KEY POINTS:
Occasionally, in the course of a year, nice, well-meaning people ask me to talk to people about talking to people for a living. I always try to wriggle out because my job is talking to people, not talking about my job.
Occasionally, it would be beyond churlish to say no. Especially when the lovely Ann from Save the Children, Papakura branch, keeps calling. She should get an award for persistence in the face of stubborn resistance. I hope it wasn't too boring for them; it turned out to be almost good fun for me, in the way that some people might enjoy digging prickles out of their feet. They put on a terrific spread, the ladies at Save the Children, Papakura branch. The questions were brilliant. The one-liners from the audience even better. I particularly liked: "You should have a bodyguard!"
This was a very dangerous year - as I obviously got across in my little talk, having only ever so slightly beaten up the perils of this odd job.
Sir Richard Branson came to the country in January to launch Pacific Blue. I was told I couldn't have an interview but would I like to go, with a select group of people, to lunch? What a peculiar lunch that was. Karen Walker, Sam Neill, Eric Watson and a few journos. Nobody seemed to have the foggiest idea why they were there, except Branson and Watson who exchanged a few old laddish jokes which don't bear repeating.
I was opposite Branson who, every time I made eye contact, winked or gave the thumbs up. I stopped making eye contact for fear we'd have to go on communicating in this way for hours. He did come over and said he'd answer some questions. He sat there ripping bits off the white paper tablecloth and not making eye contact. I almost preferred the winking, thumbs-up Branson.
He banged on about space travel and global warming and I mentioned a mate had gone to Sydney on one of his planes which went via Brisbane and took eight hours to get to its destination. Later, when he was due at the Hyatt, somebody said it would take him eight minutes. Not if he went on one his planes, I muttered.
Well, that got him making eye contact. He wrapped his hands around my mouth to shut me up and hissed at me. It's not every day you get assaulted by a billionaire, and good fun it was, too. He was capable of spontaneity.
You do not expect to go and see the Dalai Lama and get whacked. "If you ask some silly questions," he warned, "I may lose my temper. Ha, ha, ha." I may have done, it was hard to recall given the length of time it took for a silly question to travel through a number of translators and back through the manifestation of a deity. He was good-natured about all of this, as he is about silly people expecting miracles, wanting him to tell them the meaning of life.
He told me about his "irregularities" in the stomach region and kept whacking my leg, quite hard for a peace-preaching smiling monk. I counted five whacks in 20 minutes but he gave me a great big hug as I left. It was, I said, like being hugged by a Teletubby wearing a maroon pashmina. I forgave him the bruises.
Maddest interview of the year? I think the interviewee would agree with me here: Lou Vincent. Somehow we got on to how he'd been diddled by a wood-seller, for 20 bucks, and how he planned to get up at 6am and pinch the guy's Herald out of the letterbox until he'd got his money back. There was a happy ending to this story. The wood man called me and said he wanted to make it up by giving Vincent some top-quality wood. I passed this on and Vincent got in touch with wood man and got his wood and was delighted.
He is a very entertaining fellow. I had told him that all top-level cricketers were weird and he thought about this and left me a message saying that it is my style of interviewing, "which makes people seem weird". I'll take that as a compliment but I have to point out that even I couldn't have invented an obsession with a wood man. But I do like a weirdo.
I'm not saying the multimillionaire Sir Patrick Hogan is a weirdo but it was amusing to go out to see him at the Karaka sales and be given a bottle of water from the fridge in his Cambridge Stud hospitality tent that had a "reduced to clear" sticker. When I pointed this out, he rushed over to the fridge to discover that all the bottles had the same sticker. He gave me a terrific compliment, the best of the year. "You're a bugger of a woman," he said.
There were some famous people from other places. Sir Ian McKellen was wizard, in a slightly grand way. But, really, don't get him going on things gay because it's the opposite of a gay time, I can tell you.
Miriam Margolyes, who is gay, but hates people banging on about it, said, "of course I'm fat", ate with her hands, said Arnie Schwarzenegger was "a bit of a pig" and other things so rude I couldn't put them in the newspaper. She said her show, Dickens' Women, wasn't for "stupid people". I loved that.
A funny little fellow called Paul Potts came. He had won a talent show, Britain's Got Talent, and had been catapulted to a fame you suspect might not last a lifetime. He was a poppet, I said, and his American fans emailed to say: "What's a poppet?"
Clive James, that Aussie geezer, came and ate fush and chups and I asked him about popular culture and his place in it. "I'll croak without having resolved it." Other people, journalists, try to pigeonhole him. Was that a complaint? "No, look at me. I'm a man who can eat a plate of chips anywhere in the world." I adored him.
Anton Oliver was just lovely too. He took me to see his yellow-eyed penguins (he's their patron) and we had tea in a pub and he said rugby had never made him happy. "No. No, it hasn't. It's been bloody interesting though." He was an All Black, he wasn't supposed to say such things. "You're talking about media marketing bullshit."
The PM's delightful husband, Peter Davis, shed a tear remembering his trip to Passchendaele. He said, " ... if you feel something is worth showing good feeling about, like giving somebody a hug, I think you should bloody well do it." He told me about a whiteware conversation he had with his wife. They could do, he said, with a new washing machine and fridge to replace the ones they'd had for 20 years - and had been bought secondhand then. She said, "What's wrong with them?" Only, I suspect, in New Zealand would you hear things like that from the PM's partner.
Max Gimblett a wonderful artist and man, told me he'd been a beagle in a former life. He did look a bit like a beagle.
A funny thing happened the day I went to see the police commissioner, Howard Broad, who was horribly embarrassed over a story about a porn movie, involving a chicken, that had been shown at his house many years ago. On my way to see him, just below Parliament, I saw a chicken's leg just lying there, bloodily, on the footpath.
There was a stunned silence when I blurted this out in the commissioner's office. Well, what could anyone say? I didn't put that detail in. It was already surreal enough, going to see the police commissioner about a rude film featuring a feathered bird. You couldn't make it up.
You couldn't make up being bashed by the Dalai Lama, having your mouth clamped shut by a billionaire Sir.
All of which ought to be reward enough. But sometimes after an interview in which I am particularly sycophantic (according to a charmer who emailed complaining about my sucking up to one Mr G. Henry), I get sent nice things.
Shonagh Koea, who this year wrote a charming book called The Kindness of Strangers: Kitchen Memoirs, had me round for ginger crunch and a chat about cats. She sent a charming postcard, with a Victorian scene of a mare and her foal making friends with a mother dog and her pups. It was titled Chums and was addressed to my cat Arnold and signed by her cat, Maisky.
I went to see the sweetheart of the year, Victoria Cross winner, SAS soldier Willie Apiata, who put up with my asking whether, when he went pig hunting, he killed the pigs with his bare hands. His commanding officer put up with my having a good nosy around his top secret office. Could I have a drink of that SAS special port? No, I could not. Could I have one of those special SAS crystal whisky glasses, because one seemed to have put itself in my handbag? No, I could not, he said, retrieving said glass from handbag.
The CO sent me a bottle of the regimental port, which has to be the coolest thing I've ever been given. Except, perhaps, the hand-knitted blanket from the ladies at Save the Children (wool donated by the mayoress, no less). Thank you very much, and thank you to everyone who was mad enough to talk to me. I, mostly, enjoyed meeting everyone who did.
Thank you, too, to everyone who wrote or emailed. Especially those who wrote really rude emails. I enjoyed this one: "You suck, oi." That was succinct. A bit like my talks ought to be, because all I can really say is that, as jobs go, you couldn't make this one up.
