Geoff Adams (90). He is a former journalist who rose to become editor of the Otago Daily Times.
What is the best piece of advice he ever gave you?
When I was aged about 12, I began music lessons on the clarinet with the late Wes Faulkner. Dad would transport me to Wes’ house in Elder St and would always sit in on those first lessons. Then during the week he would come home from work and ask me if I had done my practice. I would try to lie and say that ‘yes I had’, but Dad would interrogate my brother and sisters as to whether they had heard me, and after the inevitable answers that they hadn’t, he would make me go and practise clarinet. His advice was the clear message that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing properly, and that if it was easy, then everybody would be doing it!
I doubt if Dad ever gave me really bad advice. The nearest might have been perpetuating the terrible platitude that ‘it’s the thought that counts’. Having imagined composing a symphony is not the same thing as actually writing and completing it. In every other aspect of life, the world judges people on their actions and not their thoughts and fantasies. I have found that ‘it’s the thought that counts’ has been an excuse far too often for my procrastination!
Although short on bad advice, Dad was not short on bad puns and cringeworthy wordplay — perhaps because he was a journalist and words were his tools of trade. So once my visual impairment came to light in my early teens, he couldn’t resist and out would come such terrible sayings as ‘keep your eye on the ball’, ‘you can turn a blind eye to that’, ‘you didn’t even bat an eye’, and ‘feast your eyes on that’! Of course, he said all these without batting an eyelid. Thanks Dad!
