Little choice in a barrel of rotten apples
And just as a see-saw has a single point that acts as a fulcrum, so this column has a single word. It is a word of one syllable, a word that you will find in every language, a word without which things wouldn't work. It's the word that rules the world.
On this page, two months ago, I was the king in his counting house, counting out his money. I rubbed my fat little hands together and I gloated. I cackled over my wealth. I was Dives. I was Croesus. I was every rich man ever. Because I had apples.
For the first time in years I had a tree full of them, which I'd protected from the ravages of possums by means of a mass of netting held together with cable ties. Houdini couldn't have got through it.
The only apples the possums could get to were fruit that hung hard up against the netting. These they grasped with their little paws and nibbled at unsatisfactorily through the mesh.
To drum home the fact of their exclusion, I baited a trap nearby with apple, and the possums fell for the irony by the dozen. I would wake most mornings to find one stiff and dead.
Smugly I quoted Keats and the Bible on the subject of apples. I reminded the world what an apple a day did for medical expenses.
In short I revelled in my apples: sweet, plump, globular, free and mine all mine. To the orchardist the spoils.
But ... and there you have it: the fulcrum of the seesaw. You sensed it coming, and you were right to do so.
For few things can be so utterly relied on in this world as the word "but".
But is the leveller. It smooths out the excesses. It dampens joy but (you see) it also soothes misery. In all things there is always a but. The but is built in.
The biggest but of all, the buttest of buts, is death. It undercuts every triumph, but (yes yes) it ends all suffering as well.
Imagine a world in which Trump didn't die, a world where he just went on going on. All griefs fade, but (there we go again) so do all joys.
But embodies a notion older than any religion. It is the wheel of fortune, the most ancient and enduring philosophy of mankind, not as a television game show with a grinning fraud of a presenter, but as an observation of life's mutability.
The wheel is always turning. And the best place to be is at the bottom, because from there you can only go up.
"Fortune good night," Kent says in King Lear when he has been unjustly put in the stocks.
"Smile once more. Turn thy wheel." And it did.
Correspondingly the worst place to be is at the top of the wheel, gloating over a crop of apples.
They grew huge. The largest is the size of a Labrador's skull. I don't know when you last ate a Labrador's skull, but I've been doing at least one a day for the last month or so. I'm sick of them. And I still have hundreds.
And those hundreds are ageing and softening and becoming floury. The obvious solution is to give them away, to feel the joys of generosity.
But that has proved harder than you might think. People have trees of their own. Or they see the Lab-skull size and they say they'll take one.
Worse, they have crops of their own that they want to palm off. They foist their wasp-hollowed plums on me, their pears like cricket balls. I seek less fruit not more.
The other solution would be to preserve. This time of the year my mother would make jar upon jar of blackberry and apple, that would reappear in midwinter as a crumble or a pie.
But the process of preservation involved pans, jars, skill and patience that I haven't got and have no plans to acquire.
The same is true of jam-making. It all serves to remind me that I am poorly equipped for the reality of this world, hopelessly dependent on supermarkets and other people.
And thus my crop lies rotting, my smugness with it. The see has sawn. But rules the world.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
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