One of the heroes of my childhood was Sir Apirana Ngata (1874-1950).

I admit to looking for more photo likenesses of him than most Kiwis. Even SWMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed is also my Bank Manager) admires him every day on our Fifty dollar notes – much more appropriate than King Charles 3rd. But I digress…

This is not supposed to be an obituary, but more to indicate how important he was and more importantly how seriously we previously accepted his famous historic judgements.

That is what might get me into trouble with the editorial censors but this Te Reo revival by Government has now gone too far. I wonder if it is just to qualify for their share of the $55 million Government bribe? i.e. I have given up watching/listening to the TV weather as I am not sure where I live any longer.

Today I was struggling to interpret the Dominion newspaper – Sorry – TE UPOKO-O-TE-IKA as on the back page they listed the religious information bulletin for their faithful worshippers, such as the teams for the KAPA O PANGO ki AHITEREIRIA. OK?

It explained the game is being held at Poipiripi at He pahotanga i Puna hei te 9.20pm. and lists match officials – i.e. the Kaiwawao is Mathieu Raynal (Wiwi), Kaiwawao tautoko: Andrew Brace (Airani) etc….. That is about where my patience expired.

TRM often invites fishy VIP guests from West Island keen to watch the big games. But today, when I showed them the back page teams they decided they no longer wanted to watch it. They thought these things were getting desperate in Australia until they saw what we have to endure. So they made a stand, drew a line, declined the invite, whatever, and TRM’s new 50″ sky TV with nine speakers is now being boycotted. These tourist inmates have stayed here many times in the past 18 years and we enjoyed Bledisloe Cup tests with them – it was probably better than being at the game. Previously any NZ/Aussie test match was looked forward to with excited anticipation but now, sadly, I will be watching it almost alone – Juno is keen on rugby too.

(No doubt it will have occurred to you that they may have used this boycott as an excuse for the threat of losing again?)

Which brings me back to Sir Apirana Ngata who memorably advised his people: “The first subject in order of priority in the school curriculum is English, the second most important subject is English, and the third most important subject is English.”

Where did we go wrong? It is time for my therapy so I am going fishing to recover.