This might be about the state of the nation,

maybe, but not just yet. I am consumed with horror at the arrival of fleas. We have no dogs and no cats and we've never had fleas before and despite their being four people in our home, only one person is being bitten. The wife of the pest exterminator person I rang today said I must have very special blood.

I don't like having very special blood and I don't like having fleas. I don't like anything to do with it.

I am using my cheese mould and cheese cloths for the first time tonight, gifts from the very lovely Tania. I'm making kefir cheese.

I'm making progress with Brighid's knitted dress, the one where I am making the pattern up as I go along. I am up to the armhole shaping so have switched to using flat needles. Before I was knitting in the round for the first time ever, having started this dress from the hem and working my way upwards. I think they are called 'flat needles'; I'm trying to resist the impulse to call them 'normal needles'.

Yesterday I even found my size 4mm flat needles because yesterday I had a huge cleaning spree in the lounge and ripped the last of the lounge wallpaper off as well. Today I had a huge cleaning spree in the kitchen. I know we don't have fleas because we have a messy house, but fleas make me want to turn the place upside down and get rid of almost everything before making some kind of new serene scene. I have other thoughts about fleas but I'll try and move on from them.

In readiness for sitting down and blogging, I made myself a sandwich. I was rather pleased with myself. Home made bread, home made green tomato chutney, home made kefir, home roasted lamb.

One problem.

It tasted awful. I made the bread without a recipe and without scales and that may be some kind of clue to why it tasted stodgy. Too stodgy. I think the kefir was not as fresh as would be ideal. I guess you all label foods in your fridge and include the date. I guess it is a good idea.

So here I am, thinking that I want a babysitter for St Patrick's night next week and simultaneously that the fleas absolutely must be gone by then. I'm still a long way off the state of the nation. Although I do now have a sandwich with shop bread, Hellmann's mayo and cold roast lamb and it is about 1000 times better than attempt #1.

But here goes. I am referring to some thoughts I began to have as I wrote and then read the comments on my last post before this one. What about working New Zealanders and shareholding? Do we have new levels of share market dependency? Well surely we do. The Cullen fund for one. So our taxes are being used to play on the sharemarket.

They could be used to fund the development of a milk processing plant which would keep West Coast dairy produce here instead of trucking it around the country and trucking other dairy products into the West Coast. Oh hang on golly hang on. The dairy farmers of New Zealand, who have run one of New Zealand's most successful ever cooperatives, are now into different games. Witness the antics of super-coop (formed from the merger of many many small dairy cooperatives around New Zealand) Fonterra in the San-Lu melanin contaminated milk tragedy. Witness talk last year of public floats of the company. Let's see what happens to our farmers, especially those in more remote areas, when China comes onstream with it's own dairy farms and world demand for our milk slumps.

Investment in productive capacity for key services is the best kind of investment, I think. So investment in power producing plants is good and the government can gain something back. Which is all of us gaining something. But buying shares in a sweatshop labour clothing company in order that I might retire and live off that portion which is my reward for merely owning some capital, that does not seem right. The cotton grower and harvester sweats, the sewer sweats, the buyer pays a sum for the garment of which a greater portion goes to the shareholder than to those who sweated for it's construction. So shareholders in this situation live off the fact of the workers being poorly recompensed for their labour. It is not honest.

What else to do? I an only conclude that a retired person can only live a life without recourse to paid work or a pension and/or private investment returns means if they live with their extended family.

Which really might be quite difficult.

But from an ethical point of view and from a blunt economics point of view in the coming decade, it is going to be turned to more and more.

I don't know that I've answered any of my own questions, let alone anyone else's, or even made sense, but I'm trying to make sense of how to live at least somewhat ethically in an inequitable world and this business of investing for retirement and how that money is produced seems a big nasty bogey which is not being talked about enough.

I have only one other thing to report. While writing this blog post, the pest man rang and he is bombing all flea life out of my home tomorrow morning. So although I have to leave this house before 8.30am in the morning and have lunches and nappies and blah blah all done as well, I also need to vacuum up the flour my children deliberately spread across Fionn's bedroom floor and duvet. Once they are awake. But before we have to leave. The carpet surfaces would be a good idea too. Although I don't expect crushed cornflakes protect fleas from death, it seems good manners not to present them to Murray the pest man. As for the lounge, where I removed about 8000 items yesterday only to highlight the remaining 16000, I don't know if bagging the detritus up would just mean the fleas get to escape into the bag and come out later.

I hate fleas.