Nickie Muir: No escaping Gareth

When Gareth Morgan becomes emperor I hope he makes an imperial decree to banish all felines from the fair isles of Noo Zelund. But in all honesty, I'm getting a bit sick of Gareth. Not only does he not know when to call it quits on Movember, he insists on improving our lives in every way from our pensions to the air we breathe. Does this man not sleep?

It seems vaguely intrusive to have our destructive and flibbertigibbet ways paraded before us while he and his paragon of a paramour, Joan, burn up carbon credits on their motorcycles somewhere exotic to save more children. Closely followed by a TV One camera crew of course.

If we misbehave in his absence, you just know he'll make us watch the slide show again. It also seems to go against every economist's inclination to follow in Gareth and Joan's puritanical pilgrimage to a better life. Joan exhorted us on Radio New Zealand recently to bake banana cakes and give them to friends. What multi-millionaire in their right mind would give banana cakes to their friends and think they'd get away with it? I hate to break it to you Joan but your friends just think you're cheap but are too scared to tell you in case you make them watch the slides of you guys riding bikes somewhere again.

At this point, I'm really happy Gareth and Joan aren't Shiites or Amish Christian fundamentalists. They would have done surveys by now to prove women would be better off in burquas or that we should all go back to horse-drawn carriages to ward off climate change and save the oceans. Just imagine how long their slide shows of their Silk Road trips would take then.

I hope Gareth and Joan's large dairy unit in Brazil wasn't formed from cutting down Amazonian rain forest and is carbon neutral. I'm sure it is. And I hope that Joan doesn't beat other people who might genuinely need second-hand furniture to the good stuff at the inorganic collections - that would be annoying and embarrassing.

But, in general, one of the most annoying things about Gareth and his surveys is not the motorbike slide-shows but the fact that he's actually paying for the kind of scientific research that governments should be doing. And coming up with some interesting stuff in the process.

In the case of the kitty killers, I have to admit he's right. And that I'm entirely delusional. I have now had two "last cats" foisted on me against my will. I have made them promise, holding their paws over a Bible that they will never ever kill stuff while I feed them and am nice to them.

The Argentine "last cat" promised solemnly that this was the case. Right before she ate a hummingbird and two resident indigenous frogs. This last one also promised me the same (I even wrote a column about the deal we'd struck) and how the love affair would be all over the day she brought home a fantail.

She brought one home the day Gareth declared war on all cats - just to prove his point. Which frankly is more annoying than all his slide shows and all Joan's banana cakes put together.

So what to do with the cat? The small person's squeals of "please don't kill her, please don't kill her" were not directed at the cat to stop torturing one of my favourite garden visitors. No. They were directed at me to not follow through on the threats I'd made towards Miss Psycho killer should she transgress. I now have two options: I can put a bell on her neck and keep her inside during the day or I can threaten her with one of Gareth's slide shows and feed her solely on Joan's banana cake. What could be worse?