His manner is strange from the get-go. He doesn’t look me in the eye; he looks at his desk or off to the side of me as if I’m not really there.
And somehow, within two minutes of my arrival in this small, brown office in a provincial family medical centre, after briefly inquiring about my family medical history and without asking me why I want an abortion, he tells me I don’t meet the criteria. He won’t certify the abortion, because “this is not, and should not be, an abortion on demand society”.
Read MoreThere became something of a campaign in Kiwi boxing for Rohit Singh to fight someone real, someone he hadn’t handpicked, to see what would happen.
Craig Thomson made a series of offers of ranked Kiwi fighters. All, he says, were declined: “He wouldn’t fight anyone remotely close to having a pulse,” Thomson says.
Read MoreWe don't ask why they're here. Instead, we help them through the first recipe. For many of these guys, basic skills like properly measuring a cup of flour have to be taught – but they're happy to learn.
And we talk about what we do in the community, and that their baking is going to women's refuges.
One baker, Kahu*, nervously asks if the women know who it's coming from – they do.
Read MoreHe’s 34 now. And some days his pain is only at a two. Some days he can easily pick up his little boys. If he went back into manual work again he would end up in a wheelchair. He’s on a strict health plan that includes diet and exercise designed to try to simply maintain where he is. He won’t get better. There is no cure for this.
Read More"No." As death notices go, my sister's call on a winter's day two years ago was a bit on the succinct side but it conveyed the essential information. Well, I thought, that's how it goes. It hadn't exactly come as a big surprise. We'd been expecting it for a while. And so I got on with my day – work, feeding the cats, reading YOU WON'T BELIEVE lists online – in a glum mood, nothing more. The next day I fell to pieces.
Read MoreHad the operation happened within 14 days - as it was meant to - Peter could have expected to return to work within two days.
Because it didn’t, Peter is missing half his face, sleeps in a van, cannot work, and lives off $400 a week. He was given a 10 per cent chance of surviving five years. That five years just expired; he’s now on borrowed time.
Read MoreIn the pantheon of jobs I’ve endured in the pursuit of less unhappiness, reporting on All Blacks weddings for a newspaper was vastly more soul-destroying than screwing in the same screw 1000 times a day on a computer assembly line. It left me feeling considerably less clean than my days as a cable layer – a job that involved actually being covered in dog manure most days.
I hated it with every fibre of my being.
Read MoreMore than two years later, she struggles to name the date of her exit.
“It was on leap year day, in—what’s the second month, sorry?”
That’s February. Where she grew up, the months and days of the week have only numbers, not names. She never knew her siblings’ birthdays—no one gets to stand out and be celebrated. ”No one should be made special.”
Read MoreBy the end of my decade and a half long bender, the shakes were bad enough I couldn't get the first couple of drinks from glass to mouth without spilling it everywhere. The trick was to make a quick diversion home en route from work to pub, improvise a sling from a bath-towel or t-shirt to hold one arm steadily in place, and wrestle to my lips a sufficient quantity to quell the shakes: precisely two cans of beer.
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