I have a friend called Benny and today is his birthday. Benny is quite possibly the most generous and thoughtful person I know. And he’s a great gift giver. He also occasionally emails me photos of his poo and although that’s not really relevant to this, it’s definitely worth sharing.
Like most truly generous people Benny doesn’t like a big fuss being made over him. So that’s exactly what I wanted to do this year, just to piss him off. The risk being he would chop my balls off. Unfortunately I live in the wrong country to arrange a surprise birthday dinner, and it was too expensive to fly his favourite band (R.E.M.) out to New Zealand to play for him. So I was forced to do something a little more low key, which he might prefer anyway. I asked his friends from around the world to write him a birthday message to be displayed on this site. So here it is.
Happy 28th pal, you are definitely not a dick.
A Peeping Tom special birthday tribute. Click HERE to read
“All of us have moments that are burned into our consciousness, moments that were the fertile topsoil from which our own particular neuroses were formed.
Mine occurred in a nondescript sun-drenched front room in suburban Upper Hutt. It was in this room, under the guidance of a very kind, self-medicating adult that I, like so many Kiwi 10 year olds discovered that people like Benjamin Castles exist.
They say that if you put enough monkeys into a room with enough typewriters for long enough, one of them will eventually, through random chance, write something beautiful. Unwittingly, as a young man, I tested this chaos theory of creativity with the help of an overbearing mother, a very small violin and what I would later come to recognise as a total absence of personal talent.
My career as a musical prodigy was marked by vast chasms of time locked in my bedroom. Here, I would coax from my poor violin a seemingly endless range of terrified screeches. No matter how bad the noise became, I was not deterred. I was armed with the knowledge, passed down to me by my family, that the onlydifference between those with the power to make people weep with joy, and those who, like me, just made people openly sob – was practise.
After all, practice makes perfect.
Like any 10 year old, I was yet to discover that rather than representing humanity’s dizzying peaks, my own family and their friends were probably the foothills of mankind’s creative and intellectual topography. I was yet to discover that mediocrity was not universal. That practice merely makes workmanlike. That only talent makes perfect. This was something I witnessed first-hand when young Tristan strolled into my life carrying in his tiny little 5 year-old hands an object that looked like my violin, but that was made of honey.
After only a handful of lessons young Tristan was doing the unthinkable.
He was making music.
This, my 10 year-old brain realised, was what talent looked like.
I put down my violin and went outside to be mediocre with my mediocre friends. What, the less perceptive of you may be asking, does this have to do with Benny? Put simply, Benny is a member of that most rare group of people – the talented. Better read, better dressed, better manners, better friend, better beard. Better. Benny.
Happy Birthday Benjamin. To me, you will always be a 5 year-old clasping violin made from a more melodic material than the rest of us. – George Bettle.”
