It’s all the rage, when you are being hypocritical, to blame someone or something else. The coalition government has taught me that.
Better still if you can be as dramatic as possible, throw some figures and soundbites about and keep to the same script even when it proves questionable. The back-tracking on promises made about the Dunedin hospital rebuild are a great example of this.
I could rave on about that, but as you will realise, it’s just a distraction from my hypocrisy.
In recent years I have ranted about unnecessary air travel on the grounds we all need to reduce our carbon footprint.
Post- pandemic, I had little sympathy for those complaining about fare-price increases and sad sagas of lost luggage — secretly, or not so secretly, hoping such issues might eventually dissuade more people from flying.
Nor have I had any enthusiasm for the campaign to get transtasman flights to Dunedin. How is encouraging more flying across the Ditch a good thing planet-wise?
Last week I went on my first aeroplane flight since 2019. Then, it was a trip to Auckland, not long before lockdown, to join all of my sisters to see the hilarious musical The Book of Mormon.
This time it wasn’t an essential business trip or a rush to the bedside of an ailing relative either. I was off to Wellington for a couple of days to see the recently-widowed Old School Mate from Feilding who was about to celebrate a birthday with a number ending in zero. I had the bright idea we could combine a catch-up with Tami’s Neilson sings Nelson concert in the capital featuring Willie Nelson numbers.
Rather frivolous, but we reckoned we hadn’t seen each other in the decaying flesh since around 2012. Was that a good enough excuse?
I am not sure, but since I knew the concert would include a song with special significance to the OSM (Beyond the Stars, written by Tami and Delaney Davidson and which she has performed with Willie Nelson) I thought it would be worth the flight guilt.
(I had attempted to assuage that guilt with a donation to Trees that Count, a great charity which provides trees to large and small restoration projects around the motu.)
As usual, Tami did not disappoint. She is an engaging performer who builds a great rapport with her audience.
She is just as good at belting out something rocking and raucous as she is at slowing the tempo for a pared back and poignant version of Always on my Mind.
She cried. We cried. She laughed. We laughed. In a couple of numbers she asked us to sing along, although there was no way we could match that voice.
After the concert we walked back to our motel, talked and laughed some more, and had toast and jam, much as we might have in our boarding school days. (Then, we might have also stolen sugar out of the school kitchen to make toffee, but as a former dental nurse, the OSM might prefer to forget that bad behaviour.)
When she dropped me off at the airport, after nearly two days of talking, I was almost hoarse.
At Wellington Airport I had plenty of time to rest my voice. My flight to Christchurch was delayed for about three hours.
Those with devices set up to receive notifications were informed of the delays, although Air New Zealand tells me they would not have been given the reason for them.
It was not until we were on board the plane, the pilot, apologising profusely, told us there had been an engineering issue with the original aircraft and a replacement had to be organised.
How hard would it have been to announce that in the terminal and add that information to the messages sent out on the app? It might have stopped the conspiratorial muttering, from some of those waiting, about nobody caring about anything involving the South Island.
While I was waiting, "I thought about friends/And how rare it is to find one", as Tami had sung the night before.
I thought how lucky I am to have found several — women I can trust implicitly, with whom I can discuss anything no matter how irreverent or irrelevant , who accept the worst things about me (including my hypocrisy), are there through triumph and tragedy, and who can make me laugh in good times and bad.
Some tears slipped out as I thought about the challenges another dear friend is facing, and how hard it is knowing there is nothing I can do to change that.
The beauty of public blubbing at airports is that nobody turns a hair.
Perhaps I should visit more often.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
