The real Shem-el-Nessim

Dear Chris

Great to hear back from you and apologies for the pause. We are off to Qatar on Tuesday for the first of a series of launches in the Middle East and we travel on to Dubai and Oman. Busy times.

Your story was written with such knowledge and passion that I was convinced that you had to be from a strand of the family that was not known to me. A PDF version will be much appreciated.

My initial research into the Grossmith family was being undertaken around the same time as yours and my interest stemmed initially from genealogy. The first John Grossmith came to England from Holland in 1688 with the army of William of Orange – the Glorious Revolution. His descendants settled in Fawley, Reading and Bishops Waltham. My lot are from Bishops Waltham and are buried in St Peters Church.

It was a book - Government Upon First Principles by John Grossmith and published 1860 - handed down to me by my father, which was the catalyst for all my commercial activity of the past couple of years. The book incorporates a dedication in the form of a Vote of Condolence from The National Reform League to the Widow and Family of the late John Grossmith. John Grossmith died on 9 March 1867 and lived in Primrose Hill. His daughter Amelia (sister of John Lipscombe Grossmith who took over the business) was my Great Grandmother through her marriage to my Great Grandfather George Russell Brooke. [A copy of the dedication from the book is attached for you.]

I grew up thinking that John Grossmith was a social reformer and it wasn’t until the middle of 2005 that I made the link with the perfume house. I have Google and EBay to thank for that. J.Grossmith & Son Ltd lives on as the name of our family owned holding company and we have Grossmith Limited as our operating company.

Here we are now, owning one of the oldest perfume houses in the world and one of very, very few with its own Baccarat flacon. We have an opportunity to build on the revival of Grossmith as a perfume house to develop a world class brand for luxury products……the new challenge!

Some samples of the three launch scents, including Shem-el-Nessim, are winging their way to you accompanied by some background papers on the history and revival of Grossmith. I hope it all arrives intact……so you too can “smell the breeze” at last and have your very own Stan Tooprig moment!

Best regards
Simon

Simon P. Brooke
Managing Director
Grossmith Limited
6 Deanery Street
Mayfair
London W1K 1BA
www.GrossmithLondon.com

Revisited: You think we’ve got it tough?

Pictured: “How fit were you after five weeks of ‘Tuesday Trimming’? Lindsay McCaughan, who leads the exercises must be very fit indeed. Each week he went through the vigorous routine time after time under hot studio lights for rehearsals. Then he had to appear fresh and smiling for the programme itself. If you were puffing (as I was) after going through the exercises only once, admire this man who did it all without turning a hair.”

The “two most important events” in television in New Zealand in 1972 were the announcements that the country would soon have both “a Second Channel” and “Colour” — as soon as October 1973, it was predicted. Those who reacted with dismay may have been cheered by the 1972 New Zealand Television Annual: “Fortunately we are able to receive colour transmissions in black and white just as we are at present receiving black and white transmissions from colour films.” This would have been a relief to the colour refuseniks.

But the annual’s writers complained bitterly about the building of the satellite receiving station in Warkworth: “The cost of operating this service has been so limiting that we have had very little of direct on-the-spot television.”

Considering the dearth of outside broadcasts, the commentators were generous about the ubiquitous repeats; as a half-page devoted to the studio potboiler The Forsyte Saga testifies: “Some of us have now been privileged to see this outstanding series three times in three years.” Bad luck for anyone who didn’t consider watching regurgitated period costume dramas a privilege.

Reading this soft-cover magazine is like opening a time capsule. With a colour cover of the recently married Elsie and Steve Tanner posing with Ena Sharples from Coronation Street, the annual grandly boasted a PICTORIAL SOUVENIR OF THE YEAR’S VIEWING, but the interior is all in black and white on cheap newsprint. Olde English favourites, such as Geoffrey Bayldon as Catweazle (“the wizard who jumps through time from the Norman era more than a thousand years ago to the 20th Century”), grace its pages alongside local shows like Break 21, an “electronic word game” featuring a studio set that appears to have been stolen from Thames TV’s Magpie.

Some of the NZBC’s programming, though, was clearly unmissable (just imagine what a wasted device a remote control would have been, assuming such things even existed): “Prime Minister Jack Marshall has emerged from a great deal of Gallery exposure as the most completely composed person appearing on the programme.” Clearly, a tryout would have been wasted on Willie Jackson or Peter Dunne.

Filming for the 1972 series of Pukemanu 2 began “on location” — at the Tauherenikau racecourse near Masterton. “Despite more sophisticated techniques, better writing, more cohesion between episodes,” the annual writers complain, “there is no attempt to make this series anything other than a tale of typical everyday life in New Zealand.” A backhanded compliment if ever there was one, when you consider that such local shows were competing — at other times on the same channel, of course — with big budget US dramas like Alias Smith and Jones and Ironside, not to mention something called The Good Life. No, not the BBC’s Richard Briars/Felicity Kendall self-sufficiency comedy. This was the American take on downsizing: “Larry Hagman (star of I Dream of Jeannie) and Donna Mills, a couple who are sick of the irritations and responsibilities of middle class life, sell their house and car and take jobs as ‘experienced’ butler and cook on a wealthy estate…” Did it sink without a trace, or does any NZBC reader remember the show?

That the big US networks were cashed-up is brusquely underscored by this aside regarding the sophisticated special effects that were commonplace in bigger productions:

“Television viewers don’t always appreciate realism when they see it. For example, did you realise that Mission Impossible is the only television show with its own ‘working’ lift?

“A lift scene is one of the easiest to fake. You close the doors, show a fake indicator moving and the audience accepts the idea that somebody is going up or down.”

Fancy that. How fortunate for viewers that they had the investigative talents of New Zealand Television Annual experts to disclose such trade secrets for them, and how disappointed Kiwis must have been that those riveting lift scenes on all their other favourite shows were, in fact, shot in the linen cupboard.

Back in more sedate territory, Derek Nimmo is pictured sharing some distinctly non al dente spaghetti with his son Piers in “an Auckland hotel”; Marty Feldman rehearses the old goggle-eyed-flame-throwing-lighter-and-fag routine at the Feltex television awards presentation in the long-gone Mandalay; and the great Warren Mitchell as Alf Garnett grimaces over a glass of apparently corked Kiwi wine during a month-long stint of nightclub gigs. There was no Spy Valley Pinot Gris in them days.

As far as TV shows from the other side of the Atlantic went, a multi-page Coronation Street special catered to low-brow viewers. The soap, we’re told, was originally scheduled for only a 13-week run, but popular demand “miraculously” extended it:

“I say ‘miraculously’ because it’s always seemed to me that the people in charge of TV aren’t really very interested in what people like. And Coronation Street, though it very handsomely pays for itself now, has never been a cheap programme.”

I wonder what that writer would have said if he or she had been told that the show would still be handsomely paying for itself 6000 episodes and 34 years later, and that the 21st Century would bring Hollywood-style car stunts and movie-budget pyrotechnics to Weatherfield. Remember that for New Zealand fans, this was before Ray Langton joined the show the first time around (and if any Coro fans have been wondering what Neville Buswell has been up to for the last 28 years, read all about it here). In 1972, Albert Tatlock, Annie Walker and Hilda Ogden still ruled Kiwi screens, and a double-page spread, with a Dickensian pen-and-ink map of The Street by Anthony Cobb, showing who lived where, brings back long-forgotten Coro characters such as Effie Spencer, bus inspector Harry Hewitt and his wife Concepta.

The New Zealand Television Annual’s editorial style was neither hard-hitting nor illuminating. This, about the impending visit by Peter Adamson, Coronation Street’s Len Fairclough, is indicative of its laboured style: “The mountain of mail coming into the Television Studios reaches its peak when the characters are involved in controversy,” we’re coyly informed. Just a few lines later, the tone shifts to apologetic: “The real person is seldom completely separate from the character he is playing.” A nice way of warning Kiwi fans that he was a bastard in real life, too?

And this on “expatriate New Zealander” Ewen Solon (a familiar face on British screens at the time), who starred in Section 7 and was obviously quite the wag: “Solon was born in Mount Eden ‘although not the jail’ he quips.”

David Frost visited New Zealand in 1972 as well, but appears not to have been enamoured with Kiwi hospitality. He “breezed through” Auckland on September 4, having given a press conference at the Auckland Town Hall and “left for the United States during the night barely 16 hours after he arrived”.

And if, like Frost, you couldn’t bear 1972 New Zealand, or stomach another episode of The Mod Squad, NYPD or Hogan’s Heroes, as little as $420 could get you away from it all. The inside back cover of the 1972 New Zealand Television Annual offered “a luxury voyage and a month’s marvellous holiday as a bonus!” The ad copy went on to promise “NO CRAMP — NO SWOLLEN FEET — NO STOMACH ‘TIME CLOCK’ UPSET, Comfort all the way via Tahiti and Panama to Southampton in the 20,000-ton one-class super luxury cruise liner SHOTA RUSTAVELI”. The ‘Shot of Rust’ had five bars, and so its “FREE medical attention” was probably a much-needed part of the service. When you finally arrived in Southampton in 1973, you could head up to Weatherfied for a Coro catch-up at the Rover’s Return with Ray Langton.

It had to be better than watching Doctor At Large or The Partridge Family on the single channel of your black and white TV set. But try telling that to the young people of today and they won’t believe you.

Five Minutes with John Clarke

John Clarke gave Kiwi humour a voice 30 years ago through the wise rustic fool of Fred Dagg, and even though Clarke has lived in Australia for decades, he has magically retained a sense of New Zealandness that transcends the Tasman. He has said that "Dagg is laced all through [what I do], it’s just changed its name a bit". That would include The Games (great mock interview about its promotion here), the political interviews on Australian TV, the poetry, the DVDs, the Farnarkelling. Any attempt to define NZ humour must include John (photos: courtesy John Clarke). We thought that given that he started his career with the NZBC, it might be time to renew the relationship. We sat down with a virtual glass of Victorian Bitter and lobbed a few questions.

Have you seen Flight of the Conchords and if so do you see any affinity with your own work?

I first saw Bret and Jemaine some years ago in a theatre full of shared delight; they are very funny, musically gifted, clever, ironical and wherever they go, there's a map of New Zealand in the glove-box. Their current success is the more admirable because subtle, esoteric work requires a larger potential audience, since a cult (even a big one) will occupy only a small percentage of it. May they continue to burn with a blue flame.

Were you never tempted to go beyond Australia? Was it just the flying or did it just not interest you going to London or New York?

I was never interested. I live here.

You told an interviewer you don't get distracted from the writing process by reading other people's books and that “ideas come pretty quickly once you identify your departure point”. But parody requires close attention to the source material, doesn't it, and don't you have to love it at least a little in the first place?

I don't recall saying exactly that to an interviewer and you're quite right, you can't work in a vacuum. I do read other people's books although I'm a better reader of non-fiction than I am of fiction.

Which Oz and NZ authors, poets, columnists etc do you read and rate?

Most writers impress me and I think NZ in particular boxes above its weight.

Was your mother a big influence on your interests and career?

Yes. [Friends of NZBC who know Neva Clarke McKenna revere her.]

The web would seem to be a perfect fit for a polymath like yourself. Did you deliberately wait until “Web 1.0” had done its dash and you could do what you wanted quickly, cheaply and well? Or did you come late to it, as you seem to other things, and there was a eureka moment?

Various projects I've worked on have used the web in quite interesting ways and eventually I got around to setting up my own site. [We'll take that as a yes.]

What are your current obsessions, and do you have a close group of “wonderers”?

I'm not the best judge of my own obsessions and aside from reading perhaps too many of other people's books I think I'm probably one of the more balanced people in my ward. I don't know what “wonderers” are but if they ask, I'll have some tea and a lemon slice.
If "talk is the first draft of a lot of things but it's not the draft you'd submit", what's email?

Similar.
How have things changed in Australia since the election?

I suspect there's a lot of policy discussion going on at the moment in health, education, environmental issues, indigenous affairs and foreign policy, since these are areas where the electorate clearly felt the Howard government was operating on muscle-memory. If there are not significant initiatives in these areas quite quickly, somebody may get a yellow card.

If NZBC readers read only one book this year, which book should it be?

A book by someone else.

What's on your iPod’s “On the go” playlist at the moment, or are you an iPod refusenik?

I don't even have a mobile phone.

Five minutes with Chad Taylor

“Early and avid” Chad Taylor fan Mr O’Neill wrote in his rave NZBC review of Departure Lounge that he’d been “a bit disenchanted” with some of Chad’s more recent books because he likes his realism, well, you know, real. The author commented “Man, you’re gonna hate the new one.” That means I’ll like it, I guess… Elsewhere Chad has said, “My stories are very real, but this surreal aspect to the stories continues to emerge. I wouldn't describe it as fantasy.” He was born in 1964 and grew up in gritty, hyper-real Manurewa. He read English and Art History while doing a Fine Arts degree at Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts. After writing music and film reviews for (and then becoming assistant editor of) Rip It Up while he was meant to be studying, he nevertheless graduated with a BFA in 1988. In the same year his first fiction was published. In 2001 he was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship. His short stories have appeared in Landfall, Sport, Metro, Other Voices, and the anthologies Tart and Juicy and Lust. Of his short story collection The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself, Chad says the two weakest stories are the most popular. We asked him for five minutes of his time and he gave us his insights into the eternal value of books. You couldn’t ask for more. We did ask him a lot of odd questions.

You’re not Mad Chad Taylor the Chainsaw Juggler (who has appeared on Jay Leno’s Tonight show) or Chad Taylor the guitarist (who has a Wikipedia entry). Are you deliberately keeping a low profile or do your agent and publisher need a kick up the arse?

“I was online after the chainsaw juggler but well before the guitarist. When I was growing up in Manurewa no one else in the world was called Chad except Chad Everett, and he wasn’t cool either. I don’t like my name.”

Literature certainly no longer gets the mindshare among the young that other art forms such as music and film enjoy. Is this a temporary glitch or a more lasting trend?

“Do we crave mindshare among the young? The kids who are hip to books are the kids who are hip to books. They’ll always be around. I have faith in the young. It’s people my age I’m worried about.

“There’s a technological reality here: books don’t need batteries. You can get them wet, pass them on to your friends, tear them in half and they still work. And they’re cheap. It was the maxim of Java programmers to ‘write once, read anywhere’. Books have always done that. They’re the wheel, the lever, the inclined plane. Basic technology. If industry could replace that with a proprietary, unreliable, fussy technology then it would have happened by now.

“Things come and go. Books don’t have a stranglehold on culture. They could vanish tomorrow, in which case I’d happily evolve—maybe... but stories work. Stories are still around because stories work and novels are the purest way of transmitting those stories, and the form is like pop music—influenced by everything other than itself.

“I was having a discussion with someone the other day: we were talking about the DVDs we’d have or the records we’d want to own, and we could easily run into 100, maybe 200 of each that every person should see or hear. But when it came to novels, really, we started running out of steam long before that. Because in terms of ‘great’ novels—novels you simply must read—we’re not looking at a surplus. Novels are precise and delicate things.

“Here’s a curve ball: the only things that separate us from animals are a written language and a linear perception of time. If that’s true, writing stories is our definitive function.”

Are you still a Paul Auster fan and what else is in your mix of literary and other influences?

“And hello viewers from Rob O’Neill... Not a PA fan, actually. You might not respect the things I read. Faves: going by the bookshelf it’s Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, Philip K. Dick, André Gide, Anaïs Nin, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Pete Dexter, Delacorta, Joseph Conrad, Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, Jim Thompson, Edgar Allan Poe, Barry Gifford, Hammett, Graham Greene (End of the Affair and The Quiet American), Bram Stoker. I read anything. Almost. If you read the first short stories that came out in 1988 you’ll see everything in there.

“‘Influences’ are different. What influences you is more private and fleeting. You’re chasing a moment. I was influenced by terrible people. The really good writers you look up to. The bad writers—you can approach them and nick something from right out of their pocket. We learn from the worst.

The author Will Self’s study wall is a scaly skin of Post-it Notes. What do you use for plotting novels, note-taking and capturing ideas? Are you a proponent of pencil and notebook, or do you favour software and keyboard?

“When I’m starting a novel I’ll try anything. Notebooks, tape recorders, chunks of plasterboard torn from the ceiling (which is a Jack Kirby joke—no one will ever get that). Once it gets going, it doesn’t matter—when you’re writing well, you can write on anything. I read a great interview with Woody Allen where he said he can write anywhere on anything—the back of an envelope. Sometimes his movies feel like that. But I really respect anyone who just gives in to the flow. We all do, eventually. When you’re going, you’re going.

“With a novel, however, I would say that you need to develop some sort of system to keep track of everything. The quicker you can find that note you scrawled early in the morning, the better. The more you need to be able to find stuff... but really there’s no definitive process. You muck through and that’s the delight of it, really. You number stuff. Or use letters. And then lose it and find it again. I think I have a process. I carry a Moleskin sometimes. The way to guarantee inspiration is to leave it behind. You live with it and live with it and then one day you wake up and it’s you. Like Cary Grant.”

Do you keep regular writing hours every day, and are you a morning or a night person?

“I worry regularly. I pay bills regularly. Inspiration shifts by an hour a day. I swear the latter is true: it moves with the tides. If you’re doing good work at 9 am on Monday then it’ll be 10am on Tuesday and 11 on Wednesday and so on. (Does this make me a hippy?)

Naming the protagonist of your novel Shirker Ellerslie Penrose, was genuinely inspired. Were you a fan of British experimental rock band Hatfield and the North, and do you have any advice on naming conventions for other writers?

“I knew Ellerslie worked when Alison Mau interviewed me for TV and referred to him as “Ellie”. I thought, hello: he’s become real. You have to be careful with names. Aptronyms are good but can tangle with the actual prose... You have to get it right. I wrote a short story called ‘Supercollider’ that introduced a girl called Carrie Factor—that worked.

“Names are hard. The new novel has some really, really good names in it but I can’t tell you because it won’t be out for a bit.”

Why is the New Zealand setting so important to you and are you ever tempted to set a novel overseas?

“I’m in conflict about this. Who gives a fuck about Auckland? I don’t know if I do any more. Write what you know and so on, but I don’t want to get stuck here, thematically or creatively. Not least of all because it’s disappeared—the good spots have all been knocked down. The new novel was set largely overseas and then it changed... the real part of the story came back to here. I don’t know why. I travel a lot and my characters are travellers, outsiders... I don’t think they’re tied here. Auckland’s nice to write about because it’s a port town and people are always passing through. It’s soulless, so the characters’ souls become, conversely, exposed. People here are really fucked up. And not in a good way.

“I do think that novelists should be able to write about anywhere. There’s a little too much emphasis placed on this by NZ critics and reviewers and so on. You want to go to Iceland, go to Iceland. All that matters is if the story works, if the book is real—if it happens on the page. But I do think you have to really feel that. You need to be truly into it. The cracks show very quickly if you’re not.

“Electric finishes in Japan—I love that part of the novel. It’s two pages long or something but I love it. I love getting away. But I don’t want to write about being a tourist—not in that instance, anyway. I don’t feel like I belong here but I don’t feel that I belong anywhere else.”

If NZBC readers read only one book this year, which book should it be?

“Um... One? This year? Two years ago I would have said Pete Dexter’s Train. Actually, the other night I had a coffee in a book store and read Hunter S. Thompson’s letters and found them to be very good... This year? Jesus, what’s been published this year? I’m scratching around. Go read Poe or Heart of Darkness or something. Like I said before, there aren’t that many really you have to go through.

What’s on your iPod’s ‘On the go’ playlist at the moment, or are you an iPod refusenik?

“Recently played on the Powerbook: Warren Zevon, ‘Excitable Boy’; Jane’s Addiction, ‘Jane says’; The Go! Team, ‘Ladyflash’; Liz Phair, ‘Somebody’s Miracle’; P.J. Harvey, ‘We Float’; The Killers, ‘Bones’; Róisín Murphy, ‘The Closing of the Doors’.

“The CDs beside the dining room stereo are: The Doors (The Doors), Kraftwerk (Trans-Europe Express), The Bird and the Bee (The Bird and the Bee), John Coltrane (Kulu Sé Mama), Nick Drake (Pink Moon), Of Montreal (Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer) and Beck (The Information).

“Don’t hassle me about Liz Phair.”

The great credit card swindle (part two)

My questions to the Commerce Commission were as follows:

1. Why is the ASB required to pay its customers only “a pro rata portion of the currency conversion fees” paid during the period, and not the whole amount?

2. Why has it been made the responsibility of the customer to pursue the breakdown of fees? (ASB’s initial letter to each affected customer neither explains what the exact settlement with the Common Commission has been, nor does it go into detail about why the total compensation due to customers is such a small proportion of the amount paid — in my case less than 20 percent of the fees.)

3. Since the bank breached the Act by failing to adequately disclose its currency conversion fees on overseas credit card transactions, isn’t it now the bank’s responsibility to fully disclose the settlement with clear information to each affected customer, without requiring customers to search out five-year-old statements and tally up old transactions?

4. What is the Commerce Commission doing to ensure that the agreed compensation settlement is adequately and correctly distributed to affected customers?

The official release about the case is here. But to paraphrase the Commerce Commission’s response to my questions (and it would be unfair to quote Sebastian Bishop here, since he only conveyed Commission policy to me), the ASB’s breach was not that it had charged these offshore service margins but that it didn’t adequately disclose them. That’s why the ruling only requires the bank to compensate its customers a pro rata portion of the fees they paid. Third party auditors will apparently be assessing the ASB’s execution of the court ruling. The Commerce Commission itself is not involved in the compensation side of the judgment. The bank’s original breach related to an “action of trade”; however, the bank’s letter of regret to its customers about the settlement does not represent an action of trade and therefore whether the ASB make a full disclosure to its customers is of no concern to the Commerce Commission. As far as it is concerned, the matter is closed. It won’t be taking it any further.

This means the customer’s only recourse is to the law — to take the matter of the handling of the compensation payout back to the courts. More expense and the granting of more time to the ASB in which to earn interest on the fees it hasn’t reimbursed its customers. If there were enough dissatisfied customers and a lawyer willing to take on their grievance on a pro bono basis, action might be an option. The ASB has had its slap on the wrist and now considers itself off the hook. A risk assessment into the likelihood of such a ruling being taken further by customers may have found that continued obfuscation was the best policy.

Personally, I don’t think the ruling was strictly enough defined. The auditors should also have been tasked with making sure the bank disclosing exactly how the compensation was calculated on each transaction, not some half-assed “pro rata portion”. The way it is, the customer gets shafted while the bank pays lip service to a ruling that only appears to have forced it to regret having been caught. After all, the bank does not apologise to its customers in its letter; the implicit message being that regret about having to pay back less than 20 percent of the fees paid is apology enough for misleading its customers.

Gotta love that Xtra support

CB: [04/07/2007 02:18 PM] “Several business emails I sent yesterday evening and today have not been received by the intended recipients. The Xtra site says: ‘There are no known major issues on the Xtra network’ but there is clearly a problem, as I’m not the only one affected and can send email via non-Xtra accounts. So what’s going on?”

Xtra: “I am sorry to hear that your emails weren’t sent properly. I am not aware of any issues at the moment, but it doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been one when you tried. If you can provide me with your phone number and address, I will check if there was an issue earlier today. The reason the Help page is not displaying a message about this problem is because we haven’t had reports of any problems, with yours being the first so far today. Until we know for sure there is a problem, then only will the help page reflect this. Kind regards, Sanjay.”

CB: “Sanjay, My phone number and address are in the signature in the email you responded to. I know of at least two other Xtra customers who had email problems yesterday and the day before.”

Xtra: “We did get some emails yesterday about email delays which is usually the warning sign for a fault, but it didn’t seem to amount to a full blown problem. These issues are sometimes tricky to diagnose as to where the problem lies. If you are still having problems with email delays then we need to see the email headers of the affected emails. There are instructions for obtaining the email headers can be found here. Hopefully if the problem isn’t fixed by now, we can sort this out quickly for you. Kind regards, Tracey.”

CB: “But there is no detailed header information for email that hasn’t been received — i.e. for which the only record is in my ‘Sent items’ folder.”

Xtra: “The person who receives the email will have this information and can send it to you. That way we can identify whether the issue is at our end or at their end. I’m sorry this is so complicated, and I wish was a simpler way. Kind regards, Tracey.”

CB: “Yeah, that’s kind of the whole point of this exchange, Tracey ... they haven’t received my email…”

Xtra: “Sorry, I was hoping it arrived by now...”

Five minutes with Kevin Ireland

Kevin Ireland (‘Self-portrait in a straw hat’, oil on canvas, 500mm x 600) tells us he’s always been lazy. That explains his meagre output of sixteen collections of poetry, five works of non-fiction, a collection of short stories (Sleeping with the Angels), three novels (Blowing My Top, The Man Who Never Lived and The Craymore Affair), an opera libretto (The Snow Queen, published by the BBC and translated into French) and a book on the New Zealand novel (The New Zealand Collection). Did we mention the paintings? His writing career began when, in the 1950s, he became part of Frank Sargeson’s “pressure cooker school of writing” in a Takapuna shed. “In the evenings we would drink Lemora wine,” he has recalled, “and people like Keith Sinclair, Kendrick Smithyman, Janet Frame and Maurice Duggan would drop in every night of the week. It was a wonderful, stimulating, exciting time, an oasis of common sense and literary excitement in the dull and conventional environment of the 1950s.”

He has described his life in his memoirs Under the Bridge & Over the Moon (1998), which won a Montana prize, and Backwards to Forwards (2002). He also has a National Book Award for Poetry, a Scholarship in Letters, the 1990 Commemoration Medal and an OBE for services to literature. In 2000 he was made a Doctor of Literature by Massey University. He is a former National President of PEN and a member and the current deputy-chair of the Sargeson Trust. In 2004 he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for poetry. He’s our Billy Collins and should be New Zealand’s poet laureate.

Why do you write poetry?

“I’ve never been able to find a plausible reason for sticking with an art so demanding and so odd. I’ve tried in several poems to explain this curious compulsion for constructing word-shapes on paper. For instance, I’ve described how it simply happened to be perfect weather for writing, or how it turned out just to be round-up time in the pastures of the mind. I think this is about as close as it’s possible to get without being dishonest or absurdly high-falutin.”

You have written a book about fishing. Do you often write poems in your head while you’re fishing and, if so, do you have to write them down immediately?

“No. I’ve never written a poem in my head while fishing. The total experience of being on a river or lake unconditionally consumes every minute spent there. I work at poems in a similar way, by giving my entire time to them while sitting down at a desk. There may be a bit of doodling, but there’s no lying around or lolling about. Useful ‘starters’ for poems are more likely to suggest themselves when the mind is completely disengaged — for instance, in the pre-dawn hours of the morning, or when walking the dog. I seldom take notes, because I find that the words start freezing up before I’ve managed to get them all down. The general notion of a starter, toyed about with in the head, is usually enough to go on. Only on rare occasions have I dreamed up a whole poem then simply tipped it out onto a page. The real art in poetry is to make careful revision look as though it’s as natural as a chance remark.”

The winner of a recent New Zealand poetry competition was a typographically left-right justified column of impenetrable text. By what definition it is a poem and not prose is unclear. The judge voted a much more coherent poem the second runner-up and raved about the winner, claiming the poet hadn’t put a foot wrong. Is incomprehensibility the main criterion for the success of a poem for the publishers of NZ poetry nowadays?

“There are no set definitions. Like the song says ‘anything goes’ — though as the song also goes on to point out, there happen to be certain things that can provide a special buzz, and obviously incomprehensible texts are a stunning turn-on for some people. They have little interest and no excitements as far as I’m concerned, and some amuse me as examples of smug drivel, but they don’t alarm or bother me, and I certainly don’t think that incomprehensibility is a ‘main criterion’ for winning a competition or for getting published here or anywhere else. It’s just that on the day this poem fell into a sympathetic judge’s hands. All prizes have a large element of a lucky dip about them. Winners should always take the money and run. No one should ever believe in them.”

You’ve worked as a sub-editor, both here and in Britain on big papers like The Times. Do you miss ‘Fleet Street’, and what do you think of APN’s ‘experiment’ to outsource sub-editing on its New Zealand newspapers to Pagemasters, which is owned by the company’s competitors, with the loss of around 70 sub-editors’ jobs?

“Fleet Street doesn’t exist any longer. The papers have gone and the whole bizarre Dickensian set-up with them. The miracle is that they lasted there so long. I got out just in time. What’s happening here with job cuts is what’s been going on just about everywhere else as newspapers have changed from being providers of hard news and political views to daily magazines of colour pictures decorated by shallow texts about murders, abductions, teenage drivers, dogs, fashions, personalities, entertainment, health issues, etc. Getting rid of the people who once maintained editorial standards is just another part of a certain-death process.”

In your poem Wasted Days (from Airports and Other Wasted Days) you say “...every wasted day accrues/in pleasure” and “I think of things/not done as buried treasure”. What’s your secret: meditation, deep breathing, the accumulated wisdom of age, or have you always felt this way?

“I’ve always been lazy. Anyone who writes poetry has too much time on their hands. Writing novels is a sure sign of an idle mind. I have no idea how I’ve managed to publish more than two dozen books and a huge bundle of miscellaneous meanderings and articles. If it wasn’t for my indolence there would have been heaps more.”

In On Getting Old (Four Winds Press), you write: “I’m working harder than ever before, not just because I am absorbed in my work, but because, as I grow older, it is becoming more of a task to get the shambling words down on paper.” Do you have any tips for those who are struggling under the weight of an increasing workload?

“I’d advise anyone suffering from an increasing workload to buck up and stop whingeing. It’s like sex or drinking — someone has to do it, so try to get on with it cheerfully.”

Your poem A Different Country looks at first temptingly into New Zealand’s past before ending on a slightly sour note (“In fact,/everything would have been fine/but for the measly morality/and the greyness, with every poor/bastard toeing the line.”) Has New Zealand society generally improved or worsened since those days, and how?

“It’s managed to do both. We may have once had a lot more time to do a lot less in, but we went about things with determination and social generosity. For those of us who did not conform to the exacting public standards of the 1950s, being out of step had its moments of excitement, good fellowship and great fun — pleasures that no longer derive to the same extent from that source, though I’m sure they have not diminished in general. We were a snooping, puritan, bitter pack at our worst and an obliging, larrikin, egalitarian mob when the going was good. We’ve lost a bit of that classless and independent streak along with the conformist excesses, but at least we’re fairly relaxed about it. I enjoy life here and now, and I prefer the country we’ve now made, in spite of some criticisms. I think things are better than they ever were — and I’m absolutely certain they’re far better than the alternative.”

If NZBC readers only read one book of poetry, which book should it be?

“Quite naturally, the latest. It’s called Airports and Other Wasted Days and it’s still hot off the press. And let me take this opportunity to remind the nation that 50 or 60 years ago every citizen actually would have had a public duty to buy a copy of it. I don’t think we should let our civic standards slip. Besides, there’s a wonderful cover illustration by Malcolm Evans, so the book will look good just left lying about on the table.”