November 21st, 2025Kyle’s Rant

I shake my head in the general direction of the TV as an advert comes on promoting skincare for the three-plus year-old crowd.
Rini is a new product from some Instagram mummy group trying to get rich off frightening other Insta-mummies into putting facemasks on their children. FFS. It’s called youth and it will take care of itself. God provided youthful skin, fearless behaviour and a positive view of the world just for babies. But it seems to be sacrilege to gather wrinkles and the rigours of time on one’s face as you age.
As a kid I lived in a rural fishing village in the top of the north island in New Zealand where Dad had leased a barn on a farm which abutted a harbour.
One memory that sticks out was at the age of four, one of my many “complimentary aunties” calling out from the long drop for some toilet paper. Now, at the time I was dragging an old case around the farm pretending I was a train and what better job for the train than to load it with a toilet roll and deliver it to my toilet captive. After about half an hour I finally arrived at my destination after a few stops en route, and with my auntie by then quite desperate for me to arrive.
My two sisters and I shared a caravan awning as a bedroom – we watched the six-inch black and white TV with one channel and a picture that always rolled, from Mum and Dad’s bed in the caravan as there was no lounge. We played in and around sheep dips, cattle yards, wharves and crawled around the hulls of rusty old boats and barges. Our money came from selling pipis, eels and rubbish salvaged from the local dump to drunk fisherman and cockies who would pass our gate from the pub 50 metres up the road. Our shower was a quick fill of hot water from the jug mixed into a watering can – pull on the rope and get third degree burns or hypothermia.
The only skin routine mum used on us was butter on burns and dad cutting a small incision into your foot when you picked up one of his fishhooks in your foot.
As a school-aged child, I endured playgrounds that had hard dirt under the monkey bars to encourage you not to fall, metal slides that in the summer would require an egg slice to release you from the bottom. I withstood skateboards made from salvaged and sometimes illegally procured parts that would throw you 20 metres after pulling up on a small rock. And then there was many a bicycle accident caused by loose chains and the wobbles. Not to mention the jumps.
As a young teenager I took on a paper round, and then a milk round which was more profitable. Sometimes the two would coincide so I dumped the newspapers down the creek. There was a lot of milk-money being stolen in those days and the only guy who wasn’t suspected of the theft was the milkman. Yours truly would come up to a bunch of bottles in the dark and take the money for myself, rendering the resident milk-less. This is not something I am totally proud of, but when there is no food in the cupboard at home it was about survival.
As I grew older and more civilised, I survived the 80s where a deckchair could go off like a beartrap plus the continous inhalation of second-hand cigarette smoke. Then there were the heated-up seatbelts which provided a nasty burn from the buckle on a hot day, not to mention the vinyl seats which stuck to the back of your legs.
I didn’t get to a nightclub until I was well into my 20s, a drunken dance at the local hall was our scene. Trying to avoid cigarettes being put out on your face, not through an exercise in torture, just your mates wielding the things while dancing. At one dance I picked up a bottle to guzzle down some beer but unfortunately it had become the designated ashtray and I ended up with a mouth full of cigarette butts.
Now I’m not saying you should put your children through all this, but I think a lot of Gen Xers would agree with me that the parent pendulum has swung too far the other way. Wrinkled rant over…