Olympic fatigue strikes early and hard
I think I’ve peaked too early in my buildup to the Beijing Olympics. Two weeks from the opening and I’m exhausted.
The problem is I don’t know what to make of the Olympics any more. The original concept of a sports event has, like the guy at the bottom of the ruck, been obliterated beneath layers of marketing, drugs, jingoism and politics. Complicating this is the media’s obsession to cast these Olympics as China’s coming-of-age; an initiation ceremony that will somehow determine that country’s status in the global community.
But, true to the Olympic spirit, I am determined to be fortius, altius and speedius – to rise above myself and participate fully in the event.
I do this largely from guilt. Over the past several Olympics I have not pulled my weight. I’ve become increasingly detached from the pride, the hoop-la and the sheer stamina required to be a member of the 4 million-strong support crew to our athletes.
Instead of doing the hard yards I’ve soft-pedalled, tuning in only for the victorious soundbite or videoclip – “coming up to the line and it’s gold for New Zealand!” – and shunning the near-misses, the failures and the steady plodders. The only thing I recall from Athens are the final three minutes of whatshisname and theotherguy winning gold and silver in the triathlon.
I am sorry for this and I will try to redeem myself in the next few weeks. It won’t be easy – as an Olympic fan my match fitness peaked in 1972 (the men’s rowing eight) and 1976 (John Walker). Over the decades the malaise has spread to my interest in all sports. I no longer follow cricket, tennis, motor racing, the horses or even rugby. I’m not so much out of shape as off the planet.
Looking back, my single greatest error as a sports fan was my failure to make the shift from free-to-air television. Over a period of about a decade I shunned the enticements of subscriber TV and satisfied myself with the dwindling offerings on the traditional channels. Eventually my diet was reduced to crumbs and I turned off completely.
A couple of years ago I realised that, quite unintentionally, I had stopped watching television altogether. Like old friends we had sort of drifted apart and it became too much of an effort to get back together. My television sits in the corner of the lounge draped with a colourful scarf. It is now so out of date it ranks as ‘legacy’ equipment because it needs a special adaptor to connect a DVD player.
My relationships with other media follow a similar, though perhaps less final, trend. I do a bit of newspaper browsing and occasionally ping the sports headlines on National Radio. I use the internet constantly in my work but almost never for recreation or news.
On the rare occasions when I confront sporting events in the media, especially radio and television, it all seems too clamorous. The grace, the finesse, the dignity of the athlete vanish beneath self-indulgent broadcasting, mind-numbing advertisements and truly blithering commentaries.
You can see what I’m up against if I want to pull my weight as an Olympic supporter.
But I’m making a start. To regain the TV habit I’ve rented a few videos of ploughing competitions from the library. I can manage about 8 minutes of this - more with carbohydrate loading. This weekend I’m stepping up to a highlights package from the 1986 Ashes and I plan to spend a bit of time with my ear to the neighbour’s front door during the rugby test.
I figure some high altitude training will do me good so I’ve booked a couple of evenings watching Sky at a friend’s bach at Castle Hill.
With my limited build-up I will inevitably resort to doping like everybody else. My preferred option would be a live-feed internet implant. That should reduce my broad band and give me a passing chance of surviving the opening ceremony. I’ll see you there.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Anti-Smacking law proves its worth
28th June 2008
One year after the notorious “anti-smacking” law came into force the screaming and shouting has begun all over again. Strident demands for a referendum to be held at this year’s general election are batted away by the government; the Opposition is gleeful, sensing another opportunity to bag Labour; Helen Clark reminds them they voted for the legislation in the first place; and somewhere in the depths of Parliament a clerk patiently works his way through politic’s answer to the New World Longest Docket Competition.
So, what has happened in the twelve months since Sue Bradford robbed us of the right to hit our kids? Have the wheels fallen off? Has the thin fabric of society been torn asunder? Yes! shout the law’s opponents. Innocent mums, dads and grannies are suffering the wrath of the state for the slightest rebukes, while a generation of children spared the rod are growing wild and lawless as a consequence.
The truth is more modest. In the past six months police have responded to 82 callouts under the legislation, which have resulted in just 4 prosecutions and, to date, no convictions. This is no upheaval.
The Child Discipline Bill had a single purpose: to remove the defence of ‘reasonable force’ in prosecutions of physical violence against children. As far as I’m aware it was never intended to outlaw physical disciplining of children, but this arose as a public perception during the passage of the bill, where it became the ‘anti-smacking law’, and so it remains in most people’s minds. The insertion of a clause in the bill giving police the power to disregard inconsequential complaints has done nothing to pacify its opponents.
‘Reasonable force’ is a fine legal precedent but, with reference to the disciplining of children, it is an oxymoron – a contradiction. Using force against children marks the departure of reason. When adults hit children they are, at least for that moment, neither reasoned nor reasonable - they have taken leave of their senses.
Some opponents of the law have tried to tell us otherwise. They claim to smack or hit their children in a calm and reasonable way, after patiently explaining to the child why they are about to undertake such an insane act. Who are they kidding? Children get hit when adults lose their temper and can’t think of anything else to do.
‘Reasonable force’ is often accompanied by cries of provocation: “the little bugger drove me to it,” “you can’t reason with kids.” I work with children every day. In my experience there are almost no occasions when children cannot reason or be reasoned with.
The only times I can imagine reasonable force being necessary with children is to restrain them when they are about to endanger themselves or others. No police officer would ever prosecute this.
The issue here is not the behaviour of children but the behaviour of adults. Most of us are kind and caring parents but New Zealand has one of the highest rates of child abuse in the world. Some of us enact the abuse, others observe it and do nothing while the rest of us look on with mild concern or fuel radio talkback with forced outrage. We scream against the Kahui family while failing to understand that the roots of evil lie in society’s general acceptance that it’s okay to hit kids. So important is this belief that thousands of us have signed a petition to restore it as a parental right. This is crazy.
We are told the anti-smacking law will never stop the worst cases of child abuse. I disagree. This law sets a standard. It places the safety and care of children above poor parenting. If the effect of the act is to make adults think twice before hitting children it will, in time, contribute to social change that will reduce even the worst violence.
The deputy police commissioner, Rob Pope, said this week that the act “provides another check in terms of alerting police to different standards of parental behaviour.” For years we have cried out for more police powers to intervene before extreme family violence occurs. It’s odd that, now we finally have something that does just this, so many of us want to get rid of it.
28th June 2008
One year after the notorious “anti-smacking” law came into force the screaming and shouting has begun all over again. Strident demands for a referendum to be held at this year’s general election are batted away by the government; the Opposition is gleeful, sensing another opportunity to bag Labour; Helen Clark reminds them they voted for the legislation in the first place; and somewhere in the depths of Parliament a clerk patiently works his way through politic’s answer to the New World Longest Docket Competition.
So, what has happened in the twelve months since Sue Bradford robbed us of the right to hit our kids? Have the wheels fallen off? Has the thin fabric of society been torn asunder? Yes! shout the law’s opponents. Innocent mums, dads and grannies are suffering the wrath of the state for the slightest rebukes, while a generation of children spared the rod are growing wild and lawless as a consequence.
The truth is more modest. In the past six months police have responded to 82 callouts under the legislation, which have resulted in just 4 prosecutions and, to date, no convictions. This is no upheaval.
The Child Discipline Bill had a single purpose: to remove the defence of ‘reasonable force’ in prosecutions of physical violence against children. As far as I’m aware it was never intended to outlaw physical disciplining of children, but this arose as a public perception during the passage of the bill, where it became the ‘anti-smacking law’, and so it remains in most people’s minds. The insertion of a clause in the bill giving police the power to disregard inconsequential complaints has done nothing to pacify its opponents.
‘Reasonable force’ is a fine legal precedent but, with reference to the disciplining of children, it is an oxymoron – a contradiction. Using force against children marks the departure of reason. When adults hit children they are, at least for that moment, neither reasoned nor reasonable - they have taken leave of their senses.
Some opponents of the law have tried to tell us otherwise. They claim to smack or hit their children in a calm and reasonable way, after patiently explaining to the child why they are about to undertake such an insane act. Who are they kidding? Children get hit when adults lose their temper and can’t think of anything else to do.
‘Reasonable force’ is often accompanied by cries of provocation: “the little bugger drove me to it,” “you can’t reason with kids.” I work with children every day. In my experience there are almost no occasions when children cannot reason or be reasoned with.
The only times I can imagine reasonable force being necessary with children is to restrain them when they are about to endanger themselves or others. No police officer would ever prosecute this.
The issue here is not the behaviour of children but the behaviour of adults. Most of us are kind and caring parents but New Zealand has one of the highest rates of child abuse in the world. Some of us enact the abuse, others observe it and do nothing while the rest of us look on with mild concern or fuel radio talkback with forced outrage. We scream against the Kahui family while failing to understand that the roots of evil lie in society’s general acceptance that it’s okay to hit kids. So important is this belief that thousands of us have signed a petition to restore it as a parental right. This is crazy.
We are told the anti-smacking law will never stop the worst cases of child abuse. I disagree. This law sets a standard. It places the safety and care of children above poor parenting. If the effect of the act is to make adults think twice before hitting children it will, in time, contribute to social change that will reduce even the worst violence.
The deputy police commissioner, Rob Pope, said this week that the act “provides another check in terms of alerting police to different standards of parental behaviour.” For years we have cried out for more police powers to intervene before extreme family violence occurs. It’s odd that, now we finally have something that does just this, so many of us want to get rid of it.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Public transports of delight
At 5 0’clock on Tuesday evening the only sound in the Palmerston North bus station comes from the carpet - a screaming cocktail of seventies psychedalia. The cafeteria is barred and shuttered and, apart from myself, the sole occupant is a frail-looking elderly woman with a red woollen scarf.
I’m hungry so I attempt to purchase a bag of ready salted crisps from a vending machine. I’m not good at these things and, after several attempts, end up with a Snickers bar.
I eat the chocolate bar and gaze out the window. In the past 20 years I have travelled in New Zealand by bus only a handful of times. Those years have seen public transport in heartland New Zealand eclipsed by the automobile. Where once the railway stations and bus depots took centre stage they now huddle on the fringes.
In Palmerston North the view from the bus station includes a Kut-Price car yard, a workshop and a row of flats. On this Tuesday evening a small circus has pitched up on a grassy area across the intersection. A row of lightbulbs marches uncertainly up the ridge of the circus tent.
The Intercity coach pulls in on time. I gather my bag and follow the elderly lady with the red scarf onto the platform and up the steps. The bus is newish and in good condition. I note the Designline logo.
Rising fuel prices have not yet driven the people of Manawatu back to public transport: only 6 of the 50 seats in the coach are occupied.
The driver bustles aboard, the only purposeful figure in the landscape, and prepares to depart. As the door shuts a long arm in a greasy brown raincoat reaches through and signals to the driver. The driver leans towards the door, there is a short conversation with the arm, money is exchanged and suddenly the arm and its attendant body are settling themselves in the seat across the aisle from me.
As the bus pulls out the new arrival snorts and writhes his way into his seat. He is large and infinitely greasy. He fixes a look at me and reaches his hand across.
“Quintin,” he exhales and the bus fills with the alcoholic residue of a hundred public bars.
“Peter.”
It’s like shaking hands with a cold meat pie.
After a time Quintin releases my grip but continues to peer boozily at me.
“Do I know you?” he charges.
“I’m not from around here.”
“So you’re from Wanganui?”
“No, but I’m going to Wanganui.”
For a moment this satisfies Quintin - but only for a moment.
“They wanna put an ‘h’ in Wanganui. Do you put an ‘h’ in Wanganui?”
I reply that I do not.
“That’d make it ‘Fonganui.’ The day they start saying Fonganui’s the day I stop going there. Yep.”
Quintin sags back into his seat.
For better or worse, I reflect, public transport brings us in contact with each other in ways over which we have no control. Perhaps that is why we fled to the isolation of private cars as soon as economics permitted. These experiences are often revealing, if not always pleasant.
Quintin snores as we pull into the Mobil station at Bulls. The driver announces he is ‘taking on’ fuel, like a steamship bunkering coal.
Quintin is galvanised by this and flails back to consciousness. He peers at his surroundings and snorts fiercely.
“Bloody Bulls again.” He turns to me, his interlocutor, once more. “I grew up in Bulls and d’you know why I left?”
He waits. I do not know why he left.
“I got sick of the jokes.”
“Jokes?”
“About Bulls. All sorts of jokes. My father…” Quintin is settling down for a serious chat now, “…my father owned a takeaway bar. You know what he called it? ‘Food on the Hoof’. Then this guy opened another takeaway bar across the road. He called his ‘The Udder Food Bar’. It was always like that. I buggered off in the end.”
“Where did you go?”
“Down the road, to Foxton.”
Exhausted by this effort Quintin collapses into his seat.
I wonder if Foxton has the ‘h’ problem.
I have travelled in countries where long-distance bus trips are a chaotic and colourful microcosm of society; where bodies sweat and jostle, chickens flap, mergers are sealed or broken and everybody talks at once. Will the looming energy crisis bring New Zealanders to that glorious state? Or will our transports of delight remain essentially Quintin-esque?
The Wanganui bus depot is a shopfront on the riverbank. We arrive in darkness. Small round taxis appear from nowhere and scurry about like tugboats. Looking back at the coach I see Quintin fast asleep in his seat. The driver is leaning over him talking gently into his boozy, dream-filled face.
At 5 0’clock on Tuesday evening the only sound in the Palmerston North bus station comes from the carpet - a screaming cocktail of seventies psychedalia. The cafeteria is barred and shuttered and, apart from myself, the sole occupant is a frail-looking elderly woman with a red woollen scarf.
I’m hungry so I attempt to purchase a bag of ready salted crisps from a vending machine. I’m not good at these things and, after several attempts, end up with a Snickers bar.
I eat the chocolate bar and gaze out the window. In the past 20 years I have travelled in New Zealand by bus only a handful of times. Those years have seen public transport in heartland New Zealand eclipsed by the automobile. Where once the railway stations and bus depots took centre stage they now huddle on the fringes.
In Palmerston North the view from the bus station includes a Kut-Price car yard, a workshop and a row of flats. On this Tuesday evening a small circus has pitched up on a grassy area across the intersection. A row of lightbulbs marches uncertainly up the ridge of the circus tent.
The Intercity coach pulls in on time. I gather my bag and follow the elderly lady with the red scarf onto the platform and up the steps. The bus is newish and in good condition. I note the Designline logo.
Rising fuel prices have not yet driven the people of Manawatu back to public transport: only 6 of the 50 seats in the coach are occupied.
The driver bustles aboard, the only purposeful figure in the landscape, and prepares to depart. As the door shuts a long arm in a greasy brown raincoat reaches through and signals to the driver. The driver leans towards the door, there is a short conversation with the arm, money is exchanged and suddenly the arm and its attendant body are settling themselves in the seat across the aisle from me.
As the bus pulls out the new arrival snorts and writhes his way into his seat. He is large and infinitely greasy. He fixes a look at me and reaches his hand across.
“Quintin,” he exhales and the bus fills with the alcoholic residue of a hundred public bars.
“Peter.”
It’s like shaking hands with a cold meat pie.
After a time Quintin releases my grip but continues to peer boozily at me.
“Do I know you?” he charges.
“I’m not from around here.”
“So you’re from Wanganui?”
“No, but I’m going to Wanganui.”
For a moment this satisfies Quintin - but only for a moment.
“They wanna put an ‘h’ in Wanganui. Do you put an ‘h’ in Wanganui?”
I reply that I do not.
“That’d make it ‘Fonganui.’ The day they start saying Fonganui’s the day I stop going there. Yep.”
Quintin sags back into his seat.
For better or worse, I reflect, public transport brings us in contact with each other in ways over which we have no control. Perhaps that is why we fled to the isolation of private cars as soon as economics permitted. These experiences are often revealing, if not always pleasant.
Quintin snores as we pull into the Mobil station at Bulls. The driver announces he is ‘taking on’ fuel, like a steamship bunkering coal.
Quintin is galvanised by this and flails back to consciousness. He peers at his surroundings and snorts fiercely.
“Bloody Bulls again.” He turns to me, his interlocutor, once more. “I grew up in Bulls and d’you know why I left?”
He waits. I do not know why he left.
“I got sick of the jokes.”
“Jokes?”
“About Bulls. All sorts of jokes. My father…” Quintin is settling down for a serious chat now, “…my father owned a takeaway bar. You know what he called it? ‘Food on the Hoof’. Then this guy opened another takeaway bar across the road. He called his ‘The Udder Food Bar’. It was always like that. I buggered off in the end.”
“Where did you go?”
“Down the road, to Foxton.”
Exhausted by this effort Quintin collapses into his seat.
I wonder if Foxton has the ‘h’ problem.
I have travelled in countries where long-distance bus trips are a chaotic and colourful microcosm of society; where bodies sweat and jostle, chickens flap, mergers are sealed or broken and everybody talks at once. Will the looming energy crisis bring New Zealanders to that glorious state? Or will our transports of delight remain essentially Quintin-esque?
The Wanganui bus depot is a shopfront on the riverbank. We arrive in darkness. Small round taxis appear from nowhere and scurry about like tugboats. Looking back at the coach I see Quintin fast asleep in his seat. The driver is leaning over him talking gently into his boozy, dream-filled face.
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