New year, same old mistakes

Bill Ralston has some good advice for 2012 which he firmly plans to ignore.

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This is the time of year when I look back over the preceding 12 months and earnestly resolve not to commit the same mistakes again. These may range from the minor but inconvenient – for example: “Never watch the gory 24 Hours in A&E while trying to eat dinner”, to the major and potentially lethal: “Never again try to waterblast the power box.” This procedure, of course, simply ensures I don’t make the same blunder twice and instead I invent new stuff-ups for a new year.

Still, the nation itself could usefully employ this method to avoid repeating the errors it habitually makes. Met­Service could learn, when it issues its “mainly fine” January weather outlook, to add words such as “except where you are holidaying, expect a monsoon”.

When the police issue their traditional holiday driving warning, it would be useful to also state it is inevitable that a slow-moving camper van will be lurking at the end of every passing lane and there is no point trying to overtake it because there’s another one just a ­kilometre ahead.

Instead of being left to discover it for themselves, campers should be told in advance that there will invariably be a pole missing from the tent bag and, in any case, MetService says they will be flooded out when they get wherever they are foolish enough to be going.

The “Slip, slap, slop” message never goes far enough and should include advice on pain relief because, once again, although you’ve smeared yourself with SP30 you will have forgotten your feet, which will be glowing like Chernobyl, with vivid white jandal Vs slicing through the red skin.

Every summer brings the same unanswerable questions. Why can a ham last fresh in the fridge for weeks after you’ve lost all appetite for anything porcine? Why is it obligatory for teenagers to lose their mobile phones at New Year’s Eve parties and Rhythm and Vines-type festivals? What homing instinct drove the couple you most abhor to vacation in exactly the same place you are?

As I’ve explained before, all in all, it’s much safer to stay at home at this time of year, conserve your leave and take a long break in February when the weather’s better, the roads are clear, and the other suckers have gone back to work in subtropical heat. Sadly, few of us – me included – heed this sage advice.

Around this time of year I also pick morbidly through our dismal financial statements and bank balances, resolving to cut back on expenses over the next 12 months, muttering, “I won’t make the same mistakes this year.” There are small Latin American countries with lower outgoings than our family.

I become a domestic Don Brash, demanding spending cuts, asset sales and fiscal restraint. The monthly three-figure bill from Sky TV is usually the first target. Do we really need all these channels? What on earth is Vibe? When was the last time anyone in the house watched the Arts Channel or Rialto? Why have a Sky box at all when we hardly ever watch TV?

Then I sign up for another 10 bucks a month for the SoHo channel because the evil swine at Sky HQ have put everything I want to watch on SoHo and demand I pay more for it. Sky’s marketing system relies on lessons learnt from heroin dealers. They gave SoHo to us for free for a month or two, and then threatened to cut it off if we didn’t pay cash. Hooked, we cough up the loot.

I suspect Sky and TVNZ are pulling the same junkie trick with their new Igloo service, where you pay a small monthly amount to get the Freeview channels and a selection of Sky channels you’ll never watch. A few months of Igloo and suddenly the soft option is not enough any more, you’ll want to mainline the full hard array of Sky content. If I was rational about this I would cancel Sky and use the $1500 annual saving to trot up the road and rent dozens of boxed DVD sets of my favourite shows, back to back, at my leisure. Take that, Rupert Murdoch! Except, for some inexplicable reason, I don’t. Logic plays little part in our ­financial planning.

I suspect the problems with the entire New Zealand economy are simply my own domestic situation writ large. We’ve been doing things the same way for years and don’t want to change or risk losing what we already have, and besides, it would be an effort to try to cut back when we can simply borrow more from those nice people at the bank. Debt is, after all, our friend.