You might fear I am about to launch forth with theories about the virgin birth, but you would be wrong.
In the build-up to the silly season, big questions do not have to involve big philosophical issues.
The question which has been on my mind this week is why, after many years of making scones (including some A&P show prize-winners), am I incapable of making them a uniform size?
I begin with the best of intentions, wielding a sharp knife, with ideas of similar-sized rectangles running through my head.
Within seconds, I am shoving misshapen lumps of dough about the oven tray which bear little resemblance to one another. (The movement is required to ensure they brown evenly.)
The idea that practice makes perfect has not worked in my case.
Practising something just means I perfect my mistakes, as I learned from piano lessons decades ago.
If I had Costelloed that quote (this is what you do when you want some top-notch research information — it involves using a widely accessible and always trustworthy search engine) I would have found that legendary American football coach Vince Lombardi said: "Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect."
I am not sure that is helpful.
The sisterhood wasn’t much use either when the scone question was posed to them.
The Queen of Cookery: Hmmmmm ... I have a few answers, and none constructive, however.
The Auckland-dwelling sister (ever the diplomat and with her language possibly unduly influenced by living in the same city as the gobbledy-gookish PM): I quite like a rusticated effect when it comes to scones. (Santa should give her a dictionary.)
The Earthquake Baby: Because you are an idiot!
She then tried to soften that blow by admitting she had the same issue before going on to say "perhaps if I got out a ruler and/or gave a expletive deleted ... "
Maybe the practice makes perfect idea is what has been behind the government’s enthusiasm for the boot camp, not that they want anyone to call it that.
Military-style academy sounds so much more genteel and exclusive.
Previous experience with boot camps in New Zealand shows they have not worked to stop offending.
The horrific case of Te Whakapakari Youth Programme on Great Barrier Island, was state-sanctioned years of extreme psychological, physical and sexual abuse combined with physical, educational and medical neglect.
Children’s minister Karen Chhour has been insistent there will be no attitude of "let’s break them and then make them" and that this boot camp is incomparable with anything that has gone before.
If that’s the case, why have the drill stuff, and the uniforms, at all? (I understand it even includes ironing, something irrelevant in the lives of most people, apart from me.)
The pilot for the boot camp, which involves volunteers rather than young offenders forced to go there through a court order which will happen once the Young Serious Offender legislation is passed, has been a public relations disaster.
I have lost track of how many of the original 10 young people are still involved, but we must be down to about half of them.
If the programme cannot ensure youth who have supposedly signed up willingly can be kept from committing crimes while still being closely supported as they transition back into society from the live-in phase of the scheme, then heaven help us when we get to the real thing.
Nobody should want society to give up on these young people, but questions remain about whether this is the best way to deal with them.
If the government is serious about breaking the cycle of offending, is it doing enough to prevent young people becoming young offenders in the first place?
That’s where most attention and funding should be going.
The hint from the PM there might need to be some consideration given to a longer live-in period seems to be grasping at straws — the pilot which began in July involved three months living in at a youth justice facility and the remaining nine months in the community.
As I have said previously, it is farcical to apply the descriptor of pilot to the current programme.
If it were a proper pilot, its success or otherwise would be assessed over say, five years, to see if it affected the youths’ reoffending rate.
But, if the government does not pull the plug on this experiment now, the "pilot" will hardly have finished before the law setting them up is passed.
Sadly, there is more chance of me suddenly turning out scones cut with military precision than this government being brave and bold enough to admit it has got this wrong.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
