I’m old enough to vividly remember every election since 1949, which ushered in the first National government.

Professional gloomster Bernard Hickey, who it will be recalled spectacularly wrongly picked an imminent Auckland house price crash a decade back and sold up saying he would shift to Wellington, is at it again.

The Guardian Weekly ran an amusing cartoon recently.

A thought-inducing story for gullible New Zealander’s appeared in Britain’s Financial Times.

Of all the silly speech affectations of the past few decades (it’s an inexplicable modern phenomenon) probably nothing is as bad as “window of opportunity”. In recent years this frequently has been shortened to just “window”.