Consider this. Every human (identical twins excepted) is a genetically unique individual, never hitherto, nor in the future, precisely duplicated. Well, think of couples one has introduced, who otherwise would probably never have met, and who then went on to produce children. It follows that without the initial introductions, those particular genetically unique offspring would never have existed, thus in a sense as parental introducer, one is the true parent, responsible for instigating their existence.
Totting up the fruitful introductions I've made brought to mind an incident about 35 years back. At the time, Truth newspaper had the biggest circulation in New Zealand. At day's end, I often played chess with its news editor, a former New Zealand junior champion.
One night, he said he had time for only one game. And why? Because, he moaned, it was his turn to write Truth's horoscopes. I was in like Flynn. "I'll write them," I offered hopefully.
Journalists being notoriously lazy, this was gratefully accepted by Truth's staff. For the first month, I boxed carefully, rendering up the usual guff, but then began to feel my punching power.
With no complaints, I stepped it up, then one week I banged in outrageously over-the-top copy.
Immediately the editor called protesting, so that week, no horoscopes. Within days he was deluged with mailbags of letters from distraught women across the land, frantic through lacking my riding instructions for their week, so I was reinstated.
Now I really went to town. For example, pertinent to my parentage proposition, I told Virgos or whatever, if they went to Westport and bowled up and down the main street carrying a red handbag, they would meet the love of their lives.
Two days later, some of us, speculating about this, drew straws to see who should fly down to see if any women were marching about with red handbags. The loser duly rang Air New Zealand to book a flight. "Impossible," the girl said, "There must be a huge conference on there. We're overwhelmed and are trying to schedule more flights."
Common sense says that of those hordes of red hand-bagged women, desperately ogling every bloke, some marriages or liaisons must have eventuated, and in turn, numerous offspring. So to anyone born after about 1980 to a Westport father, and a mother from elsewhere, I'm almost certainly responsible for your existence. Send gifts in gratitude but alternatively, if you want cash, hit on Brian Rudman for inspiring this revelation. Trust me; he'll be delighted.
Since then I've periodically pursued my oracle career, most recently with a local glossy magazine, Hutt Alive. There I sailed under the moniker, "Socrates Te Raupo, the famous maori astrologer".
Once I wrote that anyone born on a particular day would be dead by Christmas. This elicited a distressed letter from an elderly woman whose birthday was that date. "What shall I do?" the editor wailed to me. "Tell her as a Maori, I'm genetically programmed to always tell the truth," I suggested.
Instead she opted to do nothing, but not so when in late January she received a letter from the woman's daughter, complaining bitterly that her mother was still alive. It's unbelievable. I'm no longer Socrates Te Raupo as fed up with my lawyer's pleadings to have a go, I succumbed.
I can't say I admired his florid style, lacking as it did my more punchy, to-the-point prophecies, but doubtless it was followed avidly and his instructions were acted upon.
Still, as I've written before, female gullibility is essential for the continuation of the species, thus we must take the bad with the good.
