what colours
these are
in the dark
everyone knows
that he’s a
patriot
you guys
go too far
sometimes
anything
can happen
any time
she’s fine
she’s
fine
let it go
can’t you see
you’re on safe
ground?
•
Monday
I can't even tell
•
Sunday
Featherston Tales
Children terrorise Featherston
NZ Newswire January 12, 2012, 8:52 am
Child thugs, some as young as six years old, are being accused of vandalism, arson and trying to extort money from elderly residents in the Wairarapa town of Featherston.
One 86-year-old returned serviceman said he was too scared to go out at night because he would be a good target on his mobility scooter.
"I live alone and I can't even go out for a beer of a night - it's too dangerous going home. They've just got control of the place," he told APNZ.
Featherston fire chief Colin McKenna said children as young as six had been seen wandering the streets until 2am and he had seen children trying to extort money from people.
Sergeant Kevin Basher said that about six months ago a core of three or four troublemakers, with up to 15 others, began causing trouble.
They had been lighting fires, stealing, damaging property and abusing people.
Police, CYF and South Wairarapa Safer Community Council were trying to resolve the problem, but it came back to parental control, he said.
"We're taking a holistic approach, looking at the families and into such things as whether these kids are getting three meals a day, have a bed to sleep in with clean sheets."
•
Featherston residents reassured after spate of crimes
Newstalk ZB January 12, 2012, 1:52 pm
Police are assuring Featherston residents they're doing all they can to control a group of youths who've been causing problems in the Wairarapa town.
A group of children is being blamed for a spate of crimes over the past six months, including vandalism, petty theft and lighting fires.
Some are as young as six-years-old.
Masterton Senior Sergeant Warwick Burr says the problems stem from a large family in Featherston, and police are working with CYF to get the children some help.
"While we acknowledge that there is a problem, it's not a case where a whole community is being terrorised by a small group of juveniles that the police and other organisations cannot do something about."
Senior Sergeant Burr says the teenage ringleaders have been attracting others to the group.
Monday
Pity what you can't change
How can one defuse
such personalities?
The girl with a grating voice
in your morning language class
The Machiavel manager
whose own thwarted career
as writer & researcher
has choked & foundered here
Deception is one way
Listen to what they say
with feigned sincerity
Perhaps you’ll start to see
admire what you despise
open – or shut? – your eyes
•
Tuesday
Research Assumptions
Some twenty years ago I reached a crossroads in my life (though, like most such events, the fact seems more apparent in retrospect than it was at the time).
I’d recently moved to the lower North Island to take up a position at the college there. At the end of the first year, though, my employers felt able only to offer me halftime work for the upcoming semester.
On a trip up north to my alma mater, I mentioned this fact to one of my old professors, who promptly offered me a fulltime job at the university there instead. My immediate impulse was to make the move, shaking the dust of the less grateful of the two institutions off my feet.
The decision wasn’t solely mine to make. I was married, had responsibilities … It hadn’t been easy for my French-speaking wife to get a job in our new town, and I wasn’t sure how she’d react to the idea of resigning again so soon (even though – somewhat paradoxically – she was being employed to teach NZ studies, of all things …)
In the end we stayed. “And that has made all the difference.”
It contributed, I’m sure, to the eventual demise of our relationship, a few years later. The place was just too small, too far from metropolitan pleasures and stimuli to interest her longterm. She started to hanker for Europe, and while I shared her frustration at the geographical and social bounds surrounding us, they didn’t chafe me quite so badly.
A certain timorousness can overcome one when one enters the Academic life: a conviction that another such job will be hard to find, a reluctance to go back out into the marketplace to hawk one’s wares …
I procrastinated, temporised, bargained – and, as a result, lost her for good.
I understand how unusual an opening this may seem for this account of my Academic research over the past five years, but I don’t know how else to account for the precise nature of the investigations I’ve been conducting during this period into a virtually unquantifiable what might have been … Much of the material here falls into my field of specialisation: literature of the Early Modern era (approx. 16-17th century), but I’ve also strayed into local history, abnormal psychology and parapsychology.
Let me explain further:
•
Monday
Class Discourse
The unexamined life
is not worth living
said Socrates
Who was Socrates?
Does anybody know?
Not quite
Near enough
A Greek philosopher
400 BC or so
& Socrates said
that he was tapped
to search for truth
because he knew
that he knew nothing
but was interested
in everything
Does anyone
know anything?
That’s the point, I guess
What am I trying to say?
What are we here for?
To score you
a better-paying job?
hand on the art of
bullshitting?
teach you to
“think critically”?
I suppose that’s it
– not that it’s teachable –
to encourage you
to think it through
for yourselves
’coz we all know how much
that skill is in demand
in the outside world
Yeah!
•
Sunday
Ghost Stories
... And so the old man came stumbling back into the bar ... ‘Engines of war!’ he muttered. ‘Engines of war! I seen ‘em – out in the mist …’
Nobody knew what he meant at the time. They just put it down to the triple whiskies and the heavy fog. You can see just about anything in one of those! But then, many years later, the army was doing manoeuvres around that area, and there they were! Engines of war. Just like the old man had seen behind the pub, all those years ago ...
– You mean tanks? Why didn’t he just say ‘tanks’, then? What’s all this stuff about ‘engines of war.’?
– Well, it’s quite an old story. My father used to tell it. It’s supposed to be set before the First World War, I think – back in my grandfather’s time. I guess that’s why the man wouldn’t have recognised a tank when he saw one.
– Oh. Okay. Fair enough. Well, anyway, my story was told me by a guy I’d never met before – or since, for that matter – one evening in Edinburgh when I was studying over there. I was having dinner with a group of friends, one of whom had invited her new boyfriend over for the first time. He was a medical student (as was she), so when the conversation got round to ghosts and ghost stories, we expected them both to be pretty sceptical.
That proved not to be the case, though. After we’d trotted out all the old chestnuts (‘Now we’re locked in for the night’ – after the old lady has checked all the doors and windows of her bedroom in the strange house), he said he’d once played a game with a group of fellow students where they’d tried to hypnotise each other.
‘What happened?’ we asked.
‘Well, one of the others had been trained in how to do it, and she put us under, one by one, and asked us questions about ourselves.’
‘You mean, questions about the future? That kind of thing?’
‘Yeah. About where we were then and what we were going to be doing in six months time.’
‘And did they come true? The things you said?’
‘Well, that’s just the thing, they did – more or less, anyway.’
‘That’s not much of a story,’ said Martin, the loudest and most vociferous of us.
‘Except for one girl,’ he continued. ‘She said she couldn’t see anything at all. Everything was blank, she said. Then she just went quiet.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, six months later, that girl was dead.’
‘You mean, she saw her own death?’
‘I don’t know what she saw. All I know is, she said she couldn’t see anything at all – whereas the rest of us saw all sorts of things ...’
I don’t know. Obviously he could have been having us on. None of us really knew him, not even Carol, the girl who’d brought him along that night (she stopped going out with him shortly afterwards. Perhaps she was a bit creeped out by what he’d said). He seemed pretty sincere – kind of a straight-up guy, actually. Afterwards we thought he’d maybe told us the story because he didn’t know any of us. It sounded to me as if it had been preying on his mind. Anyway, that was the end of that storytelling session – I’ve never forgotten what he told us that night, though.
•
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