Committee

For a number of years now, this section of my Report has started by saying that the Committee is unchanged. That remained the status quo until December 2022 when we were confronted with the shocking news of Jeremy Agar's quite unexpected death. My obituary of Jeremy is elsewhere in this issue, so I won't go over it again here. His was only the second death of a current Committee member and the first since that of Reg Duder in 2008 (my obituary of Reg is in Watchdog 117, April 2008). But it was different in that Reg had been crook for years, and his death did not come out of the blue, as Jeremy's most definitely did.

So now there are six members - Colleen Hughes, James Ayers, John Ring, Murray Horton, Paul Piesse and Terry Moon. We continue to work with former Committee members - from both recent and long-ago times - in other campaigns. For example, Brian Turner and Denis O'Connor are very actively involved in Keep Our Assets (KOA).

Covid Impact

I've started my previous couple of annual Reports by covering the impact of covid on both me and the Committee. This time it can simply be incorporated into my Report, rather than being the lead item. Except for during actual lockdowns, the Committee has continued to meet in person and indoors throughout the whole seemingly never-ending covid saga. That is not to say that the Committee has been unaffected by it - two members have had covid and one of those has had it three times. But nobody has died, got seriously ill or ended up in hospital (Jeremy's death was not caused by covid but a much more ancient adversary, namely cancer).

As for me, I have escaped unscathed thus far. I've had a total of four covid vaccinations, plus my annual flu shot. I haven't even caught a cold for several years. I have never even been tested for covid. Until the mask mandate was lifted in 2022, I assiduously wore a mask when I was with people indoors, including at Committee meetings (ironically, I hardly ever wore one during that long 2020 lockdown, because the medical advice at that stage was that masks weren't essential). Covid doesn't affect my work - I've worked from home since 1991, long before it became all the craze.

My wife Becky has had covid but that had no impact on me. How does that work? Because she didn't catch it in NZ. She was in the Philippines from November 2022 until March 2023. It was her first visit home since she left in April 2020, at a few days' notice, on an NZ repatriation flight, having got stuck there for a couple of months longer than expected because of the whole covid global shutdown. She'd only been there two weeks in 2022 before she got covid. She only had minor symptoms and was unaffected by it.

When the omicron outbreak started in early 2022, I decided to tie low for a while. But after weeks of that, I thought, bugger it and decided to resume as normal a life as possible, albeit masked. I resumed going out for a daily coffee and a weekly movie. I didn’t go to a rugby match or concert in 2022, as I wanted to avoid being amongst a closely packed shouting crowd.

But I more than compensated for it by avidly following the Women's Rugby World Cup on TV. The Black Ferns are wonderful, playing the game with the joie de vivre that has been sucked out of the men's game. Although I don't think my nerves could stand too many more nailbiters like the semi-final and final. And please stop calling them "girls".

I went to my first party in two years, right at the end of 2022. Likewise, I have only just resumed socialising with friends in their homes. I made my pro-vaccination views clear in my previous annual Report, which received pushback from a few members. I've said what I have to say on that issue, I've got nothing to add.

Anti-Bases Campaign, my other job as Organiser, has been much more affected by covid. The great majority of its Committee meetings have been by Zoom (CAFCA has never held a Zoom meeting) and ABC paid for my Zoom account capacity to be increased (you can have a free account but it allows for only very brief meetings).

ABC's September 2022 Keep Space For Peace public meeting and picket were the first physical events it was able to hold since the January 2021 Waihopai spy base protest. The planned January 2022 Waihopai spy base protest had to be cancelled at a few days' notice - the first ever Waihopai protest cancellation, dating back to when they started in 1988.

Membership

It is in the 290s, which is slightly down from the 300 of my previous Report (and this is being written before the annual purge of non-payers). It has definitely dropped over the last few years (460 is the highest it has reached in recent years; it is quite a few years since it threatened 500; 550+ was our absolute zenith, many years ago). For any number of years now, the numerical trend has been gradually but steadily downwards.

Every year we remove non-payers but only after they have ignored two of the dreaded red slips and final, e-mailed, reminders. And every year we pick up new members, or former members re-join, so that we make up some, but by no means all, of the number lost. We lose members for a variety of reasons - death, old age, retirement, financial reasons, or simply deciding not to renew. That reflects the aging demographic of our membership. For example, one longstanding member paid their sub in 2022, accompanied by the message "I think we'll make this our final year".

With cheques now gone, nearly 100% of subs and donations come to us via online banking. People can still deposit cash into our account at a Kiwibank branch (if there is one in their area). Or, they can post us cash - at their own risk. Some members have done that for years. One member hand delivers cash to our home letterbox. So, I still have to make occasional trips to Kiwibank to physically deposit cash.

Gaining new members is a permanent project. We have some wonderfully evangelical members who set out to recruit others. Some members pay gift subs for new members. Members are very generous - falling membership does not equal falling finances. Quite the opposite. We insist on a paying membership, because we have no other source of funds. We don't charge much and haven't reviewed or increased our sub for a very long time (not since the 20th Century). If we had retained all those who stopped paying, we could claim a "membership" of thousands. We reach a much bigger audience than our actual membership.

However, in 2021, we had to substantially increase the sub for those very few overseas members who get Watchdog by snail mail (a number of overseas members get it online). We now charge $60 for members in Australia and $100 for those in the rest of the world. We told them they can get it for the standard $20 if they swap to online readership.

At that stage we had five overseas members in that category - two very longstanding members did not renew and one swapped to online, leaving two who now pay the increased sub to continue receiving it in hard copy. Of those two, the one who lives furthest away routinely includes huge donations with the sub, most recently one of more than $1,000. That money used to be sent as euros in cash via ordinary snail mail; now it comes electronically, with banks clipping the ticket along the way.

Finances

Between them, our operating account and two term deposits hold $59,000, in round figures, which is $2,000 more than at the time of my 2022 Report. That is a very good result, arresting a few years of decline, which was accounted for by CAFCA putting substantial sums into my pay account, the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account (see below). That has now stopped, so CAFCA's bank balance has held steady. And, the interest rates for term deposits have started to increase once more, after hitting close to rock bottom - one of our two term deposits now earns 4%.

There are plenty of small organisations like ours who would give their eye teeth to have $59,000 in the bank. By contrast, the other group for which I am the Organiser - Anti-Bases Campaign - has $7,000 in round figures. So, this is a very good result, considering that we're not a business seeking to make a profit. Basically, CAFCA is financially independent.

We continue to be in a very healthy financial situation and don't have to devote any energy or time to fundraising beyond our own ranks, being entirely financed by the annual subs and donations of our members. And, as I've already pointed out, we haven't increased our sub (except for a handful of overseas members) since the 20th Century.

I had to undertake one unique job regarding our bank accounts in 2022. Jeremy Agar was one of the signatories for the CAFCA and Watchdog accounts, plus CAFCA's two term deposits. We have changed signatories before but have never had to remove one because of death. It's not straightforward - Kiwibank told us they required a copy of his death certificate from Births, Deaths and Marriages, which doesn't just hand those out to the public. Fortunately, I was able to contact one of the executors of his estate, a brother, and ask him to get it for us. Once I sent that to the bank, it removed Jeremy within a day.

Expenses & Donations

CAFCA has routine office expenses. But our single biggest cost every year is the postage for Watchdog. Every year NZ Post increases the price of the pre-paid big envelopes we use, so we stockpile a large quantity and lock in the current price, to keep our costs down for as long as possible. In 2022 we bought several thousand dollars' worth of envelopes, which will last us until well into 2023 (when the price will doubtless go up again). We have no plans to change Watchdog to an online-only publication (although the option is there for members to get it that way and more than 10% of them do). The great majority of members want a good old-fashioned hard copy Watchdog.

CAFCA has enough money to be able to make donations to other campaigns. For example, we make an annual $500 donation to the Anti-Bases Campaign for the Waihopai spy base protest. And we receive plenty of donations. We have one very generous member who regularly gives us donations of $500 or even $1,000, and tells us to decide who most deserves them - CAFCA, Anti-Bases Campaign or the Organiser Account. We split that $1,000 three ways (it was made in person to me, in cash).

It's worth noting that sometimes we don't have to pay for things. The software on the CAFCA computer which connected e-mail to our server died in 2022 (we could receive but not send). The guy who has been in charge of our e-mail since we first went online in 1996 voluntarily came to my home office (only his second ever such visit), during the height of the 2022 omicron outbreak, took the computer away overnight, set up new e-mail software and transferred everything into the new set up, returned it the next morning and stayed around to check that it worked. And would not accept any pay for it. He is a longstanding CAFCA supporter.

CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account

The trend, for several years now, has been of a steady decline. So, in 2021, for the first time, my paid hours were cut from 40 to 30 per week, with a matching reduction in pay (but not the Living Wage hourly rate). Plus, the Organiser Account still pays, as it has done for decades, my monthly mobile phone and landline rentals, plus the bulk of my monthly Internet rental. That latter amount was increased in 2022 to keep pace with an increased monthly bill from Spark. I won't starve - I get the pension as well (for which I pay a higher tax rate).

To quote from the latest monthly bank statement, at the time of writing (March 2023): the balance was $4,776.27 (which was down by $300 on the previous month). There is still more money going out of the Account per month than what is coming in. There can be all sorts of reasons for the larger outflow - for example, sometimes I get three pays in the period covered by the monthly statement, rather than the usual two.

That March statement showed that there were two online donations, totalling $150, meaning that it was only $5 less than the donations received the previous month. And new people have started regular pledges in recent months (which more than makes up for the long-time pledger who stopped). One regular pledger has dramatically increased the amount being pledged, becoming the single biggest pledger. So, the Account doesn't lack for support from pledgers and donors.

But the long-term trend is down or no better than holding its own and there are two reasons for this - firstly, the commitment to pay the Organiser (me) the Living Wage (which increased in 2022 to $23.65 per hour). And the drop in the number of pledgers and donors - for the same reason that CAFCA membership is dropping. People are retiring and can no longer afford it. In some cases, regular pledgers have been doing it since the Organiser Account first started, back in 1991. I never cease to be amazed by their generosity.

It is remarkable that it has lasted continuously for more than three decades without having been a drain on CAFCA finances (up until 2020, when CAFCA had to make substantial donations to keep it going. And then my hours were cut). CAFCA's only contribution now is to donate the interest from our two term deposits to the Organiser Account (which it has done for many, many years).

For nearly 30 years the Organiser Account was entirely dependent on the generosity of pledgers and donors. Recruiting new pledgers and soliciting more donations is a permanent project. I've written the Account off more than once in the past and it just keeps going. Once again, I thank James Ayers who does a very good job of looking after the Organiser Account.

Watchdog

I am the Editor; it is our flagship, our "face", our voice to our members and the world at large. To use the jargon, it is our "brand". It looks the best it ever has. The three 2022 issues were, respectively, 84, 92 and 104 pages (so they got progressively bigger as the year went on). But the December issue marked the end of an era, because it was the last one to include any writings from Dennis Small and Jeremy Agar, our two most prolific and long-serving writers, both of whom had continuously written for Watchdog for decades. Between them, they contributed 36 of the 104 pages of that December 2022 issue. You will find Dennis' retirement notice and my obituary of Jeremy elsewhere in this issue.

We put an appeal out for reviewers to replace Jeremy and received several offers, so that will continue. I doubt that we will find anyone to replace his years-long series on Trump and American politics. Nor do I expect that we will find a replacement for Dennis' geopolitical blockbusters. In recent years, we have also lost Linda Hill's write ups of all the Decisions of the Overseas Investment Office. Put together, these represent a significant loss to Watchdog.

You will have noticed that the hard copy edition is starting to show a little bit of colour, namely on the front and back covers. We have always printed it in black and white, simply because of the cost. If we printed it in full colour, your annual sub would immediately increase substantially. But our Layout Editor, Marney Brosnan, lays out colour cartoons and graphics in colour (meaning that members who get the online edition do get a lot more colour), and that has led to a bit of colour creeping into the hard copy edition. It looks great.

Watchdog will always be a niche publication - we now have only one retail outlet, which regularly sells all or most of the copies it stocks (plus one Christchurch cinema lets us put a few copies there as giveaways). We don't have the resources to compete with mainstream magazines. Nor the intention. Watchdog is a journal of analysis, not a newspaper. But you will find plenty of news in it that can't be found elsewhere.

Editing Watchdog takes plenty of my time but I also write some of each issue, usually the lead article. For this issue I have written a lot more than I expected, brought about by Jeremy Agar's unexpected death. I spent the 2022/23 Christmas period reading and reviewing the last book I'd got from a publisher for him (Jeremy died days before he was due to collect it from me). Plus, I found myself having to write his obituary, which evoked many emotions as I was doing it (you will find both the review and the obituary elsewhere in this issue).

Thanks are due to Layout Editor Marney Brosnan. After years of sending the copy to former Layout Editor Leigh Cookson as individual e-mails, Marney decided that she prefers the old school method of receiving the whole a lot (articles and graphics) on a USB stick, which we hand deliver to each other. Ian Dalziel has provided the wonderfully quirky cover graphics for many years now. Greg Waite has also become a regular reviewer and article writer. I'm delighted to report that Linda Hill is writing regularly again for us, as a reviewer this time.

Despite exhaustive attempts to find a replacement for the very same Linda Hill, who did a superb job writing up the monthly Decisions of the Overseas Investment Office for five years, we have been unable to do so (we still get the odd inquiry from people about it). As a purely token gesture, CAFCA has decided to highlight one Decision (and one only) from each month of Decisions plus a list of all the Decisions for that month. I'm doing that now. It is the first time I have ever written up any OIO Decisions.

Watchdog attracts high-quality, high-profile writers. In the three 2022 issues, those writing for us were: Ed Miller, Bryan Gould, Jane Kelsey, Kevin Clements, Catherine Delahunty, Marilyn Yurjevich, Torfrida Wainwright, Brian Turner, Nathaniel Herz-Edinger, Liz Griffiths, Marie Venning, David Small, Joe Hendren, Niki Gladding, Mike Treen and Andy Whitmore. The range of writers is evident in the December 2022 issue - 11 in all. In 2022 we had writers on behalf of campaigns, such as Coromandel Watchdog, EcuAction, the Living Wage Movement and Aotearoa Water Action. Some had never written for us before.

And none of them gets paid anything. Readers have told us they appreciate the specialist articles, such as Liz Griffiths' one on money and banks in the August 2022 issue and Joe Hendren's December 2022 article based on his thesis about CAFCA (Jeremy Agar also reviewed Joe's actual thesis in that same issue). Watchdog always gets a response, positive and negative, whether it's about the Ukraine War or vaccinations, to give two examples. That's what we want - it shows that people are reading it and care enough to tell us they agree or disagree with it.

Online Watchdog

Terry Moon is in charge of this. She does a very good job and has introduced some innovations. Our online-only members receive each issue as a PDF but the actual online edition on the Website is a plain, text-only affair. We get free Web hosting for both Watchdog and CAFCA but the trade-off is that there is a size restriction on the total amount of cyberspace we can have free of charge. The reach of the online edition is much greater than the hard copy one. Courtesy of former Committee member Warren Brewer, you can read online the most recent issues as (semi-coloured) PDFs, on Watchblog.

Key Facts & CAFCA Updates

Our Key Facts, are uploaded to our Website. They are a vital CAFCA resource and one which has led to mainstream media articles in the past. For the past couple of years, they have been researched and produced by Edward Miller, Researcher and Policy Analyst with FIRST Union, which is a long-standing union supporter of CAFCA.

Ed has done a very good job, so much so that I decided to publish his executive summary of the 2022 Key Facts as the lead article in the August Watchdog. I have continued producing CAFCA Updates, although not as regularly as I would have liked. These are simply a collection of links to online mainstream media articles about subjects of relevance to CAFCA and its members. They have been well received.

Website & Other Digital Outlets

In addition to the Watchdog site, Terry Moon is also in charge of the CAFCA site and does a meticulous and very thorough job. In my previous three annual Reports l said that CAFCA is taking steps to upgrade and modernise our Website. This was done, up to a certain point, by our Webhost (a small local company, the only Webhost we've had since we first went online in the 1990s). Sad to say, it has become a seemingly never-ending story. This whole project will cost us serious money but, thus far, we haven't had to spend a cent.

In addition to the CAFCA site, we have the separate Watchdog one and the Historic Watchdog site, set up by former Committee member Lynda Boyd, which stores online all issues from the mid 1970s until 1999, when the actual Watchdog site was created by Bill Rosenberg. Warren Brewer runs the Watchblog site and the Keep Our Assets (KOA) site.

Colleen Hughes has done a very good job of running the CAFCA Facebook site for years now. It has more than 1,350 members, which is considerably more than our "real world" membership. But the trick is to get any of those Facebook members to become actual CAFCA members, let alone paying ones. It's the same issue faced by innumerable other organisations.

I mentioned in my previous Report that CAFCA set up our own Twitter account and entered the weird and wonderful world of tweets. It is my only venture into social media and I repeat what I said about Twitter first time around - an awful lot of what is on it is puerile superficiality. But it's a very useful discipline for me to have to confine myself to an itty bitty tweet. CAFCA has still got a very small number of followers.

My most successful tweets have been simple expressions of opinion (on behalf of CAFCA), rather than ones linking to an online article or publication. You can follow us on Twitter @CAFCA_NZ. Although I must admit, I go onto Twitter less and less often now. I find it very much a "why bother" kind of social media. I did toy with the idea of producing CAFCA podcasts but thought better of it when I realised how much work would be involved.

Overseas Investment Office (OIO)

This is a continuous CAFCA campaign that dates back to the 1980s (when the relevant body was called the Overseas Investment Commission). We never did manage to find a replacement for Linda Hill to write up the monthly Decisions of the OIO. In my previous Report I detailed the trouble we took to try to find someone, but to no avail. As a purely token gesture, CAFCA has decided to highlight one Decision (and one only) from each month of Decisions plus a list of all the Decisions for that month. I'm doing that now. It is the first time I have ever written up any OIO Decisions.

There was one unique OIO event in 2022 - one of their very senior officials (who told me he's worked for the OIO and its predecessor since 1974) asked to have a phone chat with me - via good old land line. He was delegated to ring me because of "the length of our relationship" (since 1985, he reckons). CAFCA requested that the OIO put its Decisions onto a searchable Website (the OIO Website wasn't searchable). He said he'd look into it and, coincidentally or not, it is now searchable.

I asked him about statistics, saying that the most recent annual ones I could find were with the December 2019 Decisions. He confirmed that the OIO no longer produces them but would look into it. He confirmed that since the Overseas Investment Commission became the OIO in 2005, it doesn't have to produce an annual report. It gets a mention in the annual report of Land Information NZ (LINZ, of which the OIO is a part). He said the LINZ CEO makes an annual appearance before a Select Committee and that "it won't surprise you to be told that, of the 45 minutes time allocation, about 40 are spent answering questions about the OIO".

Something immediately tangible came out of that phone conversation - he sent CAFCA a list of Decisions involving Russian investment in NZ (which is not much). You'll find it in Watchdog 160 (August 2022). And he told me to contact him if we have any problems with the flow of monthly OIO Decisions to CAFCA. I've successfully taken him up on that on more than one occasion so far, when the OIO has forgotten to send us a month's worth. They've also agreed to release data on a quarterly basis (something they haven't done for decades) and to notify us - and everyone else - when details are changed in Decisions after they have been released.

Keep Our Assets (KOA)

I am the Convenor, and a couple of current or former CAFCA Committee members are also very actively involved with the KOA Committee - namely, Paul Piesse and Brian Turner. Former Committee member Warren Brewer remains in charge of the KOA Website. And Denis O'Connor, a CAFCINZ/CAFCA Committee member in the 1970s and 80s, is very actively involved with KOA.

The other KOA Committee members are John Minto, Steve Howard, Kay Robertson, and Mike Newlove. It is the biggest Committee with which I'm involved. KOA meetings at the home of John Minto and Bronwen Summers are very social and in-person meetings did not stop during the omicron outbreak - we simply transferred from sitting close together around their dining table, to sitting more spread out around their garden table.

2022 was local body election year and for the first time since the 2013 election, KOA didn't run a Mayoral candidate. John Minto was our high-profile candidate in both the 2016 and 2019 elections, getting thousands of votes each time. He decided that twice was enough - John is such a well-known public figure that the fact that he was not running in 2022 became a mainstream media story in itself. KOA's contribution to the election was to survey all candidates for the City Council and community boards to see where they stand on a number of issues, primarily the ones on which John campaigned in 2016 and 2019. There is more and more acceptance on those issues e.g., the call for free buses.

Here We Go Again

It was only a few years ago that I suggested that KOA should close down, because we had achieved our goal, namely that we had been true to our name and kept our assets. I was outvoted and I'm glad I was. Asset sales had not been mentioned by the Christchurch City Council since it tried and failed to sell Citycare several years ago - which was a major and successful campaign by KOA. But, lo and behold - just weeks after the October 2022 local body elections, the City Council announced that a confidential report on its publicly-owned assets by investment bankers had been commissioned earlier in the year.

And, guess what - the report recommended selling them. It never used the word sell - it talks about "recycling" assets. And it tries to soften the blow by recommending only partial sales. The Council voted to investigate this further. The rationale is the same as when the Christchurch City Council first tried to flog off assets last decade - it is short of money (that time, the excuse was the post-quake rebuild cost). This time around, the Council that says it is short of money is the same one that, in 2022, blithely voted an extra $150 million towards the ballooning costs of the white elephant stadium it is building.

KOA immediately pointed out the obvious - not one Councillor nor the new Mayor had ever mentioned the subject of asset sales during the 2022 campaign. So, not one of them has a mandate to sell them. KOA told the Council it is buying a fight - John Minto and Steve Howard told Councillors that to their faces at a February 2023 full Council meeting, while other KOA members displayed a "Keep Our Assets" banner in the public gallery. We told the media what we were going to do, and it got coverage in both print media and on commercial radio.

And who would buy these assets if they are sold? The previous City Council had always refused to name the one prospective buyer of Citycare, because of "commercial sensitivity". Well, in 2022, I found out - literally in the course of a casual conversation with an anonymous stranger on a suburban street. It was Veolia, the huge French water services transnational corporation that already has its talons sunk deep into NZ. It would be the likes of them who would snap up Christchurch's publicly-owned assets. KOA is gearing up for another fight to Keep Our Assets.

KOA has been in existence for a decade and has plenty on the go. In 2022 we invited a number of people to come to one of our monthly meetings to discuss various issues with us - so, we met with Mayoral candidate David Meates, City Councillor Yani Johanson, and Jill Hawkey of Housing First, with whom we had a very interesting discussion of aspects of the housing crisis.

In my previous Report I mentioned that there are a number of opposing opinions on the merits or otherwise of the Government's three waters restructuring within the KOA Committee. In 2022 we managed to hammer out an agreed position. KOA is a paying community supporter of the Living Wage Movement and has had its local organiser Nathaniel Herz-Edinger along to speak at a Committee meeting. Brian Turner and Steve Howard are KOA's representatives on the local Living Wage Movement.

Sadly, in 2022, KOA suffered a serious setback, one which came from out of the blue. For a decade we'd had a free e-mail account with Google, one which had been set up for us by a tech-savvy supporter. Over the years KOA built up a mailing list of many hundreds of names and e-mail addresses, a database quite separate from the CAFCA one.

The supporter who'd set it all up for us left Christchurch years ago and retired from political activism. I never heard from him again until September 2022 and his message was both urgent and alarming. As far as Google was concerned, this guy was the administrator of, and contact person for, the KOA e-mail account. And he had missed announcements from Google that it was going to start charging for these hitherto free accounts and that any such accounts not paid for by a deadline would be closed.

By the time he contacted me that deadline was only days away and there was nothing to be done to sort it out, it was too late. Google closed the KOA account, cutting us off from any new incoming e-mails (that abruptly ended responses to our survey of election candidates), and wiping out our database of names and addresses.

I was able to quickly get KOA a new and free e-mail address from CAFCA's very supportive e-mail provider. Some of KOA's e-mail lists are duplicated in CAFCA's database, and some can be recreated from public sources. But I fear that other, big, e-lists are gone. Rebuilding KOA's database will be a time-consuming big job which I haven't yet had time to do. If you needed any further evidence that digital transnationals like Google are a pack of bastards, here it is.

Relations With Other Groups

In the KOA subsection (above) I mentioned the Living Wage Movement. CAFCA has been a paying member for several years, ever since it made the decision that the CAFCA/ABC Organiser (me) should be paid the Living Wage. Our first representative was Brian Turner, when he was a CAFCA Committee member, then he was succeeded by Colleen Hughes, who has been on the CAFCA Committee for many years.

Since 2018 we have developed a productive working relationship with Aotearoa Water Action (AWA), which started off by fighting the Chinese-owned water bottling plant in Christchurch and has branched out into looking at the whole spectrum of water issues, not only in Canterbury but nationally. They have provided an update in virtually every Watchdog in that period. In 2022 they scored a great victory by winning a major court case on that Christchurch water bottling plant (the company has appealed it to the Supreme Court, which sat in Christchurch for the first time, to hear the appeal in March 2023).

For many decades we have been friends with Coromandel Watchdog of Hauraki and they usually provide an annual update in (our) Watchdog. Written by Catherine Delahunty, (a former Green MP), it appeared in the August 2022 issue. Much more recently we have developed a relationship with Extinction Rebellion (XR). A couple of Watchdog's 2022 issues included articles from XR activists. I attended one of their pickets and spoke at it. I participated in a couple of the schoolkids' climate change rallies and marches, including the March 2023 one which ended in an hours-long occupation of the City Council Building's foyer.

CAFCA has had a long and ongoing productive national relationship with a number of unions and individual unionists. We have an ongoing very friendly relationship with FIRST Union, which is the only union to regularly pledge to the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account. Not only that, until very recently it was the single biggest pledger.

And its researcher, Ed Miller, now researches and writes CAFCA's Key Facts, with the union treating that as part of his job. Meaning that he gets paid to do it, at no cost to CAFCA. Other unions we work with, or have worked with, are the Maritime Union of NZ (MUNZ), Rail and Maritime Transport Union (RMTU), E Tū and Unite. Mike Treen of Unite has been a regular and greatly appreciated Watchdog writer over the years.

Media Profile

Things have been very quiet on that front for the past few years, which might have something to do with the fact that I stopped putting out press releases, instead prioritising things like the CAFCA Updates. A lot of time and work can go into a press release for little or no return. Having said that, a press release can have an impact years later. In 2022 I was contacted by a journalist, following up on a press release that I had put out in 2012!

That's not to say that CAFCA had no contact with the mainstream media in 2022. I was contacted by both Newsroom (which did lead to an online article quoting me on behalf of CAFCA), and the Northern Advocate, whom I couldn't help - the reporter wanted regional information on foreign land purchases and I had to tell him that the OIO has never kept those sorts of statistics since its inception in 2005.

We also learnt a hard lesson about the realities of today's media. A senior journalist at the New Zealand Herald, one with whom I've had a good working relationship for many years, contacted me, seeking detailed information on foreign ownership. I told her that a lot of that stuff is no longer publicly available. To her great good credit, she directly approached the OIO and got enough material out of them to write a major feature.

Then Radio NZ asked me to go on air to discuss it. But - as is now the case with so many Herald articles - it was behind a pay wall and I was not a subscriber. So, I had to decline the invitation as I could not play an informed role in the discussion. CAFCA discussed this and decided to pay for an online Herald subscription for me, on a trial basis. There is no guarantee that the Radio NZ invitation situation will arise again.

In my previous Report I mentioned that I had re-established contact with the excellent US publication Covert Action, which is now a wholly online affair. This led to an invitation to write for them (there's no pay - just as with Watchdog). Thus far I've had three articles published. Here's the link to the most recent one.

I simply provide the text and they do a very good job fleshing it out with illustrations. They've invited me to keep writing for them and I'd be happy to oblige but, as always, the issue is one of time. Covert Action is an American-focused publication, so I have suggested that they might be interested in articles about the likes of Peter Thiel and Kim Dotcom in NZ. They confirmed that they definitely are interested.

2022 saw CAFCA in the spotlight in other kinds of publications. Joe Hendren, who was a CAFCA Committee member for a number of years earlier this century (before moving to Auckland), wrote his Auckland University PhD thesis titled "Assessing The Impact Of National Political Civil Society Organisations In New Zealand: A Case Study Of The Campaign Against Foreign Control Of Aotearoa (CAFCA)".

It is a study of CAFCA rather than a history and - for a variety of reasons - it took more than ten years, rather than the usual seven. A number of the people quoted in it were contacted at CAFCA's 40th anniversary celebration, held in Christchurch in 2015. It contains both praise and criticism and reaches conclusions that are generally positive. In what turned out to be one of the very last things he wrote for us, Jeremy Agar reviewed it in the December 2022 Watchdog and, in that same issue, Joe Hendren wrote an article about it, based on his conclusions.

Owen Wilkes Book

Then there is "Peacemonger" (I love the title) the recently released book on Owen Wilkes, the internationally renowned peace researcher and CAFCA founder, who killed himself in 2005, aged 65. In late 2020 I was contacted, out of the blue, by an octogenarian Kiwi expat in Oslo, who had been a good friend of Owen's in Scandinavia in the 70s and 80s and then for most of the rest of Owen's life.

In 1978, I and my then partner (Christine Bird, a fellow CAFCINZ founder and first Chairperson of CAFCA) accompanied Owen on a "spy trip" through Norway's northernmost province, the one bordering the former Soviet Union. We met this expat Kiwi whilst in Oslo. In his 2020 e-mail he told me he had a collection of letters from Owen and other material, and offered them to me, which I accepted.

I wrote up the Oslo package of material in Watchdog 156 (April 2021). That turned out to be only the beginning of this whole new project. In September 2021 I was contacted, also out of the blue, by May Bass, who was Owen's partner at the time of his death (they were together for a dozen years). I'd had no contact with her since the year of Owen's death.

May said: "A friend of mine rang me to let me know there was an article about Owen in the April edition of Watchdog. She sent me the magazine. It reminded me that having waited all this time since Owen's death I have still not found anyone who is interested in writing a book about him. There is a huge amount of material that he left and which I arranged to be stored in Wellington Library. I am wondering whether you might have some ideas?". I told May that I wouldn't be the writer of any such book (she was not the first person to suggest it), because I don't have the time necessary to do it justice.

But I sent her a whole lot of stuff about Owen that has come out since his death (such as various Watchdog articles, and the reissued 1980s' documentary "Islands Of The Empire"). Within a remarkably short period of time, the whole thing fell into place. I mentioned the book idea to a newly joined CAFCA member (a 1980s' Wellington peace activist and colleague of Owen's, with whom I'd lost contact for decades). He took it upon himself to contact a professional writer (Mark Derby of Wellington, who has had books reviewed in Watchdog by Jeremy Agar over the years).

Mark accepted with alacrity. He and May Bass are the co-editors. It is a collection of essays about Owen by a number of writers, and was published in late 2022. My 2021/22 Christmas holiday project was writing a lengthy essay on Owen and the anti-bases campaign - which long pre-dates the actual organisation called the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC). This is what gave birth to what is now CAFCA (Owen was a founder of both CAFCA and ABC).

My essay involved researching from a whole lot of sources, including good old Watchdog. Jeremy was also going to review it but he died just days before the Christchurch book launch in December 2022 at which he was going to collect it. My good friend and Anti-Bases Campaign colleague, Warren Thomson, agreed to do the review. Both Warren's review and my essay are in this issue.

In his Introduction to the book, Mark Derby wrote: "I first met Owen Wilkes in 1975 on the South Island Resistance Ride". That was the activity that led to the birth of CAFCINZ, which was later renamed as CAFCA. There's the proof that CAFCA and Mark Derby, not to mention Owen Wilkes and I, go back a long, long way.

Old Photos Came In Handy

I was even able to provide the striking portrait photo of Owen that comprises the book's cover. There is a story behind that - in 2015, out of the blue, I was sent it (a physical photo) by a Westport CAFCA/ABC member, with an accompanying handwritten note saying: "Was at local photo shop yesterday and came across this photo in a pile of old copies the shop was clearing out. Thought you might like it".

I had no immediate use for it and duly filed it. Come 2022 and the call went out for photos of Owen for the book and Mark Derby specified that one for the cover. He asked me to get a professional-quality scan of it and to claim reimbursement for the cost. I took it to Watchdog's printer and he charged me - $3! (I didn't claim reimbursement).

When the book came out, I showed it to the printer and said: "There's your $3 scan". His daughter, who works with him, said: "It's time we put our prices up, Dad". But we're still none the wiser about when, where or by whom and why that striking portrait photo of Owen was taken, or how it ended up in a Westport photo shop (he last lived in that part of the country in the early 1980s). That photo is proof of the old idiom - don't chuck it out, it might come in handy someday.

I also played a role in securing another of the most striking photos in the book, namely one of Owen on a megaphone at the 1973 protest at the US base at Christchurch Airport (I was an organiser of that. You know you're old when you realise you were involved in things 50 years ago). The photographer was Walter Logeman. I hadn't seen him for decades, but in recent years Becky and I starting running into him at cafes all over town. Over months and years, he and I got talking about events from long ago.

He knew Owen back in the day, so I told him about this upcoming book. He'd quit photography years ago and moved into a quite different field but he undertook to locate his trove of old school photo negatives and sort through them for Owen photos. The result appears in the book and it was well worth the effort. Thank you, Walter.

That book project put me back in touch with a former leading Australian anti-bases activist, who knew Owen and who got a copy to review for various Australian movement publications. We resumed correspondence after decades of silence and he was the person with whom I had my first ever personal Zoom call, in January 2023.

It was the first time that we'd actually seen each other since 1988, when Owen and I were in Melbourne on our way back from a protest at what was then the US Navy's communications base at North West Cape, Western Australia (it's now an Australian base). My Aussie mate had come to the very first Waihopai protest that same year, 1988, when the spy base was nothing more than bare farm paddocks.

CAFCA Priorities

Much the same as they have been in recent years. As I've already mentioned, we are in the process of upgrading our Website. This is taking much, much longer than we expected, literally years, in fact. This is all part of a never-ending project to spread the word wider and build our membership and support base. CAFCA has always worked best in partnership with likeminded groups, for example, Keep Our Assets (see the KOA section, above).

Both Watchdog and our OIO work are major and ongoing long-term projects in their own right. We need to get our message out to more people, using both traditional media and social media We have an aging, indeed aged, membership, so recruiting new - hopefully, younger - members is a constant project. So, CAFCA can't put our feet up just yet. We've got plenty to keep us busy.

Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC)

I am, of course, also the Organiser for ABC. And I am the Editor of ABC's Peace Researcher. Becky is the Layout Editor, so it's a family business, but because she was on the brink of going off to spend months in the Philippines with her family, the most recent issue (64, November 2022) was laid out by Leigh Cookson, who last did that - for the same reason - back in 2018. Leigh, of course, was Watchdog's Layout Editor for 20 years.

As with Watchdog, 2022 was the end of an era for Peace Researcher. Jeremy Agar was the Reviews Editor for both. Jeremy was an ABC member from 2004 until his December 2022 death and he was also Reviews Editor for PR, starting from that year and continuing up until the most recent issue. A small number of those reviews were the same as in Watchdog but the great majority weren't, they were unique to PR. Which makes his output as a reviewer even more remarkable and prodigious. As with his Watchdog reviews he was always planning ahead. In November 2022 - just weeks before his death - he told me that he'd already bought a book to review for the next PR (June 2023).

And Dennis Small has retired from writing for both Watchdog and Peace Researcher. Dennis had a long, long association with PR, including having been its' Editor decades ago, long before I was involved. Watchdog readers will have been very familiar with Dennis' geopolitical blockbusters in virtually every issue for many years. He contributed equal size but different articles to virtually every PR (and solely wrote one whole Special Issue). The difference being that PR is a smaller publication than Watchdog, meaning that Dennis' articles took up a bigger proportion of PR than they did of Watchdog.

PR is not a mini-Watchdog, there is plenty of material that only appears in it, such as Warren Thomson's regular Spooky Bits series. PR has much more international material than Watchdog. It is the nature of ABC's issue. And PR covers events and issues that don't appear in Watchdog. You can read the most recent issue (November 2022) on the website here. But we only publish two PRs a year.

Waihopai Protest: First Ever Cancellation

ABC's major project in any year is the Waihopai spy base protest. We had our annual Waihopai protest planned for January 2022 and this was going to be our last chance to say "good riddance" to what had provided the dramatic backdrop to three decades of protests, namely the giant domes concealing dishes spying on civilian communications satellites. In 2021 the Government had announced that those domes and dishes were obsolete and were going to be removed in 2022.

We had a good programme of speakers lined up, both to speak at the base gate in the morning and at a Blenheim public meeting that afternoon. The speakers were to be Green MP Teanau Tuiono; Sonya Smith from Rocket Lab Monitor, Mahia (to talk about the campaign against NZ's newest US military base); and May Bass, a leading figure in the very earliest Waihopai spy base protests in the late 80s, specifically the 1988 women's camp.

Alas, it was not to be. ABC had to cancel it at very short notice, because of covid restrictions. The Government didn't impose a lockdown but there were stringent restrictions. We could have gone ahead but decided not to, in the public interest (and did not receive one single objection to our decision, even from people who planned to take part and whose travel and accommodation arrangements were upended just a few days out from the scheduled event).

We even got a 100% refund of the money we'd paid for the ABC Committee's Blenheim accommodation. In turn, ABC reimbursed our biggest Waihopai donor (namely CAFCA), and forwarded the other equal size donation to the Organiser Account, with that donor's blessing - the first such donation that ABC has ever been able to make in the 30 plus years of that Account's existence.

In the case of two of our planned speakers (Teanau and Sonya) it was a case of second time unlucky. ABC had booked them to come to Christchurch in September 2021 to speak at our planned public meeting on Rocket Lab (covid forced its cancellation, to be replaced by a Webinar which attracted a much bigger audience than a physical public meeting would have done).

Waihopai 2022 was our first cancellation since protests started there in 1988. So, that became the mainstream media story in the Marlborough Express and on Stuff (24/1/22, Jennifer Eder).

Ironically, the flurry of media coverage before the scheduled protest (the domes-demise announcement) and after it (cancellation) was probably more than what we would have got at the actual protest. And the latter got all tangled up with uniquely covid-related issues. The young reporter (whom I've known since she was a journalism student at the University of Canterbury) rang just as I was going out the door to get my booster shot. She asked me if she could include that detail, as "we tend to think that protesters are anti-vaxxers". Not this one. So, if you read her article (link above) you will see the views of both me and the ABC Committee on vaccines and vaccine passes.

Due to circumstances beyond our control, we didn't get to have one more protest at the domes before they went. We could fill an issue of Peace Researcher (or Watchdog) with stories and pictures of the domes. They were the focus of both international high drama (the 2008 deflation of one of them, by sickle, by the three Domebusters) to good old laconic Kiwi humour.

Two examples: Waihopai Valley winemaker Olly Oliver put out a special limited issue of Big Balls red wine in 2003, as his contribution to the campaign against his overbearing neighbour. And, one other year, a bullshit throwing contest with the domes as irresistible targets. The winner was a minister of religion, thus proving that men of the cloth are champion bullshitters.

That didn't mark the end of ABC's Waihopai campaign. Although the domes have gone, Waihopai is still a spy base, albeit a less conspicuous one, and the spying by the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) goes on. ABC's campaign has always been to call for the closure of the base. We started it in 1988, when Waihopai was an empty paddock yet to be built on. The spying goes on, so ABC's campaign goes on. We went back there in 2023, for the first time in two years. I'll cover that in my next Report.

Rocket Lab Campaign

ABC did other activities in 2022. Early that year we learned that the NZ Aerospace Summit was going to be held in Christchurch in September (it had been postponed from 2021 because of covid). We resolved to do two things - hold a public meeting, and picket the Summit (which was held in Te Pae, Christchurch's gleaming new convention centre) - to highlight our opposition to Rocket Lab in particular, and NZ's role in the militarisation of space in general. Aerospace is being touted as an up-and-coming glamour industry, both nationally and in Canterbury. Both our activities were under the title of Keep Space For Peace.

Although Christchurch is a long way away from Rocket Lab (whose two launch pads are on the North Island's Mahia Peninsula, and its main NZ facility is in Auckland), ABC resolved to do what little we could, to make sure that the Summit did not pass by unnoticed and unopposed. The Summit was a single day affair, held on a Monday. So, ABC held our public meeting the day before, on the Sunday.

As was to be expected, turnout was low, in the 20s. But that didn't stop it being a very worthwhile exercise. ABC's Warren Thomson had gone to a lot of trouble preparing material to be displayed and distributed at the meeting. I spoke first, to provide the context for why people are alarmed by, and opposed to, Rocket Lab's role as a contractor for the US military and spy agencies. You can read my speech here. My speech included showing a very short YouTube clip explaining the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.

We then screened a 2021 online video interview of veteran New Zealand peace activist Kevin Clements, talking about Rocket Lab in this country. The interviewer was Bruce Gagnon, the long-serving front person for the US-based Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.

The meeting concluded with speeches by, and discussion with, our three guests from Rocket Lab Monitor - Sonya Smith, Puti Moa and Lis Battes - who had all come from the Mahia area to attend the Summit and join with ABC at our activities. They bought an invaluable Māori perspective to the proceedings, because they are from the community directly affected by Rocket Lab.

It was a major task for them to get to Christchurch, both logistically and financially. In Sonya's case, it was third time lucky - in 2021, ABC had paid for her to come and speak at a public meeting on Rocket Lab. Covid put paid to that (we held a Webinar instead, with speakers including Sonya). We then transferred her ticket to get her to Blenheim to speak at the public meeting that ABC had planned as part of our January 2022 Waihopai spy base protest. Covid put paid to that too.

The Summit took place the day after our public meeting and a very small number of us (single figures) turned out to picket it. You can read and/or download our leaflet here. What we lacked in numbers we made up for in enthusiasm, due in no small measure to John Minto and his sound system, which enabled both speech and music to bombard the delegates for several hours.

The Rocket Lab Monitor women, who went in to the Summit (attendance at which cost several hundred dollars per head) were impressed by our hardiness and perseverance - you can judge how cold it was by the fact that it went on to snow that night, which is pretty unusual in September. And fellow activists in Wellington mounted a solidarity picket outside the head office of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), which is responsible for the aerospace industry in NZ.

Our picket got no media coverage - nobody ran our press release. The Press did send a photographer, who took some photos and told me that a reporter would be in touch. That didn't happen and no photos were published. Having said that, the mainstream media gave little or no coverage of the Summit itself, which is interesting, considering that it featured a couple of Cabinet Ministers as keynote speakers, plus a whole raft of aerospace industry leaders from NZ and overseas, including Rocket Lab's high-profile CEO, Peter Beck.

Was ABC disappointed by the small turnout at our public meeting and picket and lack of media coverage? No, we're realists - Christchurch is a long way from the aerospace action in this country, and Rocket Lab has received a free ride of gushing propaganda from politicians and media. The campaign against New Zealand's newest US base has to start somewhere, and ABC is happy to play our role in that.

Book Launch

The other activity that ABC did in 2022 was right at the end of it, in December, namely to host the Christchurch launch of "Peacemonger", the book about Owen Wilkes (see above). Owen was from Christchurch and was a founder of both CAFCA and ABC, so it was entirely appropriate that we held a launch in his hometown (it was the first launch of the book).

It was following on from other things we had done to honour his memory - when he died, by suicide, in 2005, ABC and CAFCA organised a very well attended Christchurch memorial gathering. We jointly also pushed for a permanent memorial and got it in 2007, with a pictorial and text plaque on a bench in Beckenham Park, his childhood suburb and next to his old primary school.

The launch was a modest affair, attended by 10-20 people, but it was a very enjoyable occasion. I was the MC and one of the speakers. Our guest of honour was May Bass, who was Owen's partner in both peace work and in life (they were together for 12 years, up until his death). ABC had attempted to get May to the 2022 Waihopai protest (she'd never been back there since the 1988 women's peace camp) but that had to be cancelled (in 2023 she finally did get back to Waihopai, joining ABC's protest there).

So, we were delighted to get her to the book launch (she is a Co-Editor of "Peacemonger"). We took her to Owen's memorial park bench. It was the first time I'd seen May since Owen's Hamilton funeral in 2005. "Peacemonger" has gone on to have a better-attended launch in Auckland (bad weather on the day forced the postponement of the Wellington launch, which awaits a new date).

My Ancient Past

I'm a very regular movie goer. At the end of one movie, in March 2023, before the lights came on, the stranger sitting next to me stood up, turned to me and asked: "Are you by any chance Murray Horton?" When I said yes, he told me that, in 1971 (!) he attended a Progressive Youth Movement (PYM) concert at which I read an extract from James Joyce's "Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man", "which made quite an impression on me". It must have done, if he can still remember it after 52 years, let alone recognise me in the dark.

I, on the other hand, have no memory of having done any such thing, nor could I tell you anything about that book (although I certainly waded through Joyce in my youth, and even visited the James Joyce Tower and Museum whilst in Dublin in the 80s). The only literary James that I can remember featuring at a PYM concert was Baxter, in person. The cinema stranger told me that he is - quintessentially Christchurch - a retired Anglican vicar. What's more, small world, that he'd been the vicar of the beautiful little old church in our suburb of Addington. It's funny who you run into at the movies in the dark.

In my previous Report, I detailed how I was contacted by a stranger in 2021, asking for my help in locating her birth father, Murray Shaw. I had known him as a fellow activist in the PYM - we both joined as teenagers in 1969 and, indeed, we lived in the same house that year, in what was my first flat. Years later we were both railway workers (although not doing the same actual job) and grassroots activists in the union. Sadly, that's where it ended for him - he was killed, aged only 35, in a 1987 workplace accident.

Obviously, his daughter did not know that; so, the tragic news had to be conveyed to her by the woman (an old friend of mine) who'd been his partner at the time of his death. There was a flurry of correspondence and then silence. Until February 2023, when I was contacted by another stranger - her mother - wanting to thank me for my role in "filling the gap" in her daughter's life.

The mother said she'd met me when I'd gone to Tim Shadbolt's Auckland house in 1969. I certainly remember doing that, as it was all part of my journey into a life of political activism. The mother has an impressive memory but I had to tell her that I don't remember her. As for Tim Shadbolt - let's just say that the Tim of 1969 was definitely not what the Sir Tim of 2023 has become. And I'll leave it at that.

2022 marked the 50th anniversary of Organisation to Halt Military Service (OHMS - the acronym was deliberately chosen to mock the On Her Majesty's Service logo on ominous official letters from the Government). It held a reunion in Wellington. I wasn't directly involved in OHMS and I didn't attend the reunion. But I was asked to send material about my unique contribution to the early 1970s' campaign against national (military) service, namely that I fought a semi-successful court case arguing that I was exempt from military service because I was a minister of religion, with my own church (it's a good yarn and someone can write it up in my obituary).

I thought "I don't have that stuff anymore". Then I remembered that sitting in my office is my Security Intelligence Service Personal File - well, what the SIS deigned to release to me. I've never written it up, as opposed to the SIS file on CAFCA. Sure enough, when I checked, it includes multiple pages on my court case. I knew that I could rely on the spies. So, I scanned those pages and sent them off for the use of the OHMS reunion.

Very few, if any, of my pre-21st Century articles about anything are available online. Good old hard copy only. Back in the day I used to write profiles of people who were still alive, as opposed to obituaries. The last one of those that I wrote was of David Robie, for the long-gone NZ Monthly Review, in 1992. David was, and is, a good friend and colleague who, in those days, was NZ's leading independent print journalist and the closest thing NZ has ever had to a proper foreign correspondent.

That profile captured David at the point where he was being forced out as a working journalist because of the financial exigencies brought about by the notorious Employment Contracts Act. He went on to a decades-long career as a journalism academic, years of that spent overseas and finishing up back in Auckland. Over the 2022/23 summer David painstakingly retyped and uploaded my 1992 profile of him. This is unique in that it is the only one of my "living profiles" to be online.

My other "ancient" experience actually happened in January 2023. I went out for a coffee with an old friend and, as you do, we reminisced about the good old days. I told him about the only time I ever encountered Piggy Muldoon, which was when I and a mutual friend appeared before a Select Committee at Parliament in the 80s. Labour was in power, so Helen Clark and Jim Anderton were the senior Labour MPs on it; Piggy was the most high profile Tory.

I regaled my friend with the "banter" I had with Piggy. After some time of this, the woman at the next table stood up, turned to me and said: "I couldn't help overhearing you impersonating the voice of Muldoon. You're very good". We then had a very interesting three-way conversation featuring words like "capitalism" and "neoliberalism", not the sort of topics that I usually chat about with strangers in a café . And it's given me an idea for a new career - I could hit the retirement home circuit as a Muldoon impersonator

My Health

I always include a section on this, because I believe that members are entitled to know about the state of health of the Organiser. I've already mentioned my being fully vaccinated and boosted. Coincidentally or not, I didn't catch so much as a cold in 2022. I definitely prefer not to catch covid if at all possible, as I have a couple of underlying conditions (type 2 diabetes and occasional asthma) that could exacerbate things.

But I have to say that my health is generally good. When I saw my doctor for the only time in 2022, he surprised me by telling me that my diabetes indicators had improved. But he then proceeded to tell me that, because of my age, he'd run an algorithm to calculate my chances of having a heart attack or stroke within the next five years. The answer? 17%. I noted that he'd didn't celebrate the fact that I have an 83% chance of not doing so. So, he added one more pill to my daily intake.

I've seen him once so far in 2023 and he definitely got my attention. I had a skin rash, which he examined with close attention, then told me that I needed blood tests. What for? "One of the things we'll be testing for is syphilis". Why, I asked, incredulously: "Because you have one of the symptoms, a rash on your palms" (but not on the soles of my feet, which he also checked). Needless to say, I didn't test positive for syphilis. The verdict was that the rash was probably an allergy or a reaction to one of the drugs I was taking. I was told to stop taking one of my diabetes drugs and the rash went away. I was no longer a rash fellow and I didn't have the clap. Things were looking up.

Coming Out Of Hibernation

As the country came out of hibernation in 2022, so did I, resuming activities like a daily coffee stop at a local café, a weekly movie and catching the odd art exhibition. At the time of writing, I have attended one live rugby match in 2023, for the first time since 2021. I started socialising with friends again, including a very long standing one who visited from London where she has lived for 50 years (the last time she visited me was in March 2020, when she had to flee the country just ahead of the lockdown and border closure. Her 2023 visit to her hometown was much more relaxed and enjoyable).

I've always said that I will keep on as the Organiser as long as the members want me to continue, and subject to my health continuing to be good. I actually got involuntarily "retired" (via redundancy) in 1991 and have been getting paid to do what I love ever since. I'm both a worker and an old age pensioner. And what I do is exactly the sort of thing that a lot of people say that they'd like to do if they had the time. It's not physically demanding; it gives my brain a good work out.

My paid hours have been cut by 25%, so I have more free time and I have retired from various other aspects of my life, ranging from international solidarity work to mowing my own lawns, so yet more free time. Life and work remain both stimulating and interesting. Not to mention that the work is very important. So, I have no plans to chuck it in the foreseeable future. Why give up something that is both immensely worthwhile and enjoyable?