The jabber seeds are sown very young, when we jabber at absolutely anyoneA friend rings from Auckland.
A fibrous plasterer.
He tells me he has been listening solely to opera.
Opera! I went into a dizzy sway as these words came down the line.
My friend was once a beacon in the wild '60s Dunedin R&B band scene, thrashing his guitar to within an inch of its life, and creating harmonica howl that could only be compared to the whinney of an impaled stallion He even drove a yellow Holden.
Opera!I have attended one opera, at The Met in New York, just two weeks after the towers came down.
Zeffirelli's predictably cinematic production of La Boheme.
I couldn't hear a note they were singing because of the clanking jewellery of the fur-encased woman next to me.
"It's pretty good isnt it?" I said to her during the first of two intervals.
"What?" she clanked back.
My friend says when he works with other tradesmen, they don't like his opera.
They prefer Radio Hauraki.
Which makes sense.
If you are lashing a kitchen into shape, you definitely want Bachman Turner Overdrive singing You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet.
My friend prefers to work alone.
Do you talk to yourself, I ask.
And he admits ruefully from behind every cupped hand he can spare, that yes, he does.
I should add my friend was an outstanding 1st XV halfback at Otago Boys High, a couple of years after Chris Laidlaw was that at the southern infidel, Kings High.
I wonder if Chris Laidlaw talks to himself?Of course he does.
Because when man hits 60, this is what man does.
My friend and I proceeded to talk long and hard about this, a topic that has fascinated me for some time.
Solo jabber.
And it has nothing to do with being a fibrous plasterer or a halfback, though tradesmen are noticeably prone.
My father-in-law, a painter-paperhanger, often used to work at our house, and he was a walking courtroom, rolling out adversarial banter of the finest kind as he strove for the truth.
Solo dual jabber.
He is 88 now.
He writes frequent letters to the Christchurch Press.
The jabber seeds are sown very young, when we jabber at absolutely anyone.
Our parents smile and think we're very smart.
No, we are just jabbering.
Then at 12, we cease communicating altogether, the talking tools plunge down the body, finally pitching tent at the sphincter, where they lie brooding until 16.
Then the girl who is consuming our every waking moment says if we don't start talking, she will go out with Jason.
So we talk.
Fuelled by mindfood, ambition and monstrous self-worth, men at university gabble incessantly and loudly on just about anything, virtually none of which they understand.
This is now in medical textbooks as Michael Laws Syndrome.
Good job, Otago University.
Then begins the decline.
By 50, man is entrenched in an ugly chair glaring at referees on television.
He has now reverted to little more than what he was at 12, communicating only with a slight incline of the hand when people want him to come to the dinner table or attend a wedding.
He just wants to see the end of the game.
From 60 on, man is conversationally little more than a taxidermied wombat.
But he does have a lot of words inside him, so he can either talk to himself, or write letters to the newspaper.
Rational man generally chooses the former.
But the brain is now needed to control the limbs, to steer man through supermarket aisles and stop him dropping food in the lounge.
And the brain's absence elsewhere allows the talking tools to run amok, which they then do at a socially unacceptable volume.
This is not burgeoning dementia, this is solo jabber.
My friend says he thinks opera might just be the greatest music of all.
He is keen to talk me round.
