Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

There we were again, all over the leaders’ debate on TV3 last night. The lost generation, the brain drain, the flying New Zealander: simultaneously cultural bogeyman and utterly bribe-worthy. Peter Dunne was out of the gate first, offering to “fix the brain drain” by reducing student loan principal by ten percent for each year you work in New Zealand after graduating. The Greens saw that and raised it, wiping one year off your debt for each year you stay in New Zealand. And Jim Anderton galloped past everyone else in a flurry of hooves, offering to fully refund the loans and interest of anyone who sticks around for three full years after graduation.

Money can’t buy you love, but clearly all parties have figured out that there are plenty of interested parties who are open to negotiation: students and the families who are subsidizing them, and they’re all voting age.

Don Brash pointed out, quite reassuringly that only 6% of outstanding student loans are located, in the economic jargon, “offshore,” with the other 94% based firmly in New Zealand. (This just in, from Kyle at Otago: the relevant figures are here.) Don was, on the other hand, rather worried about the six hundred people per week allegedly fleeing to Australia, loans or not.

Rodney Hide went straight for the “it’s the economy, stupid,” solution, arguing that a better economy would “hold our people here.” He also conjured up the poignant, Saatchi-worthy image of families in towns and cities up and down New Zealand bereft of their young people, who are off overseas perhaps never to return. I swear I heard the Last Post playing in the background somewhere. Or perhaps it was the Pied Piper? He’s right, though: pretty much everyone knows someone who’s currently overseas, which is what makes it such a hot topic.

Helen Clark framed the question in terms of helping young graduates get a “stake in society” as expeditiously as possible, arguing that the interest write-off would allow people to think about home-ownership and starting families earlier than they might otherwise. (Or, you know, AT ALL.) She didn't apologize for the naked bribe value of the interest write-off, and even managed to work the phrase “brain exchange” into the debate a little later on, arguing matter-of-factly that “kiwis fly, and they do well.” Well yes, cheers, Helen. That’s why your interest write-off might need a rethink.

So, the wires ran hot with replies to my last post, the most succinct of which was from Danielle:

Well, if you're studying full time overseas, you're getting your interest written off anyway. Or you should be. Mine was.

Now this is very useful information, and it nicely addresses my original kaupapa, which was to argue for an amnesty for the academic diaspora.

This just in from Ry in Switzerland:

While it's true that when you're studying overseas you get some of your interest wiped, you don't get it all wiped. You still have to pay the base interest of 4% or so.

And a quick perusal of the relevant IRD pages indeed reveals that it is indeed a reduction, rather than a total waiver.

I didn’t know the ins and outs, because – despite what many who wrote assumed – I don’t have, and never have had, a student loan.

Full disclosure: I was the last of the lucky buggers who paid minimal fees and were fully supported, albeit at subsistence level, by the government and by constant part-time work during holidays and term-time, in the factories of South Auckland, the family catering business, and at the elbow of dozens of wee piano pupils. (Intriguingly, Janette Fitzsimons and Winston Peters saw eye to eye on the desirability of universal student allowances, that glimmering memory of a golden age of fully affordable tertiary education, and without which I wouldn’t be where I am today).

Just as the allowances evaporated and the fees started to climb, I headed off overseas to study ... this time supported by, first, Japanese taxpayers, then far-sighted American philanthropists, and as always whatever paid work I could squeeze in and the occasional parental food package. Again, always at more or less subsistence level -- my Nana would be proud at how far a thrifty undergrad lifestyle can take you in your op-shop clothes -- but yes, to considerable personal and cultural, and I hope eventually economic, benefit.

So I don’t have a personal stake in the student loan argument, merely a principled objection to the ongoing philosophical confusion over what counts as a useful New Zealander for the purposes of national accounting.

And even though it appears - thanks Danielle -- that full-time students are exempt from interest while studying, regardless of their geographical location, I reckon I’m going to stand by my argument in the last post and argue that you might as well extend the policy to everyone. This is not necessarily an endorsement of Labour’s interest write-off per se. As the astute Jonathan Boston argued in this week’s Listener (article not online, alas), there are far smarter ways to spend, say, $300 million on tertiary education, if you want to make a difference.

To be absolutely clear, I’m quibbling with the assumptions behind the arbitrary distinction made between home and abroad, not just by Labour but all the other policies noted above.

Some wrote in to vociferously support that distinction: James, based in New Zealand, argued that it’s simply all about the tax-base, and Dave, who has been an expat, agrees. If you’re working overseas, they both argue, you are in fact a net loss to New Zealand because, by definition, you’re not paying tax in New Zealand. Writes Dave:

At some point one has to realise that it's not about being fair to the individual, or attempting to influence their choices, but is important in considering where the money goes into and leaks out of the NZ economy, and the tertiary sector machine that is supposed to drive the top end. It would seem reckless not to put a mechanism in place to recover some of the cost put in, if it is clear that it will not be recoverable through the usual payback - tax.

Fair enough. Except, not. One might argue that the loan itself is a massive tax after the fact: anyone making loan payments is effectively pouring cash into the national coffers. And anyone who owns property back home while living and working elsewhere, or has money in the bank, is paying rates and assorted taxes. When you bring back all that lovely foreign lolly you’ve saved while working in a pub, that’s a net gain for the national budget too. Moreover, some of those from overseas are running remittance programmes to families back here, which if not tax per se, is still money in the economy.

Even I’m paying tax in New Zealand. In fact, I’ve just emerged from a bit of a dust-up with the taxman over the vast fortune I make reviewing books for the Listener. After a lengthy exchange of letters with the IRD (thanks, Dad!), you will be pleased to know that New Zealand is approximately fifty bucks better off thanks to my desire to stay involved in the arts scene back here -- not to mention the intangible value of those reviews, and of the other things I plan to publish in New Zealand over the next couple of years. I like to think that makes me a net economic benefit.

Most fascinating, at least to a linguist like me, was some of the language applied to describe expat New Zealanders who dare to describe how it feels to be categorically isolated from a policy initiative. "Petulant" was my favourite, but there was also "disrespectful of those who chose to stay" (yo, re-read my 7th paragraph below), "ungrateful," and a couple of instances of that excellent verb "whine."

Lee got quite exercised about how “comfy” we are over there, and said that we “shouldn’t expect the benefits of staying behind to flow on through.” Whereas Dave maintains there is no politics of envy regarding overseas New Zealanders; in fact, he says, most back home don’t even think about them on a daily basis. This is true, in the sense that we are most often wheeled out for election purposes, then put back in the cupboard for another three years. But not true in the sense indicated by Rodney Hide (see above), and in the tone of the replies I got from current loan-burdened expats.

I got some very plaintive mail from people who find themselves in the painfully ironic position of having almost finally paid off the loan working long hours and many years overseas, and are ready to move back home free and clear... only to feel thoroughly retroactively dissed by the new policy.

Another Dave, writing from the UK, and his fiancée, have been assiduously paying their loans off in huge chunks so they can get home sooner, untrammelled by debt. They and some similarly affected friends were just raising a glass to the Labour party for making that task a smidgen easier when they read the fine print, and are now “absolutely furious.” Dave points out that overseas loans -- which he pegs at $545 million right now -- are more likely to be defaulted on as it is, so the interest write-off exclusion doesn’t exactly feel like encouragement to get on with it.

And -- my original point -- it’s not just about personal or national economic effects, but a powerful cultural subtext. Jake, writing from Auckland before heading off to study overseas, sees this as a victory for cultural nationalists over cosmopolitans, in that it favours earthbound kiwis over long-haul godwits when in fact both types are equally necessary to a healthy country. And Del, who is coming home next year after a long stint overseas, is miffed at the thought that the wee global citizen he's bringing back (a daughter) will learn in New Zealand that “staying home is the only way forward.”

Ziggy's response, however, struck me as the most sanguine of all. Here's a kiwi-godwit-sooty shearwater-whatever who is utterly unflappable:

Sure, they're gonna make me pay 7% on my $80k loan when I leave at the end of this year for new/ different/ exciting (but not necessarily better per se) pastures. While my friends who stay will get to pay their loans back faster.

Well, wow, good for them - but equally -- for all the reasons you list -- it's still well worth going.

I think you underestimate NZ's willingness to 'put in the hard yards' (etc etc ad nauseam - cheers Dad) - in exchange for some sort of reward. Don't think us flying kiwis will be put off by mere money...

Cheers, Ziggy. This is both a glorious, shining example of the godwit spirit, if there is such a thing, and the definitive explanation of how New Zealand always wins in the end. You had us at hello, you silly sausages, and you’ll always have us -- regardless of when, or whether, we come home.

Just would be nice to feel that we were still in the conversation beyond hello, eh?

---

Now, of all the feedback on my last post, by far the most definitive critique was provided by the opportunistic burglars who made off with my laptop an hour or two after I last posted. Nice welcome back to the mother country, guys (yep, I’m here for a very flying visit, flap flap flap).

So if anyone in or around Wellington has been offered a suspiciously cheap 12 inch titanium Mac powerbook, Bluetooth and Airport card, 512 MB of memory, slightly dinged up and with a distinctive diagonal scratch on the lower right hand corner of the top cover, it’s mine. Oh yes, the serial # is UV 3461 TXPHK, it’s got an American-style plug and about two thousand pictures of Busyboy on the hard drive. I’d really love to have it back. Tool of the trade, back-up brain, all that.

They also took my sister’s laptop, a couple of cameras, and a full bottle of fine whiskey, among other things, thus putting a serious dampener on what was otherwise an absolutely gorgeous Wellington weekend. Nonetheless, a big shout-out to Gus and Ursula from the Wellington Central Burglary Squad who showed up the next morning and made a certain nearly four-year-old’s holiday by assiduously fingerprinting the whole place, waving torches around, and generally being textbook police officers. As Busyboy put it, “I’m very proud of that New Zealand police guy and lady. They were awesome!”

It was always the interest on the student loans that was the kicker, leaving those on lower incomes to simply tread water with little hope of paying down the capital (and god forbid you ever took time off to have children). So it seems churlish to find anything objectionable about the interest write-off. But there’s a massive flaw in Labour’s otherwise tasty little election lollipop: it baldly discriminates against those who head overseas after graduation.

Yep, the interest will be wiped only for those who stay in New Zealand (and those who arrive back during a fixed amnesty period next year). Leave the country, and what’s that ticking sound? Your loan racking up again. Pretty ironic when it's the loans that drive so many of us overseas in the first place.

You can see why politicians might not want to look like they are subsidizing a generation's OE (and, after Keith's daunting calculations, why Labour might not risk expanding the write-off to everyone). But do they really think New Zealand would be a better place if nobody ever left?

I thought we’d already fought and won this battle: the idea that flying kiwis are not a liability, but an asset. Not a bug, as it were, but a feature. An immutable element of our particular culture, and of our place in the world. More than that: our secret weapon, a global network of hooked-in New Zealanders busily making things happen.

But no. Long after we all thought the phrase “brain drain” had been scrapped in favour of a more realistic notion – a brain exchange, say, which ultimately works to make New Zealand very smart -- Labour is resurrecting the phrase to explain why only those who stay home will get a break.

Suddenly it’s 1996 all over again... Ooh, help, there’s a brain drain! Someone fix it! Someone get a plug! It’s all running down the plughole and leaking out into places like Harvard! Yale! Oxford! Crikey! It’s out of control! Running restaurants in London and supervising elections in Liberia! Making wine in Argentina and teaching physics in Connecticut! Selling pies in New York and chocolate cheese in Taiwan!  Oh my god! Make it stop! Or… or… New Zealanders will get a global reputation for being clever, adaptable, well-connected, and nice! HELP!

No disrespect at all to the many awesome grads who stay in town and get on with things (my baby brother and sister included). You’re national treasures, and it’s a great choice. Frankly, without you guys, there’d be nothing for the rest of us to come back to. But why send the passport-wielders to the naughty chair?

Thing is, I started out just feeling offended on behalf of those who leave in search of more education, to become fluent in other languages and cultures, or to gain skills that are just not available in this country. That’s a demographic close to my heart, because I’m in it; and even though some of us end up being away far longer than we intended, we’re sick of being seen as a net loss to New Zealand.

But then I realized that focusing on the smartypants scholarship kids like myself was just setting up a class system all over again, no better than the Home vs. Away schema. Look, it shouldn’t matter a tinker’s cuss why you go. Just as it shouldn’t matter why you stay. You simply can’t tell in advance who’s going to morph into a national asset while winging it in London, just as you can’t tell who’s going to be a wash-out despite staying close to the home fires in an apparently solid job. The trick is to assume that we’re all worth it, wherever we are.

Whereas the implicit message of the interest write-off is that staying home somehow makes you a better New Zealander -- and going deserves a serious slap on the wrist.

It’s like a tax on gumption, in whatever form it takes.

So you go overseas just wanting to have fun and see the world: visit the pyramids, get wasted in eighteen European capitals in fourteen days, shag someone whose language you don’t speak, blah blah Kon-Tiki blah blah work in a bar? Instant fun tax on you lot. And wipe that grin off your faces, you lucky bastards. We don’t all get to visit the pyramids, get wasted in eighteen European capitals etc.

Or you’re one of the clever-clogs who actually want to work in the field you qualified in, and earn pounds or dollars while doing so. Accounting, journalism, law, medicine, working for the UN? Bloody hell, can’t have that. You might actually learn something on the job, give New Zealand a good name into the bargain, and god knows it’ll pay down the loan faster. Wanker tax on you guys for being so bloody savvy. And dressing so well. Bastards.

Maybe you want to spend time finding out about your heritage before settling into life. Visit your aging grannies, track down the family history, see the country your parents were lucky to escape when you were just a baby, view Godzone from the outside for a bit before settling back in to raise happy little vegemites. That’ll be a knowing-where-you-come-from tax on you cosmopolites. You're probably multilingual too, multiculturally adept – quelle horreur!

As for all you artists, dancers, writers, actors, who are so damn talented that you’re in demand all over the world. Finally getting some work out of that Drama School degree? A fancypants tax on you for daring to work for food in a place other than New Zealand. Come home and starve among your own people, you cowards.

And the ones who are hooking up with Volunteer Service Abroad or other humanitarian projects, building hospitals, immunizing desperately poor kiddies, tidying up after tsunamis, saving the Amazon from deforestation, that sort of thing? Well, clearly you’re not thinking about the money at all, so a silly tax on you guys for having a non-monetary bottom line, although I bet you never thought you’d hear a Labour government say that.

Then there are my people. The ones who leave the country in search of further education, and experience that’s just not available in New Zealand. Especially those who have to, in order to gain or consolidate skills in their field. Landed the golden opportunity to do a PhD somewhere excellent? Studying other languages and cultures? Just an excellent scientist in search of equipment and mentors? Well haha, a girly swot tax on you lot for being such a bunch of show-offs. And don’t come crawling back to us for decent jobs in well-funded universities, because... well, just because. Go away, you’re embarrassing us. Please?

Sigh.

Let’s start all over again. Writing off the interest is a lovely idea (and campaign-wise, it leaves National’s policy, which has its own merits, in the dust). Framing the write-off as an incentive to stick around is also a lovely idea. Who doesn’t want to feel welcome?

But this is like a welcome mat with a flip side reading “bugger off.” And this one risks saying “bugger off” to the only people who might in fact be thinking about doing precisely that – the ones who already have temporarily buggered off.

Perhaps in a convoluted way, the interest is meant to act as a sort of a bond; if you’re paying more to stay away, it will make you want to race home all the faster. But the overseas cohort is already paying in all sorts of ways (local tax, missing our families), and the bond is there regardless.

You could even argue that the student loan has become as significant a part of youth identity as the big OE. At the funeral of Shelley Mather, who was killed (tragically, horribly, pointlessly) by one of the Underground bombers last month, a family friend described her thus: “With her New Zealand flag, her Tim Tams, and her student loan, she was a true Kiwi girl.”

Precisely. We’re always here, even when we’re not. We’re all paying off the loans, wherever we are. And we’re always coming back. Even when we can’t. We’re all in it together. Give us a break?

It’s getting harder to shield Busytot -- or Busyboy as I should now call him in honour of his advancing age and his penchant for grown-up existential dilemmas -- from the news. We wake up to the radio in our house, and the report from London had barely penetrated my consciousness when the boy, who often sneaks into the big bed in the wee hours, sat bolt upright and said “Somebody ripped the top off a double-decker bus! That’s bad!”

I listened harder and then translated for him that the subway in London was broken down, but that he needn’t worry. He was still hooked on that bus, though. “Ripped off the top of a double-decker bus! That's so bad! Policemen should catch those guys and put them in JAIL.”

(I don’t know where he picked up the concept of jail. Perhaps a race memory? He is descended from a long line of Irish policemen, after all). (Stop press: his father has cleared this up for me: seems he gets it from an unexpurgated copy of the book that gave this blog its name. Whenever Sergeant Murphy -- uh-huh, the Irish policeman -- catches that wicked recidivist Bananas Gorilla in the act of robbing a fruit-stand, he whisks him straight off to jail.)

What Busyboy doesn’t know -- and I won’t be the one to tell him -- is that these particular guys can’t be caught and put in jail, because they blew themselves up on the job.

Boys next door. A Blitz from within. One of the presumed suicide bombers worked with kids and had a fourteen-month-old child of his own. I can’t join the dots here. How do you kiss your baby and wife goodbye, then annihilate a train full of other people’s kids, other people’s parents? That is fucked up. The mind revolts.

In the months since I’ve considered him in print, Busyboy has been waging his own psychological struggle against existential nausea, that mundane, queasy horror at the thought of one’s own imponderable finitude. Was it only in March that he sat weeping into his bowl of jelly, asking in a trembling voice if we were all going to die? Will you die? Will Daddy die? Will I die? Even Huckle? Even the postie? And policemen? Will they all die? Why?

It was rough going for a while there. Once the thought was in his head, it required anguished consideration several times a day, and the questions were relentless and largely unanswerable. Things reached a surreal height the day he clutched my arm and wailed, “I don’t want to die and I REALLY DON’T want people to put my things in a museum!”

That one took some unraveling. I thought for a moment he was working on a radical critique of the field of anthropology, but it turned out that a visit to Mark Twain’s house had made a very strong impression. And true, as we’d trooped through the rooms, admiring the toy cow, the bed with the angels on the four posts, the child-sized tin bath, our guide had enumerated the various members of the family who had, one after the other, not to put too fine a point on it, D-I-E-D. And now their things were indeed in a museum for our viewing pleasure. Creepy, when you think about it.

Another marker was the conversation between Busyboy and a small friend of the Anglican persuasion. “When you die, you go up into the sky,” ventured Mac in a sweet and holy voice, and it sounded rather nice when he put it like that. “No you don’t,” said Busyboy definitively, bashing a sandcastle into shape with a plastic shovel, “You go into the GROUND.” End of discussion.

Except it wasn’t quite the end of the matter -- he went on to explain that once you’re in the ground, people can dig up your bones, just like a dinosaur, and put you back together and... yes, put you in a museum. Where they'll charge you a dollar and a half just to see 'em.

How do you talk to a three and a half year old soul about death? I found that there were various stages of explanation, not unlike the Kubler-Ross model. I started with Denial (Of Course You’re Not Going to Die), which didn’t seem to convince anyone. Then we pretty quickly skated through Prevarication (Well, Not for a Very Very Long Time), to Opportunism (You Know, They Say It Might be Staved Off if you Eat Lots of Veges and Get Lots of Exercise and especially Sleep) and wound up with the Dorothy Parker approach (Might as Well Live, eh?).

But he seemed to work it through on his own timetable, and the child brain has its own clever sequence for assimilating the unassimilable. Now, surely as a rainy spring has unfolded into a blazingly hot summer, Busyboy has moved on to the highly satisfying stage of Turning the Tables (aka Not if I Kill You First).

See, there are kids at daycare with older siblings. Every day, like a Fox News broadcast, one or other will interrupt the playground with breaking news, passing on the secret knowledge of the elders about an arcane, rumoured, quasi-celestial object, and Busyboy in turn comes home bubbling over with half-arsed data and full-bore desire. Bubblegum, for example, is the food of the gods, completely delicious, only for big boys, and full of bubbles. Then there are Super Heroes, who get their powers from -– bet you didn’t know this -- eating lots and lots of soup. That’s why they’re souper, thanks for asking.

The hottest item of all is a gang of characters known as – and I quote – Injured Turtles. Sounds like they had a run-in with the other new characters in Busyboy’s lexicon, the Power Rangers. But it transpires that the rangers and the turtles are all on the same side: they all shoot and kill bad guys and rescue good guys.

Bleeding-heart softie that I am, I attempted to lobby for more imaginative policies towards evildoers. This earned me a roll of the eyes and the kindly explanation, “They only kill BAD guys, so it’s OK.”

The moral certainty is kind of refreshing, even if I now have an inkling of how it feels to be a hippie whose child goes and joins the Marines. But then I remember that at around the same age I was given a cowgirl outfit for Christmas (a hat, a fringed vinyl skirt, and a matching bolero trimmed with rickrack, all concocted by Mum). It came with a wooden gun made by the policeman grandfather mentioned earlier, out of wood, steel pipe -- I believe it was double-barrelled -- and an actual working door bolt. My brother got a matching cowboy set and an identical shooter, and we spent many happy hours killing bad guys in the bush and up the creek.

Busyboy doesn’t have any guns -- there is a limit -- but he did score an Injured Turtle at a garage sale the other weekend, whose major activity seems to be leaping on bad guys from a great height while shouting “In! Jah! Turtle!”

So here I am, keeping the bad, bad world and its bad, bad news at bay while nurturing a certain level of creative, directed violence in the home. Support for this selectively bloodthirsty approach comes from a couple of books I’ve been reading lately. Firstly, Tessa Duder’s endlessly quotable Margaret Mahy: A Writer’s Life, in which Mahy makes a sustained pitch for the “drama of who gets to eat who.” This, from a Listener interview in 1987:

Many of the first stories we tell to children are still basically concerned with “who gets to eat who in life”... While we could certainly evolve a totally different literature, it wouldn’t alter the fact that these predatory relationships do exist in nature and that children are sooner or later going to have to come to terms with the fact that their cat is going to eat a baby bird.

(Or, if you grew up on a farm, that one day your dinner-table enquiry about the whereabouts of the pet lamb will be answered with “Pass the mint sauce.”)

Then there’s the eminent Joan Aiken, who argues in her appealingly cranky book The Way to Write for Children that excessively tidy stories with happy endings that tie up in a knot are a moral rip-off. Fairy Tales for Dummies, as it were:

There is a current fashion for suggesting that everything is very easy, if it is properly explained. ... I can hardly state strongly enough what a mistake I think this is, to tell children that they will find a solution to every problem they are likely to encounter.

[Instead] it is the writer’s duty to demonstrate to children that the world is not a simple place. Far from it. The world is an infinitely rich, strange, confusing, wonderful, cruel, mysterious, beautiful, inexplicable riddle. We too are a riddle. We don’t know where we come from or where we are going, we are surrounded by layers of meaning that we can only dimly apprehend, however much we try to learn.

And how much more enjoyable it is for children -- how much more it accords with their own observations and instinctive certainties -- to be told this, than to be told that the world is a flat, tidy, orderly place, with everything mapped out and accounted for by computer, with no unexplored regions left; that somewhere, neatly waiting, each person has an identity, like a parcel left at the post-office to be collected; that a naughty bear who doesn’t like playing with other bears has only to be invited to a party, and he will soon change his ways.

I tested this the other day, by trying out the story of Little Red Riding Hood on Busyboy, who had never heard it before. It's very much a story about who gets to eat whom. First, I gave him a version with a sanitized ending: the wolf was just desperately hungry: he apologizes sincerely for his misbehaviour, and Red and family oblige him to regurgitate Granny and then invite him to share a nice dinner.

This didn’t satisfy at all.

So I told him there were alternative endings, and ran a few past him. The classic one, in which the huntsman, who is sometimes also the father, appears in the nick of time to kill the wolf -- who is then gutted, filled with stones, sewn up again and thrown down the well. The feminist one where Little Red is the avenging heroine, armed with a sharp implement and a quick reaction time. Some in which the granny is recovered whole, albeit slick with wolf-spit, and some in which she has already been digested beyond repair. All of them ended badly for the wolf.

His favourite? “The ones where the wolf gets KILLED!” Surprise.

I know this is not the end of the story; there will be countless retellings, and a wider range of tales, and both the stories and the questions about them will become increasingly sophisticated (can a wolf swallow an old lady whole? why would people hurl a dead wolf into their only water source? what kind of parent sends a child on an errand through wolf-infested forests anyway?).

For the moment, though, the preference is strongly for justice that is swift, simple, and satisfying. The bad guys get what’s coming to them, and the innocents make it safely to the other side of the woods, every time.

If only.

Not to worry - things are still busy here in Busytown. It’s not like I’ve been sitting on my hands. Except that it is, in the sense that I’ve got pins and needles and shooting pains running up both arms, mostly my right one. Yep, the tiresome repetitive strain injury has tightened its grip on my writing bits again.

As physical things go, it’s clearly not the worst that could happen. But it does cramp my style a bit, and it’s not just the writing that suffers. Everything I like to do, get paid to do, or am socially obliged to do, requires a functioning hand or two. Grading papers. Gardening. Brushing teeth. Making pikelets. Auto-eroticism. “Lend me a hand” becomes more than a metaphor.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing – apart from the slowness of recovery -- is the randomness of its arrival. There you are, typing away like a madwoman, generating dissertations, book proposals, and at a conservative estimate 70,000 words of commentary on student papers in the space of a single semester (I know, lucky students! That's a whole book right there!), with only the occasional twinge or tingle.

And then one day you wake up and you can’t hold your cup of tea.

Another troublesome aspect is what to call the damn thing. RSI, the original monicker, conjures up images of gouty old soldiers gathering for a drink and a smoke in my joints. OOS always sounds a bit too martial, a bit dojo, really. “Carpal tunnel” is the favoured American term, but what I have isn’t anything to do with my carpal tunnels, more my (ooer) thoracic outlets, apparently.

I like the old-fashioned terms for occupational afflictions: "housemaid’s knee," "nursemaid’s elbow," “jeep bottom” (I put that one in for the old soldiers, and yes, it's real). For the moment I’m calling my problem lucubrator’s shoulder, but would welcome other suggestions. Busytot’s diagnosis was to the point: “Your arm is very busted, and too busted, and very busted.”

There are remedies: stretching, exercising, a benevolent and exacting physiotherapist who puts me through my paces. She also does an enormously subtle laying-on of hands. The barest amount of pressure – like a beanie-baby on the back of a sleep-troubled infant – causes the muscles and all the other bits whose names I don’t know to relax and let go. It’s magic, and gives a few days' relief at a time.

Resting from typing is the other half of the equation. Which is why I’ve been slack about posting, although I was tempted to switch to photo-blogging for a while (garden pics? cat photo-essays? self-portraits, under the name Bustytown?). I’ve also been slack about replying to enquiries and encouragement lately. But thank you for all of them! You’re the reason I’m back at my desk. Really.

Speaking of desks, I’m looking into setting up a standing desk for myself – if it was good enough for Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov and Winston Churchill, surely it’s worth a try. (Apparently Donald Rumsfeld is another fan of the erect position, but according to an on-line discussion I stumbled across, that may be less to do with an enthusiasm for ergonomics, and more about the broomstick where it ought not be. This is the man who questioned why the "stress positions" used for interrogation were limited to four hours a day, when he happily stands for 8 to 10).

And of course I’m trying out dictation software. Not right now – this is being typed, slowly – but I’m busy training up a Mac version of iListen. It’s annoyingly slow work, especially since it doesn’t seem to recognize any word with an R in the middle when pronounced in a New Zealand accent. Art, sort, car, are... Nada. So I find myself articulating like a pirate. Not to mention punctuating like Victor Borge. Hilarious for anyone standing outside the window.

According to the detailed history of dictation software that I’m reading to the computer so it can capture my voice, the technical term for the relationship between a given word and the squillions of possible words that might follow it, is “perplexity.” As far as I’m concerned, that’s also the term for the relationship between what I say to the computer and what it writes.

Back in the dying days of the last century, in my first major brush with this occupational hazard, my flatmate Sara – another sufferer -- and I tested out earlier versions of the software, and would gigglingly e-mail each other the choicest mistranslations.

There were lots of accidental obscenities, of course, usually related to the names of professors or eminent literary theorists. There were the super-annoying ones, like the way every time I said “New Zealand” mine would write, with passive-aggressive regularity, “new sealant.” I considered designing a customized macro so that when I said “Polyfilla” it would finally type “New Zealand,” dammit.

But the best was what the computer came up with every time Sara carefully articulated “voice dication”: "foisted patience." Yes, some of us are born patient, some achieve patience, and others have it thrust upon us.

Patience is good, even the foisted kind. Being unplugged forces me to remember other ways to express myself. Watching the garden unfold in its own good time is rather soothing, as is advising my patient husband where to plant the latest acquisitions. By family tradition, all plants share the Latin name wombaticus syphilliticus, but he’s getting pretty conversant with the different strains: pink wombaticus, climbing wombaticus, etc.

And I’ve been reading: Ian McEwan’s Saturday, a wonderful Mrs Dalloway for the other end of the twentieth century, with a brain surgeon in place of a hausfrau, and terrorism in place of the Great War. Jolly good reading. As was Elizabeth Knox’s new young adult fantasy novel Dreamhunter (keep an eye out for my rave review in the Listener).

And watching. The whole first season of The L-Word on DVD -- nicely steamy and ridiculously well-dressed. And the new Miss Marple series, with Geraldine McEwan as the canniest Miss M to date. She’s no dithery old tabby, this one, but a very sharp-eyed pussycat with an intriguing new history, and a magnetic effect on those around her. As played by Joan Hickson, Miss Marple was someone you could tell things to because you thought she wasn’t really listening, but McEwan’s Miss Marple is a confidante you would deliberately seek out: smart, empathetic, and all-knowing. Nice one.

Also, the film of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was not too terrible at all. It's almost like watching Shakespeare, in that you know all the old jokes, and are always interested to see where they’ve cut the text or fiddled with the staging, and of course Ford Prefect is black, in exactly the same way that Lear, or Rosalind, or Coriolanus is black, and how are they going to do the special effects, and which fey old chap is Bill Nighy playing this time?

I liked the cameo by Simon Jones, the original Arthur Dent, as the holographic face of Magrathea. And the ghostly final image, at the very end of the film, of the face of Douglas Adams floating in space. It reminded me of two things: firstly that the man had a brain the size of a planet, and secondly, that the death of someone we know (or feel we know) is not unlike the sudden unscheduled end of the world at the hands of a Vogon Constructor Fleet. But as the film suggests, the key to reconstructing that beloved lost world lies deep in our own grey matter, and can be accomplished with time and imagination and the loving art of memory. In other words, don’t panic.

And best of all, I’ve been patiently watching Busytot experience an astonishing vernal growth spurt, both physical and mental. He’s growing into a really big boy, unlocking the hermetic mysteries of life, death, and bubblegum – but more of that next time. These hands need a rest.

There’s been no shortage of busy-ness round these parts; it’s just that for a while I’ve been content to observe it all without rushing to shape it into entertaining prose. Funny, when I’m busy teaching the art of non-fiction writing, I’m least inclined to do it myself (apart from the occasional review).

Also, sometimes it’s nice just to be. Especially when the earth is warming up, the crocuses bursting through, and the buds about to break on every branch.

And also, I’m noticing that the boy I call Busytot is approaching the age of, if not reason, self-consciousness. It’s the age at which I remember -- we all remember -- suddenly noticing that adults talked about us, above us, over us, and down to us, and for kicks, urged us to repeat our darling little formulations for entertainment. It’s an age of mutiny and self-preservation, as we struggle to protect our budding selves from misinterpretation, misapprehension, and mischaracterization.

Call it the first teenagehood, and I mean that in a wholly affirming way. If he could, he’d be dyeing his hair blue right now.

Now, some would argue that them as have given birth to the little buggers have the first right of serialization on all their charming exploits and anecdotes. But that doesn’t mean we should publish every thought that runs through their, or our, minds.

I’m thinking of the hoo-ha over at Salon.com, where a writer I once admired (not least for her ability to churn out books between babies, and vice versa) has made rather a spectacle of herself (see readers' letters here and here -- this being Salon, you have to view an ad in order to read these pieces). She's cavalierly over-exposed her children in the process (again, to a chorus of boos and cheers).

I love to hear an uncensored maternal voice (and let me recommend Brain,Child magazine for some superb examples). But this writer goes further than I find comfortable, and makes me rethink my own willingness to mine my daily domestic dramas, however minor and amusing. There’s a fine line between primping your kids and pimping them, even when it’s funny.

Which is not to say that I’m killing off Busytot as a character – even Conan Doyle saw the folly in that one and had to figure out how to get Holmes back up from the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls. Busytot will continue to pop in and out of this blog, making the occasional guest appearance. But always in a dignified pose, fully clad, and speaking nothing but plain sense.

Because, in the end, I don’t want to go A.A. Milne on him. He’s already got the hair, poor lamb, but only because I can’t get near him with the scissors, and anyway by the end of the summer it will be more late Beatles, verging on mullet, than Christopher Robin. Although I don’t think CR roamed around Hundred Acre Wood wearing nothing but his gruts and a couple of dozen stick-on tattoos, weeing on trees and terrorizing the cat.

See, but there I go again. Can’t leave the poor lad alone. So let me afford him a little space to just be himself -- and, according to some fascinating conversations recently, his many other previous incarnations too. “First I was a dinosaur, then a blue butterfly, then a cat, then a space shuttle pilot, then your Daddy, then your Mummy, and then I was me.”

Work out the karma that gives you that sequence of lives. Isn’t this a Buddha who deserves to write the rest of his own story, in his own good time?