Susi’s Great Unleashing

I have never been one for Rugby.  In fact, I was dreading the Rugby World Cup, but like all good Kiwis I had a couple of flags flying from the car, depending whether or not the Pumas were playing, or the All Blacks.  It was difficult at Artworks Theatre, where I would go to watch it all on the gigantic screen, when the ABs were playing the Pumas -  a different flag in each hand, cheering on the Pumas with all the Latinos in the audience, and then the ABs in our next collective exhale of breath.

It went like this:  out of the corner of my eye, when my son was watching one of the earlier matches, I saw this behemoth in black lunge down the field, a rugby ball clasped effortlessly in the hugest cartoon hands and then crouch and offload the ball to someone behind him, someone you had barely noticed, and with such a move pave the way to victory.

Who is that?  I said to my son, taking note for the first time, that this in fact was a game of skill.  Why, that’s SBW and he’s famous for that, he said.

I even talked about it with rugby affecionados in the market the next day.  Everyone nodded knowingly and I felt for the first time part of the nation’s collective footy tribe.

I was paying attention, when I watched the next game.  The cinema screen made everything larger than life.  On Waiheke, everyone knows each other and I could hear a German friend behind me saying this was her first game.  I turned round and told her to pay attention to the monster with the big hands.

Oh look, his sleeve is torn, the German woman exhorted, exhaling from her nose and snorting like a horse.  Fair enough, I thought, they go for each like feral animals, so that makes sense.  Oh look, he’s ripping off his sleeve she continued - my god, he is taking off his jersey. Oh wow, oh wow Susi! Just look at his tatoo!

I would have been paying even more attention, had I know he was Rose’s cousin, but I didn’t really need to with the non-stop running commentary of German female appreciation behind me in the theatre.

I’m coming back next week, she said, I want to see some more!

I was now one of the boys, and could discuss footy with the best of them, and it was during one such animated debate on the ferry with Mua that I learned that there is a grandmother somewhere down the line, living in your average small New Zealand town, who went in and bought all the No.12 All Black jerseys in stock (and at $130+ a pop, that’s not cheap) from the local sports’ shop, and cut off all the right sleeves.

Legend!

That image of the jerseyless, ripped, tatooed Hemi Dean aka SBW, is probably keeping alive all the women senior citizen in the country, though they might not like to admit it. Hehehehe!

Imagine then to discover the Waiheke connection.  My sister’s stepsister’s best friend and the tragedy in the house at Erua St.  And who was that on the beach the other day,  calling out Neville! Neville! as a tiny ball of fluff , half the size of those cartoon hands,  outran the those infamous thighs?

Rose’s aunty has been mending my clothes for a decade now.  I should have been paying more attention when she told me her nephew would be home when I went there to pick up Woody’s pants.  I did wonder why a curly blonde woman had a Polynesian nephew the size of an elephant with intricate tatoos.  His girlfriend was sitting on his lap and I remember thinking she was pretty.

I can’t help wondering what that grandmother is going to do with all those sleeveless No. 12 jerseys, and with all those right sleeves.  Maybe she could turn them into jerseys for dogs like Neville, and earn back the Pension money she spent giving into fantasy.

Go the mighty All Blacks!!

Have you ever heard of a ‘sod off shed’?  No, I hadn’t either until two kindergarten friends from the UK turned up, one from the days of hand-knitted mohair cardigans and patent leather party shoes and the other from clandestine visits to the rocks on the Italian Riviera to hang out with the sons of Nervi fishermen.

“Your mother did not approve of Claudio” she said, as we studied the black and white photos of our Summer holiday all those years’ ago.  In his skimpy togs, that left nothing to the imagination, and abs to die for, I could see why.   “What a fab time we had.  It was brill!”.

I smiled at the words ‘fab’ and ‘brill’, words I haven’t heard since I went to see the Beatles at Finsbury Park, they too in black and white, when I screamed solidly for 2 hours, in my faux leather skirt and my knee high socks on which I had embroidered “Paul” in green silk thread.

A photo of my other friend, from London in the 1970′s, cracked us up. Sitting in a tent at a Grateful Dead concert, her cheeks puffed out like a hamster and her eyes gazing into the beyond,  an old Afghan coat keeping her warm and a joint the size of a pork sausage in her right hand, she looked more dead than alive.  ”Cor blimey, you could roll half a dozen joints with one that size!” someone said.

I haven’t been to England since 1985 and then it was just to pick up a jar of Marmite and quickly get on a plane back to the US.  I had forgotten how posh people from there sound, the precision in the pronounciation, the understatedness of the language, the inbuilt sang froid of the  - “oh bother boots!” rather than the Kiwi ”fa-ah-ah-kung hell!”.

When my car fell into a ditch, on loan to friends who had celebrated Easter by drinking a bottle of whiskey and not paying attention, I told my friends that I was going to banish them to the garden shed to sober up.  ”You’re sending them to the ‘sod off shed’” my friend said, in a Somerset accent.  ”That there is the ‘sod off shed’” and she pointed to the garden shed.

We watched the antics of the drunken sods, in their shed, from a tiny window in a bathroom in the top floor of my house.  If someone had taken a photo, it would show 3 older women, all wearing spectacles, creening their necks for a better look.  ”Look!” one said “they’re stroking each others’ arms in some kind of martial art dance”.  ”Yes, whiskey makes you do funny things” I said, remembering the first and last time I drank whiskey, finding myself sitting naked on my parent’s sofa between two other naked bods, and I still can’t remember what happened.

In ”The Hurt Locker” – the biggest ‘sod off shed’ of them all – the men drink whiskey and punch each other, so my friends and I became extra vigilant when the martial art stroking turned into wrestling and there were thuds emanating from the shed.   One sod disappeared rather suddenly from view,  felled to the ground not by speed and force of muscle, but by  inibriation and the all-consuming desire to lie down no matter where.

I tiptoed to the ‘sod off shed’, and peeked around the door.  I half expected a gruff voice – “sod off” – as I braced myself.  I was quite used to the garden shed, but a ‘sod off shed’  has a meta identity, a bit like the ‘naughty step’ or the ‘time out room’.

“Is he alive?” one of my friends asked, when I returned to the house. A nice pot of tea had been made as is customary in alarming situations. “Well, I think so”, I replied “he seems to be breathing and someone has covered him with a quilt and put his head on a pillow, and there’s a bowl of oysters by his head and a mug of black coffee.”

There was a ‘sod off shed’ in the wonderful film “BOY”, where the man of the house hangs up his gang patch and  is immune to the magic powers of his youngest son, Rocky.  It is not only a place one gets sent to, it is also a place from where one can tell others to “sod off”, when they call you for dinner or to ask you to bring in the washing.

Some bloke made a fortune by writing a book about blokes and their sheds, with stunning colour photographs of men in shorts in front of garages or tumbledown wooden shacks they call their own.   I am not sure if mention was made of the ‘sod off shed’, but just in case, I offer this photo for inclusion in any future edition.



It is exactly three hundred and forty-one days since I posted anything on this blog.  341 days during which I have been totally absorbed in climate change, 341 days of drowning in acronyms – UNFCCC – LULUCF – REDD – NAMAS – NAPAS – BASIC – AOSIS – CDM – MRV – MVCS – these, and many more,  now bounce around in my brain and roll of my tongue as I navigate my way through the inconprehensible policy documents and advocacy statements that clog my Inbox on an hourly basis.

341 days’ later, I am now on a holiday from my Inbox.  I must resist the temptation to click on the terminal server from home and await the day I return to work where thousands of e-mails will greet me.  A curt message is displayed to all who try to contact me – I am not available for 2 weeks, if it’s urgent, breathe deep and find someone else. Sorry.

Now I have time to read a book, to weed the garden, to brush the cobwebs from the rafters, to bake and sew, maybe even paint.

It has been a long and exhausting year.  I have met some extraordinary people.  I have learned that the world is a complex place and that there is little to celebrate about being human.  The road ahead is paved with a hopelessness I was not aware of 341 days’ ago.

At the Pasifika Festival a couple of weeks’ ago, the dancers from Tuvalu performed in spectacular costumes, wide smiles and skin the colour of toasted honeycomb.  My friend from Kiribati said “Do not be fooled by our smiles, our always smiling, our laughter and our song.  Beneath all that, in our hearts, we carry a despair about losing our land and culture, to the encroaching tides, to the king tides, which turn our drinking water brakish and our skin red and blistered.  Our children line the corridors of our inadequate hospitals;  our fish fills the bellies of people thousands of miles away; when the tsunamis come and the radio tells us to go to higher ground, we pray.  There is no higher ground.  We live in fear because we do not understand why this is happening to us.  Can you tell us why?”

0.06% of global emissions of greenhouse gases come from the Pacific.  Islands like Tuvalu, Kiribati and Tokelau.  Their islands are disappearing before their eyes.  This is not a dramatic statement intended to get you to sit up and take notice, it is a fact.

Yes, my friend, I can tell you why.  Our greed and addiction to stuff - to the display of acquisition representing status to satisfy our addled screwed up brains – means that we need to fill our lives with product, we measure our success by how much  we consume, we shop til we drop because we are basically fucked up.

In 341 days, almost 300,000 people will have died because of climate change related impacts.  Of these 300,000, most will be in the developing world, the people who are least responsible for the problem.

So, that’s the what and the why, but what of the how?  How do we change things?  In 341 days immersed in this fight for survival have I seen much change?  The tragedy of what happened in Copenhagen in December 2009 should be etched on everyone’s soul, and branded on our collective conscience.  The big globe in the Bella Centre where the UN climate change summit was held did not even include the Pacific Islands.  A large expanse of oceanic islands at the frontline of climate change not displayed in a United Nations’ summit on climate change, with 193 world leaders present .

How I cheered on the strong clear voice of the delegate from the tiniest of these ‘forgotten’ islands, who likened what was happening to the low-lying atolls of the Pacific, a crime against humanity. Watching it live on my laptop, from the comfort of my deck on a sunny afternoon, I probably saw more of what happened during those tragic hours than many present in Copenhagen at the time.   The suppressed rage of those present, many who had not slept for days, the blood dripping from the palm of a South American beauty as she smashed her table in disgust, the Prime Minister of Denmark, Chair of the Conference of Parties, becoming inchoherent through exhaustion and having to be removed from the Plenary.

A convergence is about to happen in Cochabamba in the 3rd week in April. The World’s People’s Conference has been convened to talk about the rights of Mother Nature.  Thousands are journeying from all the corners of the globe, to Cochabamba to discuss the how.  It’s purpose is to set the stage for a World Referendum on Climate Change.

This  World Referendum will take place on October 12th this year. On this day we can start to put an end to the madness.  The questions are very simple:-

a. Do you agree to restore harmony with nature, being aware of the rights of Mother Earth?

b. Do you agree to change this over consumption and waste model that represents capitalist system?

c. Do you agree that developed countries should reduce and re-absorb their domestic greenhouse gas emissions for temperature not to rise more than 1 degree Celsius(1°C)?

d. Do you agree with transferring everything spent on wars and allocating a higher budget in defense of Mother Earth?

e. Do you agree to establish a Climate Justice Tribunal to judge those who destroy Mother Earth?

Voting in the World Referendum will be simple – by electronic means,  by popular vote, through customary channels etc.  A Unity of Peoples’ Nations (UPN) will be formed to be the representative organisation and the results of the Referendum will be taken to the Conference of Parties of the UNFCCC when they meet in Mexico at the end of November.

This is the beginning of the how.

It has taken me 341 days to become a radical.  341 days of learning who is to blame for the mess we are in. 341 days of my eyes brimming with tears on a daily basis as I read what kind of planet my children will inherit.  341 days of realising who is to blame and why.

Not sure when I’ll get back to the blog again.  Once this break is over I’ll be back in the maelstrom of climate change campaigning, navigating my way through thousands of e-mails, looking for that small ray of hope to guide us out of the Darkness, towards the future.  Will my heart be singing 341 days from now?  The answer is in all of our hands.

When you have two of the largest NGOs in the world, sitting round the table together talking about consicous collaboration on climate change campaigning, you know governments will sit up and take notice.

I wanted to slap the young climate change activist, as full of herself as this planet is of greenhouse gases.  She was making a climate fool of herself and needed to shut up.  The thing is with these green greenies, who come into a multi-national NGO in the media spotlight, it all goes to their heads.   The founding mothers and fathers of these global movements were never paid a cent for the work they did, we weren’t on designer clothing salary.  Our sweat and tears enabled this young upstart to mouth off, to show off, and it made me cringe.  I noticed her handmade leather boots and the tailored jacket, the salon hair cut and the manicured nails.  I felt mischevious and couldn’t resist throwing a curly one her way about A1 aggregate reduction targets in global effort sharing.  I knew she wouldn’t know what I was talking about.  Hehehe.  That shut her up!

This collaboration, this decision to unite to combat climate change, has been a long time coming.  It makes  common sense to join forces.  Add up the membership of these NGOs here in New Zealand and it would probably represent more than a quarter of our population.  That’s a lot of people putting pressure on the government to do the deal at the climate change conference in Copenhagen!

The former Prime Minister accepted a packet of sausages from Peter, The Mad Butcher, on stage at her farewell last weekend.  She’s off to head the United Nations Development Programme and climate change is on her mind.  She had told me so when we interviewed her for the film the day before.  She handed the plastic bag to her husband, Peter, who was sitting behind her on stage.  “What the hell are we going to do with these?” he whispered to her in front of a crowded hall.  They were flying out within 2 hours.  He was going with her for a week, to prove that she did indeed have a husband, and probably help her unpack.

The sausages will be in the freezer when he returns, but he’ll be eating them on his own.  Outside the venue a wall of tv cameras where waiting for Helen and entourage to exit.  They were not allowed inside, but our cameras were.  They glared at us as we came out filming the departure.  Eat your heart out TVNZ!

I was confused at the writing on the envelope in my mailbox the following Monday.  It looked like mine.  I couldn’t remember writing myself a letter, but I do a few strange things from time to time, like putting my glasses in the fridge.  I opened the envelope and saw the signature.  Helen had obviously been clearing her desk in preparation for the move to New York and had filled in her personal release form for our her interview in the ‘bombs and scones’  film.  I looked at the e-mail address.  It was simply her first name, no fanfare – not like the climate change activist -  the humility and understatement of a true world leader.

We  asked her about makeovers and hair styles.  “I do my own” she answered “I had to be taught how!”  I can imagine her in front of the mirror, trying to get it right with the blow dryer, not smudging the lipstick.

There’s more than Mad Butcher sausages awaiting her return to Aotearoa/New Zealand.  The queues of cross-cultural representatives stretched across the hall, patiently waiting their opportunity to say goodbye, thank you, and to pass on gifts, revealed the dimensions to her popularity.   She is a dearly loved by this tiny nation at the bottom of the world, this farmer’s daughter who enjoys a good read in a bunk in a frozen hut several thousands feet up on some faraway mountain.  Voted the most popular Kiwi, beating Sir Ed, one can feel the void already.  Come back soon!

They don’t do barbies in New York and they would probably cringe at the thought of Mad Butcher saussies.  But that’s who we were are, and she is one of us.   You can have her for a while America, but remember, she’s ours and we want her back.

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve got my tits in a tangle over Twitter.  I feel a right twit, or should that be twot, or indeed twat, but I just can’t seem to get the tweeting thing going.  I feel inadequate.   Everyone, it seems, is happily tweeting away – except me – MPs in the House, a famous British actor tweeted  “arse, poos and widdle” when stuck in a lift, even someone’s dog twoofed  “I got a ball, I got a ball, I got a ball”.  Try as I may, I can’t figure it out.  I am condemned to a world of twilence.  Consequently, no-one is following me and I am following no-one. It’s a lonely place. Contrast this with Britney Spears who has upwards of 700.000 followers.   Maybe there’s something to be said for wearing no undies in public.

Facebook has 175 million members, My Space 100 million, Bebo 40 million, Flickr 44 million visitors a month, LinkedIn and Plaxo around 20 million members each, Twitter 6 million, Cafemom 1 million, and there are an estimated 200 million blogs in the world, of which this is only one.   Not a great unleashing by any stretch of the imagination. – more a petit plop in the great ocean of virtual verbosity. I feel even more inadequate.

The nights are getting longer and colder and the blankets are being aired in the noonday sun.  The dog has taken my sheepskin slippers under the house and has added them to a pile of cherished canon bones, a chewed Bart Simpson doll and a couple of old toothbrushes.  Everyone is preparing to hunker down and hibernate, collect firewood, clean chimneys, bottle fruit and knit jumpers.  “If you can survive a Waiheke winter” the refrain goes “you can survive anything”.  I quite like the unexpected element of power cuts and rough seas, torrential rain and the ever-present Winter request “please remove muddy boots before entering”.  There’s nothing quite like the smell of baking bread, or a fortifying broth,  when you’re wrapped around a pot belly darning socks.  Piping hot water from the wet back allows for extra soaking in well deserved baths.  If only I knew how to tweet, I would have 140 characters in which to say “in bath, alone with candle, reading Tolstoy, listening to Wagner, eating feijoas, cutting toenails, blowing bubbles, scratching my…”

That won’t make the Top Ten Tweets, but this did, from a TV host at this year’s academy awards.  “Ever wonder what happens if someone has to do go the bathroom on the carpet?  There’s a portapotty behind the fan stands.  Now you know.”

Bless.

The clocks go back tonight but it still feels like summer with the scorching sun and the parched land.  I watched a movie about bush fires in Australia last night, the Christmas fires they were called, that took the lives of over 500 people around Sydney.  A deal had been done between the Premier and the largest energy company in the state, for a lot of money, and so when the fires came, the water just wasn’t there.  Makes me think the world needs a lot more than just an Earth Hour, it needs something to get inside the heads of the greedy to flick that switch off too.

From my desk in the chaotic office in downtown Auckland I read hundreds of e-mails about what is happening to the climate and I feel sick.  People walk the streets here oblivious to the implications of what we are doing to future generations and our Prime Minister drinks expensive Waiheke wine while Gaia burns.

Someone should tell Flight of the Concords that we (New Zealand) won third place in the Fossil of the Day Award at the climate change conference in Bonn.  They could incorporate that into one of their deadpan songs.  A government representative had shown a picture of a sheep in a discussion on agricultural greenhouse gas emissions to the assembled international elite in Germany.  Everyone knows that Killer Farts (well, actually it’s their burps) come from cows.  How embarrassing is that? In front of all those intelligent people!  Not only is the Prime Minister of New Zealand a climate skeptic,  he risks making a fool of us all at the General Assembly in September.  ‘Clean green New Zealand’ is a load of bullshit, and to keep with the fecal analogy, why aren’t people creating a stink about climate change?

What is it that will propel a mass movement in this country to take to the streets, in the same way they do in Paris,  or in South America, over an issue like climate change?  Anger at injustice is the emotion which has altered the course of history over the ages, with uprisings and huge popular mobilisation. Are New Zealanders just too complacent, too timid, maybe not angry enough, too comfortable?   It is far easier to stay at home and sign online petitions than rally in the thousands.  In the 80′s Kiwis had guts.  Look at what happened with the Springbok Tour, and the huge marches down Queen Street for nuclear disarmament.  We were an example to the world. Now we have been crowned fossil fool.

Kit and Maynie did it all without computers or mobiles, even an electric typewriter, even a typewriter.  They started in the days when protest marches had to be two abreast, on the pavement.

Both veteran peace activists are now revitalised from celebrating their 90 birthdays in such a fanfare of media attention and are planning to walk the first mile of the Global Peace March which kicks off in Auckland in September.  They want to resurrect the local peace group on the island, they are on a roll.  Every time I see Kit, she gives me a great big hug.  It makes me feel so happy to know that the film has given them a new lease on life.  My job is done.

Helen has got one of the top jobs at the United Nations.  Good on her.  Hubby will stay at home and tend the hearth.  I can imagine him doing that.  Baking scones for when she comes home on leave. We will be filming her at the goodbye party at her electorate office in Mount Albert in a couple of weeks  We will be working with Chris,  one of the best cinematographers in the country.  I think we all feel  honoured to have been chosen for this role, to have been asked to make this film about her life.

Each day at sunrise, when I am on the ferry home, I sit on the deck with my feet on the railings sipping on a Captain’s Club beer watching the Sky Tower disappear and the Gulf open to reveal her beauty.  I feel contaminated by the city, by the hum of the busy activist computers, all in close proximity, in the heat, fans blowing the papers around.  I feed my beloved colleagues feijoas from my trees “picked off the ground”, I hasten to add.  They must fall, ripened by the sun, guarded by the kereru.   We communicate silently, from one electronic pod to the other, with the blinds closed to avoid the glare on the screen.   With the kereru, I just plain talk.  When the pair are having a domestic, I try to counsel better behaviour.  Yes, kereru really do have domestics!

This afternoon I watched my daugher feed ham to a praying mantis who has been preparing to birth on the frangipani outside the front door.  I am keeping an eye on her because she has been there for a few days now – it must be a long labour.  Naawie and I stared at this wondrous creature feeding off a slither of meat, balanced on a toothpick, balanced on a branch.  Every now and then, she’d turn her head around, checking her load.  She was crouched on her front legs, facing down.  Good birthing position I thought.

The idea that we will lose over 40% of our species with the increase of  global temperature,  is horrifying.   The 2800 scientists from 80 countries who met in March have shown that the IPPC predictions were way off mark.  They are putting together a report, out in June.  They will send it to all the governments.   That will be our global doomsday book.  We will be put on notice,  and we will be as unprepared as those poor people in that film I saw last night. There will have been deals done among the rich to save their sorry ass – in fact, deals are being done as we speak.

Until we find that switch within,  it doesn’t matter how many Earth Hours we have.   We have to be the change ourselves and that takes courage.

In the meantime, I am scheming with the genius guys at WETA, for a holocaust of immense proportions to be visited on the powers that be, bigger than Killer Farts, bigger than King Kong.   Watch this space!

“Are you famous?” I asked the 6ft 2ins Dr Moyo from Harare.  I had watched as a giggle of young girl teens had pursued him around the WoBar, all wanting to take a photo, and he had come for sanctuary in our tent.  Next door the monks were in full throat, dying and being reborn.  That was from 2-3pm.  After that, they’d leave en masse to groove with the Little Bushman or Fat Freddy’s Drop.  They received texts as they queued for the loo along with us mere mortals, and smiled from ear to ear in recognition when our paths crossed.  I had stuck my head through the lush Moroccan tent in which they were housed, the first day I’d arrived, to introduce myself.  A guy in jeans said “Fancy a monk, take your pick” and everyone grinned.  I promised to return, and left rather quickly.

Speed Caravan kept everyone on their toes while the guys from Paris got a moko done, as we all looked on, waiting for the first wince of the needle on skin.

Turns out our beautiful doctor is a nightly feature on the most popular Kiwi soap.  My oh my!  He certainly attracted a lot of young women to our stall, and we did get a lot of signatures for our climate change petition thanks to him, so when he said “use me” I went, “you’re on, my brother!”

The major bummer was the woman who said I was being paid by the oil industry to fabricate bullshit about climate change. It didn’t seem to matter that there were scientists meeting in Copenhagen, the same weekend as the festival, saying things are actually a lot worse than they first thought.  She didn’t believe me, and spat in my face and started sentences off with stuff like “the trouble with you people….”

I am not one for huge amounts of people.  I’ve been there and done that, listening to Grateful Dead knee deep in mud, one song lasts the whole afternoon and seems like the blink of an eye in retrospect.  Here there were waves of elves and faeries and grandmothers in lace, blind aboriginals and frenetic Egyptian dancers.  At the foot of Taranaki, the spiritual mountain dusted in an icing sugar coating of snow, everything exudes magic.  Surrounded by forests of kauri and puriri, you can see why Peter Gabriel chose this spot, for his baby.  If only the whole world could be like WOMAD! Clean toilets, delicious food, happy people, fantastic music.

The East coast of the North Island is a surfer’s paradise.  Rolling in from Australia, the breakers move in synchronicity along miles and miles of unspoiled beaches.  I felt Taranaki’s gaze for hours, the jagged peak rising up through a cloak of mist, as we drove back home.  Everywhere we stopped, there were people from Waiheke.  The whole tribe had relocated South for the World of Music and Dance.

I bought a wizard hat made out of a seed pod.  On the ferry home my embarrassed daughter insisted I take it off.   She made me promise I would never wear it in public when she’s around. I look at it now and smile, remembering all those others at the foot of Taranaki, with their seed pod hats, their sultan trousers and dreadlocks, their tatoos and clear-skinned faces.  I can’t wait to get back.  If only the whole world were indeed like WOMAD….

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I was doing my bit for climate change. I needed to get to the rock star to tell him that New Zealand is pretty slack when it comes to upholding commitments in the global push to reduce greenhouse gases.  I also wanted to know if he remembered me from the previous millennium when we had sped around London together in a stretch limo.

Sitting in my Circle seat, with a packed crowd underneath the stars of the Civic dome, an interior which makes you dream of Spanish castles, the tears came strong and fast.  Music of my youth.  I remembered every word, every love making, every dream of that time.

I was trying to be discreet and make my way out to the loo.  Someone in the audience yelled  “We want to thank you Jackson for what you did after the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior.  Choice”.

“Choice as” I muttered under my breath, listening out for his reply.  I would tell him later of my connection, as we shook hands, in a soundbite moment.

“You look familiar” he said.

He gave me a bottle of beautiful red wine and we posed for photos.  I mentioned our Prime Minister who some say is the NZ equivalent of Obama.  Yeah, right.  Barack at least has a plan to reduce greenhouse gases emissions by 80% by 2050.  New Zealand, instead, is intent on going backwards.

“We-need-to-put-pressure-on-the-government-to-come-to-the-table-in-June-with-some-real-measures-to-cut-greenhouse-gases”  I blurted out in one long sentence without breathing.  “Could you help?  The Pacific will be hit first and worst.  It’s already happening.”

There was a queue of people waiting to greet the rock star and I was hogging the space.   He felt like an old friend and I was sorry I had to dash off and catch the last ferry back to the island.  I could see that he was genuine in his concern for what was happening to those small atolls. So he should be, so should we all.

There is not room enough in my head to contain the enormity of the situation.  I am concerned for my children.  I panic about what the world will look like for them when they are my age.   This usually happens in the middle of the night when I can’t do anything about it.  Not sure I can do anything about it anyway, but I’ll give it my best shot.  I’ll be head down bum up for 4 months, so if you don’t hear from me, you know what I’m up to.  Sadly, the news I heard in the office on Thursday was not good.  It does not look as if Copenhagen 2009 will produce any  concrete results for our planet and that the discussion will drag on and on well into 2010.

However, maximum respect to Obama for taking the first step. He also cut all funds for the nuclear weapons budget just 37 days into his presidency.  Way to go, Obie!  Let’s pray the world will follow.

It was stuffy in the editing booth.  I was sitting on a seat wrapped in a gingham table cloth.  I had been caught in a massive downpour and in spite of ankle-length oil skins and a good umbrella, I had been caught in a squall in the middle of New North Road.

It was my first day at work, and as I squelched around my new office, my pants started to make their way down my legs.  Not a good look for a first day, I thought.  I dived into a narrow storage area.  Hey, these guys worked in the Pacific.  There were bound to be a few lava-lavas around the place.  The red and white chequered pattern of a bolt of fabric caught my attention.  I grabbed it, quickly dropped my drawers, and tied it around me like a sarong.  The timing couldn’t have been worse.  The Executive Director was coming out of his office and I knew I would have to introduce myself no matter what I was wearing.

Seated in the booth, I was reviewing a series of films about women around the world affected by climate change.  Sisters of the Planet.  One of my new colleagues had filmed some of their stories.  6 women interviewed from Africa,India, Asia, The Pacific, Australia, Europe.  There were places mentioned, near to home, I had never heard of.  Small islands in Melanesia whose inhabitants are watching helplessly as the ocean moves in, destroying homes -like the raging fires – yet much slower.  Sometimes you can put out a fire, but what power can stop the ocean from advancing?

The pain in the eyes of these women brought tears to my eyes.  “There are no words to describe the pain we feel” a woman from Uganda said as she walked miles and miles to dig through rocks to find water.  The region had once been plentiful.  She wanted to know how to stop the big thirst.  She said she was so anxious.  How do you stop the big thirst?   I watched her swinging pleated skirt and the movement of her lean body over rocks as she carried sticks home.  There didn’t seem to be a man in sight.

Hearing these stories, I felt overwhelmed with the magnitude of the problem.  Endurance has given these women a strength few people I know have.  I may pat myself on the back for recycling all the laundry water, and be anal about 3 minute showers, but I have never had to spend a whole day walking to find water.  That is survival, keeping the show on the road, the big one, and it is the women who do it.  Their message is so simple.  I want to bring them to Copenhagen, to speak to the United Nations about climate justice, to show them what life is like as a climate refugee.

No, I cannot imagine the pain of watching your land, your house, your history disappear under water.  Before you see anything change too much, you will know your time has come.  The drinking water will become salty.  And when you’re stuck on a small atoll, surrounded by ocean, and your drinking water is salty…there ain’t no Pump or H2Go just around the corner.

The news I heard sitting round the table in the ‘fish bowl’ was scary.  The world is heating up quicker than predicted.  I’m hoping that our Prime Minister is a reasonable fellow and that he will do the right thing this year.   I am not sure he will remember me, but we did get photographed together last year, by mistake.  He may already know that New Zealand is not exactly a shining example of good climate consciousness.  Our contribution to global greenhouse gases has gone up, not down, since we were said we would cut emissions.  Tut tut Aotearoa/New Zealand.  Time to pull finger, mate.  We owe it to the world.

The entire front page of the Herald was devoted to the colour orange.  In the centre the words The Big Heat.  As if we didn’t know!   Record temperatures in 137 years.  Pointless having a shower because you never get dry. Large  toadstools which look like Barbie ufos have sprouted in the soil of a house plant.  I was bitten by 2 white tail spiders as I lay sleeping.

Thousands of school kids are trying to stay awake in class.  They are forbidden outside without a hat.  If I were President of Aotearoa, I would sort out the academic calendar so kids returned to school in the later part of the summer.  I am not sure that too much learning is done at high noon in these temperatures.  All I want to do is watch movies and eat chocolate.

My friend Catherine delivered her maiden speech in Parliament yesterday.  I am not sure if she should have called it that as technically she is a crone.  I watched it on YouTube as I wasn’t able to hear it in real time and chuckled at the thought of her in the Beehive!  When elected, I told her I would keep her honest. I like to think of her and my Grey Lynn flat-mate Gordon, falling in love on the old Kauri floor of my house.   In secrecy.  Not that I have any photos with which to bribe her should she be corrupted by power.  I somehow think she will always remain true to her values.  She wrote one of the best books I have ever read, about pioneering women in the Coromandel.  It’s out of print now, and I guard my copy with my life.  I doubt she’ll have time to write another for a while.   She sang a song at the end of her speech and got a standing ovation.  A haircut and smart clothes were indicative of her new status,  and although the habit maketh not the monk, nor, in this case – the maiden, it was fitting for the auspicious occasion.  She said herself, to those in the chamber, snigger snigger, that the last time she was in fact a maiden, was over 40 years’ ago!