Nigel Cox on Alan Preston and Unity Books

The 84th in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the January/February 1994 issue. The intro read:

Nigel Cox pays tribute to the quietly legendary Wellington bookseller Alan Preston.

Keeping the books

“After 10 years I did a tot-up and worked out I’d put 10,000 unpaid hours into the bookshop,” says Alan Preston, founder of Unity Books. Not that he’s complaining: “The shop’s been my marriage, really. But you don’t go into bookselling to get rich.”

We talk in the sunroom of his book-lined house in Eastbourne. It has a spectacular view of Ward Island, back-dropped by Wellington Harbour, but glancing around you get the sense that perhaps in this house most of the looking is done inward – into the books, many of them with neat slips marking particular pages. Lao Tzu, Spinoza, Emerson... and a little cluster of Wodehouses. Down on a lower shelf a printed card carries Thoreau’s advice about not worrying about keeping pace with others, because perhaps you “hear a different drummer”, which seems appropriate for a man whose bookshop seems always to have gone its own way.

A most successful way it’s been too – after 26 years, Unity Books is something of an institution among good readers. But back in 1967, with such capital as he had augmented by a few thousand dollars borrowed from relatives, the future was anything but assured: “On our first day we took $19.70!”

That first shop was in the Empire Building in Wellington’s Willis Street and will be recalled by those with long memories as long, awkward and skinny – “only four feet wide at the narrowest point”, he chuckles. His face fills with pleasure as he recalls the excitement of that time, when he embarked on what was to be his life’s work.

The launch of his own bookshop was something that, in hindsight, Preston had been preparing himself for since the beginning: “As a little kid visiting my grandmother’s place in Newtown, I’d be on the back of the settee, ordering the books on the bookcase, putting them round this way, that way, little private categories.”

Reading was always a big interest, second perhaps only to sport. He trained as an accountant, entering the book trade in 1954 via the accounts department of Gordon & Gotch. After stints at Whitcombe & Tombs, South’s Book Depot and the book trade’s old curiosity shop, Ferguson and Osborne, he felt impelled to hang out a shingle of his own.

From the first he had very definite ideas about what his shop would stock. “On the first floor at South’s there’d been art books, old Collins Classics, and more serious, rather more valuable books, but very few people came up there and found them – these good books weren’t being presented, I felt, to those who would be interested in them.”

Not that all this high-mindedness precluded a nose for business. “I’ve always said, perhaps cheekily, that I was trading in the holes that Whitcoulls left,” he says, grinning. Big holes, they must have been, and filled with eager readers. Unity grew quickly from the day it opened, and Preston was soon able to pay back the money he’d borrowed. At which point his relatives said, “Look, it’s working, you’re loving it, we’re loving it too: have the money.”

The book world’s gain has been the sports world’s loss. From 1955 to 1963 Preston played Plunket Shield cricket for Wellington and was twice included in the North Island team. He also played in tests for New Zealand against Australia at soccer. “In 1956 there was the possibility of sending a New Zealand soccer team to the Melbourne Olympics,” he says, “but in those days soccer was the poor relation – we couldn’t afford to go.” The same fate befell a proposed trip by the 1957 national team to South-East Asia.

The interest in books has proved to be almost all-consuming. Preston, who could never be described as conversation-reluctant, will be remembered by many of his customers for the thousands of hours spent in intense discussion about the ideas thrown up by the new titles. During the 1970s, completing an arts degree at Victoria University, he took a paper on New Zealand fiction so that he might better understand this growing aspect of his business. He became involved in the mechanics of the trade – when Denis Glover said he was having trouble distributing the books his Catspaw Press was producing, Preston agreed to act as wholesaler. Glover’s correspondence occasionally arrived on the back of labels he’d soaked from vodka bottles.

These days, with quarter of a century behind him and two shops to preside over (Unity opened in Auckland in 1989), Preston’s dedication to bookselling is as total as his involvement. “Recently, outside the Auckland shop,” he says, “I heard a couple of guys in business suits, mid-30s, and one was saying, ‘I can’t go past this shop. I have to go in there.’ And when I hear comments like that, I think, yes, it’s all been worth it.”

Not that we imagine he ever doubted.

Jo McColl’s obituary of Alan, who died in 2004, is here.

Waikato Times letter of the week #68

From the edition of Monday 27 June. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed in the Waikato Times. Including the use of hyphens for dashes.

Bennett prediction

I read my paper from cover to cover - both sections - and when something gets to me, I start writing letters. Joe Bennett’s article about dusting off the old crystal ball in Wednesday’s paper (June 22) put my brain in overdrive and made me want to reply to him, so here goes.  

Joe, don’t wipe all the dust off yet! Anything can happen in this weird, wonderful world we live in. I am referring to your article about the hooked-nosed, left-handed Semite who kept evaporating. How can we be sure the marines dumped the right body in the ocean? He could have had a twin brother who decided to change the Al Qaeda name to Isis!

Now, your other prophecy about the 44th president of the United States: the brave - oops, I mean the Bent Racist Vain Egotistical man who may have started to soil himself when he thought he may have a chance of making it to the White House and not knowing what he was going to do when the real deal became apparent and the realty TV show was over so then decided to call it a day and sack the campaign manager backs down on some of the more serious stuff that he made jokes of and soon will throw in the towel before the election to save face in a defeat that would make his hair stand on end and perhaps disappear to the Trump Tower and hide away till the dust settles back on your crystal ball, Joe!

Ann Ridley

Thames

Malcolm Walker on vodka

The 83rd in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the January/February 1994 issue: Malcolm Walker’s Drink column on vodka. Malcolm has been mentioned here before, in connection with his cartooning. He is also a very good architect. I was present at this vodka tasting but do not remember much about it.

TAKING IT STRAIGHT

I was first introduced to vodka as a one-shot drink when it came with blinis and caviar at the great, departed Flamingos restaurant. Oily, pungent, cold, and deeply alcoholic it was perfect with the caviar, sour cream and yeasty pancakes. Marvellous.

Every drink has its traditions. Vodka’s are particularly savage. Scandinavian custom is for the host to toast, individually, each guest. A large dinner party is an distinct health hazard for the host. The Russians at the Yalta conference toasted the other Allies at every opportunity with vodka and soon had them under the table. Vodka can be a good negotiating tool – particularly as the Russians were drinking water.

The simplest of the spirits, vodka is in essence ethyl alcohol distilled from a variety of bases, commonly grains or whey (not usually potatoes as commonly supposed) and diluted with water to around 40 per cent alcohol. From there differences are made by the base it is fermented from and the techniques of distillation and filtration. The trick of the brand is to avoid stripping too much of what little character the liquor had to begin with. The most common claim on the labels is “Purity”.

Vodka is bought mainly as a mixer. Being pure, it’s ideal. Also, there are flavoured vodkas on the market: citrus and chilli are two available here. (I have friends who make their own by macerating the fruit in the bottle.) So, here we are with a drink that aspires to be colourless, odourless, tasteless and puts you on your ear faster than anything else on the market. Perfect for a comparative tasting! We got the style right – none of this top-of-the-bar stuff. The bottle should be straight from the freezer (alcohol won’t freeze) and poured into chilled glasses.

First up: Stolichnaya (Stoli to converts), grain fermented and bottled in good old Mother Russia. As the frost formed on the bottle we got down to it. A heavy, oily quality, solid and a bit rough with a serious alcohol hit, and a sharp and aromatic nose. There was a bit of debate about where the alcohol bit in – somewhere between the back of the throat and the upper thorax.

Next up, Moskovskya, with a similar label but this time bright green (remember that hint after you’ve had a few). “More potatoes” was the first reaction. Obviously from the same stable as Stoli (in fact, from the same factory), it’s a fuller and more volatile drink. A real wake-up call.

The Poles claim they invented vodka in the 11th century. It seems the Russians didn’t pick it up until the early 1800s, so these guys should have got it right by now. The only Polish vodka we could get was a lightly flavoured one, Zubrowka, which features the “herb beloved by the European bison”. The bottle even contained a stem of the plant. Well, what can you say? Betterthan the worms the Mexicans give you.

The drink had a definite bouquet of hay. And a definite taste of, well, hay. Closely followed by the now familiar grunty blast of Eastern-bloc alcohol, and a broader after-taste than the initial flavour would suggest. Like the Russians, the Zubrowka is pretty hairy-chested, but less volatile.

The Eastern European vodkas have been under pressure to make a cleaner, blander vodka to suit the international market. This may explain the difference between the Stoli and the Moskovskya. Zubrowka, l’d guess, is still pretty true to its original properties.

For those who like their fun a bit cleaner we cracked a bottle of Finlandia. Much sniffing for a bouquet. Opinions varied from “none” to “vodka”. Only your chemist could tell. As for taste, it’s much sweeter but with less flavour. Not much here except alcohol and water is my guess. Very thoroughly filtered, as you’d expect from a Scandinavian. I’m bound to say it had a good Finnish.

Absolut from Sweden, a grain alcohol, is a more volatile version of Finlandia. Obviously a high-tech drink too, compared with the more muscular Easterners, but with a bit more flavour – although exactly what is hard to pin down. It hits smoothly and is very easy to drink. You could do a lot of damage with this, the most stylish of the vodkas we sampled.

Time for a good local drink: Smirnoff Blue, made under licence in New Zealand, and another high-tech grain vodka. What I like about it is that it has a 45.2 per cent alcohol content. All the others are around 40 per cent. Not surprisingly, it’s “hotter” and has a different taste, possibly because of the base. Still, it’s smooth, closer to the Finlandia than the Absolut. Nothing wrong with it.

The manufacturers are at pains to point out how much the drink is filtered. Even so, it’s markedly different from the others. One of the panel, with a longer history of vodka drinking than the rest, suggested that it was “right”, more what she was used to. The New Zealand vodka style – didn’t know we had one, did you?

So that’s vodka, the stuff a Russian tank crew recently swapped their tank for (two cases is the going rate, apparently). If you’re mixing it’s doubtful that the brand will matter much. For shot drinking, though, check the list, match the brand to your personality and go to it. Vodka, the drinking person’s drink.

I’ve avoided mixers but I can’t resist a recipe. Vodkababs. This is from my favourite cookbook, That Was Simply Delicious But I Couldn’t Eat Another Mouthful: take a supermarket sponge cake, cut into cubes, thread onto kebab skewers, soak in vodka, roll in hundreds and thousands, set alight and serve. I haven’t actually tried it but I’m sure it will be a delight. As I said, anything goes with vodka. 

In praise of: NZ crime fiction’s new name

Craig Sisterson, bless him, is a tireless advocate of Kiwi Krime. Obviously there has to be a better collective name for crime novels written by New Zealanders. He said on the Ngaio Marsh Book Awards’ Facebook page that Scottish crime fiction was called Tartan Noir  and Irish crime fiction was called Emerald Noir, so what should we call New Zealand crime fiction? “Greenstone Noir? Pauashell Noir? Flax Noir? Kauri Noir?”

The Book Council’s Stephanie Soper came up with Yeah, Noir. Which is brilliant, and definitive. Yeah Noir it is.

So here are my favourite coasters, bought in Cambridge, made in Raglan. Ethically sourced! Tomorrow I shall try to commission the maker to make one that says “Noir”.

Behind the scenes at Euro 16

Daily Mail and GQ sportswriter Martin Samuel is in Paris for Euro 16 and this is his Notebook for the Spectator. The matches are being played in France:

In the few days I’ve spent in Paris, I’d say the terror alert level is fluctuating between a little antsy, really quite nervous and eye-twitching, hair-tearing, run for your lives woo-woo.

It is not just the threat from ISIS et al – there are other security concerns:

The fear is that opposition spies will somehow learn England’s secrets.

And so, he says, a 9ft tarpaulin has gone up around England’s training base in Chantilly:

They’re clearly hoping opposition narks failed to notice John Stones’s last six months at Everton, Chris Smalling’s performance in the FA Cup final, or whatever the hell it was England’s forwards were up to against Portugal.

Graham Taylor was another security-conscious England manager. In  1993, playing a World Cup qualifier in Oslo, he became convinced that the team co-ordinator provided by the Norwegian FA was a spy. On the eve of the game, Taylor switched training locations and, distracting the poor chap with a fake telephone call, instructed the coach driver to depart without him. England then trained at a military sports centre, watched only by local wildlife and the chief sports correspondent of Norway’s biggest-selling newspaper, VG, whose house happened to back on to the ground. Photographs, and every last detail of the secret training session, duly appeared on its front page the next day.

England lost 2-0.

So here are Godley and Creme with “This Sporting Life” from their second album, 1978’s L:

What I’m reading #135

Michael Deacon, who has a beard, reviews a London hipster restaurant for the Telegraph. He is 35, and it makes him feel old. Quote unquote:

The lamb was apathetically flavourless, as if tasting of anything were somehow beneath it. It probably shrugged while it was being slaughtered, rolled its eyes while being butchered and browsed Twitter while being cooked. […]
The 22-year-old was happy enough, though, particularly with her smoked tofu. ‘They’ve made tofu interesting,’ she said, with an air of genuine respect. (I know: interesting tofu. Michelin stars have been awarded for less.)

VUP’s Ashleigh Young at The Red Room on editing books. Quote unquote:

There’s this phrase that comes up in publishing: ‘Sometimes you need to save an author from themselves.’ But you can’t every time. Who says they want saving, anyway? It’s a bit like giving someone advice on their dance routine. ‘Don’t do those jazz hands yet! It’s too soon! Do them at the end!’ Some writers will give you a withering look and do their jazz hands more energetically. I’ve had this experience when being edited myself.

The Economist’s A.D. Miller on “American for beginners”:

We were passing the tailgate grill parties and merchandise vendors when the argument began. If my eight-year-old daughter could impersonate a dinosaur in her class play, I reasoned, then for the duration of the “The Star-Spangled Banner” she could pretend to be an American. It would only last a minute or two, and thousands of baseball fans would be watching, plus many more on television, and if the rest of her school choir placed their palms on their chests in loyalty, she should, too.
“But it’s not true for me,” she said, as an Atlanta cop waved us into a parking lot opposite Turner Field. “I don’t believe in it.” She was happy to sing, but she was British, and she would not consecrate someone else’s anthem by putting her hand on her heart. That, for her, would be a lie. Inside the stadium we left her in the mustering area, alongside a marching band in plumed hats and a team of majorettes, and went to find our seats.

You won’t believe what happened next.

In the new Listener (June 18-24), not online yet, Mark Broatch interviews Danyl McLauchlan about his new novel Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley and asks, “It has plenty of goes at the Aro Valley and its people. What’s your beef?” Danyl replies:

You don’t know them like I do. They’ve got it coming.

Tom Freeman, aka Stroppy Editor (@SnoozeInBrief on Twitter), has a good piece on jargon, science/medicine and writing for the public. Quote unquote:

·         Scientists use “theory” to mean an explanatory framework, but the public use it to mean a hunch or speculation.

·         Scientists use “uncertainty” to mean the range of an estimate, but the public use it to mean ignorance.

·         Scientists use “positive trend” to mean an increase and “positive feedback” to mean a vicious circle, but the public use “positive” to mean good.

Paul Anthony Jones advocates the singular “they” which many (older) people will tell you is wrong. He and I think they are. So does the American Dialect Society, which chose as its word of the year the singular they, the use of the third person plural pronoun as a “gender-neutral singular pronoun for a known person, as a non-binary identifier”. Quote unquote:

Most discussions of singular they are quick to point out that its use dates back as far as Chaucer (“And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame / They wol come up”). Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, CS Lewis, Henry Fielding, George Bernard Shaw (“It’s enough to drive anyone out of their senses”), Sir Walter Scott, George Orwell and of course Shakespeare (“There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend”) all used it too. Hey, even God uses it in the King James Bible. […]
It allows sentences to remain neutral without issues of sexism or discrimination, and with a succinctness and neatness that its alternatives lack.

There is much more on the clumsiness generated by using gendered pronouns in genderless sentences. It’s grammatical “correctness” gone mad.

A brilliant interview by Eleanor Black with Stephen Daisley, winner of this year’s big prize at the Ockham Book Awards. In some quarters there was criticism – muted, never in public, as is the New Zealand way – of a novel set in Australia written by an Australian resident winning the biggest book prize in New Zealand. Whenever I heard this I would ask, “Do you remember who won the 2013 award and for which novel?” No one ever did, which tells you something about awards. I would tell them that it was Kirsty Gunn, who lives in Scotland, with The Big Music, which is set entirely in Scotland. And no one said boo about that.

I did a session with Stephen at the Auckland Writers Festival last month: top bloke, smart and funny, and Coming Rain is a great novel. Quote unquote:

Daisley’s parents Ken and Lal ran the pub at Raetihi, a settlement of 1000 people near Ohakune. “We come out of a very practical heritage and culture,” Daisley explains. “Someone who could shoot a deer or cut an acre of bush was much more valuable than someone who could write a poem. As a result of that you tended to just keep it to yourself a bit.
“We were also raised to never speak about what you do, but to do what you do. I never told my father I wrote. I told my mother when I was in my 20s and she said, ‘Don’t worry dear, you’ll grow out of it’.” 

Waikato Times letter of the week #67

From the edition of Wednesday 8 June. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed in the Waikato Times.

Brain fade

Recently a number of correspondents have likened government inaction on property inflation to Nero fiddling while Rome burned. This comparison becomes even more apt when taken in historical context. Today we assume that the fiddle was a violin; however, the violin had not yet been invented at that time. What Nero played was a lyre. Would playing the lyre be an archaic equivalent of “brain fade”; or was it just that Nero did not want an inventory of run-down houses that might be too expensive to rent if they were properly maintained?

Hugh Webb

Hamilton

In praise of: Auckland University Press

I was surprised, talking to some authors yesterday, that they didn’t know about Auckland University Press’s big international win. I shouldn’t have been: authors often don’t have a clue about what’s happening in publishing. So here is the news: Auckland University Press won big-time at the London Book Fair.

The London Book Fair is a very big deal, one of the biggest of the very big international book fairs, and these awards are run in association with the UK Publishers Association. So it’s the heavyweight division. AUP won in its category, Academic and Professional Publisher, beating shortlisted publishers from China (Higher Education Press) and Argentina (Teseo). Again, I shouldn’t have been surprised – AUP is a fantastically good publisher – but it is tiny compared to most others in its category. The full report from the LBF is here.

AUP’s Sam Elworthy said: “At the London Book Fair, you’re surrounded by thousands of publishers from around the world – big to small, trade to education, Africa to America. In the midst of all that great work going on, it’s humbling to have our work at Auckland University Press recognised by the international publishing community. Getting back up the morning after, finding publishers around the world excited about co-editions of books like Robyn Toomath’s Fat Science and Warren Moran’s New Zealand Wine, you realise again that we can play a full part in the international life of the mind from our small islands.”

Next month AUP will publish CK Stead’s sixth (by my count) collection of literary criticism, essays, interviews etc, Shelf Life, a sequel of sorts to 2008’s Book Self (I am particularly fond of that one because I am listed three times in the index). I spent some happy hours on the sofa with Shelf Life over the last few days and found it to be, much like the author himself, very congenial company: alert, intelligent, amusing, often surprising, never boring. There is also, if you look carefully, a lot of practical advice for writers. But.

But there is one piece that disappoints. It is not that “Some Railway Journeys in NZ Literature”, a paper presented at a conference in Italy, has the least promising title possible. It is not that the paper is as dismal as its title – it isn’t at all. What disappoints is that CK makes no mention of Peter Cape’s classic “Taumarunui on the Main Trunk Line”. All together now:

Wintec Press Club: Dave Dobbyn edition

The Wintec Press Club lunch is held three times a year by the Wintec School of Media Arts and is hosted by Steve Braunias. The star-studded guest list always features big names in politics, media, entertainment, sport, business, law and the arts. I have no idea who they were on Friday 13 May, the first lunch of 2016, because I was away being famous at the Auckland Writers Festival that afternoon. So Joshua Drummond was subbed in off the bench. Josh stood in for me in August 2014 when Rachel Glucina was the guest speaker. His entertaining report on her performance was cruel but, I am told, fair. It has been read 8477 times so far.

The speaker this time was Dave Dobbyn. Josh reports:

After all were sat down, and food served, Steve Braunias took the stage and launched into opening remarks. He started by bidding a heartfelt “good riddance” to Mark Weldon, which was greeted with toasts and cheers by all.

He also undertook a recap of previous Press Clubs, saying that their theme had been that journalism is doomed. “It’s United Video,” Steve said. “But good news, we’re all saved – we’re merging with Video Ezy.”

There was something dark and apocalyptic about Steve at the beginning of this Press Club, like a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher coming down from a ketamine high. He talked of the strange nihilism that seems to be overtaking America, with the unstoppable rise of Donald Trump: “New Zealand operates in a vacuum, too. She’ll be right, envy, accusations, a profoundly felt sense of moral outrage.”

He spoke too of public shaming, citing Richie Hardcore’s recent Twitter trial, judged and executed by a bunch of self-righteous first-stone-throwing assholes (my words, not Steve’s) and Jon Ronson’s excellent book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. He made the point that mass public shaming used to be the preserve of journalists; now the power has been democratised and handed to social media.

More important matters! Best-dressed man went to Steve Newell, for irony reasons. Best-dressed woman (“nothing that would make Lizzie Marvelly baulk!”) went to “a vision in white”, Amanda Gillies. More shout-outs: the Two Dons – Rowe, expert on dope; Brash, cannabis reformer, who had graciously accepted Steve’s invitation to Press Club with the remark that Dave Dobbyn was an “odd choice”.

Then came the feature presentation. Dave Dobbyn, “a household name, like Jif”, drew a huge laugh. I missed a bit of this part because I had other stuff on my mind. The pudding had just come out and at least two people at my table hadn’t even touched theirs. Fuck’s sake! Just send it back if you don’t want it! I hate seeing food wasted, especially good food, and I wish that it wasn’t such a social faux-pas to ask people for their leftovers. Giovanni Tiso was at my table and he’d gotten stuck into his pudding. Good on him. I’d never met Gio IRL [editor’s note: older readers, this means “in real life” as opposed to online] and, like everyone else I’ve ever scrapped with on Twitter and then actually met, he was a charming and altogether lovely person. I liked him immensely. Hi, Gio.

Dave Dobbyn! Steve’s parting remarks were that he’d seen DD Smash – or was it Th’ Dudes? – while the friendly bloke next to him popped amyl nitrate under his nose. “I love you, Dave,” Steve said.

Dave welcomed us all to our perch at the Ferrybank Lounge, next to the Waikato River, “a slow meandering eddy of loveliness and arsenic”. He started with talk of the early days, playing four forty-minute sets of covers a night, in booze barns, and later, a 62-school tour. He took a moment to mourn the booze barns – “Roll on the automatic car!” he said, to cheers – and said how this experience taught him and his band to love what they were doing and be really good at it. He was endearingly unselfconscious about this last bit, which was brilliant, because it’s quite rare in New Zealand hear from someone who is good at what they do and who quietly, modestly, knows it.

He talked about an early rivalry with Hello Sailor, whom his bands measured themselves against, the manager (label?) who took 32 years to figure out how to pay them, refusing to play for a bunch of communists in Wellington, and being called a bunch of faggots for their outrageous outfits in the early days. “The whole New Zealand music industry was under the cultural cringe” he said. His band’s power to overcome was that they knew how to build something that was strong – simple, structurally sound, pop songs.

Dave touched on his influences, speaking of the “clawing despair, sadness, and loss in towns like Whakatane” – this being back in the Muldoon 70s and Lange 80s. He said “Welcome Home” was written at a pivotal time for him, politically, and that it hinges on the fundamental acceptance that in New Zealand we are all immigrants. He’s a Bernie Sanders fan, it turns out.

Speaking about the nexus of entertainment and journalism, Dave was enlightening. He made the point that journalism and music are both industries that have been savaged by the digital revolution but which are finding new ways of surviving – and sometimes even thriving – in a new, turbulent ecosystem.

Procrastination reared its head: “The bugbear of my songwriting is finishing.” He said of journalists that you’ve got to get used to talking to people at 7 a.m. who think they’re really funny.

There is, he said, “an expectation that as writers and musicians, we’re not going to get paid”. The trick is not to do it for the pay, and hopefully the pay will come. “It’s mostly for love that we make records. It’s not about money. It’s about culture.” He warned, for both writers and musicians, that the quality of what you can do can easily be overshadowed by crap. Unsurprisingly, he was critical of both the mechanisation of the music industry and the dross it produces: “I find it really difficult [listening to the music] in a mall – it all sounds like a truck reversing.”

It was time for a tune. An exclusive Dave Dobbyn concert! He played a sweet song with a tricky melody – I don’t know the name of it, but it was a 25th anniversary song for his wife. Steve approached the stage and retreated quickly when Dave suggested another song – this one was “Singin’ Through the Storm”.

Question time! A few good ones, too. About the Queen Street Riots: “Muldoon had just been booted out, thank God, and there was lots of tension. There was no security, people were drinking cask wine. I think the fatal mistake was the [police’s] decision to turn the whole thing off, and then the heavy-handed reaction of the riot squad.” Dobbyn had called the riot squad wankers: “I wish those riot squad guys would stop wanking and put their little batons away.” He said that the judge let him off charges of inciting the riot because the dictionary had multiple definitions of the word “wanking”, some less offensive than others.

I asked if he ever got sick of waiting on hold to any government agency, given that he’s responsible for at least 50 per cent of their on-hold music. He said that fortunately he didn’t have to wait on hold because other people tended to manage taxes and such for him, but he’d had the occasional person suggest that they’d strangle him if they had to hear “Loyal” one more time down the phone.

Steve returned to the lectern with tears in his eyes, the hints of darkness from before quite gone. His closing remarks started, as they always do, with “What have we learned?” The conclusion was that we had learned that – unlike with Rachel Glucina, whose philosophy was “If people want shit, let’s get the biggest shovel we can find” – that quality is important, that truth has value.

“I just want some truth,” Dave had said at some point in his speech. I’ll be cheesy for a seconds and proclaim that I think this impulse is what brings both the best songwriting and the best journalism.

Dave was a fantastic speaker. He was no orator, but it worked. Like the river outside, his voice meandered, sometimes mumbled, but there was power there, and often poetry would appear in the stream, like the flash of a leaping fish.

The last song Dave played was “Be Mine Tonight.” It had the entire audience clapping and singing along. Press Club can occasionally tend towards cynicism and the ironic appreciation of decay and despair, but this time it was joyous, starry-eyed – a bunch of New Zealand’s top media talent yowling along to New Zealand’s foremost pop singer, the way we all do. A slice of heaven.

Waikato Times letter of the week #66

From the edition of Friday 20 May. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed in the Waikato Times.

Fishing industry

The current exposures about our fishing industries highlight all that is false and excuse-making. It does nothing to address the claims that have been made. An exposure of such magnitude and importance requires a united multi-party review as well as open, honest, factual reporting. And the emergency actions necessary to stop and correct any wrongs discovered. We must put a stop to blames and counter claims as to who did what and have our leaders combine forces so that the collective brain is oriented towards fixing the mess and actually function as a sensible human problem solving tool. The current neurological synaptic activity located in the posteriors of most politicians is rarely activated by sensible electrochemical energy. It is usually locked onto a negative reactionary short circuit. God help us!

Barry Ashby

Raglan