KEY POINTS:
There are certain words, charged, potent, fizzing with menace, that invariably set the journalistic heart aflutter.
Whatever inspired some guttural Goth or epicene Roman to coin these words long centuries back is now forgotten. Today, they have only one purpose; namely, to suffuse a headline with such intimations
of alarum as will ensure the passer-by anxiously seizes a first edition.
"Epidemic" is one of those hot button words. It sours the cornflakes and darkens the morning. It whispers to the collective subconscious, conjuring ancestral memories of plague and panic. It plunges a small sliver of terror deep in the modern heart.
And we like that. We like being scared. At a distance, danger adds a subversive undercurrent to our bland existence. It spices up our day.
Hence, all manner of "epidemics" have stalked the front page in recent years. Aids, obesity, bird flu, scrotal mange, climate change; they've all come and gone, one replacing the other as each in turn either doesn't happen or only happens somewhere else.
Like Antarctica where, this week, a bit of ice has very conveniently broken off a bigger bit of ice just in time for Earth Hour, thus ensuring assorted pompous worthies will leap into their motors and rush to a microphone, the better to warn us about the grave dangers of using too much petroleum and electricity.
Still, we mustn't be flippant. Especially when an epidemic of "epidemics" is looming. We seem, for example, to be on the cusp of a "debt epidemic" as confidence "plummets" and "outrage" grows. Heck, with a bit of luck, we may even see somebody important "slam" something or other that's earned their displeasure. And then we'd have nearly all the fizz words in a single compelling narrative.
Well, apart from ones like "binge drinking" which, thank goodness, no one ever defines, thus ensuring not a weekend goes by without a "spate" of it causing distress and concern.
And there is another most ominous term that rescued many a grizzled newsman over the long weekend. Just when these curmudgeons were contemplating the unthinkable prospect of doing a story about the numbers attending Easter church services, along came an unlikely salvation - "toxic" honey.
Ahhhh, toxic! Now there's a word!!!! A frightening word! One that evokes images of persons clutching their throats and falling, face forward, into the mousse. Oh, yes. No doubt about it. Toxic's got legs!
So it was we had "toxic" honey for almost all of Easter. Not literally, you understand, but with our news. And that was nice. It kept us on our toes and made sure we eschewed the nectar.
The one sadness of this whole "toxic' affair is that the attention so lasciviously given to the lethal effects of honey diverted attention from another wonderful story, lost in the mists of time, in which honey plays a major role.
And also tutin, the troublesome toxin from the tutu plant that caused our weekend perturbation. Now, as any scholar of 19th century archaeology will know, Maori originally came from Egypt and it is on the fertile banks of the Nile that the tutu bush first flourished.
We'll never know if the Polygyptians intentionally brought it here or whether it arrived accidentally, perhaps on the back of the fur seal, but what we do know, because the faded hieroglyphics tell us, is that humanity's first experience of "toxic" honey - and our first foray into the wondrous realm of alternative therapy - actually occurred in Egypt.
Bathed by the hot sun in those much warmer days when the ice was melting everywhere, including Mexico, the Egyptian tutu produced prodigious amounts of the toxic tutin which, when consumed as a libation or smeared by Egyptian women upon their skin in the fond hope that visiting Romans might lick it off, produced the most terrifying spasms.
Sadly, the doctors of Egypt couldn't allay these seizures. Until someone suggested building a pyramid because a space alien reckoned such structures had strange powers of recuperation.
So the Egyptians built their first pyramid, a small, hollow structure with a bed in the middle upon which victims of tutu poisoning could receive the healing benefits of cosmic rays.
And it worked! No sooner had a twitching tutu-ravaged wretch been lain in the pyramid than great peace and stillness came upon them. Seeing these amazing results, the doctors immediately recommended this treatment for everyone, including an unfortunate Pharoah called Trevor who'd been tragically afflicted by tutu-tainted honey.
"Hop in there, Trev," they said (in Egyptian, of course). "The pyramid will fix what ails you."
"How so?" asked the trembling Trevor, convulsing more feverishly than an IRD officer who's just lost $600,000,000.
"It gets rid of the toxin," said the doctors, "and stops the twitching. We call it tutin calmin. You should try it."
Well, the Pharoah did and the rest, as we know, is history.