“People look at me, with my eclectic tastes, and eccentricity, and think, There goes a weird bastard. Admittedly I dress like a country squire, and have the oddest accent you will ever encounter. I would describe myself more as a ‘bohemian gentleman’…”
Also sprachen Vaughan Humphries – aka the Irascible Kiwi – whose valiant attempts to live up to the iconic status of New Zealand’s Grumpy Young Man are continuously subverted by a fatal and irredeemably cheerful optimism.
From grumpy to cheerful and back again. If only life was that simple ... but things are not quite as they seem ...
It was only not until he finished his undergraduate studies that he had an epiphany, when he started to make sense of a lot of things in his life that had never quite added up.
Vaughan was raised for a society that no longer exists. He is a man out of time with his generation, putting the world to right with peers that are old enough to be his parents and grandparents.
From his childhood in the suburbs of NaeNae in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, through to his arrival in England at the age of 22, Grumpy Young Man covers his curious life and times throughout all points of the globe.
Before you read on, a few words of caution ...
The first rule of Grumpy Young Man is that it never quite sticks to the point – it’s funny, irreverent, discursive, usually politically incorrect and definitely written from a male point of view.
The second rule of Grumpy Young Man is that it never even begins to stick to the point, so if you’re looking for a pointy sticky rulebook, don’t even think of reading any further.
Our only other line of defence against our larger metropolitan city was using Maori mythology. Apparently the North Island is the ‘Fish of Maui’, while the South Island was his canoe, and the southernmost island, Stewart Island, was his anchor. Maui was a demi-god in Maori mythology who carried out all sorts of tasks such as slowing the sun down by restraining it, and beating it to a pulp. He was not unlike Homer’s Odysseus, a bit of a wily character that used cunning and underhanded plans to succeed.
Maui managed to sneak on board his brothers’ canoe one day and went out fishing with them. After a while, he hooked a rather large fish, shaped like a stingray. He planted his foot on what is now Bank’s Peninsula, and hauled the fish to the surface. His magical fishhook, made out of the jawbone of his grandmother and then smeared with his own blood, is the curved bit of the North Island called Hawke’s Bay.
Seeing the fish was clearly a big catch, Maui went off to appease the other gods so that he might gift it to humankind. In the meantime, his brothers set to carving up the fish, creating the mountains and valleys. Now, like most religions and mythology, all this is a bit hard to swallow. The story was passed down orally through the generations, seeing the Maoris had no written language. What amazed me is if the Maoris had no written language, how did they know how the landmasses of New Zealand were shaped? That would require not only great navigational skill, but knowledge of cartography and longitude.
Fishermen are well renowned for their stories of the ‘one that got away’, but you have to admit, that this myth is a whopper. I wonder whether they had been drinking at the time. It has been presupposed that you can picture the ‘Fish of Maui’ from space, where Wellington is its head, with Wellington Harbour and Lake Wairarapa its eyes and New Plymouth and Gisborne its fins, which, anatomically speaking, makes Auckland its arsehole.
