KEY POINTS:
T. S. Eliot had it wrong. September is the cruellest month. April has nothing on it by comparison.
Apparently there is a technical term for the physical aversion I'm currently feeling towards politics.
Which is a relief, because I thought I was going mad. I don't know what the word is, but I recognised the sentiment when someone described it to me.
It wasn't supposed to be this way, though. I never thought I'd give it up. People who say they don't like politics, aren't "into it" or just don't care, bore me terribly. They rank up there with people who practice aromatherapy and give each other a roof in an African village for Christmas.
Politics is important. And you have to care. There's no getting around it.
Politics is as inevitable as death and taxes, and a damn sight more interesting. Politics is choice in action. It's expression, it's art, it's exercise. And you shouldn't need anyone else to tell you why it's good for you.
Which is why my current state is so uncomfortable.
I am sick of politics. New Zealand politics. So utterly totally sick of it. Winston should straighten up and fly right, and stop drawing fatuous comparisons between the privileges committee and a well-reviled kleptocracy. He won't.
Helen should cut him loose and wear it. But she won't.
John Key should stop saying all the right things, but spoiling it by looking abjectly slimy on TV. He can't.
Pita Sharples should get over his fit of the vapours over a word in the ear from Parekura. It's politics after all. But why should he? Everyone else is firmly entrenched in a paradigm of self-indulgence, why should the Maori Party miss out?
But honestly. All this noise. All of this fulminating and huffing and puffing and burning houses down. For what?
November 8 awaits us and the worst is the real campaigning is yet at hand.
There are little lights in the gloom of course. Mere swamp gas, probably, but Russel Norman is looking good. Call me old fashioned, but there's something satisfying about a politician who actually answers a question.
Doesn't prevaricate, doesn't bluster, and doesn't fall back on the tried and tested strategy of blaming the other crowd when things get sticky.
Last Sunday I was part of the panel who got to interrogate Norman on Bill Ralston's Campaign 08 show on Prime.
Viewers would have seen a man who didn't have all the answers, or none that we wanted at least, but who tried, nevertheless, to be as frank and honest and fluent as possible in his responses. He couldn't have known, of course, that I'd come away unfulfilled.
My current disenfranchisement precludes any sort of meaningful engagement with an elected representative. I was always going to be disappointed, but that's my problem, not Russel's.
As disappointments go, he was one of the more effervescent. There was a moment when I actually admired him, I swear. It helps that he's tall and rangy and has a way with a pinstripe, of course.
Until he came into the boardroom afterwards and started talking the most awful nonsense about fairy terns in Whangarei that is. Aside from that, though, there's not much to be excited about, is there?
Hone's good for it, I suppose. His frank disregard for basic arithmetic when questioned about GST abolition on Agenda last week was great.
Hone has no time for sums. He's far too busy comparing Labour to a decaying corpse and saying other fabulous things. This is the man who did an impromptu haka for the Dalai Lama in the middle of his morning jog after all.
Pre-election fatigue, or PEF, is a real and present hazard.
Like HRT and SAD and ESP and STD it's a common complaint. Sit it out, sweat it out, sleep it out. Whatever your preferred method is, you're going to have to get over it.
Because we're just getting started. Here's hoping time flies while that lot are having fun.
