Not around? Here's something anyway!

If I'm not around much in the near future, it's because I'm currently writing a novel! A bad one for sure because it's so much more fun writing bad novels than good ones, because ... well, that's the trouble with having a cluster of stupid sodding degrees in Literature! You no longer know what a good novel is, and all you can say for sure is that if critics consider something "a good novel" it just means it has dense concepts, dull pedantic characters, no narrative pull and is unbearably boring to read.

So, in the meantime, I'm still on such a high over New Zealand's win that I'm making my main character a Kiwi in honour.

And also in honour is this parade through the streets of Auckland:



And a lovely note from Queen Elizabeth to the All Blacks!  Let me see if I can find that too:

28 Oct 2011
To the Governor-General of New Zealand:

I was delighted to learn of New Zealand's victory in the 2011 Rugby World Cup. As one of the many who has admired the extraordinary fortitude of New Zealand's people in the face of recent disaster, I am so glad to know how much pleasure the All Blacks' victory has brought to the entire nation. Please convey to the team and management my warmest congratulations on their outstanding achievement.

ELIZABETH R

 Lovely stuff, yeah!   Choice, Bro! (My Kiwi character speaks lots of Kiwi slang, so I'm boning up!) And what makes this exceptionally nice is how she gracefully acknowledges that she's been following the recent series of horrible disasters in God's Own Home - The Land of The Long White Cloud - Aotea Roa - 

1) The two earthquakes in Christchurch! 

2) The Pine River Mining Disaster 

3) The Rena Oil Spill  ...

 ... and knows full well just how much New Zealand needed something to cheer them up!

Shot, Bro! Yeah nah! Good azzz, that Queen Fulla, yeah, ehhhhh!  

E noho ra!

Still Singing the Song!!!

Still on the post-RWC New Zealand win high, as the rest of the world seems to be too.  Even yesterday it was still in the Hong Kong newspapers, although no longer on the front page.

No, seriously, the All Blacks win made front page of Chinese newspapers!  Let me show you Monday's SCMP!

 Front page.  How cool is that?

Also got sent this!

LOVE? And I just love that the announcer says "This is trenchant war" because that's precisely what it felt like. Seriously, it wasn't until 10 seconds before the game ended - in a mad tangle of bodies at the edge of the field as NZ tried to place the ball out while the fighting scrum of Frenchies fought to keep it in - that the pressure let go and we all permitted ourselves the luxury of thinking "We might very well win this?" as it was never a sure thing until that point.  And see the ten second countdown from those fans in the clip!  Oh man, Keith and I did that, right there, surrounded by the French, in Trafalgia! Couldn't help ourselves!

And everyone is now asking "Where did the French dig that up from?" because, apart from Big Fat Smarty Pants Keith, no one expected the French to put up such a fight and, as the French coach said, "to make the Kiwis' tremble" in such a hard won battle. Truly, the phrase 'trenchant warfare' is not hyperbole.

And I don't believe I'm saying this, but Kudos France!

The Shower Saga!

Talking earlier about the French singing "La la la la la" until the chorus of their National Anthem yesterday reminded me of a hilarious event from 2000, while the Sydney Olympics were on.

Baby Jane was over from NZ and we were on holiday together with the kids, taking a camper van up the East Coast of Australia, when we stopped off in a camping ground in Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast.

Around sunset I took the kids for a shower, and we were all in our separate stalls when the kids started to chat about the Olympics - which we were only seeing bits of since we didn't have a TV - and Ella asked me "How does the Australian National Anthem go?"

I'm from Fiji so I didn't really know, but I'd heard it lots of times so replied with singing what I knew of the song: "Australians all, let us rejoice for we are young and free. With something something something something, something something sea!"

"Oh, for heavens sake!" came an old lady voice from another stall. "Now, you listen up, children! It goes like this."  and she sang the entire song ...

... and then, in the strictest voice, she says "I want to now to sing it with me! Your mother as well!" and, from her shower stall with the shower still running and the sun slowly setting, she gave us each line in turn and we had to sing it with her.  "And now do the whole thing." she said sternly ...

... and we did.  And although we never saw the old lady's face, we and the kids now know all the words of the Oz National Anthem.

And let me find it for you so you too can imagine you're in a quickly darkening shower stall, with the water rapidly cooling, singing this song:

Kudos Kiwis!

I have no fingernails. They are bitten down to the red, raw quick!  It's all France's fault.

You have undoubtedly already heard that the All Blacks won the Rugby World Cup. 8 to 7!

 Friend Luce took this photo. Isn't it wonderful!

Oh yeah! Go All Blacks! Great feasting at the marai last night and for many days to come.

But here's the curious thing: We all knew that France only got into the Finals literally by "luck of the draw" - previously pitted against such weak teams in the earliest matches - and only two weeks ago they were stomped into the ground by the All Blacks, and it seemed like they were being called The Worst Team ever to get into the Finals of RWC for good reason ... so this really should have been a shoe-in for New Zealand!

However you should have seen that match.  Ahhhh! Never has there been a game so closely contested and so ... FRAUGHT! I know I'm never usually generous and fair-minded where the French are concerned - Remember Muaroa!! -  but I really have to hand it to them because this was a wonderful game which could easily have gone either way, always so close that I doubt there are fingernails left anywhere in the rugby watching world.

We went out into Lockhart Road looking for a seat in a sports-bar a full hour before the game started but ...

... there wasn't one to be had anyplace at street level, all packed in like sardines in a tin and already spreading out into the street, so we tried the basement bars ...

... and they were the same, so then we tried the upper storey bars and it wasn't until we got to the 5th floor that we found a single unpleasantly located table still vacant in one called Trafalgar. Yayyy! Since the Haka was about to begin we realised beggars can't be choosers and we were definitely ready to beg.

And it wasn't until we were seated we realised we were packed around with Frenchies ...

 In the middle of our own French scrum!

... but the line-up had started and we weren't moving anywhere.

"Why would any French person come to a bar named Trafalgar?" says Keith, because, as you know, The Battle of Trafalgar had them entirely routed.  "They're already admitting defeat!" I sniggered because I was still then full of confidence ...

... so full I hadn't even lit a candle to Kwan Yin this time.

 During the All Blacks and Wallabies match,

before I realised that the tassels were green-and-gold -

the sporting colours of Australia - so 

I took them off and replaced them with 

black ribbons!  Go All Blacks!

Quickly regretted it. The game started and, right from the start, it was so close and the French were so on fire, there were a great many times when I considered racing home to light that candle.

Prior to the game, in all our excited chatter, we were guessing at a 30-5 win to NZ, but not Keith. He was predicting a hard fight with either team to win and in the end it'd just come down to luck and didn't he nail it!

But the highlights?  What leaps out was just how gorgeous the French captain was. Like, such a seriously beautiful man! Both those team captains were.  It was like they could have been voted into their post on their eye-candy-ness, but then that French captain scored their only try, so there's obviously so much more to him than just that and I felt so mean-spirited that I'd been judging him on his looks alone.

The other big thing for me was that big sookie Frenchie breaking down and bawling his eyes out when he was pulled out of the game, and the other benched French player giving him a comforting cuddle.  Oh for heaven's sake: THIS IS RUGBY, GUYS!!!! THERE ARE NO TEARS AND CUDDLES IN RUGBY!!!  Watching that outrageousness, I kept thinking of that new Graham Norton game where you have to decide if a metrosexual-looking man is "Gay or French?" Close call here but either way it ain't rugby!

What else?  Oh yeah, when they played the National Anthems all the French sang along with theirs but no one really knew the words so there were lots of Lalalalalas until the chorus, which everyone knew and they threw their arms out, with waitresses dodging, as they loudly sang along.  And Keith and I decided we'd stand up to sing the Kiwi Anthem, just to be provocative, but then Hayley Westerna sang the Maori version and we didn't know the words ...



 ...  and although it was so very beautiful, we then and there decided that someone had to tell New Zealand that singing a National Anthem in Maori may be all very well and good down there on the marai, but it really does make NZ look provincial and negligible when they take it out onto the world stage!

Oh, and the only other thing of note among the highlights is that the various Chinese girlfriends of Trafalgar's Frenchies,  all cheered when the All Blacks made their try!  Yeah, you GO girlfriends!

But it was such a good afternoon!  And my fingernails will, now that the Rugby World Cup is over, grow back!

China! China! China!

Many years ago, when we were living in Australia, someone made a racist comment to our friend Ping Ping's four year old son, who came home crying, and so, in a fury, the family packed their bags and returned to China!

Five months later, they were back.  "What happened?" I asked Ping Ping.

She immediately broke down in tears and it took a while to get the story, but what happened was that, back in Beijing, her beloved uncle fell off a ferry into the Yangtze River. He was a good swimmer so was making his way to the bank when a passing boat's propeller sliced off his arm. Ping Ping had viewed the surveillance tapes on behalf of his grieving family and was chilled to the bone that they showed him screaming for help for an hour and forty five minutes with no one on the river bank or in any of the passing boats taking the slightest bit of notice. It wasn't until he was well and truly dead that he was fished out and returned, without ceremony or warning, to his family.  It was all just so awful that Ping Ping couldn't tell anyone, until me, what she'd witnessed.

"I can no longer live among people who behave like that!" said Ping Ping!

We talked about how and why no one cared to rescue a dying man and attributed the lack of action to decades of Communism and their stupid rules on the protocols of rescue, which, if broken, could get you executed ... but then we got more philosophical and decided that it also had something to do with how neither Buddhism nor Taoism have a remit to Charity or looking out for others' wellbeing ... but, if we wanted to be strictly accurate, it actually went back to Confucianism, since Confucius said that if you saved anyone's life, you then had to take care of them for the remainder of their now-extended natural life, which could get rather expensive.

I was thinking about this after watching the news last night and seeing what happened to the two year old girl in China who was run over by two separate cars and left to die on the street, with ever so many folks simply stepping over her.

It was just so awful I do hope something good comes out of this. Apparently the Chinese bloggers are up in arms over it, and everyone across the Mainland is talking about it, but I do hope it extends to proper questions being asked of Chinese Culture and Religions and maybe even to the adoption of a little "Christian Charity", for the want of a better phrase.

It isn't impossible. In Hong Kong, we've had years of the "Show You Have a Good Heart" campaign, with posters and ads everywhere.  It just asks that you show charity to others ... and, yeah, yeah, it sort of works, although ... no, let's not go there!