The Midnight Countdown 2

There are days when nothing goes right.

And then there are New Year’s Eves when this happens.

My evening began with a ghost bus. In fact, several of them.

The thing is, the bus shelters along Symonds Street all have electronic read-outs to tell you how many minutes you must wait until your bus will arrive. This is good – it gives you realistic expectations. 243 - Blockhouse Bay - 26 minutes. 25 minutes, 24 minutes, 23 minutes, 22 minutes, 21 minutes, 20 minutes, 19 minutes, 18 minutes, 17 minutes, 16 minutes, 15 minutes, 14 minutes, 13 minutes, 12 minutes, 11 minutes, 10 minutes, 9 minutes, 8… oh you’ve got the idea. I’ll carry on anyway – 8 minutes, 7 minutes, 6 minutes, 5 minutes, 4 minutes, 3 minutes, 2 minutes, DUE.

You scan the edge of Grafton Bridge on the horizon. No bus. A minute passes. You glance nervously up at the display.

DUE.

Another minute passes. The same. Then a third minute passes.

Despite the absense of anything resembling a bus, all the available evidence still says that it’s about to arrive. (the electronic read-out is 100% of the available evidence)

And then there it is – stopping at the lights. In fact there are two of them. You patiently wait. Presently the lights go green, they approach, you flag them down, they obligingly pull-in next to you, and you fish out some cash.

You step on, and smile at the driver “New Windsor, please.”

“I’m going to Threekings. You want a 243 or a 247.”

WHAT??? Muttering horrified apologies, you get off in shock and rush to the second bus behind… but that’s not yours either. A quick check of the electronic read-out confirms your conviction though. You look back at the traffic lights, but there is no third bus. Before you know it, you’re into crazy-talk, protesting to the drivers deranged things like “I know what the sign on the front says, but are you absolutely certain that you’re not a 243 going to New Windsor?”

But it’s no good. Both buses leave, containing all the other passengers you’ve been waiting with, and now you’re all alone, looking up at a resolute electronic read-out that’s looking back at you with a frighteningly familiar deadpan message:

243 - Blockhouse Bay - 26 minutes.

That, my friend, was a ghost bus.

You can’t see it, hear it, or get on and be told there's "Just room for one more inside, Sir", but you knew when it was approaching, you knew when it was here, and now you know it’s gone and heading for New Windsor without you. And you missed it.

26 minutes later I missed another ghost bus, and then a third one. They passed by without a blip, which was a shame, as they were exactly the sort of bus that I had been waiting for all this time.

As the title of this post suggests, I was heading to Hope City Radio to present The Midnight Countdown and take the station into a new year for the second year running. Last year’s “midnight moment” had been a bit uninspiring. My inept engineering had been poor, my logging tape had run out while I was talking on air, and the actual moment had suffered terribly from a lack of any firm plan as to what to do on the actual stroke of midnight. (click here for details, and to hear it) This year I was determined that the run up would be full of energy, excitement, and planning.

By the time the cab dropped me off at the station, it was literally four minutes to 12. Poor Patrick had been doing this entire live show leading up to the big moment, and now here I was walking in at 23:56 to steal his thunder from him. He had a great suggestion though:

“How about you start your show just after midnight?”

I didn't much fancy starting a show called The Midnight Countdown at five past midnight (it would have been a very long show), so to my shame, I told Patrick that I really wanted to do the midnight moment, and sat down to outro the track currently playing. Patrick already had Gary S Paxton’s The Meat Wagon lined-up and ready to play, but I wanted to start the new year with Flatmate Dave’s copy of Hillsong’s That’s What We Came Here For. (who can resist a track that rhymes “Shout Halleluyah” with “Lifting to ya”?)

So that was that. I’d outro this track, play The Meat Wagon, do the midnight moment with Patrick, and then launch into Hillsong. Nothing could go wrong.

So I began.

“Chris Christensen – Please Please Me on Hope City Radio, 106.7 FM,” I said, mixing my text with my subtext. “And we’re almost ready for 2006 here in the studio. It’s all looking quite exciting, isn’t it Patrick?”

“Yeah! Yeah, man, yeah, yeah.”

“It’s been a crazy year, hasn’t it? What have you been up to this year?”

As Patrick waxed on about his hopes for the new year, something bothered me. We only had about three minutes left until midnight, and I didn’t know how long Gary S Paxton’s The Meat Wagon was. Would it be less than three minutes? Would we have time for it? It bothered me almost as much as the studio clock, which didn’t have a second hand.

This of course meant that I had no way of knowing when midnight actually was.

Okay, I was just going to have to ditch the track, talk for three minutes, and, short of any nearby parties helpfully cheering all of a sudden, guess when 2006 was. (As New Zealand gets the new year before the rest of the planet, Patrick and I might actually have become the first people in the entire world to enter 2006!)

So Patrick and I got chatting on air about, what else, Hope City Radio.

Patrick: “I mean - we’re the home of contemporary Christian greats! So we’re the meat in the sandwich as it were, er, I must say, tofu in the sandwich. You see, I’m not a meat eater. But anyway, we’re not too light, not too heavy, as far as Christian radio goes.”

Me: “The tofu in the middle of the sandwich, I think, is a very good way of putting it actually, ‘cos, err…”

At this point I ejected the disc with Gary S Paxton’s dropped track on it, at which Patrick betrayed all his vegetarian listeners by suddenly exclaiming on air “Oh no – you’ve taken The Meat Wagon out!”

I babbled on for a bit about my year gone by, scrutinising the microscopically edging minute hand of the studio’s ticking alarm clock, before eventually deciding that I would just have to take the plunge and pick a random moment from which to begin counting down.

And this is what happens when you’re not disciplined by a real time. For some reason, which is utterly beyond my comprehension, I began counting down from 60. And immediately I felt like I was back at that bus stop again…

Me: “Fifty-nine!”

Patrick: “Yeah, fifty-nine!”

Me: “Fifty-eight!”

Patrick: “Yeah!”

Me: “Fifty-seven! Fifty-six!”

Patrick: “Yeah.

Me: “Fifty-five!”

Patrick: “Yeah.

Me: “Fifty-four!”

Patrick: “Yeah.”

Me: “Fifty-three!”

Patrick: “Yeah.”

Me: “Fifty-two!”

Patrick: “Yeah.”

Oh you’ve got the idea. (reviewing the tape afterwards, counting down from 60 to 50 took us about 24 seconds)

Somewhere around about 49 I decided this sounded about as good as when Anne Diamond and Nick Owen had regularly read out all the different newspapers’ bingo numbers on TV-AM. It was time to chat again, about 2005’s highs, it’s lows, and 46 seconds later I declared that we had 11 seconds to go.

This time I was gesturing Patrick to join me. This time were ready. This time it was good.

Us both: “Eight! Seven! Six! Five! Four! Three! Two! One!”

Me: “Whey-hey!”

Patrick: “Yeah!”

We clapped, we cheered, and this segued into all that applause that tends to start Hillsong tracks.

Then, in a crazy throwback to my old Through The Night graveyard show back in the UK, I presented the remaining 96% of The Midnight Countdown, finishing at about 1:30 am, when Flatmate Dave arrived to pick me up and reclaim his Hillsong CD.

Well, it was still midnight somewhere.

(Don’t believe me? Click here to welcome in 2006 again!)

2012 UPDATE: Just to prove that this show could still go even wronger, a few years later my off-air cassettes of this and a few other shows went missing while in storage. (the above excerpt is therefore the only clip that I now retain) If you find any of them, please email me as I would love to get them back again! Thanks! Steve. (ῧ)

Ahh McCain, You've Done It Again

Mad Uncle Christmas TV

Spent Christmas Day slumped on the sofa over at Shane’s. Neither one of us had any family nearby to retreat to, but we did invite over one common relative – Mad Uncle Christmas TV.

You remember Mad Uncle Christmas TV. He was that enthusiastic, slightly boring at times, confused old man who would come over each December 25th, and spend the season spewing several wildly inconsistent and contradictory Christmas stories with his own uniquely skewiff view of the real world. The best thing about Mad Uncle Christmas TV though, was how he would repeatedly forget the story that he’d been telling for the past half hour or so, and start all over again with a completely new set of characters. Sometimes the old fool would even flip back and forth between two completely different tales for a while, or repeat one that you remembered from last year. Really - he'd act them all out and everything.

Anyway, Mad Uncle Christmas TV came over, and spent the day regaling us with a brobingdinagian salmagundi of stories for Festivus.

His first tale was clearly ripped-off from Gulliver’s Travels, and featured Ted Danson. Granted, Mad Uncle Christmas TV started this one half way through, but perhaps he was just trying to be arty. Promisingly, this adventure turned out to be so inspired and full of imagination, that I felt as though I was watching something by Douglas Adams. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

Next up, Uncle went outside for a smoke while the Queen barged in and told us exactly what she thought of the year gone by. She didn’t stay long though, as she had to race back to the UK to express exactly the same views to everyone back in Britain 13 hours later. Really, I don’t know why she doesn’t just film her opinions once and then broadcast them on the telly. Sadly, she didn’t tell us the day’s lottery numbers.

Somewhere along the line I wound up telling Shane that back in England, Mad Uncle Christmas TV’s favourite festive story has always been The Wizard Of Oz, however Shane then floored me with his demand for an explanation as to why. Erm… because it’s a Christmas story, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Yes, it... oh…

Returning inside from the sunny back garden, Mad Uncle Christmas TV began the story of The Flintstones: Viva Rock Vegas. There was nothing unexpected here, except the encouraging presence of dinosaurs and hominids together.

Then, jumping significantly forward in the narrative, we got a modern retelling of Little House On The Prairie.

Ahhhhhh… my overiding childhood memory of this series of stories is of sitting down in a French lesson to watch a video of some jingly little frog language programme, only for the teacher to instead get interested in Little House, and that was that for the whole of the lesson. It had been the Christmas episode then too, and I remember being impressed that a kids’ show was treating its audience like adults. While the kids in the series all slept on Christmas night, their parents were all sitting around discussing ways in which they had kept the legend of Santa alive. Compared to what other shows were doing, this was believability that I respected.

Today, I was pleased to see that this new series of Little House stories was aiming for the same level.

Perhaps he’d drunk too much sherry, but Uncle’s next shaggy dog performance was entitled Jurassic Park. I first saw this movie in March 2004 on one of my many flights home to the UK, when I’d had significant problems with the premise. My main problem was the notion that this guy’s island of dinosaurs had remained a secret, despite its dependence upon the outside world. For example, in one scene, the guy shows a fully storyboarded, animated, edited and developed movie of what he’s been up to in hiding all these years, which had surely been animated, edited and developed off-shore. Today however Shane kept interrupting Uncle with his own ‘director’s commentary’ of its scientific madness. Once more however Spielberg proved his fine powers of direction – injecting enthrallingly believable characters into fairly plastic events.

I never heard the end of Uncle’s final story this year. It was definitely a good one, but halfway through his entrancing tale of hardship in prison (which he called The Shawshank Redemption) he fell suddenly asleep, no doubt overcome by the day’s mince pies, and Shane’s hearty cooking. Good job too – it was time for me to head home.

Home – which for the second year running was as far away from it as possible.

This was also the second year running that I had intended to help out with Auckland City Mission’s free meal for the homeless, but failed.

And also the second year running that I hadn’t made it to a church service.

Somehow, this just hadn’t been what Christmas means to me.

But then, if it’s not about your friends, what is it for?

The Last Day Of The Year

For most people, the last day of the year is usually December 31st.

For me, it’s always been December 24th.

Advent is just a long wind-down period. I’m never looking forward to new year, only to leaving work to go home for Christmas.

Ah yes, that last day at work before Christmas. The office is unusually quiet. There’s the occasional phone call, and unexpected visitor, for someone else. There’s not much work left, you’re mucking about, you’re going home at lunchtime, and hardly anyone else was at work that morning anyway.

Or that’s the way it’s usually been for me in secular employment anyway.

This year however I was working at the Christian Broadcasting Association.

And, yes, I was sitting there all alone, cracking through some long-outstanding low-priority editing, while the occasional phone call, and unexpected visitor, came in for someone else. Normality.

And then there’s Christmas Eve in the afternoon, which this year happened on a Saturday. Tearing around with a shortlist of gifts to tick off. Yeah, that’s normal too, but here’s the thing:

While doing my last-minute Christmas shopping, I usually bump into loads of people I know. Not just people who I know today but people from years gone by. Old schoolfriends, forgotten faces from college, and usually some old mate from church, who since disappearing 6 years ago after getting married, has now disturbingly put on 20 years and a push-cart.

But this year, again, I was in Auckland.

Richmond Bridge, the H37 buses and the Bentalls Centre were too far away for me to run into any old friends now.

But then… I’ve been living here for 18 months now… hasn’t that been long enough to make some new old friends?

After completing my Bible study and prayer-time in sunny Myers Park, I headed off down Queen Street to do my ‘rounds’. Christmas Cards from the Warehouse, and then off to 24/7 Food Town. I prayed that God would lead me to some vegan biscuits for Patrick, and got distracted by a book on popular conspiracy theories – which actually conceded that Jesus’ crucifixion was an extremely tough one to challenge.

Back to ACB – the backpackers where I had spent 9 months of my life, to drop off a card and bag of sweets. Caught up with friends there. I will never know in this life if my daily Christian witness there meant diddly-squat to anyone, but it feels encouraging to be told “You are so f*cking nice.”

Catching the bus up to New Windsor, I dropped in on Patrick at Hope City Radio. I’ve been dropping off the prerecorded tapes of my show That Friday Feeling here for ages, but I haven’t actually seen Patrick for well over a month now.

I was therefore slightly taken aback to learn that the studio cassette-player has been bust for an uncertain number of weeks, and several of my shows have not yet in fact been broadcast.

Anyway, I gave him the vegan biscuits I’d bought. Surprisingly, Patrick had never come across this brand before, which pleased me because I’d expected a vegan to have long-since exhausted his comparatively limited choice of processed food.

(and they were tasty bisucits too)

So then it was back to Symonds Street, to hunt for Albatross. When I’d met him a few weeks ago, he’d told me he was working at a hotel along here, but I had no recollection of which one. I wanted to invite him to come join Shane and myself for Christmas Day, if he was free. Alas, I checked every hotel I could find, but to no avail. After returning a trolley I’d come across to Food Town just before they closed, it was time to jump on the bus back home again, with a few chocolatey gifts to share with my flatmates.

But there’s something else about Christmas Eve.

It’s a moment. I witness it every year, no matter what country I’m in.

I’m always in a shopping area. Once I was in Richmond, another on a bench outside Marks and Spencer in Kingston, and this year I was sitting down writing cards at Food Town by Auckland Harbour.

The shops are closing. People are going home. The crowds are dispersing. Most of them have just finished the mad mad rush that was the year gone by.

And now it’s all over. The last spurt of Christmas shopping finally releases them to go home to their families, and probably a few days of respite from whatever daily stresses and challenges their walk through life had been trying to convince them were normal.

And I always just sit there, and I watch them all go away to their homes.

And then there’s a peace. A very beautiful, almost tangible peace that they all leave behind them. I always wonder whether that’s just my own personal sense of release from my own daily problems, or the very real presence of the Holy Spirit.

So I always sit there, give thanks to God, pray, and then I go home too.

People Are Beautiful

I sat down on the sunny grass to read my Bible in Myers Park.

I seem to go through phases of finding spots in which to do this, and Myers Park had been my Bible haunt at this time last year while I’d been doing stuff at Rhema nearby. As tends to happen in my weird life, bizarre events had followed me there on several occasions.

One time a foreigner had broken off from his mates to come and sit down next to me on the grass, apologising in his European accent “I’m sorry, but my friends have bet me that I wouldn’t come over here and be gay with you.”

A druid who’d come up for a chat near midnight, before suddenly bellowing something in another language at a volume that filled the entire park, and hurrying off away from me again.

And, of course, those two guys who seem to come down here regularly to practice their fire juggling. On hoops and sticks, you name it. (next week I’m hoping for performing elephants)

Anyway, today the most interesting thing to approach me here was a big leaf.

It suddenly blew across the grass towards me, and stopped expectantly in front of me, begging me to pick it up with the conviction of a panting dog sitting on your head.


The big leaf, it must be said, was beautiful, especially so in the sunshine. In fact, the leaf was so beautiful that it reminded me of God. The design, the colours, the intricately detailed veins. No matter how close you looked, which was easy in the sunshine, it just got more beautiful.

And that’s the thing about creation. You look at a hillside, and it’s beautiful. You go closer and look at an individual tree, and it’s still as beautiful. You go closer and examine a flower, and it’s beautiful. You scrutinise a petal, and it’s gorgeous. You gently behold the wonder of the countless delicate hairs on its rich green stem. You squint at the network of tiny shining indentations on the skin underneath, and try to seperate them, knowing that as soon as you look away you’ll never find the same one again. You take it home and put it under a microscope, and at each greater and greater magnification you gasp at the universe of alligned perfection hiding inside it. Its beauty actually is infinite.

But this leaf had something else. Damage.

Somehow bits and pieces of it had been charred and scorched and eaten away at. It was no longer perfect, by any means. It was like looking down from space at the surface of a lush vegetation-filled M-Class planet, on which a nuclear bomb had gone off.

And that’s a lot like us. People start out beautiful, but one thing and another damages their soul. Sometimes you can still see the beautiful bits, but sooner or later you see their massive damage. The bits of them where they’ve been so hideously hurt, that that section is now pussing ugliness and hate, instead of beauty and love.

Yet as I looked at the leaf as a whole, it still appeared cheerful despite its wounds. Sure, it could have looked better, it could have been better, but it was still getting on with achieving its purpose of being a leaf, despite everything. If it were more damaged, too damaged, then at some stage it would have been overcome, given up and quietly died.

The more I looked at this leaf, as well as reminding me of the human condition, it seemed to display a map of the whole of fallen creation.


Still awesomely beautiful, just like those awesomely beautiful people with ugly pussing damage.

Addicted To Spuds

Sam - the Korean teenager I help with English each week - has a hobby.

Most teenagers are into girls, music and trying to look old. Sam might be into those things too, but as well as all that, he has a far more altruistic pastime.

He's nursing a potato back to life.

Below is a picure I took of the little fella on June the 5th this year. Mr Potato appears to be extending a cautious shoot into the world, but he still has alot of ground to make up before catching up with Mr Carrot-Top next to him.


If you like, you can click on Mr Potato to see what he looks like today - over 6 months later!*

*WARNING: not for the squeamish

Romeo And Julietstock

A lovestruck Romeo sings the streets a serenade,
Laying everybody low with a love song that he made,
Finds a streetlight steps out of the shade,
Says something like: ”You and me babe - how about it?”

Regular as clockwork, every – I mean every time that I am about to fly home, a reason emerges to stay, usually within the final 24 hours. Tonight was my latest flight date, so after going out for a final coffee with everyone at work, we returned to the office to find my new visa and Work Permit waiting for me, valid for another 12 months.

Again and again and again.

So yes – I was daring to expect it. God always seems to come through at the last moment – if he was quicker, then we’d never recognise that it was him.

That said, I try not to jump to conclusions. Just because he’s kept me here for 18 months now, doesn’t prove that this is where he wants me for the 19th.

Anyway, as if to embrace my fast-approaching 2nd Christmas away from home, this evening was spent with my flatmates.

Then cockney Neil had an idea.

Juliet says “Hey, it's Romeo, (IN THICK LONDON ACCENT) you nearly gave me an ‘eart attack,”
He's underneath the window, she's singing “Hey-la, my boyfriend's back,
You shouldn't come around here singing up at people like that,
Anyway, what you gonna do about it?”

He wanted to watch a video of Mark Knopfler singing his track Romeo And Juliet, so of course flatmate Dave, being an aficionado of all things Dire, rose to the occasion by presenting us with a whole evening of it. That’s right – into the wee small hours, watching the entire back-catalogue of Knopfler performing just the one song over and over again down the years in rough chronological order. It was such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that even Tim downstairs checked his brains at the door to join us.

Now I like Mark Knopfler, in fact I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who didn’t appreciate his unique flavour of metal guitar twanging, but the question I was facing tonight was this: would I still like him after 2 hours of the same song?

Juliet, the dice was loaded from the start,
And I bet that you exploded into my heart,
And I forget I forget the movie song,
When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong?
Juliet…

First up was a VHS of a live performance from the 1980s. It appeared to have been filmed at some theatre in London. There stood this young man, still looking slightly surprised at his new-found fame, crooning away in an unexpectedly high-pitched voice. Wow - whatever happened to those tones?

Being the 80s, when music on TV still had a colour-signal, this had been shot in apparently low-light on real grainy film. Very cold and uncomfortable, and yet the pitch-black around him brought a certain intimacy that you just don’t get with today’s electronic filmic-effected recordings.

Come up on different streets, they both were streets of shame,
Both dirty, both mean, yes and the dream was just the same,
And I dreamed your dream for you and now your dream is real,
How can you look at me as if I was just another one of your deals?

When you can fall for chains of silver, you can fall for chains of gold,
You can fall for pretty strangers, and the promises they hold,
You promised me everything, you promised me thick and thin, yeah,
Now you just say “oh Romeo, yeah, you know I used to have a scene with him.”

Perhaps an hour later we were watching an older incarnation playing to another (probably also older) audience outdoors. The young man’s fortunes had clearly been on the up, as he had by now recruited Eric Clapton to provide backing for some other numbers.

Juliet, when we made love you used to cry,
You said “I love you like the stars above, I'll love you till I die,
”There's a place for us you know the movie song,
When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong?
Juliet…

A brief hiccup in the second half as Dave realised that the Live Aid tape had gone A.W.O.L….

I can't do the talk so like the talk on the TV,
And I can't do a love song like the way it's meant to be,
I can't do everything, but I'll do anything for you,
I can't do anything except be in love with you,

At some point we watched the original video, which doesn't appear to even feature Knopfler. Now that was a bit of a blast from the past. Its sheer unashamed conviction could teach an entire diploma in video directing today.

And all I do is miss you and the way we used to be,
All I do is keep the beat and the bad company,
Now all I do is kiss you through the bars of a rhyme,
Juliet, I'd do the stars with you any time,

… until we eventually came bang up to date with camcorder footage of his last tour to date. These recordings are always great – shot from the audience on maximum zoom, so that any tiny little jolt of the tripod looks like a meteor collision.

By now Knopfler was a grey man in his middle-ages, which gave the exact same lyrics a deepness of conviction that his earlier youthful inexperience hadn’t been able to.

Juliet, when we made love you used to cry,
You said I love you like the stars above, I'll love you till I die,
There's a place for us you know the movie song,
When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong?

Juliet…

And we finished.

So what on Earth does Knopfler do between concerts? That last sight of him sitting on stage between tracks with a mug of tea in his hands rather gave me the impression that he barely gets any time to give performances now, because he’s just too busy working on something far more serious and important, like experimenting with music to find a cure for death.

And why not, after all, performing Romeo And Juliet on stage in front of thousands of people IS hard work. Being a giant pop legend isn’t all money for nothing.

A lovestruck Romeo sings the streets a serenade,
Laying everybody low with a lovesong that he made,
Finds a convenient streetlight, steps out of the shade,
Says something like: “You and me babe, how about it...

...you and me babe, how about it…?”

(and would you believe while writing this I've found another one...)

Doctor Who: The Long Game

I'm sure the title meant something that I missed.

It's the sixth story to be set on/by Earth...


... (the last story set in the future on a space-station overlooking Earth was 5 weeks ago) and the second one to make a big deal of stuff coming out of people's foreheads.


As usual, I enjoyed it while it was on. Plot holes still abounded, but at least they all only contradicted this episode. I know this should really be worse than contradicting the other ones, I really haven't figured out why it's not.

So they have to vent the heat from the alien down to the lower levels, instead of... the vacuum of space outside?


So The Doctor takes one look at Adam with the hole in his forehead, and exclaims "What has he done?" instead of "What have they done to him?" The Doctor also knows all about the message Adam had recorded on his home answerphone, without any possible way of knowing.

Ahh - but they've remembered the hypnopass again. Maybe next week they will forget Rose, and we will all have to nod sagely "Oh well it's not a mistake, he obviously dropped her off somewhere."

Best thing would be Simon Pegg as the Editor, who is always brilliant. And just for once he wasn't reducing his audience by swearing.


7¼ out of 10. Hoping to see one set on an alien planet soon.

Never Gonna Leave Your Tithe

When I came here in July 2004, my plan was to follow God’s wishes.

One of the promises that I made to him then, was that when he got me work, I would tithe. So, today I think, having been earning since September, I carefully finished adding everything up, and I kept that promise.

The collection at church was taken by Jack - the guy whose truck I crashed back in May.

Jack's communication skills aren't award-winning - the first time he’d rung me up he’d never even told me who he was, he’d just presumed that I'd somehow know. Anyway, forget what you’ve heard about the evils of money – after the service tonight, Jack unusually came up to me and exchanged small-talk. Or maybe he actually wanted to talk to someone else, and I was just in the way. Or maybe he needed a loan to pay off his motor insurance.

Anyhew, with his traditional air of sarcasm, he nonsensically comes out with "I see your mate's here tonight."

I have absolutely no idea what he means, so, quite reasonably, I ask: "Who?"

"Your English mate the singer. Daniel Bedingfield."

Okaaaay, so either "here" means "New Zealand" where internationally famous pop-singer Daniel Bedingfield must therefore be on tour, or there's someone else from England at church, who also sings, to whom Jack has just given the hilarious nickname of "Daniel Bedingfield," expecting me to understand.

So I reply "Ha ha, yes, of course. How are you?"

"Aren't you going to say hello to him?"

Well you can tell where this story is going - standing just behind me at church was Daniel Bedingfield.

So This Is Where All The 37s Get To

It always rains in New Windsor.

Look I’m sorry, but it does. Well all right, it always does on Fridays then.

I know this from the bitter experience of having regularly finished my radio show, splashed across the road, sat down on a wet bench at an exposed bus stop, and miserably tried to body-shield Mr Hippy’s cassette-radio from joining me in my dilution.

Since I got back from the UK last September though, things have been a bit different.

Yes, the powers that be have erected a shelter. It’s wonderful – after I’d dropped the latest cassette off tonight, I waited in perfect dryness as I froze. (N.B. It may not actually have been raining tonight, but since it always rains in New Windsor, it therefore continues to do so in my memory.) (That’s right – it actually is raining in my heart.)

(Sorry Buddy)

Tonight I had company though.

A guy called Albatross approached the bus shelter and sat down. (All right that’s not his name, I changed it for this okay?) So I asked Albatross what he was doing here in New Zealand. (He was from overseas.)

He’d met a Kiwi girl, it hadn’t worked out, and then she’d had his kid. Recognising his responsibility, he’d come out here to do whatever he could. That meant visiting them when he could, and watching his Working Holiday Visa tick away until the day when the law would require him to leave them again, for at least another year.

As our bus wound it’s way down to Symonds Street, we chatted about this and that, and he told me that several people had questioned the wisdom of his impossible decision, and that he really couldn’t forsee any possible right outcome.

Anyway, as I got up to depart the bus at my stop, I wanted to encourage him, so I looked him straight in the eye and said something like “Whatever anybody else says, I think you’re doing the right thing for the right reasons, and it will all work out for you.”

As he looked away from me out the window, I could hear the relief in his voice. “Thank you. I really need to hear that a bit more often.”

"How Much Money Sir?! I Can't Hear You Over My Uniform..."

They dress a bit casual down at the local bank here…

Christmas In The Park 2005

Last Saturday night flatmate Dave and I caught the bus to the Auckland Domain for this year’s Christmas In The Park concert.

This is only the second one of these that I’ve been to, (last year's one here) as where I come from, it’s fairly unheard of to do anything outdoors this close to Christmas, unless of course you’re Santa. In fact you have to wonder just what kind of crazy trip the guy was on when he nominated one of the coldest/hottest days of the year as the one on which he wanted to annually head outside and lug the world’s, yes, the entire world’s Christmas presents across 24,859.82 miles, before repeatedly repeating it at a slightly different longitude again and again until the entire surface of the planet has been covered in one freezing/sweltering 24-hour dash.

Just what on Earth is his angle? Oh that’s right - all of them.

Just to add petrol to the whole suspicious conspiracy-theory, tonight Dave and I were reliving Saturday’s fun by watching the whole concert again on TV3, when suddenly, somewhere between Fast Crew and a surely jet-lagged Crazy Frog (who after all that travelling to get here was cruelly cut-off in his first verse), we spotted Santa. He was dancing and frolicking on stage along with all the other alphabet-list celebrities, but the TV director, throughout the segment we watched, constantly kept him safely hidden in long-shot. Petra Bagust even interviewed Mrs Claus at one point (controversial news for those of you outside New Zealand – she’s a Māori), but the man himself’s features determinedly remained a fuzzy mystery.

A strange way to treat your show’s biggest celebrity.

The Power To Go The Distance - Staying Strong On The Inside by Rob Harley

It's a collection of true-life motivational stories that Rob has come across during his busy career.

Unlike his earlier more in-depth work Brave, Mad and Memorable, here Rob packs-in over 50 bite-sized anecdotes, together with Bible-verses and questions to challenge the reader.

I don't think I'll ever forget the story about the Bee Gees!

Available here.

Doctor Who: Dalek

Time-travel is a tricky business.

Back in the UK last year, I was browsing through the science-fiction magazines in W H Smith, when I read that the Daleks would be appearing in the planned new series of Doctor Who. However a month or so later I read that there’d been some dispute with the rights-holders, so they now wouldn’t be appearing. Then a month or so after that, just before I came to New Zealand, I read that, yes, they would in fact be appearing after all. Or did I read that after my flight here? The thing was that, due to shipping delays, most of the science-fiction magazines on sale here in New Zealand were 3 months out of date. So was this story old news, or new new news?

Darrrghhhh!!!

This all worked in my favour of course, as I really didn’t want to know in advance. If the Daleks were going to unexpectedly show up at the end of an episode, say maybe episode one, then I wanted to be as surprised about it as the characters.

Of course, Doctor Who has a history of spoiling these surprise returns itself, with givaway episode-titles like “Planet Of The Daleks”, “Destiny Of The Daleks” and “Unexpected Return of the Daleks At The End Of Episode One: Episode #1.”

So, what do you reckon this is going to be about?
:)




(Star Trek fans don’t have this problem. They get insomnia-curingly allegorical titles like “Lessons” “Masks” and “Ethics.”)

Anyway, having given away this big twist of the episode in advance, ('Metaltron' would have been so much cooler) the script then had to, conversely, invest time in explaining an unmade back-story.

The Daleks had fought a huge “Time War” against the Doctor’s race, and both sides had been wiped-out. This Dalek had survived by accidentally falling through some sort of a time-hole to early-21st century Earth, where it had spent the last few years incarcerated, and unable to receive any further orders from its dead superiors.

Surely less hassle to have said this Dalek was left-over from their last appearance in 1988’s Remembrance Of The Daleks. (set in 1963) It can even fly just like those Daleks could. There seems however to be a general presumption among fans that the new series mustn’t refer much to the original series, for fear of distancing new viewers. So what we got instead was a sequel to a story that no-one had seen.

How exactly is that better?

Apart from that, great Cyberhead, a few minor plot-holes, terrific soul-searching stuff from the Doctor, and generally an all-round good watch – I enjoyed this.

Best of all was the sheer amount of thought that had gone into re-realising the show’s most popular race. This one Dalek looked the same as the originals, but could fly, think, download the entire internet in seconds and was utterly lethal. This Dalek was unquestionably the sort of loyal revamp that I had been hoping for.

Well, for the first 35 minutes anyway.

For the last 10, let me go back to my earlier Star Trek comparison.

So on Star Trek, who are the baddies?

It always used to be the Klingons, until around about Star Trek V – The Final Frontier (1989) when they started to become the good guys as well. Yes, by Star Trek: The Next Generation some of them were even serving on the Enterprise. So the writers invented a new race of alien baddies called the Ferengi, but again it wasn’t long before we got episodes about good Ferengi joining Starfleet. (Hey – they’re not so different from us y’know. Why, underneath, they’re just as human as we are.) After that it was the Borg, until they couldn’t resist writing “good Borg” episodes, notably one of them joining the regular cast of Star Trek: Voyager. Then it was Species 8472, and guess how long they stayed thoroughly evil for? Oo - maybe a year. (Photon-torpedo the lot of them I say)

Anyway, turning all nice is what happened to the Daleks tonight, complete with sad moving suicide ending.


Not the best introduction to them for new viewers. The BBC even got complaints about there being too much violence... to the Dalek. (see here)

(Maybe they actually complained about too much violins...)

Memo to self – the Daleks can now all be defeated by simply touching their casing so that they absorb your DNA and develop a conscience.

Handy. Let’s hope they remember this next time.

7 ¾ out of 10.

It's Official - I'm 'Normal'

In 2006 I will clock up 2 years in this country, so the Department Of Immigration recently asked me to have a full medical check-up.

Hence, last Monday was therefore full of reliving my whole medical history of having a broken mirror slash my leg open at 7, a lawnmower break my arm at 11, a car run me down at 16 etc etc. Ah yes, West Middlesex Hospital. I liked going to the theatre there. I always left in stitches.

Today I also had a blood-test, a blood-pressure test, a urine test, and one of those reflex tests where the doctor whacks your knee with a hammer. Oh, and I had an x-ray.


Fortunately, in the doctor’s own summary comments, I’m “NORMAL – FIT MAN.” Well, thank goodness I passed those 3.

Christmas Paper

Tonight was the last church cell-group meeting before Christmas, so Nev handed round sheets of paper with everyone’s name on, for us all to write encouraging messages to each other on.

Here’s mine: (with names removed)

Doctor Who: The Aliens Of London / World War Three

The 2-part Doctor Who story The Aliens Of London / World War Three feels like being told a story by that guy from Memento who has such a short-term memory.

The first episode begins by claiming that the last 12 hours of story-time actually took a few days to happen. Okay, that’s fine, maybe there was a lot of other stuff that we didn’t get to see.

The Doctor and Rose also don’t seem to remember the last time they returned to present-day London, in episode 2, and had some chips.


Rose then returns to her mum’s flat to find that, in fact, 12 months have passed at home, so her mum had assumed that she must be dead. Lots of emotional angst and crying. Hilarious.

Sobbing, her mum demands to know why Rose never even phoned. “Why didn’t you phone?” Also sobbing, Rose protests that “I was busy.”

Unfortunately, at this point flatmate Dave voiced the words surely on the entire regular audience’s lips: “But she did phone!”

Indeed, only 2 episodes ago…



Well, y’know, Rose was 5 billion years in the future when she made that call, so maybe she got through to her mum at a point in time before she’d actually left. In fact, if you go back and listen to that scene really carefully, you can read that in. So that makes it okay, doesn't it? Yes, it would. Except that Rose doesn’t seem to remember making the call either.

Fortunately there’s an obvious answer to the whole problem, and again it’s flatmate Dave to the rescue: “Why don’t they just go back in time a year?”

More to the point, Dave, why don’t they just phone back in time a year?

Sheesh, we would have so much more fun with a time machine than these two…

Anyway, back to the story.


Aliens invade. Everyone is shocked, including the Doctor, Rose, Rose’s mum and Mickey Smith, who have all forgotten the last alien invasion only 3 episodes ago. Really – it never occurs to Rose’s mum that their last words to each other had been just after being shot at by lethal plastic mannequins.

The ones we just saw again in the recap.

The Doctor and Rose stand behind a military cordon, unable to get through, because they have forgotten that they have a hypnopass. (maybe they’d stared at it for too long)

But if you can live in denial, or actually are the above-mentioned guy from Memento, then it must be said that episode 1 has plenty of good things to distract you with. Billie Piper’s shockingly good acting, the terrified alien pig in a spacesuit, the fickle public gathering together to watch the invasion on the telly, before ultimately losing interest. (maybe that's what we're meant to do)

The best scene however had to be the Doctor sneaking off in the TARDIS late one night and walking straight in on all the soldiers having tea, particularly everyone's frozen embarrassment at each other. Priceless.

And the military capturing the Doctor and surrounding the TARDIS. Brilliant sequence. There's really no going back now.

Except that, in the following week’s episode, they just forgot about that as well. The Doctor got back to the TARDIS, where there were no soldiers. I guess they’d all forgotten too.

In fact, it all seems as though we - the viewers – were expected to not remember.

By the end of the second episode, all this selective memory was becoming rather frustrating. I mean why take all these plot-developments in, if next week you might have to forget half of them again?

The two-word headline at the end - "Alien Hoax" - hardly undoes the UFO that crashed into Big Ben, the bombing of 10 Downing Street, or the gigantic media frenzy and international politics of part one.

I think the pleasure in all fiction lies in, on some level, believing it all to be true.

When a plot-development only remains true for a short time, then the pleasure can only last that long.

6½ out of 10.

I Am Easily Affected By Advertising

Saw a MainFreight lorry today that carried the advertising slogan “False Hope Is Unnecessary Pain.”

Catchy, and clever, but really, a bit deep for a freight company.

Thinks: Could this fanfare the end of dumbed-down consumerism? In the future, will salesmen aim to sell to the highest common denominator? Will the phrase ABC1 become XYZ∞? Might we see ads in which Ronald McDonald appears without his make-up to seriously discuss, in his own accent, the philosophical and intellectual benefits of purchasing a Farenheit 451 Elated-Meal, but only in moderation, like a fine wine?

Oh no, I forgot. “False hope is unnecessary pain.”

Sheep World!

I kid you not – there really is a place on this planet called “Sheep World.”

And indeed, it is a whole world of sheep. There are sheep-shearing demonstrations, sheep memorabilia for sale, the Black Sheep café, even the animals are sheep.

As a result I spent a great afternoon seeing all kinds of animals, and I even got to feed some of them!

Galling story of the day though, would have to be hearing how the poor sheepdog had been brainwashed into just wanting to chase sheep all its life.

Sometimes I hear Christians insisting how in Genesis 1, God gave man authority over the animal kingdom, so it’s okay to squash bugs, experiment on mice and pull the legs off of spiders. Yes, I eat meat too, but hopefully in some sort of humility. There’s no way I’m turning that permission into a God complex.

I highly recommend Sheep World for a great day out, but use that insect repellent. Link, with video:

http://www.sheepworldnz.com/farm.htm

Horse-Sense

6 months ago I promised fellow Brit Karen I’d come horseriding on the farm where she works.

Instead, I travelled as far in the opposite direction as it’s humanly possible to go.

But that’s the thing about the Earth being round – you run away too far and you wind up back where you started.

Shiloh (pronounced "Shy-lowe") Farm is a Christian-run horseriding stable up in Warkworth. For only $30 they take you out trekking, and even teach you a bit to speak a bit of horse. They speak with their ears, apparently.

Karen: "If they're pointing forward, then it's a happy horse. If they're in the middle, then they're listening to something. And if they're pointing back and flattened then you're in trouble."

Yeah, we used to have a cat who used the same system. Instead of $30 though, he would charge blood.

Talk about learning on the hoof.

I had a wonderful time, in some beautiful surroundings, and would love to do it again.

Sabrina Down Under

"I was just tellin' yer pommie cobbie here that I was afraid there might be too many steak and kidneys about, but er, not the case, aye?"

As far as canonicity goes, Sabrina The Teenage Witch has a lot of explaining to do.

Having started out as an Archie comicbook, the 90s saw a TV movie version starring Melissa Joan Hart, which necessarily started everything again from scratch.

However when that got comissioned as a series, still starring Melissa Joan Hart, the very first episode ignored the recent movie and darn well started all over again again.

Then came further TV movies, also staring Melissa Joan Hart, which non-committally avoided mentioning whether they followed-on from the first TV movie, or the weekly series. They even avoided featuring the characters who were cast differently in each.

Then finally came a cartoon version, which still retained Melissa Joan Hart… but infuriatingly now playing a different character.

Eurghhh…

Which reminds me - I recently received a tape in the post from Herschel, on which he had kindly taped the last TV movie for me in England. The irony that this one was entitled Sabrina Down Under was not lost on me.


Sadly, this turned out to be a very slow, almost melodramatic piece, lacking the enthusiasm and energy that had made the series so popular.

The sequence with Sabrina as a fish was nice, Salem's comedy sub-plot was amusing, and the pace does get going towards the end, but on the whole I found myself wishing that Herschel had just sent me 3 back-to-back episodes of the vibrant, and much lower-budget, TV series instead. This production team seemed to have very little passion for their subject.

Conversely, afterwards on the tape, there was the first half an hour of Inspector Gadget’s Last Case. Right from the off it was clear that this had the benefit of a lot more love. This writer was working hard to pack the gags in, and stay true to the appeal of the original series. And how lovely to hear the late Don Adams again.

"Go, go Gadget"? With writing like this, I rather wish he'd stayed.