Robyn’s Secret Passage

There’s this thing about how large shops put a lot of science behind the in-store music. Tunes are picked to quicken the pace during the busy times, and to inspire during quieter times.

Today I stopped in to Foodtang to pick up some toilet paper. It was very ordinary, very Thursday morning. A young woman spent so much time picking a basket that her boyfriend mistakenly started a conversation with the woman who’d walked in behind him, before stopping in embarrassment. A gesticulating woman near the meat department hit my shoulder as she pointed without looking where she was going. “Have you got a Foodtown card,” the checkout operator asked me as I was unzipping my bag. As I was leaving the store I noticed David Hartnell waiting at the information desk, clutching a Louis Vuitton manbag.

Then I realised what song had been playing the whole time I’d been in the supermarket. It was the Talking Heads’ ode to nihilism, “Road to Nowhere.”

From this point on, something has to change.

I stayed up too late last night watching the women’s shot put finals. I was initially interested in it because Valerie Adams had made it through to the final and I wanted to see how she’d do, but after I started watching it for a while, I noticed an interesting thing: there were a lot of competitors from ex-communist countries.

Yes, how we laughed during the ’70s and ’80s when the Iron Curtain ladymans would show up and grunt and heave their way to gold at the Olympics. Oh how we snickered as we saw the sweat glistening on their moustaches.

But a few years ago I saw a documentary about some women who, as teenaged swimmers in East Germany, had been given steroids. They were told that it was vitamins, but were a little alarmed when the vitamins seemed to make their voices deepen and bodies bulk up. They went on to Olympic victory, which theoretically proved communism’s supremacy. But some of them were now infertile, one had had a sex change.

In the women’s shot put final, six of the 12 competitors were from Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany, and indeed they took six of the places in the top seven (the silver medal went to a Cuban). Most of these women were born in the late ’60s or ’70s, making them the right age to have received some special vitamins, though it is worth noting that the two Belarus chicks were born in the early ’80s.

So are these top shot putting women remnants of communist-era steroid or hormone use? Or is it just that those countries have a really good history and tradition of shot putting? Perhaps it’s genetic. Or maybe a combination of all.

But it will be most interesting in, say, 10 years’ time when the old communist ladies have retired and the newer breed of non-vitamin-enhanced shot putters are in their place. They probably won’t get the same distances (the world record hasn’t changed since 1987, the Olympic record since 1980), but things will be a bit more exciting.

I saw a little bit of the Olympic opening ceremony this morning before work. The action briefly cut back to the New Zealand studio and one of the commentators mentioned that there had been complaints about the footage shown of the New Zealand team marching around the stadium.

Specifically, that flagbearer Beatrice Faumuina had barely been shown, with most of the shots being of other members of the team. The clips replayed showed a number of pretty blonde chicks up the front, smiling and waving.

The commentator apologised and said they were at the mercy of the international feed. But then I realised that if you were some dude sitting in a control room faced with the decision of which people to put the camera on, would you go for the stocky Samoan shot putter chick or the cute blonde girls?

Yeah, that’s right. The Olympic Games aren’t really about sport.

At work tonight I glanced up at the TV showing the captioned evening news bulletin. One of the opening teasers was for an item on Rick James’ death, which included a bit of the “Super Freak” video. The segment ended and the action cut to the studio, but the last caption from the Rick James item was still on screen. As the camera zoomed in on pretty blonde Bernadine, below her was captioned, “I really love to taste her.”

The blood donation squad were at work today. Apparently none of the other captioneurs and captioneusses had donated, so I thought I’d better get along there and squeeze out a few drops to help the sick kiddies, or whoever.

The squad had set up their tables and stuff in the marae. I’d never been in there before and was expecting, well, a marae, but it was just another ordinary office room. Not a woven panel or picture of someone’s great uncle to be seen.

A nurse took a pinprick of blood to check my iron level was ok, and indeed it was, so I got up on the deck chair while the technician dude got to work finding a vein.

My veins are notoriously hard to find. The last time I tried to give blood they couldn’t get the needle in a vein, so I had to leave without having done my bit to help the children. But this time the fellow managed to get the needle in and soon the thick plastic tube was filled with my warm dark blood.

He didn’t speak very good English, and what he said was heavily accented, so he’d tell me to do something, like to squeeze the plastic ball, and I wouldn’t really understand him. But, uh, it added to the fun of the experience.

On another deck chair another donor wasn’t having a good time. She had a wet cloth on her forehead, one person was holding a fan near her face and another was holding a plastic bucket under her chin as a potential vomit catcher. But the needle was still in her arm. She was still donating. She was still making life good for someone.

I remembered how on The Insiders Guide to Happiness that Matthew had been feeling a bit down and so gave blood which then ended up being given to Tina when she needed a transfusion. I briefly wondered if a similar thing would happen to me, but there was no Golden Egg/Lotto ticket parallel, so probably not.

The slow flow alarm sounded a few times, and the technician told me in his special English to pump the plastic ball. I pumped. I flowed. Soon enough the bag was filled with 475 ml of my blood.

I wanted a sticker, one of those ones that said “Be nice to me. I gave blood today” but they were no where to be seen. There was, however, the recovery table, well stocked with tea, coffee, Milo and a selection of fancy biscuits. They were all chocolate ones or creme-filled ones. Not a wine or nice biscuit in sight.

I made a Milo, sat down and began the recovery process. Then a nurse declared that the bickie box wasn’t full enough and tipped a packed of Chit Chats into it. Even though Chit Chats are a poor man’s Tim Tams, I felt the call of biscuits that were both chocolate and creme and continued, er, recovering from the arduous task of sitting in a chair and having a couple of cups of blood drained out of me.

With the recovery complete, I made my way back to my desk, happy in the knowledge that I’d done my bit for the children.