Editorial: There's a branch near you

Hustling is an entry, along with Hundertwasser, under H in the perennially unfinished volume Aunty Jo's Alphabetical Advice on Almost Anything (keen publishers, please note).

Eventually we all have to do it to get by. Some - wage-earners, the salaried and sinecured who are seen as a (possibly aspirational) norm in Western economies - set themselves up early and settle in to the kind of employment which offers a level of security, sick pay, and a reasonable expectation - barring redundancy, restructuring, disgrace, earthquakes or business busts - that more than enough money will appear regularly in the bank to fund necessities, holidays and time-off. These passive hustlers have spare time to burn.

What more could they desire - to wallow in media-hyped courtroom reality soap opera, or even to know the origin of the universe perhaps? Enter the elusive Higgs Boson (another entry under H in AJ'sAAoAA), allegedly discovered last week in a Swiss hole in the ground into which more than Greece's, Spain's and several African states' combined GDP has been poured, I'll be bound.

Subjective scientists with expensive boys-own particle accelerators proving what they expect is hardly surprising. Call me when something blows their tiny minds.

Meanwhile, others (maybe the majority) - the self-employed, the flexible, the halt, the lame and dispossessed, dreamers, beneficiaries, landless nomads, entrepreneurs, wastrels, artists (whose work is more vocation than job) and other difficult independent types at the subsistence, trickle-down end of economies throughout history and across the planet who baulk at prostituting their charms to scrounge at others' hearths - must still hustle actively on a daily basis, mining their wits and the environment, to survive.

Keeping warm in winter is a case in point. While Jack Frost swirls outside their watchtowers, passive hustlers sit cosily oblivious under nuclear/ coal/ hydro/ oil or wind-fired electric heat pumps; never mind the fallout.

Active hustlers somehow arrive at biting winter with no trees felled in time to dry out enough to produce the miracle of fire, no wherewithal to buy firewood, broken chainsaws, and power bills in such arrears they can't support a two-bar heater; probably because summer (heat/ drought?) had its own urgent demands.

Fortunately, combing rural roadsides for windfalls is still possible here. There is much joy and beauty in walking along sunny ridges in clear, sharp air collecting kauri twigs, pine cones, tea-tree brush, or old flax flower-heads which kindle instantly even when wet, and in wielding the incredibly cheap, orange-handled, seemingly-ever-sharp hand-saws, available in every bargain basement hardware shop these days, to saw up enough found branches to keep warm and to be twice warmed - once by the physical effort and once again in the burning.

Sometimes it's possible to stockpile serendipitous treasure-troves for rainy days.

The same goes for hustling. In bad times in feasts and famines lifestyles, it's a daily grind, but on lucky days, when brilliant hustles go spectacularly well, the resultant bonanzas might last long enough to really knuckle down to productive work without having to worry about where mundane sustenance will come from tomorrow.

"Hallelujah" is an entry under H too. It's also a handy painkilling mantra when chanted repeatedly long and slow while lying on the floor to cure the backache caused by lugging firewood.