Driving
to the Mahau Sound this Thursday we stopped at a café in Middle-Of-Nowhere,
South Island, to refresh ourselves over a meal and bottle of wine. Mrs H and I
always order a bottle of wine when we lunch out, given the rip-off it is buying by the glass, plus, well, we like wine, and a couple of glasses leaves me within
the limit – I've always assumed – for driving.
This
day, however, we didn’t feel like drinking the whole bottle, and thought it
would be a good idea to take it away with us to finish somewhere along the
Kaikoura coast later in the afternoon while Daisy dog, who doesn’t travel well,
stretched her legs by running around barking randomly at stuff.
But
it was not to be. Imagine us listening incredulously as the café owner said she
would not give us the screw top back, as we could not take the remains of the
bottle, a quarter left, given the café didn’t have an off-licence.
You
don't know someone intimately for twenty two years without knowing when a sense
of foreboding is warranted.
Mrs
H calmly took in a big breath, explained how we were adults, we’d bought that
wine - and obviously to have with our meal - so please use some sense: surely
the laws around off-licencing were only to stop underage teenage ninja mutants
binge drinking in inner cities, and look, with a gesture of her hand to the
only other patrons, a ninety year old couple who’d limped in from a funeral
finishing up in the old stone church over the road, there were no teenagers in
this joint. Indeed there were no teenagers in this town, the last had left with
a joint in hand sometime in the 1960’s for the communes around Nelson. It was
simply a place to retire and pleasantly, ultimately, expire.
But
the café owner was adamant, and I guess I can’t blame her for that; it was her
business at stake if she lost her licence. So, did we relent and do the
sensible though stupid thing necessitated by the laws upon laws upon laws of
the land and leave the wine there to be thrown down the sink?
Did
we heck.
As
when you sometimes lose the will to live, who knows why we sometimes do the
stupid things we do: perhaps on this day we’d become too depressed on listening
to David Cunliffe being interviewed over the radio-machine while we'd been
driving through Christchurch on the various, nefarious ways he would be
relieving us of our income and effort from 2014.
Mr
and Mrs Bloody-Minded never letting good sense get in the way of a principle
did not leave. Or at least, Mrs Bloody-Minded motioning to bar seating by the
window said sit there husband of mine, we’re drinking this bloody wine which
we’ve paid for. And we did, watching the departing funeral goers, hair pieces
fluttering in the wind, from atop our high chairs of righteous indignation.
The
unintended consequence of forcing rules designed for underage misfits in urban
areas onto middle aged ornery folk from the country, is that laws designed to
promote sensible drinking ironically made responsible taxpayers like us drink
more than we wished, and possibly more than we should’ve.
Think
about that while I put an unrelated challenge to Mr Cunliffe. I’ll email you a
bottle of Noilly Prat vermouth, David, if in your next speech or interview that
you intend to use the word collective, as you did that morning, you use Borg
instead, to state your politick more correctly.
In
the meantime I raise to you the first of many martinis in the Mahau,
congratulating you for the leadership win yesterday, while wishing for your
political failure next year. Nothing personal, just that the economic policies
you believe in are unethical and when applied to our country will be our
funeral. But then as Robert Heinlein said – hattip to economist Paul Walker
from Anti-Dismal – trying to educate a politician in economic policy is like
teaching a pig to sing: it wastes time and annoys the pig. Which might be a
nice segway into a next post: pork barrel politics.
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