There would be much dead rat consumption on policy required, but the licence to do what I damn well liked would be worth it, I reckon.
I longed for such freedom in the fourth form (year 10) when I was punished for my behaviour in Latin.
My indignant take on it then was I was only pretending to play the drums on my desk when the exasperated teacher ordered us to stand in silence.
Now, I accept I had made that poor woman’s life hell for ages with my pathetic class clown attempts (a cover-up for being out of my depth in Latin, and everything else), and this was the last straw for her.
I was given a school detention which, as I recall, involved both being kept in after school, and days of reporting to the boarding school prefects’ sit so they could allocate cleaning tasks to me.
This may have also been the time when the headmistress, the formidable Lois Voller, called me into her office for the "I was told you were a girl in a million, and all you have done is disappoint" lecture.
As well, my parents were contacted. Dad decided my invitation to spend some time in the summer holidays at a fellow boarder’s family bach at Kaiteriteri would not be accepted. Resistance was futile.
Whether any of this punishment/lecturing made any difference to my behaviour is questionable. At least the world was spared me defiantly taking up the drums.
Maybe Christopher Luxon, despite his government pushing punishment as the solution to almost everything, recognises telling off Shane Jones for his intemperate outbursts regarding the judiciary is unlikely to work.
His apparent reluctance to even attempt it is fascinating, given that a Google search quickly establishes instances where former prime minister Dame Jacinda Ardern publicly reprimanded Mr Jones.
Since he was part of her coalition government, which could have been brought down by Jones’ leader Winston Peters throwing his toys out of the cot, it makes the current PM look timid.
Is it plausible for Mr Luxon to defend Mr Jones by insisting describing a High Court judge as a communist is descriptive and not critical because decades ago she once belonged to the Socialist Action League?
I reckon, like the New Zealand Bar Association, Miss Voller and Dad would have found that hard to swallow.
Mr Jones has referred to his remark as like a beauty spot in a broad discussion. His overblown clever clogs rhetoric has become as tedious as my Latin antics.
Is it really up to Attorney-general Judith Collins, even if she might rival Miss Voller for scariness, to wield the big stick on this rather than the PM?
Mr Luxon has also done nothing to publicly pull up Associate Health Minister Casey Costello, whose behaviour continues to disappoint.
She was told off by the Chief Ombudsman for acting contrary to the law over her office’s handling of two Official Information Act requests related to the controversial scrapping of anti-smoking legislation.
She cannot explain the origins or arrival of a document spouting Big Tobacco rubbish which found its way to health officials.
But, forced to release it to RNZ after the Ombudsman’s intervention, she redacted parts on the grounds of protecting the confidentiality of advice tendered by ministers of the crown and officials.
Since she has no idea where this document came from, how can that possibly wash? I hope RNZ complains further to the Ombudsman.
Huge questions remain about Ms Costello’s supposed "trial" which, without fanfare, reduced excise from heated tobacco products to allow them to be promoted as a smoking cessation tool, against the advice of health officials.
Ms Costello has distanced herself personally from any links with the tobacco industry, but a recently leaked 2017 Phillip Morris strategy document recommending targeting NZ First and the Māori Party to get favourable regulation for heated tobacco suggests the party has not been hidden from Big Tobacco’s gaze.
Mr Luxon has shrugged off a series of undermining comments from both current deputy PM Winston Peters and deputy-in-waiting David Seymour, did not seem to mind Paul Goldsmith making things up at the same fishing industry meeting where Mr Jones made his communist judge comments, and allowed the folly of having a former gun lobbyist in charge of gun law reform.
If he keeps this up, rather than his legacy being "veni, vidi, vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered) it could be "veni, vidi, fugi (I came, I saw, I ran away).
But what would I know? I never made it past fourth form Latin.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
