Mark Todd, the “accidental” property developer whose company is the chief sponsor of the country’s biggest literary awards, the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, is pretending to be apoplectic. He excels at pretending to be apoplectic and sometimes he actually is. He shouts: “I’m not a fucking leftie. I’m a fucking thinker.” He uses the F-word the way other people use commas.
If I inserted every example of every time he swore, the Listener letters inbox would implode. So I’m going to settle for removing most of the choicest examples from here on and you can choose to insert them yourself after every second word, or not, depending on your tolerance for swearing. That “every second word” is an exaggeration, but not a wild one.
“I like swearing,” he says, in a brilliant example of stating the bleeding obvious. Swearing provides emphasis and he is an emphatic character. You will never be in any doubt as to what the co-founder of Ockham Residential thinks about things, and the things he has emphatic opinions about are wide and varied, and sometimes contradictory.
He rails, for example, over the property development industry’s use of lobbyists. His company employs a lobbyist. He is too smart not to know that opens him up to accusations of hypocrisy. Pah.
“We just try to
