Dialogue: Plenty to help the winter blues bite

It must be that time of the year. I am not a winter person and about now my mindset takes on the same leaden colour as the heavens.

I have to force myself to get up every morning, resent having to go out in the cold and the wet and get thoroughly sick of driving home from work in the dark, particularly among idiots whose vehicles show only one headlight, sometimes none at all - and not a traffic cop in sight.

At weekends and in the evenings I can't be bothered doing anything except to lounge in my chair and read newspapers and books.

The pool is full of dust blown in by the wind so it's not worth vacuuming it, the lawns need mowing but the ground is so soggy the mower would likely sink up to its axles, the cars need washing but what's the use? They'd be just as grubby after the next day's travel.

As far as I'm concerned, it should be summer all the year round and it is about this time every year that I yearn to be back in Rockhampton in Queensland where my wife and I lived for a couple of years in the mid-1980s and which has just that sort of climate.

Only for a few weeks about this time of the year do you need to put on a jacket or sweater, and then only for an hour or so first thing in the morning and after 5 at night. Paradise.

Even reading the Herald in bed of a morning - usually one of life's great pleasures - has become a drag. The news these days is like the weather - thoroughly depressing. Just take a look at our offerings over the past few days.

On Saturday, when I don't even have to get up if I don't want to, I picked up the paper to find that a strapping bodybuilder, who intentionally manhandled a newborn baby girl so viciously that he broke six bones in her body, is let off with a brief suspended sentence and given name suppression.

And this at a time when the memory of tortured, battered little James Whakaruru's death at the hands of his mad father is still fresh, the nation is up in arms over child abuse, and social agencies, both private and state, are at their wits end to know how to cope with it.

The police have recommended that the Crown Law Office appeal against both the sentence and the suppression. It had better - and quickly.

And at the same time whoever is responsible had better take a good look at the future of the judge who handed down this incomprehensible sentence.

I don't know how they choose judges these days, but I get the impression from some of the sentences passed and comments made that standards of selection have slipped alarmingly.

And that doesn't apply just to the District Court, either.

Then I open up page 3 to be told that there are 60 mental health "timebombs" roaming the streets of this godforsaken city, apparently of the nature of the madman who stabbed to death the ACC woman in Henderson last year.

And right underneath that I'm confronted with a tragic picture of a mother gazing wistfully at a photograph of her 8-year-old daughter who was stabbed to death by her insane father in Christchurch in December 1998.

And all those responsible seem able to say is that these murderers "fell through the cracks" of our so-called mental health system. It's no wonder they did. The cracks in the system are so wide that even a sane person would have to tiptoe carefully round them.

But that's not the worst of it. The people who designed and administer the system are obviously cracked, too.

Page 4 informs me that teenagers are getting hooked on gambling, which I told you years ago was going to happen with the proliferation of casinos and pub pokies.

But Page 6 takes the cake. There we were told that pre-school is about preparing children for life, not just readiness for school. This preposterous idea springs from a study made by some academic (who else?) and leaves me speechless.

How young do children have to be nowadays before they're allowed just to be children?

Monday's front page tells me all about a snivelling, mean-spirited, petty-minded jerk taking a video of Tana Umaga out on the town, and of an 8-year-old boy being severely mauled by two mad dogs.

And page 3 records a weekend of 11 serious crimes including a killing, a home invasion, aggravated robberies a tomahawk attack, a stabbing and a bashing in the upper North Island.

If I didn't know that God is in his heaven and that in the end everything will be all right, I'd just pull the bedcovers up over my head and stay there.

Roll on summer.

garthgeorge@herald.co.nz