Brian Holden: Making hay havoc while sun shines

Boys being caught on CCTV damaging cars in Whangarei brought back childhood memories (top left).

Police nabbed a couple of boys who crumpled the panel work of five cars at a Whangarei car park last week. We immediately ask "How can these kids do something so bad? And "Where were their parents when all this was going on?"

A certain farmer would have asked these same questions when a similar incident of appalling behaviour occurred 55 years ago, involving a group of young sprouts - me being one of them - destroying a haystack. It's true. There we were - a group of us climbing a huge pine tree under which the hay was sheltered. Numerous times during the course of a sunny afternoon, we climbed the tree and jumped down on to the haystack, not giving a thought to the precious store of winter feed being demolished in the process.

Unlike the two boys who were captured on CCTV, we were somehow tracked down by other means by the farmer who paid my parents a visit that evening. If there was ever a time of coming close to going under the guillotine with my furious father working the lever, that would have been it.

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It had to happen sooner or later. There's now an app that monitors ultra-violet levels, with the new sensor being trialled in 100 New Zealand preschools in a bid to improve children's sun safety and reduce the nation's skin cancer rates. Sensors are being set up in the playground to send information to a tablet in the classroom informing teachers of UV levels before kids go outside to play. The $295 device also sends prompts for when to apply and re-apply sunscreen. Kindergartens and play centres have already found the set-up useful in establishing whether it is safe to let the children play outside. Throughout the day, staff refer to it and, when required, get the children to slap up and put their hats on. One centre recently reported a moment when the device warned that the UV had reached danger level and the children had to be kept inside. Oh dear.

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Now I'm not saying for one moment that the youngsters of our nation should be pushed outdoors to be fried by nature's elements. After all, the dangers of ultraviolet light have certainly been in the spotlight over the past couple of decades. And it would be naive of the older generation to attest that "playing all day in the sunlight never did us any harm".

The truth is, it did - and oh boy, we're paying for it. Oldies are now queuing at skin centres to have melanomas and all sorts of UV-induced nasty stuff removed from their skin. We accept now that common sense must prevail with regular applications of sunscreen and to be sun smart during the summer months. What is of concern is that if schools get hold of these new UV detectors, the instructions on the readout will be taken to the extreme and kids are going to be whipped indoors at the slightest hint of danger. Hopefully it won't come to this.

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The gremlins were at work when trying to email And Another Thing last week. Despite sending the document several times to the Rotorua Daily Post in the usual attachment form, things fell apart en route. Even old-fashioned cut and paste didn't work, so in the end, with the deadline approaching, I had to make a mad dash into town, with USB stick in hand, and load the document file directly into the subeditor's computer.

Even then, it was the draft version that somehow ended up being published - hence the following correction to the Lewis Rd milk (flavoured with Whittaker's chocolate) article.

It was not Whittaker's staff who were going like the clappers to get the product out, but the team at the Lewis Rd Creamery in Otakiri. Everything will be back in order both with both the production of chocolate milk and my column this week, hopefully.

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Finally, to support the ongoing anomalies between Rotorua Airport's temperature readings and those taken at my weather station in town, I have summarised both daily maximums for the month of October.

On average, the airport temperatures have been two degrees cooler. Time, I think, to relocate the thermometers.

• Brian Holden has lived in Rotorua for most of his life and has recently celebrated 10 years' writing And Another Thing.