it out of your tourist tips.

But I wouldn't. That afternoon at Maunganui Bluff changed my mind. So did our trips to the Kauri trees, and the Kai Iwi lakes and the little settlements on the road to the Waipoua forest, and a great breakfast cafe in Dargaville.

And oddly enough, so did the sentimental trip to the hospital. The reception desk has gone, and I could only stand with Karren and Mary-Margaret in the foyer and try to describe what had happened, but it was enough. Some provincial towns look backed against the wall these days, especially when you poke around what's left of their hospital facilities. But Dargaville's hospital actually seems to have more going on there now than it did in 1987. I could be mistaken, of course, because I didn't actually ask anyone about it, but the car park was full and there seemed to be other primary care facilities there. If that's what they've managed to achieve, good on them.

We had a great time. And my heart didn't miss a beat.

David Slack's father was a farmer. His father was a farmer, and his father was a farmer and as far as the records show, it's farmers all the way back. It was only a matter of time before one of them became a speechwriter. He runs speeches.com from his home in Devonport.