Random reminder

Press, 16 December 1985, Page 20

Random reminder

WRITE ON, SISTER

She was frail, tenei kuia, she was venerable, she no longer drove. She did not. always make it to Society meetings. But her brain was as active as ever, and her enjoyment of current events no less. Living in a small flat, she had a problem. The postman kept coming. Six days a week, correspondence overflowed. Storage space was the problem. . Not junk mail, this correspondence. She had had a mis-spent youth, by the standards of her time. Her parents had “wasted” money on sending her to University. She had “thrown away her chances” by getting down to study. She had “de-sexed” herself by taking up competitive sport. She had ’’shameless!/’ travelled overseas without a man, and even more shamelessly she had travelled back from overseas WITH a man. The rest' of her life had been mis-spent, too, by the standards of her political opponents. The wages of sin turned out to be newsletters, gazettes, magazines, journals, and reviews. The obvious solution to the problem

does not work when you are 73. Committees refuse to allow you to resign. They make you a life member instead. Fear not, they say. Your newsletters will continue to arrive. You smile gallantly. You have every intention of living to be 106. This means another 300 or. 400 newsletters. per Comittee. You wish that as a teenager you had taken vows of reclusion, silence, and withdrawl from public life. If you insist on resigning, the Committees feel guilty that you are depressed and lonely, and they bring Newsletters around in person, which is veiy nice but costs a fortune in chocolate biscuits and there is nowhere for people to sit. She has solved the problem in her own way. Several times a week, she totters down to the Post Office and pokes back into the hole a trundler-load of journals, reviews and so forth. Each has been readdressed. At no cost to herself (Members of Parliament Rights and Privileges Act, 1908) she is sending the good stuff on to her favourite Ministers of the Crown.