I was fourteen when I flirted with politics for the first and last time. I can't remember why I wanted to be Chairman of the Casebrook Intermediate School Council but I did and won and wondered why I did. There were three students standing against me and we all got the chance to speak to the school for five minutes max because back in the 1980s we all had a short little span of attention and called each other Al. The others had lofty aims to make the pies warmer and the school pool warmer and the Winter warmer but my only policy was to build a wall around the school to keep Mexicans out. What swung it for me was my happy ending. If you were alive in 80s New Zealand you'll undoubtedly remember a TVC featuring the Kiwi Elvis, or Kwelvis, John Rowles. Here's a link to watch him belt his big hit 'If I Only Had Time' in France in 1969 and it's worth a watch because he's bloody good and only 22. Nearly two decades later things weren't going quite so well for John and as everyone in the entertainment game knows, sometimes you have to take a shitty gig to pay the rent. John's shitty gi, gi, gi, gi, gi, gi, gi gi, gig was an advertisement for Gerard Roofs that pretty much gu, gu, gu, gu, gu, gu, gu, gu, guaranteed a whole ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, generation of Kiwi's were stuttering their G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G's for fuckin' age, ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, ges.
I'm going to post John's Gerard Roofing advertisement below. Just a warning, once you've watched this the phone will ring and the little girl John's holding will try and sell you a roof.
In 80s NZ it was compulsory to watch a TV show on Sunday night called A Dog's Show where men whistled at dogs all called Blue and Gyp and the dogs made sheep go over bridges and sometimes John's ad would play halfway through and for 30 seconds every Kiwi was connected by some deeply spiritual happy hive mind and no one spoke. All you could hear was John g, g, g, g, g, g, g, g, g'ing from every house in the land and afterwards people couldn't quite remember what had happened but felt a bit better about the Muldoon g, g, g, g, g, g, g, g, government.
This is a round about way of telling you I got the power by finishing my five with, "Go for G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G, Gregory, go for Gregory and your Chairman's looking good."
And by power I meant the power to give up one lunch time every week to sit in the library listening to class representatives blathering about how the Four Square outlines were too small, or the GutterBoards were too angular or the K-Bars were too hard. After six months some of these student reps started to grumble that nothing had been done about their concerns so I decided to distract them with first a school disco and second a school mascot competition.
The disco didn't go well, mainly because we couldn't afford a DJ so I did the job myself with the shitty stereo from the music room and my brother's cassette of Disco by The Pet Shop Boys. It's a bloody fantastic album but there's only so many times you can play the 12" version of 'Paninaro' before people get toey. So I needed the mascot competition to go off like distraction dynamite and it did. Over 30 mediocre designs poured in and the council spent weeks deciding on the five best to be presented to the school for a vote. This never happened because I lost all the entries but it didn't matter because by then everyone else had lost all interest.
I've confessed to this before and I'm thinking about it again as the National Government of New Zealand wraps up spending $26 million changing a flag 70% of New Zealander's can't be arsed changing. There's no good reason to change it. NZ hasn't become a recent republic and John Key and the Windsor's are thick as thieves. So I'm guessing Key's flag competition, like my mascot competition was a distraction and now it's time for John to lose all the entries quick smart and pretend it never happened. There'll probably be a few annoying people on Twitter asking annoying questions but in a few weeks the All Blacks will be in the World Cup finals and Lorde's new album might drop and then we'll all say goodbye to Dan Carter and watch the Melbourne Cup and shit, then it's Christmas isn't it and before you know it John Key's won a 4th term and we're all feeling g, g, g, g, g, g, g, g, great!
I'm going to post John's Gerard Roofing advertisement below. Just a warning, once you've watched this the phone will ring and the little girl John's holding will try and sell you a roof.
In 80s NZ it was compulsory to watch a TV show on Sunday night called A Dog's Show where men whistled at dogs all called Blue and Gyp and the dogs made sheep go over bridges and sometimes John's ad would play halfway through and for 30 seconds every Kiwi was connected by some deeply spiritual happy hive mind and no one spoke. All you could hear was John g, g, g, g, g, g, g, g, g'ing from every house in the land and afterwards people couldn't quite remember what had happened but felt a bit better about the Muldoon g, g, g, g, g, g, g, g, government.
This is a round about way of telling you I got the power by finishing my five with, "Go for G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G, Gregory, go for Gregory and your Chairman's looking good."
And by power I meant the power to give up one lunch time every week to sit in the library listening to class representatives blathering about how the Four Square outlines were too small, or the GutterBoards were too angular or the K-Bars were too hard. After six months some of these student reps started to grumble that nothing had been done about their concerns so I decided to distract them with first a school disco and second a school mascot competition.
The disco didn't go well, mainly because we couldn't afford a DJ so I did the job myself with the shitty stereo from the music room and my brother's cassette of Disco by The Pet Shop Boys. It's a bloody fantastic album but there's only so many times you can play the 12" version of 'Paninaro' before people get toey. So I needed the mascot competition to go off like distraction dynamite and it did. Over 30 mediocre designs poured in and the council spent weeks deciding on the five best to be presented to the school for a vote. This never happened because I lost all the entries but it didn't matter because by then everyone else had lost all interest.
I've confessed to this before and I'm thinking about it again as the National Government of New Zealand wraps up spending $26 million changing a flag 70% of New Zealander's can't be arsed changing. There's no good reason to change it. NZ hasn't become a recent republic and John Key and the Windsor's are thick as thieves. So I'm guessing Key's flag competition, like my mascot competition was a distraction and now it's time for John to lose all the entries quick smart and pretend it never happened. There'll probably be a few annoying people on Twitter asking annoying questions but in a few weeks the All Blacks will be in the World Cup finals and Lorde's new album might drop and then we'll all say goodbye to Dan Carter and watch the Melbourne Cup and shit, then it's Christmas isn't it and before you know it John Key's won a 4th term and we're all feeling g, g, g, g, g, g, g, g, great!
