Maree’s musings – Happy days!

By Maree Roy

As the end of the year approaches, it seems we need to find excuses to celebrate. Like just last week [as I write this] when Monday turned up and Black Friday was still on the go! Traditionally, Black Friday marks the start of shopping madness, but it looks like consumers needed more time this year. Of course it may be a plot hatched by retail outlets to take over Cyber Monday, invented in 2005 to persuade people to shop online.

I’m not one for shopping, I confess, but I do enjoy the occasional shindig. This delightful word possibly stemmed from the Gaelic sinteag [to leap about] and is very apt for this month’s column. Rest assured, I don’t make a habit of leaping about, by the way, but Dunedin’s annual ‘Edinburgh Festival’ was worth a visit. Harking back to Dunedin’s extensive Scottish heritage, it’s traditionally celebrated around St Andrew’s Day, and the bigwigs in charge were fine with borrowing it.

So I took myself off to the Octagon where the impressive bronzed (though not from sunburn) statue of Robbie Burns, the traditional landing stage for the city’s screeching seagulls, watched benignly over the festivities. Tartan kilts abounded despite the ten degrees temperature. Yep, summer’s coming! Various contests included a race to finish a bowl of cold porridge, chucking the caber and hefting huge concrete balls onto barrels. There were bagpipes; an Ode to the Haggis. And singing and dancing, naturally. All good fun.

Other saints have their day in the sun as well. There’s St Martin’s Day, also in November, where geese feature on the menu. Apparently he didn’t want to be a bishop, so hid in a goose pen, but when their cackling gave the show away, Martin was discovered. He survived but not the hapless geese. This reminds me of the old nursery rhyme

‘Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat.

Please to put a penny in the old man’s hat.’

Of course, it’s turkey or chicken nowadays. Maybe someone had more than a ‘wee dram’ and got the days mixed up!

November 19^th is World Toilet Day. Like me, I imagine, you’re thinking ‘WHAT!!!’ I just had to sort this one. When I stopped sniggering, that is. I now know it’s been celebrated since 2013 as one of the United Nations’ collection of sustainable development goals: to have a dunny and clean water for everyone worldwide by 2030.

And getting to the bottom of this story, good news! Thanks to Covid, the giant inflatable toilet on the front lawn of the UN headquarters in New York had been dismantled, but after three years, it’s back! Standing four metres high, this colossal loo is a magnet for crowds and the inevitable selfies are then shared on social media, tagged #WorldToiletDay. What a great way to raise awareness of an important issue. I think so, anyway.

Well, that’s all from me for 2022. Next year … what it will bring? Here’s hoping we’ll find some good times to celebrate. Happy Days!