Three Grand

I had 3 job applications in progress today, all of them with Christian companies, and all of which ultimately fell-through due to employee-starved New Zealand's impenetrable Work Permit requirements. (sheesh - it sounds like a Marvel Comic by Stan Lee)

First, an employer would have to spend $1,000 advertising the position to prove that they have genuinely tried to employ a kiwi first. Then to make the actual application would cost around another $2,000.

I mean I'd benefit, they'd benefit, the only problem is that we both have the same queen. Ah, no, wait a minute...

Domestic Violins

So I was all set to attend a Korean violin recital this afternoon, when I realised that my lift was not legally allowed to drive passengers.

He however had no problem with this, insisting that I was wrong.

So as we cruised through leafy Auckland countryside, I turned this over in my head, attempting to nail just what was wrong with my acceptance. After all, he was in the wrong, not me. I’d warned him. I’d argued with him. He’d quite deliberately chosen his course of action, and no-one could blame me, on any level. Why was it wrong for me to accept the lift at his behest?

When we arrived at the home (mansion, actually) where the performance would happen, the violinist’s father confirmed my assertion, and my friend suddenly found himself outnumbered. He realised that he actually wasn’t allowed to drive passengers after all. Good, so he wouldn’t be making that mistake again.

As I later sat marvelling at such extraordinary violin and piano-playing, 2 and 2 finally made 4 in my head. My friend was my lift home. Purely by sitting in this chair I was now compelling him to repeat what he had already got away with once.

So I got a lift back off the violinist’s father instead.

Psalm 138

My helping Rhema out at Parachute 05 in January indirectly led to my receiving a copy of the Word For Today Bible-study notes for February-April. For various reasons (including using other Bible-studies) I've only just started reading it. As a result last Tuesday 24th May I read the entry for Thursday February 10th, which included Psalm 138 in the SoulFood (read the Bible in a year) section.

I really liked this Psalm, mainly because it sums up some of my feelings about being in New Zealand.

I read it out on my show on Hope City FM tonight. I don't suppose Rhema expected that!

Here we go:

I thank you, LORD, with all my heart;
I sing praise to you before the gods.
I face your holy Temple,
bow down, and praise your name
because of your constant love and faithfulness,
because you have shown that your name and your commands are supreme.
You answered me when I called to you;
with your strength you strengthened me.

All the kings in the world will praise you, Lord,
because they have heard your promises.
They will sing about what you have done
and about your great glory.
Even though you are so high above,
you care for the lowly,
and the proud cannot hide from you.

When I am surrounded by troubles,
you keep me safe.
You oppose my angry enemies
and save me by your power.
You will do everything you have promised;
LORD, your love is eternal.
Complete the work that you have begun.

(GOOD NEWS)

Why Don't You Just Switch-Off Your Television Set And Go Do Something Less Boring Instead?

Sometimes when I switch the TV on, actually the TV is switching me off.

I couldn’t sleep this morning, so I foolishly decided to get up and watch some cable TV. “I’ll just watch a few minutes” I told myself. Oh surrrrrrrre.

Kicking-off at 1:30am I switched-on to Shine TV – New Zealand’s Christian cable channel. They were running a classic Billy Graham meeting from McCormick Place, Chicago in the 1970s. 2 things struck me here. 1, just what a brilliant speaker he was in his younger years, and 2, he sort of resembled a young Frasier Crane, didn’t he?


"...and he said to me ‘But Billy – I don’t know how to pray.’"


"Go ahead caller - I’m listening."

After I'd realised this, he actually started using the "Jesus was either a liar, lunatic or Lord" argument, which for the 2nd option involved talking about Jesus' mental health, and whether he’d actually needed a psychiatrist. And then he went off on one about Diane being MAD.

After that I turned over to UKTV, where the great flag of classic British comedy was being kept flying by…ah, no, maybe not, they were showing 'Allo 'Allo.


Tonight, René had to hide Colonel Von Strohm and Leuitenant Gruber upstairs at the cafe, so the latter was in bed dressed-up in a nightie pretending to be Edith’s mother. Meanwhile the French resistance woman and the English policeman covered for Edith's cabaret by performing Shine On Harvey Moon. (“Listen very carefully – I will sing this only once!”) And Herr Flick's assistant had to make some forged banknotes out of a pornographic magazine, which he wasn't allowed to look at as he did so, so he wore a paper bag on his head. No-one asked him if he wanted woofers or tweeters with that.

I must admit, I always used to think that there was some sort of overall storyline going on in ‘Allo ‘Allo. I remember in the 80s watching one that finished on a train. I then tuned in the following week and, lo and behold, they actually picked-up the story – on the train – and finished it about 10 minutes into the second episode. Lately however I have had this nagging worry that maybe, just maybe they have been pulling a fast one on me all these years. Maybe every episode just started and finished in any old situation, regardless of what happened before or after. ‘Allo ‘Allo ran for a very long time – over 80 episodes – so surely they couldn’t possibly have kept such a complex ongoing farce that remained possible and never contradicted itself for all that time? I mean I’d like to think so, but I just don’t credit the writers with going to that much trouble over it. How cynical of me - I sincerely hope they did.

Anyway, after a brief glance at Last Of The Summer Wine (which I couldn’t place time-wise, as it had no Compo, yet was showing in full-screen), it was time to flick over and get sucked-into the black hole that was...The Disney Channel!


I don't mind admitting that I'm a fan of Disney - they make the best movies, the funniest comedies and they never offend me. They even make me cry sometimes. What else does one buy one's ticket for?

On TV however, they were a bit more clawing to fill-up the time.

In-between trailers for The Princess Diaries 2 and the Teacher’s Pet movie, I came across a British live-action show called Bus Crew. Every episode of this, it seems, is set entirely on the top deck of a bus. Driving around some leafy English region. I didn't read anything into this though, as I knew that it was just standard procedure for all BBC programmes...(which this wasn’t)

After that I was really feeling like it was time for bed, but Disney just wouldn’t let me go, introducing me to 2 episodes of Dave The Barbarian.


This was just brilliant! There were so many fine gags in these that I just wish I’d been writing them down. The whole “Previously on Dave the Barbarian” sketch, presenting a montage of the title character running away in terror from many different foes had me in stitches. He then, suffering from an ingrowing toenail, chucks in being a barbarian in order to open a bistro. But things go wrong when Dave accidentally bakes a monster blancmonge that threatens to eat the entire world. Marvelous.

By now however, I was in a battle of my own to turn the TV off and get to bed. But it was no use. The increasingly demanding mouse with the big black ears had anticipated my every thought, and had strategically scheduled Sabrina – The Animated Series straight afterwards.


Sigh... well I really needed to watch just one episode of this, to see how it related to the enjoyable live-action series.

And, you know, it did tie-in pretty well. Whilst the forgettable B-plot about Sabrina and her best friend auditioning against each other at school was really just filler, the A-plot about the cat’s arch-nemesis challenging him to a carpet race was both exciting and sitcom, not to mention alot freer in a cartoon than a live-action show.

This show really had promise – and the promise was in its retaining the original 2 leads from the live action series – Melissa Joan Hart (Sabrina) and Nick Bakay (cat’s voice). Of course, whilst Bakay just did his own brilliant catty thing as usual, Hart had actually been hired to voice not one, but TWO completely different characters, NEITHER one of which was Sabrina!

Had she been playing the same character (instead of the 2 aunts) I think I would have given this show 7.25 out of 10. As it is, that painful betrayal of the audience alone knocks it all the way back down to 2. Good thing too, or I might have tuned in again.

Another cartoon started, so I switched-off.

ARGH!

It was 4am.

I really think we, as a society, need to get rid of TV-on-demand.

I don’t mean get rid of all TV – watching a specific programme or film is not the same thing, as we allocate a specific time to switch these off. But this constant never-ending demand for our attention that every channel now has – that’s just taking away all your time until you die.

A few years ago in the UK, the BBC had a slogan – The New Going Out Is Staying In. Watch EastEnders - it’s better than living your life.

Radio. Radio only requires one sense, and actually helps one to get on with ironing, or washing-up, or writing, or hosting a party, or sightseeing, or whatever. Music can actually bring life to life. It’s impossible to do anything when that flickering box of distractions in the corner is on.

You try turning it on the next time you have friends over, and just watch them all turn away from each other to stare at it, and stop talking.

On the whole, radio helps people to live life, TV saps it.

But I’m not too worried, you see, this is a battle that TV will ultimately lose, and the internet will win.

I think that 10 years from now people will download, for free, TV shows that are sponsored through adverts in the corner of the picture. Broadcasters will be on their way out. After all, who wants to watch a show at someone else's time?

Hopefully then I can get some sleep. It's actually better.

Second Cession

After last week’s crazy adventures in bus-land, today I decided to visit a church nearer to home.

There was one a mere 5 minutes’ walk away, that I didn’t even need to cross any roads to get to. Although I now live some 45 minutes drive away from my old digs on Queen Street, it was one that I had actually been to before.

It had been last Christmas Eve, whilst staying overnight with my friends Frank and Melva, that we had all attended the midnight service there together.

Today therefore I dropped into Cession at around 4:30, only to find that I had got the time wrong and was about an hour early.

“You’re welcome to just sit down and wait quietly,” someone kindly suggested.

“Actually I’d rather stand up and help with something.”

I must make a mental note to, in future, always turn up to any meeting of new people at least one full hour early. Usually I find it terribly hard to break into any group that has already gelled without me, but sharing an activity with someone almost always deals with this, even if it is only putting a load of tables and chairs out. By the time I walked into the service, I found I had quite a few choices of who to sit next to.

It was good to catch-up with Frank and Melva too. Despite all the new people I met today, I really no longer feel as though I’m new in New Zealand.

I know everyone here.

Personal Demons - Part 2

(part one here)

You've heard the phrase "I waited forever for the train." Well, here in New Zealand this can actually happen.

New Zealand’s public transport system has always been a bit thin on the ground. English readers will recognise the now famous excuse that “There are no trains running today, due to the wrong type of snow falling.” Well, here in New Zealand, every day they have the wrong type of entire transport infrastructure.

Years ago New Zealand had an enviable railway network. Today, after privatisation, there’s one, count them, one national domestic train a day. Its destination, after it has pulled out of Auckland, is SOUTH.

Take Matamata, where the Hobbiton village set is from The Lord Of the Rings. There’s a line that goes there, there’s a station and everything. There just aren’t any trains. Ever. Too much danger of tourism bringing some money into the country. Y’know a monorail system could really put New Zealand on the map...but no. That's really more of a Sydney idea.

In fairness though, what New Zealand lacks on the rails it makes up for on the roads. The national coach services are thriving, Auckland has its own limited rail network, and of course there's always walking. Ah, no, wait a minute, most of the roads here actually don't have pavements. Yes, I know, when building a road, the pavement is usually the second thing that most people would think of. I find it disappointing to realise that, in a country as dependent upon conservation as farm-covered New Zealand, at some point, someone actually decided to ban people from walking and insist that everyone buy carbon monoxide machines instead. Forever.

Anyway, I was still astounded to discover at http://www.rideline.co.nz today that, presumably to combat the above carbon monoxide issue, there were no buses back from Queen Street to Botany after 5pm on Sundays.

In fact, my 45-minute outward journey down to Queen Street looked to be a bit of an adventure as well, but after yesterday’s missed opportunity, today I was a man on a mission. No, wait a minute, it’s just become 3 missions, hasn’t it?

1. Somehow get to church.

2. Have demons cast out of me just in case.

3. Somehow (again) travel home.

So I stood in the rain outside New World supermarket and waited for my first bus. If I could get that, then I might just be able to make it to church in time for the end of the service.

Soon, a different bus arrived, I watched it, and then it left. Then I remembered that today being Sunday, I was actually waiting for a different bus. Dang. Now I needed to get 3 buses, by which time the service may well have finished.

It hadn’t.

The main 'demon guy' from yesterday was up the front speaking along broadly similar lines again.

This church’s services usually end with an open invitation for people to come forward to receive prayer about something. Today it was for people who needed prayer for mental discipline.

So at the end I went forward with the crowd, and prayed that I would be prayed for. Either way, it wasn’t long before all the yelling began again.

About 40 people had gone forward, and it certainly seemed that most of them wound up screaming in agony on the floor again at some point. I wasn’t going to let this put me off though. Darn it, I had come to New Zealand intending to try new things out, and if asking someone to cast demons out of me just to be on the safe side didn’t qualify, then life was a boring thing to be leading.

From very early on I had a curious sense that I would wind-up being the very last one there. Sure enough, people came forward after me, and got prayed for while I continued waiting. I remember wondering if standing in the middle of all these exorcisms was really a safe place to be. At one point I got a burning sensation on my arm, which I told in Christ’s name to go for a bit, until it did. There seemed to be only a few people who left quietly.

2 of my friends saw me waiting, and prayed for me in the meantime.

Finally, after standing there for about 2 hours, there was no-one else left to pray for. The church’s minister came up to me and said “We’ll pray for you, bro’.” So he and ‘demon guy’ did.

But despite all the fireworks I'd just witnessed in front of me, at no point did either one of them verbalise any intention to cast any evil out of me. And why should they? I hadn't asked them to.

The thing is, neither one them had asked me what I wanted prayer for either.

So they prayed for the confusion in my mind to go, and asked for God to provide a breakthrough in His purpose for me this week. One of them also prayed in tongues.

They finished, one of them promised to pray for me during the week, I thanked them both, and left, getting a lift home off Rach from Hounslow.

I decided to take this as a clean bill of health. The irony is, I think I would have felt happier if I’d done the crying-screaming-and-writhing-in-agony-on-the-floor thing. I think what I’d wanted was peace of mind. The only thing that had changed for me since I’d entered the church, was that I now knew that I had honestly tried. I had beaten my fear.

Metaphorically at least, I’d battled a demon with prayer and won.

Personal Demons - Part 1

Who knows what evil lurks within the hearts of men?

Tonight I had pre-recorded That Friday Feeling so that I could attend Edge Church’s Leading With Excellence weekend. Link NZ, of which Edge Church is a member, holds these weekends sporadically. The last one, which I also attended, was back in October down at Gateway Church in Hamilton. The next one will be down there again in July. Normally these weekends cover a variety of different Christian teaching topics. This weekend however would focus exclusively on just the one – Demonology.

Edge Church’s minister, has long since maintained that demons are commonplace within Christians. Almost every week, somewhere in his sermons, he’ll slip in stories of how God’s cleaned-out people in front of him, or sometimes of how demons have been driven out of him. Since he joined the ministry.

His teaching this weekend, along with 4 other people's, was excellent.

The first guy told how he’d once prayed in Christ’s name for 45 minutes for a mud-drinking woman’s demon to leave her. At the end of this she’d cursed him, and he’d fallen grotesquely ill for 6 weeks. He’d only recovered after someone had come to hospital and prayed for him.

I think the section that I found the most useful was The Legal Basis For Our Authority In Deliverance.

God creating Adam in His own image, God giving Adam authority over the earth, Adam losing that authority in the fall, Adam’s son being in his own image instead of God’s, Jesus being human in God’s image and not falling, Jesus inheriting and offering Adam’s original human authority back to mankind again.

But it was the weekend’s final speaker who spoke with the greatest experience.

Jack's wife passed me a note during his session, on which was written the question "Do you believe him?"

I think I probably responded with something like "The world is a big place, and I have only seen a small part of it. Do you believe him?"

"Some of his stories are rather tall."

And, yes, they were. A mother and daughter who used vacuum-cleaners without plugging them in, people turning invisible, E.T.-like beings running away, but not getting anywhere due to the spiritual realm not having any physical substance. Truly, stuff I have not seen in my short 34-year life on this very, very big planet. But there’s a lot in the Bible that I’ve never seen either. And in Africa. And anything that happened before 1971 or after 2005. Yada, yada, yada...

Still, now it was time for these people to put their money where their mouths were. Some of the people seated around me had travelled here from all around north island, many of them specifically to be delivered of their demons. They were invited forward first. Would there be any special effects?

There was a great crowd of about 30 of them. Hands were laid on, prayers were said, this went on for a while with nothing else happening. A few people cried. Some sank to the floor. Then one girl began to scream.

And this was no idle song she was crooning, she was in agony. A few minutes after she’d stopped, someone else went down. And then another. This happened so many times that it actually became normal.

And they were all in sheer agony.

I’ve heard theories that crowds of people can easily be controlled by suggestion, hypnosis, and simple neuro linguistic programming, playing to their own desires.

For me, none of these explanations come anywhere near to explaining how so many people can be convinced to convulse on the floor, screaming in agony, one at a time.

From my vantage point towards the back of the congregation, 2 things bothered me.

The first was that I hadn’t obtained prior permisson to take any photos. There was alot of very powerful body-language going on over there, and I really believed that it would translate well into a few pictures. I took one photo of a screaming girl on a zoom-lens without a flash, and in the available light it took about 10 seconds to expose. Well, that blurry image would have to do. Until it gets processed, we can but wonder whether anything will be in the image that I couldn’t see in real life.

My second problem had been a nagging worry, ever since I had first heard Edge’s minister teach that many Christians have demons in them. If demons really are that common, then do I have one? Wouldn’t it make logical sense to go forward in case?

The last speaker had said, and emphasized in his notes, that suffering rejection was a 'major doorway' for demons. Well at 34 I certainly feel as though I’ve been cursed with that.

Trouble was, I felt too embarrassed by this idea. Too ashamed. I couldn’t possibly go forward, because they would ask me why I had done so, and I just couldn’t bring myself to tell them. I needed someone to invite me.

Finally, after much soul-searching, I stood up.

Unfortunately this was because the seminar was now long since over, and they were locking the doors. And one of the screaming girls was leaving, laughing about how much better her eyes felt. My eyes felt worse. Oh, there was a sitcom plot right there...

So as, later that night, I sat on the last 68 bus home, I felt a bit sad. I’d given-in to a groundless fear, and I have this annoying personal rule about standing up to anything that scares me.

Somehow, tomorrow, I had to face it.

Little-Fed Hiding Hood

Paperclips are the currency of faith.

Last August, at a church prophecy conference, I got chatting to a girl called Courtney. She was taking a Front Line course at Lifeways Christian College in Warkwork. She told me that one of the group exercises they’d been given was to be dumped in the middle of nowhere for a week with only a paperclip. The plan was to then find someone with whom the paperclip could be swapped for something of greater value, like a pen. Said pen could then be swapped for something of greater value still, and so on. At the end of their week in the wilderness, groups tended to return to college with microwave ovens, cars, Africa that sort of thing. It was a lesson in learning to trust God.

Since then I have been gradually learning to replace money with God. I recently saw a tramp on Ponsonby Road. I didn’t want to give him any money, but I didn’t have any paperclips either. So I gave him 5 cents.

Back to the present. After last night’s cell-group meeting, I slept the night on Neville’s floor in Three Kings, before heading, via Penrose, down to Grafton. After slipping a note under Sam’s door to confirm when I would be tutoring him this week, I walked up to Edge Church’s office in Ponsonby to book myself a place on this weekend’s demonology course. It was whilst strolling back towards Queen Street that I spotted a tramp on Ponsonby Road.

If he was the same tramp (and I’ll probably never know in this life) then my 5-cent plan had been worth exactly that.

Still, whether he was the same guy or not, I wanted to give him something, just not money. All I could find in my rucksack that seemed appropriate was a green headband, which Paulo had given me ages ago when he’d checked-out of my room. I looked at it. I really really wanted to keep it to incorporate into my Budgie-Man costume, but the reason I had it on me was because I had been using it as a neckscarf. It was soft and very warm, and just the sort of thing the tramp would need at night as we plunge further into winter. So I offered it to him.

I saw him, beneath his hood, lift his unshaven chin to look slightly up at it, and weakly shake his refusal.

So I left, but only by about 10 meters.

For the next hour I hung around. I was determined to do something to help this guy – but what? And why on earth was it so difficult for me to just ask him what he needed? I think it was because I thought that I had nothing to offer. He would surely ask for money, and I wouldn’t give it to him. But my own envisioning of his answer was no excuse, so I eventually went up to put on my best Patrick McGoohan voice and ask him "What do you want?"

As I approached, I read his piece of cardboard. "I need food."

“Would you like me to buy you some food?”
“No I don’t.”

Oooookay. “It’s just that you’re holding that piece of cardboard that says ‘I need food’ on it.”

“I don’t want anything, I don’t want anyone to go to any trouble over me, thankyou.”

He wasn’t budging, and I couldn’t help someone who didn’t want to be helped. “All right, but if you see me again and you want anything, you ask me, all right?”

I continued on my way, being careful not to feel absolved of my responsibility. I mean was he even genuine? His card was new, and his face was hidden inside his hood like an unrevealed villain. Perhaps he was the lookout for an imminent raid on The National Bank behind him.

I hadn’t really had this problem whilst I had been staying at ACB on Queen Street. I’d got into a pattern. Whenever I’d seen a tramp, I’d asked them if they would like some sandwiches. With a 100% yes rate I’d gone back to the hostel and made some out of the free food mountain that God had been accumulating in my room. It had been a great way of getting rid of jam that wasn’t my flavour, and Giles in particular had always been so happy to see me.

Anyway, I was hungry now, so I walked the 20 minutes down to ACB and dropped in, looking forward to finding some free elevenses.

Skippys corn flakes, milk and sugar. Marvellous.

Whilst I was tucking-in, my old colleague Sue entered the kitchen and began clearing out all the food that guests had left behind upon checking-out. Although my Korean hosts now feed me well, my table still filled-up with food that I fancied having before my return to them late tonight. Tinned tomato soup (with the ring-pull top), muesli bars, noodles, bread, margerine, jam...I was looking forward to this. What a shame that tramp hadn’t been begging nearer to ACB. I could have...

...no, he was 20 minutes away. Uphill. In Ponsonby. And it had been the best part of an hour since then, so he would have moved by now. Nooo, Jesus responded to those who came to him, this guy had not approached me, and when I had offered my help to him he had turned it down. And besides...oh stuff it.

I wasn’t going to make sandwiches, but there was so much bread that I asked Sue to give me a blunt knife to include in the bag of stuff. That way he could make his own.

At Ponsonby Road of course, he was nowhere. Only the piece of cardboard that he’d been sitting on remained. I saw 2 truck drivers (no doubt laughing about some idiot truck driver they’d heard of reversing into a 4x4 last week) and asked them “Did you see that tramp that was sitting there?”

Blank expressions. I’d used the English word ‘tramp’, so I corrected myself.

“Did you see that bum that was sitting there?”

Just what is the deal with these 2 words? In New Zealand they call homeless people bums, and refer to walking as tramping. In England we call them tramps, and talk about bumming around. Honestly, it beggars belief. Bit over.

With no leads on the vagrant’s whereabouts I walked a few hundred yards down Ponsonby Road, crossed-over and returned on the other side, checking the cafes and restaurants in case someone was buying him a meal. He wasn’t even in the church. This gentleman of the road had motored.

I really felt like eating one of the muesli bars now.

Walking the 20 minutes back to Auckland’s CBD (Central Business District), I determined to do a circuit of the Queen Street haunts where I had previously found hobos hanging-out. The first one I found would win the home-sandwich-making-kit.

And the winner was...Giles!

As I shook his sticky hand one more time, his red inebriated face grinned so happily out at me from that football of hair that he called a head, that I really wish I’d taken his picture.

But I had other priorities.

God had provided lunch for both of us, and by now I couldn’t wait to get back to ACB and boil-up my free noodles.

It’s good to accept the blessings that He offers us.

Ecclesiastes 11:4

In 2003 I lost my job in England, and was unable to find alternative employment. I consider this to be God's will.

In March 2004, whilst on holiday in NZ, my friend Bill told me one evening all about the Family Television Network - a local Christian-run TV station in Matamata. Local Christian TV - this was an absolute revelation to me. I had a really good feeling about this, and even found myself outside their studios one day, but at the time didn't have the confidence to go in.

In July 2004 I returned to New Zealand on a visitor's visa, which would allow me to stay for a maximum of 12 months. After that, I would have to leave for 12 months. In order to remain here longer, I would need either a Work Permit or a Student Permit. Both require an offer from either an employer or an educational body to be obtained.

Despite many applications, I have not been offered even one single job interview, except for voluntary positions. Except for one.

In October The Family Television Network offered me a very low-paying position with just one proviso - to accept it I had to believe that God wanted me there.

6 months had now passed since I had first heard of them, and for some reason I turned their offer down. Looking back now at how, in over a year, it has been the only paid position that I have been offered, either here or in the UK, combined with my film-making skills and how 'right' it felt when Bill first told me about the station, it certainly seems like taking it would have been the right choice.

In December I met a Korean family through the Salvation Army. They told me all about Fowey Lodge - a Bible college that, incredibly, charges no course fees. Their reasoning was that, just as Jesus never charged for his teaching, neither should they. Freely give, as freely you have received, that sort of thing.

In January, after an interview, I was offered a place at the college, again with the proviso that I had to believe that God wanted me there.

I prayed, and asked God for His direction.

Since then, I have continued to regularly visit the aforementioned Korean family, to whom I've been teaching English. When they moved into a bigger house nearer to the Bible college, they invited me to move in with them and teach them more regularly. Again I prayed, and my prayers became an alternative to doing something, instead of a part of it.

This week, God has taken me out of the hostel, and then had me stop. Considering a return to the hostel to be a step backwards, my Korean friends' offer suddenly emerged as my only path forwards. I also saw this as my cue to begin attending the Bible college with them.

Not only was God's plan for me to teach English becoming yet more solid, but now I knew I had a year of Bible college ahead of me. What could those 2 things possibly be foreshadowing?

This evening, as my new hosts treated me to a free meal at Club Bobos, we hammered out some sort of a deal.

What they really wanted, Mr Korea explained, was for me to teach English to their younger son. Apparently he's had other teachers, but seems to respond well to me. Mrs Korea: "You have spirit. You have spirit of God inside you." I honestly hadn't been aware of this, but was of course very keen to help in any way I could.

I then outlined to them my plan to head back to the UK in July for a few weeks, before returning here to study afterwards. Fowey Lodge Bible College is very close to their home, in fact Mrs Korea and Young Master Korea were both students there already.

They then exchanged some words in Korean, during which Mrs Korea began to look decidedly distressed. Oh dear. She looked as though some idiot had backed a truck into the side of her 4x4 over the weekend.

Mr Korea explained to me.

Since my successful interview at the college in January, the NZ Department of Permits (or whatever it's called) has, after 39 years, refused to issue any more Student Visas to Fowey Lodge students. Perhaps because of the free courses. Perhaps because the teaching is designed so that the Holy Spirit can guide each student individually. Perhaps because, with this in mind, there is no written exam at the end.

The most likely reason however is to stop people like myself appearing to take advantage of it.

And the moral of this story? Take it away Ecclesiastes 11:4...

If you wait for perfect conditions you will never get anything done.

Bath??? I Nearly Paid My Licence Fee...

You’ve heard the old joke about "I had a bath last March." Well, today I actually took my first bath since July 2004.

The last one had been 10,000 miles away, so far away in fact that as I sank deeper into this lovely familiar boiling kettle of heat, my last bathtub was actually getting ever so slightly closer.

I found myself musing. They say the water swirls clockwise down the bathplug in New Zealand, and indeed this can be true. However it's not true of the overflow. I'm not kidding. In New Zealand, when bathwater reaches the overflow, it stops. It won’t even go in. They don’t have overflows.

It's as though whoever wrote the software for New Zealand, forgot to include the bit of programming for overflows, and as a result the subroutine controlling the water just doesn't know what to do with it. This paragraph is all getting a bit Matrix. I'll stop.

I don't recall now, but I probably lay there swirling around some stuff of my own - what I was doing in New Zealand, where my life was going, my feelings, oh yes, and my having reversed Jack's truck straight into the side of someone's parked 4x4 yesterday.

Jack had been furious. His wife had been absolutely aghast. Unfortunately, the lady who actually owned the big black 4x4 hadn't taken it nearly so well.

Sitting alone in the passenger seat of Jack's MPV afterwards, of course I'd prayed. I didn't want to lose points off my licence. I didn't want to lose the money. I didn't want to get shouted at again, I mean who does? But I gave the whole thing to God, and told Him that if He wanted me to face up to those things, to build me in His own way, he'd better just bring it on. I’d do it.

I glanced out of the right window at the 4x4. I couldn't hear anything, but Jack was standing beside it talking to his wife, who was gaping at the (miniscule, I swear) scratch marks with both her open palms completely covering her temples. I wish I'd photographed her. That one image would have saved me typing the whole of the last entry.

I asked myself a thoroughly self-righteous question: had it been my fault?

Well let's see - I had been in the driver's seat, but the other vehicle had blatantly been parked in a parking bay. Nonetheless, I still rated my chances of being found innocent quite highly, at least by myself.

The thing I couldn't reconcile, was that for something to go wrong, I believed that there had to be a sin somewhere. Otherwise it could happen in Heaven. So where had the sin that caused this been?

I'd found the truck's gearstick to be awkward right from the word go, and had had a few earlier problems with thinking that it was in a particular gear, when it hadn't been. I knew I had physically pulled the stick back out of reverse, centred it, and then thrust it firmly forward into what I had honestly believed to be 2nd. This was a mistake, not a sin.

All right, what would Jesus have done differently? Would He have known that the truck was actually in reverse? If so, how? Saying that He would have known because He was God undermines His example to us of how to live.

He saw in the distance a fig-tree covered with leaves, so he went to see if he could find any figs on it. But when he came to it, he found only leaves, because it was not the right time for figs. Jesus said to the fig-tree, "No one shall ever eat figs from you again!" And his disciples heard him.
- Mark 11:13-14 (Good News)

So, what, I'm supposed to curse the truck?


This is getting me off the point - I'm not concerned with the effect, but the cause. Where was the sin here? Jack had shouted at me. But I had been the one actually driving. The gearstick, I reckoned, had been designed badly. Or maybe it was old. Or maybe that’s a normal type of gearstick for a truck. But I had been the one actually driving.

Waiiitaminute. I’m on a NZ Learners Licence. As Jack was in the vehicle, he was my supervisor. Could it be that he was unwittingly legally responsible?

Well, it doesn’t really matter who was legally responsible. Only who was morally responsible, and that had to be me.

Although I still couldn't figure out how, it was my fault. Whatever had actually caused the misunderstanding within me of how the different bits of machinery in the car had been aligned was irrelevant. I was the one who'd changed the gears inaccurately, and depressed the accelerator. Even though I had done it in innocence.

As we had driven in silence off-site for lunch, I voiced an earlier concern that I’d had about the mailboxes I’d driven past. A couple of enquiries had confirmed my suspicions.

"You told me," I contended "that I would only be driving on private property. If that is a public road, then my NZ Learners Licence won’t allow me to do this. I’m afraid this just isn’t going to fly."

It was the employment equivalent of a Get Out Of Jail Free card. Jack agreed, and together we had found a scapegoat. He didn’t need to 'sack' me, and I didn’t need to leave. We both had no choice in the outcome.

Of course, as I type this now, I can see how that quite unequivocally makes it my fault.

Every test that you have experienced is the kind that normally comes to people. But God keeps his promise, and he will not allow you to be tested beyond your power to remain firm; at the time you are put to the test, he will give you the strength to endure it, and so provide you with a way out.

- 1 Corinthians 10:13 (Good News)

My mistake - my sin - was in consciously deciding to drive the last stretch of what appeared to be a public road without L plates. I should have stopped and told Jack that, legally, he had to do that bit, no matter how much he'd shouted at me. But I had thought that I would do better by getting away with it and keeping him calmer. If I had asked myself what God's moral will was, and followed it, that would have been my way out.

Jack said that I could stay at his house until I found somewhere else, but I told him I’d leave on Sunday whatever happened.

That evening he, his wife and I all helped their daughter to deliver the local newspaper. It was good to do something together, however brief and trivial.

Now it was the following day, and I had their whole house to myself and Princess Leia. Getting out of the bath I remembered why I shouldn’t run them so hot – they can make me dizzy.

I had about 24 hours to find somewhere else to live. Sure - I had a plan, but right now I wasn't the slightest bit worried about whether it would work.

I was far more interested in whatever God's plan was. And to follow that, all I really had to do was follow His moral will.

(tomorrow's post here)

The Wrong Gear

Day 2 on the farm got off to a good start. (day 1 here) With their daughter off at school, Jack and his wife sat opposite me at the breakfast table. The previous night I had learnt that they all hold hands whilst saying grace before each meal, so I asked them "Are we going to say grace, or are you two just holding hands anyway?" They both fell about laughing. It was good.

I had worried if I was making the right decision in leaving the hostel. My intention in coming to New Zealand has always been to serve rather than to work. God had clearly placed me at ACB, amongst so many people, certainly to develop me and, I like to think, to help a few people around me.

Now I was a little afraid of becoming isolated. I was going to spend most of my days alone, doing a job that I could forsee little growth in. Was this really God's path for me? I had felt that I had to take the opportunity. I had been losing self-discipline at the hostel, staying up too late and not getting around to doing simple daily things like eating, and badly needed a change. I had left my comfort-zone in England, and ultimately formed a new one. I had to get out of there. I had to make sure that my real comfort-zone was in God, not in the free-food shelf, or the internet cafe, or the people who had now grown to know and accept me.

On the farm, Jack and I climbed into the truck so that I could familiarise myself with it for an hour or so. It had been about 2 months since I had last sat in a drivers' seat, but it quickly came back to me. I was thrown however when I turned the ignition on, and the radio came to life, but no engine.

Actually I was really thrown by Jack shouting at me for trying to drive a truck powered only by pop music. What a laugh.

So we pulled-out and turned left down the road adjacent to the farm, deserted but for a mailbox now and then. Jack told me not to start in 1st gear, but to always start in 2nd. I don't recall him ever saying why, I just remember it reminding me how all driving instructors seem to give different instructions. Indicate manoeuvres/don't indicate manoeuvres. Park so that you can put your foot on the kerb/park so that you can put your foot in the gutter. Always stop in first/yeeeeah let's stop in 3rd here. No-one's ever told me to always start in 2nd though. Oh well. It would have been easier if I hadn't been repeatedly putting the thing into gear, only to find that it actually wasn't.

Jack said to pull in at the next turn-off. Again, as I've found to often be the way, he never specified if he meant to pull into the turnoff, just before it, or just after it. I always consider the first rule of communication to be to speak the language of the person who's listening. I only really mention this here because Jack's temper took another knock, as consequently did my ease behind the wheel.

We pulled-in, and Jack asked me to turn around, berating me for wanting to steer the wheels around whilst moving to save wearing-down the tyre tread. Turn the steering-wheel all the way around to lock them first, and then move. Oh well, okay. I was unlearning stuff fast.

Jack was getting flustered. He was particularly upset when I stopped on a hill facing upwards and went to put the handbrake on. Footbrake start when uphill. Another lesson-fee wasted. I felt like I was due for a few refunds.

The mailboxes we were driving past bothered me - Jack had told me that I would be driving solely on private property. Unless these houses were for on-site staffmembers, living on a private road, I should legally be displaying L-plates. I considered stopping and explaining that he would have to drive back to the farm so that we could put them up, but we were almost there, and I really didn't want to get shouted at again.

By the time we got back to where we'd started for the second time, he was really having a hard time of it. He'd kept screaming at me to pull in at that metal. I asked what metal, and he couldn't believe that I couldn't see all that metal. That metal, there! I was looking for pipes, girders, bathtubs, that sort of thing. It turned out he was talking about the composition of the soil. It was metal, apparently.

Finally it all came together. This would have been just peachy, had it not been for the fact that the only stuff we had to put together had all been bad.

Jack said to pull in at this 4x4. I figured he meant the big parked black car and, with no time to ask just what he meant by "at", stopped just in front of it. He'd had enough of my incompetence and now just wanted lunch, so bawled at me to reverse around adjacent to it. So, as instructed to earlier, I locked the wheels all the way to the side and reversed around, straightening up as my angle turned out, as I'd expected, to be too sharp. He shouted at me to stop, so I stopped both the vehicle and straightening up. He yelled at me to never look behind me whilst reversing.

I pointed out that I’d been taught to look behind me whilst reversing in both the UK and NZ, presumably to see where I was going. He yelled that I had to do the whole thing entirely using my mirrors, and furthermore every driving examiner in the world would fail me if I looked behind me whilst reversing.

So I took the vehicle out of reverse and put it into 2nd. Releasing the footbrake, we went backwards, which logically meant that we were on a slight slope, as we were now using footbrake starts on hills. I compensated the same way I imagine most people do with hillstarts, with more gas.

Bad move.

So bad it cost 500 metal pictures of the Queen.

Well at least we could make some new ones out of the metal I’d torn off the big black 4x4.

I should have called this entry "A Close Shave."

(tomorrow's post here)

Only My Own Total Incompetence Can Mess This Up Now

A few weeks ago at church, Jack (not his real name) decided he needed me. To work for him.

He'd taken on a contract to move a 20-year-old pile of earth from one side of a capsicum farm in Helensville, over to the other side, but he had a problem. Drivers. He just hadn't been able to find anyone to drive the vehicle for him. Until now.

I explained that I still needed a few more lessons, and that my NZ Learners Licence wouldn’t allow me to drive alone. Jack answered that it would be dead simple, and as I would be driving purely on private property, I wouldn't therefore need a licence. This was handy after all the red tape that the AA had already gift-wrapped me in over this. Jack even tried to apply for a work permit so that he could pay me, but eventually decided that would take too long.

So, as I turned-down yet another illegal cash-in-hand offer, we agreed that he'd pay for me to take a few more lessons and get my licence, and also accomodate me at his home in Big Manley (together with his wife and their 12-year-old daughter) for the month-long duration of the job.

Having spent the last 9 months+ sleeping in a small windowless 7th-floor cupboard with 3 rapidly-changing roommates and an air-conditioning unit that, quite literally, sucked all the oxygen out of the room, I wondered just what sort of new accomodation I could look forward to. A pig-sty maybe? Would Anna-Lisa's suggestion that I might have to sleep in a corrugated iron box finally come to pass?

They gave me a floor.

No, not a floor to sleep on, an entire floor of the building. It had umpteen rooms, its own toilet, basin, shower and washing-machine. And there’s a park outside. And a beach. And lights that I can turn on and off at all hours of the day whenever I feel like it! They even have a cat.

Her name is Princess Leia, and she has 2 ears that (vaguely) resemble hair-bunches. And she’s a real cat. Not like Seven and Pompey back home in the UK, who are only really interested in themselves, and not like their predecessor Phantom who would have lacerated you whilst you were trying to feed him, oh no.


Princess Leia will follow you all around the house and play with you. She'll purr and everything. She'll even jump up on your lap and climb all over you while you're trying to drink a cup of Milo. Honestly, she's starting to sound like a really great Kenner toy.

After I wrote in this blog on April 28th that I was not buying toothpaste because God would supply me with some, my new hosts have even, without my asking, got me a tube.

So I sat on my new bed in my new room on my new floor, admired the wardrobe, and the cupboards, and the funky psychedelic lampshade, and gave thanks aloud. "Well God, I have really landed on my feet here."


Tomorrow's post here.

More Than Just A Bed

It had been over 9 months in coming. Now the moment was upon me.

I was at reception. In the queue. As a member of the public.

Nicole, the girl whose eyes I'd seen sparkling countless times on the lounge videoloop, was asking me if I'd paid a $50 bond when I'd begun working in housekeeping last August. I replied that I had, and that she also owed me a $20 key deposit from when I'd checked-in last July. As she telephoned my boss in housekeeping to confirm, I picked up the message book, grabbed a yellow biro with the hostel's name on it, and realised that I hadn't the foggiest idea what to write.

Hello!

I HAVE LEFT. I AM REALLY GRATEFUL TO HAVE MET EACH OF YOU. THE LAST 9 MONTHS HAVE BEEN...WELL THERE ARE SO MANY ADJECTIVES...FUN, CHALLENGING, DAFT...I AM TRULY LOST FOR WORDS.

I WILL MISS EVERYONE. MAY GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU ON THE PATH HE HAS FOR YOU.

Steve.

Pathetic, huh? JP wrote an entire page when he left. He likened living every day in the hostel to Bill Murray's movie Groundhog Day. I, on the other hand, only managed to come up with the paragraph above, and my email address. Heurrrrrrrghhhh...

Nicole put the phone down and reminded me that my boss had a reference letter for me. I raced round to her office, quickly saying goodbye to whoever I bumped into on the way.

I've always been very careful about how I dealt with my boss. At any moment she could have failed to see the sense in my saving food that was to be thrown out, or of using blankets instead of a duvet, or of letting me stay in a room on my own for a month. Although I'd done nothing wrong, I'd stayed quiet anyway in case she'd decided to make any of these things wrong. I'd become a bit suspicious of her.

She kissed me on the cheek and gave me a big hug. At that moment, more than any other, I knew that I really was leaving.

Tomorrow's post here.

"If You Don't Invite Them, People Won't Come."

Fig. 1: James Earl Jones, Kevin Costner and Amy Madigan wait for no-one to come to their Bible-study.

Just what is God's will for my life?

This little tale begins with a Californian girl named Joanne.

It was August 7th last year, 2 weeks after my arrival. I was doing my laundry when I got chatting to her. She'd flown in from San Francisco on some mission or other with her church. We had quite a lively discussion, and I saw her a few more times before she went home again. In particular I remember shifting an unusually heavy sofa after she'd lost some change undeneath it. But Joanne set my mind wondering...

Just how many other Christians came through this secular 530-bed youth-hostel? Shouldn't they have some point-of-contact? Some on-site Christian who can tell them where the different churches are, study the Bible with them, pray with them, minister to them or just simply say hello? I stayed in a Christian-run hostel in Amsterdam once, where they held 2 Bible-studies a week. Surely there should be someone planting the Christian flag in this place?

Such a person could obviously not be me. At the time I wasn't planning on staying long, I didn't know anyone, and I certainly didn't have the confidence to go organising Bible studies for sex & alcohol fuelled backpackers. Nevertheless the idea wouldn't go away.

Every night the bar downstairs would advertise its free alcohol and sex quizzes with, no surprises for why, free bar tabs as prizes, so why couldn't there be a Bible study upstairs each week? With all its drunks, bloody fights in the street and rape victims, this really nice hostel had issues, surely those Christians passing through should be making contact with each other and praying for these issues? They were at least likely to encourage each other and make friends.

Perhaps I just valued the encouragement that Joanne had given me. My biggest discouragement was that I simply did not feel led to do this. Not for the first time in recent years I found myself asking that question which I want answered more than any other: "But how can I determine God's will?"

Only once has God ever taken the unprecedented step of actually telling me something that he wanted me to do. The rest of the time it seems we have to mash together some mixture of prayer, feeling, experimentation and seeing what happens.

So how can we determine God's will for each of our lives? I've asked this question to many people since arriving here, and they've all had a different take on it.

There's a free library (small bookcase) in the kitchen, where travellers drop-off books that they no longer want, and pick-up ones they do. (Lionel once told me he'd a found biography of Jackie Collins there that he'd abandoned in a hostel in Invercargyll - the exact same copy!) One day I found some Christian book or other that had this advice to offer me:

When we talk about "God's will," we really mean one of 3 things:

1. God's absolute will - His control over every single detail in the universe. For example, His control over the dust on the computer you're reading this on, His control over the dinosaurs, His control over the colour of that tiny little subconscious thought at the back of your head, His control over the behaviour of atomic particles on the far side of the universe ten-thousand years ago that no-one will ever see.

2. God's moral will - Is what we are contemplating doing right or wrong?

3. God's will for me personally - What should I do tomorrow?

The first 2 we can't really do much about. It's the last of these that gets us wound-up.

I can't remember whether the author was talking about point 2 or 3, but he likened life to a football pitch - we're allowed to do anything we want, so long as we stay within the big white rectangle and don't break the rules.

On 9th November documentary-maker Bruce told me "If you're contemplating doing something, you pray ONCE, and then you do it." I think he was arguing that point 1 would save you from getting anything too drastically wrong.

On 6th March, my old friend 610 said "We make our own lives. If you're not making your own life, then someone else is, and that's wrong." But then I don't think 610 believes in God. And I personally want God to make my life.

With no sense of revelation, I had already just begun preparations to run a weekly Bible-study group at the hostel anyway.

Having found a woeful lack of suitable one-off Bible studies on the net, I dropped into the ever-helpful Christian Resources Centre on Queen Street to interrogate Bogdan for a book.

Day after day I asked God to show me which book to get, and day after day I could not find the 'right' one. I told Bogdan that I would wait for God to provide me with one for free, as I knew that that would be the right one. This must have sounded like I was trying to pull a fast one on the kindly Christian bookseller, but really I wasn't.

I asked ex-Minister Neil if he had anything, but his experience gave him a different take on things. He suggested just calling it a Bible-reading group to avoid sounding too heavy to non-Christians. I really hadn't anticipated non-Christians coming. I mean... why would they?

His suggestion was to just ask those present if there were any passages that meant something to them, to read them together, and then to simply ask 2 questions:

1. What is it saying?

2. How does this change us?

He and his wife Jenny prayed for me, and the following day Greg, my pastor at church, agreed to fund some Bibles for it. I got permission from Andy at ACB to hold the thing in the hostel's lounge, and did up a poster to go on the noticeboard in reception.

So it was that at 8pm on Wednesday 23rd March, feeling like a complete idiot, I headed down to the lounge, Bible in hand, not really expecting anyone to show up.

And indeed nobody did. Not that week, not any week except for on 6th April when Won jin and Won kee came, purely because I'd been to Club Bobos with them immediately beforehand.

Tonight was the last night I ran it, for reasons which will become obvious tomorrow.

As I sat alone in the lounge, flicking through my Bible, I heard Jimmy's poor lost voice guffaw over the tannoy that, as usual, there would be 100 litres of free alcohol in the bar at 9:30, to get everyone as wrecked as possible before fleecing. So I grabbed the mic after him and announced to the hostel "Bible study. Lounge. Now. Bible study."

As I sat in the lounge a few minutes later, still alone, I really couldn't blame anyone. Jimmy, for all his long-suffering oppressed down-troddeness as the Globe's only slave that had stuck at the job for longer than a week, still at least had a spiel. Who on Earth was going to come to a Bible-study advertised in 6 emotionless words?

Alan, an old youth-leader friend of mine, once told me "Never call anything off due to lack of numbers."

Perhaps I should have listened to the absence of God's voice. I really never did feel led to run those meetings. I just thought that I should. At least I don't regret not having run them.

Like so much that has happened to me whilst here in New Zealand, maybe the point was not so much to help others, as for God to emotionally teach and change me.

The day I met Joanne, I would never have announced a self-run Bible-study over the tannoy to everyone.

Perhaps God only wanted to teach one person at those Bible-studies He organised.

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (movie)

In the late 70s one of my favourite authors, Douglas Adams, wrote a radio series entitled The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

This turned out to be so remarkably popular, that Adams actually spent the rest of his life re-writing it.

It became a book, then an LP, then a TV series, and even an early computer game.


Fig 1. Ford and Arthur's TV incarnations trapped in an airlock inside my living-room, apparently.

It was inevitable that Douglas Adams would eventually be contracted to write the story as a movie.

But the deal stalled, as so many movie-deals do, in this case not least because the moneymen and Adams could not agree on what sort of changes would turn a winning radio script into a winning movie.

The story goes that Adams did complete the screenplay before his sad and sudden death in 2001. How much of that draft is what I watched tonight, and how much has been changed by the studio, are the reasons why this very long-awaited movie will be so contentious amongst Hitchhiker fans.

Perhaps the most interesting twist in this tale is that Adams' many different versions of his story all flatly contradicted each other anyway. Oh sure, they all began the same way, but sooner or later each medium has diverged and told its own unique version of the story. After all, space is big. Really big, so there must be an infinite number of directions for our Hitchhikers to travel in, and only Adams' mind-boggling imagination to limit them.

With this in mind then, tonight I sat down in Auckland's Sky City Metro screen 1 (on a free ticket) expecting a familiar start, and hoping to see the story blast-off in a new and unexpected direction. After all, it was a movie. They would change everything anyway.


The film has a strong opening - a song-and-dance number "So Long And Thanks For All The Fish" entirely featuring dolphins. It was truly wonderful to feel that rare barmy sense of humour again that I love so much. No-one seems to produce "my" type of comedy any more, which is a mystery to me as The Goodies, Father Ted and Spaced were so popular.

The credits over, we kicked-off properly in the same familiar place where the story always begins - ordinary Englishman Arthur wakes up one ordinary Thursday morning to learn that his house is about to be demolished. He figures this out when he looks out the window and sees the advancing bulldozers.

In all the story's previous incarnations we are introduced to Arthur - and build-up an empathy with him - as he confronts the workmen's supervisor. He does this whilst simultaneously halting the bulldozers by lying in the mud in front of them. In his dressing-gown.

Arthur, understandably agitated, is told that the plans have been on display for nine months at his local planning office:

ARTHUR: I eventually had to go down to the cellar!

SUPERVISOR: That’s the display department.

ARTHUR: With a torch!

SUPERVISOR: The lights, had… probably gone.

ARTHUR: So had the stairs!

SUPERVISOR: Well you found the notice didn’t you?

ARTHUR: Yes. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard”. Ever thought of going into advertising?


This is a beautiful piece of finely-honed comedy, that Adams has not really rewritten down the years.

Until tonight:

ARTHUR: I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.

SUPERVISOR: But you found the plans, didn't you?

They probably cut this for time, but it was a bad call. We needed to meet Arthur, we needed to get on his side, and, darn it, exchanges like these are surely one of the key reasons why people are seeing the film.

But no adaptation is going to exactly match everyone's wishes. The reason I highlight this nitpick here, is because there are many instances where the director, or editor, or whoever seems to be afraid of dialogue.

Unlike most of today's visually-stunning science-fiction movies, the original radio scripts were obviously 99% speech, however Adams' dialogue is his style. Surely style, more than anything else, is the reason for any creative product's popularity. The 1980s TV series was not afraid to transfer most of Adams' dialogue, and became arguably Hitchhiker's most popular incarnation.


Speaking of dialogue, some of the first half-hour is unintelligible, due to a mixture of poor-recording and mumbled delivery. Sloppy.

After Arthur's non-argument with the workmen however, the film follows the usual well-trodden plot for a while. There is an absolutely beautiful moment when the music from the original radio series kicks-in, and for 30 wonderful seconds it really is as good as the original. Then of course we reach the moment that will set hard-core fan against hard-core fan - they land on the wrong planet.

And all of a sudden we have no idea what is going to happen next.

This is WONDERFUL!

NEW Hitchhiker is such a rarity these days, that to see Arthur, Ford, Zaphod and Trillian in a completely new set of situations was just what I wanted. I know about the story's canon, but as I mentioned earlier, each version of Hitchhiker starts its own new one.

Yes I know the new plot doesn't really hold together, and yes I even agree that the story as a whole is quite a mess. There are bits of the original thrown back in here and there, and where this happens it tends to be disappointingly mishandled. The joy in this film is therefore really in all the new material.

I suspect that some reviewers may condemn the new material and extol the virtues of the old. I'm going to do things the other way around.

Here's some of the old stuff that they've messed-up on here:

The computer Deep Thought. So carelessly realised. The BBC did it much better on such a tiny TV budget in the 80s. In that version the late Valentine Dyall had performed such a terrifying voice, that they would have done much better to seek permission for re-using it here. Since Deep Thought is a computer, any limitation in sonic range would have been fine. Sorry Helen Mirren, you were poorly directed.

The original TV robot Marvin is in a crowd scene on the Vogon homeworld. It's wonderful to glimpse him again, and he fits in so well. Into that shot, and that shot, and that shot. Oh, and that one as well. He's a bit like the red double-decker bus in that Austin Powers movie, constantly coming past in the background. The problem here is that such screen-presence really built-up my hopes that he was going to say something. Even just one sentence. Or one word. Maybe even just a solitary syllable - a depressed "No." or something.

He got nothing. I felt really disappointed about this. Maybe he would appear in a tag scene after the end credits?


"No. Aw-ful, isn't it?"

Simplifying the story does not mean that you don't need to explain it anymore. How are Arthur and Ford saved from the vacuum of space again? How does the starship Heart Of Gold take them wherever they want to go next? What does the infinite improbability drive actually do? Why do they travel to each planet? And is there any actual hostility towards Earth? The previous versions never left me in any doubt. Never dumb-down Douglas Adams.

Now here are three of the new elements that do work well:


Zaphod. Is quite horrible until you recognise that he was clearly written as Johnny Depp's character from Pirates Of The Carribean.


"You're the worst space-pirate I've ever heard of."
"But you have heard of me."

He even mistakes a caravan for a spaceship. Inspired.

The film's visuals - utterly gorgeous. Just the sort of fresh air that Douglas Adams' amazing ideas deserve. The scene in which Slartibartfast takes Arthur on a journey in a workmen's cradle is everything that it can be, and more. To see them shooting at such incredible speeds through so much gigantic electronic machinery, with our point of view from an adjacent track, is just awesome. See this on the big screen while you still can.

Arthur's romance. An inevitable symptom of the Hollywood market, so consequently there's never any doubt of how this will end, but although Arthur deserves someone with a little more commitment (and Trillian has none), this ends just lovely.


Arthur's the last human guy alive. And this is the last girl. Now that's what I call very very improbable.

I think it was Nick Meyer, who helped to write and direct the first three evenly-numbered Star Trek movies (you remember - they're the ones you can), who once described the franchise's secret as "something old, something new." That certainly held true here. I think I would have enjoyed this movie a lot more though, if I hadn't spent the whole 2 hours concerned whether the director was going to treat the material right or not. My fault? No, I'd have let my guard down, if he'd given me reason to.

Adams used to think through his ideas to such mind-bogglingly logical extremes, and many of those ideas are still here, but ironically held-together by a film that has not been thought-through at all.

The unhoned comedy, unfocussed performances and worried editing, along with several copied visual concepts from the TV interpretation (Deep Thought, the book's retro computer-graphics) suggested an inexperienced film-maker without many original ideas of his own.

The graphics themselves on the other hand were absolutely prolific. My guess is that these people had done this before.

For all this, I really really enjoyed this movie. It was the first film in ages that I have not snacked during - I was way too engrossed!

Every so often a film unexpectedly moves me. I don't care admitting it to the world - I shed a tear during Toy Story 2. Jesse the cowgirl's song in the middle about how her owner threw her out when she got too old to play with toys was reeeeeally sad. Don't mock - Disney are masters at that sort of manipulation.

Hitchhiker's left me with a few hard-to-explain tears during the closing credits too. I think this was because, among other things, for me it was such a trip back to childhood. It's so rare that I get to enjoy something so beautifully unashamedly bonkers these days.

When I was a teenager I had a typewriter in my bedroom. I'd write whole reams of these crazy sketches, stories, comic-strips, books and so on. And sometimes I'd have The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy playing on my tape-recorder at the same time.

I really miss those days. It was so nice to pop back and visit.


8 out of 10. Patchy. You really could have made it to 9.75 you know.

Link: If you've done 6 impossible things this morning, then why not round it off by playing an updated version of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy computer game here. Just don't run crying to me when you can't even get out of Arthur's bedroom at the start.

Requires Flash to play.

Stand-Up Hiroshi

"I wanna talk to you all about a man. He was a bit of a rebel in his day, refused to be put in his place, got into quite alot of trouble. Stirred up the masses, the authorities hated him, continually bucked the system, hung around with thieves and prostitutes, destroyed property - in a church no less, was hounded by the law, eventually captured, tortured and publicly killed. So, who was this man? Jesus! I've tricked you all into loving the Lord!"

Obviously not actual street evangelism, but MC Charlie Pickering at Queen Street's Comedy Club, performing an act that all the Christians at my table (myself included) laughed at. I suppose we really were laughing in the face of criticism.

Anyway, Jamie, myself and others were there to support Hiroshi in the latest heat of the annual Auckland Comedy Awards.

There were 8 acts, and as these guys had already made it through one heat, they all demonstrated quite definite syles. Each one knew what sort of comedy they were doing. Whether some of them were aware of any other types of comedy is a matter for speculation.

I think you could tell which of them had 'done' this before though. Presumably not the girl who was shaking. I know many performers get nerves, but those who've had them before have usually developed ways to hide them. There was another guy who had a fine act, until he unexpectedly gave up at the end with "I"m sorry I've had a bad night so I'll stop now" and walked off. Maybe you had a bad night, but we didn't suspect until you told us. Then there was the girl dressed up as an old lady, who got massive laughs every time she swore. So her entire act was one long swear-fest without, in my opinion, any jokes at all. I mean I did look for them.

Finally, or more accurately firstly, was Hiroshi.

Without being in any way biased, Hiroshi at least won the award for being my favourite act, simply by default of being the only entirely clean performance. I didn't expect him to win, but lo and behold he did! And not just this heat either - Hiroshi subsequently went onto win the entire title!

"You may wonder why we Japanese all carry cameras - it's so that we can recognise each other."

Does he get away with this back home? Or do they have trouble finding him without his camera?