Uncle Norm makes a brief return to consider the passage of time.
I write this poised at the border of a far-away country. Shortly, when I cross (touch wood), I arrive at the age of 80.
Turning 80 was never on my bucket list and besides, that bucket is mostly kicked.
Eighty was beyond imagination when I was 20, and it remained a Neverland at 40 and 60. I finally grasped its concept during my 70s, around the time I noticed it was pointless explaining how I used to be important.
The cliche asserts "age is just a number," but 80 is a screeching alarm. It is the transit point from "elderly" to "old". A highway interchange where you’re thrust sharp left down a medical sniper alley. That, of course, being a dead end.
During our first 79 years we gather a barrow of wisdoms, balanced by a sack of idiocies. Let me stick with the former.
Most obviously, we’ve lived with spiffy new luxuries arriving so fast they soon became old.
When we got our first refrigerator my mum was ecstatic. We high-hogged on to the no-push lawnmower, the microwave oven, and a TV so smart it fast-forwards asinine commercials.
Clothes, once expensive, became cheap. The hardware Big Sheds delivered us a home-maker’s treasure trove.
It’s worth remembering that governments contributed almost zero to these leaps in our living well. Almost all are the result of businesses needing to outdo each other.
Today we forget it’s a luxury to no longer trudge to the shed to refill the coal scuttle or behead the Christmas rooster. But I do feel for Generations Y-Z who have never kissed a girlfriend after she’d kicked off her heels to push-start the Vauxhall.
Private enterprise’s hugest new gift is actually ethereal — infinite information. Whopper burgers of knowledge, served with as many sides of data as you like. Home delivered by internet, Google, and now, artificial intelligence.
As artificial intelligence develops its smarts, it will seem like a co-op of 10 billion Einsteins itching to provide us exact solutions — for your local council to then ignore.
I could stuff this page with other people’s AI predictions, so I’ll go with my particular favourite ... within this decade we’ll be trialling AI’s cure to the ABCs learning crisis which cripples children’s schooling. AI will begin calculating the individual needs of every child and then teaching specifically to them.
And our teachers? For a few hours each day, they’ll be helped by a score of crazily clever tutors — each an unpaid screen android, with no plans to join the Teachers’ Union.
These "screen buddies" will make learning better and much more fun. (You’re already across this, Ian Taylor, Peter Jackson, Erica Stanford?)
Sure, there’ll be the odd glitch. Perhaps a rogue programme will teach year 4 that our first settlers came by canoe from Bulgaria.
Our South Island may need a curriculum tweaked for the ways we drift from the North. It’s 50 years since flying shortened travel times about as far as they’ll go.
Yet North-South cultural idiosyncrasies grow. We don’t have the conveyer belt of change that is Auckland, nor an entitled government city like Wellington.
But we bat equal in the mistake of judging government policies by their intentions rather than results. Also, at being played as gullible fools by Treaty word-twisters.
At 70 I was sniffy about retirement villages. Now I live in a "lifestyle" (yes, I know) village whose gardened paths and villas look smarter than any fat-cat suburb.
Living here, among people in tune with each other, feels like holidaying with the cousins.
The joke is people suspect villagers are feeble victims of some new breed of commercial villainy. Truthfully, most old farts are smart farts who retain the canny streak taught by a life lived.
The worst change in my lifetime hit because "Believing Christians" became (as I did) merely "Cultural Christians".
Science, rather than any god, better explained the world, and we presumed Christian values could survive without faith. But no.
We’ve watched humanity’s finest religion being edged out by the Progressive Church of Woke.
Where did it lead? The poet William Butler Yeats worried about the gap opened by the dying of Christianity:
"And what rough beast, its hour come at last
"Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
I doubt it’s been better put.
But society’s madnesses are eventually overcorrected by the arrival of their opposite.
Perhaps it is in the intervening calms that we find the best of times?
And so — next stop 90? Yeah, nah.
• Arrowtown’s John Lapsley wrote the ODT’s Wit’s End and Uncle Norm columns.
