My grandmother was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. She was a master of the theatrical flourish, the withering repost, the needle to any fatuous balloons of pretention who wafted her way. She never pretended to enjoy the role of a mid-century housewife, consoling herself with poetry, her four children, and long, excruciatingly funny letters to her family. In her last weeks, when she was in hospital, I asked how she was. “Bloody but unbowed!” she said, a quote from one of the first poems she ever learned: Invictus by William Henley.
Her name was Ethel Bernice Mary, but everyone, including her grandchildren, called her Bernie. ‘Gran’ was never an option. Bernie had her own rich comic language, an inventiveness encapsulated in her signature dish: ‘jam doo-dah’ (a baked sandwich of jam and scone dough). It took her daughters years to realise that this deliciously oozy concoction was not a classic dish from Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management.
In the 1970s she took to wearing caftans because they were easy to sew. (“Two seams and a hole for the head!” she cackled.)
When her children became too much, Bernie liked to lie on the floor in the living room with a newspaper over her head, listening to Schubert at full throttle.
I can still see her smoking a cigarette in a long black holder with her nose in the air like Agnes Moorehead from Bewitched. In the memory, she is complaining about band names. They were getting so weird, she said, that ‘the absolute end’ must be just around the corner. The week after her death, I spotted an LP by an Australian punk band called ‘The Living End’. Close enough.
She didn’t talk about politics much, although I remember her saying that the world had “gone to hell in a handbasket” since Michael Joseph Savage died. It comforts me to think that, however bad the news gets, people have been thinking that the world is going to hell for a very long time.
According to Wikipedia, the phrase “To hell in a handbasket” could refer to “the baskets used to catch guillotined heads in the eighteenth century.” In the 19th century, the phrase cropped up during the 1840s California gold rush when miners were lowered in baskets down deep shafts to set explosives.
While this might seem like a reasonable metaphor for current events, it is important to remember how far we have come. Guillotined heads haven’t rolled into baskets for a while now, and there are laws against blowing up your employees.
While we no longer read the news in the shadow of a beheading machine, there is still doom to be scrolled. The Spinoff’s Hayden Donnell put it this way: “Unemployment is high and trending up, Moody’s [a US rating agency] just downgraded the country’s financial outlook and people are taking out mortgages to buy mince.”
With so much of the world’s fertiliser stuck in the Strait of Hormuz as planting season begins in the Northern Hemisphere, food inflation is sure to get worse. In the US, 70 percent of farmers say they can no longer afford enough fertiliser. Britain is predicting a food inflation rate of 10 percent. The Financial Times, not one for hyperbole, is talking about a “coming global food crisis”.
A staggering proportion of Kiwi families are already food insecure because their take-home pay can’t cover soaring bills. Like electricity, for example, rising 12.5 percent in the last year.
In New Zealand we make and export large quantities of food, so it is a painful irony that so many children don’t have enough to eat. The government’s inability to serve decent school meals is the setting for one of the most shocking headlines in a year of shocking headlines: Specialists say children have gone blind due to malnutrition (Radio New Zealand, 1 May).
Cheddar cheese, a major New Zealand export, is a rich source of Vitamin A1, also known as retinol – the vitamin which would have saved these children’s sight. Another good source is orange kūmara.
While there is obviously a global (aka Trump) component to incoming inflation, the government seems unable to cope with the implications.
As Australians are deluged with public messaging about saving fuel, our Prime Minister is refusing interviews even with mainstream hosts like TVNZ’s Jack Tame or Tova O’Brien.
Meanwhile, Sealink has announced a 9.2 percent fuel surcharge per trip, the Interislander has doubled its fuel surcharge for trucks, and Maersk is slapping a 27 percent fuel surcharge on shipments to New Zealand.
It’s tempting to lie in the middle of the living room floor and pull the newspaper over our head and listen to the ‘Trout’ Quintet.
I’m not stopping you. But it would be a mistake to cut ourselves off from the news entirely, with an election coming up. If there is any time to stay informed, it’s during a crisis.
• Jenny Nicholls
