Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor.
OPINION: I have a confession to make. (No, I have not been to see Melania, the film, although I’ll admit to being tempted. There is an attraction to the truly terrible, and a grovelling two-hour hagiography of the mute former pin-up is such a sure and certain horror show, it might be good to go and hoot. The whole thing was funded to the tune of $75 million by a tech billionaire seeking to slobber all over her husband’s shoes. No further confirmation is needed that the current White House is one part Fagin’s den to one part Palais de Versailles, with the glacial gold-digger a shoo-in for the role of Marie Antoinette. What’s the Slovenian for let them eat cake?)
My confession concerns a change of mind. I now approve of a habit that I have previously decried both loudly and publicly. (Of course it isn’t a crime to change one’s mind but we mostly don’t do it. Somewhere around the age of maturity we arrive at a set of opinions that we find comfortable (at much the same time as we settle on a wardrobe that we will more or less stick to for the rest of our lives.) We reach these opinions by a variety of dubious routes – inheritance, conformity, instinct, prejudice, and almost never by thinking them through – but it takes a lot to shift them. We think it weak to vacillate. The strong know their own minds. Yet simultaneously we know that all is flux and nothing certain in this variable world.)
So yes, I’ve changed my mind but it’s not because I’ve learned anything new (though of course one does learn new things all the time. Only this week I had a drink with a bloke who’d spent much of his life selling pools – spa pools, paddling pools, swimming pools, infinity pools - and boy did he have plenty to say about them. Standing water, it seems, is unruly stuff, forever generating the sort of life forms you do not want to bathe with, and having to be bombarded with an arsenal of costly chemicals to keep it in line. Pools of all sorts, he said, were up there as investments with race horses and boats. Indeed, considering the negligible use most people made of their pool, it would make better financial sense for them to fill the thing with dollar bills on the day of purchase, then nail a lid on it and biff it. I said that was a strange thing for a pool salesman to say, to which he replied “in vino veritas” and ordered another balloon of shiraz.)
(I also learned this week how to crack an egg. All my life I’ve been cracking them on the rims of pans and bowls and frequently making a mess of it either by puncturing the yolk or by dropping a bit of shell into the pan or bowl and having to chase it through the albumen with an unsatisfactory finger. “Wrong wrong wrong,” said a visitor who walked in on me when I was knocking up a weak-wristed quiche, “do it like this”, and he seized an egg from its little cardboard nest and tapped it once on the bench then broke it neatly into the bowl. And it works. I’ve been eating eggs constantly since for the pleasure of cracking them on a flat surface, and trying not to rue the six decades of culinary malpractice.)
But anyway, what I have changed my mind about is a habit that I previously denounced as being a sign of sloppy thinking but which I now consider more reflective of the associative nature of our minds. That habit (as you have no doubt already guessed) is the use of brackets.
