Prejudice is a bad thing. Much is made of the various ‘ists’ and ‘isms’ that make the world a nastier place, but this week I have been learning that on a day-to-day basis, people make many little ill-informed calls based on nothing more than preconceived notions.
Take the small, wrinkled, near-death dog attached to a small, wrinkled, near-death old lady that I encountered whilst out jogging on Tuesday. As it was slightly patchy in the fur department, walked with a limp and sounded heavily asthmatic, I simply dismissed it as being incapable of rapid motion without the aid of electric probes. It was only after the old biddy had mysteriously chosen to release its lead and – despite my best efforts at a sprint after 5km of waddling and sweating – fifty yards down the road I still had a furious ball of fur and teeth attempting to remove my ankle bones, I realised that an error of judgement may have been made on my part.
Then there was the e-mail received from my sister informing me that she had bought a new flat in Blackheath, London. This is a pretty salubrious area of England’s capital where even the most broom cupboard-esque of crash pads commands a serious price tag. She assumed I would find the sums involved staggering because being in remote little New Zealand, where civilisation cannot possibly exist because we are a good twelve months behind in Coronation Street, I could purchase a house for what most people would splash out on a Chinese takeaway.
This is of course, ridiculous. As anyone who is currently trying to scrape together enough money to put a deposit down will tell you, Aotearoa isn’t exactly giving houses away at the moment. Prejudice sets you up for making bad decisions and looking a bit silly; particularly if it means you attempt to enter Auckland’s housing market with change found down the back of your sofa.
And all of this is why I’m very excited about the day I can finally get behind the wheel of a Great Wall ute.
Thanks to my experiences with early Japanese and Korean cars, I have some niggling doubts about certain aspects of the output from the fledgling international arm of China’s motor industry. While they may be cheap, I suspect that it will be a good number of years before their products become as polished as more established competition. Read the rest of this entry »
This new VE Series II take on the previously popular special edition looks sharp with some light cosmetic additions and is set to go on sale across Australia from next week.
contender to the ute market which was officially launched in New Zealand on 14 February 2011.
