KEY POINTS:
It has been stinking hot these past few days in Hawkes Bay.
I flew down last Sunday evening, after recording the Waitangi Day debate at Maori Television, and as we began the descent into Napier just before 8.30pm the skipper declared the temperature there to be 29C.
I could not believe it. A wave of windy heat hit us as we disembarked. During the day it had neared 40C at the farm. It is desperately dry. People are running out of water, so they told me at the firm where they sell pumps and where I went to buy a couple of lengths of pipe.
Country people are coming into Hastings to shower, so little water do they have, so low is the water table. We are lucky. We have a good well. We can throw water on the lawns.
Mr Lambchop, our Devon Rex cat, an ugly thing I must say, is in heaven. He is a mighty hunter. We put a bell round his neck to give the birds a fair go. The bell has been torn off during one of his hunting expeditions through the undergrowth. Last week he left four dead rats at the back door.
I am mindful from my research into rats a few weeks back that if a rat is out and about and away from its dark subterranean world, then it has been forced out by bigger rats because there are so many in the colony and food is scarce. Lambchop kills them, splits their skulls and sucks their brains out. Suits me. We might leave the bell off for a while.
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The Waitangi Day Maori Television debate was interesting, thought-provoking and fun. Well, I hope that if you saw it when it played on the night of Waitangi Day, you found it so. The moot was: This Land is My Land. It is always a pleasure to go to Maori Television. A guest is treated with warmth and hospitality. It was an unusual format, this debate, three teams instead of two.
Team Maori, Team Pakeha and Team Others. Suddenly there was a whole new racial classification in New Zealand by which to offend people: Others. The "Others" were the very funny Samoan actor, Eteuati Ete, Mai Chen, the Chinese constitutional lawyer and TVNZ's Ali Ikram, a New Zealand-born child of Pakistani parents. Mai Chen said she resented being an "Other". How am I an Other, she was asking. I was born here! I am a New Zealander!
Mike King was the moderator. I have never seen him funnier or more relaxed. Meng Foon, the Mayor of Gisborne, who is able to launch forth in what appears to be fluent Maori and who speaks several other languages, Sir Paul Reeves and I were the judges. I assumed Meng Foon must have been a professional man in his life before becoming Mayor. Not so, he told me. He grew vegetables.
In the Green Room, I teased Sir Paul about the constitution he wrote up in Fiji, for which the locals there are not displaying due respect and with which Commodore Frank Bainimarama seems happy to play fast and loose. He has a nice sense of humour, Sir Paul Reeves, but when he is being serious he displays a finely-tuned mind of grace and elegance. When he spoke in the studio, you could have heard a pin drop. In his gentle way, he demands to be listened to. Frank should have more respect.
Maori Television's great strength when it comes to covering our two big National Days, Waitangi and Anzac, is the way they give things time and space in which to live and breathe well and with good humour.
Tom Scott led for Team Pakeha. In his summing up, he flattered Sir Paul and Meng brazenly and then turned to me and said he had some old, unseen footage of a man in a lonely situation with a sheep.
The film was grainy, he admitted but it was clearly me. I had better mark his team well. I replied that I admitted the pictures were of me but that the sheep was lonely too, had a lovely time and I had always looked after it. Yes, it was all good fun.
In the end, Team Maori won and did so handsomely, ably led by Tahu Potiki, former Ngai Tahu chief executive, with Moana Jackson, the singer, and a wispy, wiry, friendly man called Tom Poata, the Anglican vicar at Faith's Church in Ohinemutu.
Tom is very funny physically and has great wit, too. I would put him up there with the funniest people I have ever met. They presented excellent arguments, pulled the heart strings, sang, and made us laugh.
At the end, though, I asked, just to be provocative: What is the point of this? What is the point of these endless discussions and debates about who owns this land? Why don't we just accept that we are all here and get on with it and move forward?
Sorry, I said, you owned it, we took it, there were some bad people but we have a process now and we're giving some of it back. I was born here, I love the place too and I've got nowhere else to go. I'm stuck here and I'm staying!
A good argument ensued but the point was well made that by having these discussions between some of the key stakeholders in New Zealand, we learn more about each other's position. It is true. The wonderful thing about this country is that we meet round a table and we speak honestly to each other in an atmosphere of understanding and cordiality.
We do not make bombs, Moana Jackson reminded us. We work with patience and persuasion. Beneath the fizz and the fun, there was something quite moving about Maori Television's Waitangi Day debate. We were all slightly softened by it. We all ended the day as warm friends.
* * *
Must tell you about a wonderful book I have found, and cannot put down. It is In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Christina Mosley.
Deborah is the Duchess of Devonshire, formerly Deborah Mitford, one of the beautiful Mitford girls the British remain obsessed with after nearly a century. Deborah's sister, Diana, married to the heir to the Guinness fortune, fell in love and ran off with Oswald Mosley, the British Nazi. Leigh Fermor was a war hero and travel writer who, in the 1930s, walked from the UK to Greece.
After the Germans won Crete, he stayed behind in the mountains disguised as a shepherd. He and his junior officer and the Cretan resistance organised and achieved the capture of the German commanding general on Crete, after which they sat in the mountains with the general and swapped stanzas of the classics.
Fermor met Deborah and her fiance, Andrew Devonshire, at a party after the war and watched the devoted couple "dead dancing", holding each other, hardly moving. Fermor, a classicist, bought a place on the sea in Greece and they began to correspond.
They are both alive and these are their letters. Deborah pretends she can not be bothered reading books. She prefers to farm and restore the great Devonshire family house, Chatsworth.
She is an aristocrat without airs. She is funny and clever and calls the Queen Mother "Cake".
Fermor is scholarly and richly travelled. They seem to exist in another world, or a gracious world almost gone. They know everyone, are devoted friends, yet are so different. You'll know from the first few pages if the book is for you. I can't put it down.
