AUTUMN MEMORIES

AUTUMN MEMORIES

By Michael Bott

Many years ago when I was a teenager I used to cycle home from school and would often call in on some friends of mine, the Turnbull’s. Jim and his wife Marjorie were English, their family had grown up and moved on, and they lived in an old house that Jim, who was an architect, had extended and painstakingly restored.

When I used to call by they were in their youthful 70’s. Their offspring, like most children eventually do, had flown the coop, established families of their own and would only return for Christmas and the odd occasion.

Jim and Marjorie had a huge garden, full of old rhododendrons, bay trees, fruit trees – groaning with fruit in season and a large kitchen garden with raspberries, strawberries and gooseberries and rows of neatly ordered vegetables.

Anyway after school probably once or twice a week I would call in, park my bike in the car port and go into the kitchen for a glass of milk or a cup of tea and a piece of slice or a biscuit from the tins and would either help in the garden or just talk with Mrs Turnbull about how to take the laterals out of young tomato plants, or about a piece of poetry or anything.

As we talked I would marvel at the old furniture, paintings and books that festooned the walls and tables. Jim and his wife came from very old stock and over the years had inherited and or bought pieces of furniture from “the old country.”

One day, an old welsh dresser turned up in their living room, I marvelled at it. It was intricately carved with lion head handles, scrollwork and rope edging. The wood was heavy and dark with the grease of hands, long since passed.  This was a novelty to me. When I was a child, anything that was old was “got rid of”, and old carved kauri or oak pieces from family that had passed on, were taken to the tip, to be replaced by the latest mass produced chipboard and plastic veneer offerings. “Where did that come from?” I asked. “That’s an old dresser that comes from my mother’s house. We’ve had it for over three hundred years” Mrs Turnbull replied. “She’s brought some of the larger items with her and come to live with us. I was then introduced to a small shrunken Welsh woman who looked almost as old as the dresser.

Mrs Evans was small and wizened with dark eyes that sparkled with mischief and life. She was the first person I had met who was 100 years old. Seasons came and went and my visits also included time with Mrs Evans. We would read to each other, play backgammon and I would listen enthralled and Mrs Evans would tell me about living through the War, “making do” on rations and of hearing Churchill on the radio.

Over the next two years we became good friends. As I visited I became aware that the passage of time was moving quickly for Mrs Evans. I watched her shrink even more than I first thought possible and by degrees she stopped venturing out and in the end began to spend her days resting in her bed.

When I was small time used to travel, I thought, very slowly.  Christmas, the event by which I marked time, took an aeon to come around again. As I have grown older it seems to come around in the twinkling of an eye. So I guess for someone as old as Mrs Evans was, though she moved at glacial speed, time must have felt like a roller coaster.

I have a clear memory of Mrs Evans resting in her old carved double bed. It was autumn and the leaves were turning a thin parchment brown and gradually falling to the earth. I was reading her "The Hand of Glory” from the Ingoldsby Legends:

ON the lone bleak moor,
At the midnight hour,
Beneath the Gallows Tree,
Hand in hand
The Murderers stand
By one, by two, by three!
And the Moon that night
With a grey, cold light
Each baleful object tips;
One half of her form
Is seen through the storm,
The other half 's hid in Eclipse! ….

As Mrs Evans rested, her eyes shut in meditation a thin stream of spittle formed on the corner of her mouth and travelled to her chin. She laughed as I read. Suddenly she stirred and produced a small cellophane bag containing nuts from under her pillow. “Here have one,” she said. “They’re really rather good.” I gratefully took the bag, grabbed a couple of nuts and placed them in my mouth and began to chew. “You know”, she said, “Some friends sent me these lovely toffees from home, I suck the toffee off, but my teeth can’t handle the nut centres, so I save them.”

Speed Limits and Motorised Snails

Police are thinking about cementing in the zero tolerance policy re the speed limit. Aside from there being no proven link between the 10 km an hour normal extra tolerance previously allowed (110km pr hr) compared with the present 104km limit what irritates me is that Police won't institute zero tolerance  for those preternaturally slow drivers who hold up hundreds of motorists by their desire to behave as snails. Having been on holiday and trapped in queues of up to thirty cars behind a front vehicle doing on one occasion 30km under the posted limit, it seems these drivers do more to pose a risk to traffic than a motorist doing 110 km per hour on the open road. How can it be that when the road toll goes down, Police give themselves credit, yet when it goes up they blame motorists? According to motoring expert and editor of the Dog and Lemon Guide Mr Matthew-Wilson an analysis of the statistics shows that 80% of road fatalities occur at speeds less than the speed limit. Of the 20% that occur at above the limit factors such as age, fatigue and alcohol consumption play a large part (3 News 3/1/14). If speed and road safety are intimately connected, why is it that the UK has higher speeds and better safety figures? It seems to me that the subjecting of  hundreds of mums and dads on holidays to speeding infringements is more about revenue generation than reason. 

SCHOOL – EARLY DAYS

By Michael Bott

In many ways I had no idea that the bliss of my pre school years would ever end. I just always thought that I would be little, that big people would always be big and caring, that death was somewhere else, it was not in my world. The sun shone in summer and there would always be warm food on the table. That mum and dad knew everything.  My grandparents were lovely cuddly people. I didn’t know how they fitted into my world, they just were.

Unlike mum and dad, they had special powers, they could remove their teeth, which I thought was pretty cool. Nanas were better cooks than mum and could make such things as golden syrup puddings, jams and scones. Unlike mum and dad, they would also buy you ice creams whenever you went to go for Sunday drives in ancient round cars that drove sedately like galleons on a tar seal sea.

I remember that every now and then there would be big celebrations like Christmas, where an old fat man dressed in red would somehow slide down our central heating ducts and deposit presents around our plastic tree. Then sometime in around March or April chocolates and spiced buns would suddenly appear.

Sometime in about March 1971 my mum got out her Singer sewing machine and told me, “Right Michael, let’s make you a book pouch.” I was excited, “A book pouch!” I loved books and it was for me. I chose the fabric – green cotton. I remember mum stitching the pouch, her fingers guiding the fabric under the needle, and her then stitching two domes to secure the pouch. Then in her careful hand, she wrote my name in ink at the top of the pouch. But still I had no idea, why I would need a pouch?

I remember my first day when my mother, my near constant companion from beyond my first memories put me in my fairisle jumper, woollen shorts and handed my brown leather satchel, containing egg sandwiches and some chocolate and a piece of fruit and declared, “Well you’re off to school today.” “School why?  What is that?”

Off in the car to Mayfair Primary School, I had often seen it but had no idea what it was all about. As I entered the school building I recall what for me were long cavernous corridors lined with rimu that smelled of wax polish, toilet deodourisers, oilskin raincoats and school bags all reeking of peanut butter and egg sandwiches.

Mum marched me past all these strange sights and smells and up to a wooden and glass door, a portal to my first encounter with the New Zealand school system - to Room 1 and my first teacher, the grandmotherly Mrs Bonguarde.

There for a few hours I was made to feel special, “This is Michael” “Who will be Michael’s friend for the day?” “Thank you Mark, can you take Michael and show him around during playtime.”

I was marched to a mat, and Mrs Bonguarde recommenced reading “Little Black Sambo.” Mum had somehow vanished, I was on my own.

One thing I do remember about my first day is the end of it. Books were being given out to my class-mates to take home for reading. I went to the end of the queue and waited to be given a book. “No Michael, you can’t have a book?” “Why?” “It is too early, you haven’t learnt to read yet. You can get a book in two weeks time, you will have to wait.” “ But Miss I can read.”

“Sorry? What?”

The tears welled up and I remember being bitterly upset and not being given a book, because the system said I was unable to read, even though I could. Evidently I must have created a scene, and I was eventually given a book.

But the damage was done. I was marked – I had cried and had shown weakness. Little did I know that I had marked myself as a target for attention. I suppose being a runt as a child, with sticky out ears, knock-knees, and cursed with a stutter to boot I had marked myself out as a target from my first days at primary school.

When I ran, my legs used to splay out in an ungainly fashion. I supposed I stood out as different. A couple of days later, while running in some game, I remember suddenly hitting the asphalt, my knee stung, blood flowed. I looked up and saw John grinning at me. “Why?” “You’re a cry baby and you run like a girl!” As with a brand applied to the hide of a cattle beast that burns into the flesh, I was now branded by the school bully.  I was stuck with that label throughout primary school.

As I hit the ground that day it struck me that what was for me the golden optimism of childhood had begun to be stripped away as painfully as the skin off my knees.

ACC's Continuing Persecution of Mike Dixon-McIvor

Early this week I wrote about the bullying that ACC had subjected advocate Mike Dixon-McIvor to in its campaign of payback. They had indulged in behaviour which saw them actively seek to deprive him of the means to earn an income by writing to his clients advising that he couldn't work for them.

ACC also attempted to prosecute him for fraud in a case that was thrown out before trial. ACC were made to pay costs to Mike.

Now having lost his home and income thanks to ACC Mike is conducting a hunger strike on the doorsteps of ACC's plush Wellington offices in Aitken Street.

But now it seems that ACC's bullying of Mike continues even while he protests. At night as he maintains his presence outside their building an ACC security guard wakes him up every two hours. Last night the guard admitted he did this on the instructions of ACC. The denial of sleep in this way is getting pretty close to a form of sleep deprivation. Also Wellington City Council received an "anonymous" complaint about Mike's dog, who was his companion on the protest. Following an approach by the council, Mike's dog has had to be sent away.

The streets of our capital are cold at night, and to deprive an old man of both sleep and a source of warmth as he undertakes a hunger strike is particularly cruel.

ACC Corporate Bully Par Excellence

Advocate Mike Dixon-McIvor was unsuccessfully prosecuted by ACC for fraud. Over the years he has helped literally hundreds of claimants get their due entitlements from a heartless organisation, that is infamous for employing a suite of "experts" that seem to specialise in writing reports to deny or attack the opinions of other health experts who believe people have suffered injuries caused by accidents. Alongside this ACC while limiting or striving to deny the injured compensation think nothing of hiring private detectives to follow people, even lurking outside private residences and going through people's rubbish bins.

Mike through his tireless and passionate advocacy fought for the little person and often won. ACC wanted payback. They sought to prosecute him for fraud. His crime, assisting a brain damaged man to obtain his full ACC entitlement, using the rules, protocols and procedures applicable at the time.

Years later the procedures changed and ACC attempted to have a crack at him under the new protocol. ACC  pursued Mike relentlessly with the full force of the Crown at their bidding. Unsurprisingly the case was thrown out before trial. Ultimately, ACC were compelled to pay costs for this. 

Unfortunately Mike's costs were considerably more than just legal bills. In the meanwhile thanks to ACC he was declared bankrupt after ACC wrote to his clients attacking his good name. In over six years of persecution he lost his income and ultimately his home. 

ACC have deep pockets and have hired a top QC to try and shut the door on Mike. In the meanwhile he lives rough outside ACC's doorstep. Mike is on a hunger-strike and is literally starving himself while the suits working for ACC file past supping their lattes every morning. In many ways this captures perfectly the corporate arrogance and uncaring bullying that ACC has become infamous for. If you are going past Aitken Street in Wellington call by and give Mike your support. 

Legal Aid A Loan, So Why Do You Lose Your Right To Choose?

As has been mooted for some time, the state is now to charge interest for the provision of legal aid services to people accused by it of committing crimes (Stuff, 31 October 2013). This underscores the fact that legal aid is seen by the state as a loan, which people must pay back.

Well that might or might not be reasonable. What I don't get is why, if you need a legal aid loan, should you be prevented from hiring a lawyer of your choice? Under the changes to the legal aid scheme brought in by then Justice Minister Simon Power, people if they required a grant of legal aid to defend themselves in terms of most offences, lost the right to choose their lawyer. Defence counsel are now assigned by the state, with over 50% of all defence assignments given by the state to its own Public Defence Service. This seems to run counter to the government's belief about market choice that it promotes in other areas.  

There is something blatantly wrong when you have a free market government, that trumpets the beneficial effect of the market in terms of its assets sale programme for example, yet when it comes to the provision of legal services, it moves to prevent people from selecting counsel of choice. Further, If you require a loan to build your house or put on an extension, the bank doesn't choose your builder.

Why is it then, that if you require a state loan (legal aid) to run your defence, that the state removes your right to choose your lawyer? Surely your liberty is more important than an ensuite or a conservatory, therefore your right to choose your own lawyer should be even more fundamental?

Gossip Based on Good Oil

A well known blogger has been outed as having a long term affair with his left hand. Asked why the infidelity, when he had a steady relationship with his right? He responded, "it was hopeless in bed and would frequently fall asleep during our lovemaking." His father denied all knowledge of the affair saying, "While we are close, we have Chinese walls around our separate activities."