Karyn asks the question of writer and columnist, Jane Bowron, “If you were going to write a column this week, what would you write it on?” Jane shares her wit and insight with us on the times we’re living through, and her thoughts on the demise of a publication whose pages she has graced for decades, The New Zealand Listener.
Photo: Jane Bowron
Jane Bowron: My Inner Fascist
It’s the little things that drive you nuts. When lifestyle slogans urged me to ‘eat healthy’, I let it go.
But when they started telling me to ‘shop normal’, I had to draw the line.
If I am to be arrested for anything during this period of incarceration, it will be for climbing up a ladder and adding i-l-y to healthy, changing it to, eat healthily, and a-l-l-y to normal, changing it to, shop normally.
Doesn’t it make you mad when people don’t talk proper?
Like every other pandemic affected person, I have become my own personal lifestyle coach, taking a good hard look at myself in the mirror, downloading instructions from You Tube, and cutting my own hair.
A couple of days before lockdown, I managed to procure a pair of hairdressers’ scissors and, if I must say so myself, I’ve done a sterling job.
Sporting more layers than Farrah Fawcett Majors, this lifestyle coach took out the spread sheet and is busily estimating enormous future savings from self-cutting.
When I’m not worrying about being arrested for impersonating a hairdresser, I’ve taken fraud a step further by masquerading as a doctor and dishing out, over the phone prescriptions to the worried well.
Frenzied friends phone to tell me they’ve been stricken by a nasty outbreak of craft and can’t stop knitting, crocheting and needlepointing.
Dropping their craft dosages to half, and walking round the block backwards on their hands before performing 4 backward flips at the letterbox, is the standard recommendation.
Many of my patients confess they’ve been indulging in out-of-control behaviour and are noticing enormous weight gains from home baking.
I reassure that in the earthquakes we suffered from ‘quake weight’, and tell them it’s a science- based fact that ’lockdown lard-arse syndrome’ is the same animal.
One particular patient complained of being unable to refrain from continuous over-eating and asked, ‘If it was all right to eat chocolate cake in the shower?”
‘As long as the cake has its own towel,’ I advised while urging them to wash safe.
Many of my patients are worried about social distancing and wonder if talking over neighbourhood fences might be construed as loose behaviour.
If they limit their shouting to safe levels to prevent vocal fry, they should go for it, I advise.
An overwhelming number of patients are exhibiting signs of nascent fascism incessantly calling up the national dob in line to knee-jerk nark on their neighbours.
Alas, I tell them, there is no cure for this, but ask for their addresses to dispatch brown shirts so they can be clearly identified as they go about their business working safe.
An overwhelming number of patients have experienced advanced cabin fever syndrome. After having been turned back at road blocks and prevented from accessing their holiday homes, they tell of trying to escape their suburbs by hiding in rubbish bins on collection days.
I tell patients to leave the keys to their houses in the letter box, and instruct collection drivers to pick up the bins and drive them to the tip.
All pseudo quackery aside, this quack asks you to bear in mind, that never has the country been asked to do so little, to save so many. Please stick to the recommended dose, and stay the course.
