Even as far back as high school most of my friends were rational thinkers. Back then we defined science as the subject boys did when they couldn't write essays.
And as far as I was concerned, if you couldn't write an essay, you were only half a man. The Who wrote a great song about being half a man.
Happy Jack. No song has ever had a better opening line: Happy Jack wasn't all but he was a man. In other words he was half a man.
I bet Happy Jack was good at science. (Actually, I've just been told it was "old" not "all" but let's not allow facts to spoil a good tale.)
We have two glorious lilies by our front door, towering and surging like two superb NBA basketballers. They are far and away the best things in our garden. I have no idea how they got there.
Possibly they are the result of two errant seeds falling out of a top dressing plane on the Taieri Plain and were swept cityward by the awful winds we have had this summer.
Is that how lilies grow and become tall and colourful? I have no idea.
Apparently, the answer lies in science, so it is beyond my ken.
"Wife," I said last Saturday morning as I lay stretched out in my deckchair surveying the garden, "those two lilies are extraordinary. Why don't we fill the entire garden with them?" The reply was incomprehensible.
There are probably scientists at the University of Otago who could have understood what she was saying, but it made not a whit of sense to me. Something about coming out for only two weeks once a year. How ridiculous is that?
We plant children and they don't come out for only two weeks every year, they come out all the time. They grow bigger and develop extra bits. Why can't we make these lily things come out all the year round by planting them at two week intervals?My wife said I was being silly.
There was loose talk of my interfering with the incontrovertible laws of nature. Bwahahahahah!!! I remember travelling to Bannockburn when I was at university selling capping magazines in a Hillman Husky van. My friend Gordy was with us. He came from Bannockburn.
What is in Bannockburn, I asked him. Nothing, he said, just our house, a bowling green and a lot of rocks and tussock. Couldn't you grow wine there, I asked, incredulous. I knew there was money in wine. No, he said. Wine doesn't grow in Bannockburn.
That was because the scientists had told the people of Bannockburn this. You go there now and there is wine growing everywhere. It is like the Loire Valley. I bet they could plant lilies there every two weeks and they'd come out all the year round, too. People who study science and can't write essays just don't have the vision that life requires for it to move forward.
I'll warrant there will be no science taught in schools by the year 2050, the evidence for its retention just doesn't stack up at all.
I don't know what our lilies are called. I do know there are many kinds. Tiger lilies, water lilies, Christmas lilies - my mother-in-law complains about the price of them every Christmas - and Dennis Lillees. My favourites are inevitably the Dennis Lillees, for Dennis Lillee was what we in rational thinking call a real man.
He got into a fight once with the Pakistani legend Javed Miandad, which is something every cricketer wanted to do at some point.
But I digress wildly. Google says our lilies are called Stargazers. We had a boy at school we cruelly called Stargazer. His father was a local judge. Stargazer viewed the world by peering high into the top left-hand corner of the sky.
We used to think he was looking for errant top-dressing planes. He was good at science.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
