The Black Page
Don’t look now
by Joanne Black
Oh, the joy of having perfect neighbours.
Research conducted by Colmar Brunton, on behalf of Neighbourhood Support and Nestlé, has revealed that almost 80% of New Zealanders have either occasional or regular contact with their neighbours, and 72% of respondents to a poll on the topic want to get to know their neighbours better. I fit neither category.
I have perfect next-door-neighbours, by which I mean that I have never seen them. Better still, I hardly ever hear them. I know they are there only because I occasionally hear their front door slam. By that alone I have surmised that they are young people, but I know nothing more about them. I have never noticed whether they have any kids, P labs, pets, cars or, best of all, a stereo.
It is quite an achievement to know so little, since there are only two houses in our street – ours and theirs – and the side walls of the houses are about an adult arm’s length apart.
My lack of curiosity about what goes on in my street makes me think I could move to Amstetten, Austria, and immediately integrate perfectly into the local community. It’s not that I am averse to good neighbourly relations. Far from it. At my last house, the next-door neighbour was so nice I married him. But you cannot keep doing that. You’d get a reputation.
Neighbourhood Support and Nescafé have set up a fund to which people can apply to create neighbourhood projects. It seems a nice idea, although I will not be applying. I have never been keen on forced socialisation, and if I was, I might start with something such as “hello”. You never know where it could lead.
After telling a friend the other day I would buy her a packet of cigarettes while I was at the supermarket, I was confronted with the choice not of which brand, because I had her instructions, but which disease to select.
The legal requirement to display on cigarette packets grotesque pictures of illnesses associated with smoking makes choosing a packet rather tricky.
A friend of a friend asks for “a packet of Pall Mall with heart disease, please”, because she can’t bear the lung cancer ones. Another person I know has expressed a preference for gangrene. For my friend, I tossed up between heart disease and a picture of the feet of a corpse. I chose the latter because we are all going to be corpses one day, whether we smoke or not.
It also occurred to me that cigarette packets could be collectibles, like Bluebird’s rugby cards. People who stand in alleyways in the cold having a cigarette could trade packets, to complete a full set. “I’ll swap you a Rothmans mouth cancer for a Pall Mall heart disease”, and that sort of thing. Exactly where to display your collection might be problematic. Loathing your partner’s toby jugs is one thing; their collection of gangrene could be much worse. Although not enough to put you off smoking, I gather.
The abject human misery going on in places such as Myanmar, Zimbabwe and Sudan is a reminder that climate change will have to get a great deal worse before it kills, or even affects the lives of, a fraction of the number of people that politicians do.
Compared with torture, starvation and repression, the burning of coal to make electricity seems relatively minor. The aid worker from Comité de Secours Internationaux, who said the Myanmar authorities should be tried for crimes against humanity for refusing to permit foreign aid workers into the country, is right. The military junta did not whistle up the hurricane that ravaged Myanmar, but by deliberately obstructing aid, the junta is surely culpable for the escalating death rate. We are right to be concerned about climate change, but for decade after decade millions of people have starved to death in many different parts of the world. Not because of floods or droughts brought on by a warming planet, but because of their tyrannical leaders.
