Madeleine Chapman reflects on the week that was.

This is my final weekend editorial for the year and I was struggling to think of how I could sum up the year in a clever, succinct way. At our Spinoff Year in Review event in Auckland on Wednesday, host Anna Rawhiti-Connell asked the audience to cheer if they thought this year had been better than last year. It was dead silent.

That’s probably about as succinct as you can get, but I wanted something that I could share, something that I could see in the future and think “remember 2024?”, something that is so uniquely 2024 that it wouldn’t mean anything else.

And then I found gingle malt.

I was at The Warehouse with my girlfriend, each of us looking for one specific item – her a single bauble and me a tin of chocolate wafer sticks, the best festive snack of all. While looking through the seemingly random assortment of individual Christmas decorations on offer, we viewed a greatest hits of festive puns (sleigh instead of slay, for example). All were predictable and fine, until we got to gingle malt.

There, on a purple liquor bottle with glitter on its neck, were the words “gingle malt”. I picked it up and froze. Gingle malt. My brain whirred into action (it always falls asleep when I’m in a store with concrete floors) trying to understand it. My first connection was single malt. That made sense. But what the hell was “gingle”? It took me a moment more to realise the intended pun was “jingle”, in the same way Bed, Bath & Beyond still sells “All the jingle ladies” sleep shirts. 

Gingle malt is perfectly 2024. The sticker being slightly crooked and the fact that the shape of the purple bottle is clearly a champagne bottle not a whisky bottle just adds to the charm. What better way to sum up a dumpster fire year than gingle malt (hard g)?

Since that day, I have found myself muttering “gingle malt” every time I see or hear the words single or jingle. Every gingle time. I ponder the series of errors that led to me being the proud owner of a gingle malt tree decoration. 

It’s a bit depressing when you think you about it too much: the Chinese manufacturers collating a list of lazy English puns to mass-produce; the inclusion of jingle as festively rhyming with single; the person who knew there was such a thing as a soft G and maybe did not know about J; the lack of a second set of eyes to check; the thousands of stickers being printed; the incorrect pairing with a champagne bottle; the thin plastic that will break immediately but never break down; the cursed addition of glitter; the janky application of the sticker so it almost looks like it’s made by a child; the lack of a second set of eyes (again) to check; the purchasing by The Warehouse, where people know about hard Gs; and finally, the outrageous $5 price tag (it was $3 by the time I bought it). 

Every single element of the gingle malt decoration was poorly considered, poorly executed and lacked any real person’s oversight or care from inception to point of sale. And it’s overpriced.

If that isn’t 2024 in two words, I don’t know what is.

A merry gingle malt to us all.

This week on Behind the Story

This week on Behind the Story: Aotearoa and movies

Senior writer Alex Casey has a long history with cinema, both as a reviewer and as a former projectionist. This week she wrote two film-adjacent features. The first had Alex travel to Akaroa to speak to the people running a bustling local cinema and then go down a rabbit hole of South Island cinemas holding on to the movies as a third space. And the second is just a fun appreciation of our strangely high proportion of successful child actors, and what makes it possible to succeed here at 11 years old. She appeared on Behind the Story to talk local reporting, the magic of movies and the very best of our child actors.

Read the stories Alex discusses:

• The small town cinemas holding on at the edge of the world
• How does New Zealand produce so many successful child actors?