Rosemary McLeod: Sloppy cultural cliches

I can't blame Springbok coach Peter de Villiers for his comments on the omnipresent haka. I'm also starting to suffer from haka fatigue.

It's right that Maori retain, and we respect, their cultural practices, but surely we can be forgiven a wan smirk when we see on TV news, as we did the other night, a mob of pakeha striplings performing a haka about the reopening of their Christchurch school.

Just who were they challenging on that occasion? The NCEA? Their headmaster? The god of earthquakes? None of those likely targets would have trembled in their boots. And what about the growing practice of performing haka at funerals? What is the aggression aimed at then? God? Doctors? The dead person? And is this really a way of expressing grief? When you see a haka performed in the context of the death of a small child it just seems disturbing, and not in a good way.

There are times when a haka truly speaks to us - and movingly - about who and where we are, but there are also times when it just makes you fidgety, and overseas visitors must resent being repeatedly forced to face down a mob of ferocious performers before they get down to some well-earned tea and biscuits. We don't want the haka to become a cultural cliche, surely. We've got enough of those already.

And here I'd like to offer Dan Carter's cute little face and muscular, spray-tanned, alarmingly hairless body as an exhausted cliche, the poster boy of sport who I can't even escape from during TV commercials. Carter is a nice lad I'm sure, but I prefer to know a chap better than this before seeing him regularly in his underpants.

I much preferred the misty past when an All Black typically spoke in sentences of three words max, and got back to dagging and crutching. In those days - quite rightly - you weren't expecting to get a whiff of chemicals when you poked your snout into a man's armpit, and you did expect to find hair there.

Hakas - and Carter - may be most in danger of over-exposure, but there is also that cultural cliche, the political dignitary, and his excruciating verbal drone. How we dread the requisite wet joke; the tribute to the better half; the quote from Shakespeare - or Oscar Wilde; the observations about the locality's attractions, real or fictitious. The marginal advantage of this over a haka is you're more likely to fall asleep than feel nervous.

Goodness knows culinary cultural cliches also abound, especially that awful bore pumpkin soup, which I prefer to call pumpkin slop. I don't believe there's a cafe or restaurant in the country that isn't currently serving up a version of it most days of the week. There's nothing wrong with pumpkin itself. It's mostly pleasing to look at, but the uses to which it's put can be actionable.

It's too easy to make pumpkin slop, that's the trouble. All it takes is pumpkin, onion, butter, water or stock, salt and pepper, and a food processor to whiz them in when they're cooked. There are variations - curry powder, celery, tomato, coconut milk, and fresh ginger are some - but the outcome is much the same, baby food you have to eat with a spoon, its colour, aptly enough, Karitane yellow.

I recall, as a tot, envying a bowl of similarly yellow mush streaked with silver beet that my grandmother was feeding to a toddler foster child she looked after, but that was long ago. I've grown teeth in the interim, and I hereby give fair warning that the next time I see pumpkin slop on a menu I'm likely to perform a personal haka for the benefit of the unimaginative, lamentable bore of a cook who put it there.