We spent this weekend up a ladder, standing on water tanks, on woodshed roofs, cutting the hedges at Pūrākaunui. They had grown huge, lumbering, pushing over the smaller trees in front of them, forcing them to bow in subjugation.
I’d let them get out of control because I knew how much work it would take to tame them back and I just couldn’t summon the energy to get started. I felt defeated before I’d even begun. But the weekend was going to be sunny, I wasn’t alone, and the Yorkshireman had just bought a new piece of Milwaukee.
The gateway tool was a battery-operated grinder, but things escalated quickly, and his Milwaukee addiction is now officially out of control. The last time he came through customs from the Gold Coast he had two drills in his hand luggage. He has lines of red batteries, red tool boxes. Grinders, an impact driver, hammer drill, weed eater, reciprocating saw, circular saw, LED lights, leaf blower and now a massive pole saw, everything red, like a Mongrel Mob prospect’s wardrobe.
Milwaukee also sells a system of tool boxes and shelving/racking that make it impossible to quit, because you need more things to put in the boxes.
‘‘I don’t have a Milwaukee addiction,’’ he says. Denial, de nail.
Now is a good time to take advantage of these dormant months to prune branches, letting those smaller plants formerly in shadow - baby ferns, grasses - unfurl and bask in the sunlight from which they were being blocked. Winter gardening is the best way to promote strong spring growth. You need the sharpest tools to remove any dead, dying or diseased wood and to be ruthless. Know it will look bad to begin with, sparse, a bit straggly, but things will come back green and beautiful in time.
Cutting the dead wood, trimming those giants that cast shade and take a substantial amount of the nutrients from the soil ... I thought, I can’t be the only person to have Googled ‘‘When is the next general election?’’. When can New Zealand topple the political dead wood, dig out the hemlock, assemble a bonfire of the vanities, the vainglorious, and go back to being the country we used to be - a little mixed up, doing our best, but not nasty, vindictive, petty.
Result: ‘‘The next New Zealand general election will be held after the current 54th New Zealand Parliament is dissolved or expires.’’
Dissolved in a vat of acid, hopefully.
This government is truly awful. It seems like not a day goes by without some new horror visited upon us. Some group that already didn’t have enough suddenly getting less. Fewer rights, less in people’s pay packets. There’s been a whittling, a winnowing. Less food in school lunches. Less te reo spoken, less regard for our nation’s wilderness areas and unique biodiversity, less humanity. It shouldn’t come as a any surprise: ‘‘I don’t care’’ is the prime minister’s constant refrain.
I take no satisfaction in being right when I said this coalition would be the three-way none of us wanted, a tragic episode that would leave us traumatised and sent back to the ’50s in term of race relations and rights for workers. No-one listens to me because I’m funny. Cassandra probably cracked a few, too.
Two days of solid work, and we had a pile of hacked limbs, ready for the bonfire. The Yorkshireman, in addition to being addicted to red apparatus, is also a pyromaniac and eyed the pile saying, ‘‘Just a splash of petrol...’’.
‘‘Don’t burn the green wood. It will smoke a lot and be really obnoxious. Let’s wait until it dries out,’’ I said.
‘‘It will burn,’’ he said. ‘‘We can just start with a small amount, and once those catch, add more and more until the heat gets enough and, before you know it, it’ll all be gone.’’
He’s right. As Paul Kelly sings in the iconic protest song paying tribute to activist Vincent Lingiari: ‘‘From little things, big things grow’’.
