This is my photo of the good ship Arahura, on its last voyage in commercial service, linking the North and South Islands in New Zealand. It is coming into Wellington Harbour, after leaving Picton three hours earlier, and I’m standing on the Eastbourne side of the harbour as it approaches the dock in Thorndon, where I used to live. I’ve forgotten which year it was, but it was well before the pandemic.

So this is the last blog post, for what it’s worth. I had intended to end this time last year, but the domain auto-renewed, so I kept it going. The cost goes up each year, and now WordPress expect me to pay tax on a blog that I never earnt any income from. If it had been successful maybe I could have earned a bit, but I didn’t want any advertising on it. And while there seemed to be quite a few page views, especially of the early posts, that didn’t indicate whether people really read it or that it was successful at all. It started off as an outlet for some empirical research, when I was doing a PhD at a university that had claimed to be interested in journalism, if not the study of tax havens, but in the end had no interest in original empirical research at all, let alone how the media reported tax havens and money laundering in New Zealand (or didn’t as the case may be).

In more recent times I have paid tribute to deceased international musicians, and written about the increasingly disastrous Covid policy response in New Zealand. I don’t regret that, despite the fact that anybody who questions the policies of the outgoing government, and Ardern’s authoritarian tendencies, is called a conspiracy theorist. It so happens that other bloggers, now mostly on the Substack platform, have been requesting official information, and highlighting how poorly the Covid policy was formulated and implemented, in spite of the official blockade on criticism, the over-zealous academic experts, and the news media name-callers.

So I may go back to historical research, and try to finalise some old book projects, for a rather smaller audience. Or I might just make a trip back to the South Island, on another ferry, take my old film cameras and drift into semi-retirement. To quote Robert Hunter: “such a long long time to be gone, but a short time to be there” [Grateful Dead, ‘Box of Rain’, American Beauty, 1970].