Grumpy old buggers needed

He was the newspaper boy, the delivery boy.

But then he BECAME the news. He became a national incident. And all because one small error of judgment.

On his round that day he did what every newspaper delivery boy does and folded a copy and tucked it within itself.

It became a projectile, a missile.

Normally it would land with a reassuring ‘thomp’ on the veranda, or in a driveway. Not today though.

ere was only a small margin of error with sash windows and glass panel doors.

And out of the 5.45am darkness there was a resounding crash and splintering of glass as a hefty metropolitan daily sailed over the veranda, the intended target, and through the nursery window.

e closed nursery window.

All hell breaks loose. A baby starts squawking, a mother starts screaming, lights ash on and doors start banging. A bleary eyed dad tries to restore order out of pandemonium!

Call the cops, call the newspaper, call someone!

And there on the nursery oor, amongst the glass and domestic chaos, was the evidence, the o ending and misdirected newspaper with an image of the new 800 metre Olympic gold medallist Peter Snell staring up at them. Of course, word got out and everyone, the vulture media that is, wanted a piece of that poor newspaper delivery boy, slash villain, slash scoundrel, slash disruptor of the peace.

He very wisely went to ground.

And as you could imagine, all around the country, health and safety committees probably went into emergency session formulating ‘best practice’ and ‘protocols’ for newspaper delivery boys. Rule 1: No indiscriminate or random tossing of newspapers. ey must be delivered to letterboxes. ey will have excised the one element of enjoyment of being a newspaper delivery boy. row and be damned I say.

e newspaper boy probably executed

49 perfectly tossed newspapers that day – but no-one lauded him for his 49 perfectly directed deliveries. ey vilify him for one dud chuck.

Now how did we get here? Well because this ‘old fart’ who writes e Weekend Sun found himself delivering it too.

I was mucking in.

At best, a break in the routine. At worst a few digits covered in printers’ ink and a bit of bad language trying to navigate the unnavigable retirement homes around Pyes Pa. “It’s easy,” said the woman at 45c. “Down there, turn right, up the slope. It’s the cream place on the right with the pot plants.” Well, they’re all cream, and they’ve all got pot plants.

Now you multi-task in small companies where demarcation is a dirty word. If someone goes down then everyone steps

Whoops!

up. For example the accountant, who’s dog sitting for someone else, also becomes the receptionist and the receptionist dresses down and turns up two hours early to do deliveries too.

Everyone pitches in. And so on this day I became a 73-year-old, geriatric, Weekend Sun newspaper delivery boy.

It’s humbling.

ere was one moment on my round.

I was dropping o a pile of my carefully crafted words when an old fellow, whose manner was clipped as short as his moustache, asked if I knew the person who writes Page 2? “Disgusting,” he snorted. “He’s actually a lovely guy,” I said of myself. ”But I will pass on your disgust.” I suspect he’s not a ‘sitzpinkler’, nor does he want a stadium. I didn’t wait to nd out. I scuttled o . e day continued downwards - because suddenly I was confronted with my mortality. I realised that 63 years ago, as a 10-year-old, I was doing exactly the same thing – I was delivering newspapers in the steep, cold, dark, unforgiving hillside suburbs of Dunedin. My life had gone the full cycle. I am nishing as I started. e di erence was that 63 years ago I would trudge through a numbing sou’westerly delivering newspapers on foot, then school, then football practice and then I would cycle half an hour home in the half dark. My day and mood started and nished in gloom.

But last Friday I took a car round the delivery route and, even then, I needed a grandad nap that afternoon.

A mate remarked “ at’s pretty much it Jim – you only get to do one lap in life. ere are no second trips. You’ve crossed life’s start nish line.”

I was also reminded of another dark bit of advice from the mate. We had lost an old work colleague of many years and ‘mate’ suggested we needed to see more of each another, while we could.

“Seems the Grim Reaper is doing his recruiting in our corner of the paddock these days Jim. And we don’t want to shu e o with regrets.” I was feeling vulnerable, my low fuel light had just icked on.

He tried to make me feel better by suggesting I “looked quite good for 73”. But how does that help? When you’re lying on the slab with a toe tag that reads Jim Bunny, I don’t think it matters how good you look.