My Campaign Against the Bishop of Bristol (continued)

26 July 2013

The Annexe
Hobwell Lane
Long Ashton
Bristol

Dear Bishop Declan, Your Grace,

Thank you for your reply of the 5^th inst.

I must confess I had hoped for a substantive, if not necessarily lengthy, response. Although I am but one parishioner of many, I hoped that the subject matter might elevate our exchange to a level of intercourse, albeit brief.

I refer you to the homily delivered by Pope Francis at Lampedusa, on a matter of such importance that it prompted his first visit outside Rome. He coins the memorable phrase “the globalisation of indifference” in a homily he specifies as intended “to challenge people’s consciences and lead them to reflection and a concrete change of heart.”

As we are all seeing, the Holy Father is a powerful and thoughtful user of language. His homilies and statements are entirely devoid of platitude and formula. He could have declared to some effect that he wanted a “new church for the poor.” He didn’t. He quite specifically said he wanted “a poor church for the poor.” (My emphasis.)

How can we square this with a diocese which has funds to invest with JP Morgan yet has not the money to pay for a lawyer when one of its own is threatened with being sliced away from home and parish in a grossly unequal battle? Such was the fate of John Patrick, a member of our choir, last Friday.

Let me answer: we simply cannot. It remains a broken circle.

Why is the diocese investing so much money? Against the future? What future? A future when we have too few parishioners to support our institutions? To plan for such a future seems to me verging on sinful. Did Jesus not say, “Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof”? Or was He a bit off the mark with that one?

I am, from where you stand, a lone, insignificant and probably presumptuous voice. But I have had a lifetime as a communications professional and know very well how to create a ‘story’ when I need one. I know how to reach people. This is my committed campaign: to see Clifton Diocese become an active, visible champion of the poor and the discarded, using both its voice and its assets to help them.

Remember, Jesus did not say in Matthew 25-36 “I was in innocent in prison and you came to me”. You and many of your congregation may be concerned, as many are, about the problem of illegal immigration. If it is a problem – I’m not so sure. Even if those arriving become a burden on us, history tends to support the proposition that their more numerous young will be working to support us in our old age, when our too few children cannot. But it is beside the point. No position on this issue can provide an excuse for a wealthy church not to succour the penniless and over-whelmed in our midst.

So I say this: if you continue to rein in St Nicholas’ spending on helping the poor, I will do my best to out you. It may not concern you. I will probably fail. But not certainly. I have pulled offer tougher assignments in my time.

Respectfully, God bless and forgive us all,

Christopher Hegan

January 2014 Update: Although still technically in place, the order to stop helping people out of parish funds is not being enforced. Good on ya, Declan me old mate!

The Dishonourable Sword: Workers’ Welfare as Covert Industrial Subvention. 

The United Kingdom probably has the largest and most complex welfare system ever known. Much of its workings are the standard stuff of modern economics – the pretence that everyone should be in education, paid employment or retirement, i.e. full employment, continues as usual. This in defiance of the plain fact that for more than half a century standard economic theory has held that a certain level of unemployment is both desirable and necessary as a hedge against inflation. The clear and present threat of loss of employment is the sole available brake on wage demands in those economies such as the UK still locked into the adversarial employment relations model.
The German mitbestimmung, spectacularly successful as it has proved, is of course an effective alternative. Germany’s experience has shown that wages can effectively be limited by mutual agreement based on open books. Workers under mitbestimmung have shown themselves well able to recognise wage thresholds beyond which the success of the enterprise and therefore their jobs cease to be viable. This holds little political appeal in the left-right obsessed minds of British politicians and workers’ advocates, with each side holding the other to be unrestrainedly greedy. This is a pity and a waste, but it is business as usual, neither likely to change nor even particularly interesting, the quotidian folly of a society mired in 19th Century industrial relations philosophy.
I am more interested in the other, possibly larger slice of the welfare bill: payments to the poor in employment. In the mid 1980s New Zealand introduced a purer form of monetarism than that of either Britain or the United States; Thatcher was a fervent admirer of Minister of Finance Roger Douglas under the unfortunate Lange government, who swept away every single vestige of state support to the employed. Not that there were many to start with. The child benefit of around £7.50 per week per child had been around since Michael Savage’s far-reaching welfare reforms in the thirties. I part-funded the purchase of our first house by the common practice of child benefit capitalisation, which gave us 18 years’ worth of child benefit for both of our children – a substantial sum. The only other benefit was the ability for the employed to claim work expenses – study and training, work-related travel beyond the daily commute, clothing allowances, etc, which also went in the late 80s.
So arriving in the UK to see vast sums disbursed in welfare payments to the lower-waged was something of a shock. In my world it is now an absolute given - to go into work is to leave direct welfare behind. Free or subsidised health care is not viewed as welfare, but as a right, derived from the shared value that access to healthcare being dependent on wealth is immoral, an anathema.
So why is it seen as necessary in the UK? On the face of it, you could call it the good old British sense of fair play, simple compassion for the strugglers. But scratch the surface and we see a deeply unpleasant underbelly: a hidden subvention for British industry and agriculture, direct support being under the firm and ungenerous thumb of Brussels.
Suppose the housing benefit, the winter fuel payments, the child tax breaks and all the rest of it were swept away in one fell swoop. What would happen? Housing costs would white ant the rest of the family budget. Then what – imaginable, if unlikely, rent and mortgage default on a huge scale, hundreds of thousands of simultaneous evictions? If that were the only consequence, well, rents would simply have to drop. So what? The consequences of that are not hard to calculate – thousands of highly geared landlords going bankrupt, for a start. A squeeze on the income of thousands of retirees living off investment properties.
But that would not happen, because experience shows that most people will freeze and starve before they give up their home to go – where? If there were any slack in the system, the lowly paid might stand some chance of enduring the shock. But there isn’t any, at least not nearly enough. My son-in-law and his family simply could not survive on their meagre earnings alone. Most people would simply choose unemployment and continuing welfare support. And it would be a valid choice. You can’t hold your job if you can’t afford to get there. You can’t put in a day’s work if you’re constantly hungry. You can’t show up to a retail or office job in shabby old clothes. Of course the first to go would be the Smiths, the Perkins, the Jameses. The Wronskis, the Odungas and Wachikes would hang on longer, the ones who will live six to a room and subsist on rice and beans, a dynamic already observable under the current system. Cue deepening hatreds, the oppressed turning on the oppressed. So often ‘taking our jobs’ really means doing our jobs under conditions we refuse to accept and should not have to accept.
Shutting down workers’ welfare could not be made without declaring the whole plan, being an intention to divert those billions into supporting capacity and advancement in agriculture and industry, into research and development and where necessary direct price support. The British public has become so used to ubiquitous welfare it is likely that, even if the scheme were openly described as a reallocation of resources, the reaction from the street, the pulpit and the leader page would still be to flay the heartlessness of the politicians driving them. The British sense of entitlement to welfare has become endemic. I suspect very few see workers' welfare for what it really is. From the other side of the fence, the beneficiaries of these hidden subsidies would howl about the unavoidable wage increases which would follow, ignoring or not trusting the intention to replace them in a more open and targeted manner.
It is a fact that, failing that strategy forbidden by treaty, many British products and services would become more expensive than those of their competitors. So we see what this really is all about – international competitiveness. A deeply dishonourable covert subvention that reduces its recipients to the role of part-time beggars on their knees before the armies of bureaucrats employed to administer their welfare. Their day-to-day existence haunted by the spectre of The Cuts. Perfectly honest hard-working workers who deserve decent wages and the respect due to those who thrive by their efforts are often driven to become cheats, sharing with their mates every new wrinkle to work the system, escape deductions, drive up entitlements through falsehood and secrecy. Absolute loss of belief in the political process and the law.
It is a terrible price to pay for staying in Europe and exalting the Holy Grail of free trade. This is the hidden cost of Europe: the humiliation of the British worker.
It is too high.

It's the Tax Laws, Stupid!

Yesterday Google admitted that in ten years they had paid £10m in taxes in the UK and collected £12bn. Then they said they had obeyed all the UK tax regulations. The chilling truth is that they probably did. I wonder how many people like myself are shouting at their radios "It's the tax laws, stupid!" It is not greedy evil capitalists. They have been encouraged by the ethos of modern crony capitalism to do exactly what they have done. By the standards of the market they have not 'been evil.'

So why are successive governments taking so agonisingly long to change, if indeed there is even a serious intention to do so. I suspect that Europe is the lesser obstacle. Indeed the anti-Europe lobby, growing stronger every day and with good reason, could seize on exactly this fiscal necessity to lever us out of Europe.

The greater reason, one of which we are fearful in so many economic spheres, is the spectre of international competitiveness. The argument goes that if we step too hard on the multinantional's toes they will simply lose interest, up stakes and quit the market. OK, maybe that wouldn't cost so much in taxes. But the jobs. And the insult. Cue collective shudder.

So here is a lesson from little New Zealand. In the reform of the health system the labour government of Helen Clark instituted Pharmac, a body whose sole function was to manage the supply of medicines. In order to get the best deal for the New Zealand consumer they started to play hardball with the pharmaceutical companies. Unfortunately they had to show their cojones to be taken seriously, which they did in a couple of instances by refusing to pay the demanded price and refused to fund the cost of the drugs in contention, forcing some patients to settle for a less effective alternative. In effect, they used patients as hostages whom they were clearly prepared to shoot. Ouch!

It worked. The drug companies sat down, furious, squirming, at the table and started to talk. Impressive deals started to flow, to the benefit of sick kiwis. Over the next couple of years one company after another declared in the media that this had gone too far, they couldn't recover their costs, they would pull out of the country. No big deal, surely - four million customers? Ha! The loss of the NZ account would scarcely register on their global spreadsheet.

To date, how many companies have actually quit the market? One, their product easily replaced by generics (another reason they hate leaving any market). Lesson - never, ever, underestimate the greed of the multinational corporation. Who would have dreamed a tiny handful of customers on the edge of the world could produce so much muscle? I promise you, no corporation will forgo a single penny they can get their lunch-hooks on.

Look at the fines Microsoft paid in Europe. Even when European Court fined Microsoft €561m for leaving the browser choice pop-up out of 15m copies of Windows 7, finely calculated to equal their total share of income from those sales, Microsoft did not consider for a second quitting the European market.

Because it is also not just about the money, but global strategy. The world-dominant brands cannot afford to leave any significant market open to give a competitor the space to grow and become strong. The UK may be smaller, but in the English-speaking world - the rich part - the UK is still hugely influential.

Conclusion: no matter what they threaten, no significant multi-national will quit the UK over tax rates. The implicit threat to quit the UK if the taxes become too fair is a paper tiger. Do it, Jimmy. Do it George.

Thatcher - Saw Everything But the Utterly Obvious

Thatcherism and Populist Capitalism. Virtually synonyms. The idea is that you turn everyone into a grocer, funding the project out of the sale of all those enterprises put together in over two centuries for the public good - water, power, broadcasting, railways and much more. Create shares for them to own, and trade in, giving everybody a chance to become even wealthier grocers.
It's a brilliant idea and it works. Unless you're no good at being a grocer. Then, you're stuffed.
Well, the grocer economists respond, people must accept that if we are to be a strong and prosperous society people must get up to speed, stop expecting the state to watch out for them. We have provided the means, now get on with it.
Unfortunately Thatcher in England, Reagan in the US, and Roger Douglas in New Zealand who, it can be strongly argued, did it first and gave those other big fish the idea in the first place, were all blind to one toweringly obvious fact, something that any first year psychology student could have told them. Some people are just too thick. Low IQ. Born that way. Hardware, not software, and unfixable.
The old system had a place for those people, and not just paternalistically. It gave them simple, lowly paid but utterly secure jobs in the public service. The man behind the counter at the Department of Railways was dull, unambitious, knew his place and was happy to stay there stamping pieces of paper. Actually, the pieces of paper did need to be stamped, so we had a society that had an honourable use for everyone from the high flyer to the lowly plodder. It was a perfectly good system, and it worked.
Until, let's be frank, greedy, selfish and corrupt unions wrecked it. Take careful note of the qualifier corrupt; I'm certainly not anti-union, but corruption will ruin anything. In the post-war era we had rotten trade unionism and it needed to be taken out. For that the United Kingdom owes Margaret Thatcher a huge debt, although the pendulum, probably inevitably, swung too far and needs correcting. Strong, honest unions are an essential component of a fair and successful democracy.
But back to the thesis. The neo-capitalists respond that society can take care of the incompetent with welfare support, a specious idea shot full of obvious holes. For one, a supply of money that can be ratcheted freely up and down is no substitute for essential services, because the services tend to be absolute, rather than unitised. You either see a doctor, or you don't. In NZ if you don't have any money you, or your child, simply does not get to see a doctor. The visits may be subsidised but they are not free. There's no such thing as a part of a doctor's visit, or a tap out of which water partly flows, in the way that a pound or a dollar can be reduced or increased in infinite fractions. So there's that.
Then, there's the opprobrium. Sure, we used to look down on and make jokes about the dummy behind the railway counter. But we did not vilify him as a parasite.
Worst, there's the fear. When there is a real possibility of falling into utter destitution simply because you're not bright enough to make the right choices at the right time, you feel fear. Fear which further cripples the already compromised ability to comprehend and succeed.
By creating the society we have to day, in which the least talented have no place, the neo-capitalists have worked evil.
Since the brightest and most avaricious will never choose to work for the Inland Revenue, there will always be an echelon of human swine smarter and more motivated than those we hire to collect their share from them. They may always make obscene amounts of money and pay little or no tax, growing inexorably wealthier at the expense of the rest. But in creating a society which venerates the individual acquisition of money as the greatest of all goods, the neo-capitalists have removed the stigma from these people, the true parasites. In this too they have worked evil.
Trust me - they were and are not stupid. They surely foresaw this, and see it now, and choose it. It is a simple, moral truth that these people, the Thatchers and Camerons of this world have been the agents of a great evil, and not unwittingly either.
Actually, there was another aspect to the great and failing neo-capitalist experiment. It was the choice to reject as superstition the old saying that money is the root of all evil, and instead turn to money for a single yardstick by which absolutely anything could be measured. And yes, they added, absolutely everything can in fact be numerically measured. Who is the best doctor? Why, the one who treats the most patients for the least amount of money. Reward that man or woman. Which is the best school? The one that educates the most pupils for the least amount of money. It may be squalid. The teaching might be rubbish. The doctor's patients may be sick and in pain. No matter. The providers are heroically productive (and wealthy), and there is no greater good than that.
It is surely time to recognise that the experiment is a failure. The patient is miserable, possibly dying. Call it off.
If only we could unbreak that egg. In a better world we might set our minds to rebalancing the operational structure of society so that we intentionally created honourable work for everyone. I refuse to believe that human beings, who have learned to manipulate systems of far greater complexity than a modern economy, can't do this. The solution is actually as simple as it is apparently unachievable: end the worship of money. Although in fact money is just the measuring stick. The underlying dehumanising principle is that idea of universal measurement, the belief that absolutely everything can be quantified. In business it is a time-honoured principle - if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. In that limited sphere the proposition stands, but you simply cannot measure the kindness of a nurse, the ability of a great teacher to inspire. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies even on this scale: it is impossible to absolutely measure anything without altering it, so it is theoretically and practically impossible to know everything about anything. Teachers preparing reports into the small hours, teachers who are restricted to dispensing named and quantified units of information according to an iron-clad curriculum cease to be great teachers. Nurses and doctors, a similar lot.
There are societies which seem to have a better grip on this - Sweden is one. And what do you know? They are not only happier places than most, they are also wealthier. Odd, that. I believe - no, observe - that a caring society where no-one has to live in fear of destitution enjoys a collective lightness of spirit which transcends the crude maths of economics and produces genuine prosperity.
A synonym to start, a tautology to finish.
Goodness is good.

The Fencible Girl, Chapter 13: First Encounter

Marshall McLuhan, smart bugger that he was, said the best way to tell if you would like a book was to turn to page 69. As it happens, Chapter 13 of The Fencible Girl starts on page 69. So...

Rawiri and Winnie took less than ten minutes to reach the beach called Takapuripuri. The tide was racing out – there was now less than two feet of water in the bay and within ten or twenty minutes there would be half a mile of mudflat between them and the water. There was not a moment to lose.

They both avoided looking at the churned up stretch of sand a few yards away where the raiders had driven their captives on board the waka with shouts, kicks and blows with the flat of their taiaha spears.

Rawiri plunged into the undergrowth on the foreshore and came back dragging a light dugout canoe less than four yards long. A single outrigger shaped liked a solid, miniature canoe was attached to the main hull by two poles lashed across the gunwales, or top edges of the hull. The design was simple – being double-ended, the craft could travel in either direction in order to always have the outrigger on the side away from the wind, keeping it stable in all weathers.

Wasting not a moment they threw their loads into the hull. Winnie jumped in while Rawiri heaved the craft forward and threw himself aboard, jumping into position and paddling in long, strong strokes. The light craft shot forward and within minutes they were out of the tidal flats and on the outer edges of the channel.

While Rawiri kept the craft steadily into the wind, in water deep enough to not run aground but still clear of the outgoing tidal flow racing towards the distant harbour mouth, Winnie opened the bundle wrapped in the big mat. She passed the musket in its holster to Rawiri, who clamped its upper, open end between his legs to keep it dry. Then she laid the pole across the outriggers and the long side of the mat beside it. Taking Rawiri’s largest bone fish hook with its finely woven flax line attached she swiftly, using a long running stitch, fastened the long edge to the pole.

She fastened the three strongest cords they had to the top of the long pole she had chosen for the mast and tied one to the stern outrigger arm, one looped around the pointed bow of the waka and the third to the side opposite the outrigger, where the arm at the front crossed the hull.

Then she changed places with Rawiri. Although Winnie had never used a paddle before, it was quite simple to paddle this way and that to maintain a steady position pointing into the wind so the sail would not catch.

As Rawiri set to work, they heard cries from the shore, now some two hundred yards away. Winnie’s heart sank. It was her parents, accompanied by three of Edward’s men. She could hear them clearly across the water.

“Winnie!” called her father. “Come back. Please don’t do this! Come back now.” She glanced at them, feeling her heart wrench with the conflict between wanting to obey her parents and her compelling need to help Rawiri. He suppressed any acknowledgement and went on rigging the sails, raising the pole and sail upright against the forward outrigger arm where it crossed the waka. 

“Winnie! Come back this instant, young woman. How dare you!” She could see her father touch Freddie by the arm, shaking his head. She shook his hand away, repeating her demand for Winnie to return. Her anger made it easier for Winnie to ignore her. Rawiri, who had only his mother to whom he felt deeply protective, lost his resolve and looked at Winnie with pleading eyes. He knew only too well that if it had been his mother on the shore he would have turned back.

Winnie tried to think of some way Rawiri, who had never as far as she knew sailed anything, could carry on by himself, and failed. If she returned, if that is she could persuade him to take her back, it was all over for him and his chance of rescuing his mother. Rawiri stood the pole with the three cords attached up in the boat, against the front outrigger arm. After gently tightening the three main cords Winnie had put in place, Rawiri took more short lengths of cord and lashed the pole to the arm, using more lengths to secure the pole however else he could. While Edward called out again in a more encouraging tone, Winnie tried to focus on admiring Rawiri’s speed and method. The previous year she had seen a music teacher re-string a violin; he first put all the strings in place, and then tuned them up one by one until they were all correctly tensioned and in tune. Rawiri took the same approach, first choosing the right lengths and thicknesses of cord for each position, and then ‘tuning’ them one by one until the makeshift mast was locked firmly in position, each lashing tightened to perfection. 

After watching him for a couple of minutes, during which he looked at her twice, seeing her struggle against her father’s calls, he just said, ”Please. Please, Winnie.” She could stand it no longer and started to paddle along the current parallel to the shore, driving the boat forward until her parents were almost out of sight as they followed the boat’s path along the shore. Just before she lost sight of them around a point, she turned and saw her mother with her head in her hands, sobbing, with her father’s arms around her. At that moment, with the paddle in her hand, she came closer to turning back than at any point in the escape. Finally she waved. “Don’t worry – I will be back. I love you. I love you.” She tried to shout but her voice choked in her throat. Shaking her head to clear her feelings Winnie turned and dug the paddle in hard. Within seconds they were gone. Rawiri saw the tears pouring down her face and said, “Thank you. Thank you, Winnie. It will be all right. They will forgive.”

Winnie wasn’t so sure but there was no turning back now. She rested and let the sail swing free for the five more minutes he took to complete the task.

When all was ready, Rawiri returned to the paddle position and brought the waka around into the wind. As the wind drew the sail across the boat Winnie grabbed the lower cord. Rawiri turned the waka stern to the wind and the sail swung out and filled with a powerful jerk.

The effect was so dramatic they were taken by surprise – for a second, as the boat leapt forward, the outrigger reared up in the air and only Rawiri’s lightning reaction in throwing his weight onto it prevented a disaster which could have ended their expedition then and there. Once steadied and brought into the wind the little waka with the two youngsters aboard took off like a horse under the spur. Within seconds they were flying along at a speed that unnerved them both – it was certainly faster than Rawiri had ever travelled on water before. A huge, exultant grin lit up his face and, for the first time since Winnie had met him, he roared with laughter. Even Kura joined in the fun, flying up into the air above the boat and ducking and diving around their heads for several minutes before settling on Winnie’s leg, fluttering her wings to steady herself against the wind and the movement of the boat.

In the note to her father that she had placed under his saddle, Winnie had promised him to remain safe and contact him when she could. But she had not revealed what Rawiri had explained, adding to his earlier comment that he thought they were heading for the Hauraki Gulf. Rawiri, clever as he was, had worked out that there was nowhere else for such a large party to be based. South of Auckland was densely populated by the well-organised Tainui tribe. North was held by a variety of smaller tribes dominated by the Ngapuhi, a federation of independent sub-tribes. Although not as organised as Tainui, with frequent feuds and inter-village raids, their territory was still too thickly populated for so many warriors and slaves to remain hidden.

The final point, which confirmed his theory for the pair, was the question of why they were taking so many slaves. Not just those of Rawiri’s village, but the others her father had told about. The gang was up to something big, needing up to a hundred workers. This meant that they must be based in some unpopulated region within reach of the waka.  Only one place met that description – somewhere in or across the Hauraki Gulf, the wide body of water between the east coast of the mainland and the long mountainous peninsula that stretched north, twenty miles away on the other side of the water. The gulf contained numerous islands, but the larger ones were inhabited, the smaller too small to conceal any large undertaking. But the peninsula itself had been so emptied of population by Hongi Hika’s massacres that large tracts were still uninhabited thirty years later.

Although currently crossing the Manukau Harbour on the other side of the mainland they were making towards one of the narrow points on the island where a river flowing into the Manukau harbour was only a short haul overland to the head of a river feeding into the gulf. These places where the two coasts were very close to each other had long been used by Maori as ‘portages’ for their canoes. They would paddle up one river, drag their vessel across land and launch into the other.

The most important portage was at Otahuhu, the site of the shortest crossing. Both Rawiri and Winnie doubted the raiders would use this because of the Fencible fort that commanded a complete end-to-end view of the busy slipway and road.

Rawiri knew the names but not the locations of the others, while Winnie, from having studied the large chart on the wall of her father’s home office, had some idea of their location but not which was which.

Their only chance of knowing where the raiders would cross would be to catch up until they had them in sight and keep as great a distance between them as possible.

In this respect both wind and fortune were with them. They sailed for almost an hour south-east toward Otahuhu, during which time Rawiri fed Kura and the two bagged tui from a large bottle of honey water. The wind, as Rawiri had predicted, held true and steady and even increased in strength on the open water, driving the little craft through the water at the speed of a galloping horse. Suddenly Rawiri gave a shout and pointed. Sure enough, by squinting into the distance Winnie made out the form of the great waka taua, white-tipped paddles flashing in the sunlight as they rose and fell in perfect unison. It was making good speed but the belting breeze drove the little waka before it at twice the pace of their quarry. 

To avoid coming up upon it, Rawiri altered their course to due east, putting them on a long line that steadily brought them closer to the big canoe, one that they could easily shorten or lengthen by small adjustments of their course.

Within twenty or so minutes they were as close as they thought wise. Rawiri’s spirits soared when he realised that they were now in control of situation and, short of an accident or failing wind, the waka could do nothing to shake them off. He leaned forward at the paddle, grinning with intense, joyful focus, the expression of a hunter who knows he has his game cornered and is merely choosing the moment of the kill. He altered their course again to further avoid coming too close and arousing suspicion on board the big waka.

Their intentions were in any case well hidden by the number of other craft on the vast harbour. The two hours before and after low tide were prime fishing time; at least fifteen boats of various sorts were scattered across the water, some areas of which were now separate channels between flat expanses exposed by the tides. Groups of women and children gathered shellfish from the rich beds of cockles and the larger pipi, shaped like a flattened egg, big, tasty and nutritious. In some shallows the even larger round flat-sided scallops, most delicious of all and usually found in deeper water, could be gathered by hand. A two-masted schooner was cautiously navigating the channels under light sail on its way towards the port, having crossed the fearsome Manukau sandbar at the harbour’s entrance a few hours earlier on the high tide, the safest time to make the run.

From the position and direction of the big war canoe they could see it had skirted around the southern reaches of the harbour to avoid coming too close to other boats. Winnie and Rawiri were under no such restriction and were able to set a straight course through the fishers, not all of them Maori. Winnie’s thoughts returned constantly to the tremendous trouble she was in with her parents. She hoped that one of the two or three European fishing boats would notice them and report their well-being to her father once back on land; she had no doubt Edward would soon put out the word for everyone in the community to be on the look-out.

As they flew along, keeping their distance from the big waka, Winnie noticed a sailing dinghy labouring along in the direction of the great canoe. After keeping an eye on the boat as they drew closer she became certain that this was indeed the lone sailor’s objective. She could also see that the man was facing difficulties. His sail showed an ugly tear about half way up the mast where the fabric had torn away. Although also rowing strongly, he often paused to bail water with a billy, the basic tin can with a wire handle used by workers and travellers to brew tea and cook food.

Bit by bit Winnie started to feel sure this was the same lone European they had come across that night in the forest, a feeling heightened by a return of the weird sense that she knew him, or had met him somewhere before. He was still too far away for her to be able to make out his features, but she kept her gaze on him in the hope that she might finally recognise him.

She was roused from her staring by a shout from Rawiri, who was pointing at the waka, now some thousand yards distant.

So far, the waka had appeared to be heading straight for Otahuhu, which could now be made out in the distance. Rawiri’s call had been to alert her to the fact that it had turned to the south, heading down harbour, no doubt to one of the longer, less-used portages. Within a few minutes of their holding this new course the man, who was about the same distance from the waka and still closing, quit rowing and, after hurling a few billies-full of water from the bilges, appeared to be fossicking through something out of sight in his boat. Soon she could see he had something under his arm and was struggling with it in some way. Next moment his intentions became clear as he threw both hands in the air and released a bird, which circled the boat two or three times in an ever higher and wider arc before flying off in a direct line to Onehunga. It was a pigeon. 

The man now changed course, rowing hard and with an almost desperate energy, heading straight for Otahuhu about two miles distant. As she watched, Winnie saw the sail, now receiving the full force of the wind, ripped further until it was almost in two almost useless parts. 

Again she heard a shout from Rawiri, this time a fierce cry of alarm. He pointed again at the waka. Horrified, she saw that it had changed course again and was now pursuing the stranger. She tried to calculate whether he would reach the safety of the settlement before being caught. He was a powerful oarsman with seemingly unlimited energy, with the wind behind him and providing some push even to the broken sail, but the waka had now picked up speed. She could see a man in a cloak moving up and down the length of the boat, obviously shouting, gesticulating with his spear and even, once or twice, using it to beat one of the paddlers on the back.

It now seemed likely but not certain that he would be caught. He was rowing at a tremendous pace, pausing every couple of minutes to frantically bail water before returning to his task. To Winnie’s alarm Rawiri had changed heading to intercept the canoe and was pointing at it and shouting, “Look! Look!”

Winnie’s heart sank as she made out the cause for Rawiri’s alarm. Two warriors had abandoned their paddles and were making their way through the captives, kicking them and striking them with what Winnie saw were muskets. They were going to shoot the fleeing stranger.

She looked back at Rawiri. He responded by nodding his head toward the musket holster lashed to the mast. There was no mistaking his meaning. Winnie felt as if a steel band was being tightened around her chest as she sized up the situation and the ways it could go. She had taken the musket without having a fixed idea of its purpose; it was simply to equip themselves as well as possible for what could be a dangerous venture. Now she was confronted by a hideous choice – sit by and watch this man be shot or take up the musket herself and … She pushed the thought out of her mind. The Maori were shooting from a moving canoe; they were still quite some distance away; reloading a musket took most people quite a long time and they may get only two or three shots away before he was safe.

Almost as they formed in her mind she saw the arguments fail. As she watched, she could not avoid noticing that the great heavy waka cleaved as steady as a rock through the small chop on the harbour, and that the paddlemaster’s calls had produced another significant speed increase. They fired their first pair of shots and, as expected, missed. 

But the second shots came quickly – far too quickly. The Maori were doing something ingenious, something she had never seen or heard of. The standard military procedure was to pour gunpowder down the barrel, then remove the ramrod from its groove underneath the barrel, use it to ram paper wadding down the barrel to hold the powder in place, then drop in the lead ball and ram that home, return the rod to its groove and finally shoot. The average soldier could do this twice in one minute, a fast one thrice. She had counted on the Maori taking considerably longer, giving the stranger time to get away.

But even from this distance she could see that they were doing away with the time-consuming business with the ramrod altogether. They seemed to simply pour in the powder, add a piece of wadding, then the ball, then compact the load by slamming the butt of the gun once or twice on the decking before firing, then quickly repeating the procedure. 

“Shoot! Shoot!” shouted Rawiri, not understanding her reluctance and gesticulating at the musket still in its holster. They could both now see that unless she did so, the stranger was a dead man.

Although the distance between themselves and the waka was at least four hundred yards, Winnie knew she held a deadly edge.

Among Major Meldon’s various interests was a consuming passion for military technology, above all the various kinds of soldier’s musket. 

Always up to date with the latest developments, Edward had seen to the delivery in England of twenty of the latest Springfield musketoons, a shortened version of the standard musket. But these were special: the barrels, normally a smooth tube, came with long, spiralling grooves on the inside and had mounted sights, new features normally found only in advanced types of sporting rifles. The grooves, or ‘rifling’ caused the lead ball to leave the barrel spinning rapidly, making the ball travel much further and in a reliably straight line – a huge advantage over the older smooth-barrelled weapons. 

With these, instead of a group of soldiers blazing away in a barrage, the individual soldier could pick a target, aim, and expect to hit it. This revolutionary weapon would change the nature of warfare. It was one of these precious, state of the art guns that Winnie was now going to use, accurate to an incredible five hundred yards in the right conditions. These conditions were far from perfect, but the range was now less than three hundred yards, and closing, and Winne was a crack shot.

Although scarcely able to breathe, she took the musket from its holster and spoke. “I’m going to put the barrel on your shoulder. When I am in place, let go the sail and bring the boat to face straight into the wind and waves. Do you understand?” 

He nodded, pale under his brown colouring.

“When I’m ready I’ll nod. You must stay as still as you can. The shot will make a very loud noise. You might not hear properly for a few minutes. Do you understand?”

Another nod.

Winnie desperately fended off the thought that she was going to try to injure or even kill another human being, fixing her resolve by remembering the dead children at Parekaroro.

Winnie took a cartridge from her father’s case and quickly loaded the musket, going through the step-by-step routine she knew so well. She tore the top off the paper cartridge with her teeth and put the lead ball on top in her mouth, both to hold it and lubricate it with her spit. She carefully but quickly poured the powder down the barrel, then screwed up the paper to make a wad. She slid the long brass ramrod from its groove under the barrel and rammed the wad and powder down hard. Finally dropping the ball down the barrel she tamped it home with one more push of the rod and returned the rod to its groove. All this took her less than twenty seconds – a fast time even for a top musketeer.

She knelt on one knee before Rawiri in the classic front rank shooting position and lowered the barrel to rest on his shoulder. Two more shots rang out – five times in less than a minute, Winnie thought. Unbelievable. A quick look confirmed that they were still shooting standing up and had both missed, which was good, but the range between them and their target was closing fast, which was not. Luckily they were standing well away from the captives on the platform surrounding the majestic and beautifully carved prow, giving Winnie a clear shot. 

Rawiri let go the sail and let the boat’s momentum spin it around into the wind, holding it as still there as he could manage; not as steady as she wished, but Rawiri deftly adjusted his posture slightly to provide her a solid support. At the last minute, she thought of the possible effects of the recoil. The last thing they needed was for the barrel to kick up and knock her friend unconscious. 

Leaning forward she gently pushed Rawiri’s head to one side, gesturing with the palm of her hand that he was to stay in that position. He gave a slight nod to show he understood, bending his neck even further to stay clear of the barrel. She extended her back leg and braced it strongly against the outrigger and took aim. 

Now Winnie put to use the training her father had given her with the sporting guns they had used in South Africa. She knew how far to aim in front of a moving target depending on how fast they were moving and how far away, that is, to shoot to the place the target would be at when the bullet arrived. She was also skilled in allowing for the effect wind had on a bullet as it flew through the air. The barrel still moved slightly, but she fixed her eye on a spot about a foot in front of the nearer warrior and tracked it steadily with the waka’s forward motion. The man was quickly reloading, which kept him in a fairly still position. She breathed out slowly to calm herself and nodded to Rawiri. As the barrel swung slightly with the movement of the boat to meet her imaginary target point, she fired. The recoil pushed her backwards but she held her position. Rawiri jumped with the shock but reassured her with a nod.

As the wind quickly blew the smoke clear she saw that she had missed, but must have been close enough for the man to hear or feel the ball whistle past. The waka was still closing on the man in the boat, but now the warriors’ attention was divided.

Winnie noticed with surprise but also relief that, in spite of the fact that she was engaged in the deadly and horrifying process of taking human life, an extraordinary calm had settled on her. She felt no fear, and neither reluctance nor eagerness. She was in a state of…efficiency. That was the only word. She felt perfectly efficient. These thoughts flashed through her mind as her hands raced through the familiar routine of reloading. They could hear shouts from across the water – a glance showed that many of the crew had spotted them and were pointing their way. She noted with satisfaction that her first target had now finished reloading and had turned to fire upon her. She took up the firing position again, knowing that her target would be attempting to steady himself, offering an easier target.

She nodded again to Rawiri. She took aim and fired while her target was still taking aim. A split second after her shot he too fired. Through clearing smoke she saw his head snap back and he toppled backwards into the water, out of sight. A small hole appeared in their top of their sail. Rawiri roared “Maté! (Dead!) Maté! Ta heke é!”

The effect of her shot was dramatic. At least half the warriors dropped their paddles and scrambled for their muskets. The waka slowed dramatically. Instantly they saw the big European from the forest leap to his feet, roaring commands. Some warriors responded, others didn’t. He fired one pistol and the air and levelled the other at a nearby warrior who had started loading his musket. The man quickly returned to paddling, as did his fellows, but the delay had given their quarry the chance to widen the gap between them.

By now, Winnie had reloaded. Checking the stranger she saw that he was rowing more strongly than ever and was now within half a mile of the shore. She had improved his chances considerably but not enough to be certain. 

She knelt again and lowered the barrel to Rawiri’s shoulder. The lone musketeer had recovered his senses and was raising his musket for another shot. Two more were coming forward to join him. As the waka following the man was now closer to their little craft it was an easier shot. Going for safety, she lowered the barrel slightly, breathed out and squeezed the trigger.

The remaining marksman doubled over, dropped his musket and, clutching his side, toppled off the bow into the water.

“Quick Rawiri. Let’s go!”

With the sail flapping in the wind by her side, she had no difficulty grabbing the line while Rawiri spun the little boat round away from the wind. The sail snapped tight and they shot forward, rapidly picking up speed. The big waka, now less than three hundred yards away, turned to chase them, but a few seconds’ observation reassured Winnie that as long as the wind kept up they would never catch them. Rawiri headed straight for the Otahuhu channel, less than fifteen hundred yards away now. The tide had slackened to still during the exchange of fire and the wind was carrying them towards the shore.

“No Rawiri. Not Otahuhu. Father may have sent word and they may well be looking for me. Follow the wind and take the quickest way to land.”

The landscape ahead consisted of a few farmlets separated by areas of well-developed second growth forest, and it was for one of the larger forested areas that they were headed. 

Once more, Winnie checked the waka and was worried to see that it had given up the chase and was now broadside on to them. The entire crew had dropped their paddles to load their muskets. With thirty or muskets blazing away in the quick-fire Maori style they were far from safe, even at the slowly lengthening range, still about three hundred yards as they were not heading straight away from the waka. 

The shooting started. At least half a dozen bullets hit the boat and the sail, but not only were neither of them were hit, she saw a ball fall into the boat after failing to pierce the sail. The range was now about three hundred and fifty yards and the firing was constant. Suddenly Rawiri yelped and clutched his right arm, although still managing to retain his grip on the paddle.

He let go again and grabbed the paddle with both hands. Winnie saw a nasty bruise starting to spread out from a blackened spot on his arm, but there was no blood. Looking down she saw the ball rolling around at his feet.

She burst into a peal of relieved laughter. Rawiri glared at her, furious that she could think of his injury as a joke.

“I’m sorry, Rawiri, I’m sorry. But don’t you see – the bullet didn’t hurt you – they are too far away now. Look!” She retrieved the ball from between his feet and showed it to him. “We’re safe! We’re safe!”

At this, Rawiri too started to laugh. For a good minute or more they were both shaking with laughter, grinning hugely at each other. Rawiri clapped her on the back once or twice. It was the laughter of release, of the end of fear, and it felt good. Even the sudden sobering recollection that she, a girl of twelve, had just killed a man and wounded another, possibly fatally, could not dampen her happiness at having saved the stranger and escaped with their lives.

Shots continued to ring out, but now they were falling in the water between twenty and fifty yards behind them. It struck them both as vastly comical and their laughter continued to ring in the breeze. Even Kura seemed to share their delight, wheeling and diving around their heads, once giving Winnie a playful nip on the ear. As she watched she saw the waka turn and resume its southerly course, which relieved her completely.  They were safe.

But then she saw in the distance that the European in the stern had a long spyglass to his eye trained directly upon them. Instinctively she ducked her head to conceal her face under her bonnet but knew that her move was too late. He would have been observing them throughout the barrage.

They may be safe for the moment, but they were now also known. As they closed on the shore, Winnie felt the cold chill of returning fear.

The Strange and Unsatisfying History of the Human Orgasm

As I have said earlier, I did not want to write this story of my life until I found good reason to do so. One of the most intriguing reasons, to me, is that I have finally arrived at what I could call the Grand Unifying Theory of Sex, with apologies to Stephen Hawkings and co.

Humans, like, I suspect, many mammalian species, have sex lives which are for the most part unfulfilling. And the strange fact is that this is so because it is a good thing, in that it improves our chances of successful propagation of our genes.

What?

Yes. What men want, what gets men off, doesn’t do it for women, and vice versa. Our bits are in the wrong place and our instinctive techniques are at odds. Men feel driven to violent thrusting, women like strong, gentle rhythm, and the physical areas which produce the orgasm through friction and heat, the penis and the clitoris, don’t even normally come into contact because of where they’re placed. Weird. What’s worse, men let it all rip in one great bang and that’s it. A few drags on the post-coital fag and off to sleep with a beaming smile on our faces. But the women can come again, and again, and again, and love it.

How could nature get it so wrong?

My theory, for what it’s worth, is because that old trickster Momma Nature did it deliberately. That’s right. In this all-important part of keeping the species going she made sure that we guys get what we want and our female partners don’t.

Think about it. It all stems from the unchangeable fact that for the hugest part of our time as this species we didn’t have language anything like useful enough to have a discussion about who did what with whom and when. And it wouldn’t have done any good if we had, because we probably didn’t understand the connection between copulation and fertility anyway. Result: the females were alone in having certainty that the babe in their arms absolutely was theirs. Studies of comparable species show that the odds of a monogamous male wasting his time in feeding, protecting and training offspring who are not biologically his own are very high. Even today among knowledgeable, suspicious humans, anonymous surveys suggest that as many as 25% of kids are brought up by men who unknowingly are not their fathers.

Such an eventuality is evolution’s ultimate catastrophe for the individual bent on propagating his genes, which is the only thing we care about at the level of the biological organism. The male of many species, lions for example, avoid this disaster by killing any existing offspring of a female they hook up with. Humans, being highly communal and co-operative, don’t. So what the male does is take every chance he gets to swing his leg over someone else’s woman. If he spends his efforts raising someone else’s kid, but gets the mates of two other women to raise two of his, he's a winner.

So, since our cultural evolution has far outstripped the rate of the physical, and biologically we’re essentially cave-men and -women in suits and skirts, we guys are still wired up to pop our rocks and leave. Get to sleep as soon as possible, because that’s important for the success of the next day’s hunting. Of course, we come back the next day for more of the same with the same partner. Because ‘guarding behaviour', the polite sociological name for murderous jealousy, makes it most likely that the female we coupled with last night and for the preceding period of time really will be carrying our child. So the main strategy is always going to be to hang around and keep the groceries flowing.

But if the male gets a chance to leap the odd back fence while some other guy is off doing …whatever, both he and the neighbour’s missus have a certain investment in laying off their bets with another partner.

That’s right – both of them. Because the female is stuck with an uncertainty neatly corresponding to the male’s: unless she has no children and has only ever mated with Loverboy No. 1, she can't know if he is actually fertile. When life is brutish, nasty and short, every year of fertility counts more than we can imagine today. Not only does she have to be free of disease or debility, she has to be carrying enough body fat to ovulate, menstruate and produce milk. And have enough healthy years left in her to see the kids through to university at age, say, twelve. Not an everyday guarantee in 150,000 BC. A couple of years wasted with a husky hunter shooting blanks is another catastrophe.

So, if we observe how The Act, in its default setting, works, we can see exactly why it is the way it is today. The male piles in, gets his rocks off and rolls over for his beauty sleep as soon as she’ll let him go. She is attracted, turned on, stimulated, but during the act the chance that there will be enough of the right sort of clitoral contact to produce that satisfying orgasm is very low. So she clings, holds him in her, wanting more and unknowingly providing those little spermies the optimum environment to complete their long paddle to light up an egg.

And, just as nature designed it, when Big Hunter has rolled off and is stacking up Z’s in the corner – she still wants more! So maybe she’s aware of some youthful eyes glittering in a far corner of the cave, has observed an unattached stud with his mitts in his loincloth while they’ve been at it. Mmmm. Insurance time.

Sadly, of course, it’s no more likely that lover number two is going to hit the G-spot either, or even be interested in doing so. But maybe. You never know.

Don’t believe me? Female chimpanzees will routinely copulate with every male in the family group.

Of course, although for the interests of readability I describe all this as though the protagonists are doing all this in full knowledge of the whys and wherefores, or as if some notional designer worked it all out that way, that’s not how evolution produces behaviour or physiology. Just as no-one up there, be it God, or Evolution as Architect, has any interest in making us behave in a manner which makes us happy. All that happens is that men, and women, who by inclination are sufficiently promiscuous to cover their bets but not so promiscuous that they incite jealous rage and an early death will out-reproduce those at either end of the promiscuity spectrum, viz., the nuns and the slappers. That ideal point is to be faithful, do whatever you can to keep your husband on song and providing, or your wife faithful, but when opportunity arrives, cover off the risk with someone else. Especially because in early times we lived and moved in smallish groups, with correspondingly small and interconnected gene pools, and the chance of the odd infidelity being exposed by a child of incongruously variant appearance was small.
Thinking about this for about three seconds, you will realise that this is why women are still powerfully driven to control their husbands. Women with children can't hunt. And because the children tie them to the home, they are very vulnerable to the aforementioned guarding behaviour - physically weak and unable to shift any further or faster than their children can travel. But they still feel that urge to cover their bets. Result: they're much better than we are at cheating, because throughout all of pre-history the best they could hope for, if caught, was abandonment.The penalty still meted out to adulterous women in barbarous cultures remains to this day very strong evidence for this. So I'm willing to bet that three times as many cheating husbands get caught as cheating wives. In one of my long relationships, in my earlier years, I strayed and my partner knew immediately and hit the roof. This happened twice in three years. If she had not told me at the end of our relationship I would never have known that during those three years she maintained a sexual relationship with one of our friends. I never suspected. 

To return to The Act, yes, it's true. Without thought and intervention women who rely on coitus to achieve sexual repletion will remain perpetually unsatisfied. Because that lack of satisfaction produces higher rates of successful reproduction. It’s a good strategy.

Enter, the articulate, uninhibited and informed Modern Man and Woman. How do we deal with it?

The answer is, for a long time, very badly. When we eventually got around to even mentioning it we tried to brand the female orgasm a myth. In Victorian times male doctors called it ‘hysteria’ (from the Greek word for the uterus), i.e. a kind of madness, and alternately invented a machine to discharge the dangerous ‘hysterical paroxysm’ or carved off women’s clitori to settle them down. I had a second cousin who had her uterus removed in the early 1950s as an attempt to treat her schizophrenia; even that late in history the belief persisted in some dark corners of the asylum that there was some connection between a woman's reproductive instincts and insanity.

In the 70s, the feminists came up with an answer which really sucked, and was drivel into the bargain. Women are unsatisfied because men are pigs who don’t care. A miserable time was had by all, because could there be anything more stupid, more filled with self-hatred, than the belief that Nature got it all wrong, that the universe doesn’t work?

All along, women have combated Nature’s heartless design using two principal methods that I know of. Masturbation, obviously, and in a couple of lovers in my life, aggressive and (to me) painful grinding, probably the origin of the notion of the vagina dentata. Ouch!

We’re almost there, but let me chuck in another consideration. Conservative Christians, Muslims and probably Jews like to say that the only purpose of the sexual act is reproduction. As a Catholic, I find that a damn shame. I am proud that the Catholic Church was the first major religious group to recognise the truth of evolution. Many eminent scientists are Catholic and the Vatican even has a Jesuit-run observatory which works at the forefront of astronomy and astro-physics. But when it comes to biology, sociology and palaeobiology as it informs our knowledge of sexual behaviour, they remain firmly cemented in the Stone Age. The idea that human sexuality is exclusively about reproduction is utterly anti-scientific and in defiance of the evidence.

Homo sapiens is one of many species that use sex for far more than reproduction. Just look at all those homosexual giraffes. Stops the victorious bull male from constant challenge by the unsuccessful losers, I suppose.

But even by that standard we’re out on a limb as one of the few in which the female will willingly engage in, even seek sex when she is not ovulating, and the male will oblige at any time in the menstrual cycle. We have evolved to use sex as a means of communication. Not only that, but I am convinced that for us this is an important and highly effective compensation for the confusing complexity of our verbal and non-verbal communication. In sex we communicate body-to-body, heart-to-heart at a depth and with a simplicity which transcends the verbal.

Especially when both the man and women have orgasms, and very especially when they occur either together or in close sequence, in blatant defiance of Nature’s plan.

So let’s hear it for the lucky couples in which the woman gives herself orgasms during sex. Any male who has been lucky enough to experience this has enjoyed the incomparable pleasure of being brought to stupendous orgasm by the sudden rise in intra-uterine temperature and a flood of natural lubricant.

What can I say? Tell your friends. Put it on Facebook. Tell everyone.

Believe me, it's the best.