Mmm-mmm that tap water really hits the spot!

It was fashionable, when I was a trainee air force pilot in the 1980s, for my university student friends to display a poster that read: “It will be a great day when schools and hospitals have all the money they need and the air force has to hold a cake stall to buy a bomber.”

I thought of that poster the other day as I spoke to a young bloke standing at the back of a C130 Hercules at the Tauranga Airshow. The aeroplane had been on static display duty for two days, and the guy I was talking to was manning a stand selling souvenirs. I bought a 40 Squadron hat (we never thought to have any made when I was on the unit) and we got to talking. I wondered what they were raising money for. His answer surprised me, and it’s why I’m writing this.

The souvenir stand was to raise money for tea, coffee and biscuits.

The government, apparently, now requires our airmen, sailors and soldiers to pay for their own.

So when a C130 crew arrives home at 2 in the morning after flying God-knows how long to airdrop a pump onto the Ross Ice Shelf, and want to grab a coffee before heading home, they have to pay for it themselves.

Or when a bunch of copilots spend a rainy day hour in the crewroom talking about how their airline counterparts are being paid three times as much for safer and easier work, there’s nothing to drink unless someone goes to the dairy and buys it.

On one level you could call this a petty complaint. I’m sure doctors and teachers pay for their own morning tea too. But we don’t expect them to risk their lives, to be away from their families for months on end and earn a fraction of what they could elsewhere. Yes, other professions demand some of those things, but the military specialises in combining all three, and more.

And if that’s not worth the occasional lousy cup of Nescafe, I’m not sure what is.

(And yes, with apologies and thanks to Haruki Murakami.)

I used to fly all the time. Every day, more or less. Sometimes the flights spanned from one day into the next. I flew small fast jets and big long range transports. Around New Zealand, around the Pacific and around the world.

Then I hardly flew at all, for 15 years.

This year I decided to fly again. Not because I had the money (it’s not as expensive as you think), but because I had the time to do it regularly enough to do it safely.

I never thought about it much when I did it for a living, but now that I’m doing it for love, I’ve been thinking about what it is I love about flying.

And I think, in the main, it’s that when I’m flying, flying is all I think about.

Don McGlashan touched on it in his song “A thing well made.” He was talking about the feeling you get when you hold a well-crafted fishing rod or, in the case of the song, gun.

At a time like that / you wouldn’t care about your job / or your mortgage / or the fight you had with your wife / because when a man holds a thing well made / there’s connection / there’s completeness…

(I should point out that my rekindled interest in flying has nothing to do with fights with my wife, without whose blessing and shared investment I wouldn’t have a plane at all.)

They’re living machines, aeroplanes, and they demand attention. All those switches and controls need to be operated in the right way, in the right order, or the engine won’t start, or you won’t take off safely. Yes, they can be flown sloppily – and many of them are – but if they are, they won’t reward you with a perfect landing at just the right point on the runway.

So when I’m accelerating down the runway, I’m thinking about the sound of the engine, the push it’s giving me in the back, the flicker of the airspeed indicator, the lack of flicker of the engine instruments. I’m feeling the wind from the side and gently correcting with my rudder and ailerons. I’m feeling the weight on the elevators and waiting for the moment when the wheels are ready to leave the ground.

And when I’m coming to land I’m thinking speed. Not too fast, or we’ll cross the fence too fast and float to the end of our not particularly long runway. Not too slow, or the stall warning buzzer will sound, the controls will turn to mush in my hands and the wing will stop flying. I’m thinking height and distance too … is the runway looking wide and flat (too low) or tall and skinny (too high)? Do we need more or less power, or another notch of flap?

I have a lot to learn, and with every flight my Piper Warrior teaches me a little more. I still float a little on every landing, so need to work harder on my speed control. There are buttons – and entire systems – I am completely ignorant about. I haven’t tried the (frankly scary) short field takeoff techniques described in the flight manual just yet. I think they’ll need a very high nose attitude, so might wait for our new artificial horizon to be installed before attempting them. I haven’t flown nearly enough glide approaches, and I haven’t flown at night.

But we’re getting there.  There’s plenty of time, and the Piper Warrior is patient and mostly forgiving. She’s been flying about three years longer than I have and has 1500 more hours to show for it.

And that’s what I think about when I think about flying.

Last week’s NetHui began not with the usual mumbled, “first I’d just like to get some housekeeping out of the way,” and a reassuring confirmation that the exits were where the big green signs that said EXIT were, but with a kaumatua leading us in prayer.

I’m not religious, and I’m not Maori. I didn’t really understand what he was saying. There was a bit of grumbling on the back channel about this, but it got me thinking about the power of invocations, and the way they can set the tone for an event.

It reminded me of this poem by one of my New Zealand writing heroes: Denis Glover. I love it for lots of reasons. It reconnects me to a part of the country I love. That’s me in the photo at the top of Ben Lomond. I had run up it the morning after we finished shooting our first BNZ campaign. I love it mostly for the way Glover asks that his words be good ones, so that his work will be enjoyed and remembered.

Sure, some of the rhymes don’t travel well. Pairing “omened” with “Ben Lomond” probably earned Glover a self-congratulatory pull on whatever bottle was with him at the time, but it grates just a bit.

But I love what it says, and I love how it says it. And if I’m ever asked to open a conference, I might just read it out loud.

HOLIDAY PIECE

Now let my thoughts be like the Arrow, wherein was gold,
and purposeful like the Kawarau, but not so cold.

  Let them sweep higher than the hawk, ill-omened,
higher than the peaks perspective-piled beyond Ben Lomond;
let them be like at evening an Otago sky
where detonated clouds in calm confusion lie.

  Let them be smooth and sweet as all those morning lakes,
yet active and leaping, like fish the fisherman takes;
and strong as the dark deep-rooted hills, strong
as twilight hours over Lake Wakatipu are long;

  and hardy, like the tenacious mountain tussock,
and spacious, like the Mackenzie plain, not narrow;
and numerous as tourists in Queenstown;
and cheerfully busy, like the gleaning sparrow.

  Lastly, that snowfield, visible from Wanaka,
compound their patience – suns only brighten,
and no rains darken, a whiteness nothing could whiten.

I was privileged last night to be in the crowd to hear Tim Train from Zynga speaking at an event hosted by KEA Auckland.

While I possibly wasn’t the drooliest in the room (Tim would top most NZ game developers’ equivalent of Rove’s “Would turn gay for” list, if only for the job opportunities he represents) I was pretty impressed with some of his thinking. Who wouldn’t be? With a market capitalisation reportedly greater than Fonterra, Zynga is one of the world’s most successful businesses in any sector, let alone gaming.

What stuck with me is the way Zynga has transformed the approach to game development. Traditionally, platform games costs tens of millions to develop ... You can spend a million dollars, Tim said, just getting a game to the point where you know it’s useless. Problem is, by the time you’ve invested all that money, and staked all those reputations, it’s kind of hard to stop the bus.

One result of this is lavishly produced crap games. The other is big studios becoming more and more conservative in their approach, preferring to back game ideas that are similar to the most recent blockbusters, rather than gamble on innovation. The problem, of course, is that with long development cycles, by the time your knockoffbuster makes it to market, the market has moved on.

At Zynga, according to Tim, 10 people can develop a game to the point where you can make a call on it within months or even weeks. While he wasn’t allowed to share numbers, he did indicate that a bunch of games Zynga develops to this point never see the light of day. The idea is shelved and the developers move on to the next one. This way, Zynga gets to try out a dozen ideas in the time it takes EA to mix the surround sound on one level of Shadows of the Damned (uninformed comparison is entirely mine, BTW).

I like this approach and it mirrors the way smart brands approach advertising in general and digital in particular. Research and planning will only get you so far. Learning by doing works for Zynga, and if you’re willing to accept a few failures along the way it could work for you too.

The Reptiles And I by Shriekback

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The reptiles and I

20 gears and no idea: the author, on his bike

If popular feminist proverbs are to be believed (and to be honest, I only know one, so I hope we’re both thinking of the same one here), fish don’t have much use for bicycles.

  Fish companies – salmon farming companies, to be specific – seem to, though, which is why the good folks from Regal Salmon sponsored not one but two media teams in the Grape Ride cycle race, earlier this month.

  I wasn’t sure at first whether to accept the invitation to join the team. My main reservation was that the trip involved my boarding a plane from Auckland to Blenheim just hours after getting off a flight from Paris. But my policy – wildly successful so far – of saying “yes” to pretty much every opportunity that presents itself, overrode any feelings of guilt I might have had at spending a fourth consecutive weekend away from home, and a cycle racer I was.

  Again unlike fish, cycle racers need bicycles quite a lot too. While I had a bike or two stashed away in the shed, neither of them was what you would call a road bike. A digression here: when I was growing up, there were really only two bikes to choose from. Gold Raleigh 20s and blue ones. A couple of years later Raleigh got all jiggy with it and introduced the now-retro-cool Chopper – so-called for its car-style stick shifter perfectly positioned to chop yours off if you ever fell forwards off the saddle. But generally speaking, back in the day (cue L&P ad voiceover here), there was no such thing as a road bike or a mountain bike. There were just bikes, and you were lucky to have the one.

  But we’re not back in the day, we’re back to the narrative with me needing a bike. Luckily, our local bike shop was having a HALF PRICE SALE. (Not that luckily at all, really, bike shops are a bit like Kathmandu and Briscoes when it comes to discounts … you’d a be a mug to ever pay full whack.) A short time later I’m the proud owner of the most expensive thing (per kilogram) I think I’ve ever possessed. Apart from saffron, possibly. Must check if there’s any in the cupboard and see if I can build a bike frame from it. Bet it’d sell.

  The difference between the fat wheels and low gearing of my mountainbikes and the skinny, lightweight everything of my new red (they didn’t have orange) road machine is astonishing. I’ve invested heavily in instrumentation, of course, and I’m amazed to see that we’re flying along the North Western Cycleway at 30 kmh at the same heart rate it would take me to run at a third of that speed.
The other thing I discovered on that first ride is why road cyclists dress the way they do – and why I, despite every intention not to, was going to have to dress that way too. The slinky nut-hugging shorts are for safety. Baggy mountain-style ones are always catching on the seat and turning a casual dismount at the lights into a visit from Mr Faceplant. Those overly colourful shirts? Same deal. Zip in the front to regulate the temperature, pockets at the back for phone, food and raincoat. Of course, there’s no need to buy one that makes you look like a human billboard.

  So when I got home from my ride to discover just such a shirt in my letterbox, I felt equal measures of gratitude for my sponsor and despair at looking like a dick. (Actually the shirts are pretty cool. Slimming, I think. Judge for yourself.)

  All too soon – and with almost enough training rides under my belt to count on one hand – it was time to break down and pack the bike in readiness for flying it to Blenheim, then head for the US and Europe for a long-planned round of conferences.

  Luckily, both destinations offered opportunities to keep what pass for my cycling muscles active. One of the few charms my hotel in Austin, Texas, featured was a gym with a pretty decent exercise bike, and I squeezed in a few sessions between stints at the South by South West Festival. On my first morning in Venice Beach, I restored my host’s hybrid bike to something approaching roadworthiness, and got an hour’s pedalling in between Marina Del Ray and Santa Monica each morning before the dog-walking and rollerblading traffic got too intense. The beachfront cycleway covers some fantastic scenery, from the medicinal marijuana “clinics” at Venice to dolphins lolling beyond the breakers at Will Rogers State Beach to the North. I got some saddle time in Paris, too, thanks to the excellent bike hire system that is hands-down the easiest way to get around the city, albeit on very upright and exceptionally heavy machines.  

  Then wham-bam-taxi-aeroplane-lounge-aeroplane-taxi-shower-unpack-drive-small-aeroplane-taxivan and 40 hours later here I am in Picton about to take part in the Grape Ride.

  The Grape Ride is a 101km road race (there are much longer options for the truly mad) that’s sponsored by the vineyard that also serves as its start/finish line, Forrest Estate. Because all media are pussies, our two teams are both taking the relay option, which means we only ride around 34km each, and those of us lucky enough to be doing the middle leg get to sleep in then mooch to the changeover point near our hotel in Picton.

  The relay option isn’t all that popular, so instead of well-ordered entry and exit chutes and endless racks of bikes, the changeover point consists of a dozen of so people loitering at the side of the road down by the ferry terminal. Other than a fishy stink we never quite find the source of, it’s a nice enough place to wait though, and everyone’s friendly. It’s calm and sunny, too, which is great news for the race.

  Eventually my fist leg rider turns up and I’m off, straight up a hill. Leg 2, I was probably told when I agreed to take it, is not exactly straight or flat. The only parts that aren’t winding or hilly are the parts that are winding and hilly. Which is quite a lot of them. Our route takes us from Picton to Havelock (Green-lipped Mussel Capital of the World!) via Queen Charlotte Drive; allegedly one of the most scenic roads in New Zealand. Uphill, though, on a bike I’ve ridden three times in my life, one crappy sleep after 40 hours on three aeroplanes, I somehow miss quite a bit of the scenery.
Encouragingly, as my first-leg rider strategically chose to ride well back in the field, I get to pass quite a few other bikes, not all of them delivering newspapers either. The hills don’t turn out to be quite as punishing as the first one and before long I’m enjoying the downhills almost as much as I am shitting my nut-hugging pants at the thought of falling off at 60kmh.

  Another upside of trailing the field was getting a look at the diversity of ages and shapes with the guts to tackle a 100km bike ride. I can probably sum it up best by saying a lot of the riders doing the whole 100 made me feel young and skinny.

  And then, just down one last, too-fast, magnificent hill, is Havelock. Was that it? 34km just like that? Cool. (Next time I’m training for the full 100. Promise!) I hand our timing chip to our stage-three rider, lie in the grass and wash down a half-melted peanut slab with the last of my plastic-tainted lukewarm water. Yum!

  A quick ride to the finish line (quick because I cadged a lift in another rider’s car) and I’m under a tree at the vineyard, beer in one hand, quite possibly another beer in the other. The Regal Salmon team is exceedingly generous and it’s all I can do to finish the afternoon sober enough to go out with them again that night and get drunk.
 

Sing it with me! "Take me to the river ... drop me in the water ..."

Farming where the fish are

  I love salmon. Always have. When the salmon man would come calling at work he knew he could count on me to lighten his chilly bin by a vacuum-packed bat-belt of salmon fillet slabs or two, with possibly a couple of packs of gravlax rolled in. When I left the company, they said, he cried for a week.
Luckily, my home is on the same street the salmon man operates from, so I haven’t had to go cold turkey on chilled salmon. Even luckier, our sponsor Regal Salmon was treating us, post post-race dinner, to a boat trip to their floating salmon farm in the Marlborough Sounds. I’d never been to a salmon farm, so was very much looking forward to watching the salmon farmers in their Swanndri wetsuits mustering the salmon on their quad bikes, while their dogs swam alongside nipping at whatever salmon called heels.

  OK, of course I’m joking. They’d use jetskis instead and seals for sheepdogs. I’m not a complete  townie.

  Turns out they used neither. Yes, there were seals, but they were there for the leftovers, not to get in behind. The farm was a floating complex of net-enclosed pens, out by Tory Channel. A base barge stored feed, maintenance gear and the type of offices and accommodation you’d probably find on an oilrig. (It also stored a handful of fishing rods, which the crew had just used to haul in a feed of Blue Cod for breakfast.) The whole show was monitored by cameras and controlled from a PC. (Although the guy on shift also had his Mac plugged in so he could go on FishBook.) A couple of clicks, and huge quantities of feed are hoovered from the barge out to a rotating feeding arm in the middle of each pen. When the feeding frenzy abates to the point where the underwater camera shows feed pellets sinking to the bottom (and the opportunistic Blue Cod and Snapper waiting below the pens) the feeder is shut off.

  Out on the pens you can see the occupants up close: thousands and thousands of Chinook Salmon, each pen circling clockwise or anticlockwise, depending on whatever took the first salmon’s fancy. We stroll between the pens (each is the size of a decent school swimming pool) and head to the most distant one, where it’s harvest time.

  This is no John West ad. There isn’t a Grizzly Bear in sight and the feeling is one of an industrial process – a floating abattoir – rather than fishing. There’s a processing barge tied alongside the far pen, and a couple of workers are pulling shallow nets across the pen to corral the fish for harvest. The next step, while it makes perfect sense looking back on it, threw me a little. They anaesthetise the fish, by pouring what mainly consists of oil of cloves into the holding tank. Our guide is informative, but can’t help be macabre given the subject matter. “If we threw these fish back into the pens right now they’d recover and be right as rain,” he shouts, pointing at a couple of thousand dazed, flopping salmon. “These ones are essentially brain-dead though,” he adds, as we spy the next fish up the chain, floating nose-up in the water.

  The next step is to scoop out the brain-dead salmon (they need a new name for them … Zombie Fish? Maybe not.) slit an artery near their head so they bleed out, then pack them on ice for the quick trip to the processing facility in Nelson. Freshness and condition is everything (hence the anaesthetic) and a fish can apparently be on your Auckland plate within 24 hours of saying to its mate, “hey, does that smell like cloves to you?”

  And hours later, Auckland was where I found myself too. Slightly sore in all the places you’d expect, wiser on exactly how salmon finds its way to my plate in perfect condition, and hungry for a feed of the stuff and a crack at the full 101 Grape Ride in 2012 (in that order).

  I travelled to Blenheim – and yes, I have always wanted to end a post with this phrase – courtesy of The New Zealand King Salmon Company.

My wife said: there’s been another earthquake in Christchurch. It’s really big. We don’t know where everyone is.

My wife said: everyone’s together. Jimmy took three hours to get home from school but he’s OK. He was in the gym so he hasn’t got any shoes. Everyone’s together in one house but there’s no roof and it’s just started to rain.

My neighbour said: I’ll mind the kids if you need to go down and help.

My sister in law said: I was at our bach with the EQC inspector looking at damage from the last one.

John Key said: it’s like Beirut down there. The last one, you went there expecting the worst and it wasn’t as bad as you expected. This one is worse than you expect.

My niece said: I was on a study break at home and when I heard the girls screaming I thought the boarding house had collapsed. I wasn’t sure what to do but I ran over there and half the teachers were just walking around crying like everyone else. One girl was so scared she was vomiting. When the quake struck the girls eating lunch in the dining hall fought each other to get out the exits. No one was helping each other they were just trying to escape.

My niece said: the boys from Christ’s College might be coming to our school for two terms!

A woman working in a shop in Aranui said: at nights the druggies are going from door to door threatening to kill people if they don’t hand over any booze or drugs in the house.

My nephew said: nothing for three days. Then: we were playing outside and the whole cliff behind the school came down.

My other nephew said: I want to move to Australia.

My mother in law said: I mowed the lawns so people wouldn’t think our house was empty.

Spraypaint said: CLEAR and NO GO

A relative said: my friend was in the PGC building. She only works there two days a week.

We said: was that another one?

I said: earthquakes are nature’s way of telling you that you have too much shit in your garage.

A billboard on a half-buried subdivision fence said: Could this be your new home?

Signs by the road said: slow the fuck down. Free coffee and food. Free barbecue after 2 min silence @ 1251.

We said: fuck, was that traffic jam the two minutes’ silence?

Someone said: two people died in the fish and chip shop there.

My father in law’s partner said: money to rebuild isn’t the issue; it’s time. He’s 75.

I said: the lifetoll stands at 500,000.