Speaker by Various Artists

Today's Drinnan covers one of the claims circulated in a release from former Herald on Sunday assistant editor Steve Cook, in advance of the hearing of his Employment Relations Authority complaint against APN yesterday.

The claim is summarised thus:

The document alleged that for a time in 2005 a Herald on Sunday reporter who lived opposite the Sunday Star-Times office in Auckland's New North Road had a clear view of the office of SST editor Cate Brett.

The reporter was allegedly given a telescope.

According to the document, Brett at the time wrote on a whiteboard details of the Sunday Star-Times' upcoming stories and photographs and the reporter with the telescope was told to ring through details to editor Shayne Currie.

Herald on Sunday chief reporter David Fisher, who owned the telescope, has asked us if we could publish his account of what actually happened. It follows below.

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The telescope story has grown beyond the point where it can be ignored, and grown more fanciful with each retelling. If you haven't heard it, you can find it in the original version of Steve Cook's employment case against my employer, and his former employer, the Herald on Sunday.

It goes like this: that editor Shayne Currie forced Jonathan Marshall, a current Sunday News journalist, into hiding a camera in his apartment to spy on the Sunday Star-Times.

This allegation will not be made in the Employment Relations Authority hearing today. It was struck out as admissable evidence, and not related to Cook's dismissal. How do I know the contents of confidential documents submitted and rejected by the tribunal? Because Cook has bandied so many copies around town to get media interested in covering his case that one came close to me.

I refused to take a copy. I didn't want to be close to something so fraught, messy and none of my business. But one story I've heard from it in the last few days was this telescope story. I know it to be false, because it was my telescope, and along with Marshall, both our ideas. It was a joke driven by a sense of mischief, and one that Currie had no part in organising - or even knew about until after it was used.

The mischief was conceived around the habit of then Star-Times editor Cate Brett, who I admire greatly, leaving her office for the evening with the light left on and blinds open. I drove past on my way home sometimes - a friend and Star-Times staff member lives nearby and at the time, I was free to visit often.

By coincidence, at this time, Marshall moved in opposite the Star-Times office. I have known him for years and find him endearing and infuriating in equal measure, mainly in both regards the madcap schemes that spring up around him. I can't recall if he was working for the Herald on Sunday then, but I think not. I'm sure at that time he was commuting to Waikato for a year-long journalism course.

Marshall invited me around to see his new flat, one or the other of us joking about it being close enough to spy on the Star-Times to talking about the light left on. The joke continued, and I brought from home a telescope to put behind the blinds, and duly peered through it, trying to train it through the office window.

I say joke because the first time I stopped at that intersection, and looked across the road at the editor's office, my first thought was: "Bloody hell, they've pinned all their pictures up on the wall and you can see them from the road." Second thought was to get a photographer where I was with a 600mm lens for less than 10 seconds - in and out. With a high quality camera, and digital zoom, we would know, and could study, everything the opposition was doing photographically.

If it was a serious scheme, that would have been the way to do it. But it would have been pretty cheap. I have friends there who have the same belief and pride in their work as I do. One of my dearest friends was working as a photographer there at the time. I think Cate Brett, the editor, is one of the finest actual journalists to lead a newspaper in decades. Her staff, my friends, thought the same. I would not steal their work, even when it was made so easy.

Which was why I was drinking beer with Marshall, occasionally squinting through a telescope. It did occasionally bring a photograph into focus, but have you ever tried looking at a newspaper and guessing the content of a story by its picture? It can't be done, or at least, not in a way that would give real benefit to a competing journalist.

And the telescope? It was given to me one Christmas to look at stars. I don't really know how to use it. I still haven't seen a star through it, before the telescope spent six months at Marshall's, or since I got it back. In the time Marshall had it, it was used three times, none seriously. The length of time it stayed with Marshall is not an indication of use, rather than not getting around to pick it up.

Currie found out about it some time after it was in there, and in my recollection, wasn't particularly comfortable it was there. There's been a number of editors who, at times, have wanted to scream with frustration in dealing with something that seemed funny to me at the time. He's another, and a very good editor too.

The telescope event was quickly forgotten until it emerged in this testimony of Steve Cook's. It is his evidence and I know it to be false. Jonathan Marshall also knows this, and I hope his friendship with Cook will not keep him from confirming it.

And if I know that portion to be false, what regard would I hold his other claims? I know the answer to that. With the same regard in which I personally hold Cook's stories about Sharon Shipton, Debbie Gerbich, Kirsty Gillon and Maycsena King.

Eight months ago, David Herkt suffered a severe and disabling stroke. This is his story of what happened that day, and what happened on the road back.

Part 1: The Last Day

A stroke – it is generally a word we use to describe the gentle, running touch of a human hand, but it can also be the one we use for an explosion of a blood vessel in the brain with more or less devastating results.

On my last day, November 20th 2008, I woke up with what I thought was an unexpectedly severe hangover.

I’d had a friend over the previous evening and between the two of us, me more than him, we’d polished off a third of a bottle of over-proof Ukrainian vodka.

I was really into vodkas. I had five bottles of differing brands, chosen with some experience, in the freezer. It was an area of taste in which I had developed expertise. I used to think of it as keeping in touch with my Polish heritage.

So a third of a bottle did not seem that much, comparatively speaking.

There had also been a number of cigarettes, some new music and a shared joint or two of marijuana. It was a semi-regular Boys’ Night, without the benefit of more temperate partners.

So a hangover afterwards wasn’t exactly a new thing, though this one’s intensity felt more than a little undeserved. I’d even complained about feeling bad before I went to bed.

I had just finished directing a TV documentary and I was busy looking around for work in the increasingly tenuous area of factual television in New Zealand’s modern media environment. I was tired from a full-on year, and I knew I was drinking and smoking too much. It had got to the stage where I wasn’t even enjoying either of them.

That final morning was dully normal. There was me, what I thought of as my hangover, and a world where not only did I need a job, but I also probably had to create the position in order to fill it.

There was a new digital widescreen TV just out of its box that needed to be set up so it could be used. There was the supermarket shopping. There was banking to sort out. I had a whole list of social obligations that had been put on the backburner for months.

I was home alone. I had not long finished lunch.

Strangely, courtesy of my computer’s memory, I can resurrect my last minutes in great detail. I know the websites I visited. I know what I saw. I know the music I played. My words and exchanges are logged in the records of online forums. My final minutes of being myself are all still there, preserved in some sort of digital Pompeii where I can, if I wish, discover me as I was…

I don’t usually go to analgesics immediately for a hangover. I wait until I really have to – which does mean sitting around feeling off-colour for hours if need be. You did the crime, you do the time. Suddenly, though, my head was splitting.

It is indicative of how severe the pain was, in my own scheme of things, because I immediately went straight into the bathroom, got two Panadeine, went to the kitchen, filled a glass tumbler with water, and washed those powdery pills down.

Then I headed for bed.

By the time I got into the bedroom my limbs did not seem to be working properly. I can remember having difficulty actually getting up onto the bed.

I think it was a barely controlled fall more than anything else.

Once I had hauled myself up onto the mattress, I found I couldn’t sit up straight. I kept falling sideways or backwards, like a badly positioned doll. I kept on trying and failing. Struggle to sit upright. Fall over. Struggle. Fall.

And amid the confusion as to what was happening and why, there was nausea and the pounding of a headache that had been ratcheted up to stadium volume.

It is about here that my own memory begins to fail. I am still desperately trying to sit up on the bed, and falling over, again and again. I’m bewildered because I do not know why this is happening to me. I’m just toppling over every time I try to sit up. It has never happened before. Why is it happening now?

I attempt to use my knowledge and experience to work out what to do. For a while I focus on finding my centre of gravity, composing myself around it so I can sit upright. It seems to work until I move again. Then I topple over.

I can’t really remember making the call to my partner at work. I do know my mobile must have been luckily to hand. There was no way I could have managed to get to it if it wasn’t. I do remember, though, being nearly reduced to tears as I repeatedly misdialled a number I knew by heart.

It could have been much, much worse.

Later on, I got to talk to someone who’d lived alone and it had taken him two days, post-stroke, to make it downstairs from his bedroom to reach the landline.

Part 2: Contemporary Crisis Unit

My stroke was a haemorrhage – where a blood vessel ruptures and bleeds into the brain. It was not an age-related condition.

It was simply a weakness in an unusual little knot of veins in the left hemisphere of my brain that had been quietly waiting to burst. The possibility of it happening had always been there, unsuspected since my birth.

When a haemorrhagic stroke happens it affects a large area of the brain, is usually severe, and carries a high risk of death.

The MRT images of it that I saw much later were remote from me personally, as only images on a computer monitor can be. There is that biblical quote from the Book of Genesis where, “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”. My stroke looked just like that on the phosphor screen in the specialist’s office – a large cloud of blood in the middle of my brain, a fine darkness suspended there like a grainy veil that obscured things.

If it hadn’t been my own brain I was looking at, I would have just gone, “huh,” and clicked on to the next image.

But I was now learning a wake-up routine where the nursing staff in Auckland Hospital would ask me if I knew what had happened to me, where I was, the month or the day of the week, and the year.

I also had to live with the fact that I’d often get most, if not all, of those answers wrong. And I’d be corrected.

For those first days, I felt white-hot. I was molten. It was nothing to do with my measurable temperature. It was how I initially experienced myself. Something had happened in my mind that had seared me clean. It had been blindingly bright. I could feel its remnants like the fading radiation of the Big Bang at the origin of the universe.

In the beginning, the first week or so, I was often a being of light – where before I had experienced myself as a fleshy, lumbering body, with a history, a pulse, regular breathing and a slightly age-expanded waistline, now I only knew me as a burning blaze.

It is hard to describe.

Sometimes I felt comforted by this blasted whiteness, as if having its purity and intensity there meant that there was nothing else bad that could happen to me ever again.

At other times it was just too bright, as if it was the apocalyptic aftermath of some unholy war through which I was struggling to find my way home.

Underneath, though, for better or for worse, I was still me.

The silent conversation I was having with myself in my thoughts seemed to be entirely normal. I could remember historic dates – 1066, 1492, 1773, 1939. I could quote memorised poetry to myself – “Let us go then, you and I/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherised upon a table...”

I knew my personal back history, mother’s maiden name, my partner’s name, computer passwords, relevant medical history, my pets’ names and ages....

My past seemed intact. There didn’t seem to be any noticeable holes. Looking at it from the inside, that is, because I still had to learn an absolutely essential fact; the human mind has an immense capacity to delude itself and it easily and unobtrusively fills in the gaps.

I was certainly having difficulty speaking. Where my thoughts seemed to preserve all of my old bounce and opinions, I couldn’t communicate this. I might have been able to think it, but somehow, I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t quite put things into the words I wanted.

I certainly couldn’t walk. After a twelve hour period of confusion, where sometimes it appeared that I couldn’t use one side of my body, and then suddenly I could, everything settled down.

The right side of my body was useless. I couldn’t move my right arm or my right leg. My face hadn’t been touched by the consequences of the haemorrhage, so at least I didn’t have that facial drag or sag often associated with people who have had strokes.

I was also a medical entity. My whole world had become a hospital ward deep in the new block of Auckland Hospital.

The view out of the window above my bed was just the neo-brutalist architectural struts and trusses of the building’s large inner light-well. It is something you can’t see or know from the outside. There was no sky. It was a little like suddenly living in the space-station sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Everything was clear, hard, modern, and enclosed.

The opioid drugs also helped my sense of insulation.

Becoming a hospital patient brings out the inner junkie in us all. Mine didn’t need much assistance. In my surviving memories of that first week, there was more than one long instance that involved getting topped up with increasing doses of one of the more potent synthetic painkillers. I knew what it was. I knew what it did. I wanted more. I was getting given more. My nurse was helpfully complicit.

So my first week was warm and pain-free and distant. It was like being locked into an elevator with a muted recording of Matt Monro singing Lennon and McCartney’s ‘Yesterday’ on repeat and not really worrying about anything else. Reality was a very long way away.

Though I do remember having odd dreams when I slept.

I had just been researching spinal injuries for a documentary. I’d even paid a visit to the Otara Spinal Unit and had another scheduled. All this information had got mixed up in my mind, so I had dreams about a non-existent Miramar Spinal Unit and the words ‘Spinal Dogs’ written as a tattoo and worn by tough and near-forgotten men with spinal injuries in wheelchairs. There was a Wellington suburban milk-bar bleakness about the whole thing.

I do not remember eating or excreting in that first week. I can’t describe what I ate, nor how I organised the other end of the process. I was only just managing to communicate to visitors coming in from an outside world that was remote and somehow unnecessary – I relied on the very human fact that most often they’d want to talk about themselves, and so I gave them that chance.

In my few moments of remembered consciousness I generally looked out over my fellow patients with a benevolent, much sedated love.

I was, to put it bluntly, out for the count: couldn’t walk, could barely talk, and didn’t fully realise the enormity of everything.

First ←Previous Page 1 of 4 Next→ Last

I haven’t attended much recently to describing my experience of settling back into New Zealand. In the main, this is because restarting work and buying a house are time-consuming activities.

It is also not easy, I think, to get a clear handle on precisely what I feel. And, lest this be seen as a cop-out, confusion is probably the most honest description of this part of the resettlement process. Just as I found the process of deciding to return to New Zealand a rather bipolar experience – with my volition alternating between “London days” and “New Zealand days” – resettling is not linear, but volatile. Some days it seems clear that we have made a brave and wise choice to be part of our young homeland in the context of friends and family. Other days, particularly as the sky darkens early and the southerly continues churning up the harbour, the place can seem less welcoming. Compared to the bright lights of New York and London, the relative solitude amid the elemental, inky black, darkness can have a disconcerting mien; though it makes the stars seem much closer and luminous than I had remembered.

There is a series of clever adverts for HSBC which have recently adorned arrival terminals of international airports. They consist of two photographs, each described by different one-word captions; and then the same two photographs, in which the captions are reversed. The objective is to illustrate that values depend upon one’s point of view. An example is a picture of a full moon and a picture of the Earth as seen from the moon; each captioned, alternatively, “romance” and “madness”.

I am still at the stage where I am not sure whether a decision to live and work in New Zealand is romantic, mad, a masterstroke or merely routine. That is, I am still trying to unpick what is real and important in my experiences and what is ephemeral or merely a passing fancy. I suspect this can make me appear obtuse, or possibly evasive, when being kindly asked how I am finding things. The truth is that it depends very much on my precise mood when I am asked. In this way, it is a bit like being a teenager all over again. And just as teenagers tend to give non-committal replies to questions because they have not yet mastered their conflicting emotions, I’m not yet able to formulate a response, even to myself, which renders my different experiences and thoughts into a coherent and stable whole. Even if I could, it would take a good while to relate it.

To make matters even more confusing, after less than two months in the country, I have just spent two weeks working in Europe. If I thought it was strange getting used to the idea of living in Wellington again, it was positively surreal to find myself back in London, working with my former colleagues in my former office and catching up again with friends, but living now in a hotel and not a home. My last night in London consisted of a BBQ at a flat in Tooting. It was a great and memorable evening. But in terms of layers of significance, it resembled a Charlie Kaufmann screenplay. I was back in London, though living in and about to return to Wellington, sitting outside wrapped up against the chill on a windy night, with several dear friends who used to live in Wellington. There is no clear parable to this encounter; it was just all very self-reflexive.

Its effect was to make me feel elated, even through the hangover and tedium of a flight back; and then flat, even though I was returning to my first night in my new house which my wife had heroically moved us into during my ill-timed absence. It was clear to me that that day that my reactions to everything – from the blue and white walkway between the Auckland terminals, which seemed a perfect emblem of homecoming; to our lovely new home, which, despite containing the reassembled pieces of our former lives, seemed somehow bereft – were being coloured a lack of balance and stability in my judgments and feelings.

The best word for what I am experiencing is dislocation; in the sense of not being fully connected with where I now live. As I sit here, trying to think through the fog of jet-lag, it strikes me that the dislocation is itself a form of jet-lag; a consequence of living between different places and not being fully in sync with any of them. Of course, it was partly this nagging feeling which led me to decide to return home. While that may indeed be the cure, it doesn’t have immediate effect. My sense, though, is that a period of short-term confusion is a necessary step along the pathway to long-term happiness.

This, I think, is the great difference between coming home and moving to a new place which carries no emotional significance. Wellington has many objective merits: it is attractive, energetic, cosmopolitan and navigable. But to a returning Wellingtonian, these merits are filtered, unevenly and unpredictably, through a web of recollection and emotional response. Just as the thought of the green belt, the blue harbour and a good flat white are powerful forces drawing one back, Wellington is also inhabited by ghosts of people who now live elsewhere, and bears the burden of having to live up to one’s present-day aspirations, which have in the meantime been moulded by other places. Just as with getting over jet-lag, there is no quick fix; the best approach is just to get out there and engage. And eventually, I figure, the fog will clear.

Daniel Kalderimis

We've been soliciting questions for Telecom about its new XT Network via ads across the ffunnell network for the past week. The answers to some of those are below -- you can discuss those over the next 10 days and ask any others you might have.

We expect to be joined on Public Address System over that time by a variety of Telecom employees -- technical, marketing and perhaps even senior management. Telecom staff will identify themselves and state their role in this project.

Not everything will be up for grabs immediately -- the "reveal" of the network is still underway -- but Telecom has assured us that by Friday everything will be revealed and all questions will have an answer.

For now, three main questions have been asked by people who've participated via the ffunnell website. Here they are, along with the answers:

1. What phones will be available on the new XT Network? People want to know if they will be able to use their existing handsets, or if they'll be able to just buy a sim card from Telecom.

The range available at launch is showcased on www.testdrive.co.nz Telecom is building an online tool so you can check whether your existing phone is compatible with the 850Mhz network.

Geekzone already has an unofficial list of Vodafone handsets likely to be compatible and an unofficial FAQ covering related questions.

2. Will you be able to get an iPhone or use an iPhone on the new network?

A number of WCDMA 850 MHz capable mobiles will work on the XT network as long as they have been unlocked by their original provider. Telecom will not restrict which phones can be used on the XT Mobile Network so if you purchase a Telecom SIM you can do with it what you like, but Telecom cannot guarantee the customer experience of a phone that is not sourced from and supported by Telecom.

3. What will the plans (business, consumer and prepay) look like on the new network?

The timing of announcements on this front is still being determined but all will be revealed this week. It's possible that some of the answers may even be revealed in this forum. But two key changes stood out in CEO Paul Reynolds' launch announcement:

• Plans will not have on and off peak rates.

• It will not cost more to ring Vodafone mobiles than Telecom mobiles.

We suggested to Telecom marketing that participants in the discussion could propose their own ideal plan design in the discussion. They said "go for it", so you can feel free to say you think would work for you.

We can also talk about the technical capabilities of the network itself and what they will mean. Technical team leaders will be here to answer questions on build and tuning.

Thanks for taking part.

Alastair Thompson, Steve Adams and Regan Cunliffe for Ffunnell, co-organisers and hosts of this XT Network discussion on Public Address System

There is something awry in the state of Auckland - The Growth Machine is being constrained. That great Machine is feeling restricted. And those select few who make a whole lot of money from the Growth Machine - the property developers, the motorway builders, the corporate investors - are unhappy, very unhappy.

They have found themselves constrained by local communities with too much power under the Resource Management Act. The RMA has given local community groups the right to take them to the Environment Court.

And the RMA is pissing them off.

They have found themselves constrained by a metropolitan urban limit (MUL) that says they can’t keep putting new sprawling subdivisions on greenfield sites serviced by motorways.

And the MUL is angering them.

They have found themselves constrained by elected councillors who are under the influence of the community that elected them; councillors who are influenced by communities that don’t want to sacrifice green space to development.

And they are railing against all these elected councillors.

And they have found themselves constrained by a regional land transport strategy that says that better buses and trains, walking, and cycling should be the priority ahead of new motorway developments that bulldoze their way through the ‘burbs.

And they are furious that 50 years of road wisdom is being ignored.

And they have run up against laws that block privatisation of assets, and a timid central government that won’t sell them cheap public assets like the 80s and 90s.

And they can almost taste the money they made last time around.

So, they are going to do something about it.

They’re going to give those pesky community groups the bash, by changing the RMA so they can’t get into the Environment Court without coming up with a bond before they walk through the door and then bankrupt them if they persist.

They will shut up the community groups.

They’re going to abolish the constraint of the metropolitian urban limit so those paddocks they own on the far side of that infuriating line will now be worth millions as they can be used for urban sprawl.

They will lock in the sprawl.

They’re going to conduct a forced amalgamation of the Auckland councils so they will be left with just 20 councillors for 1.4million people - ,20 councillors who will have even larger electorates than MPs and even less connection with their communities, and who will be less under the sway of the park-loving, library-loving, community hall-loving unwashed masses.

They will shut up the local councillors concerned about being re-elected.

They’re going to use central government funding of motorways to subvert regional land transport strategies so that Fulton Hogan and all the rest can get on with building motorways and making money; regardless of whether there is a positive benefit to cost ratio or not.

They will take the wheel clamps off the bulldozers.

And they will hand over $28billion in assets to a 20 member über Council they control who won’t have legislative or political constraints on privatisation.

They will liberate these assets from the clutches of the public sector.

They have a plan and they are going to push it through, because they remember that blitzkrieg worked well in 1939 and 1984 and 1990 and it can work again.

Melissa Lee was right when she said people are coming along the Western Motorway to steal our stuff. But they don’t live in South Auckland, they come from Auckland Airport; they don’t wear balaclavas, they wear suits; and they don’t drive beat up Toyotas, they are driven in Crown limos. Grand Theft Auckland is heading our way.

Time to get up off the couch and fight for your stuff and your democracy.

Russel Norman