05 Nov Get Out of Town

First published in the NZ Woman’s Weekly 2 November 2020

Before all this Covid palaver redesigned our lives, mine involved constant travel. I recall sitting once in an airport close to Christmas, feeling a smidge travel weary, and filling in the time before a delayed flight by thumbing through my diary to count how many days I had spent away from home that year. The long and short trips round the country and the globe added up to a staggering four months out of twelve – fully one-third of a year spent sleeping in places other than my house. It certainly explained why my herb garden had gone wild, and why the cat had taken to sleeping in my suitcase whenever he got the chance. This, he possibly thought, is the only way I’ll get to see her – as a stowaway.

I travel for work, and also for pleasure. Even when I was little, and family trips generally meant I’d be carsick somewhere around Waipukurau, I still loved packing a bag – imagining what I might need for the places I imagined I might go. One of our family’s genealogists tells me there is Romany in our DNA and it feels not at all surprising. Even without the “gypsy” blood, the fact that my great-grandparents on one side and great-great-grandparents on the other travelled half-way round the world to a place they’d never seen suggests an adventurous spirit, right?

Part-Roma, part-shark, maybe – just like the fish, it is the moving forward that makes me happy. When we shifted into Level 2 that first time in May, I was in my car and driving out of the city in the first possible hours – I had grandchildren to see. But as I turned left off State Highway 1 and settled into the rhythm of rural roads, I could feel my shoulders drop and my muscles relax. The thought of arriving was joyous, but the getting there was part of the joy.

In the last few weeks, my suitcase – cat hairs removed with a lint roller – is back in regular business. Where have I been lately? Great Barrier Island, for starters. And I’m not the only one – New Zealanders hankering for a getaway have been arriving there in droves. The fabulous Orla who owns the island’s only pub tells us that, in non-Covid times, they have closed up for winter, but they stayed open this year to feed and water the kind of crowds who turn up for summer high season. Reports of the death of tourism have been somewhat exaggerated, here at least.

I’d encourage you to give Great Barrier a whirl. The locals will be thrilled to see you, and the scenery reminds of me Stewart Island/Rakiura but with the thermostat turned up about eight degrees. (That’s not a reason to not head as far south as you can, but it gives the Barrier an edge in early Spring.)

Living off-the-grid, locals are rightly proud of being the first island in the world to be awarded “dark sky sanctuary” status which makes it an extraordinary opportunity for star gazing. There are official tours, or you might get lucky enough to be invited, as we were, to dinner with enthusiastic locals who encourage you to poke your eye into their telescope and see Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons.

I am also freshly back from Levin, described once by some wag (possibly me) as the Paris of the Pacific. Many of us who grew up in small places have complicated relationships with our home town, but I liked this visit. Without wanting to come off like a crazy person, I will confess that almost all my nightly dreams are set in Levin – our old home, my school, the Little Theatre, the main street – so going for a wander there felt surreal but wildly familiar because, heck, I’m there every night.

Levin still has one of the best libraries – it was the centre of all the things I liked best as a kid (Books! Librarians! Daydreaming!) and is now literally the town’s community centre where you can borrow a DVD, play the piano, drink coffee and vote.

My diary tells me my suitcase will barely be home for the next few weeks – Rotorua, Whitianga, Tauranga, Wellington, Napier and more. Work mostly, but some days off here and there for hot pools and shopping and catching up with old friends. After months of connecting via Zoom, it will be grand to see people’s whole selves and do that hugging thing we’ve missed. Best I remember to bring some treats home for the cat.

22 Oct Broccoli & Bedtimes

First published in the NZ Woman’s Weekly 26 October 2020 

Fish fingers and macaroni cheese. That’s it. If you asked my granddaughter to draw you a picture of nana’s cooking, that’s what you’d see. Maybe there’d be a chocolate pudding discernible in a corner of the artwork if nana was being fancy and had the time. But dinner at my place? You don’t even need to ask.

This is not because that’s all I can cook. Indeed, Ariana has seen me whip up spicy enchiladas with smashed avocado (her mother’s favourite) or roast lamb and winter vegetables, or that lemon and wholegrain mustard thing I do with whole chicken legs and serve on couscous. At all of which she wrinkles her little nose, and turns instead with satisfaction to her plate of fish fingers and side dish of macaroni cheese.

Children should, of course, be encouraged to try new foods – educate their palates, widen their culinary horizons. But not by me. Because I am the nana, and I have decreed that broccoli and bedtimes are not in my purview. At Nana Michy’s House, carrot sticks and mandarins will be offered but not compulsory, and there is every chance you will stay up watching Disney movies till you fall asleep in her lap.

It hasn’t always been like this. When Ariana was two, she lived here with us (and her mama, and her great-grandparents) and all the necessary rules and routines were in place. There was a bath-bed-book routine preceded by meals which would have required many different coloured crayons to draw. (Green, certainly, on a daily basis, and also orange, plus red for tomato sauce which seemed to make everything palatable.)

But now, almost seven years old, she and her little brother live three hours away and travel here every few weekends so, operating on the basis that broccoli and bedtimes are correctly observed there in between visits here, I have adopted a different approach.

You can map it back to my own childhood when visits to Grandma – before she came to live near us – had its own ritual of treats. Jet plane lollies in a dish on her brass table, toffees in a purple jar. We knew without being told which bath towels were ours – routine and certainty amongst the strangeness of sleeping away from home, and away from our mother.

Even more clearly, you can trace it back to every school holiday and another each summer when we were bused to Hawkes Bay to stay with our great-aunt and great-uncle. Ruth and Frank arranged their home to make space for us – a camp stretcher in the sunroom, a particular eiderdown in the back bedroom, books on the bookshelves, egg cups designated for each of us, a crate of soda pop in the garage. Familiar things in our away-place you could count on that said, “You belong here, we keep a place for you”. So much so that, when we visited with our parents, not staying, I found it a little shocking that those things – the extra bed, the special china – had been put away. I think I had imagined that Ruth and Frank’s house was always set up for us, and that perhaps they always spent their days as they did when we were with them – feeding the ducks, visiting the local pool, finding all the things that enchanted small children.

It is impossible to measure how much all of this contributes to your sense of confidence, security and belonging as we grow up, except to say “a lot”. When the world feels uncertain, or you don’t quite fit in it, knowing there is a place – or several places – where you are welcome, expected and treasured casts a protective spell.

So at Nana Michy’s house, our moko have their own spaces. There’s a drawer filled with toys and nonsense – ones they remember and the occasional surprise. Books on the shelves and another basket of particular favourites beside the bed. Plates and cups in the cupboard, playdough, paper and pens. Stuff they can count on to be waiting for them so they know that, even when we are going on without them, they can slip right back in.

My favourite trip to the supermarket is the one just before they are due. Animal biscuits, honey yoghurt, rice crackers, and the pancake mix their mother expertly turns into breakfast each morning here. Also on the list, of course, fish fingers and macaroni cheese.

There is a theory that, to become the best version yourself, you need at least one person to believe in you. A teacher, or an uncle, or a nana, or a friend. A whole village would be even better, but one will do it. And at this stage in my life, I can’t tell you which is better – to have one of those people, or to be one.

15 Oct An Homage to “Schitt’s Creek”, Bébé

First published in the NZ Woman’s Weekly, 19 October 2020

Back when we were isolated at home for weeks – two adults, one cat – I satisfied my need for company by voyeuristically immersing myself in the shenanigans of other, bigger communities. My favourite was a joyous binge-watch of “Schitt’s Creek”, a Netflix series following the trials and tribulations of a formerly wealthy family who had fallen on hard times and relocated to the distinctly unglamorous small town they’d purchased once a joke.

We watched all eighty episodes in an enchanted romp. We’d given the series a bit of a go when it first launched five years ago, but I’d sighed and given up somewhere into episode three. Back then, I hadn’t been in the mood for watching wildly privileged Americans look down their snouts at small town hicks. “I don’t like any of them,” I’d said, “and I don’t care what happens to them – shall we try one of those cheery Scandi noirs?”

But come lockdown, and with the sixth and final series gaining traction, we gave it a second glance and couldn’t take our eyes off it. First impressions dissolved, giving way to something that felt a bit like… well, love. I couldn’t wait to catch up with them each evening. Their heartbreaks broke my heart, their triumphs lifted my spirits. I had a new friend-goal in “David Rose” and a fresh role model in his mother, “Moira”. They were deeper and more interesting people than I’d given them credit for, and they had the ability to do that extraordinary thing – remain essentially themselves while becoming better people. At the end of the final episode, I cried – because it was deliciously moving, and because it meant we had to say goodbye. I still miss them. I continue to imagine them out there somewhere, being complicated and happy.

Feeling viscerally attached to people we have never actually met – either fictional or real – is a phenomenon much older than television. We can adore (or despise) anyone who lives large in our minds, from characters in books, to royalty and politicians. When Princess Diana died there was genuine grief from vast numbers of people who had never been in the same country as her, let alone the same room. We all navigate a range of emotions when an American president is shot, or becomes ill, or gets (or doesn’t get) elected, and there are local public figures who arouse genuine distaste or adoration depending on where we’ve placed them in our “friend or foe” file.

Sometimes, the emotional attachment to people we’ve never met – or who aren’t even real – defies rational thought. Back in the 1980s when “Dallas” was the TV show du jour, there was a woman who possibly lived alone with cats who would phone TVNZ the morning after each week’s episode and pass on her advice about what should happen next. Occasionally, instead of simply logging her call, reception would put her through to the most junior member of Avalon’s publicity department (hello) for a chat. I think we all felt a bit of company was the least we could provide. The nice lady – we’ll call her Joyce – would have preferred to speak directly to the people who had been in her living room the night before, but I would do. “Tell Pammy not to listen to JR – her Bobby is a good man, and that brother of his is just out to make trouble,” she’d tell me and I’d promise to relay the message to Southfork. She quite liked Sue Ellen but felt she had made some terrible life choices and we agreed she was best left to sort things out as best she could.

Joyce also had concerns about real, actual people on her screen – there was a Wellington newsreader whose hair she disapproved of because it looked to her “too much like a hat”. I explained that perhaps this was down to the way the make-up artist styled it, to which Joyce replied, incredulous, that the newsreader in question was surely old enough to do her own hair? I promised to nip downstairs to make this suggestion, but despite bumping into the newsreader occasionally in the Avalon corridors, it never felt like the right time to say, even with 1980s ambiguity, “Joyce called and she thinks your hair looks unreal”.

Heaven knows what Joyce would have thought of Schitts Creek – though I would definitely have been up for a chat about Moira’s wigs nailed to the motel room wall like trophies, evidence of who she was yesterday and might be tomorrow. When anyone wonders aloud about the point of actors and writers and other creatives, I think about this basic human need we have to attach ourselves to each other, to feel something towards the people – real or imagined – who live our heads, and remember Joyce.

07 Oct Legalising the Devil’s Lettuce – Cannabis Referendum

First published on the RNZ website 2.10.20 

RNZ – Legalising the Devil’s Lettuce

When people talk about how they’re going to vote in the upcoming cannabis referendum, it is usual practice – even for those in favour of legalising the Devil’s Lettuce – to clearly state they don’t touch the stuff themselves, actually officer. Fair cop – it feels risky to tell everyone you do something illegal, even if that something has been dabbled in by most New Zealanders at some point in our lives.

In a nod to that tradition, I will say these things: cannabis is not my drug of choice but I was at university in the 1980s and I’ve worked in the entertainment industry for over 30 years. I’m voting yes in the referendum in small part because I’d like to ditch my current drug of choice – alcohol – and replace it with a nice, soothing, legal cup of cannabis tea.

As a balm, cannabis strikes me as a distinctly feminine drug. Despite the popular image of cannabis users being a bunch of blokes getting blazed on the strongest strain of weed they can cultivate, there is a whole other world of Mary Jane proponents whose names are more likely to be Mary and Jane. There is a network, for example, of Green Fairies in Aotearoa – mostly women who grow and supply the herb to assist with anxiety, provide pain relief, and offer a natural pick-me-up or calm-me-down. Before it became illegal here in 1927, the story goes that Mother Suzanne Aubert (currently in line for a sainthood) included the plant in her remedies and sold it to help fund her community work.

It is an entirely human thing to seek out substances that change our mood – every culture finds a leaf or berry, vegetable or fruit that they can tootle about with to come up with vodka, pinot, coffee or cocaine. Something that shifts us from our factory settings to either a more or a less elevated state. When I gave up the booze (or “reassessed my relationship with alcohol” in popular parlance) for a couple of months this year, the most challenging part was finding something to do at 6pm each day to mark the shift from “work time” to “me time”. Best I could come up with was a mocktail and taking my bra off, only one of which is acceptable in polite company. Apparently.

So after a lot of reading and a little experimentation (not currently, officer, feel free to have a look around) I fully plan to embrace cannabis tea whenever I can do that without legal risk. Though frankly, the risk of someone like me being searched, arrested, charged, convicted and imprisoned for having a Tupperware container of something that looks a lot like oregano is pretty slim.

And that is the bigger part of the reason why I’m voting yes in the referendum. Cannabis offences put more people into New Zealand prisons than any other drug, and they are not people like me, but a disproportionate number of young Maori men. A recreational drug that presents little legal risk to someone like me if I were to indulge could have a catastrophic legal effect on someone like my grandson if he were to have a tootle about with it when he grows up. The hypothesis that cannabis is a “gateway” to harder drugs has been largely debunked, but it sure as heck is a gateway to prison.

The proposed legislation could make it less likely a teenager would become a regular user – with cannabis out in the open and frank conversations and education about the harm to young brains, plus stringent regulations on the strength of the cannabis on sale, we would all know what we’d be buying and why it is a terrible idea for anyone under the legal age of 20. Cannabis would be more regulated than either alcohol or cigarettes – you won’t see it advertised, and its use would be confined to private homes or specially licensed premises.

And unlike alcohol or cigarettes, there would be a limit to how much you could buy at one time – 14 grams or about 30 joints. As a daily limit, that might have us clutching our pearls, but it’s a restriction, not an invitation. When I go to the supermarket, I don’t eat all the food in my trolley that day, right? So if you are buying cannabis once a month, that’s how much you can buy on your shopping day – and that would cost around $200. Also, we can, in theory, buy a fatal amount of alcohol whenever we want – but we don’t, because we’re buying that pinot noir to take the edge off our day, not end it. Also, you can’t die of weed.

Like many drugs, cannabis is neither perfectly safe nor extremely dangerous – it is somewhere in between. The current prohibition of it makes it hard to talk about safely finding that middle ground over a calming cup of tea.

06 Oct The Forever Project – Protecting Our Natural Playgrounds

First published on the Stuff website, 30 September 2020

There is an argument that the best thing humans can do to protect our natural playgrounds is to stay the hell away from them. Quit stomping around kauri, clambering on glaciers, poking about in mud pools and camping on our coasts.

And it’s true – good things happen when we subtract ourselves from the environmental equation. In April’s Level 4 Lockdown when we parked up our cars, moored the boats and grounded planes we watched wildlife fill up the space. The weather was great, right? And the air was measurably clearer. Covid-unemployed, I had weeks to sit very still in our garden and watch the native birds take over.

Tūī – the boy-racers of the ornithological world – chased each other at great speed in what was either a display of skill or an expression of sexual power – it’s always hard to tell with boy-racers.

Kererū, who usually visit in pairs around our place, turned up in veritable mobs. Five – no, look! – six of them clustered in an old karamu tree, testing its resilience with their considerable weight. We would watch them coming towards us, graceful in flight, then land like a fat bastard with an almost audible “oof” on a poorly chosen branch, occasionally stumbling sideways into a mate who’d picked a less bendy one nearby. You’d try not to laugh – it felt like their garden now, and it’s rude to snigger at your hosts.

So yes, “not be in it” is a plausible answer to the question, “What can we do to protect the environment?” Miserable prospect, though. Mother Nature is better than we are at creating exciting destinations for R&R. Glow worm caves, geysers, snow-capped mountains, golden sand beaches… Well done, her. Best we seem to come up with without her help is “a day at the mall” and “a night at the casino”.

Plus the whole “subtract humans from the equation” approach ultimately leads down some very dark roads. It might be true that the best thing any of us can do for the economy, for example, is die aged 65 – make that breath you draw between paying taxes and receiving superannuation your very last. But that’s the kind of argument I’ll leave to talkback hosts and columnists who are cool about saying stuff like, “They were going to die anyway”.

I am, however, a big fan of minimising human harm, and maximising our environmental care. Collectively, we need to continue putting pressure on our governments to take a global lead in cutting carbon emissions, and keep encouraging corporations to invest in sustainable solutions. I get excited when I hear that electric cars will soon be affordable, and that electric planes are a thing – for short haul flights only at this point, but maybe by the time we’re allowed to move around the planet again, long haul will also be an option. Though I understand it’s a challenge to find an extension cord long enough for electric international travel.

Personal responsibility, too. Recycling is something we can all do – paper, plastic, glass, clothing… Textiles to Wellington’s Southern Landfill have doubled in the last decade, and around four percent of what ends up in Auckland landfills is perfectly good yet unwanted clothing. So when you see someone wearing the same old shirt, don’t assume they’ve just given up caring, but thank them for doing something terrific for the planet.

I have also recycled two husbands. This is a fancy way of saying that I chucked them out and someone else found a use for them, incontrovertible proof that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. And also the better option – I’d been tempted to compost them until someone explained the carbon emissions involved in that. Releasing them back into the wild turned out brilliantly for everyone.

Eventually, you learn to trust the natural process. Mother Nature is smarter than us all.

29 Sep Dying Wish – NZ Woman’s Weekly Column

First published in the NZ Woman’s Weekly, 5 October 2020…

I have been a close witness to five deaths – two very special friends who died of cancer in the 1980s, and then family members in recent years, including my father who died in January 2017, and my mother who died in June last year.

I’ve also been present for several births – I was very involved in my daughter’s birth 27 years ago (I’m still tired when I think about it) and I was holding her hand when each of my grandchildren were born.

What I’ve learnt from those experiences is that the beginning and the end of life are similarly significant events. There’s nothing simple about arriving on the planet, or about leaving it and, no matter your role, being in the room when those things happen changes you forever. My mother, Donna, and I talked about it a lot over the years – how these twin events are the bookends of life.

We spend a lot of time planning for a birth – talking about it, preparing ourselves, writing a “birth plan”, doing everything we can to make it as healthy and comfortable as possible for the mother and baby. We will also intervene to make a birth happen days or weeks sooner than it might otherwise to make it safe and bearable, with the least trauma and suffering. My daughter, for example, was induced six weeks early because getting her out of the womb and into the world was better than letting nature take its course.

It seems right to think about death the same way – talk about it, make a plan, be prepared to intervene to make it as free of pain and as full of kindness possible.

When my mother, Donna, was given a terminal diagnosis in 2018, she said with her typical courage and clarity that she was not afraid of dying, but she was afraid of pain. We knew from other deaths – particularly my father’s the year before – that no amount of palliative care is a guarantee there won’t be suffering. We have known friends and family who have taken their death into their own hands by refusing food and water because they felt they had no other choice. Donna said she didn’t want that. She wanted a final chapter that reflected the rest of her story which was a life lived with elegance and dignity.

Our conversation about end-of-life choice had started years before, and we owe a debt of gratitude to Lucretia Seales for getting us talking so openly. In 2015, Lucretia mounted a legal challenge seeking the right for a doctor to help her die without being at risk of criminal prosecution. I think everyone’s heart broke a little when the courts didn’t allow this, but Lucretia did a remarkable thing in allowing her death to be part of our national conversation. I will be thinking of her as well as my mother when I vote “Yes” on the End of Life Choice referendum next month.

Where you put your tick will depend largely on how robust you think the safeguards are. There are doctors and palliative care specialists in both camps, plus people with terminal diagnoses or vulnerabilities because of race, disability and socio-economics who do and don’t support it.

In a nutshell, you must be terminally ill with less than six months to live and experiencing “unbearable suffering” that cannot be relieved to even begin to be eligible. The law is intended to put the patient at the centre – patient-led and with the option to change your mind at any time. Very few of us – perhaps only five percent – will ever need this law or be able to use it, so it’s about giving those people a choice. The government’s website will be your most trustworthy source for clear and unbiased information: https://www.referendums.govt.nz/endoflifechoice/index.html

We did manage to give Donna what she would call “a good death”, though we could never be certain and there were moments when it was a close run thing. There was a tension at times between what health professionals needed to be seen to do in terms of medications and protocols, and what the patient would choose to be eased off the planet. Donna would have had a different death if she hadn’t had a constant advocate, and not everyone can arrange that.

We need to talk about death more – especially the good deaths, and what it is that makes them good. Think of the people you love, and what you would want their last days to be like. Most of all, think of the things you most like about your life – being independent, making your own choices, living with integrity and dignity, being able to leave the party when you have had enough – and how good it would be to have a final chapter that reflects the best of your life’s story.

23 Sep Silver Linings – NZ Woman’s Weekly Column

First published in the NZ Woman’s Weekly 28 September 2020…

Somewhere during those 102 Covid-free days, I expressed nostalgia for our Level 4 Lockdown. So yeah, it was probably me that jinxed it – though I met more than one person with a similarly rose-tinted backwards view.

We talked fondly of those five weeks in early autumn when we had sat very still while birds took over our gardens, or took government-mandated walks down the middle of our streets and spotted bears in other people’s windows. Shout-chats over the fence with neighbours, and finding time to sort through forgotten boxes. I found a recipe I’d been meaning to try ever since I clipped it out of the Listener in 1996 and used it so often it became a staple.

It is possible I also went a bit mad – my underwear drawer was as neatly arranged as a museum catalogue cabinet, and one day I vacuumed the dust off the top of the living room curtains. (There is a special brush for this, so don’t tell me it’s not a thing.) Insanity aside, as a secret introvert I relished not having to go out, and only putting my game-face on for the odd Zoom.

Thrown back into Level 3 last month, I worked hard at remembering those silver linings. The Lockdown I’d hankered for – and it was only a mild hanker – came with caveats: we’d know when it would start and finish, maybe a month tops once a year, and there’d be a guaranteed basic income to ease the fiscal terror. A kind of “paid annual leave” plus “enforced staycation” scenario.

That’s not, of course, how a viral pandemic works. A lot of us found this second round harder – a repeat disappointment that forces you to grasp that if a bad thing can happen more than once, it might happen any number of times, like the particular tragedy of a second failed marriage.

We are all in this together, but our lockdowns are different depending on whether you have kids to educate and entertain, a job you’re trying to do remotely, a business you’re trying to keep afloat, how full your pantry or bank account is when each alert level is announced, how far you live from the people you love, or how vulnerable you might be to the worst this virus can do.

As a freelance creative, I used to say – possibly with a fair bit of smug, sorry if you heard it – that the wide range of things I did gave me “income security”. Turns out – ha! – almost everything I do relies on large numbers of people being able to gather in a room, which is – ta da! – the very thing we cannot do. So for the second time this year, I watched the work vanish from my diary. Not just for this month, but for many months ahead – an August lockdown makes clients pretty leery of making plans for November, lest the gods laugh. I’ve made a spreadsheet (lord knows I have time) called “Lost to Covid” detailing cancelled and postponed gigs, with a running total of what they were worth. Keeping it updated is the financial equivalent of obsessively poking my tongue into a broken tooth.

So I do other things in between, finding the things that make me happy and calm my mind. As someone who was time-poor before I am trying to see myself as time-rich, and recalling all the things I wished I could do back when I was busy being busy. I bought stamps (yes, stamps!) at Level 2.5 so that when I think about someone I miss, or someone I should have said thank you to for some kindness, I can send them a letter (yes, a letter!) or a card.

Old-school in that respect but less of a Luddite in others. I have fallen madly in love with my kindle – bought for the overseas trip we couldn’t take in April – treasured now as a magic portal for every book in the world (or the ones available as e-books, anyway). I am really getting my money’s worth out of the cheap leggings I bought for no good reason in a sale three years ago, pulling them on in the morning on the off chance I might be moved to ride my bike before it’s time to put my pyjamas back on at night. And attempting to embrace the new normal with a modicum of flair by buying a range of face masks from a similarly underemployed but vastly more crafty friend so I can get all matchy-matchy with my outfits.

Most of all, though, I am promising myself never to take it for granted when we get the moments I am properly nostalgic for – being in a room with friends, or grandchildren, or total strangers. And yeah, trying not to descend into the kind of madness where it feels normal to vacuum the curtains.

25 Aug “Lockdown II – The Resurgence” and Self-Care

“Lockdown II – The Resurgence” is, in many ways, a tougher watch than the debut series. I easily recognise the lead characters, Grief (for pre-Covid life) and Anxiety (about future life) but I feel like I’m not seeing enough of my favourite early players. Like, where is Teddy-Bear-In-The-Window? I liked her a lot. Plus, the first series finale tied up all the loose ends in a pretty satisfying way and I was keen to think that was the end of it.

Binge watching this second series is a new kind of exhausting, and I’m having to work harder to look after myself – no more Covid-19 Drinking Games at three in the afternoon for starters. In case it helps anyone else, this is the stuff I’m doing now to dial down my anxiety, and to make me feel safe. Lots of it will be specific to me, but it might resonate with you. Almost none of it costs money, and most of it can be done at Level 3 Lockdown.

Scroll down to the list of Small & Specific Things That Make Me Happy and Calm My Mind if you want, or you can stay here to see how I worked this stuff out.

I did a useful thing a couple of years ago. On holiday at the beginning of 2018 with no distractions, I sat on a beach and made a list of all the things that had made me happy in 2017. This was after I had spent the whole of the previous day writing down all the things that had made me unhappy that year. My father died in January 2017, and my grandson was born in December 2017, and in between those bookends it was a pretty eventful time.

So I ended up with two lists in a notebook: “Traumas 2017” and “Joys 2017”. Writing stuff down is one of the things that works for me – instead of feelings and vague ideas and worries floating around in my head, writing them down pins them to a page and makes them look and feel more manageable. Originally, I had planned to burn the pages of “Traumas” in a ceremonial way (“Burn it all down!”) but decided not to because, as time goes by, that list of things feels further away from me… And it reminds me that big and terrible things become smaller and less terrible eventually.

Also, because I spent a whole day writing down everything I could think of – big and small – some of the things that ended up on the “traumas” list sounded almost amusing when you read them side by side.

• “Breast cyst – waiting for my biopsy results.”
• “Satchmo catches a Tui.”

Writing down the list of traumas put some of them in their place and gave them perspective. It was also weirdly comforting that reading some of the others made it clear that it had, objectively, been a fucking year.

• “Withdrawing medical intervention for Dad and feeling like we were killing him”
• “The night my mother thought she was dying in her flat downstairs and she called an ambulance but not me. Paramedics arrived at our house. Woke up to hear a man’s voice coming from her bedroom, thought it was a home invasion.”
• “Holly goes into labour too soon.”

Bloody hell. So after a day of recording that list, writing the List of Joys the next day was, in and of itself, an exercise in self-care. It made me remember and savour all the good things that had also happened in 2017 – Disneyland, New Orleans, dinners with friends, things I had been proud of writing, stuff I had achieved round the house (“New roof, fixed deck”), reconnecting with my high school English teacher, singing in the car with my three-year-old granddaughter, favourite gigs, things I’d learned… I got really specific with it, and made myself remember all the times I had been happy.

Then I looked for the patterns in the list of things that had brought me joy and came up with:

• People
• Places
• Writing
• Gigs
• Moments of Stillness

And it felt like those are the places joy comes from for me, and that these are the things I should consciously think about putting into my life. Make appointments to see people, plan to visit the places where I feel the most like myself, write about the things that make a noise in my head, say yes to as many gigs as I can because some of them will be spectacular and you don’t know which ones until you have done them, and carve out some time just for me.

I put a post-it on my office wall with those 5 things to remind me. I also made another post-it of the filters I use to decide if I am going to do something, so that when an email arrives asking me to spend time on something, I can look up from my screen and check to see if it fits. My “is it worth my time” filter (in no particular order) is:

• Mortgage
• Creativity
• Feed my soul
• Whānau

I made a third post-it of the people I like to spend time with because they uplift me, people who make me feel light and happy, better after I’ve seen them than I did before. There are more than a dozen names on that post-it, and the goal is to make sure that, in any given week, I see at least one of them.

Covid-19 has temporarily fucked some of that – seeing people in real life, travel and gigs, and I lost my regular writing job even before this all happened. So that’s a problem now, an extra challenge, but I am trying to find work-arounds. I have set up a couple of group Messenger chats with people from the post-it so we can talk – every day if we want, about nothing or everything. And I am planning local travel, and beginning to write for no good reason and no money, just for the sake of writing…

Big Hot Tip: Whenever I feel happy, I write down what it is that has made me happy. Some of it is surprising – like, if I hadn’t written it down, I wouldn’t know that “tidying out a drawer” is a source of joy for me, and calming. Then when I am anxious or flat or filled with dread or lost or lonely, I have a look at this list and see if there is a thing on it that I can do to lift my spirits. So it becomes like a shopping list of things I can go and get when my cupboard feels empty.

Caveat: Everyone’s experience of lockdown is different – we are a team of five million, but the field we play on isn’t level. I don’t have small children in my bubble to educate and entertain, so finding time to myself is easier. I also don’t have a job that I am trying to do from home. While my income has almost entirely disappeared, I have been able to access the Government Wage Subsidy, plus pre-Covid I earned a decent living and wasn’t living from pay-day-to-pay-day, so there has been a buffer. My stressors are that I can’t see my daughter and grandchildren at Level 3, and I don’t have enough work and I don’t know when or if that will change. Like I say, grief for my old life, and anxiety about where I might fit in a post-Covid world. But even though your stressors may be different, there might be some things on this list that work for you.

Here is my crazy random list of:

Small & Specific Things That Make Me Happy and Calm My Mind:

• “Tidy” something like a drawer (go through my socks and undies, or the pantry, throw out old shit) because even though I can’t manage the world, I can manage one tiny piece of it and make it make sense
• “Clean” – anything that can offer the opportunity to stand back and notice the difference like floors and windows, or makeup brushes, or the bathroom mirror. Not necessarily the whole house, just a small bit of it if that is all I can manage. The world might be a filthy pile of shit but a corner of my house is fresh and new.
• “Sort” through and “organise” my clothes or jewellery, put away stuff I don’t want to wear, keep out just a few things so I can look forward to wearing something lovely, and just gaze at pretty things. The world is a dumpster fire and heading in the wrong direction and I cannot understand it, and everything is ugly, but if I ever go anywhere again I have a pretty thing to wear, and how lucky am I?
• Do something nice for someone else. Send a card or a letter or a text, telling someone else they are wonderful, that you are thinking of them, that you admire what they do.
• Video record bedtime stories to send to my daughter so she can sit the kids down with the iPad while I read to them, and she can get five minutes’ peace.
• Walk on the beach, listen to the waves, picture what is over the horizon, imagine what it might be like to live in one of those houses right there, watch the dogs chasing balls and imagine for a few minutes what it is like to only have to think about chasing a ball…
• Watch a Tui fly, and imagine what it is like to only have to flap some of the time, and be able to glide effortlessly for short moments.
• I use Headspace and do a 10 minute guided meditation whenever I feel like it, sometimes on the beach, or I drive somewhere and do it in my car. One of the best things I’ve learned from meditation is to be interested and curious about my mental state, but not judge it. “I’m really anxious today. That’s interesting. It feels like a buzzing sound, or a clamp, and look how fast my heart is, and it appears to be in my throat… Fascinating.”
  
• Stare at my cat. Watching Satchmo sleep and seeing him breathe rhythmically with his little tummy going up and down makes my own breathing settle. Holding eye contact with him also, according to the scientists, releases oxytocin (the feel good hormone) in both of us. This also works with humans if you have one handy.
• Ride the stationary bike in my office (but I have to approach it as a gentle ride, not a workout because I hate “exercise”) usually while I listen to a podcast (because my mind wants a distraction from its own noise or to feel like it is being “useful” by learning something, and I know I will stay there until the audio has finished).
• Write a long email to a trusted friend, and experiment in the email with giving my life a narrative. Find the story I am living right now – the “what is happening” and the “how I feel about it”. This is my friend Lesley in Canada. I have known her for 50 years. She doesn’t judge me and I can tell her secrets, and I write to her to find out what I think because somewhere in my storytelling I find the truth. Or at least, begin to make sense of things.
• Books: find the ones that either lift me out of my real life, or tell me something about my real life, or both. I read memoir and fiction right now – I immerse myself in other lives as an escape from my own, but also in the hope I can bring some wisdom back.
• Music: Loud and fierce women are working for me just now. Give me Lizzo and Beth Hart. Turn off the news (it is very fucking repetitive) and put on Judy Garland.
• At the end of each day: wash my face with cheap and safe face wash from the supermarket, and use organic face oils bought from a local supplier online which are relatively cheap (like $12 each) which feel great, and make me feel good. Plus aromatherapy oils in the morning and at night as a ritual. It feels like an ancient practice that women have been doing for thousands of years and makes me feel connected to them all.
• Designate whole days for not washing or getting dressed, giving myself permission to be a sloth. Then have a day of fixing that – shave my legs if I feel like it, wash my hair, wear real clothes. Give myself permission to be a princess now and then. The contrast between sloth and princess is satisfying, and I let myself enjoy both.
• Make a plan for something to look forward to. I am finding this challenging now because plans keep being shat on from a great height (our big overseas trip for 2020 was cancelled, our weekend getaway this month was derailed) but I am trying to accept that I should still make plans – change them if I have to, but keep making them anyway. Let the gods laugh.
• Pick a thing to fight for. Have a campaign I believe in. Work out what I can contribute to it (often for me it is writing or speaking out loud) and do that. One fight at a time.
• Don’t fight with people I haven’t met. On Twitter, or on Facebook. I am easily tempted into this and fuck it up all the time. But I try to only engage with people I would also let into my house. Otherwise, they don’t deserve to be invited into my head.
• Make meatloaf: I found a recipe for meatloaf in Renée’s memoir, “These Two Hands”. Renee is a 90 year old New Zealand lesbian socialist writer. Her memoir is filled with stories about people and places that are familiar to me, and it has been the best Lockdown book. The recipe is from her mother-in-law, Ruby, so this meatloaf has been made for at least 100 years. You put everything in a bowl (mince, vegetables, spices, an egg) and smoosh it with your bare hands, and it is like a combination of playing with playdough and finger-painting – a treat of tactile goodness. And then you get to bake it and eat it. On the night I make it, I serve it with mashed potatoes, and make sandwiches with the leftovers for a couple of days. A literary meatloaf, if you will, handed down through many generations of women who got shit done, both in and out of the kitchen.
• Love someone. Be one person’s best and most loyal friend. Make sure they feel loved every day.

01 Jul End of Life Choice – Why I Am Voting “Yes” in this year’s referendum

In her final months, my mother would say that she wasn’t afraid of dying, but that she was afraid of pain. She had been traumatised – we all were – by my father’s death two years earlier. That had been long and slow, excruciating for him and almost unbearable to witness. We had all done everything we could back then – for him and for her – but there were frustrations and regrets, and wishes that things could have been gentler. Grief is a messy beast, and harder to live alongside when it comes with what-ifs and why-couldn’t-we and how-could-we-have-done-better.

So after her own terminal diagnosis, Donna was clear about what she most wanted for herself. It wasn’t more time – she was philosophical about reaching the end of her life even when we weren’t. What she wanted was as little pain and as much dignity as could be managed. Her life had been about graciousness and elegance, and she wanted her final chapter to match the ones that had gone before.

She got that, I think. I am certain if I could ask her now, my mother would use that phrase, “a good death”. We were lucky – privileged – to arrange hospital level care in a rest home, staffed with extraordinarily kind nurses and caregivers. Donna’s body was frail, but she remained sharp as a tack until her last day. I was lucky – privileged – to be able to stay right beside her to be her voice when she could no longer use her own. I channelled my mother’s assertiveness to argue, insist, make calls, seek help, call for back-up. Not everyone is able to arrange their lives to do that.

I felt there was a tension at times between what health professionals need to be seen to do in terms of protocols and medications, and what the patient might choose in terms of being – as my mother said – “floating through it”. The scales are tipped towards keeping someone on the planet rather than helping to ease them off it. You need a loud voice to find the balance. Not everyone can find a loud voice when they need it.

Death (and I know my mother would agree with this, because we talked about it many times) is one of life’s bookends. We work hard to make the other bookend – birth – as safe, as free of pain and trauma, and as welcomed as we can. That’s what the End of Life Choice Bill aims to achieve for terminal patients – an acknowledgment that when death comes, we can allow people to leave with the least pain and trauma, and the most dignity. To let them continue to have a voice, even in their final moments.

We have just marked one year since Donna died. You never go back to being the person you were before, but you learn to wrap the grief more gently into the person you are now. You find ways to honour them. Which is why I will be voting Yes for Compassion in this September’s referendum.

11 May Mother’s Day In Lockdown

First broadcast on Mother’s Day – 10 May 2020 on RNZ National. Listen to it here:

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/audio/2018745866/3mm-michele-a-court-on-mother-s-day

Or you can read it here…

My great-grandmother, Edith Rogers, famously disapproved of Mother’s Day. Born in 1873, she was a Captain in the Salvation Army and – by all accounts – a feminist-socialist with a warm heart and firm principles. Great-Grandma said that if you needed to set aside one day a year to celebrate your mother, you weren’t doing it right.

Mothers were for treasuring every day, she said – and indeed she was much adored. In her later years, before she moved in with her eldest daughter Ruth, her son-in-law Frank would drive to her house each evening with Great-Grandma’s share of their dinner, carefully plated and placed in a basket, on top of a hot water bottle to keep it warm.

But although we were discouraged from buying into the Hallmark consumerism, it has been our family tradition to turn the dial up a little to celebrate motherhood on mother’s day – homemade cards, breakfast in bed, maybe something a bit daft from the $2 Shop. And all of us gathering together – at least three, and more recently four generations of us under one roof.

This Mother’s Day in Lockdown looks very different. It will be the first one since my mother died, and while I know she would heartily disapprove of me getting maudlin, I also know that grief by-passes rational thought so I expect to be bowled over by a wave of it at some point during the day.

Like lots of us, my daughter and grandchildren’s Bubble is too far away for us to be with each other, so I won’t get to sniff their heads. Instead, of course, we will Zoom – which can be tremendous fun, especially when my six-year-old granddaughter, Ariana, grabs the iPad and runs with it out into the garden, giggling at her own wickedness; or when my two-year-old grandson, Nukutawhiti, smothers the screen in wet kisses.

The madness of Lockdown also means that I’ve tidied out some drawers and rediscovered old handmade Mother’s Day cards my daughter created over the years. I’ve taken pictures of them to send to her, to remind her of her lifetime of fabulous handcraft skills.

This is a shout-out to everyone who might find Mother’s Day a little tricky this year. People who can’t be with their mothers, for whatever reason. People who aren’t mothers, but wish they were. People for whom a day like this might remind them of what is missing, rather than what is there.

I hope that, instead, we can celebrate the mothering we all do – looking out for each other, making each other feel loved and safe, checking in, staying in touch, doing the metaphorical equivalent of plating up a share of our dinner and delivering it in basket with a hot water bottle to keep it warm. And then remembering that, like Great-Grandma Edith said, we do that every day, not just once a year.