After all, it has copped more than its fair share of unflattering descriptions.
Some who took part in an online poll (the most reliable and scientific polls you can have y’know) voted it the s... town of the year last year for doing absolutely nothing notable in 2022 to earn the title.
The city has never lived down the controversial anatomical description assigned to it when The Rolling Stones visited in 1965. They were none too impressed with Dunedin then either, apparently.
Keith Richards reckoned it was like Tombstone, complete with hitching rails. There was nothing more depressing than a wet Sunday in Dunedin. The city "made Aberdeen seem like Las Vegas". Ouch.
I am not sure I could get much satisfaction from a wet Sunday in any city, but then you can’t always get what you want.
At the weekend, if I had been inclined to give Invercargill another name it would have been a glowing one. It was sunny and still T-shirt weather, following a wonderfully warm summer there.
I must admit I lowered the tone by starting the name-calling. Someone’s got to. "You’re a flibbertigibbet," I said. Fortunately, because he is not yet 6, he did not expect me to be able to spell it, but I had to explain how it involves the way he flits from activity to activity, talking constantly.
He soon got his own back.
"Smarty pants", he said, possibly when I was in the middle of over-explaining something during one of our card games. Such know-it-all behaviour did not help my ability to win.
In our defence, at least our names were sort of accurate.
That lifts the name-calling up a notch. For instance, who could be critical of our new King if, when he sees the hapless Harry at the coronation, crows "I’m the king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascal". (He might even be moved to say some other word rhyming with rascal, and who could blame him? If you can’t work that out, I am sure someone from Invercargill could put you right.)
But name-calling for the sake of it has a whiff of the schoolyard. Graceless Act New Zealand leader David Seymour, who seems increasingly to have an inflated idea of his own relevance, recently called former prime minister Jacinda Ardern dumb and not clever enough to be prime minister. Maybe it was his idea of getting back at her for her "arrogant prick" aside in Parliament last year, something for which she had already apologised.
His comments came in a chummy podcast interview with Max Key, famous for being the son of another prime minister. In the interests of research, I listened to almost an hour of their inanity during which Max referred to Mr Seymour as See Me B or Semi B or maybe Seamy B. It was hard to concentrate when they began by talking about their own golf prowess or lack of it. Golf is the most boring game in the world to those of us who have no desire to lift a club, even in anger (although by the end of the podcast I was sorely tempted).
Mr Seymour, as well as serving up a simplistic rear-view mirror reinvention of the Covid-19 pandemic management, made a crass comment about a former National Party woman minister. That prompted sniggering from both of them, like year-10 boys who still think it is funny to ping girls’ bra straps. I hope voters who care about the way women are treated are paying attention.
It’s fascinating this created far less of a stir than Elizabeth Kerekere’s inadvertently revealed cry-baby remark, supposedly referring to her fellow Green MP Chloe Swarbrick when perhaps it might have been/ should have been Dr Kerekere describing herself. It’s attracted ridicule and seems to have opened a can of worms, an unwelcome sideshow for the party as it sorts out its list rankings, but one its opponents will relish.
Since the cry-baby jibe happened when Ms Swarbrick was speaking to her member’s Bill, the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Amendment Bill, nobody paid much attention to the fact she could not muster enough support to get it to a select committee.
Her tireless promotion of the Bill, particularly the proposals for improving communities’ say on liquor outlets in their areas, shamed the Government into coming up with its own Bill on this.
But who knows if Parliament will ever get around to properly debating the other issue featured in Ms Swarbrick’s Bill, banning alcohol sponsorship of streamed and live sports and at all sporting venues?
It must be so frustrating. If I were Ms Swarbrick I’d be having a good bawl and to hell with the consequences.
- Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
