A memoir of bureaucratic warfare.

I am working on something different.

To begin at the beginning, as Dylan Thomas put it:

As a young bureaucrat, I did not like meetings: I preferred to get things done, rather than wasting time discussing Plans for a Policy on getting Things Done, 

but to keep myself from erupting, I carried a pad and a fine pen into each meeting, and doodled. As a biologist, I knew how to use stipple to draw animals like this one. (Stippling is monochrome pointillism with a pen, and each has no lines, just dots.)

Andronicus, hatless.

Mostly, I began drawing a sphere because I was trying to master shading, but the spheres invariably went wrong, and morphed into strange heads that I changed into birds with bent beaks and often, to hide wrong starts, I gave them crash helmets.

At home, I amused my children with the tales of Andronicus Duck, who wore the helmet due to a fear of low level bridges, and bent his beak when he landed badly. The weight of the helmet meant Andronicus usually needed some sort of flotation device.

I also introduced them to Victor, the Rotorua Moa and a small budget of other dotty characters. 

Back at the meetings, I would comment only occasionally, but this stippling distracted the drones who would otherwise have stopped the meeting going anywhere, and before long, a like-minded colleague and I realised that the idiots sitting each side of me spent more time watching my work than in vapouring and sowing confusion.

As the colleague (Ian Munro) was a true artist, he took to sitting opposite me, between two more clowns while drawing fanciful seascapes. Thus we knocked out four numpties, giving the Sensible People the upper hand, most of the time.

One day, though, I was completing the duck pair on the left, and one of the numpties asked why the following duck was smaller than the other. Ian had made a joke earlier about renting a couple of easels for our work, and I had asked where we might find a lessor of two easels? So I was primed.

I replied “They are actually both eagles in witness protection." Then pointing at the follower, I declared: "And that is the lesser of two eagles."

As Ian and I gained a reputation as doers who could get things going, we were both promoted, and I found myself managing higher-powered people of varying quality. Once, I sat in a committee with two urbane and educated people and one idiot. Having been instructed not to rush an action, I said “So in other words, festina lente?”

The clever ones smiled and nodded, but the idiot chimed in “What does that mean?”

It is worth noting here that I have some facility in Latin, and I use it to confuse. Extreme case, importunate sales types and religious door-knockers are greeted with mater tua caligas gerit, which means ‘your mother wears army boots’. This is clearly more than nonsense syllables, and I have quite enough phrases to make them run away. Latin-as-a-weapon is fun! Excreta tauri cerebrum, vincit.

I grinned inside: I had a Gotcha, and answered. “Get rotten during Lent. It was a favourite saying of the emperor Augustus. These days it just means ‘hasten slowly’.” The clever ones kept straight faces. (They both later found me interesting jobs.)

In those higher strata of administration, I could not really doodle while my betters and superordinates were speaking, but I could make the notes that, forty years ago, set this work in motion.

Think of Ambrose Bierce, brought up to date to take in higher mathematics, lower mathematics, quantum physics, music, art and philosophy, which are all treated with scant respect. Here, there are puns, misleading origins (feghoots, which are like punny shaggy dogs: look them up) and remarkably dubious scholarship, derived over 40 years of sitting in boring committee and board meetings: one learns to look busy, and shows great wisdom.

What is a feghoot? Here are three short examples:
1. A culture vulture is a person who can listen to the entire William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger. In passing, William Tell was extremely fast as a runner, and in the Tyrol, whenever somebody is praised for running fast, they will say, self-deprecatingly, ‘If you think I’m fast, time Will Tell!’.

2. law and order. In actual fact, much easier to maintain than the conservative authorities would like to admit. Recent research has shown that a significant number of different events must occur simultaneously to cause a real tumult, and that two wrongs do not make a riot.

3. rabbit. A small and over-sexed mammal. They are rare in some areas, as the female rabbits prefer to mate with roosters, which is the origin of the ‘Easter Bunny’ legend. To achieve this result, a rabbit must first associate with hens, to acquire a suitable smell, after which they move in with the rooster, but it does not last, for a fowl and his bunny are soon parted.

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* forewarn:

handiped. An unfortunate individual with a birth deformity, resulting in the person having a second pair of arms, complete with hands, where the legs should be. The most famous recorded handiped was an Icelandic Viking called Thorfinn the Legless, who sailed to Greenland with Erik the Red. While he was necessarily diminutive, Thorfinn was extremely dangerous in battle, as he came in low, wielding one shield and three weapons. The mere sight of Thorfinn’s unique helmet with four horns was a cause of fear to other Vikings, giving rise to the saying four-horned is four-armed.