Mike explains where he's been for the last few minutes..

Mike's Pith & Wind - The first time..
It’s paradoxical that when you have actually accumulated a certain amount of wisdom, sometimes painfully acquired through life experience, nobody wants to listen. Or, to put it another way, wisdom is as wasted on the old as youth is wasted on the young.
It’s a long time since I saw the movie Real Life, (1979), an early example of a mockumentary. The premise is that a documentary filmmaker, (named Albert Brooks, the actual name of the movie’s director), attempts to live with and film a dysfunctional family for a year. It‘s apparently a spoof on a 1973 reality TV show called An American Family. The grandparents communicate solely by way of inappropriate or inadequate clichés, proverbs and sayings that are generally ignored by the rest of the family as some sort of senile coping mechanism.
Mind you, more often than not that’s what the so-called ‘wisdom of the elders’ comes down to; desiccated old-sayings, adages, proverbs and quotations. But there remain some life experiences that haven’t been put through the reductionist grinder of calendar philosophers and that are worth passing on.
As youngsters Dick and I used to holiday with our great-aunt Emily in Kaikoura, a picturesque coastal town a few hours north of Christchurch. I could’ve been sixteen I suppose. I remember Dick and I were experimenting with Capstan Navy Cuts after Emily had retired for the night. It must’ve been after my four-year sojourn as a choir boy and I‘d graduated to thinking girls and rock.. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - Deck the Dick Builder.
I was perched on ladder four metres above the ground watching with stricken incredulity as the third and last bolt dropped from my hand into the grass below. Patiently, only moving one limb at a time in proscribed mountaineering fashion I descended the ladder to the bottom and picked up the bolts and climbed to the top again. I did not swear, I did not curse anybody’s gods; I did not froth at the mouth. Rather I patiently picked up the bolts, smug in their galvanised coatings, and ascended the ladder which was carefully tied to a beam at the top. With the expertise of a person who had tried to do this three times before I finally slid the bolt into the carefully drilled hole – just so that the bolts could drop from my tired fatigued fingers to the ground four metres below.
There were moments when I thought I was part of the Gerard Hoffnung’s brick layer’s lament – ……… “So I rigged up a beam, with a.. read more