The Nonsense Liquor Law That Made Mrs H and I Drink Too Much for Lunch.

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.