KEY POINTS:
Damn and blast it, this is unacceptable. Seriously, a chap heads off for a few days to work in balmier and more sultry climes. When he leaves, things are much as they normally are in Outer Roa; fractious and grumblesome.
But we're used to that. We love a
good grizzle. Pessimism is our oxygen. It keeps us going not only to Australia but generally.
However, when he returns from the hot countries as they were known in the grand old days of pith helmets and gunboats, the same chap discovers to his horror that while his back's been turned (and burned) things have gone from usually bad to very, very, very much worse!!!
In such a situation, you'd be in the grip of a curmudgeonly spasm too.
Imagine this: It's check-out time on Wednesday morning. Gentle breezes lick your unshod feet. True, there is the small matter of the Dom Perignon on the bar tab but, generally, life is good.
No, life is boneless. That disjunct you felt when you first left the rusty shacks behind to enter the manicured zone of resorts is forgotten. As is the potholed road that brought you here and the battered local buses, belching diesel, so different from the luxury coaches with bullock horn mirrors reserved for the tourists.
Slowly, easily and utterly, you've been seduced by the rhythm of a place where everyone says "Bula" and walks slowly, languidly, as if time can wait. Which it can, when nothing matters and you're not really there and there is absolutely no news at all - no papers, no frantic television bulletins blaring alarum.
Maybe this uncanny absence is a result of the coup. If so, that's a spiffing reason to have one here! Because the fact there was no news whatsoever soon became a blessing.
Well, there was the BBC, but it's hard to take seriously some financial wallah in London talking to another financial wallah in Zurich about Lehman Bros when dusky maidens (most of them from Dannevirke) are rubbing coconut oil on your loins and Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gaugin are having an artistic argument in the next room.
Now jump forward 10 hours. You're at Auckland airport and the first thing you see is the Harold front page. Gone are the good old, penny ante banner headline shocks; Owen Glenn, the Privileges Committee, tax cuts and such.
Instead, there's something so bad, it's unbelievable. Something that's crept up on your future while you were lost in that newsless bubble.
Something that could ruin everything because short of another world war it's the worst thing possible - 1929 all over again. The Great Depression, mass unemployment, more sugarbag years, work schemes and riots. This is a calamity of unimaginable magnitude. No wonder the Harold hollers, "In the eye of the hurricane".
Things are so bad that the lonely Business Editor has been released from the gloomy broom cupboard in which such grub-white souls are usually stored and promoted to the front page with a photograph.
A worse recession that's our best hope as 1929 looms is the headline and beneath it a picture of the man himself, Liam Dann, admittedly looking more like Catherine Zeta Jones' gardener than any Business Editor has any right to look but nevertheless as sombre and depressing as his less photogenic predecessors.
Even the optimists are pessimistic, Liam tells us with a the steely look in his eye. Even the normally cheerful Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, who clearly didn't spend the weekend sipping champers in Suva - can only offer the cock-eyed reassurance that this crisis should be less serious than 1929.
And all because some US$40,000,000 Lehman Bros dude we'd never heard of, a former squash player called Richard Fuld, swapped his racquets for rackets and started spending money he didn't have to buy mortgages people couldn't pay on houses that were only worth as much as the in-ground Jacuzzi!!!!
Or so it seems. At least according to Liam and he should know. But suppose you had just returned from balmier climes to find such balminess besieging you, once you'd recovered, you might decide to suffuse your soul with some of the warmth and serenity you'd just left behind.
Heck, if there is another Depression we'll all learn how to grow veggies again. Sunlight soap sales will rocket assuming anyone's still making it.
The gummint might finally build some decent roads as part of a work scheme.
We could print a bit more money - it worked for a while in the Weimar Republic. (A wee tip for Dr Bollard: when folk start papering the sunroom with it, it's probably time to stop!)
Houses would be cheap, especially the ones people walked away from. Sky might drop its rentals to retain hard-up customers. People would decide they really didn't need cellphones. Ad-men would start buying their clothes at St Vincent de Paul and there'd be less adverts on telly!! Kids would make things instead of buying them.
And if, like most Business Editors, your office is a tiny room in the basement, you wouldn't have far to fall when you jumped!!!!! There!! You feel better already. Bula!!!!!
