Mark Story: Province has slipped its moorings

Mark Story says the twin cities need to grow up. Photo / File

If the twin cities were in fact twins, I'd tell them to grow up.

Advice perhaps I should have imparted last week to a Napier gent who called me to gripe about our weather reporting.

This newspaper had (apparently for years) been hoodwinking Napier residents into believing Hastings had higher temperatures. Livid, he was, at the fourth estate's deliberate campaign to shortchange Napier.

It dawned he'd make an apt poster boy for the amalgamation debate. For when the dust settles from the incessant thrust and counter thrust, the high-flown rhetoric and intriguing conspiracies, Hawke's Bay's good old-fashioned sectarianism betrays itself at the heart of the stand-off.

The twin cities are now akin to the warring families of Montague and Capulet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Pick your quote from the play: "From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

"The ever-prescient scribe even introduced an Art Deco line into his play: "What, ho! You men, you beasts, That quench the fire of your pernicious rage."

Friends formerly of this region read the debate's dispatches and conclude their home province has slipped its moorings. For them, and more importantly for us, they use the word "provincial" in the pejorative sense. I'm tired of listening to their collective sigh of derision. Who can blame them?

The cultural legacy this debate threatens to leave is worrying. The newsroom is privy to the protagonists' tirade of puerile emails and the anonymous tip-offs (this week) about whether Montague has or has not illegally erected amalgamation billboards on Capulet property.

A poll on the issue is imminent. The very real spectre of boredom-induced apathy should be concerning to both Montague and Capulet. Due to their dysfunction, when either of the families profess they have the region's best interests at heart, proud Hawke's Bay residents, including me, switch the channel.

A heartfelt thank you to the above chap who rang with an honest delivery of drivel.

After all, he's only parroting the main players' lead. Regardless of who trumps who, this provincial scrap won't be remembered for valour. This is no Rumble in the Jungle, no Thrilla in Manila. What we're watching is instead the proverbial group of bald men fighting over a comb.