The other day as I was out on my usual run, I spied a tree hut in a lone pine. It made me reminisce about the good old days. Back when I was a lad, building huts, playing bullrush,…
Being on the wrong side of 50 and having grown up in New Zealand, my formative years included Television ads for the electronic retailer LV Martin and Son. LV Martin a long-gone institution in New Zealand was a family-owned…
Many years ago, I dropped out of school to embark on an electrical apprenticeship. I was never a particularly good electrician – something about really disliking the work meant that it was a vocational choice that was sub-optimal in…
Last Saturday was the United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day (UNIHRD). As a board member of New Zealand’s Holocaust Centre, and the son of a survivor of the camps, I was asked to speak at the Christchurch event. This…
As I sat down to a slice of toast this morning, I got thinking about our recent European sojourn. You see my wife and I just returned from a month of road-tripping around Europe, in particular Eastern Europe. The…
A few months ago, I attended a function and happened to be sitting next to a very nice elderly man. Nothing particularly noteworthy in that, but bear with me. Said individual had a long and distinguished legal career before…
I like to confuse people. Being enigmatic is my modus operandi of choice. Being the worst-dressed traveler in the Koru Lounge is a given for me, as is being the most under-qualified individual around pretty much every board table…
I have a mind that is very rarely at rest. It’s a standing joke amongst my family but when I run, I often compose speeches in my head. I’ve written and re-written 21st birthday speeches for my sons, their…
I’ve got a slightly secret, horrendously unhealthy and largely inexplicable addiction to Coke. Not the stuff you inhale through your nose, mind, but rather the sugary water stuff. I manage to limit my consumption to times when I’ve had…
A couple of weeks ago I attended a private media briefing at the Israeli Embassy in Wellington where select New Zealand journalists were allowed to watch footage captured from the October 7th terrorist attacks in Israel. The footage came…