Taking its toll

Brendan texted me yesterday to say that Robin Williams had taken his own life. Williams’ untimely death shocked the world. How can someone so talented who has given so much pleasure to so many people be so utterly depressed as to want to end it all? Poor mental health is a huge problem in our society and it shouldn’t take an A-list celebrity suicide to get people talking about it. Every year about 300 people are killed on New Zealand’s roads. Road deaths are readily reported on the news. You can find the figures all over the internet, and they’re updated almost daily. Road casualties are broken down month-by-month, by age, location, and type of road user. And wouldn’t you know it? NZ road fatalities are in steady decline. We’re all becoming better drivers and our roads are becoming less dangerous. But while the road toll is decreasing, over 500 New Zealanders are killing themselves every year, and that figure isn’t going down. Just imagine for a minute that suicide statistics were displayed so prominently and in such detail on a government website, and updated every time a suicide was confirmed. Suicides would be the second or third item on radio news bulletins. Millions of dollars of taxpayer money would be spent on suicide-prevention adverts, specifically targeting those most at risk. By tracking the stats, you’d know exactly who those at-risk people are because, guess what, they aren’t the same people they were in 1994. Knowledge is power. Yes, John Kirwan’s depression campaign has been a definite help, but so far it feels like we’ve only just scratched the surface of the problem. Depression, and suicide in particular, still seems to be largely a taboo subject.

I talked to Brendan on the phone last night. We talked about Mark, a 23-year-old guy who, for a while, attended both the Auckland autism group and the North Shore men’s depression group. He died on a sunny afternoon in August 2011 when his car crossed the centre line and collided with a truck. I don’t think it was ever determined whether or not it was suicide. Mark had a combination of mental health and other conditions: depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and Asperger’s, although I never would have guessed he was on the spectrum. He was what I’d call a “pretty boy”, and he had a habit of getting closer to women than they might like. He came from a well-off family north of Auckland; I don’t think he had a good relationship with his parents. In September 2010 he wanted to move away from home and he asked me if I’d take him on as a flatmate. I said no, using the age gap as an excuse, but really I knew he’d be hard work with all his conditions. If I’d said yes, he might still be alive today. If a butterfly flaps its wings and all that.

 

The autism group on Monday worked rather well. Our facilitator had to leave at short notice but that wasn’t a problem – we were more than capable of facilitating ourselves. My phone app – remember that? – cropped up in conversation. If I’m ever going to create apps or games myself, perhaps my best bet is to make a Facebook game.

Here's a great article on FiveThirtyEight about Nigel Richards, the Kiwi Scrabble player who is number one in the world by some distance and gets virtually zero recognition here in New Zealand. He's almost a recluse and is Zen-like when he plays Scrabble. Both his interests are obsessions: Scrabble and cycling. If he wasn't somewhere on the spectrum, I'd be surprised.

Here's another good article from Joe Bennett, describing a moneyed suburb of Auckland. He's right - house prices have reached almost mythical levels in that city. Things were bad enough when I looked at properties in 2009. The no-price thing was a real turn-off. I'd look at a place and ask an agent for just the first figure of the price. Three or four? Four or five? Give me a clue. Of course if I'd actually bought, we'd be talking six or seven now. But that was 2009, the year when my income peaked. I'd be really surprised if I ever earn as much in real terms as I did then, and I knew that even then (and if by some miracle I do make that much, it won't be from a salary). The earning power of a graduate is "supposed" to peak around fifty; mine peaked in my late twenties. Going back to the article, Joe Bennett has a remarkable knack of making mundane things, like that road sweeper, sound interesting, almost beautiful.

I had my Chinese lesson tonight. I still think it'll be ages until I can speak vaguely comprehensible Mandarin, if I ever do. And as for reading or writing it, that will take even longer. At the moment we're using pinyin, which is the most popular Romanisation system. The design of the system was headed by Zhou Youguang, a remarkable man who is still alive at 108. The Language Log blog is interesting reading. It covers Chinese quite often. The latest post on the blog, written by Victor Mair, features a Chinese restaurant menu. The two most impressive things in that post (to me) are that: (a) the Chinese have at least seven words for cabbage, and (b) Victor Mair knows them all.

My car failed its warrant. I'm not surprised. It's got some fairly large patches of rust on both of the front pillars. I'm getting the patches repaired for now, but all this rust will probably be end of my car eventually.

It feel like rust patches are sprouting all over this blog too. I don't think my writing is up to much these days, and I don't enjoy it as much as I used to either. So we might be nearing the end.

We've got brackets!

I've just been speaking to Bazza on the phone. He hasn't changed. We hadn't spoken in almost a frigging year, and he just launches straight into the men's Wimbledon final. Heck, I like tennis and have blogged about it here a lot, but a how-are-you or a fancy-you-ringing-me-it's-been-ages would have been nice, if a huge surprise. I plan to see him on Sunday week when I'm up in Auckland.

When I was a kid, at about quarter to five on a Saturday, you'd see the football results trickling through on the TV, one letter or number at a time, via something called the vidiprinter. If there was a big score, they'd also put it in words in brackets, just so you'd know it wasn't a typo, as in "Oxford 1 Birmingham 7 (seven)". I'd get a bit excited whenever I saw brackets. Well this morning we had brackets all right.

Seriously, who’d have thought it? I actually wanted the Germans to win (yes, I know, English and all that) but with two-thirds of the game still to play, Germany had a scarcely believable five-goal lead! Someone at work managed to get a live stream, and at half-time I saw a replay of the goals. They were a result of abject defending more than attacking brilliance, and it seemed that for all the talk about Neymar, Brazil missed Silva (their best defender) even more. But 7-1! And it really should have been 8-0. The look on the Germans' faces when they gave up that last-minute goal showed what a determined bunch they are.

I wondered last night what the legacy of this World Cup would be, and barring something truly ridiculous in the other semi or the final, we’ve got our answer. Even if Germany lose in the final. As shock results in football go, this one is a magnitude 9.5. Kids with parents wealthy enough to get them tickets to the game, will relive it 60 or 70 years from now. In some ways I’m glad Brazil were beaten. If they’d lifted the trophy, it would have glossed over the obscene amounts of public money spent on the tournament.

Nate Silver and his mates at FiveThirtyEight.com have come in for some criticism for their World Cup prediction model following this crazy result. Some of it is deserved. If you’re going to give Brazil nearly a 50% chance in a four-horse race, in a sport as unpredictable as football, they need to be pretty damn good. Better than they’d been in their previous five games, which I don’t think were weighted heavily enough in the model. But all this talk about all statistics in football being meaningless is pure guff. Of course you can model football results, just like you can model election results. You just need to get your inputs right.
Edit: I now see that the FiveThirtyEight model gave a Brazil a 45% chance of lifting the trophy before the tournament started. Yikes. That was way off base, surely. This isn't rugby where one side (like the All Blacks) can dominate. That they even came up with a probability that high and didn't seriously question it makes me wonder.
 

Here’s Joe Bennett’s take on World Cups (he wrote it before today’s match). Very accurate I think.

Part two of the fruit series

In this episode (!) we talk about satsumas. I’ve eaten two today – it’s hard to eat just one. Of course people don’t use the word satsuma over here, which is a shame, because it sounds so squishy and juicy when you say it. Mandarin, which is the preferred term in NZ, doesn’t quite have the same effect. Around Christmas time in the UK, we ate boxes of the things. My brother was the biggest satsuma consumer – he’d usually eat the peel too – and we’d all know about it afterwards (and promptly vacate the room). Because they’re so easy to peel, and divide nicely into segments, they’re great for kids. They’re obviously firmly cemented in British society, for there exists a football team, some way down the pyramid, who play in orange and are known as the Satsumas. Here’s one of their match reports from 2000, written in Comic Sans; it makes following a non-league team sound way more fun than supporting Man City or Chelsea or whoever. (There are also at least two teams known as the Tangerines, but that nickname doesn’t have nearly the same level of awesomeness.) Click here for the post about persimmons. I don't expect this fruit series to last very long.

That leads me on to the World Cup (again, I know). During a dull moment at work (there have been quite a few of those lately) I was following the final matches of Group C. Colombia had already qualified for the next round, leaving one of the Ivory Coast, Japan and Greece to take the second spot. I would have been happy with either Japan or the Ivory Coast making it, but please not Greece. Colombia were beating Japan comfortably, so the match between the Ivory Coast and Greece was a straight shoot-out. The African side just needed a draw; the Greeks had to win. With the score at 1-1, Greece were awarded a last-minute penalty which they duly converted to book their place in the last 16 at the expense of the Ivory Coasters. Greece managed to qualify despite scoring only two goals in their group games and letting in four – the same record as England, who finished bottom of their group. I don’t know what makes Greece so unlikable in football, but whatever it is, they won’t care. Talking of unlikable, Luis Suarez should get a very long ban, if not a lifetime ban, for biting that Italian player, if that's actually what happened.

My flatmate had a check-up yesterday on his backside. He found out that he has an anal fistula and will need more surgery. He wasn’t in a good mood when I got home. I do feel sorry for him sometimes. “Fistula” is a nasty word, isn’t it? It’s the same length as “satsuma” and even has some of the same letters, but somehow it sits right at the other end of the word-niceness spectrum. I guess the meaning probably doesn’t help.

Joe Bennett has written a couple of interesting pieces lately. There's this one about multinational companies and the people who "work" at them, and this one about those extremely unhelpful people you get at information desks at UK railway stations. Oh god. Why are they always so deadpan? I still remember a few years ago asking someone at Leicester when the next train to Peterborough was. She wasn't far off the computer-says-no woman on Little Britain. "Twenty-one twenty-four," she said, or whatever it was. What? That's over three hours away! At least look like you give a damn that I'll be stuck in this hole for ages. By contrast I found the Italian information-desk people, usually women, to be very helpful, even though my Italian wasn't exactly brilliant. Train travel was a lot cheaper in Italy too.

Mum only found out on Monday night that her brother had died. I'm surprised it took them that long to get to a computer, even in a fairly remote part of the Dordogne, as they knew he was in a bad way. According to Dad she was beside herself, as you can imagine. I still wish I'd gone to the funeral.

28/11/03

I advertised for a flatmate on TradeMe last night and have already had someone take a look. He's British and has only been in the country a couple of months. He knew exactly where St Ives was, because he graduated from Cambridge as recently as 2011. So he's a clever bugger. He now works as a geologist (interesting job) in town. He almost turned a blind eye to the whole earthquake-risk business (he missed the big quakes we had in August and September). It was funny showing him around. I feel a bit embarrassed by how big my place is considering I live here alone. I'm not sure about him: practically he'd be fine I think, but his youthful exuberance might get a bit much. A 32-year-old German woman, who works at the hospital, has expressed interest too.

I arrived in New Zealand ten years ago today. What an absolutely stunning day that was. Not a cloud in the sky; as we drove from Christchurch to Temuka the sun was mind-blowingly bright as it lit up the snow-capped Four Peaks. Perhaps being zonked from spending 24 hours on a plane actually enhanced that experience. Today has been quite the opposite (admittedly in a part of the country that experiences "the opposite" more often than Canterbury does). It started off grey and drizzly, just the sort of day you get when you land at Heathrow and go home via the M25. Then around lunchtime the drizzle turned into proper rain, and it's been properly raining ever since.

Ten years, or 3653 days, is a long time. I don't feel like I've achieved much in that time but maybe my own expectations are too high. In 2004 and '05 I gradually became more and more Kiwified, going on road trips and getting to know which rugby team plays where. But that Kiwification has since unravelled and I no longer feel especially attached to any country (I do however feel some affinity with Wellington now). I should mention Mum - she spent thirty years in the UK, got married and brought up two kids there, and when she came back to her old stomping ground of Geraldine to live, it was like she'd been away for thirty minutes.

Silvio Berlusconi has been kicked out of parliament after being convicted for tax fraud. My only response to that: Hooray! What a nasty piece of work.

Here a couple of recent Joe Bennett articles that I liked. There's this gem about people's smartphones being chucked in the Avon river, and this one about pronunciation of French words in English, a subject I touched on in this post last month.

A stormy trip to Auckland

Hooray! It's over! The America's Cup regatta came to an end in this morning's 19th race of the best-of-17 series, with the limitless resources of Oracle winning out. It's remarkable how many Kiwis got so emotionally (and irrationally) involved in it all. It wasn't NZ v USA or anything close to that, it was a battle between two mega-corporations. I kept hearing "we've been penalised" and "we've got no chance now", and even the mayor of San Francisco said "we won!". You can just about get away with "we" when a national team like the All Blacks are playing, but how can you get that attached to a brand? Today I got a long and very emotive text from Brendan (a friend from Auckland) who normally shows no interest in sport at all. He was "totally disgusted", calling Oracle's comeback a "conspiracy" and saying, in all caps, "MONEY TALKS". I totally agree with his last point. I only learnt yesterday that Larry Ellison (Mr Oracle) is the world's fifth-richest man. As for Dean Barker, he took defeat extremely well I thought. I hope the NZ government cut their funding for the next America's Cup challenge to zero. Imagine if that money was spent on mental health services instead.

The piece in the Press on the America's Cup by the ever-brilliant Joe Bennett sums it all up rather nicely. Two more of Bennett's columns caught my eye. First there was this one about personalised plates. It's weird, people pay hundreds of dollars to get hard-to-decipher vowel-free combinations because they provide an ego-boost. Not so long ago I was following a car with a plate that read (or so I thought) NOTLGB. Hmmm, what's LGB? Is that, like, gay? So you're straight? As I got closer I noticed it wasn't a B on the end, it was an 8. NOTLG8. Huh? I sat right behind him until it finally clicked. "No tailgate". But I had to get so damn close to figure that out. Then there's this piece which touches on a subject dear to my heart, all that nauseating marketing speak (I'm guilty sometimes too: I talk about "issues" too much). As he says, words matter. He's obviously a voracious reader; that's one reason why he writes so well.

Well I left Wellington eventually on Friday night. We had a downpour and a rare thunderstorm; one of the planes on the ground was struck by lightning. There were a lot of cancellations as a result, and it was complete chaos in the terminal building. The departure boards were worse than useless (they only showed a handful of flights and gave dodgy information about those) and the staff were very unhelpful. I spoke to one woman who told me all flights were suspended for the evening and I'd need to queue up to get put on a plane the next day. I had my phone on me and, as a rare treat, I'd bought an internet data package. According to my phone, that woman was telling porkies and I was good to go from gate 11. After a 90-minute delay we did indeed take off from gate 11. The plane was packed - people had been rebooked on my flight from earlier (cancelled) flights. The flight was fine. My phone was a godsend: I knew exactly which bus to get on and where, and I arrived at the motel a few minutes after midnight.

On Saturday I met up with Richard in Newmarket before the autism group. I hadn't seen him in over a year. I still prefer the set-up of the Auckland group to the way they run it here in Wellington. There you're able to get up, walk about, and have conversations in twos and threes. Richard will try and talk to just about everybody, which is great. As I chatted to some new people (there was one woman I really liked) I bemoaned the fact that I wouldn't see them for at least six months, possibly longer, possibly ever. There's a bigger spread of ages at the Auckland group: in Wellington they're mostly twenty-somethings.

A big thunderstorm came through on Saturday night (I could have been luckier with the weather). The rain was torrential and I was kept awake for hours. Between two and four, the fork lightning got further away, then closer again. In the morning I popped over to the Shore to meet up with Mandy, who is now five months pregnant. So that gave us an obvious topic of conversation. She was also studying for yet another exam. I don't know how she still manages it (she reckoned the prospect of a new baby gave her extra motivation). Her partner holds a senior position at the same company; in her (serious) words he gets paid far too much. They bought an apartment in Birkdale, a stone's throw from the cold, damp flat I lived in for a year. Its value has already shot up in the short time they've owned the place. Mandy asked if I would ever consider having a family. Never say never, I said. I think I'd be OK at the dad bit up to the age of five, but not much use after that.

On Monday I caught up with the ex-facilitator of the Wellington autism group.  We had lunch at the swanky new section of Britomart. She's pretty happy with her lot now - her husband's got a good job while hers (at a school) is rewarding and almost free of stress. It's all very different to their situation when they lived in Wellington. Later I met Richard again, at his new flat in Onehunga. He showed me his drawings, mostly of fantastical figures, then played me some songs on the guitar. It must be nice to have his level of creativity. Things are looking up for Richard - he's far happier with his current flatting situation than some of his previous arrangements.

I didn't get to see Bazza while I was up there, or (despite my best efforts) Brendan, which isn't his real name, or either of his two previous real names. The wet and windy weather made Tuesday a bit of a write-off. I couldn't really go anywhere or do anything before my flight except read my book. I was pessimistic about my flight but it took off with only a short delay. Our approach and landing was a bit bumpy but unremarkable by Wellington standards. So I was back to work yesterday, and I surprised myself (and probably my boss too) by how on the ball I was.

Jumping in

Yesterday I had an enjoyable day at the Heineken Open tennis. The big names weren't there - the top four seeds, who all hail from Spain, get a bye through to round two and don't play until Wednesday. But that didn't matter. I decided not to watch the first match on Centre Court, instead seeing my fellow Pom Daniel Evans play his final qualifying round match against someone called Wang from Taipei. I made the right decision too; it was a very good match which Evans won in three tight sets. I felt sorry for the players who had to contend with Centre Court's ridiculously loud PA system, the announcer mispronouncing the players' names and getting all the countries wrong at full volume. "Turn it up a bit," Evans said as he faced a big point in the third set. It would have driven me potty too. I then moved to the main court see the two wild-card Kiwis who happened to draw each other in round one. Rubin Statham ran out a well-deserved winner against his higher-ranked opponent Dan King-Turner, playing like a man possessed to reel off the last four games. The rest of the day's play didn't quite live up to the earlier action but I stayed till the end regardless.

After six years of living close to the sea I've finally figured out how to get in it. In the past I'd gradually ease my way in on tiptoes with my arms outstretched above me. This works fine until the water reaches my nuts and I start to wince. Once I'm over that hurdle I'm OK again until it reaches my chest. Finally, after all that agony, I'm in. At the weekend I changed my strategy completely, deciding to run in making as big a splash as possible. It turns out that's a far less painful method.

On Saturday I popped round to see Brendan. He's reorganised his living area again; he now has two TV rooms, labelled Cinema One and Cinema Two, complete with viewing schedules neatly set out using the 24-hour clock. Talking of clocks, he has dozens of them. And that's not all. He has precisely nine telephones, a calendar for every month of the year (all with pictures of naked men - he is gay after all) and every kind of calculator known to man including a novelty foot-high one and a retro one that prints out receipts. Hanging on his wall is a seemingly innocuous photo of a rugby team, but it turns out it's a Where's Wally-type picture, except the object isn't to find Wally but willy. I could go on, but I won't. I'm sure you'd only need to spend five minutes in my flat to have a jolly good laugh.

I've finished all my Joe Bennett. He has a remarkable knack with words; he even managed to get the words "rootling" and "fossicking" in the same short story. I'll have to get hold more of his fine work soon.

After 7000 hands of limit hold 'em at the lowest stakes, over two months, I plucked up the courage on Sunday to move up to the nosebleed nickel-and-dime level. Though I was well ahead, in big bet terms at least, I bemoaned my lack of monster hands. My best hand had been four fives, until Sunday evening when this happened:



Of course thousands of players catch royal flushes every day, and they make little difference to your overall win rate, but it's still nice to have hit the poker equivalent of a hole-in-one. After being stuck in a holding pattern around the $30 mark, my bankroll has now nudged over $40.

Tonight I'll be seeing my counsellor/psychologist and going to the men's group shortly after.

Joe Bennett - one clever bloke

Yesterday I started reading Barking, a collection of Joe Bennett's columns. I've already finished it and am about to start on a more recent selection, entitled Eyes Right (and They's Wrong). Boy do I wish I could write like Joe Bennett. Sometimes I even wish I could be him; I certainly envy his lifestyle. As it happens we share the same birthday. Joe Bennett, Adolf Hitler and myself: an unlikely trio.

My favourite column in Barking (there were plenty to choose from) was on the subject of apples: pick up any apple from a supermarket and it'll be a beautifully polished but utterly tasteless eight-ounce water bomb. As a kid we had four apple trees in our back garden: a Bramley (for making yummy apple crumbles), a Worcester and best of all, two of the delicious (and wonderfully named) Bohemian Blenheims. We sometimes had more than we could eat so when I was ten I started selling them, or trying to at least, outside the front gate.

His column on Singapore was interesting. I visited recently; my experience was very similar to his. We even stayed in the same hotel, the Excelsior. He was on the 21st floor while my room was on the 13th, a floor that most hotels superstitiously skip over. I tried to fit as much as possible into my four days: Sentosa Island, the zoo, the amphibious boat, the Singapore Flyer (their version of the London Eye), the river cruise, Chinatown, Little India, you name it. Like Bennett I got very sweaty in the process. He said Singapore was a very ordered place - mainly I agree, though a couple of exceptions that spring to mind are the seven-storey shopping malls with names like Lucky Dragon Plaza, and a rabbit warren of eateries in Little India called Lau Pa Sat Market, which serves appetising food so long as you can get past the signs:



I watched one of the women's tennis semi-finals today. At the change of ends before what turned out to be the last game of the match, Shahar Peer called on her coach. She said she was struggling to pick up Wickmayer's second serve. While this was interesting, which muppet decided to allow on-court coaching? I realise tennis players now have coaches, agents, physios, psychologists, the whole nine yards, but while you're on the court it has always been one-on-one, mano a mano, and should remain so. In Agassi's book he likened tennis to boxing, and there are definite parallels. While they're at it, could the WTA also eliminate those tactical momentum-upsetting loo breaks? And that supposedly high-octane doubles scoring system, which is in fact anything but, is also a farce.

I've been back in Auckland for four days and until this afternoon I had yet to make human contact. Lack of human contact is the biggest danger I face in being out of work - hell, it was bad enough in work - so I gave Brendan a ring. We chatted, or mostly he did, and we agreed to meet up tomorrow.