Southerly by David Haywood

Even without consulting a calendar, there are several unmistakeable signs that an election is looming. Mailboxes begin to bulge with political pamphlets (usually containing numerous spelling and punctuation errors). Obscure politicians cut down on their drinking and take a sudden interest in their constituents. And the members of parliament for New Zealand First rise up on their hind legs, and start braying about immigrants.

The braying began early this year with Deputy Leader Peter Brown hee-hawing his opening salvoes in a press release entitled 'Figures Confirm Immigration Folly'. Mr Brown notes the latest Statistics New Zealand projection that 16 per cent of the population may be ethnically Asian by 2026. This, he says, is "horrible" and a source of "real danger" for which "both National and Labour are equally culpable".

Horrible? Real danger? Let's just revise our basic geography so that we can precisely identify these horrible and dangerous people.

A quick squint in the atlas reveals that Asia is the largest continent on the planet -- encompassing around 30 per cent of the land area and 60 per cent of the population. Asia comprises some 50 countries, including India, Pakistan, Iran, the Philippines, Cyprus, and Israel. The biggest single country in Asia is, of course, Russia. (Note: Statistics New Zealand seems to bend the strict geographical definition of Asia by splitting off the Middle East into a separate region. It's unclear whether they distinguish between European and Asian Russians).

The word 'Asian' clearly describes a lot of different people by the Statistics New Zealand definition: Indians, Chinese, Afghans -- can they really all be so horrible and dangerous? Hell yes, insists Mr Brown in his press release, because "they will form their own mini-societies to the detriment of integration and that will lead to division, friction and resentment."

Mr Brown knows this fact because, well, he just has a funny feeling that it must be true. Even if, for example, Scotsmen form their own little Caledonian societies, and no-one thinks they're particularly divisive to society. And Catholics and Protestants even have their own separate schools -- and yet they somehow manage to get along together in this country without friction or resentment.

But Asians are somehow different from Scotsmen or Catholics and Protestants, aren't they? After all, Asians are really different -- they're born in Asia. Well, no, actually. In fact, a large part of the ethnically Asian population growth by 2026 will be due to the children of our current immigrants. Why would these second and third-generation New Zealand-born Asians be so different and dangerous in comparison to European or Pacific New Zealanders? And anyway, where are these huge differences even now?

Gosh... it's enough to make you wonder if there could be another explanation for Mr Brown's funny feeling about Asians.

Here's an alternative hypothesis: what if -- plain and simple -- Mr Brown simply has an irrational dislike for people whose physical appearance is different from his.

And, furthermore, perhaps he suspects that there are a small minority of other sad people like him. And, not to take things too far, maybe he hopes that these misguided people will vote for him, and thus increase New Zealand First's woeful one per cent polling, and hopefully put Mr Brown back into his comfy job in parliament.

Yes, from a certain perspective, New Zealand First's predictable antics are almost humorous. The punchline to Mr Brown's crack-brained press release, of course, is that he himself is an immigrant to this country, something that he seems to have conveniently forgotten.

There's a school of thought that New Zealand First's idiocy stirs up parliament in an amusing manner. They make politics a little more interesting, and do no real harm; effectively they're a party of taxpayer-funded clowns. This is not a point of view that I share. Just after the last election -- during which similarly anti-immigrant sentiments were bandied about -- I conducted a lengthy interview with Dr Lan Le-Ngoc.

Dr Le-Ngoc arrived here from Vietnam as a teenager, and has subsequently become one of New Zealand's top scientists. Unlike Mr Brown, he has made a genuine contribution to this country, and his work was recently recognized by a Royal Society Medal. Here's what Dr Le-Ngoc had to say about the increasing levels of racism that he's observed during his time in New Zealand:

[In my opinion], the rhetoric of people like Winston Peters and Don Brash has actually promoted anti-immigrant sentiment. It was probably always there to a certain extent, but when senior politicians start spouting this sort of nonsense then it isn't merely airing the views of a racist minority -- it actually starts to incite racism.

Easily-led people take such political rhetoric as legitimization of their own bigoted views. They think it gives them carte blanche to treat immigrants rudely in shops, or to shout insults from their cars. Of course, I'm not suggesting that this is the intention of Peters or Brash. They're just doing it to get votes. I'm sure that after the election they forget all about it. But they don't realize the long-term impact that it's having on people like me and my family -- who can be easily identified as having ancestry from somewhere other than Europe.

After hearing something like this it's hard to find cretins like Mr Brown particularly amusing. In fact, I think that Mr Brown is not only a disgrace to parliament and a source of national shame to New Zealand -- but even perhaps, in his own way, a 'horrible' and 'dangerous' influence.

And frankly, the sooner he and his creepy New Zealand First chums are out of politics the better for us all.

Listening to other parents talk about their babies is like visiting a foreign country. "Our daughter can quietly amuse herself for hours watching her baby-mobile," claims a member of our Plunket group. "We're actually getting too much sleep now that the baby's arrived," says another. "I was planning to take three months away from work," asserts a third, "but I had so much time on my hands that I decided to go back early. I've also put my name down to foster some teenagers with behavioural problems, and I thought I might study for a Ph.D."

What a bunch of f**king show-offs. Never once has our son been amused by his baby-mobile for so much as a nanosecond. Over the last four months he has slept a maximum of five hours a night, and seldom longer than an hour in a row. And he screams and bellows to such an extent that our former neighbour, a German earth-mother who adores babies, is on record as saying: "Gott im Himmel! If I had ever seen a baby like Bob, I never would have wanted children in a million years."

In fact, Bob-the-baby's behaviour is so utterly beyond the pale that it gives us a certain cachet in parenting circles. Members of our antenatal class call up to hear his latest outrage. "He urinated all over our G.P.," says Jennifer. "Then when he got home he threw up on the floor, rolled round in his own vomit, and smeared it over the furniture."

Above: Bob at age four months (warning: baby may be less angelic than he appears).

On the day that Bob was (sort of) expelled from the local Plunket group, Jennifer and I basked in the glory of his reflected badness. We subsequently had to take him to a special Plunket centre: basically a Parrie Max for bad babies. "At least he won't be the worst baby here," said Jennifer hopefully.

No such luck. Bob announced his presence by demonstrating his 'wall of sound' abilities. By the end of the session the other parents were looking harrowed but visibly cheered-up. "Well, of course, I now realize that our baby isn't so bad," said one of them, casting an eye at Bob.

Bob's outré antics also include a trick that our paediatrician lightly refers to as "the constipation issue". At first blush, this actually seems like a good thing -- no dirty nappies -- but, as the days turn into weeks, Bob eventually begins to resemble nothing so much as an unexploded bomb.

The inevitable detonation is appalling beyond belief. I can only liken it to a fat man stomping on a jumbo-sized tube of brown toothpaste. Excrement comes cascading out of every opening: Bob's trouser cuffs, his sleeves, and even his collar. On one occasion, the event occurred when he was in bed with us -- deluging parents, duvet, pillows, and mattress with a week's worth of faeces.

But all of this antisocial behaviour is inconsequential in comparison to Bob's really difficult trait. You can probably guess what I'm going to say, and it's every parent's worst nightmare. Yes, I'm afraid that Bob-the-baby likes country music.

As a new-born we attempted to pacify him with soothing classical CDs -- but he simply wasn't having it. Brahms made him scream; Mozart turned him purple with rage. Any kind of rock or pop reduced Bob to a blubbering wreck. And a brief encounter with jazz left him more distraught than the occasion when a mid-wife stuck a giant needle into his bottom.

Curiously, it was only when Bob was accidentally exposed to his parents' most hated genre of music that his true inclinations were revealed. The transformation was astounding. He stopped screaming. A beatific smile crept across his features. He began to grunt in a manner that indicated he wished to be held next to the loudspeakers in order to enjoy country music at maximum volume.

And so, to our intense horror, we have become a country music-playing household. God knows what it's doing to Bob's mental development. If classical music is supposed to enhance children's intelligence, then one can only theorize that country -- at the very least -- might make them inclined to vote for Winston Peters.

Even more worrying is the emotional impact of those country lyrics on Bob's impressionable young psyche. If you believe the newspapers, teenagers are always topping themselves after listening to depressing tunes on their iPods. And I defy anyone to come up with a musical genre more depressing than country. In evidence, I quote from a song called "No Depression" (presumably an ironic title) recorded by the Carter Family in 1936:

This dark hour of midnight nearing,
tribulation time will come.
The storm will hurl the midnight fears,
and sweep lost millions to their doom.

Bob usually gives a huge guffaw of laughter when he hears that last line -- a response which, I fear, is already not a good sign.

The peculiar thing is that now I've heard the song about 500 times, I'm beginning to think that Bob might have a point. It does have a certain something. In fact, I've even begun to twiddle round with some of Bob's favourite country tunes on my guitar. Bob falls into a state of absolute bliss when I do this: his face lights up with pleasure, he sways joyfully, and he waves his little hands in the air. When I stop playing, his face crumples up, and he breaks off into heart-rending sobs. It's such a shame that audiences never did that when I was a proper musician.

Above: The author plays country music while his fan club looks on adoringly.

At any rate, despite his dubious taste in music, Bob appears to be otherwise normal. Between bouts of screaming (which are gradually getting less frequent), he leads a busy and action-filled life.

Perhaps his happiest moments are spent rifling through the recycling bin in order to drink the dregs from my beer bottles, but he also enjoys such pursuits as: poking paper-clips into electrical sockets; crawling precariously down flights of stairs; and having protracted 'my parents don't understand me' conversations with his close personal friend, Adrian the Rabbit.

Above: Deep in conversation with Adrian the Rabbit.

All in all, I think that things could really be much worse. Now that he's out of his Rodney Hide phase, Bob has returned to his original good looks. In fact, impressed with Bob's movie-star appearance, an eminent academic pointed out to me that it's much more sensible to have handsome badly-behaved babies than well-behaved ugly ones.

Behavioural therapy, she explained, will almost certainly fall under the umbrella of the public health system -- whereas cosmetic surgery is still very much a privately-funded procedure.

So it's farewell to our house in Christchurch. The morning of settlement day was bleak and stormy, and so dark that I had to switch on the sitting-room lights. The house reminded me of its former self -- as it was on the evening when we first moved in: gloomy, echoing, and with a faint odour of floor-polish.

The new owner, Rob, arrived in an industrial-strength raincoat, and splashed his way to the front porch. We had to raise our voices to be heard above the noise of the river. Overnight the Avon had turned into a rushing torrent, with branches and small trees being swept downstream.

"Does it ever flood?" asked Rob.

I handed him the keys to his new house. He stepped inside and gazed at the wooden floors and rimu-panelled interior. His face took on the resigned expression of a man whose wife is an enthusiast for arts-and-crafts-movement architecture.

The rain had become even heavier by the time I parked outside Jennifer's office. Most of our household effects were in storage, but a few essential travelling items had been temporarily stashed here for safekeeping. At the time, Jennifer had expressed concern over the sheer volume of paraphernalia that I had deemed to be essential, but I'd reassured her that my highly-trained engineer's brain could visualize how everything would fit perfectly into our car.

Predictably perhaps, I could only squeeze in about a third of the essential items. I explained to Jennifer that the interior spaces in Citroëns tend to be triangular rather than square, and this had caused me to misjudge the amount that could be carried. Sensing that something had gone awry, Bob-the-baby began to scream at the top of his lungs.

We unpacked the contents of all the boxes, and -- shielding them as best we could from the torrential rain -- discarded everything that was not absolutely critical. This time I managed to fit in about half the items. We stood, defeated and dripping, and contemplated our predicament. Over Bob-the-baby's deafening sobs, Jennifer suggested that my acoustic bass might not, after all, be absolutely essential. She made the astute observation that an acoustic bass is somehow exactly opposite in shape to the boot of a Citroën.

We carried the bass up to her office, and transferred the contents of some of our boxes into plastic bags, so that they would squish up with greater triangularity. This time almost everything fitted into the car. I pushed down on the boot-lid with my full body weight, and it clicked softly shut.

The rain stayed with us all the way to the Rangitata river. By the time we reached Temuka, it had faded to a damp drizzle; and in Timaru, of all places, we suddenly emerged into dazzling sunshine.

We stopped for lunch. Above our heads, the South Canterbury sky -- implausibly blue, and populated by aimless, sponge-like clouds -- looked as if it had been designed by a special effects department.

All afternoon we drove steadily southward: traversing a parched and rumpled Otago, and then out into the river-meadows of Southland. After the town of Gore, we left the main highway and headed towards the ocean. On either side of the road, contented-looking cows gazed at us from trim pastures -- their intelligent faces filled with inscrutable bovine thoughts.

At Riverton we could go no further southward. The town -- founded as a fishing settlement in 1835 -- is almost prehistoric by New Zealand standards. Fishing boats still work here, moored to a broken-down wharf that wanders out into the lagoon. There is a small library, a church, and a grand two-storey brick villa with a sign that says "Fresh Laid Eggs".

We stopped to buy some bread and a few other supplies, and drove the last leg of the journey -- to our new home, a weather-beaten crib on the sea-front, some distance from the town.

After only a fortnight we have already begun to develop our daily rituals. In the morning, while Jennifer has her bath, Bob-the-baby and I wander down to the seashore and look across at Stewart Island (or, more frequently, to the fog that obscures the island). At about five o'clock, we go for another walk, and Bob encourages me to buy a pint of beer.

It's been a number of years since I've lived in a small town, and I'd forgotten the pleasant feeling of Gemütlichkeit that it gives. Up north, somewhere far away, there are traffic jams, homeless people, drug-dealers, murderers, and Paul Henry. But here we have only the oyster-catchers, and Foveaux Strait, and a handful of fishing-boats in the lagoon.

It will do us for a while.

Okay, when this guy starts you think we are never going to get to play the zither here. He spends forever giving a speech about the Jews. Then he's in a plane with all these clouds for ages, and then suddenly he's playing 'Ride of the Valkyries' at top speed. You are supposed to play along, but there is no bouncing ball telling you what notes to play. Then he starts singing, which is not that great, so you are thinking what the heck is going on here?

I can't see how anyone could learn to play the volkszither from this DVD, and I am only giving it 2 out of 5 stars.

DVD Review: Learn to Play the Bagpipes in the Style of Nurse Ratched from Ken Kesey's Novel 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'

Is it just me, or is does this DVD not even make sense? First of all, you've got these musical experts like Jack Nicholson and Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd, who just sit around talking the whole time. I mean, you can hear bagpipe music in the background, but you can't see anyone playing. And then Nurse Ratched comes in, and tells them that they've got to form a band, and that her Red Indian friend 'Chief Bromden' is going to show them how to play. Then she goes out of the room, and while she's out Jack Nicholson convinces everyone that they should go fishing. So they all go fishing, and when they come back Nurse Ratched is really mad with them. And so then the Red Indian guy starts singing and playing the bagpipes, and then he picks up this big box of plumbing and throws it out the window. What the heck is that all about?

There is no way that this DVD is suitable for "bagpipe beginners" as claimed. You hardly even see a set of bagpipes, and it seems to me that it assumes you know all about chord progressions and musical theory. I'm only giving it 2.5 out of 5 stars.

DVD Review: Learn to Play the Ukulele in the Style of Ingmar Bergman's 'Wild Strawberries'

Apparently Ingmar Bergman is some kind of famous ukulele player, even though I've never heard of him. So he starts off in his house talking up the ukulele for what seems like hours. Then he gets out his ukulele, and you think he's going to show you some chords. But then he puts his ukulele away again, and goes out to visit his daughter-in-law Marianne, who's also a famous ukulele player. And they both get out their ukuleles, and you're thinking now we're going to learn how to play the ukulele. But then the next thing they get in Marianne's car and go off driving, and they collect this hitch-hiker called Sara, who also plays the ukulele. And then they go to this house, or maybe it's a hotel (I'm not sure), and the whole place is full of ukulele players. And they all get out their ukuleles, and you're thinking at last we're going to learn about ukuleles. Then the DVD ends. I just don't get it.

I still don't know how to play a note on the ukulele, so I'm only giving this DVD 2 out of 5 stars.

Note: If you have your own opinion on any of these DVDs, then feel free to click on the 'Discuss' button below.

I adore a good misunderstanding. Happily, a feature of New Zealand dialect known as the NEAR-SQUARE diphthong merger provides endless scope for confusion and entertainment.

This diphthong merger affects only some New Zealanders, and means that they pronounce the words 'near' and 'square' (and other words in these lexical sets) as if they rhymed. Older New Zealanders will be astounded to hear that anyone -- however young and shiftless -- could rhyme two such dissimilar words. But if you don't believe that it can be done, then listen to this speaker pronouncing the words 'fear', 'fair', and 'fare'.

On the other hand, younger New Zealanders will be utterly gobsmacked if you suggest that the words 'near' and 'square' don't rhyme. An assertion which, in turn, may make people of a certain disposition demand the reinstatement of compulsory military training and/or the death penalty.

For myself, I do differentiate between 'near' and 'square' -- although I can usually guess what shabbily-dressed young people are trying to say. I've even become acclimatized to television advertisements for a company called "Ear New Zealand" (apparently they also have a fleet of planes).

But occasionally, I get caught out. I recently met a woman in her late thirties, who introduced herself as "Clear". In a nervous attempt at chit-chat, I commented on the unusualness of her name, and jocularly inquired if her parents were hippies or scientologists.

Her: What's so funny about the name 'Clear'.

Me: [beginning to wish I'd never mentioned the subject] There's nothing funny about it -- it's just such an unusual name.

Her: It's not unusual -- there must be thousands of women in New Zealand called 'Clear'.

Me: [absolutely astonished] Really? I've never met anyone else called 'Clear' in my entire life. Is it spelt with a 'C' or a 'K".

Her: C... L... A... I... R... E.

My own humiliations are, however, utterly dwarfed by a superb misunderstanding that I overheard on the bus the other day.

A young mother and son had climbed aboard at a childcare centre called Caring and Sharing. They took a seat opposite to an elderly lady and her groceries.

Elderly lady [to little boy]: Where have you been today?

Young mother: He's been at Caring and Sharing.

Elderly lady: Shearing? He's a bit young for that, isn't he?

Young mother: No, Caring and Sharing believes in learning to share as early as possible

Elderly lady: Really? I thought it would be all computers and that, nowadays.

Young mother: Oh no, learning to share is much more important than computers.

Elderly lady: Well, I never! The farmers will be pleased, I suppose.

Young mother: Oh, here's our stop [grabs child and disembarks].

This is the kind of solid-gold misunderstanding that leaves me almost speechless with delight. And, best of all, the confusion was unresolved. It gives me scope to have happy visions of the elderly lady telling her friends about the new educational methods: "Gosh, you've no idea what they've got the little ones doing at kindy these days..."

... or perhaps arguing with her grown-up children:

Grown-up son or daughter: Mum, you must have got it wrong. They wouldn't be teaching pre-schoolers how to shear.

Elderly Lady: [doggedly sticking to her guns] No, I asked several times. She said they're all learning to shear at kindy nowadays. Apparently it's much more useful than computers.

There's even the joyous possibility that she may go to her grave believing that shearing is being taught at kindergartens. And perhaps it will even give consolation in her final moments -- knowing that the art of shearing has been passed to a new generation.

It makes me proud to be a New Zealander.