EDITORIAL: Gripped by old gold' as life goes on

THE Budget ... I must have blinked because I think I missed it.
It can't have been too sinister because the sun still rose yesterday morning and the birds were all out there in the leafless silver birch ... awaiting breakfast.
And the sun rose again this morning and it will arise again tomorrow, and the next day.
It will continue to do the for the next three billion years until it combusts and collapses ... not that you or I or Bill English need to worry about that.
Nor will doomsayer Harold Camping (an unfortunate name for a clear homophobe) who has predicted that the world will burn in the flames of the apocalypse from today.
The poor, delusional dolt ... and a dangerous dolt, because he has needlessly frightened the emotionally vulnerable and gullible.
He should be dispatched to purgatory ... a week with Hone Harawira should sort him out and introduce some reality to his odd life.
I have not given much thought to the end of the world or the predicted end of the recession this week - I have been more intrigued by the "time capsule" unearthed under the old courthouse building (now DoC HQ) in Napier's Marine Parade.
The articles dredged from the soil and gloom beneath the floorboards may seem trivial, in the context of what was found in the crypts and labyrinths of ancient Egypt, but to me they are gold.
There were old hand-forged nails and slabs of chipped kauri timbers; old cigarette packets and slabs of stone once used to sharpen tools. Bits and pieces. Flotsam and jetsam. Odds and ends.
But each and every last piece of century-old discarded "rubbish" was once held by a person now gone from the earth.
That fascinates me.
I looked at the recovered items, now being assessed by heritage consultant Elizabeth Pishief, and imagined scenes and stories - gnarled hands and faces of workmen and labourers, upon a landscape of early Hawke's Bay we would not recognise.
For me, those seemingly insignificant items possess more colour and depth of character than a lot of the stuff I've seen from arguably more dramatic and mysterious eras.
They kind of have that "human" touch; long ago, but not so long ago.
We had insulation put under and over the rooms of our house a few weeks ago and the boys found a length of old lead pipe under there.
"Make a few sinkers," one said.
Oh no, I have decided. It is history. Some old plumber once handled that. It's staying with the rest of my shambolic "collection" in the shed.