You can only choose the least bad option

7.50am

A very good morning from More Than A Feilding, the newsletter that identifies as a long-tailed bat. What a great day to be a thing that flies and has teeth and is not what people look for in an award-winner. 

Morning Report has announced that the Bird of the Year for Delta21 is by a wide margin the pekapeka-tou-roa.

I’m fully into it.

In other years I put my heart and soul into campaigning for the Kokako. It still and forever is my first choice.

But let it just be noted: the Phantom of the Forest, the Grey Ghost, mostly does short little glides from one tree to another and then hops and jumps its way back up the branches to regain height. So with respect at least to flying, that award-winning bat is more Bird than my beloved Kokako.

Please enjoy this footage of former Bird of the Year Kokako being ineffably beautiful and entirely non-airborne.

8.10am

Morning Report is reading out wearyingly pedantic objections about taxonomy and other questions of award-giving propriety like you’re supposed to be picking Bird of the Year as carefully as they pick the nation's top sports person and give me strength it's just a bit of inspired ecological campaigning.

The pedants and the mansplainers and the inexhaustibly irate will always be with us.

Saturday afternoon I got on the Twitter to roll my eyes.

Cue sundry mansplainers, pedants and bitter denialists putting up their specious objections. They don't make themselves easy to love. I looked at the profile of one, carrying the assertion he was proudly self-employed and you got the feeling he might be making a virtue of a necessity.

Hello sundry angry people, can I offer you a couple of thoughts to chew on and maybe dilute that bile a little bit?

Freedom is not some FlyBuys card for brandishing to get you waved through. 

You might imagine you’re making some solemn incantation when you say: 
I’m allowed to do this because Freedom
or 
You can’t stop me doing this, because Freedom

But that’s not how it works.

What we understand to be our freedoms come with qualifications and limitations and obligations, all of them the product of arrangements we’ve made in order to live together in a civil democracy.

And so no, you will not be free to come into designated places if you're not  prepared to do what's necessary to stop the spread of a deadly disease. And yes, it is deadly. And no, it’s not an unproven crazy experimental vaccine. And no, I will not be responding to your tweets.

9.25am

Reader Mark Graham - hi Mark!- gets on the Twitter to make a solid point about the dopey tuneless song that goes come to Auckland and see for yourself Prime Minister.

Tbh she seems quite visible to me and fronts regularly. The only thing these numpties want is for Arden to come to Auckland so plan B ‘business leaders’ can yell at her. She’s in contact with many of these people already. This is just another cheap attack.  

God save us, does anyone genuinely believe she doesn’t comprehend the frustration and hardship of all this? You’d have to have rocks in your head if you had not by now grasped how keenly she feels and relates to people’s distress.

She said this morning on the radio:

There is not a moment that I am not thinking about how I can bring life back safely for Auckland, not a moment

and that would have to be the least surprising thing you've ever heard from her, because even the most woeful of leaders would be wired into this. 

The only reason we are in this position is because we have to choose the least worst of bad options and she knows it and we know it.

What would change as a consequence of the PM coming here to see and hear for herself how living with the least bad option is still pretty shit? Absolutely nothing. 

10.00am

Have been putting off making coffee in case some Italian soldier is already making us a short black. But there’s no sound of marching up the drive so I go ahead and do it myself.

Yes, really. Italian troops. This is the kind of swivel-eyed stuff that is keeping fevered minds warm down there in the rabbit holes right now. Wait until they come back up and discover we've turned the bats into birds.

11.00am

Day Seventy something and still pretty shit here in lockdown. 

But on the upside the raindemic seems to have taken a break, the sun is shining, and someone has made a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode for that complete Dud Root of a Prime Minister Scomo. 

Poor Scomo.

12.30

We all make mistakes, and here at More Than A Feilding it’s not a bug, it’s a goddam feature. So let me correct a couple, helpfully pointed out to me because the readers here are the very sharpest. Thank you Michael, thank you Helen, thank you Winston, thank you all.

Correction 1: The correct spelling is draught, not draft.

Correction 2: There's probably no egg in a Croque Monsieur. Although I did check with Mr Google before I made it an option in Friday's quiz to ask which of these is not an ingredient and well, le voila.

But I should have just said bread instead.

2.00pm

Pupdate!

Readers may recall the SOS of a few weeks ago from Clan Macdonald for their little dog out of reach on the other side of the border. Success! Yesterday the Pet Express rolled into Auckland and various animals were united with their humans. 

3.00pm

So long, then, Dame Cath Tizard. You really were one in a million. Did anyone who ever met her not find themselves smiling? She had a truly winning way. 

4.00pm

Time to hear what the PM has to say.

Hottest take: whatever way you look at it, the thing that matters most continues to be Vaccinate, Vaccinate, Vaccinate, lean in harder, get the remaining work done.

The more vaccinated we are, the less awful things get. You can only choose the least bad option.

Fortunately there’s a newsletter every day, so we can talk about it all the rest of it tomorrow.