WORDS ON PAPER This page contains some of the stories I have most enjoyed writing. At the bottom of the page are links to some online stories.
Our weekly bread
Solving the mystery of the Grey Lynn bread run By PAUL LITTLE, Metro 2009
Karl Maughan is one of our most successful artists. His work sells for good prices and goes to good homes. He is married to the Montana Award-garlanded writer Emily Perkins. He has three gorgeous children. And he is also the phantom bread deliverer of Grey Lynn. One Saturday morning last April, around 6am, I got up and went outside to get the newspaper. Hooked over the gate halfway down our path was a large plastic bag containing a loaf of bread of the variety annoyingly called “artisan”. I took it inside and poked it.
My wife and I ran through possible explanations - somebody left it at the wrong house, one of our notoriously convivial and nocturnal offspring had nicked it from a baker and left it there; it was a simple prank.
“Try it.,” said my wife.
“It might have been injected with poison,” I pointed out.
“Surely not.”
“You try it then.”
“Umm… no.”
Bread was left again the following Saturday, and again we did not eat it. The following weekend we were out of town. Older children moved in to look after the youngest one. On Saturday evening my wife rang to see how everyone was.
“There was another bread delivery yesterday,” she said after she’d hung up. “They ate it.”
And so we too began eating the bread which continued to arrive most Saturdays. And very tasty it was, too.
Several weeks after this I was at the Ponsonby Food Hall and bumped into Marcus Lush.
(If you haven’t already guessed, a lot of names are going to be dropped in this story. It’s as Grey Lynn as it gets. In fact, it couldn’t be more Grey Lynn if it were wearing Moa, reading Anne Salmond and listening to Dimmer.)
“I go on the bread run sometimes,” chirped the radio and TV host.
There ensued one of those not-quite-at-cross purposes conversations, at the conclusion of which I learnt that the bread was being left by Karl, a mutual friend, not just to us but to many other people. “[TV all-rounder] Carol (Hirschfeld) and [writer] Finlay (Macdonald) are on the route too,” said Marcus. “[Actor/director] Michael (Hurst ) and [actor] Jennifer (Ward-Lealand). Just people around the neighbourhood.”
And it wasn’t meant to be a secret at all.
The next night, to continue the theme of media incest, I was at a party held by Steve Braunias. Karl was there too. He was surprised to learn we were surprised. He’d put an invitation to his latest show in with the bread one week. Which week? The third week he delivered to us. The one when we were away and the kids ate the bread. And threw out the bag without noticing the invitation. It turned out Karl thought we had been disingenuously affecting not to know the source of the bread. He had no idea we had only just started to eat it. He’d been a bit surprised we weren’t at his opening. Some mysteries solved. But not all. This was obviously a nice thing for Karl to do, but why was he doing it? Why was he was getting out and about at sparrow fart on a weekly basis and delivering bread to numerous people with no expectation of recompense.
Was it a piece of performance art; an experimental work outside the main body of his oeuvre? Was it a unique form of male mid-life crisis – Karl is mid-40s - manifesting itself as benevolence instead of self-indulgence? Was it an experiment in psychology, to test how people would respond to unsought generosity? No one I asked had any idea.
Attempting to enter reciprocally into the spirit of the enterprise we began leaving gifts for Karl: eggs from our hens, a cake, homemade herbed feta. But I still wanted to know why it was happening.
So one Saturday in September, I find myself waiting outside my house at 5.30 in the morning to go on the Grey Lynn bread run with Karl.
To the sounds of Joy Division and Laurie Anderson on the CD player, we head for Glenfield … Glenfield? Yes, he drives all the way to Glenfield to get the bread from Diehl’s German bakery. No wonder we’d never been able to work out where it was from.
“Someone told me about this guy who makes great traditional German bread,” explains Karl, “and Emily said, ‘If you’re going to go all that way, why don’t you pick up a couple of loaves for otherpeople?’” Well, that tells me how it got started but not why it has continued.
Diehl’s is hidden away in a cluster of industrial buildings and is the only source of light at this time of morning. It normally opens at 7, but production is in full swing when we get there at 5.45, and most of Karl’s order is lined up on the counter for him.
Thinking out loud, he sorts the varieties of bread – many people have made their preferences known – and assembles his order. None of it is written down. It’s all in his head, like some complex formula that has had to be memorised lest it fall into the wrong hands.
We distribute the bread around his car according to variety. Pretzels – two bags of five and one of four – go on the floor in front. A giant round wholemeal sourdough in halves – one goes to my house - is deposited in the middle of the back seat. Country loaves go on the left of the floor in the back, twin loaves on the right. It takes about 20 minutes. We leave with last-minute samples of pastries forced upon us.
We make it back to town buy around 6.30am. The late September sun is well up as we make our first delivery, to a home in Herne Bay . In winter Karl moves from house to house in the dark and morning mists. Spring daylight makes for a warmer experience but has taken much of the romance and mystery out of the run..
It’s a condition of the exercise that recipients aren’t disturbed, a rule that’s broken at this first delivery, when Karl hangs the loaf on the Victorian twist doorbell. We run back to the car but not quickly enough, as a head peers around the door and whispered “Hellos” and a “Sorry” cross the air.
The only other recipient we will see this morning is a bairn in a bathrobe whose hand sneaks around her front door to bag her bread. She has obviously been waiting for this warm, fragrant start to her day.
Many of the homes come with anecdotes. Second drop is at a desirable Herne Bay property inhabited by a couple whose children have recently all grown up and moved on.
“It’s a great place and I asked them what they were going to do, just the two of them in that big house, and they said they were thinking of knocking it down and putting up something smaller.”
At the home of writer Richard and artist Pamela Wolfe, Karl tells me: “Once, I thought they might have been away but wasn’t sure, so I left a loaf, thinking ‘If they are away it will still be there next week and I’ll know.’ Soon after I was walking on Takapuna beach when a guy came up and said, ‘Do you deliver the bread to the Wolfes’ place? I’m housesitting for them’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Do you still want it?’ ‘Um, yeah … but do you have any other kind.’ So I changed that order for the three weeks until they got back.”
Accompanying Karl emphasises the interconnectedness of people round here. As we approach the next house, Westmere waterfront, he starts telling me what a beautiful property it is, home of an architect some of whose “hippie” children are old friends. I know a similar place nearby and start to tell him about it. It is, of course, the same house. The architect is father to Conrad Armstrong, husband of Woman’s Weekly editor Sido Kitchin.
Soon we are dropping off the other half of my loaf to another old friend, toggle.co.nz co-founder Esther Lamb and TV director husband Mark Beesley. (They live next door to a house my daughters rented when it was owned by Conrad and Sido.)
We deliver to artist John Reynolds, who has told Karl he will give him a painting as quid pro quo, though Karl doubts he could deliver in a lifetime enough bread to meet the value of one of Reynolds’s works. “I used to drop off at [photographer brother] Patrick Reynolds too, but discovered there was wheat intolerance in the house.”
The question of reciprocity is complex. Some people flat out pay. Others leave wine or small gifts. Cake is not ideal. “It’s a nuisance sometimes because you get three and you end up having to freeze two.”
But many people are uncomfortable with the whole thing and quietly drop off the run. They struggle with knowing how to respond to a spontaneous act of kindness for which no recompense is sought. There is no precedent. Which bothers them more than it does Karl, who says, “It’s just nice to do things for people.”
But this is a little more than nice – and not just in the practical sense of being expensive and time-consuming. Intangible factors flavour the project. The Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, shoemaking elves and Santa are the sort of individuals more commonly associated with anonymous overnight gift-leaving. Getting the bread makes you feel like you are in the middle of a folk tale.
Bread is also a thing so fundamental and so necessary that to give it to people– as opposed to selling it to them - is to fill a basic need. And having our basic needs met is something we accept much more readily from family than friends or strangers.
The act also resounds with numerous religious echoes: give us this day our dally bread, loaves and fishes, he took bread, blessed it and broke it.
No wonder some people struggle to find the right response. Today, no one has left anything for Karl and I am mildly shocked.
“It’s because I’ve been away for a few weeks and deliveries stopped,” he says, with exemplary equability . “I did it last week but I think people are just a bit confused.”
The deliveries go on: actor Cameron Rhodes, musician Chris Knox and sculptor Barbara Ward, scientist/comedian Peter Murphy, culture czar Hamish Keith and costume designer Ngila Dickson. But you don’t have to be a shining light of the media-artistic complex to get free bread. We also deliver to Karl’s endocrinologist and babysitters (different people). Several deliveries are to “other school parents. You know how you stand around at soccer and get to meet people. Actually, I coached one of the soccer teams for a while, but that got really stressful.”
I am able to fill in some gaps along the route, pointing out the homes of Random House publisher and former Metro editor Nicola Legat, TV presenter Jeremy Wells, my acupuncturist, artist Ralph Paine, the brain surgeon who operated on Keith Richards, writer Stephanie Johnson and film editor Tim Woodhouse, at the last of which Karl is particularly pleased. “So that’s their place. I’ve been wanting to have them on the run. And I’ve always liked that house.”
Last delivery is to the café Dizengoff where Karl can frequently be found of a morning. They too get some of Diehl’s bread.
At this point the tables seem to turn and the bread run starts following us. We are joined at the café by artist/lecturer and regular recipient Ian Jervis, along withartist/curator and occasional recipient Sarah Hillary. The couple who talked of bowling their house and replacing it walk by with their dog. We pass Michael Hurst taking his DVDs back to the shop. The neighbourhood, small before we started, has got even smaller.
But I still haven’t’ pinned down exactly why Karl does it. I don’t think he knows himself. He suggests it’s partly the need for an artist or writer who works in isolation to do something sociable, yet,. although this connects him with other people, there is little direct contact. I make a feeble attempt to draw a parallel between the detailed obsessiveness of the project and the detailed obsessiveness in his painting. It doesn’t get us very far. Eventually, I decide I like the mystery of it more than the satisfaction I could get from any explanation. Our world runs on answers and rationales, on being able to see the machinery behind the façade and work out how the pieces fit together. We are addicted to “Behind the scenes at” exhibitions and “Making of” extra features. There is an altogether different kind of pleasure to be had in letting something just be what it is – in this case, an act of kindness with its own self-sufficient poetry.
My back pages
Libraries are meant to be as dead as the typewriter. So why are they busier than ever?
By PAUL LITTLE, Sunday magazine, 2009.
In one corner a group of mothers clutch their babies tightly and do the hokey kokey. A gaggle of Goths sprawl across seats flicking through the latest lurid manga. Between film festivals, a dedicated cineaste holds a DVD in each hand: Tokyo Drifter or Fassbinder’s BRD trilogy? Two overseas students are asleep, one with her head on the other’s shoulder. An angry young man is emailing his ex in Caps Locked 24 point. Teenagers squawk over lattes in the cafe that occupies another corner. And, because it’s New Zealand Music Month, a band plays on. It’s the traditionalist’s worst nightmare: the modern library. In this case, Auckland ’s Central City Library, but Auckland is typical of institutions elsewhere in the city and around the country.
How did the library become the most happening place in town? The usual reason: the internet.
The internet was supposed to be the beginning of the end for libraries. Who would use them as an information source when anyone could find out anything without leaving home? But figures show that since 2004, the number of items issued is up 16 per cent, library visits are up 20 percent, and website visits have doubled .
Part of the reason is that the internet also made information a focus of daily life and, indeed, just a little bit glamorous. The new billionaires, the new media, the new celebrities - all were the product of the internet and the information age it has spawned.
If libraries were just about books, then they would indeed have been shunted to the margins of relevance. But libraries have always – with their newspaper reading rooms and author talks and lp collections and art prints for hire – been about providing information in the wider sense through a range of media. The information superhighway ended at the library door.
Someone who is comfortable with both the old and new ways of working is father of two, part-time musician, goodreads.com review poster and library assistant Ben Eldridge, who, at 30, was just 10 when Tim Berners Lee ‘invented’ the internet.
With a bookish background and an active interest in music - he is in a guitar band called Dictaphone Blues and a soul covers band called Reputations - Eldridge’s position on the first floor music section would seem the perfect fit.
As well as playing a large part in event organising, especially selecting acts to perform during New Zealand Music Month, Eldridge is also messianic about the neglected but rich repository of vinyl in the collection, which, after a long time in storage, is being made available again.
“We get weekly enquiries from people saying they can see [from the online catalogue] something is in the collection and wanting to know where it is,” says Eldridge. “There’s amazing jazz, like a John Coltrane Swedish bootleg, double A side, live 25 minutes of ‘My Favourite Things’. Things I'm sure would be worth a lot of money. Spoken word stuff. New Zealand poetry. Flying nun vinyl. Stuff I think would be really rare, like The Skeptics.”
The library has 65 Flying Nun LPs in its catalogue.
At the other end of the musical spectrum is the Auckland Philharmonia member who found a rare double bass concerto he’d been looking everywhere for. Rare concerti and Flying Nun obscurities are two aspects of a key library role: keeping the niche back catalogue full, supplying the material that is deleted or out of print, and which it is not commercially viable to republish.
Librarians always have an eye on posterity. Eldridge is involved in the Made in Auckland project, which for several years has encouraged unsigned bands to lodge CDs of their work with the library. These go straight into the Heritage Collection, building up what will be a comprehensive archive of local music year by year.
It’s not all collectible vinyl and event management in Eldridge’s working day. “I do normal librarian stuff – customer service, queries, following that up on the phone or in person over the ref desk or looking after the collection or at least the part of the non-fiction my team is responsible for – the musical area – CDs, scores, books, biographies, withdrawing things, assessing.” He does not, as people invariably ask when they find out what he does, “read books all day. I don’t even browse when I’m at work.”
Outside work, he reads music biographies, World War II history and horror fiction. Despite his Gen Y demographic, he doesn’t see himself as particularly wired. “I don’t blog or anything like that - apart from facebook, but everyone’s on that. And I’m on one called myreads, a community of people sharing book reviews. I'm addicted to online reviews. Amazon is a favourite website.”
Eldridge’s boss, and the woman pressing enter for the library revolution in Auckland , is the city council’s Group Manager - Libraries, Allison Dobbie. Her office looks out on the rear of the once thriving, now moribund St James Theatre, an architectural treasure at risk of demolition if not collapse. Unlike the fusty old book barn, the live performance venue failed to keep pace with changing times.
Dobbie is responsible for Auckland City Libraries’ one mobile and 17 stationary libraries. She has been at Auckland “since 2001. Prior to this I was city librarian for Dunedin from ’89 to 2001 and worked in lots of public libraries around New Zealand and the parliamentary library and in the tertiary sector.” Dobbie is a Southlander with a burr so strong that when she says purpose, you think for a moment a cat has got into the room. With that background, she is clearly no digital age iconoclast. A woman of brisk everything – movements, decisions, speech – she is a passionate advocate for libraries, which she points out still do what they always have done and now do a whole lot more. Paradoxically, it is the new technology that has made this possible.
One instance: the library used to have to buy bulky annual directories from around the world to keep as up to date references. Now this material is all available online, through the library. The reference section contains more than it ever did but occupies a quarter of the space.
“ In the past we would have subscriptions to newspapers,” says Dobbie. “The big ones out of the UK in particular, the States, Australia .” Delivery was erratic and slow. “But today we have a web page to make it easy for people to find newspapers. We also subscribe to a service whereby we get key international newspapers emailed to us daily, in a particular format, and we have a machine here that enables us to print those off and put them in our newspaper area. We’re able to do a larger number of papers than previously and have them there in print the day they are published.”
Technology has also changed the librarian’s role. “Once we saw ourselves as being gatekeepers of information. People came to us and asked for what they wanted and we assisted them to find out. Our skill now is applied to adding value to how information is organised … into the way we describe things in the catalogue and make that easier to use.”
The catalogue can be searched in a way people are used to from the likes of Google. But instead of producing a list of more or less useful websites, it will throw up the names of books that can be ordered and picked up from the nearest branch, usually the next day.
“There are still people who need help,” says Dobbie, “and that’s still there, but more of our energy goes into skill development . That may be one reason why people come to libraries still in such large and growing numbers, because they know they can get the help here and that the help is non-patronising, supportive.”
That cunning internet would have you believe that between iTunes and Amazon, Google and eBay it can find anything for you, but it can’t. The internet is like an enormous but very poorly run library. It’s acknowledged that most people only have access to a fraction of its potential. Which brings us to the deep web, another new library specialty.
“The internet is not well organised or easy to use in terms of quickly getting to what you’re looking for,” says Dobbie. “There is a lot of information that sits there in databases behind subscriptions and passwords. Libraries pay those subs on behalf of residents so people have access to that information. That’s the deep web. To access it you have to have someone paying those subs for you, otherwise, as an individual or small company you will never get that.”
And, once you’ve learnt the trick, you can access the deep web from your home computer through the library website. Free one-to-one half hour tutorials are available at the Central and Remuera libraries..
But the most striking contrast between new and old libraries, at least as far a this user is concerned, is the level of service. If you were treated this well in most shops, you’d think you’d fallen into a parallel universe. It’s practically un-Kiwi. A ridiculous request by me for four obscure books from the basement 10 minutes from closing time recently was met cheerily – “We’ll try but I can’t make any promises.” - and with 10 seconds to spare. A research inquiry was responded to within an hour in the form of an email telling me a folder of relevant photocopies was waiting for me on the second floor. Did I mention the free one-to-one tutorials?
There have also been brief flurries of controversy during Dobbie’s tenure. One was over staffing for the heritage collections. “The heritage collections are exceptional collections that are in very good hands,” says Dobbie. There was also talk of ending the mobile library services. “We will continue to have a mobile library for the foreseeable future,” says Dobbie The latter exists to assist those with limited mobility and may soon be supplanted by a home delivery service. Trials are about to begin.
Then there are the critics. The international patron of the ‘libraries were better back then’ movement is author and archivist Nicholson Baker who got in early with a weakly argued, 22-page story in the New Yorker in 1994, lamenting the shift from card to digital catalogues.
Locally, writer Peter Wells – two copies of whose Iridescence were out on the fiction shelves when I did a pop survey – has railed against the librarians at the gate, publicly bemoaning the presence of “love comics” on the ground floor, apparently put there in the “forlorn hope that the illiterate will be seduced indoors”. Wouldn’t want that.
Linda Herrick, in the New Zealand Herald in 2006, wrote disapprovingly of how much of the fiction had been removed to the basement. Fortunately, the general population remained calm and people continued to go about their daily business as normal.
The critics have a point – the meagre “classics section” at Central is smaller than its equivalent at Whitcoulls, St Lukes – hardly a standard bearer for literature. But people are learning that what is on the shelves is a sample and that through the online catalogue or the old-fashioned ask-a-librarian strategy, it is easy to get access to the rest. What those who bemoan the amount of fiction on the library’s shelves are really talking about is the sort of fiction of which they approve, rather than the sort of fiction borrowers want.
Yet, that too is well catered for in reality. Last weekend at the Grey Lynn branch library I bumped into a friend who was collecting two of last year’s most acclaimed novels – Roberto Bolano’s 2666 and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones. The latter has only just been published in English overseas. He may have been repsonsible for the library buying them - member suggestions for acquisitions are often acted upon.
Items come and go from library shelves. About 175,000 a year are acquired and in one recent year 150,000 were removed. That means 25,000 new items added to limited space in 12 months. The only solution to this growth has been to move a lot of the collection to The Basement.”
Dobbie says this approach means books get used more. It’s all about browsing psychology. “There’s a point where if the shelves are too full and the material is duplicated and it looks tired, people won’t even begin to look at it,” says Dobbie. “So you get more use from a collection if you keep shelves looking fresh and tidy. Our experience is that fiction use has increased.”
The recently returned and recently added piles, themed displays and other tactics are the equivalent of browsing.
There are still some problems at the micro level. You need minimum Nasa entry qualifications to work the photocopiers; and the lack of a return date stamp in books means it’s very easy to let them go overdue and incur fines, which may or may not be a deliberate revenue-generating strategy.
But over-riding this is the fact that a library – almost by definition – must attempt to contain … everything. The promise of access to every piece of knowledge in the world is contained in the notion of a building full of books . Today the library, drawing on all the resources it can, is closer to this goal than ever before.
GLEN INNES – Imraan
Libraries have managed to do what so many organisations and media try and fail to do – reach and retain a young audience. And it hasn’t just done this by keeping them supplied with coffee and DVDs. It’s also done it by the likes of the after school homework programmes.
At Glen Innes library, Imraan Ali oversees anything from five to 40 students who come in of an afternoon for help with – or simply to do – their homework. These are young people whose homes may not have a quiet space where they can study, in many cases don’t have a computer and whose parents may not be able to give them help with their problems.
“If they don't get homework we give them activity sheets to keep them active, says Ali. “But it’s less a classroom than a fun learning environment that we try to create. We also provide some board games and activity games to stimulate learning.
“A lot of kids bring siblings. Often they are responsible for their brothers and sisters after schoo,l so the library has to be able to cope with that. You need a staff member to take the younger ones to do some colouring or do a little story time on the spot.”
The programme is run with the Ministry of Education here and in four other Auckland libraries. It extends to supplying afternoon tea, and staff put themselves out by staying longer during peak times, such as the lead-up to exams.
And because, for most projects, students need to supply two sources – a book and an online reference – Ali contacts the schools to get “a heads up so we can get the right books in before the kids need them. This isn’t the biggest library, but if a book’s not here we can get it for them.”
In the short term the programme breeds successful students, in the longer term it’s getting them used to the idea that libraries are places where they belong, can enjoy themselves, and will keep coming as adults, bringing their own children – as some graduates of the homework programme have already started to do.
THE PRAGMATIST
The minister of police, corrections and veterans affairs is not the blue-ribbon National Part automaton many take her for. By PAUL Little, North & South magazine, 2009
The electorate office of Judith Collins, MP for Clevedon and minister for police, corrections and veterans affairs, is in the middle of Papakura’s Roselands Shopping Centre. I encounter her here, first thing in the morning, leaving a café and bearing two big cups of takeaway coffee. You could say that she has based herself in the heart of her constituency because that is where her own heart is. Or that she is a lackey-free, carry-her-own-coffee kind of minister. You could say that her second-storey office with its combination lock and barriers is a miniature version of the sort of secure institution for which she is responsible. In fact, you could continue to torture details into metaphors almost indefinitely, but you would be making the mistake a lot of people do when they see or hear Collins – projecting onto her what they want her to be. She says she likes the location because it’s between her favourite frock shop and an excellent dry cleaners. Her valkyrie’s stature and Nordic colouring suit a warrior against wrongdoers, which is how her fans see here. “Fans” rather than supporters because Collins attracts not just voters but enthusiasts. Her portfolios have a natural attraction for the punitively inclined, of whom there is no shortage. It’s not an inclination she particularly shares, but being talked about as Crusher Collins is better than not being talked about at all. If the Judith Collins Appreciation Club on facebook has only 28 members, well, that’s twice as many as the Rodney Hide Supporters Group. And there is no Simon Power Appreciation Club. Her office is done in Convention Centre Classic. Everything is in its place, including Collins’ day, which is laid out for her in a neatly prepared agenda. The morning will be spent on the road. In the afternoon she will see a miscellany of constituents here. She runs through the appointments: “One is from a college wanting a police officer in schools on security, one on a prostate cancer foundation, boy racers and something about concrete.” As in the building material? “It will be to do with the pre-cast concrete work that corrections gets their inmates to do for their training.” Collins and I have never met, although we talk regularly as mouths for hire on Newstalk ZB’s Kerre’s Café, chewing over the events of the week. She perforce plays the hard-arsed right winger, which leaves me having to fill the role of the namby pamby liberal, which is no stretch. In reality, outside the most doctrinaire of topics we often agree. The difference is that she has to choose her words in the knowledge voters are listening. Given her high visibility, it is surprising how little is known of Collins’ background . One of the few previous profiles of her was in student newspaper Critic, which took the time to note that she had “one of the few decent racks in parliament”. The professional background is covered in an official CV that covers everything from the Matamata Rotary Prize for Best Essay (on Nationalism) to a glittering career in law, and business success. It describes a goal-oriented progression, although one not at either end of the National Party talent pool – bootstraps and state house or Dio and holidays in Europe . Collins’ background – like that of many of her generation in the National Party – is anything but blue ribbon. Yes, her parents were dairy farmers but they were not Daimler-driving, gin-swilling plutocrats. The farm was on Paratu Loop Road, seven miles from Walton, which is 15km from Matamata. Collins was born in 1959 at the very end of the baby boom, the youngest of six children of Percy, a World War II veteran father, and Jessie, a quite remarkable mother. Both parents died before they could see their youngest succeed to heights of which they would never have dreamt. "My mother was a very unusual woman,” says Collins. “She had about 10 per cent hearing in one ear and not much in the other, and ended up with two per cent in one ear and nothing in the other. She didn’t like going out socially because she couldn’t hear.” Instead, Jessie put her energies into the farm. “She and Dad used to have two herds - hers and his. They milked alongside each other in the cowshed and the cows knew they had to go into the race in the right order. All hell would break loose if my father touched one of my mother’s cows.” Collins says her mother’s skill as a breeder gave her her first taste of being a winner. “Winning is really good and second sucks. I never got anything less than first prize in dairy type for our calves, and at one stage at the Royal Show at Hamilton , we won the reserve champion dairy type which was pretty amazing because we weren’t pedigree breeders.” The cows came first because the family’s existence depended on them, but Jessie wanted her kids to have every opportunity they could. She had not had many herself, having grown up in straitened circumstances in the King Country during the Depression.
“Her father left her mother with seven little children on a leasehold farm in 1927,” says Collins, “and things got really bad just after that. It had a huge impact on my mother, who wanted always to be a teacher or nurse and to play golf and the piano. And she never did get to do those things. She had to leave school at 13. She didn’t start school till she was six because she had to look after her younger sister. A five-year-old looking after a baby - today we would say it was abuse, but it was because but her mother was trying to feed them.”
Collins’ father was no less an influence. Percy taught her to drive a tractor at the age of nine. She would bump over the paddocks while he shovelled the hay off the back.
Like his wife, he revered education. Jessie “thought teachers walked on water and were almost as wonderful as doctors”. One day, when Collins was two, Percy went to a PTA meeting at which a speaker extolled the value of reading to children from an early age. Yes, he told Percy – even as young as two.
“From then on I was read to every night. It’s one of the best things I can remember from childhood. Mostly it was Dad, who used to get into stories about going pig hunting. Mum would sometimes sit up in bed with me, and she would read one page and I would read another, and she would fall asleep because she had to milk but I would keep reading. We were never particularly rich, but we always had money for books, and I hate library books because I didn’t like giving them back. It’s why I’m such a proponent of Duffy Books in Homes, because kids need books of their own to love.”
Learning became a passion. But again, Collins did not take the expected path, attending Matamata College rather than Diocesan in Hamilton . “I was meant to go to Dio because we had a little bit more money by then. I was booked in, and we went over for the day, and I was scared of these posh girls. I came home and said, ‘I don’t think I want to go there. Would you mind if I didn’t?’ And my parents said, ‘Oh that’s good. We didn’t know what we would do without you here.’ ”
MatamataCollege exposed her to a more diverse range of people. “It paid off because I often feel more comfortable in situations that a lot of lawyers don’t feel comfortable in.”
Given their backgrounds – the Depression, the War – Percy and Jessie were, if not politically active, at least politically interested. Dinner time debates were a family tradition.
“My parents believed absolutely firmly that people should be forthright in their views, and we used to have extensive discussions at the dinner table. I should also say they were quite left-wing. At my urging - as I was young and obviously stupid - my mother joined the Labour Party.”
Collins was 16 and still at school when she went to her first political meeting. Helen Clark was running her debut campaign – standing for Paiko. “My God, it was boring. It completely put me off politics, or I could have ended up being a left-wing politician”
Eyes firmly focused back on educational goals Collins began work on an impressive collection of degrees – bachelor of laws, master of laws with honours and master of taxation studies - which show not just a high degree of commitment but also one of the highest boredom thresholds on record.,
“Bill English once asked me, ‘Why did you get all those degrees?’ and I said, ‘Because I could.’ ”
Meaning, not just that she was intellectually capable but also that personal circumstances permitted her to get the education her mother had craved but had to forgo. “I felt obliged to learn as much as I could. I took the opportunities that came my way because they might not turn up again. I would still love to do a PhD one day.”
Collins chose law, like more lawyers than would ever admit it, because she had seen them doing noble deeds on TV programmes. It wasn’t an obvious choice, though it was one that gladdened her mother’s heart in particular. The Collins family social circle did not run to members of the legal profession.
“The school arranged for me to go and visit a woman lawyer in Hamilton ,” recalls Collins. “And that turned out to be Dame Silvia Cartwright. She was one of the few women lawyers around and was very nice and kind to me. I remember her saying, ‘Wouldn’t you like to be a legal executive, dear?’ And I thought no, I want one of those careers the boys have got.”
The other big influence on Collins’ choice was a well-meaning Walton neighbour who was sceptical when the 14-year-old told him of her ambition.
“You’ll have babies and get married. You’re a nice girl,” said the neighbour. Collins bet him five dollars she would see it through and when she graduated with her LLB Percy made sure the neighbour paid up.
“I didn’t really believe I could be a lawyer. If Mr Bruce hadn’t bet me I don’t think I would have done it. I need to have a challenge. I was just a little country kid, but I kept passing exams.”
She began her studies at Canterbury because Auckland seemed too daunting and Cartwright had told her “Aucklanders could be a bit difficult to deal with”. Part way through, she moved north and completed her degree in Auckland . A small bribe of a car supplied by her parents “so you can come home and visit us” helped.
The other thing she acquired in Auckland was a husband. Collins met policeman David Wong Tung, who was then doing his intermediate year to get into Law School , at a party in 1979. He went on to work as legal adviser for the police and then into practice on his own when they would not support him doing an MBA.
Collins says her husband tries to stay out of the political spotlight that shines constantly on her. “He has found over the years that my occupation prejudices his ability to do things because of people’s perceptions of me, which is a bit of a shame, but not uncommon.”
Their son James is at high school. Like her own mother, Collins has ambitions for her academically inclined offspring. He is unfazed by her role and profile.
“I think James just thinks that’s what mothers do,” says Collins. “I still do housework, the washing – even iron the odd thing from time to time, and when I’m home I cook the food when I can. I said to him this morning, ‘Is anyone being mean to you at school about my work?’ He said, ‘No, why would they?’ It helps he has a different surname and he doesn’t look a lot like me.”
Percy Collins wasn’t so happy about his daughter pairing up with someone who didn’t look a lot like her. “I’ll say this because he’s dead now: My father didn’t take to me marrying a Samoan. He did say to me, ‘He’s a nice bloke. Shame he’s black.’ Before we got married we had about six years of Dad not being that co-operative. David was very understanding. He’s a strong, staunch person. It was all right for me because I knew what Dad was like. Dad wanted the best for us. He thought people would be mean to me if I was in a mixed marriage.”
Collins’ mother took a different view. “She was a bit of a romantic. She liked David and she loved the fact he was a police officer. She would be so proud of me being minister of police. She would probably even vote National.”
When it became clear the couple were going to stay a couple, Percy told his daughter her mother could go to the wedding but he wouldn’t. She told him he wasn’t invited anyway. The pair eloped to Hong Kong and got married there, with borrowed witnesses.
“As soon as we were married, that was the end of it for Dad. He never said another thing and he was perfectly fine. He’d had his little battle, lost it and accepted that.”
In Hong Kong , the newlyweds discovered capitalism and liked it very much. The energy and industry of the island and its people infected them. When they got back to their more sedate homeland they bought a restaurant – La Gondola in Auckland ’s Ponsonby. A year and a half later they traded up to take over Dr Duddings in Takapuna. Obviously favoured by fortune, they cashed up shares to do that deal just before the 87 crash.
The next few years were marked by a succession of career milestones which should have made Collins’ entry into parliament in 2002 no surprise to anyone: chairman of the Casino Control Authority, director of Housing New Zealand, president of the Auckland District Law Society.
Politics had long been in the back of her mind but “what really prompted me was that a National MP asked me to be their electorate chair”. Collins asked another MP what she thought. That MP told Collins she should put her own name forward. So she stood for selection against sitting MP Warren Kyd, won and got into parliament first time out.
All good training for an MP’s lot, yet the maelstrom of parliamentary life was still a shock in her first few weeks. She soon found her feet, however, applied herself to numerous spokeswoman roles in opposition and is now ranked number seven in Cabinet.
Being in government as opposed to opposition held one major surprise: “The hours are unbelievable. I used to work really hard before, but not nearly as hard as I work now. You don’t get any time off. If you plan time off, something terrible will happen in police or corrections. If you plan days off, you plan for change.” At the same time, “I love being able to say, ‘We should do this,’ and having it happen.”
Her ministries are galvanising and polarising ones. Her first stretch as minister was marked by the almightiest of rows over corrections boss Barry Matthews and whether she had confidence in him as after a damming auditor-general’s report on parole.
Collins says she didn’t want him gone, she wanted him doing his job properly.
“Barry Matthews is a decent, honest and uncorrupted person. But he needed to have some support and the department needed to take seriously the failings identified in the auditor-general’s report. This was interpreted as me wanting him gone but that was not the case.”
If you followed Collins through the daily media life seems to leap from crisis to crisis. As we drive to one appointment her Blackberry tells her a case of inappropriate behaviour – ie, “doing it” – between a guard and a prisoner. This will be in the news two days later. Not long after that, she wades into the fuss over publishing the names of convicted drink drivers in the Dominion Post. Another 72 hours and there’s a preview of a study showing police are not following their own domestic violence policy because it’s too hard.
But there have already been achievements. She says Corrections has been turned around.with a 50 per cent drop in the number of prison escapes, attributed to nothing more complicated than closer vetting of prisoners taking part in activities outside the walls. “We still have people going out - just different people, and walkaways have fallen right off.”
Similarly, “when I go round the prisons I always ask what should we do differently. They told me there was an issue with razor blades being used as weapons.” Now, maximum security prisoners are still allowed to shave, but they aren’t allowed to stockpile razor blades in their cells. “The prisoner gets the blade and hands it back. Not in minimum security, in high security. I’ve said I’ll take any political flak if someone wants to have a go at us over the human right to store razor blades.”
Collins also has an associate Minister of Corrections, Pita Sharples.
“He’s great. He does all the issues relating to Maori rehabilitation, which is quite big because so many prisoners are Maori. But he got a bit of attention, as did I, over plans to extend the Maori focus unit into more of a rehab unit to help people back into society. We got the mad hysteria from the opposition about a so-called separate justice system.”
Surely this stance is a more than paradoxical one for someone whose website describes a vision of “one standard of citizenship for all” and never “dividing … our country along the lines of race.
“No. It’s just accepting we have a real problem with rehabilitation of Maori prisoners. Our recidivism rates are worse than anywhere. My thing is whatever works. I guess that’s one of the things in corrections – you can’t be ideological, because that doesn’t work
Which sounds great, but justice issues are so politicised that surely anything other than locking ’em up and throwing away the key runs a high risk of alienating most of the people who voted for Collins and her party. She doesn’t agree.
“I think one of the good things with my persona,” she says, “is that nobody thinks I’m going to be soft on crime. I can sometimes think a bit outside the ideological and political square when it comes to things like rehab. There are a lot of people in prison who don’t need to be there. They are drug and alcohol addicted and need help
Collins notes that 60 per cent of prisoners are in for two years or fewer, “so they are not really bad buggers. They are often confused. It’s people who are functioning fine during the day but going berserk afterwards. We have not done enough about that, which is why we are doubling the number of rehab programmes.”
Collins says she doesn’t want to spend millions on prisons for people who don’t really need to be there and who, with a little pres-emptive help, would not indulge in the behaviours that get them there. “It costs twice as much to have someone in prison than it does to have them in a residential rehab unit. We can’t do it for everyone but we can do it for a big number It’s a good idea isn’t it? I’m gonna do it.” MEMBER FOR PAPAKURA 10am, Friday, August 7
Manukau mayor Len Brown is an efficient operator. He holds monthly meetings with the MPs whose electorates are included in his city. Collins is accompanied by party colleagues Pansy Wong and Maurice Williamson. Just the four of them – no PAs, media managers or other satraps. At one point Mayor Brown notices me trying to be invisible against a wall.
“You’re not media are you?” he says.
He obviously knows my work. Collins assures him I am quite harmless.
There is small talk – Brown is off to Samoa , where he may catch up with Collins’ husband, who is there to visit his ailing mother.
The conversation meanders around expected topics of local concern – P, alcohol sales, crime. There is discussion of scuttlebutt around the sinking of the Tongan ferry Princess Ashika. Then Brown brings the conversation around to a favourite youth project, modelled on one successfully trialled in Otorohanga, for which he would like some budget.
“That seems to work,” says Collins, “so let’s do it” and the mayor gets his money.
MINISTER OF POLICE 11am
Collins has promised 300 extra police for the Counties Manukau district. Between Len Brown and her next appointment, she finds time for an unscheduled stop at Westfield Manukau City , where several officers are manning a recruiting stall in the middle of the mall. One is a former officer who is returning to the force because she has missed the teamwork. Others proudly tell their boss they have had 200 enquiries since setting up shop. They’ve also nabbed at least one shoplifter for whom their mere presence was not sufficient deterrent. It’s Collins’ view, however, that a more visible police presence in the area will have a significant effect on the crime rate.
MINISTER OF CORRECTIONS 11.15am
Alastair Hall, senior pastor of Manukau City Baptist Church , sited in a former roller skating rink, wants to help prisoners back into society. Collins is no evangelical, but Labour MP Ross Robertson is one of Hall’s congregation and has arranged this meeting. She knows a “faith-based unit” in Rimutaka Prison has had good rehab results and Hall’s approach may be in line with Collins’ “if it works, we’ll do it” philosophy. The two swap stories. Hall has an old lag doing the cleaning. Collins was moved by the effect that being given dogs to train had on some women prisoners. The outcome of the chat is that she smooths the way for Hall’s ministry to run one of its programmes at the women’s prison in Wiri.
MINISTER FOR VETERANS AFFAIRS Noon Collins relishes this portfolio, as anyone with a returned serviceman for a father would. Today she will speak at a ceremony at Papakura Military Camp, home of the SAS, to inaugurate an honour board and memorial to the Long Range Desert Group, a bunch of daring servicemen who were one of the forerunners of the SAS itself. The service is attended by descendants of the LRDG and a few survivors, although they are far outnumbered by those who have sent apologies for their non-attendance. Among the guests of honour is little-known war heroine Pippa Doyle, whose exploits behind enemy lines are outshone by few. Collins lays a wreath before sitting down to lunch with the SAS’s new commanding officer. It’s suggested that this ministry, and the people it enables her to meet, might be some sort of compensation for the two tougher jobs. “Well,” says Collins, “you could say that.”
PARIS CALLING There is so much more to Paris than the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and the Seine
By PAUL LITTLE, Kia Ora magazine, 2008
The average length of time a tourist spends in Paris is approximately two anda half days, barely long enough to take in the sights that line the Seine, let alone go inside them all. If that’s all the time you’re going to have here, then taking in the sights known around the world – Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe - is probably the best way to go. None will disappoint.But if you have a little more time, then you can dig a little deeper and discover much more. ALTERNATIVES Instead of going to Notre Dame, you could go to the 13th century Ste Chapelle (Holy Chapel). Minute compared to the more famous cathedral, Ste Chapelle was built by KingLouis IX to house relics from the crucifixion. No expense was spared, Louis paying for the alleged crown of thorns alone three times what it cost to build the chapel. But it’s the building that interests us today You climb a narrow, dusty staircase and emerge into a narrow, high-vaulted room whose walls seem to be composed entirely of stained glass. Visit near dusk to see the glass catch the light of the setting sun, filling the whole space with a jewel-like radiance that is breathtaking. Similarly, you could go to the Louvre – mad if you don’t, f rankly; you’re unlikely to see this many Da Vinci’s anywhere else– but most people will have a more rewarding time at the Musee d’Orsay, which holds the national impressionist and post-impressionist collection. Housed in a converted railway station, it’s much smaller than the sprawling Louvre and, masterpiece for metre, contains more familiar works or art, including what is probably the world’s second most famous painting after the Mona Lisa, Whistler’s Mother. This plus a plethora of Van Gogh’s, Cezanne’s, Gauguin’s and many more that will delight even the most art-resistant tourist. WARNING: LOCALS ABOUT If you want to rub shoulders with the non-tourists in town there are a few sure bets. PARKS The Parc Monceau is as popular with locals outfor a Sunday stroll now as it was in the 18th century hen it was built. It’s a rambling – by Paris garden standards – sprawl of a place dotted with follies such as a Chinese pagoda and Dutch windmill along with numerous statues of notables. Further afield is the almost suburban Parc du Buttes-Chaumont, an entirely artificial creation – the gallows used to be here, then landfill was converted into a steep park – where You can make the climb to the top for the view – but you don’t have to. MUSEUM The Musee du Carnavalet is the museum of the history of Paris, containing everything from dinosaur bones found within the city limits to relics of the French Revolution such as a lock of Marie Antoinette’s hair and a model of the Bastille prison carved out a brick from he Bastille itself. The Musee du Quai Branly, Paris’s newest big museum, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower,collects the city’s hitherto scattered collections of “ethnic” – including Maori – art in an ultra-modern building whose design has the city’s aesthetic elite still arguingabout its merits. MONUMENT La DefenseIf you stand outside the Louvre and look towards the Arc de Triomphe on a clear day, you will be able to make out another arch in the distance. This is the centrepiece of the modernist La Defense business precinct. The arch itself is so big Notre Dame could fit under it. Its sides are filled with offices and there’s an observation deck on the top. Take the lift. WATERWAYS The classic tourist Seine cruise is a good option.The city is completely different seen from the water, especially after dark when all itsmonuments are brilliantly lit. Sit outside and pretend you’re shivering with delight, not just cold. For a different set of views you can’t see any other way, take a canal day trip. Leave the city behind and cruise - very slowly -through locks and along waterways, past the likes of Charenton, the old asylum where the notorious Marquis de Sade was incarcerated, abandoned buildings and the idiosyncratic dwellings of the affluent who live outside the city. FOOD There’s no getting around it – the food will be a highlight of any visit to Paris. Among his other innovations Napoleon insisted that restaurants post their menus – with prices - outside their front doors so no one would go in and get a nasty surprise. Two recommendations for the traveller in a hurry. Le Navigator, though a stone’s throw from Notre Dame in the heart of tourist territory, serves traditional cuisine at its best and is always full of locals, many of whom have the proprietorial air of regulars. For an upmarket blowout, try Le Grand Vefour near the Louvre. Napoleon and Victor Hugo ate in these opulent surroundings. Dinner can run into the thousands but you can have the same experience at lunchtime – with a reduced menu selection – for a fixed price of around $100. Unlike other Parisian “temples of gastronomy” Le Grand Vefour’s standards are still high. But you can also prepare your own food. A visit to your local Monoprix supermarket is an excursion in itself, as you are faced with a happily bewildering array of the sort of delicacies Parisians take for granted (as well as their little secrets, like a staggering variety of heat and eat meals). What’s French for “Tsk”? CROWD AVOIDANCE STRATEGIES If you’re going somewhere, go early No one goes anywhere at opening time and you will have the place to yourself for about an hour. The closer it gets to Christmas, the fewer people there are in Paris. At the height of the tourist season, there are few sights you will be able to see without having had first to wait in a long line. But once the cold sets in, visitor numbers drop off and you can enjoy the likes of the Mona Lisa without having to peer over the tops of other visitors’ heads. OUT OF TOWN Versailles, easily reached by train, lets you be king or queen for a day. Louis XIV’s palace has been restored in fits and starts over recent years but in any state its magnificence makes itself felt. Allow a day to view the great rooms of the palace and, just as impressive, the formal gardens with their water features and the like of Marie Antoinette’s toy village, where she and her pals played at being rural folk. TRANSPORT One of the best things about Paris is how easy it is to get around. The Metro underground train system is cheap and simple to use. The bus system is also efficient, with destinations and stops clearly indicated. It has one advantage over the metro in that is above ground. PARISIANS You will find Parisians everywhere here. Parisians are not French people and should not be mistaken for such. Those who say that to see Paris is not to see the real France are correct. In fact, many Parisians have never seen the real France either, because that would mean leaving the city limits, and as far as they are concerned, if you live in Paris, why would you want to go anywhere else?
Although they may be insular in outlook., the city’s inhabitants do not deserve their reputation for hostility to visitors. Like the inhabitants of any great city, they are immensely proud ofwhere they live. Show them a little respect, which is as simple as saying “Bonjour, Parlez-vous Anglais?" on first encountering a local, rather than launching into “Hello, do you speak English?”. Nearly all of them do and will be helpful with directions and information.
TIM FINN: THE MAN WHO GOT IT RIGHT At middle age – his words - the maker of perfect pop music has finally found out who he is. BY PAUL LITTLE , FQMen, Autumn, 2007
The house is big, the street is quiet, the fence is high. The impression this creates, however, is not of someone trying to keep the world at bay, but of someone who has created the environment they need. Tim Finn lives here with his wife Marie and children Harper end Ellie. Relaxed on a couch in a small sitting room with a few items of memorabilia from a career that’s spans four decades, he has an air which suggests the phrase “the lion in winter”. It’s not just the mane of grey hair or the grizzled stubble on his face, it’s a sense of battle fought and won, of struggles that have earned him the right to lead the life he does now. He doesn’t have to prove anything. A large part of the reason is Marie. After a fallow period in the ’90s “when not much music came” Marie helped Finn reconnect with the music he had always loved and see it still meant something to him. The two met through a mutual friend. although they had been living just 100 metres from each other in Sydney and patronised the same corner store and laundry, they had never been in the same place at the same time, although Marie, who Knew Who He Was, had occasionally seen Finn round. Marie was still at school when Split Enz were well known. Like many prominent people, Finn liked the fact that she wasn’t a big fan of his work. It meant the way she felt about him was untainted. Marie says that was largely because one of the other cliques at school was the Split Enz clique. “She helped reconnect me with my roots of music,” says Finn. “Just her enthusiasm and love for it, coming from a different generation but feeling it that intensely. Started playing a few shows and just loving it. When I wasn’t touring – I found the writing was difficult and didn’t feel natural. But once is tarted touring it started again. “ And now there’s not the pressure, whether imposed from within himself or buy others. “if I’m not wriitng and a few months go by that’s fine. I’ve got two little kids. I’ve got plenty to get on with.” When we speak Finn is at home between a short Australian tour and a short European one. The tours support the album Imaginary Kingdom, released late last year, a work that pulls off the apparently paradoxical feat of being likeable at first hearing and then growing on you the more you listen to it. We had agreed, to our mutual relief, that this wouldn’t be a conversation about history, but inevitably the past insinuates itself. Discussing where he is now Finn connects it with where he was then. “The gift of Split Enz was being able to inhabit that band. You could hide inside it and use it and move it and be part of that and gradually get more confidence. I still get times on stage where I catch myself thinking what am I doing here. They’re very fleeting.” It’s possible to see in the progress form Split Enz with its members disguised in costumes and inches of make-up to the man whose lyrics don’t hide behind anyone else’s shell. “I wasn’t a natural performer,” Finn reflects. “I loved words and writing. Going back to schooldays I was never the kid who’d thrust himself forward to be in the school play. I’d more likely be trying to write it or direct it. Through Split Enz, that persona which was very extreme and got less and less, and through the solo years I’ve become more comfortable just to be myself and express that. I’ve said before: when you go deep you find what’s common [between people] whereas the surface is what separates us. “ I used to inhabit characters a little more in the early Enz days but I haven’t done that for a long time. I think lyrics come more readily if I’m writing from the first person. There seems to be plenty to explore. And I suppose my heroes, like John Lennon - he was a very confessional writer. When you hit is great when you miss it’s a bit woeful. You walk a fine line.” But learning to walk that line steadily is all part of growing up and there are lessons that have been learnt along the way besides that of speaking in his own voice. “When we found Split Enz we found our tribe. We felt we were onto it and were destined to be acknowledged as a great band. It was harder than we thought it was going to be. We were pretty cocky, but only because we had each other. Noel Crombie and Phil Judd in a band , Eddie Rayner and Mike Chunn – these were very interesting people. When I met these guys, who were going to Elam [art school] they had a sure sense of themselves as artists. I’d never met people like that. I was shocked and completely drawn towards them so that was fate or luck for me.” Finn may once have hoped for different results, but he’s obviously got no regrets about how things turned out. “I just think of it all as having a glorious kind of logic or illogic.” Anything he would have done differently? “I don’t really think like that, the firs thought that popped into my head was management. I would have wished that we could have put more energy into finding a good manager who was perhaps based in London or the States because we wanted to go there but to go there without a manager was a huge problem and caused us many delays and frustrations. ”Also Phil and I started out writing and our heroes were The Beatles, The Kinks, The Small Faces. I think we allowed the first songs to be expanded and developed and take on all these unwieldy structures and there was something wonderful about that but perhaps we could have also just kept close contact with our roots a bit more. Some songs would have benefited from being a bit simpler. Not all. It’s a partial revisionist attitude.” While still deeply involved in music, Finn can now afford the time to be fully involved as a parent in a way that many younger fathers – and mothers – cannot. He is somewhat rueful about his status as an older father. “It came later in my life, so its pretty wonderful and I’m valuing it because there’s a poignancy to being an older parent. There can be pluses and minuses. I’m certainly aware of preciousness of it more than I would have been in my 20s. There’s an urgency to get it right now every day. “It’s an opportunity. Kids are like a mirror - you see yourself at your best and worst every day. It's quite confronting but there are so many payoffs. There are times when you think, ‘God I’m a terrible parent. I’m appalling,’ and you’re filled with remorse but you just pick yourself up and on you go.” So children can bring a new lease on life and Finn’s circumstances mean he can make the most of it. But, he says, the negative about having waited this long is that “you’ve had more decades to work on your bad habits. And selfishness. I was 46 when my first child was born. I’d had a long time to just think about me. There were a lot of habits to break.” Tim Finn has seven solo albums to his credit. There should only be six. He as supposed to be putting together a “best of” when Imaginary Kingdom started to come to him and hopes to make that compilationhis next project. “It would be fun to take the best two or three songs from each album and make one album out of them. I think that would be quite satisfying because looking back you always see the failures, the songs that don’t really work. The songs where you were a bit lazy with the lyric or there's something contrived about it or the arrangement's wrong. They’re easy to see but it’s really important to find the ones that do work and sit with those and think about how they work. Not so you can repeat it but so you can acknowledge that there's a through line. At the end of this year I might start putting that together.” Always thinking, and apparently a serious, thoughtfulman who doesn’t take anything for granted. Finn agrees, squirming only a little, and says, “It’s weird because it's a paradox. I’m not very analytical, I don’t make sensible decisions, and I can't sum up situations very easily or I get people wrong all the time. t think about things but I often just feel things and that gets me into trouble. Too much feeling not enough thinking. There’s a wisdom path for everyone and it’s a good idea to find it. If you can find it at 25 instead of 55 you’re lucky. And it has to be something you feel a connection with. Whether Christianity or Buddhism or shamanism. There’s a path for people and I think its good to get onto it. It's probably the most important thing you can do. "I’m grateful I've had this path even though it's taken many side roads and turnings but I think happiness lies elsewhere. I don't think happiness lies n your work or your external life much at all. I think it all lies much more inside you and it is there and you just have to uncover it.”
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