Gardens New World in Dunedin used to run a special fleet of 'retired' trolleys for this purpose in the 1990s. I recall something about leaving your name and address at he counter and being allowed to take one of these rattly old trolleys home with your groceries.

I was deeply impressed with the NZ police when they made Louise Nicholas the patron of a graduating wing at the Police College recently, so they've shown they can reconsider their attitude to a critic of their culture and performance.

Hopefully their reconsideration of their attitude to Jarrod Gilbert won't take as long.

The NZ Flag….97 bucks!

Flags have a pretty hard life if actually flown - the only current NZ flag in my house is really too ragged to fly, as it's had a long trip around the pacific. So spending some bucks for decent fabric and finishing is important for some uses of a flag.

It's just the serial number for the paper isn't it? Hardly fishy to make it easily machine-readable.

Pharmac is moving into into medical devices as well as drugs - so the single purchaser model is coming, but not there yet. How they'll prioritise reliability of service, electrical backups etc. compared to least cost per patient is another question.

https://www.pharmac.health.nz/medicines/hospital-devices/

Hey Francis, and hi regulars here. Religion and the associated philosophy is a subject that’s interested me most of my life and had a big, practical influence – I grew up in the church, and moved with my family to Dunedin as a primary school child so that my father could study theology at Knox College. He never went on to become a minister, due to complicated and sad family implosions, but I thoroughly enjoyed my association with the faithful and thoughtful Presbyterians we met there. Caversham Presbytarian Church Youth Group circa 1990 had a collection of kind, welcoming and intellectually curious people that I’m pleased to have met.

The religion wore off but I recall that sense of community very fondly and still find some of Jesus’ sometimes counter-intuitive advice very helpful, though I’m inclined to re-interpret “Thou shall love thy neighbour as thyself” through Lennon: All you need is love. This feels profoundly true and has helped me through some really dark days.

As an atheist teenager and adult I’ve been through some argumentative stages, as you describe in your own story Francis, and I’m not really interested in arguing metaphysics any more. Your approach of religious story and life story seems much more productive, thanks.

Thanks Emma, I was just on the point of un-lurking to post that. I'm pleased that my children haven't had single faith type religious education at their primary school. I suspect that was a pragmatic choice - there could be many children withdrawn from the sessions at their fairly heterogeneous primary school.

Having said that, I'd love them to have had exposure to a variety of religious ideas, presented by people who understood them properly. As a post-Christian type person, I can give them a fair idea of what different Christian groups think about the world but when my daughter asked me to suggest a couple of religions she could compare for an awareness exercise for Scouts I realised she doesn't know much about world religions at all.

This bowl is just right...

Very Escher.