I watched Guillermo del Toro's brilliant "Pinocchio" on Netflix one night in December 2022. I was struck by the final words from the voice over: "What happens, happens. And then we are gone". I thought that an admirably concise, if brutally frank, description of existence and its transience. The next morning, I got a call to tell me that Jeremy had been found dead in his Lyttelton home, aged 80. And then we are gone.

To say that Jeremy's death was unexpected and a shock is putting it very mildly indeed. It still strikes me as odd to see his name as the subject of this article, having spent decades seeing it as the writer's by-line for his countless reviews and articles. Jeremy died from internal bleeding caused by undiagnosed bowel cancer. According to his death certificate he'd been symptomatic for months but he didn't go to his doctor until two days before he died, by which time it was far too late. He didn't tell anyone about it and I know that he was allergic to doctors.

The CAFCA Committee last saw him at our November 2022 monthly meeting. He appeared to be in bit of discomfort. I asked him about it, he said he knew what it was and that he was OK. That was our only discussion about his health. He and I were in touch, by text, just two days before his death and he gave no indication that anything was amiss. Likewise, his final two Watchdog contributions (Trumpery Triumphant and his contribution to Reviews), in the December 2022 issue give no indication that they were written by a man with only weeks to live (the issue was posted the day before we found out he had died).

For several consecutive monthly Committee meetings in 2022 he bought a full suitcase of books that he had reviewed and was now returning to the "CAFCA library" (our place, which is also the CAFCA office). I don't attach any morbid significance to that - he had periodically done so throughout the years, he had finished with the books and wanted to make them available to his colleagues.

End Of An Era For Watchdog

Jeremy's death is definitely the end of an era for Watchdog (and, to a lesser extent, for the Anti-Bases Campaign's Peace Researcher, of which I'm also Editor and for whom Jeremy regularly wrote reviews). Watchdog has always had reviews, shared around among various writers, including me. Jeremy's first review, of Naomi Klein's "No Logo" appeared in issue 98 (December 2001). By issue 101, December 2002, Jeremy was doing all the reviews and that continued to be the case for the next 20 years, right up until the December 2022 issue. Other reviewers, including me, sometimes pitched in but Jeremy was very much Watchdog's Reviews Editor for 20 years, which is remarkable.

Throughout that entire 20 years, Jeremy and I worked as a team. I knew that I could rely on him to provide reviews for every issue of Watchdog, three times a year. Some of the books I obtained from their publishers for him, including from overseas - the first two reviewed in this issue fall into that category (he died before he could collect them from me). Some of them he went out and bought on my recommendation after I'd seen them reviewed elsewhere (likewise with movies and DVDs). But an awful lot of them he bought on his own initiative.

He was constantly looking for books to review and he was always planning ahead, wanting - if possible - to review a mix of New Zealand and international books for every issue. And it must be stressed - he declined any reimbursement for the huge number of books that he personally bought over those two decades. Same for the movie tickets he bought. "It can be my donation". When you consider that you'd be lucky to find a non-fiction book for under $50 these days, you can see the extent of his largesse.

Both as a reader and a reviewer, he was prodigious. I'll give one example, which was of the last book he ever reviewed for us, the Jim Anderton biography, in the December 2022 issue. I asked the publisher for a review copy but never got a reply (which has become more and more common in recent years). Jeremy was going away on a post-80th birthday family holiday to the Cook Islands in October 2022. He contacted me to say not to worry about the publisher, he'd bought his own copy, as "I want something to read on the plane". Which he did and got his review to me by the November deadline. When I started reading that book, in January 2023, I made the poignant discovery that he'd left a bookmark inside, with some review notes written on it.

As A Writer He Was An Editor's Dream

He was fluent, articulate, literary and could mount a compelling argument, mixing both facts and opinions. He rarely ever included Weblinks or references and never used footnotes or endnotes He was never, ever, boring. All I had to do was think up the subheading titles. He had a distinctive style that remained constant throughout those 20 years.

The only thing of which I had to be mindful was that he had lived overseas (in Canada) from 1968-98, which was a significant chunk of NZ's 20th Century history. Keith Holyoake was Prime Minister when he left; Jenny Shipley when he got back (this being NZ, he saw her on his first day back in the country). He had no personal experience of Muldoon, Rogernomics, the Springbok tour, etc, etc, and sometimes that showed in his writing.

Here is one very recent example. The last book Jeremy reviewed for us was David Grant's biography of Jim Anderton (issue 161, December 2022) After Jeremy died, I read the book. Now, CAFCA had history with Jim but you wouldn't know that from the biography. Here is an extract from my Watchdog obituary of Jim (147, April 2018).

"CAFCA had plenty to do with the Alliance in the 90s. For example, we worked with them (and New Zealand First) in the major campaign against National's Overseas Investment Amendment Bill (which became an Act). That included us hosting a 1995 Christchurch Town Hall public meeting where both Anderton and Winston Peters were among the speakers. It came just after a much talked-about merger proposal between the two parties had come to nothing and there was bad feeling between both leaders and their supporters (who attended the meeting in equal numbers)".

"I had the interesting experience, as a fellow speaker on the night, of sitting between the two of these short, immaculately coiffed and suited men, both of whom had king size egos. They didn't like each other and I could feel the animosity radiating off both of them. As it was, Peters was easily the better speaker of the two that night, having a much better grip of the subject. Jim didn't know his stuff".

The biography mentions nothing about this significant public meeting; indeed, it mentions nothing at all about National's Overseas Investment Amendment Bill (which became an Act in 1996) and the campaign against it. If I had reviewed the book, I definitely would have highlighted that omission. Jeremy didn't mention it because he was oblivious to it - he was still living in Canada when it happened.

But that was a minor quibble. After his death, lots of people responded saying how much they'd appreciated his writing and they had gone out and bought books that he had reviewed. Sadly, he didn't get that while he was alive and he was thinking of including his e-mail address with future reviews and articles, to encourage readers to contact him directly for debate and discussion. Jeremy was a bibliophile, an intellectual who was passionate about ideas. He was very much an old school practitioner of long form writing - social media was anathema to him.

I remember his absolute delight when we were in Gisborne on my 2014 national speaking tour (see below), having lunch in a café above a wonderful book shop, which he discovered sold the New York Review of Books (he bought it). He was very surprised that he could buy one of his favourite publications in provincial New Zealand. But he also had very clear ideas about what books he liked and disliked (he gave the odd bad review).

In one quite recent case, I secured the book for him from the overseas publisher and it wasn't until a long time later that I realised that I'd never heard any more from him about it, let alone received the expected review. I asked him what was the story. He immediately rang me with his blunt assessment: "I hated it", but had decided that it's better to say nothing if you've got nothing good to say. I found another reviewer (whom I didn't tell about Jeremy's opinion of the book) and that person wrote a glowing review. No, I'm not going to say what book it was.

The Trump Series

He didn't only write reviews for Watchdog. He contributed articles on subjects such as the Productivity Commission, Christchurch local body politics and neo-liberalism. But, in the past few years, what really got him going was Donald Trump. Jeremy loathed Trump and everything he stands for, he saw Trump as dangerous, vulgar and a personal insult. He wrote a series of articles about Trump and Trumpery, starting with "The Post-Modern President" (144, December 2017) right up until "Trumpery Triumphant. Even If Trump Is Not" (161, December 2022)

I didn't ask him to write this series of Watchdog articles on US politics and Donald Trump, it was entirely Jeremy's own idea. It is sobering to think that if we'd done things my way, his final Trump article would never have happened. Several months in advance he told me he wanted to write about the 2022 US midterm elections. I was sceptical, telling him that they were on November 8 and the Watchdog deadline was November 1 (and those elections might end in deadlock, court cases, whatever).

I suggested he leave it until the next (April 2023) issue. He was insistent that he would write them up for December. The election was held and everything hinged on a December run-off in Georgia. I said "I told you so" and repeated my suggestion that he leave it until April. He repeated his insistence on doing it for December and he duly did so.

These are the last words he ever wrote for Watchdog, so they're worth reprinting: "The general reaction after the election was one of relief, as though the fever had broken. But it might not herald a return to some sort of normalcy, not in the era of social misinformation. An angry Trump can be expected to sink to new depths as he seeks to regain control, and with the next Presidential cycle looming, the wooing of support in the primaries will be foremost in the minds of the contenders".

"Often it seems like a permanent concentration. GOP (i.e., Republican) candidates will need to solicit support from the party base, which will likely still be the terrain of loonies and extremists. They'll be mad as hell because the evil paedophile Democrats are still in control. Just". Jeremy gave every indication he would still be writing about American politics up until and beyond the 2024 Presidential election. He would have loved watching the absolute shambles within the Republicans as they struggled to elect a Speaker for the House of Representatives in January 2023.

Veteran Committee Member

Jeremy was much more than a Watchdog writer. He joined CAFCA in 2001 and was a Committee member from 2006 until his 2022 death. He was our Chairperson for several years and was always an active member, both of the Committee and CAFCA. He was part of the team that did the Watchdog mailouts for years around our dining table. He was always available for any CAFCA driving job, such as getting those Watchdogs to New Zealand Post. He was a signatory to several of our bank accounts and term deposits. I've already mentioned his generosity vis a vis paying for the review books himself. It didn't stop there.

In 2019, when CAFCA first asked for members to pay the annual membership fees for other members who were struggling financially, Jeremy was the first and, by far, the most generous to contribute - he came to the CAFCA office (i.e., our home) and handed over a cheque for $200 to pay for ten members if necessary.

By far his greatest act of generosity, both to CAFCA and to me personally, was in connection with my 2014 CAFCA/ABC national speaking tour (the most recent such tour that I've done). My report on that is in Watchdog 137, (December 2014, "On The Road"). It included this subsection, with the below subheading.

Jeremy's Priceless Generosity

"This speaking tour had a number of unique features. All of my previous ones (1993, 1999, 2002 and 2011) had been done solo, using public transport. But things were very different this time - CAFCA Chairperson Jeremy Agar volunteered his car, himself as driver (I'm a non-driver) and several weeks of his time. Special thanks are due to him - Jeremy made an effective donation, worth thousands (even buying a brand new car for the trip, which led to some funny looks at some venues), paying all car related expenses himself (including inter-island ferry costs) and would not take reimbursement for any of his personal expenses, such as food".

"Without Jeremy the tour would not have been possible in the fashion that it took place (all of my previous tours had been by public transport); I could not have transported such a large volume of papers with me, let alone things like a data projector and big posters - more unique features - if not for the use of his car. That was extreme generosity of both money and time - he was on the road, driving thousands of kms, for six weeks - plus another half dozen Christchurch meetings in widely dispersed parts of town".

"Jeremy wasn't merely the driver - he was in charge of screening the Powerpoint at each meeting (using his laptop and the data projector that CAFCA bought especially for the tour). The whole experience was a very interesting one for a couple of technophobes. And, as our Chairperson, he introduced me at every meeting, which meant that he also had a speaking role on the tour. He started the tour just telling people what material we had available but, as it progressed, he also referred to relevant topical subjects in his introduction, which worked very well. It was great to have our own MC and chair".

"We spent six solid weeks in each other's company, day and night (including weekends) and were still speaking to each other at the end of it. We had many adventures but the telling of those will have to wait until the Watchdog obituary (depending on who outlives who)". So, sadly, now that we do know who has outlived who and who gets to write the other's Watchdog obituary, I am no longer constrained and will indeed recount some of those tour adventures further along in this.

Peace Researcher, ABC & KOA

Jeremy and I didn't just work together in CAFCA. I'm also the Organiser for the Anti-Bases Campaign and Editor of its publication Peace Researcher. Jeremy was an ABC member from 2004 until his death and he was also Reviews Editor for PR, starting from that year and continuing up until the most recent issue (64, November 2022).

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). Sadly, that one will never happen now.

Jeremy came on ABC's Waihopai spy base protests on several occasions, sometimes bringing other people with him. In 2008, when the three Domebusters were arrested for their famous deflationary action and my ABC Committee colleague Lynda Boyd wanted to get to Blenheim fast to hold a solidarity action, it was Jeremy who, at a moment's notice, drove Lynda and several other young activists up there. He was there in January 2021, which was the last Waihopai protest held in his lifetime. He planned to come to the 2023 one.

At the 2016 one he was a speaker, in his CAFCA Chairperson capacity, at the march through Blenheim which was part of the protest. As with CAFCA, he was happy to offer practical help to ABC - for example, when its Waihopai display needed transport to and from various Christchurch libraries, Jeremy was happy to do the driving and help to set it up. He was a fully active member of both CAFCA and ABC. And I used to edit a third publication, Kapatiran (Solidarity) - it ceased in 2009 - for the former Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa. Jeremy wrote a few unique reviews for that too.

Jeremy and I worked together in Keep Our Assets Canterbury (KOA), for most of the decade it has been in existence. He spent several years on the Committee, until he resigned in early 2022. He took part in the full range of KOA's activities, such as pickets outside Citycare when it was under threat of being sold, and inside the Christchurch City Council chamber during meetings. He took part in KOA deputations to meetings of the City Council and community boards. During John Minto's 2016 and 2019 Mayoral campaigns for KOA, Jeremy tramped up and down Lyttelton's hilly streets, delivering leaflets to letterboxes.

From Christ's College To Canadian Communist Party

Before I go any further, I'd better fill in the back story. This is all done from memory of what Jeremy told me, during our numerous extensive talks over the decades. I haven't gone to anyone else or any other sources - so I take responsibility for any errors. Jeremy was born in 1942; his father was killed in World War 2. Jeremy's mother remarried and he had several half-siblings with a different surname (I've met a couple of his siblings either of the full or half variety).

Jeremy was related to New Zealand military royalty. The clue lay in his full name - Jeremy Charles Upham Agar. He was a nephew of Charles Upham VC and Bar, New Zealand's most decorated war hero (from World War 2). He told me that he had little in common with his uncle, beyond being related, although his name did come up in unexpected circumstances. For example, we got to talking about funerals on one occasion and he said: "Of course, my uncle had a State funeral". In the course of a big climate change protest march we passed the Bridge of Remembrance - Jeremy pointed to a pictorial plaque high up on the memorial arch and said: "That's my uncle up there".

But the distant ancestor of whom Jeremy was most proud was his great-great-great uncle William Hazlitt. Who? Hazlitt (1778-1830) was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. Now, I had studied, at university level, English literature of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, and only vaguely remembered that name (so, no need to be embarrassed if you've never heard of him).

To me, that period belonged to the Romantic poets - Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats (Jeremy was scathing about all of them). It might seem strange to be such a fan of a prose writer from 200 years ago but Jeremy was a big fan - Hazlitt was quoted in his Christchurch Press death notice; Jeremy quoted him whilst chairing CAFCA's 40th anniversary celebrations, in 2015. A drawing of Hazlitt took pride of place on the wall of his Lyttelton home.

Jeremy went to Christ's College, which means something in the class politics of Christchurch, and which led to him being regularly ribbed by some of his CAFCA Committee colleagues. He was in the Christ's First XV in the late 1950s (I think he was a forward, he was a big bloke), proving that his lifelong love of rugby wasn't just from the side line.

He took that seriously - he went to the 60th anniversary reunion of that team, and was a regular spectator at the annual game with Christchurch Boys High (known as the School versus College game). He went to the University of Canterbury, he took part in drama productions, he trained as a secondary teacher, did a bit of Christchurch teaching (at Boys High, actually). Then, in 1968, he left the country - and was gone for 30 years, nearly half his life.

I know very little about his decades in Canada. He was an English teacher in Toronto, he got married, he was immersed in Canadian life. And he joined the Communist Party of Canada, which was a pro-Soviet party. I don't know anything about what he did as a Party member, although he told me that he was active in the anti-nuclear peace movement of the 1980s. In the late 90s his wife suddenly died and Jeremy decided it was time to come home. He took early retirement from teaching, and returned to Christchurch, buying his Lyttelton home.

So, his CAFCA colleagues never knew him when he was working or married (he lived alone for the rest of his life). Ironically, he got a pension from the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, one of the biggest pension funds in the world and a regular foreign investor in NZ (for example, in September 2022 the Overseas Investment Office approved it buying the physical infrastructure - mainly the towers - of Spark's mobile phone business).

Very Active Conservationist

Having quit work in his 50s, Jeremy had a very active retirement. I have already detailed his life and work with CAFCA. He was elected to the former Banks Peninsula District Council, as part of Bob Parker's team which had the expressed - and successful - goal of having Banks Peninsula being absorbed into the much larger Christchurch City Council (Parker became a two-term Mayor of Christchurch). Once inside Christchurch, Jeremy was elected onto one of the Banks Peninsula Community Boards. All up, he served several terms in local government.

Jeremy was a very proud and very active conservationist. Upon learning of his death, Marie Gray, the Secretary of the Summit Road Society, wrote: "Jeremy was involved in the Summit Road Society for nearly 20 years. He joined the Board in 2004 as the Banks Peninsula District Council representative. He became Vice President of the Society in 2009 and has ably filled that role for 13 years".

"Jeremy was also a member of the Eastenders and Omahu work parties as well as trustee on the Harry Ell Summit Road Memorial Trust. He was the driving force behind our community and backyard trapping programme, Predator Free Port Hills. Jeremy was a dear friend to many in the Society and he will be missed".

"Jeremy was passionate about creating safe habitat for our native birds, not only in the bush areas but also across our neighbourhoods, schools, farm areas and everywhere in-between. For many years, Jeremy advocated for BirdSafe, a community-based trapping programme around Lyttelton Harbour. In 2016, the Board of the Summit Road Society agreed to take on the challenge and Predator Free Port Hills was born. Over 1400 households have now joined the programme. Jeremy was so proud of how far we had come with Predator Free Port Hills and the wider Pest Free Banks Peninsula project" (e-mail, 14/12/22).

All of this might make Jeremy sound worthy but dull. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was an old man but never acted it, he was extremely energetic. He was a restless spirit who liked always being on the move, which is why he so generously offered his services to drive me all over the country on the 2014 speaking tour.

He absolutely loved that trip and, for years afterwards, told me that he would never have otherwise met the extraordinary range of people that were our organisers and hosts. It was a highlight of his life. He loved exercising freedom of movement i.e., getting in his car and going somewhere. He had a crib (what the rest of the country calls a bach) built in The Catlins and spent as much time there as possible.

Sports Fan & Adventurer

Jeremy loved words. Geoffrey Palmer was one of his favourite pompous asses and when I told him that Sir Geoffrey had baffled reporters by saying New Zealand is "an irreducibly pluvial nation", Jeremy ensured he used that word every time it rained. But he wasn't only interested in politics, books and ideas. He was a big sports fan and an absolute cricket tragic.

For his 80th birthday, just two months before he died, he was given a book about Don Bradman (hopefully he died before the news came out that Bradman was a rabid Tory bastard who supported the bloodless coup that overthrew Australia's Labor government in 1975). I rang him during 2020's covid lockdown to see how he was doing and he was despondent. Why? No sport on TV!

Jeremy and I had many, many conversations about sport, ranging from rugby and cricket, to the ones he followed during his 30 years in Canada (ice hockey, baseball, even curling). We didn't just talk about it; we went out on cold Christchurch winter nights and went to the rugby. We went to several games together during the Crusaders' extraordinary purple patch of recent years, including one Super Rugby victorious final. The city's rickety "temporary" stadium is walking distance from our Addington home, so he'd park outside our place and we'd walk to and from the games.

Jeremy was an adventurer and, more often than not, those adventures were of the unintentional variety. Like everyone in Christchurch, he had his earthquake story. His home was high on a Lyttelton hillside, very close to the epicentre of the February 2011 killer quake. He was just about to sit down for lunch in his lounge when it struck - behind him, a window pane came out, aiming at his neck; in front of him, his grandfather clock fell face down towards him across the floor.

He was equidistant between the two, and unharmed (but his grandfather clock was never fully repaired, despite several attempts). He told me that when he looked outside, "all the neighbourhood cats were running down the street". His house was damaged but repaired. CAFCA, including Jeremy, carried on throughout that whole quakes' saga. A week after the killer one, the Committee met at our place and at the exact time that it had struck we stood out on the footpath to join everyone else in a minute's silence to commemorate the dead. Then we got back to work.

Cars, Cops & Soldiers

I certainly don't profess to know all of Jeremy's adventures; he was wary about telling me what he was doing and where he was going, because he was concerned about that ending up right here (and now it has). A lot of his adventures involved his car, because Jeremy fell into the literary tradition of other notable motorists like Toad of Toad Hall and Homer Simpson. There was a certain style to Jeremy's driving adventures.

He drove high performance German cars - we toured the country in 2014 in a brand new Audi. I asked him if he got a good trade-in price on his previous Audi. He told me that as he was driving it to the trade-in place, he got engrossed in listening to a radio programme about the origins of World War 1, so he decided to drive it around the block one more time, during the course of which he had an accident, which drastically reduced the price he got for it.

We parted company very briefly in Auckland on that tour - he rang me to say that he'd blown a tyre on his brand new car. Just how he managed to do so in central Auckland in broad daylight was never explained (the mechanic's report said it had been "shredded"). We drove to Kaitaia and back on one of those emergency tyres with no problems. Sometimes his car adventures involved an inanimate object. My 2014 Gisborne public meeting ended abruptly because we had to vacate the venue by a certain time or incur additional expense. Jeremy did not react well to sudden upheaval; he would get flustered.

So, we found ourselves loading his car in the dark. To add to the problem, it was also a dark car (he never did work out some of the features of his brand new Audi, one of them being how to turn on the interior light - which made for an interesting six weeks of packing up after night meetings). As the car started to move, it ran over something with a sickening bump. Yep, it was CAFCA's brand new data projector, worth hundreds and bought specifically for the tour. That was buggered, meaning we either had to bludge other people's data projectors for the rest of the tour or go without.

As we drove out of town the next day, he said: "There's no need to tell anyone about this, Murray". And I have dutifully kept my mouth shut until now. He undertook to get it sorted and he did. When we got back to Christchurch, he took the damaged item back to where it was bought (not by either of us) and managed to persuade the retailer to replace it with a new one, under warranty. That new one is sitting next to me in the CAFCA office as I write this.

He had a wonderfully devil may care attitude to authority figures when it involved his car. For years after that 2014 tour he would regularly and cheerfully report to me that debt collectors were still trying to get him to pay a parking ticket incurred in Dunedin at the very start of it - I remember us driving back north over the Kilmog with that ticket flapping under his windscreen wiper.

Coming into Wellington on that tour, we were driving down the Ngauranga Gorge cheerily discussing something suitably esoteric (the origins of World War 1?) and I noticed us speeding past a large sign telling us that the speed limit was well below what we were doing. By the time we hit the Hutt Motorway down by the harbour, there was a siren behind us from a cop on a motorbike and a command to pull over. Jeremy was genuinely mystified and asked me what he had done.

This cop was like Robocop and he leaned in my passenger side window. In very short order, I had two angry men shouting at each other across my face. I said something, the cop told me to shut up. Jeremy shouted: "Just give me the ticket". The cop told him to stay where he was while he went back to chat on his bike radio. I had a vision of Jeremy being cuffed and carted away, leaving me, the non-driver, in the Audi on the motorway.

But, no, the cop came back and only gave Jeremy a warning. This being Wellington, with only one motorway into the city, Jeremy and the cop drove alongside each other for some distance. As soon as the cop peeled off left, Jeremy leaned across me and vigorously gave him the fingers (fortunately Robocop didn't see it).

Jeremy didn't just tangle with the Police; he took on the Army as well. This incident didn't happen on the national tour but at home in Christchurch. We were showing someone around the quake-buggered central city during that period when great chunks of it were fenced off and guarded by soldiers. We drove past the fenced off Cathedral Square but the gate was open and before you could say "elderly delinquent", Jeremy had driven in.

This immediately attracted military attention and a young woman soldier came over to politely tell us to get out. Jeremy backed the car, her facial expression registered immediate pain as she gasped: "You're on my foot". Whereupon Jeremy stopped - on her foot. I could see that things could rapidly escalate from there, so I suggested that we get out fast, otherwise it might be construed that we were attacking the military during what was still a state of emergency. We duly beat a hasty retreat and carried on with our sightseeing tour. I have no idea what happened to the soldier with the run over foot (a literal foot soldier?).

Cats, Rats & Shopping Centres

Not all of Jeremy's adventures involved his car. When I said he lived alone, he did have one constant companion, his hyper-active, nutty black cat Moon (who survived him). Jeremy completely doted on Moon the loon (he would take him to his Catlins crib with him). Moon livened up many a CAFCA Committee meeting at Jeremy's place - he was prone to rush around, sitting on people's heads, which was rather distracting. One "Moon" meeting in particular sticks in my memory - I was droning away, reading the minutes of the previous meeting when Jeremy suddenly exclaimed "Christ" and hurled his Chairperson's book to the floor.

I didn't realise that my reading out the minutes could have such a galvanising impact. But Jeremy was staring fixedly at where I was sitting, saying "there it is again". I looked down to my left and there was a cheeky rat peeking out into the meeting (his presence was not recorded among those present). Post-quakes, Christchurch had a rat problem (they were literally shaken out of their rat holes) and nowhere more so than Lyttelton. Jeremy had been plagued by this particular rat all day and now here was the bastard rodent gatecrashing a CAFCA meeting.

As I said, Jeremy got flustered under pressure. I suggested he get Moon the cat to deal with the rat. Jeremy duly plonked Moon next to the rat and - they just stared at each other. Then decided to play chasing around the lounge, with humans in hot pursuit. It was like the Keystone Kops combined with an animal act. Jeremy got highly flustered and I suggested we relocate the meeting to the Lyttelton home of another Committee member. We duly did so, and after half an hour, Jeremy joined us, having calmed down. I can't remember what happened to the rat.

The all-time "Jeremy story" happened just a few years ago, and involved his car, his cat and his health. He took his Audi to get a warrant and he went for a walk in the Botanic Gardens whilst waiting. He told me that, during that walk, one leg went funny on him. That was a warning sign. Whilst driving home to Lyttelton he had business at the Ferrymead shopping centre. When he went to back away, his leg went funny on him again, he hit the accelerator and took out the wall of the business he was parked outside.

His newly warranted and repaired Audi (the one we'd toured the country in) was a write off but nobody got hurt, including Jeremy. The cops took him home, and friends persuaded him to see his doctor, who asked him if he'd hit his head recently. He said that six weeks previously he had done so, by walking into his bedroom door (he'd started shutting it at night because Moon kept bringing his daily rodent catch into Jeremy's bedroom and taking them under the bed).

The doctor ordered Jeremy to hospital immediately, where scans revealed that he had a brain bleed. He then had to spend more than a week flat on his back in a hospital bed. He got out but the cops came to his home and confiscated his driver's licence, on medical grounds. That would have been the end of it for most people but Jeremy was determined to drive again. He sat the necessary cognitive test and passed it with flying colours - the hospital specialist told him that his was the highest score the specialist had ever seen.

He got his licence back, bought another new car (a VW, he loved German cars) and drove for the rest of his life without taking out any more shop walls. To this day, whenever my wife Becky drives past that particular shopping centre, she mentions "the Jeremy memorial wall". When I heard that he'd unexpectedly died, I thought it might have been another brain bleed, but no, it was our old nemesis, cancer.

It Was All Fun And Games Until It Wasn't

I've thought long and hard about whether to include the following material and decided to do so, because this is a warts and all obituary and because the behaviour and incidents described happened in front of his CAFCA colleagues and in public. They had repercussions for CAFCA. Jeremy had a problematic relationship with alcohol (I'm using very diplomatic language here).

Now, before I go any further, I should hasten to explain that I'm not approaching this from a holier than thou position. I'm a New Zealand male - booze is in the genes. My personal contribution to the teenage binge drinking culture occurred at my first student party, when I woke up on a stretcher in the hospital emergency department, covered in vomit and with a mysterious line of nail holes down each leg. I had no memory of what happened or how I got there (until I got the ambulance bill).

I worked for many years in, first, the Post Office and then the Railways, two Government institutions that made truly heroic contributions to NZ's total alcohol consumption. When I arrived at the Railways on my first day on the job, I was handed a beer. Nuff said. In a previous life, my hard case Sydney in-laws introduced me to Aussie working class culture (booze and pokies). So, I have had plenty of first-hand experience with drinking and drunks.

Jeremy was different. He was not what my Railways workmates would have called a pisshead; he drank only what they called top shelf - whisky. I've seen him bowl a bottle of it in a day (and that's just what I saw). Unlike the Railways boys, he wasn't a gregarious pub drinker but a solitary one. Not that he kept it secret - when CAFCA meetings were held at his home, he had a whisky decanter and glass to hand.

When he came to meetings at the homes of other Committee members, it was obvious that he'd been drinking. Sometimes, for reasons that were unclear to me, he would start speaking French (I've seen him do so to somebody's bemused cat on one occasion). One of the funniest exchanges I witnessed was when he was decrying the recent insistence on putting the macrons into Māori words. He was left speechless when confronted with his love of French, which is knee deep in a bewildering variety of accents (not to mention having a President named Macron).

He had a powerful thirst which had to be slaked. To the end of his life, he identified one host from our 2014 national tour by the fact that she had a brand of whisky he'd never heard of before. On that same tour, his top priority in one town was to find a bottle store to replace the whisky he'd accidentally left at our last stop.

Did any of this affect his ability to write high quality reviews for every issue of Watchdog for 20 years? No, not in the slightest. Was he a drunk driver? All I can say is that I was in the car with him on more than one occasion when he was subject to random breath testing by the cops and he passed each time. I never had the slightest apprehension about being a passenger in a car driven by him.

But booze did adversely affect his behaviour at times. He could be a volatile drunk, prone to outbursts as a result of real or imagined disagreements. To put it in old school Kiwi vernacular, he was a sconedoer. We learned to read the signs that he was building up a head of steam and was about to let rip. It happened sometimes at Committee meetings and we shrugged it off.

But on a couple of occasions, both in 2017, it was more serious and couldn't just be shrugged off. The worst incident happened at that year's Annual General Meeting where Jeremy took umbrage and just erupted, screaming and shouting at the top of his voice. Worse, he came within centimetres of punching two of his Committee colleagues (it is noteworthy that both of them attended his February 2023 Lyttelton memorial gathering, and that one of them spoke on behalf of CAFCA).

This had repercussions for the Committee, which has always been a harmonious unit. I suggested he should apologise; he was having none of that and insisted that others should apologise to him. So, I recommended that he stay away from meetings for several months until things calmed down. We all took the standard Pakeha way of dealing with issues like this i.e., saying and doing nothing. It worked, Jeremy got his act together, came back to meetings and was once more happily working with people that he'd wanted to punch. But that was the end of his being our Chairperson and we never held another meeting at his home.

Good Friend, True Original, Greatly Missed

He never behaved towards me in that way. He and I were very good friends for the 20+ years that we knew each other. I could wind him up about some of his favourite subjects of outrage and it would all end with a laugh. I would conclude the discussion with: "What is it, Jeremy?" And he would reply: "It's political correctness gone mad, Murray". And we would both laugh. I'm delighted to report that Jeremy's life story did not end on the negative note of those 2017 outbursts.

In the following five years until his death, he was back as a highly valued member of the CAFCA family. He, presumably, cut back on his drinking and he never behaved like that again around us. We saw hints of it in 2022 when he would get excited about the war in Ukraine (he hated Putin as much as he hated Trump) but he kept it within bounds. More than once I invited him to write a Watchdog article putting his point of view about Ukraine, but he never did.

He last attended a Committee meeting in November 2022, just weeks before he died (not that we knew that was imminent, or even on the cards). Terry Moon is the most recent member to join the Committee, and she and Jeremy became good friends. She joined us at that fateful 2017 AGM, leaving it just before Jeremy erupted. She knew nothing about that until I told her at the Committee meeting immediately after his death. She had never seen any of that kind of behaviour from Jeremy in the years that she knew him.

Jeremy Agar was a unique individual. Whatever your stereotype might be of a passionate and committed CAFCA activist, he was not it. An adventurer and enthusiast, a writer par excellence, a formidable intelligence, a hands-on activist, environmentalist, a lover of books, movies, art, ideas, sport and the open road, extremely funny, exasperatingly impractical, emotional and volatile, a high functioning drunk who didn't let that define him, the youngest 80-year-old I've ever met. His death was a great shock to me, as it was for so many other people.

I miss his company, I miss the unforgettable adventures we had together, I miss his sense of life and fun, I miss our discussions about politics, ideas, books, grammar, apostrophes, movies, rugby, cricket, Donald Trump and Homer Simpson (he was an aficionado of buffoons), all of life itself. I hope that if there is an afterlife, it comes complete with German cars, cricket always on TV, good books, and a whisky decanter that is always full. Enjoy your last trip along that highway, old friend.

NOELINE GANNAWAY

- Murray Horton

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