Moo Moo

Lately I have been mulling over the days of my youth. More fortunate authors of the literary class I rightfully belong to, might think nostalgically of South Italy and Paris.
My memories are of budget hotels and half-crazy people. I recall my life was not altogether sad and I had my moments of cutting wit and transcendent thoughts.

I recall an English tough working man who was strong on the corrosive affects of unemployment. Some people were one day talking in the budget hotel foyer about their problems.

None of you have any problems. You are just workshy,
 he told them.

That's what I like about Lloyd. Lloyd is honest. He told me he doesn't work because he is lazy. That's what I call integrity.

I blushed. I had snapped that at him when he was putting me down. So I resolved on a trick on him. The following morning, I sat down with a cup of coffee while he was slaving away for Roussin, the Landlord.

Oh it was windy this morning, I remarked.
When I went to the Post Office to collect my dole I could hardly move.

The working man's face dropped. He stared at me, his eyes popping out.

You are complaining about the wind when you collect your dole! Jesus! That's incredible!

I pretended hurt.

It was strong, I remonstrated.

Like the disabled and diseased, I too sometimes like to flaunt my misfortune in public. But I strive to do it with grace and wit.

I had the luck to move into the employment market at the exact time it was re-inventing itself and turning into a very different kind of beast. My parents simply couldn't comprehend why I didn't walk down the road or take a bus to a mindless factory. Nor why the whole University experience had become ashes in my mouth. In their eyes I should graduate out of University and glide straight into a socially esteemed public position.

But in my first College year, I read job vacancies. There was simply a lacuna for English language scholars and historians. The beast – otherwise superbly endowed – seemed to lack a head. But no-one seemed to notice or be the least bit concerned if that was pointed out. Rather, they seemed to like to rub my nose in my dismay. When the little boy sat on the floor of his grandmother's lounge and read the History of the Roman Empire he was very conceited about it.

His cousin namesake Lloyd and his mates fooled about elsewhere. Now he discovered all that time they were learning how to become employable and he was learning how to become unemployable. Now in the present he discovers, if he talks publicly about what he now knows, he might one day be taken away by all the little fools at gun-point. As they all assured him,

Ancient History is completely useless. Don't bother to defend us with words. We don't need you.

In recent times an actual glimmer of awareness has permeated the New Zealanders' dense crania. In business and media circles, they bitch about their society's institutions malfunctioning because of “lack of institutional memory‟.

When I first went to University three decades ago, they had such institutional memory waiting patiently back-stage for professional public positions. They used to be called historians and scholars. Now they are all gone. Except those being hung out to dry in the classrooms, or wringing dry the country in the Waitangi Tribunal.

I have just read again, "The Killing of Sister George". I had seen it performed in one of those fantastic amateur small town theatre productions. I was fourteen at the time.
Oh how we, the entire audience, rocked the theatre with our laughter and scorn. In the play, a radio serial country nurse is killed off by the script writers because she was too popular with the listeners. The B.B.C. wanted a new era for the English village. It would now be driven not by old heroes but by anti-heroes.

The unmarried mother would replace the country nurse. We laughed so much at the paranoia of the country nurse actress as she picked up the signals of an inevitable redundancy. She was only an actress and a lesbian. None of us thought that that poor woman was the oracle. We were staring into all our own futures. The actress was a shining star in the radio theatre repertoire. Then by a whim of management and a stroke of the pen, she was reduced to a figure of public contempt and hysterical laughter. Her new role would be that of a cow in the toddler's hour.

Ihe English village has the name Applehurst. In maybe even the same year 1968, my family and I had witnessed a seminal scene in the English Television serial Coronation Street. The working-class old lady (and number two in a trio of old ladies in the Rover's Return pub) died suddenly in her performance of a lifetime. I suppose you could call the three old ladies "institutional memory". The television management wanted more younger characters and more contemporary issues. This trio which dominated the serial had become by its very public success, a block.

The serial, a Pinteresque and Dickensian depiction of working street life, would slowly but inexorably degenerate into a routine soap opera. My suspicions the author of Killing of Sister George had the fate of that old lady in mind appear confirmed when I recall her character surname was Longhurst.

The very accomplished (and tragic) television actress never got another acting role. She was a redundancy in our brave new world. We all lament an easier era. But we all know in our hearts we can no more go back than voluntarily switch back from computers to exercise books and a pen.

As the radio character concludes the play with her cry of pain, “Moo! Moo!” in her new bovine role. So sort of likewise, the television actress finished her working life pulling pints at her local pub. “Closing time! Closing time!”