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Woolly Socks

June 11, 2020 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

With much of the globe seemingly lurching from one crisis to the next, it’s not for the first time that I feel blessed that life in my small corner of the world is, for the most part, a little bit dull. Now that winter is upon us, the most difficult decision I’ve found myself making is whether or not my desire to have warm toes in the morning is worth turning the fan heater on for. Yes equals toasty tootsies, but a bigger power bill at the end of the month. No equals… a pair of woolly socks. It’s hardly life-changing stuff.

Woolly Socks — *Woolly socks **and** a coffee? What more could a person want?*

Socks and Coffee Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

Socks, Coffee and Books Image by FotoRieth from Pixabay

My children have gone back to school, and despite the not infrequent pleas of “I hate school! It’s so boring!” and “Turn the heater on! My toes are cold!” they’ve settled back into the swing of things remarkably well. Life got a bit too loose during the lockdown and they’ve all benefited from the return to a more structured daily routine.

I’ve also returned to my school, and there’s something else to be thankful for. It’s wonderful to see all the smiling faces, teenagers and teachers alike, but the most interesting thing that’s happened since my return is that the textbooks I ordered from the Ministry of Education to be sent out to my students during lockdown finally arrived… on Friday… in my classroom… two months after I ordered them and almost a month after lockdown ended.

I shouldn’t complain. A free textbook is a free textbook, and for the Ministry of Education to be a mere two months late in their delivery of a promised service is practically unheard of. But it would be hyperbole to describe the outcome as an exciting one.

However, when I compare that to the excitement of joining the unemployment queue, or sleeping in my car, or fearing for my life because of the colour of my skin, it helps put things in perspective. Yes, at this point in time I’m certainly thankful that my life is as mundane as it is. There’s a certain beauty in boring. For the moment, at least, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

What are you feeling thankful for at this point in time? Let me know in the comments.

My Writing Progress

In other news, I’ve finished the first draft of the sequel to Taking the Plunge. Hemingway said the first draft of anything is shit and my manuscript is no exception to that rule, but I’m pretty sure there’s a decent story buried in there somewhere. I’ve been through it chapter by chapter and made a looooooong list of things that need improvement. Now it’s on with the hard graft of writing the second draft.

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A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.

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The Art of Conversation

May 12, 2020 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

As I write this, we’re into our seventh week of lockdown here in NZ and the days really are turning into one big amorphous blob. We went from Alert Level 4 to Alert Level 3 a couple of weeks ago, which meant some restrictions came off and more people went back to work, but it made minimal difference to myself and my family, aside from the fact that we were able to order takeaways again — potato wedges with sour cream and sweet chilli sauce have never tasted so good.

Speaking of food, despite more ambitious intentions, my main task during the lockdown has been the provision of snacks. In the last six weeks, I’ve served at least 600 pieces of square crusts-off bread spread with butter and Marmite (in both toasted and sandwich form), 150 bowls of cereal (to a single child) and 100 chocolate muffins (to a different but also singular child). This is as nothing compared to the number of times I’ve heard the word, ‘no’. The following is a transcript of a typical lockdown discussion with my children:

“Do you wanna do some maths?”

“No.”

“How about some writing?”

No.”

“Then I’ll tell you what. Let’s all sit down at the table and do some drawing? You love drawing.”

“No.”

“Well then, go get a book out of your room and read it to me.”

“No.”

“Okay, then why don’t we all go outside and kick the soccer ball? It’s a beautiful morning.”

“No.”

“Cricket?”

“No.”

“How about a bike ride?”

“No.”

“Then help me fold the washing/do the vacuuming/wash the dishes?”

“No! That’s your job.”

*Sighs* “Well, what do you want to do?”

“Playstation! And can I please have four square crusts-off Marmite sandwiches?”

*More sighing, tempered by the fact that the request has come with the word ‘please’ and an adorable smile.* “Have you washed your hands?”

“No.”

Who says the art of conversation is dead?

Thankfully, not all of my proposals have been dismissed so summarily. Earlier last week, my suggestion that we go outside and make flower art designs from the camellia petals that had fallen to the ground was met with a surprisingly enthusiastic response from two thirds of my cohort of offspring, resulting in these.

Chicken made from Camellia petals. — Can’t you tell? It’s a chicken!

The Art of Conversation: Pictures speak louder then words. — You’re a star!

Anyway, it’s been announced that we’re moving to Alert Level 2 tomorrow, which means that everything can open again, with some social distancing measures in place.

Next Monday, with a sigh of relief (and yes, there has been an inordinate amount of sighing in our house over the last six weeks), my children will be returning to their school (and I’ll be returning to mine). I already had a healthy amount of respect for the work their teachers do and that’s only increased now.

It’s been a strange and fascinating time indeed, and despite the challenges and frustrations I have, for the most part, enjoyed the extra-time with my kids. And although I’m sure they would have preferred to be stuck at home with their mother while I went to work instead, I hope they would say the same.

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Lockdown Activities for the Family

April 14, 2020 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

As I write this it is Sunday 12th April 2020, and here in NZ we are about to enter week three-and-a-bit of a nationwide lockdown in a bid to beat Covid-19. The days are beginning to blend into each other now, and the only thing to distinguish today from any other is the collection of easter eggs sitting on the TV cabinet waiting for the kids to wake up.

Lockdown Activities for the Family: Eating Chocolate — *Luckily, the Easter Bunny was considered an essential service.*

These are extraordinary times indeed.

I feel blessed to say that in our very small corner of the world, the trauma and tragedy has been far less then elsewhere. We are lucky to live rurally with a rather sizeable back yard, so the restrictions on movement have not been particularly onerous. Prior to the lockdown, if I wanted some exercise, I could take a few laps around the garden. This hasn’t changed.

Both my wife and I are also lucky enough to have public service jobs. She’s a nurse, and leading up to and during the first week or so of the lockdown, what with the massive upheaval the virus has caused at the hospital where she works, she was seriously concerned about where things might go. Now, a couple of weeks later, with the national statistics on Covid-19 cases trending downward on a daily basis, there is reason to be cautiously optimistic. The shit hasn’t hit the fan, so to speak, and it looks as though with careful management, it might not.

I’m a high-school teacher, and the biggest challenge for me has been finding ways to keep my children busy, now that we’re all stuck at home together. My respect goes out to all the home-school parents out there. Despite the many and varied challenges, I think that teaching other people’s children is a damn sight more simple than teaching one’s own.

I’ve tried. We’ve painted pictures, baked muffins, written stories, solved maths equations and hit nails into bits of wood. PE has featured heavily, mostly because the weather continues to be sunny and hot. There’s been backyard cricket, soccer, hide-n-seek, tag and frequent bike rides to the local shop for ice-cream and chocolate. Oh, and we’ve made a bit of Lego, which is fine with me, because I REALLY LIKE making Lego.

Lockdown Activities for the Family: Making Lego — *Did I mention that I like making Lego?*

But I must confess I bought a PlayStation the day before we went into lockdown and the kids have spent more time than I’m comfortable admitting playing Sonic Team Racing and Lego Marvel Superheroes. The fact that Lego Marvel Superheroes is remarkably educational (sure there’s a lot of supervillain face-punching, but there’s also a lot of teamwork and problem solving required to progress through the levels), has done little to assuage my feelings of guilt.

Still, all this PlayStation time has freed me up to get other stuff done. I’ve read some books, done some writing (I’m now 77,000 words through the first draft of novel No. 2 — on the home stretch) and marked some assessments. I’ve mowed the lawns and cut firewood. And yes, I’ve surfed the internet for updates on the virus and to see what other people round the world have done to entertain themselves in lockdown. This was one of my favourites.

So far, the best thing I have discovered in my search for lockdown activities for the family and my absolute favourite thing to do with the kids during lockdown has been GoNoodle dancing in front of the TV. It’s at least as educational as Lego Marvel Superheroes, plus it’s guaranteed to get your heart rate going and make you smile. If it’s good enough for their real teachers to use in class then it’s good enough for me. If you don’t know what GoNoodle is, here’s a taste.

If you and your family been stuck in lockdown during the fight against Coronavirus, what have you been doing for entertainment? Let me know in the comments.

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Waiting for the Rain

March 12, 2020 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

It’s been an especially hot, dry summer here in our wee corner of Northland, with no real rain since late in 2019. The vegetable garden, aside from a few lonely, overripe tomatoes drooping from a couple of withered stems, is essentially dead, and the leaves on the azaleas have turned a mottled shade of brown that I’ve never seen in the seven years we’ve lived here.

Waiting for the Rain: Tangihua Range, Northland, NZ — There’s brown in them thar hills.

We live in the country, so the only domestic water supply we have available is the stuff that’s fallen out of the sky onto our roof. As a result, my favourite pastime over the past few weeks has been climbing on top of the water tank to inspect the water level inside.

It costs approximately $450 to get half a tank load of water delivered from town on the back of a truck, and my wife and I see it as a matter of personal pride that we not allow this to happen. So, we’ve implemented rigorous water conservation measures. These include, in no particular order: washing our clothes and our children at the in-laws house in town; a strict if it’s yellow let it mellow policy with the toilet (and then when it becomes necessary to flush the brown down, bucketing water from the small tank that is fed from the garage roof to fill the cistern); and ceasing to clean our cars (this was easy for me since I never washed mine in the first place).

I’ve even taken to showering at work, which is no small sacrifice, as the men’s bathroom there is a strange and disconcerting place. Although it received a new paint job a couple of years ago (a particularly unsettling shade of baby blue), the ledge above the shower stall is a graveyard of empty bottles of shampoo and conditioner which have potentially been there for decades.

The door to the stall is hinged in such a way that you have to contort your body just to get inside it (or maybe I’m just fat), and there’s only one single hook for hanging your clothes and towel on. Leaving them on a pile on the floor isn’t an option, because the doorway into the shower is screened by a mouldy plastic curtain which doesn’t quite do what it’s supposed to, so by the end of your shower there’s an inch of water pooling on the floor outside the cubicle.

Things don’t get any better once you’re in the cubicle itself. I’m six-foot-four (or at least that’s what I tell people), and the ancient shower rose is conveniently located at a height just north of my navel. Even so, there’s always at least one half-blocked jet that shoots upwards at just the right angle to hit me in the eye. Furthermore, for some reason there’s rarely any hot water, and even when there is, it has a nasty habit of disappearing at the most inconvenient times (I’ll spare you the details).

To be fair, there has been a smidgeon of the wet stuff falling from the heavens in the last week or two, but while our friends who live five kilometres down the road have been plastering pictures of the downpours at their house all over Facebook, all we’ve had at ours is the occasional short-lived, misty kiss, as though we’ve strayed too close to someone with the habit of ‘spraying it’ rather than ‘saying it’. So far, no amount of naked shamanic rain dancing has convinced the sky to perform otherwise, and it remains touch and go as to whether we’ll have to forfeit that 450 bucks for a tanker delivery.

Hopefully, the heavens will open up soon and we can go back to washing ourselves, our children and our clothes in the comfort of our own home. I suppose the one good thing about waiting for the rain is that we learn not to take such a precious resource for granted.

Do you have any handy tips on saving water? Let me know in the comments.

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TAD – The Angel of Death

February 6, 2020 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

At times, writing can be a lonely job. One thing that makes it a little less lonely is the encouragement of other writers, whether they live down the road or on the other side of the world. Since I met him online a few years ago, friend and fellow writer, M.D. Neu, has been an inspiring and supportive figure in my writing journey. M.D. is an award-winning, gay fiction writer from San Jose, California. His most recent novel, TAD, was published in September last year. Here’s a little teaser.

When Tad pushes the boundaries of his duties too far, his angel wings are stripped and he is sent to New York City to live as a human. Lost and alone, he meets Doug, and the two start a friendship that will last a lifetime. But nothing is simple when you’re dealing with a former Angel of Death and a Drag Queen. Could these two cause our world to end? Or will they manage to keep the future secure?

In a guest post for this month, M.D. writes about his inspiration for the novel’s two main characters.

TAD — The Angel of Death is something unique to me, as are the cast of characters. For the story, I focus on two people: Doug, a hairdresser and drag queen, and Tad, a former Angel of Death. Despite how fun these characters sound I realized there was potential for them both to be silly and over the top, but for the story I wanted to tell, I needed them to be grounded.

They couldn’t be caricatures; they had to feel real and they had to read as real, like people you might know. Also, we follow both characters throughout their lives. They had to change and grow as they got older, which meant they needed to be fully fleshed out. I had to have a life arc for both Doug and Tad, which was something I’d never had to do before, so it was fascinating to work on. It wasn’t perfect, but it gave me a starting point for each of them and as the story progressed I was able to change and modify bits of it as I needed.

The character of Doug starts out at the age of twenty-one, so he’s in his prime, he loves to party and have a great time, but he’s also somewhat irresponsible and unsure of himself. I based his character on two of my drag friends from when I was in my twenties. They were both full of life, but each of them had hints of sadness behind their bright smiles. One lived on the streets for a while and the other had some mental health issues which plagued him for a while. I was in a position to see how both these conditions affected them over their lives. So with Doug, I needed to ensure he had real-world issues that would affect his life as he got older. Some of his ‘baggage’ helps him, while some of his issues are a hurdle he must live with and deal with for good or bad.

With Tad being an angel (and not just any angel but an angel of death), unlike Doug, I didn’t have any point of reference. However, I believe that angels surround us and look after us. There are too many things that happen in our world which we can’t fully explain and I think this is due to the influence of angels. So pay attention to the people you pass on the street, because you never know…

I wanted Tad to be honest and open. He needed to almost be like a child who we watch and see grow up. And just like a child, Tad can be shortsighted and stubborn. At times he acts spoiled and struggles to understand that his actions have consequences. Major consequences, which he has to learn and grow from. Tad is modeled on the idea of a teenager who doesn’t fully understand the world but thinks they do. That was fun to play with. He changes a lot throughout the story but everything he does makes him a better person, which I enjoyed seeing in his character arc.

With the characters of Doug and Tad, I wanted to explore how our character flaws affect us throughout our lives. Because I’m no longer in my twenties I can see how the choices I made back then have affected who I am now. I wouldn’t go back and change my past because that is what got me to now and has given me the life and friends I have, which I’m happy with. It’s the same for Doug and Tad — they may not like everything that happens to them or the choices they make, but in the end I don’t think they would change anything. Although maybe they would… you’ll have to read and see for yourself.

TAD — The Angel of Death is available at NineStar Press and major eBook retailers. You can find out more about M.D. and his writing at mdneu.com

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The Fine Line between Fun and Fear

January 14, 2020 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

Rainbow's End, Auckland, NZ — Indigo and Violet were upset when they discovered they weren’t invited to the party.

It’s the school holidays here in NZ and keeping the kids entertained through the slow, sweaty, summer days can be a real challenge. So as a special treat, this last weekend we took them to Rainbow’s End, a theme park in South Auckland.

They had a great time, and two out of the three of them proved to be real adrenaline junkies. For myself, overall, it was a fun day, although when broken into smaller chunks, it was more like pockets of fun interspersed with long stretches of tedium (the inescapable queues), dotted with two or three paralysing moments of sheer terror.

One of these awful moments occurred while hanging upside down at the apex of the loop on the roller coaster, where I was struck by the sudden thought that if the engineering failed and our cart came tumbling out of the sky, the inevitable result would be a battered and bloody death for everyone involved.

At the end of the ride, my daughter, smiling from ear to ear, asked me if I’d like to go again. I wiped a dribble of vomit from my lips and suggested that she spread the joy by asking her mother instead.

After completing two more circuits, my wife and daughter then recommended I finish the day with this little number, the Fearfall.

The Fine Line between Fun and Fear: The Fearfall, Rainbow's End, NZ — Lucky I bought a spare pair of undies.

Despite still feeling slightly nauseous following my turn on the rollercoaster, I was up for it. I’ve been bungy jumping and skydiving before and I thought it couldn’t be any worse than that. The Fearfall rises 18 stories into the South-Auckland sky. I don’t know why they don’t provide a useful metric measurement for its height, but in the final few seconds of our ascent all I could think was, S#*t this is high. This was immediately followed by Oh, God, this is going to be bad.

And it was. Pants-wettingly terrifying, to be frank. In some ways, the worst part was the few seconds stopped at the top, prior to the drop, where you realise you’re well past the point of no return and have the time to contemplate how absurdly horrible the coming moment is going to be, without ever knowing exactly when that moment is going to begin.

It was just the same when I went tandem skydiving in Queenstown many years ago. The same feeling of utter helplessness that comes with being strapped to some stranger’s front, blasted by the wind screaming through the open doorway of a plane 10,000 feet in the air, with no control over what’s going to happen next.

The abject terror of the fall was the same too. Time slowed down and, too scared to scream, my stomach rose up into my throat and I thought I was going to die. Then, only a moment later… it was all over and I was on the ground again.

Despite the awful, incapacitating horror of it all I actually giggled at the operator and thanked him upon exiting. The words came out before my brain could stop them. I suppose I was happy not to be dead after all but still, it seemed so incongruous. It’s a fine line between fun and fear.

Trudging back to the car with three exhausted but exhilarated children, I felt the day was another reminder (along with grey hair and varicose veins), that I’m not as young as I used to be. These days, when it comes to being entertained, I’d rather read a book.

When was the last time you paid good money to get scared out of your skin? I’d love to hear about it. Let me know in the comments below.

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The Elf on the Shelf Called Ralph

December 11, 2019 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

It’s that time of year again and our elf, Ralph, has been busy with his Christmas shenanigans. In the weekend he caught a dinosaur.

And a couple of nights before that he borrowed my wife’s brassiere and used it as a hammock.

He’s not all mischief though. Sometimes he can be quite helpful. Yesterday we woke up to find that he’d cooked the kids breakfast.

However, his helpfulness was short-lived.

This is only the second year Ralph has been visiting us (prior to that I’d never even heard of elves on shelves) and I have to say that the notes he writes each morning have been reasonably successful in modifying our children’s behaviour in the lead-up to the Christmas school holidays (well, all except for last night, when one of the twins decided to do a ‘Mike Tyson’ on his brother’s ear!) But despite that hiccup and being hot and bothered by some extreme early summer weather, they’ve all tried hard to be a little bit nicer to each other since he arrived on the scene.

Do you have an elf on the shelf? If you do, I’d love to know what your elf has been up to. Let me know in the comments.

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Small Towns in New Zealand

November 16, 2019 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

My new novel, Taking the Plunge, is set mostly in the small town of Cromwell, in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. The main reason I chose to set it in Cromwell is because I lived there for a couple of years in the early 2000’s, commuting to work in Queenstown, and the impression it left on me has been a lasting one.

Cromwell is fairly typical of small towns in New Zealand. Sleepy and serene (some might say dull), it’s surrounded by mountains and perches on the edge of a man-made lake that was the result of damming the Clutha River for a hydro-electric power station in the 80’s. Historically, it was a gold mining town (parts of which now lie beneath the waters of the lake), but these days it’s better known for its vineyards, apricot and cherry orchards, and for being the place you pass by on the way between the popular alpine resort towns of Queenstown and Wanaka.

As if real fruit weren’t enough, Cromwell also has the notable attraction of the fake variety, on a giant scale. Just beside the highway turnoff, imploring visitors to stop and take in all the town has to offer, is this:

Small Towns in New Zealand: Giant Fruit Sculpture, Cromwell — *“That lady should really put some pants on.”*

Cromwell isn’t the only small town in NZ to have a giant sculpture as a local landmark. Gore, for instance, has a giant fish;

Small Towns in New Zealand: Giant Fish Sculpture, Gore — *“Eeew, someone laid a big brown trout!*“

Ohakune, a giant carrot;

Small Towns in New Zealand: Giant Carrot Sculpture, Ohakune — *“It’s the carotene that helps you ski faster.”*

*Image by Tony from Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0).*

And Taihape, a giant gumboot.

Small Towns in New Zealand: Giant Gumboot Sculpture, Taihape — *“Hold on, I’m sure I left my keys here somewhere.”*

*Image by DaxMairead from Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0).*

These sculptures play their part in helping put these towns on the map, and if nothing else, they make for great photo-ops.

Along with its giant fruit sculpture, Cromwell, like most small towns, also has some interesting street names. When I was living there one in particular always stood out to me—Neplusultra. Off Barry Ave, and running parallel to Clare, Wicklow, and Kirtle, Neplusultra’s Latin heritage stands out. I had to consult a dictionary to discover that it means no more beyond, which I guess makes sense because running down one side of the street is a golf course, so there are no more houses beyond that side of the street.

Anyway, if you’re wondering where I’m going with this, here it is. Neplusultra Street and the giant fruit sculpture were the inspiration for a limerick I composed whilst living in Cromwell:

There was a young man from Cromwell,
Whose landlord was giving him hell.
He moved from Neplusultra
To the giant fruit sculpture,
And there he did happily dwell.

If you know of any other small towns in New Zealand or elsewhere with giant sculptures or interesting street names, I’d love to hear about them. And if you have a favourite limerick or two then I’d love to hear them too. Let me know in the comments.

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A holiday from the holidays

July 21, 2019 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

As I write this, early on a wintry Saturday, it’s the first morning of the mid-year school holidays here in Aotearoa. I’ve been counting down the days for the last week — not because teaching is such an onerous job that the idea of having a student-free break is the one thing that makes life liveable — but because the holidays do provide a small opportunity to get things done without the constant interruptions that are an everyday part of school life.

By the last week of term, everyone is in survival mode. By the last day of term, the brains of students and teachers alike have turned to mush and in an atmosphere of barely suppressed chaos a successful lesson is one where nobody gets stabbed with scissors and the floor is cleared of paper aeroplanes before students stampede out the door when the bell goes.

All pretence of anyone learning anything disappears. On Friday, my lesson plans consisted of handing students a laptop each and telling them not to swap the letters on the keyboard around. By last period, four students turned up to my lesson out of a class of twenty-three. God only knows where the rest of them were — I was in no hurry to find out — and the lesson consisted of putting the chairs on the desks so the cleaner would have better access to the floor and comparing Justin Bieber’s early catalogue with his more recent material.

But even in the midst of such chaos, great things can happen. In the corner of the main whiteboard in my classroom, sometime in the distant past, some helpful boy has used a sharp object to inscribe the outline of a penis (I guess I can’t know for sure it was a boy, but in my experience, girls, while being perfectly happy to vandalise school furniture, don’t do it by drawing images of male genitalia). One of my delightful students took it upon himself to use the penis as the central feature of an idyllic landscape scene, turning it into a lighthouse on a rock, surrounded by a gentle ocean, fluffy clouds and a passing sailboat. I’m not quite sure why the light was shining in the middle of the day but I wasn’t complaining — it was a wonderful picture and I was loath to rub it off when it came time to clean the whiteboard.

Boy with paper aeroplanes — *“Boy, this is boring — I wish I was back in English class.”*

Image by Виктория Бородинова from Pixabay

I have a depressingly extensive list of schoolwork to complete by the end of the school holidays. There’s also an extensive list of chores to do around the house — all the things that build up because there’s never enough time to do them in the weekends.

If I didn’t have children of my own the chances of getting all these things done would be reasonable. However, I have three young children, who due to the vagaries of our schooling system have their school holidays at the exact same time as mine! Which means they’ll spend the next two weeks stealing each other’s toys and then complaining to me to arbitrate their disputes. This dynamic is going to be further complicated by the arrival of their older half-brother, who’s coming from Australia to stay with us for the holidays. It’s going to be fun times I tell you, but I can’t help thinking that by the end of it I’m going to need a holiday from the holidays.

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Overworked and Underpaid

June 20, 2019 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

On Wednesday 29th May 2019, there was a national teacher’s strike here in Aotearoa. It was reportedly the largest ever example of industrial action in our history, and the first time members of both the primary and secondary teachers unions had taken combined action. More than 50,000 teachers across the country were involved.

I attended a march in the city of Whangarei. Multiple hundreds of teachers and supporters marched in a long ragged line through the centre of the city to a rally on the eastern edge of town. We got lucky with the weather — it was a beautiful day, and the march was fun. I got to catch up with a bunch of my friends and colleagues from other schools, and there was a real sense of solidarity as we marched, waving signs and chanting.

overworked and underpaid — “Two, four, six, eight; we just want to educate!”

It seems a little sad to me that I’ve just had my forty-fourth birthday and it’s possibly the only protest action I’ve ever taken. I say possibly because I have the vaguest memories of student protests at Otago University when I was attending in the mid-nineties. There seemed to be annual protests about fee increases at the time, but my memories are so vague that I’m not sure whether I actually participated in any of them or whether I was just aware of them happening around me. I can’t pretend I was the most politically active of students, nor the most dedicated, and there’s every possibility that my experience of the protests came through the lens of a beer glass and the window of the local pub.

Since it was a combined primary and secondary teachers strike and my wife was working, I dropped the twins off at their grandparents and took my daughter with me. I was proud of her, and of the fact that she could be there with me and get a taste of collective action at such a young age.

Only a few days earlier we had the second national day of student strikes against climate change. As teachers, our reasons for striking are the usual ones — we’re overworked and underpaid — and they seem somewhat petty when compared to the existential threat of climate change, but the reality is that we all have our lives to live. In a world of increasing temperatures, weather extremes and rising sea levels, we all still have to earn a living so we can feed our families and keep a roof over our heads — until there’s some radical reorganisation of our social, economic and political structures anyway.

I do think these protests signal a change in the social landscape, and a positive one at that. While protesting against climate change doesn’t suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, just as protesting against poor pay doesn’t suddenly fill one’s pockets with fat rolls of hundred dollar bills, one thing it does do is make people sit up and pay attention. I think there’s a slowly growing awareness (perhaps painfully slow, on a global scale, but growing nonetheless) that the status quo is not a viable option for the planet or humanity’s place on it.

If that all seems a little morbid, then my apologies. I didn’t mean it to — it just came out that way. Really, I’m an optimist, and despite the doomscrollers and naysayers, I think we, as a species, will figure things out.

Been on any protests lately? What was your experience? Let me know in the comments.

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J.B. Reynolds

Page 4 of 7

Woolly Socks

My Writing Progress

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The Art of Conversation

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Lockdown Activities for the Family

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Waiting for the Rain

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TAD – The Angel of Death

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The Fine Line between Fun and Fear

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The Elf on the Shelf Called Ralph

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Small Towns in New Zealand

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A holiday from the holidays

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Overworked and Underpaid

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