Now that we’re getting towards the end of the year, and I’m getting towards the end of my time as a contributor to this newsletter, I’ve been thinking about the news story that most stood out for me this year and that best encapsulates my experience of this country. 

The obvious answer is the story of Ned the snail. 

You may remember Ned going viral (as well as spiral) in August this year after illustrator Gieselle Clarkson happened upon him while she was doing some weeding in her garden in the Wairarapa. 

What makes Ned special is that his shell spirals the opposite way to the overwhelming majority of his peers, making him unable to mate with 99.9975% of them.  

His situation is thus almost as bleak as that of centre-right singles in Wellington. That’s despite Ned’s many advantages, including owning his own home. 

There followed an international campaign to find Ned a mate, but all Clarkson received was thousands of photos of ‘optimistically misidentified right-coiling snails.’ 

Biosecurity only made things more difficult, with closed borders limiting international arrivals. 

Ned’s current dating status is unknown, but his story holds some important lessons. 

First, as my colleague Michael Johnston points out in a Herald column this week, if we want to maintain our population at reasonable levels, we’re going to have to embrace immigration. We can’t just retreat into our shells. 

Second, New Zealand is kind of a weird place. When we hit the international news, it’s as likely to be because of our Bird of the Year competition as for any other type of electoral fowl play. Even sluggish, garden-variety performers like Ned can streak through the international headlines if conditions are right.  

And finally, New Zealand is all round, a pretty nice place to be. Of course, like anywhere else on earth, we have our travails and tragedies. We also have our challenges (see Insights, passim). But New Zealand life isn’t generally punctuated by civil wars or military coups. Local news stories can still move at a snail’s pace. 

Whether things move too slowly here is, of course, for each individual to decide. At the time of going to press, it was unclear whether Ned had departed for pastures new with everything he owned on his back. Nor was it clear how he felt about leaving an environment where he always felt right at home and, at the same time, oddly out of place.