How are you?

A standard greeting in New Zealand is “how are you?” (How are yer mate?)

And a standard response to that is “good”

In fact this response is so standard that people often just say “how are yer mate, good?” and get the preliminaries sorted out faster.

After seeing a subtle nod of the head, the person inquiring can then wrap things up themselves by saying “Good on yer mate”

This week a friend asked me how I was in an email.

And this was my response – he probably wished he hadn’t asked…

"Two weeks ago @kiwideb came down with a sort of flu like thing and felt like crap. I had to do everything for a couple of days and managed to put my back out really badly – as in I could barely walk and was reduced to crawling, and then I also came down with the same thing she had.

Then her dad died and she had to help arrange the funeral. Her brother was flying in from Dubai but his plane broke down. He managed to get another flight via Melbourne and got here with not a minute to spare.

I had just managed to get to the point where I could barely walk down the front path to the street and we all got zoomed out to Lower Hutt in her nephews Honda Integra while I tried not to whimper every time the car hit a bump.

After a full on day of funeraling I was all finished up. But then I got a call to say my dad had just died as well.

Now I’m helping to arrange his very basic funeral (he wasn’t into that kind of stuff) and I can still barely walk.

As far as my dad goes I’m actually relieved that he has finally passed on because the state he was in (severe dementia) was far worse than being dead.

What a week!"

A photo of one of New Zealand's biggest hydro electric lakes, Lake Twizel, by my father Harry Gregson

(Twizel is the largest town in the Mackenzie District, in the Canterbury Region of New Zealand's South Island. The town was founded in 1968 to house construction workers on the Upper Waitaki Hydroelectric Scheme)

This is what I wrote for the funeral tomorrow:

Harry Gregson

It’s been such a long time since Harry was his full self that I have to think way back to how he used to be.

It’s hard to remember now, and I don’t think any of the nurses at the rest home could really have imagined any of this, but for most of his life, my dad was defined by his fitness.

He was into squash, tennis, badminton, walking, hiking, cycling and mountain biking. He completed one of New Zealand’s toughest mountain bike races, the Karapoti Classic, aged 60.

Pretty much every day he played squash and was consistently in the top five players at Tawa squash club for over 30 years.

At the squash club, the top players tended to be fairly elitist and most didn’t want to play with anyone who wasn’t as good as them. Dad was the exception, he would play with anyone, helping beginners to improve and explaining key tactics in a way that often rapidly transformed their game.

He designed many of the hydro-electric generators that now produce most of New Zealand’s electric power.

As an engineer he was always into the maths and the theory rather than the practical stuff. Back in the days when most engineers used slide rules, he was one of the first to get a new invention called a calculator.

Sometimes he liked to try and fix real stuff – cars, bikes, things around the house, but because that was practical rather than theoretical, some of the results were not that great.

On one occasion he decided to change the engine oil in his car. Unfortunately he drained the oil out of the gearbox rather than the engine, and then poured four liters of fresh oil into the engine.

As fate would have it, it was me who was first to drive the car. As I drove down the street it was making a horrible crunching sound from the gear box having no oil in it, and clouds of smoke were coming out of the engine which was totally flooded with twice as much oil as it was meant to have.

It was moments like this that inspired me to later become a mechanic.

Long ago he had a Triumph 650 Tiger motorbike and in more recent years he drove a Subaru Impreza. Once he managed to crash his motorbike on the motorway and break both his arms.

And once, while out tramping with mum, he slipped off a log while crossing a river and broke his leg.

This was in the days before cell phones, and the only option was to get hopping. He hopped for two hours and eventually got to the car park.

When he finally got to hospital, with his leg swollen up massively from all the hopping, a doctor told him his leg couldn’t possibly be broken because you can’t hop with a broken leg, so he should go home and put ice on it.

Eventually they agreed to x-ray it and found it was broken clean through.

Years later I broke my own leg falling off my mountain bike and had to hop for about two minutes. A doctor said the exact same thing to me, and then later apologised when my leg turned out to be broken.

What doctors don’t seem to understand is that if you are lying there with a broken leg, hopping is your only option. But even so, I am in awe of two hours – two minutes was beyond hard.

He played both mandolin and guitar, and he liked to listen to Spanish and Flamenco guitar music.

Although we all mourn death, I think he would have chosen to move on, he had been hopping for long enough, and it’s time now for him to rest in peace.

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MY MINIMILIST STEEMIT SIGNATURE

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