Dear Paul,
It may have been hard for you to notice spring, holed up with journalists circling like buzzards.
If you could escape, without their notice, you would be welcome to join me for a weekend at an undisclosed location in Otago before the season ends.
Lest you be concerned you might be drawn unwittingly into some new scandal or speculation (Will Paul dare to make varicose vein jokes after Otago tryst with older woman?), fear not.
We would be chaperoned.
I would insist on silence from you for the whole weekend.
Believe me, I know how hard that would be, but, as someone wiser than me said, sometimes you have to be unkind to be cruel.
I could, perhaps allow you an involuntary expletive on the trip if a hawk, lingering a little too long over roadkill, grazed the top of the car with its talons as it made its getaway.
There is something shocking about life masquerading as metaphor.
If I felt you were glowering in the back seat feeling sorry for yourself, I would resist the temptation to lecture and urge you to admire the colour and freshness of the world emerging from winter as it whizzed by.
I hope, when we reached our destination, you might share my sadness at the discovery of two starlings in the fireplace, their hopes of nesting in the chimney cruelly dashed.
Our companion would confess these have not been the only such deaths, softening that blow by telling of other bird rescues.
As a distraction from the mental image of the birds' last moments, I would make a cup that cheers and we would sit outside, admiring the candyfloss pink pom-poms of the flowering cherry.
The background music would be birds, the distant baa of lambs and ewes and the back-beat of a neighbour sledge-hammering something metallic - country style heavy metal interrupted occasionally by pigs squealing, a rowdy rooster and the odd expletive from said neighbour.
If you were bored, I would offer to show you how to knit a multi-coloured sock on four needles.
It would show you there can be a point to going round in circles (as opposed to going square, or triangular).
While you might not like every colour of the multi-striped wool, you could appreciate each had its part to play in the pattern.
I might not talk at you much over the evening meal, in perhaps a futile attempt to provide extra manners education.
If you know not to talk with your mouth full then perhaps you may see wisdom in keeping your mouth full at all times.
Later I would tell you about my surname.
It was Badcock.
Hilarious, isn't it?
Some of the kids at primary school thought so.
I can remember being called Bad Balls and Wobblycock, as if the real thing weren't bad enough.
Later, people I had just met would never want to believe it, calling me Bradcock, Babcock, or, in the case of an Australian woman mayor (a rarity herself 30 years ago), Badco.
Funnily enough, I don't remember anyone beyond primary school teasing me about it.
After an early night, our companion would insist on a morning forced-march up to the cemetery, early enough to see hares and rabbits playing in paddocks on the way.
I would point out scenes of other discoveries as we puffed upwards.
Searching for frogs with one of my adult sons, I discovered both that I was a hopeless frog-finder and my gumboots leaked.
That trip, I caught the look on my son's face as he watched me clambering over a fence atop a small greasy bank.
Suddenly, I felt old, as if in an instant my role had changed from protector to someone who needed protection.
Further up, I would reflect on the sad pilgrimages made up this hill.
Did the parents of "little Marion" who died at 13 make this half-hour journey on foot in the 1920s?
Would their sagging spirits have lifted a little at the sight of a cottonwool cloud seeming almost close enough to touch when they reached the top, or the sun paying special attention to the most spectacular of the distant snow-topped mountains?
I doubt it, but there is no excuse for us, I would tell you.
After breakfast, I would whine about dead starlings so much our companion would resist the urge to stuff me down the chimney and agree to make a wire-netting cover to stop the carnage.
We would send you up to install it.
Sliding about on a slippery roof to help prevent a sometimes irritating creature killing itself by following its natural urges would cap off a perfect weekend.
Call me, Paul.
You know you want to.
Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
