Pointy heads and an absent 'h'

Fred Frederikse: Builder, geographer, traveller and musician.

By Fred Frederikse

SOMETIMES I get the urge to write columns again ...

The lack of a deadline meant I no longer had the commensurate discipline to get my philosophical ramblings down on paper and they remained buzzing around inside my head.

In some ways, column writing is like therapy -- a way to try to make sense of a small piece of the world. Like autobiography and travel writing, it's also about ego, and inevitably about a sense of self -- although sometimes it's just an opportunity to tell a story.

Recently I dipped into some of my columns from the past, still on file on my old Apple. It was instructive to re-read pieces that one considered entertaining or insightful at the time, and discover that some were barely comprehensible and were fragmented, opinionated, badly written, creatively punctuated and sometimes unnecessarily cruel.

"Could do better", was my assessment.

From the distance of time I also realised that, to some readers, these pieces might seem a little "pointy headed".

Not everyone is interested in the philosophy of science to the point where they construct their own global geography model based on the theory of some obscure anarchist English lord; and they probably wouldn't be infatuated either with the spatial philosophy of Peter Sloterdijk, the "anti-humanist" black sheep of contemporary European philosophy.

Better just to have a byline at the end, as some columnists do, and say: "Fred has a science degree (physics and geography)", and leave it at that.

Politically, I should also lay my cards on the table. I was founding member number 13 of the New Zealand Green Party.

I suspect the membership was initially ordered alphabetically and I remained member number 13 until the Greens left the Alliance and I declined to renew my membership -- it was a hard number to give up.

Before seeing the light I even stood for Parliament in the Whanganui electorate for the Greens and the Alliance. These days I have given myself the liberty to be the contrarian that I am and I call myself an anarcho-green-capitalist.

"Sometimes the left are right and sometimes the left are wrong; and sometimes the right are right and sometimes the right are wrong" would sum up my political position.

Because of my science background, I would side with the Nobel science laureates and question Greenpeace and the Green Party's position on genetically altered organisms -- the genie is already out of the bottle, folks. On the other hand, I support the Greens' position on getting NZ troops out of Iraq.

I was tempted to call this column "W'anganui Green", which is the way I usually write the name of our town. It seems elegant to me to include an apostrophe of omission to indicate that there should be an "H" there but that, historically and dialectically, it has been dropped -- it is my way of saying that language is constantly changing and I question the right of anyone, whether it's the state or iwi, to make rules for language.

As the Dalai Lama says: "Know the rules so you can break them properly."

Invariably, whenever I sign a letter to the editor with "W'anganui", some sub-editor will correct it. Ironically, these days the Wanganui Chronicle changes it to "Whanganui" and last week the New Zealand Listener changed it to "Wanganui". It's not easy being a contrarian, so I'll leave it to the editor to come up with a title for the column.

� When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller. In his spare time he is co-chair of the Whanganui Musicians' Club.