Blog 16 - From a Villa in Grey Lynn - To the late great Johnny Fay and Mrs. Smith and Ann

I was in the sauna at the Olympic pool on Wednesday with my 67-year-old friend Nina, who used to be a Chinese ballet dancer. She is still Chinese but not a ballet dancer anymore, and she is teaching me how to stretch and bang certain points of my body with my fists.

As we lay supine, I told her the Olympic pool will remain under the careful custodianship of Johnny Fay’s merry men for another 11 years. A smile alighted on her mouth, unaccompanied by any crinkling of the facial flesh, as she burst into Chinese, telling her very elderly friends sitting behind us in their saggy rompers that I had saved the pool. They all beamed at me and thanked me profusely. One very old one poked me in the back, smiling with the toothless charm of an elderly child while indicating with hand signals that she’ll be 94 by then.

I tried to tell my fan club that I had done nothing at all to contribute to this successful outcome, but if the wicked council had succeeded in stealing our pool from Johnny’s merry men, I had fully intended to mobilize our supporters of every age, culture, and gender to march around Broadway in their togs and rompers.

By way of a bit of background, John Fay, as anyone who knew him knew, had, in true Robin Hoodian style, battled the council for many years as they tried to wrestle his lease on the Olympic pool from him.

“Why should we extend your lease?” they toyed with him. “Even though you successfully run the only public pool in the country that doesn’t cost the ratepayer a brass razoo, even though you are prepared to spend millions of dollars of your own money to upgrade, seismic strengthen, and improve the pool while still keeping it open, why should we extend your lease?”

“We want to take your pool over ourselves. We want the ratepayer to subsidise your pool to the tune of a million dollars annually, like they do at some of our pools. We want to penalise the 8,000 members of your pool family by shutting the pool for at least two years for remedial work. We want the ratepayer, not you, to pay for all these works.”

Now, I may not be the sharpest pencil in the case, but in what business model does the business losing money make a successful takeover bid for the one making money?

The Olympic too is much more than a business. It is the best and, in many cases, the only constant in many people’s lives, keeping them mentally and physically well and happy.

So this begs the question: Does our council really care about us or show any fiscal responsibility for the money we entrust them with?

The story of the Olympic has opened the curtain on a play of such incompetent intrigue it simply beggars belief. Let this story be a cautionary tale for the 64% of eligible voters who didn’t care enough to vote in the last council election, one of whom I confess, was yours truly.

We are simply bad parents playing truant from our civil responsibilities, and hence we have mayhem in the school corridors.

It was only a last-minute appeal by the Waitemata Board that gave our pool a stay of execution.

So thank you to the Waitemata Board for the courage you showed in voting against the council’s recommendations. Thank you too to all those who cared enough to write to the powers that be in defense of our pool.

Let’s learn from this and force the curtains of the council plays open so we can watch every play we are paying for. Let us shoot the baddies, clap for the goodies, and be proud of a script we are, each of us in our small way, writing...

And long may the merry men continue fighting for the community on behalf of the late great Johnny Fay, who will be diving for band-aids and hair elastics in his little black speedos for another 11 years and, God willing, beyond.

The legend, Johnny Fay