Jeremy Tindall: Standing in awe of the great bores of our time

Businessman Rob Fyfe at home. File photo / Doug Sherring

Opinion

SATIRE

It's a habit that bores have. To look scientifically defiant, in ways various.

Take Rob Fyfe, who is well into his 50s. I don't know him; I've met him. He has one problem. He looks as if he never suffered a childhood, adolescence, early adulthood; only he emerged fully formed, non-born, as a 33-year-old man. His doggish, please-don't-hurt-me mien is timeless.

Then there are other bores such as Georgie Best who was too vague to invariably die. A Gemini man, or a Gemini men - as it astrologically pertains to being twins - an air sign, with his unwilling, belchy smile. One would think he flew the coop on the grim reaper completely. Undead. How can you kill such a miasmic force? Not even death could do it.

Then there are celebrities whose records are as spotless as their faces. Robbie Rakete must be the only infallible Kiwi, both in form and spirit, since a pack of cigarettes was five New Zealand dollars. Being of limited attention span personally, I tend to speak with similar breeds who can only muster answers, such as, "Oh, he's made millions!"; or, "Only on Thursdays"- when questioned as to whether Robbie has made any spiritual mistakes. That's not bad going from people afraid to fling praise. Proposing the same question to people who can hold a moment, "No, none. He seems like a really nice guy." Is the considered response.

Robert Rakete around the time he joined a group of Australian children's entertainers and became known as 'the brown Wiggle'. File photo / Sarah Ivey

Then there are people, present company excluded, who look as if they've never passed a day of work in their lives. For example, the late Sir Keith Holyoake. When our country was his, nothing happened. He had time enough to pose photographically by his own portrait painting. I mean he was the Chair of the NZRU, which means "guy most able-bodied to stay seated upright in a drinking session". Beer was the national panacea against humidity then more than ever, and he grew fields of hops. Not him personally, of course. But someone under his auspices.

Richie McCaw nonchalantly poses with a travel writer after landing his helicopter on a mountain. File photo / Supplied

My favourite bore is s/he for whom living in a comfortable domesticated environment doesn't apply. How could Richie McCaw, for example, take the western comforts for granted we all take for granted? The answer is he probably doesn't. A great Southern Man with the terrific pain threshold he has would sleep on a stainless steel bench, as would Grant Dalton. These men wouldn't believe in blobbing out, and thus would live in a kitchen showroom without linen and fabrics. Basic men, they. They would surely only get a crude four hours sleep a night, sans pyjamas, prostrate on a granite bench, rising at quarter-to-four in the morning with the cleaners before vanishing on a motorcycle into the woods on a classified mission for the CIA.

John Lennon snapped Paul McCartney was "all pizza and fairy tales"; but I tend to believe he is an evergreen elf whose clumsy biology finds him torn between either squatting in an oak tree in green pyjamas or stealing from the rich.

Sir Paul McCartney says Wirral the Squirrel is much more pizza and fairy tales than him. File photo / Supplied

And how could Minister of Finance Grant Robertson ever feasibly holiday? It's unimaginable. Vacations don't apply to those who look as if they're perpetually emerging from the squash court, as his custom, when the mics are under his chin. There is absolutely no way Adrian Orr would break for happy hour or even lunch, similarly. Not at all. He is 24-hours, seven-days-a-week in a suit playing the invisible accordion at a kauri lecturn.

Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr during a press conference about the Official Cash Rate. File photo / Mark Mitchell

Some don't get born, get dead or live with linen, and some don't holiday owing to bubbling away on the squash court. Tell them they send me.

• Jeremy Tindall is a North Shore writer and singer