Having annoyed the living it makes sense to bother the dead, but it must be disappointing when they don't leap out of their graves and chase you, and no god points down from heaven, opens the ground under you, and sends you to hell. What an anticlimax. You must wonder why you bothered.
When I was young my mother used to take me to visit the family graves on a fine summer day, and we'd place flowers on them. The old cemetery is next to the town park, where I was photographed many times feeding the ducks when I was not much bigger than they were. There was a huge duck pond, still is, and in the centre of it a small island where nobody, even the people who hired row boats to explore the lake, went.
It seemed to me to be a magic place, impossibly far away and full of mystery. Later they made a bridge so people could reach it; it wasn't far away at all; and I lost all interest. The forbidden is mysterious and powerful: letting anybody go there immediately made it a place of no interest.
They were times of full employment, when I was little, and farmers, backbones of the town economy, were wealthy. All that has changed. There are no longer several families supported on farms of any size, the freezing works is long gone, and when I wrote about my home town a while back, in the aftermath of local arsons, I discovered that the number of benefits being paid out there equalled the population. Granny farming may keep it ticking today. That's good news for the undertakers.
None of us knows what we'd be like if we had no good reason to get up in the morning, and saw no hope of a better future. That, I suspect, is why we once again have the highest rate of youth suicide in the developed world, and why my family's cemetery plot - I'm sure it's not the only one - is attacked so often. It's no longer the town I grew up in, and no matter how many Aucklanders sell up and move there to buy cheap properties and feel rich, it won't be again in a hurry.
Meanwhile the paddle boat operators in the park were disturbed recently to find the body of a black swan that had come to a grisly end. "You'd wonder what kind of person could do that," said Peter Douglas, of Queen Elizabeth Park Boats.
I think I have a fair idea.
How mundane all that play-acting is compared with the idea promulgated in America that there's a colony of kidnapped children on Mars, victims of sex crimes who've been sent there by Nasa to be slaves to paedophile rings. Mars has an average temperature of -62C, is 54.5 million kilometres from Earth, and the air is carbon dioxide, but that doesn't deter believers.
The idea took off with a media host who previously claimed that the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 schoolkids was a hoax, that 9/11 was a stunt staged by the American government, and that Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign was linked to a child-sex ring operating from a Washington DC pizzeria.
People often say that you have to believe in something. The reverse is true, surely: You're better off believing nothing than believing anything at all.
