Yes vandalism is deplorable but its definition too is subjective. For instance, a few years ago a local roadside tree - a dark, wizard-limbed macrocarpa - was felled. It overhung a paddock and since macrocarpa induces miscarriages in cattle, fair enough.
The stump burnt, smouldered and cooled into a black sentinel figure visible only from a certain place on a sweeping bend.
My old father spotted it first on one of his walks and christened it "The Hooded Man". For the last three years this mysterious character conjured from the heart of the wood presided as a rare sentinel milestone over the journey home.
Suddenly, though, a month or so ago, The Hooded Man was pushed over and cremated. Barely a black smudge remains..
Maybe to the paddock's owners he was just an ugly blot on the landscape but, to me, his destruction was wanton vandalism.
Irony I do like, though, but I rarely get it before ruining it with the naive credulity that meets finely honed counterpoint with semantic marshmallow.
Lists I dearly love. They feel so efficient.
The list of notes for this column included:
1. Re Rolf Harris - the irreverence of his wobble-board version of the sacred Westie funeral anthem Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, and certainty that he - and any remaining unreconstructed, ostensibly charming, narcissistic males of his pre-feminist era who see women as sexual or servile objects - will never accept he did anything wrong. When I was a young woman, being groped was an accepted occupational hazard unless you were quick. Three cheers for younger men raised by post-feminist mothers to enjoy women as equals.
2. Re David Cunliffe's earnest apology to Women's Refuge for being a man - it was well intentioned and appreciated but sadly exposed him to the taunt from the road-to-hell bullies of the right of being an apology for a man, unfortunately a status not tactically calculated to appeal to voters susceptible to the strut and trade of glib wealth and power.
3. Re Trevor Mallard's moa resurrection proposal - which even were it possible is not necessarily desirable. Thanks for the laugh - a rare and precious left-field gift in the battle against smirking John Key (described beautifully by blogger Martyn Bradbury as "a smile looking for a murder") when the unelectable default option is to angst.
Fortunately, however, as with all lists, having made one it is possible to ignore it and do something else entirely.
