We didn't go anywhere this weekend; well nowhere beyond the ordinary, beating the usual path to work, one eye on the speedometer, the other peeled for the highway patrol, but in between, at night, we were glued to the television.
At one point I even found myself watching an ice-skating reality show, which is saying something, because the last time ice-skating featured in my viewing habits was in the dim and distant past when Torvill and Dean were an inescapable item, so to speak, and burnt up the ice to the strains of Bolero, repeated to the point of ruination.
We were looking out for the road safety ads, not because we had suddenly become obsessed with messages about driving carefully - we usually do - but because we were being expectantly proud parents.
Offspring number one, who has found gainful employment in the agency which produces the advertisements, had a hand in the one designed for this particular weekend reminding drivers to take extra care, so parental vanity required an additional degree of attention.
Perhaps we were not the only ones. For this past holiday weekend has made it into the record books as being the lowest-fatality weekend on record.
For the first time in 50 years there have been no fatalities on the roads over the Queen's Birthday Holiday period. That is some cause for celebration.
How often are such occasions blighted by an unrelenting flow of news on road carnage: "horror smashes", "head-on collisions", "multiple road fatalities"?
That it wasn't this past weekend is of course due to a whole range of factors - the same that have contributed to the overall road toll for the year standing at 121 compared with 186 last year. That, by any standards, is a near miraculous drop.
Driver education and those constant messages, overt and subliminal, to take care on the roads are undoubtedly part of it. So, too, are the widely publicised police traffic campaigns targeting a reduced speed tolerance - 4kmh over the limit being the actionable speed.
By early evening on Monday, 70 Dunedin police officers had staffed checkpoints over 25 hours, conducted 4000 breath-tests and issued 104 infringement notices. Between 9am and 3pm in Milton on Sunday, one police camera snapped 360 motorists within the 50kmh zone.
Police presence and publicity relating to safety strategies, such as the weekend's Operation 5 campaign - a partnership between Police, ACC, NZTA and Sadd - have evidently played their part.
But so too, most likely, have unrelated factors. The price of petrol and the recessionary times in which we currently live will have put a damper on the number of casual road-users - in particular the accident-prone young driver age group.
When it costs $80-plus to fill up the car, joy-riding becomes a luxury, rather than a cheap thrill. Better to stay at home with the six pack and your mates.
One of the other stories that exercised us in the newsroom over the weekend was the latest Christchurch aftershock - and how instant and detailed the information pertaining to it now is. If you log on to www.
christchurchquakemap.co.nz, you can almost instantaneously access a record of the number and scale of tremors hitting the region, with some clever little visual flourishes.
What it tells you is that living in that city at present must be a little like living on a big quivering bowl of jelly - with thousands of minor tremors rippling beneath your days - and nights.
The effect of this is something most of us can only begin to imagine. Physically, most of these shocks will be entirely harmless. But each must carry at least a small emotional charge. How for instance does one decide when to down tools and leap under the nearest table?
Or rush outside only to discover by the time you are halfway there the quake has been and gone?
As stoic and unperturbed as our cousins to the north appear to be, it must be like living under a psychological state of siege. Picking yourself up and getting on with the task of rebuilding lives, businesses, relationships after the trauma of the February 22 earthquake will, in itself, be extremely testing. But when the ground keeps on shifting under your feet, the task assumes altogether more challenging dimensions.
They deserve our ongoing concern and support.
- Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) at the Otago Daily Times.
