What I Said to Metro … The Context.

Fun Football World Cup piece up on Metro Online today. Yours truly receiving some amount of deserved ribbing from his political foes, not helped by missing a little context. So digging the hole deeper, here was the full email, in all its misanthropy, noting I honestly only half thought it was Steve Braunias - yeah, I know, a bit of 'a chump' - and the below was written off the cuff and quickly, three days into work after a holiday (which may explain the general grumpy tone. Although I'll go for the high ground and say I'm the Daniel Day-Lewis of New Zealand blogging, my method is method, staying in character for all blog related queries.)

See if you can pick why I would never go into politics.

Hi Steve

I know of, follow on Twitter, plus 'like' that acerbic, bookish, anti-authoritarian, contrarian Steve Braunias from watching him on Emily Perkin's sadly finished Book Show, and even have his yet unread NZ Post Award winning Civilisation on a shelf waiting to be read - I've been on a novel stint for some while - but, I can't see how that Steve Braunias would even know of me, or that Metro would be interested in my opinion on anything. Thus, two problems:

1. I'm assuming from my general paranoia this a spam, albeit a detailed one, and I have no idea what the schema is - and yeah, for the hell of it I often reply to spam;

2. As much as I would love to give an opinion to Steve Braunias and Metro on most things, particularly the nature of the Orwellian tax surveillances states we live, and the need for minarchy, if there is one topic I am least qualified to speak on that would be football -which up until this world cup I was calling soccer. I give the sport passing attention once every four years for the World Cup, and that only by a live score screen in my browser of a morning as I work: other than Wayne Rooney, I couldn't name a single other player from any other team, indeed, the nearest other connection I could recite would be Posh Spice. I do think the game is overrated as a spectator spectacle, and aside from my loathing of sitting in stadiums, due in no small part to the extortionate alcohol prices there, wouldn't pay money to watch a game live.

So, prudence would have me say thank you very much for this opportunity, feel free to ask my opinion on something I know anything about, but I probably have to bow out at risk of otherwise looking like a chump. That and I never played team sports unless the strap was the alternative - chess only at high school and university. I hated, unto death, the prospect of being committed to having to do an activity regularly on a weekend when I'd rather be free to do as I wish, and then having to spend all that time with people whom I generally try to avoid, face-to-face at least, (hence in my mid-adulthood trying to live for most of my time at our holiday house in middle-of-nowhere Marlborough Sounds with Mrs H, Daisy Dog, a cinema room, Kindle, wine cellar and martini set.) And given the only way I suspect you can have my email is via my blog, (when I think about it), I would end in noting my views on teams sports are a personal matter, probably unrelated to my Libertarian politics and laissez faire economics - or perhaps not.

I've no idea what you could say in response. Feel free to use the team sports quotation. Or anything.

Kind Regards Mark ... looking forward to Civilisation, even if I don't much care for the actual thing.


(It was only a long time after 'quickly' writing this and sending it off I realised the last sentence of the final big paragraph can be read in two quite different ways, as can much of the email :) There you go, think before you post. But for now, take a dose of smelling salts and good humour: onward and upward.)