Style a late scratching at Trentham

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, February 3.)

STYLE is hard to define but you know it when you see it. A person with an innate sense of style can look good in clothes from The Warehouse. Conversely, those who haven’t got it are never going to have it, no matter how much they spend on designer labels. You can dress a turnip in Working Style or Starfish but it’s still going to be a turnip.

The recent male fashion contest at Trentham demonstrates the point. Judging by the published photos, style was a late scratching – with the possible exception, that is, of 83-year-old Norm Rodley, who managed to make even the clichéd safari jacket look acceptable. He carried it off because he has natural flair and panache.

As for the other contestants, oh dear. The cravated fellow who was initially adjudged the runner-up, and ended up sharing the main prize with Norm after the winner was disqualified, looked like a 1950s spiv from London’s East End.

The 50s look is obviously in. Another Wellington male stylemeister who posed proudly in the fashion pages of this paper a couple of weeks ago was a throwback to the same decade, except that in his case it was more the Neapolitan handbag-snatcher look. I could have pictured him on the pillion seat of a Vespa, cruising the narrow streets looking for unsuspecting female tourists.

And what of the women fashion hopefuls at Trentham? Tragically, not much better. It seems a tradition that women racegoers must dress in a fussy frou-frou style that is the fashion equivalent of gaudy chocolate boxes.

Raceday fashion is a peculiarly sexless branch of couture, one that seems to have forgotten that the fundamental purpose of dressing up is to make oneself look attractive to potential partners. At Trentham, there are better-looking fillies in the birdcage than on the catwalk.

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THERE’S a new class of have-nots. On Newstalk ZB last week, a Wellington woman complained that her son’s high school seemed to assume that all pupils’ homes had Internet access, when his didn’t.

She couldn’t find out when the school re-opened for 2009 – apparently the information was availably only on the school’s website – and even more astonishingly, she said many of her son’s homework assignments last year were delivered online. She had been fighting a running battle with the school administration and getting nowhere.

I suspect this is the tip of a very large iceberg of disaffected and disconnected citizens. People without computers find themselves excluded from a steadily widening range of activities, from taking advantage of cut-price deals to participation in public affairs.

It can be argued this is simply the market at work. Technology changes and people eventually have to adapt if they want to stay “in the loop”. But have we reached the point yet where vital public institutions such as schools are entitled to assume that everyone is plugged into the Net? I wouldn’t have thought so.

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WHEN I was a boy I would save my paper-round money and send a postal note to a mail-order firm for an item I coveted, such as a sheath knife or watch. Invariably the product would be delivered within 10 days or so.

Fast-forward several decades, and we are able to use the miracle of technology to buy things online. Sometimes this works – stuff I’ve ordered from US-based Amazon has arrived only days later – and sometimes it doesn’t.

In a previous column I mentioned my experience with online retailer Fishpond. I ordered a DVD from Fishpond last November 3 and was told it would be dispatched within days. To cut a long story short, it turned out they didn’t have my requested DVD in stock, though it was advertised on their website, and eventually they advised me I wouldn’t have it till early January at best, and possibly several weeks after that. I cancelled the order.

I can now report that my relationship with Fishpond has gone from bad to worse.

On December 31 I ordered a book via their website. A confirmation email advised that it would “ship” (sic) within 6-11 days.

On January 20, I got another email saying there had been a “temporary delay” in sourcing my item. “At the time of your order, the supplier was showing stock on hand but they must have mis-counted so it has been ordered from another source.”

Oddly enough this was precisely the same wording as in the email I had received advising of the delay in the arrival of my DVD the previous month. There seems to be a lot of miscounting going on. Or perhaps Fishpond is misleading its customers into thinking it has certain items in stock when in fact it doesn’t.

You might well wonder why I would risk doing business with Fishpond again after my earlier experience, but I was given a Fishpond voucher as a present and am determined to use it, no matter how hard this outfit tries to frustrate me.

Incidentally, I’m still waiting for my book.

Let's be honest about child deaths

(Published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, December 23.)

WE’RE killing our kids, according to a recent news item. Two children are said to die every week as a result of accidents, and the blame is being laid – at least in part – on our “she’ll be right” attitude.

A front-page news story in The Dominion Post cited figures from a recent World Health Organisation report and quoted Ann Weaver, director of Safekids New Zealand – the injury prevention arm of Starship Hospital – as saying that compared with other wealthy nations, New Zealand performed very badly.

“We have this ‘she’ll be right’ attitude and an aversion to being told what to do,” she said. “We don’t want to mollycoddle our children … but, looking at these statistics, you can see we’re not doing enough.”

I interpreted the statement that we’re “not doing enough” as a coded call for more regulation – more rules that place the paternalistic state, rather than parents, at the centre of child protection.

I’m the first to agree that two child deaths a week are two deaths too many, but there are some important points to be made about these statistics.

The first is that a press statement issued with the WHO report specifically cites New Zealand as being among the countries with the lowest rates of accidental injury to children. Lobbyists who agitate for greater state intervention are careful to make us look bad by comparing us with the relatively few affluent western countries that have even better child safety figures.

They also seem careful to avoid reference to the politically unmentionable factor that prevents New Zealand from catching up with those countries. I refer to the disproportionately high rate of accidental death and injury among children from Maori and Pacific Island families.

It’s an awful but indisputable fact that whenever you read of a toddler being backed over by a careless driver, of a baby being smothered in bed, of a child wandering off on a riverbank or a beach and drowning when no one was watching, or of children dying in a house fire caused by a burning candle or a cigarette lighter left lying around, the probability is that the victim will be from a Maori or Pacific Island family.

It’s an even more terrible fact that children who die or are permanently damaged as a result of physical abuse are most likely to be Maori or Polynesian, though I’m not sure whether these deaths and injuries count as “accidental” for statistical purposes.

No one, least of all the innocent victims of parental carelessness or brutality, is served by denying that these problems are disproportionately common among Maori and Pacific Island families.

What’s more, these issues are well understood and in most cases are covered by existing laws. The law has long required, for example, that children in cars be properly restrained, but it's commonly disregarded by Maori and Pacific Island drivers.

Ignorance? Carelessness? Laziness? Lack of imagination? Who knows? But to suggest that we need more laws to reduce injuries to children is either delusional or dishonest. Adequate laws exist already.

Stricter enforcement might help, but what’s far more important is that parents are encouraged to develop a greater awareness of the risks surrounding children and a stronger sense of personal responsibility for the safety of those in their care. There can be no more urgent task confronting Maori and Pacific Island leaders.

Performing a haka at the graveside of a dead child is a poor way to show how precious the tamariki are.

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MUCH has been said about the supposed virtues of online shopping. You can get goods cheaper, people say, because online retailers have low overheads. You can shop in the comfort of your own home and at a time of your own convenience.

But in the midst of the Christmas shopping frenzy, I want to put in a word for the old-fashioned shop.

Online retailers such as Amazon - which I use occasionally - have taken a huge amount of business from traditional stores, but there’s still something to be said for a retail outlet where you can examine the merchandise.

It’s easy to make a wrong decision about a product on the basis of a description on a website, as I did recently. Misled by an Internet retailer’s brief note about an expensive music reference book, I ordered it and when it arrived, found it wasn’t at all what I expected.

As it happened I liked the book anyway and have no regrets about buying it. But the deal could have turned sour.

Online shopping has other drawbacks too. I recently got the run-around from online retailer Fishpond over a DVD I ordered off its website at the beginning of November. To cut a long story short, the DVD turned out not to be in stock. After several exchanges of emails I was advised that it might not arrive before mid-January.

Tough luck if I’d ordered it to give someone for Christmas. I told them to forget it.

There are no such problems with the conventional retailer. If you’re shopping for a book, for example, you can pick it up and flick through the pages. And if you like it you can go to the counter, pay for it and walk out with your purchase tucked securely under your arm

Technology is great when it delivers, but too often it sings a siren song of false promises.