KEY POINTS:
You like to win, don't you, New Zealand? I realised that this week, if I hadn't before.
I woke up on Wednesday morning to a mobile full of text messages. Everyone I knew in Ireland had taken the time, it seemed, to tap out a brief dispatch telling
me exactly how wonderful, how bloody great it was to be beating the All Blacks.
It was a lovely feeling, actually, between the jubilant "Go Munster" and all the "ha ha, look at the state of your crowd!" texts. I felt comfortably sandwiched between the new home and the old.
On the one hand, I'm Irish, born and bred. How can I not take great delight in the prospect of yet another victory of a Hibernian David over the Goliaths in black?
On the other, I've spent enough time here to realise that "gutted" is the only acceptable emotional default setting when it comes to an All Black loss, anywhere, ever.
And yet I experienced no real conflict of loyalties while it hung in the balance on Wednesday morning. I only ever wanted to be on one side. The winning one.
Which, as it turned out, was quite lucky for me, given that I watched the last half-hour of the match in a room full of sports journos. Bemoaning a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat by the All Blacks wouldn't have been so much churlish as downright suicidal.
Far, far better to slap on a stoical grin and endure the backslappery and patronising commiserations that followed the final whistle.
I didn't feel too bad about it, though; like I said, it was always going to be win-win for me, less so for the fanatical AB boys in sports.
Which is what started me thinking about this national drive to win. It's a funny one, the competitive nature of Kiwis. I've spent a lot of my time here trying to assess what it is that makes you guys tick. However, I'm trying heroically to not turn this into yet another column about the national character.
There's far too much rubbish written about that for a start. Mostly by Kiwis themselves, it must be said. Who are we? Where are we at? What do we sound like/look like? What do we do?
Whatever you think about rugby or sculling, if there's one thing you lot are world-class at it's navel-gazing. I did Hamlet in my last year in secondary school and, honestly, coming here was like stepping into a diorama of that particular tragedy.
"The crime of thinking too precisely upon th' event" is one just about every New Zealander has the propensity to commit.
And what about "there's nothing neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so"? A national motto in waiting, if I may be so bold.
Should we change the flag? Do we need a written constitution? Is the haka too aggressive?
Why must every aspect of our collective life here, from the Treaty to new uniforms at Air New Zealand, be mulled over, pondered and canvassed to an inch of its life?
I know the answer, of course - because they matter. They are issues of importance for a new country, as it moves forward and forges its own identity, yadda yadda yadda, and so on, and so Aotearoa.
Forgive my cynicism, but I'm bored with that particular strand of public consciousness. That said, what would I know? I come from a country that's been having exactly the same argument for 600 years.
It's just that I love New Zealanders when they're doing things. When they shut up about the hows and the whos and the wherefores and the why-are-we-heres.
The ironic corollary of being such a ponderous lot is that nobody in the world (in my limited view of it, anyway) is as good as a Kiwi at just getting on with it. Hunkering down, setting to, ploughing through. "Head down, bum up" is a good old Kiwi phrase for a reason. It's an apt description of what you're all doing when you're finished checking to see your bellybuttons are still there. And it pays dividends, of course.
Is there anything in the world as magnificent as the spectacle of Sir Edmund Hillary steaming towards the Pole and history in his souped-up tractor, or straddling the top of the world with his magic grin? I'm picking an obvious example here, I know, but it's the one that occurs.
"He was our prince" is what a colleague of mine at Radio New Zealand said on the day he died, and of course he was. A prince, and an emblem of people who are at their best in motion.
And so you like winning. And so your rugby team must beat every other team, whatever their pedigree. I saw that on Wednesday.
In spite of all the cant talked about Kiwi modesty and understatement, winning suits New Zealanders.
You like it and you're good at it. It's not surprising, really. All that thinking has to count for something, I suppose.
