A motel owner taking a phone booking asks the potential guest where he's from. The guest is refused accommodation on the basis of his answer. You don't see such state-of-the-art racial discrimination much these days.
I couldn't believe my eyes when I read in this newspaper that Aucklander Partha Roychoudhury and
his family were denied a unit at the Morrinsville Motel because they might cook curry. I recall a case similar to this in the 1980s. It seemed bizarre even in that distant and wacky decade.
The story was not so bad that the Waikato Motel Association couldn't find a way to make it worse. "Perhaps the gentleman concerned could have explained what he was going to do, to alleviate the stress," said a spokesman. Of course. It was all Mr Roychoudhury's fault.
Good grief. Still, there is a bright side. We could use this to market ourselves abroad as a living museum, a sort of big glass coffin of social attitudes that should have died with the last millennium.
As well as entertaining themselves by trying to smuggle coriander and cumin into small-town motels, tourists could listen to us debate immigration for a laugh. Who says we're boring? New Zealand, your clean, green, GE and brain-free holiday destination.
Does the Morrinsville Motel refuse visiting young rugby players a room in case they get trolleyed and vomit all over the soft furnishings?
The matter has assumed Currygate status, with Holmes reporters lurking in motel rooms quizzing experts on bad smells. We cook curries at home. In my experience, it's the fried fish or schnitzel that lingers the next morning, especially when subjected to my partner's thermo-nuclear cooking style.
I have two words for motel owners: extractor fan. You can get them with the suction power of a 747. I know this because I had to stop my partner from buying the deluxe model when we did up the kitchen - "Mmmm big engine!"
I've never been in a motel room where there was a decent fan, if there was one at all. Which is odd, if curry cooking is really such a problem.
It would be amusing if it wasn't so depressing. Our feet may be planted in the 21st century but our heads are somewhere in the 1950s. In the case of some Greens and the Business Roundtable ("Holidays!? Bah, humbug!") make that the 1850s.
We aren't good at change. We can't even seem to get our minds around the fact that it gets cold every year. The curry incident only just managed to grab some news time amid the endless updates from reporters freezing their butts off in snowbound locations. It's cold. Hold the front page.
In the case of Auckland, there are only a couple of precious, bum-freezing weeks in which you can confidently identify winter as distinct from the tepid, humid soup that passes for seasons here. Yet each time it happens it seems to catch everyone by surprise.
As with our race relations, I suspect the nation has always been in denial. When it rains a little after a few dry days, Aucklanders feel obliged to crash into each other as if they've never driven on a wet surface before.
Now the news is full of cars sliding down icy South Island streets and banging into each other. It happened to a son last year. He got his own sound bite. "She was going too fast down the hill and then boof!"
All flavours of weather bring their attendant problems but I can't help but celebrate when Auckland does something other than warm and rainy or warm and sunny. I am out of step, as I realise every time someone looks at me like I'm a madwoman when they say, "Cold enough for you?" and I reply "No".
I blame my Canadian childhood. Waking up early to see an unearthly glow outside the window, signalling that either aliens had landed in the night or there had been a fresh snowfall.
We'd sneak out early to find all petty, human neighbourhood boundaries obliterated by a pristine eiderdown of snow.
We'd play till our feet froze. Thermals? Polyprops? Luxury! We had scratchy woollen socks and the hair shirts that passed for singlets in those days. We'd come in only to painfully thaw our extremities in bowls of warm water, then go out again. Magic.
Cold weather can be challenging. But, as Scots philosopher Billy Connolly says with all the authority of someone who has danced naked in the Arctic, there is no bad weather, only the wrong clothes.
And, he might have added, the wrong architecture. I have never been so cold as my first winter in Auckland, sleeping in my grandmother's sunporch when I wasn't huddled over a one-bar heater. I'd never even heard of chilblains before that. Or one-bar heaters.
Things haven't changed that much. Our draughty old villa is nice in the summer - cool and breezy. In winter? Suffice it to say I'm wearing thermal socks as I write.
Not that I'm complaining. This is Auckland, where you can enjoy a walk along the beach in the thin, invigorating 9C air in the morning and catch a tan on your deck in the afternoon.
Let nature do her full repertoire. The other night we had thunder, lightning and hail. It was freezing. As different from Auckland's usual body temperature blandness as a hot winter curry is from a steak and cheese pie. Excellent.
The weather people say winter's chilly antics aren't over yet. Bring it on.
A motel owner taking a phone booking asks the potential guest where he's from. The guest is refused accommodation on the basis of his answer. You don't see such state-of-the-art racial discrimination much these days.
I couldn't believe my eyes when I read in this newspaper that Aucklander Partha Roychoudhury and
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