Next door to us is a piece of land that used to be empty. When our city was founded, it was set aside for educational purposes: to build a boarding hostel for Otago Girls' High School, to be precise. The hostel never got built but two other schools, Kaikorai Primary and Columba College used the land anyway. During the day it was occupied continually by children and in the evenings people would walk on it or play touch rugby on it or fly model aeroplanes or golf balls over it. It was one of those many open spaces which are dotted around our city and which give it much of its character. No-one ever imagined it would pass from public ownership, but in the 1980s we New Zealanders elected one of those governments with tunnel vision. This one's particular tunnel reduced everything - schools, hospitals, utility supplies, postal services, you name it , to the status of a business. And seeing as Otago Girls High School was suddenly, by dint of bureaucratic fiat, a business, this...