Midwinter Musings
Mark Honeychurch - 7th July 2025
I had a fun time this weekend with friends coming over to my house to celebrate Christmas. No, this email hasn’t been delayed six months, or arrived from the future - it’s July, not December. Like me, most of the friends that came over on the weekend are from the Northern hemisphere, and there’s something that just feels right about having a second Christmas celebration every year when the weather’s cold and miserable, just like it was in the “good old days”. We eat brussels sprouts and roast potatoes, drink mulled wine, and open presents - all while the TV plays YouTube videos with cheesy Christmas songs as the audio track and logs burning on an open fire as the video track. For one of our few Southern hemisphere guests, Aaron, not only is this mid-year “Midwinter Christmas” an alien idea, but he also never celebrated the usual December 25th Christmas when he was growing up. This is because he was brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness, and they famously avoid celebrating events like Christmas, Easter and birthdays. I met Aaron through the NZ Humanists a while after he’d “faded” from the organisation, and it’s been great to be there to see him find his feet and move on with his life since then.
I mention Aaron because he’s written the first article in this issue of our newsletter, talking about a fun experiment he ran a few years ago seeing if myself and some friends could differentiate between a selection of diet colas. Being involved in a blind experiment, where we didn’t know which drink was which, was fascinating to me as a practical example of why blinding is important, and how much of our confidence in what we know is assumed, and at times can be unfounded. So, to try and explain this, I’ve attempted to write about what I learned from this experiment in my own article.
Bronwyn has done the work I should have done for my Ringing Cedars article a couple of issues ago, looking into whether this weird Russian “Anastasianism” group has made inroads into New Zealand. I’ve dug up the bones of a complaint I made to the ASA almost 10 years ago - a complaint that was disappointing not so much because of the fact that I lost (and then lost again in the appeal), but more because of what I learned from MedSafe about some of the bad decisions that were made back in 1981 when the Medicines Act came into force. And finally Bronwyn has looked into some of the weird and wonderful legal implications of cryonics and the ownership of dead bodies. One of the many things I learned from her article is that burial at sea is legal, which is great to know as I really like the idea of my dead body being disposed of in this way - no fuss, just unceremoniously dumped into the ocean.