Cousin Thorkild hails from Denmark.
Denmark is notoriously flat.
If you lose your dog in Denmark, you just step outside your house and look for it.
At 69, Thorkild is rather old for a cousin and possesses the kind of stomach usually seen on Russian oligarchs.
"I don't bloody care," says Cousin Thorkild.
Cousin Thorkild used to be a bosun, sailing the seven seas, amassing an extensive collection of tattoos, mostly of naked ladies.
Knickerless Betty Pages decorate Thorkild's arms and chest.
Most have surrendered to time and gravity's effect upon their canvas.
Thick green/black wobbly lines are etched into rain-softened stevedore skin, like crayon drawings on a decaying orange.
On one bicep, a hula girl is blurry but still swaying.
Thorkild's first day with us, he got lost.
Wandering the streets of South Dunedin, he asked people, "Where is Dunedin?" This, and the fact that he was dressed in a pair of women's trousers, wearing slippers, and is heavily tattooed, caused many South Dunedinites to recoil.
"They think I am mental," said Cousin Thorkild, acutely putting his finger on the problem.
The waistband of Thorkild's MC Hammer pants sags to reveal a significant, if illegible, tattoo blooming across the nether swell of his vast belly - and this may have frightened some pedestrians.
However, one brave lady stopped, and recognising CT might be in some distress, asked if he was all right.
"I can't find where I came from," explained CT.
"And where do you come from?" she asked.
"Denmark."
Cousin Thorkild is a terrible one for snuff, or snoose, packing it into the gap between his bottom lip and his teeth - which haven't stood such abuse well, blackening like tree stumps after a forest fire.
Filling this facial pouch thus gives him the look of a querulous bulldog, which is misleading, as cousin Thorkild is a cheerful soul.
"Nevermind," is his answer to any impediment.
"I am an old man, what do I bloody care?" he says, of reactions to his wardrobe.
For my own entertainment, I enjoy trucking CT around town, if just to watch people's responses to this bowlegged sea-dog and his rolling walk.
Eyebrows rise at his floral pantaloons and piratical air.
Many are surprised, as I am, that the Danish come in such a squat, trollish form.
The economist is only half-Danish, and he is twice the size.
Cousin Thorkild does have one Danish trait: blue eyes.
Wicked blue eyes, according to my mother, who invited us all over for breakfast.
"It's a pity I had to bring them with me," said Thorkild to mother, "we could have some fun, you and me."
She giggled and fluttered her eyelashes, the hussy.
My stepfather was too shocked to react.
I guess it's true what they say, all the ladies love a sailor.
And Thorkild's salty seamanship is ever-present.
In fact he eats, drinks, and tells tall tales as if still amidships, pitching and tossing on stormy seas, drinking his coffee while leaning into a blistering gale.
Scrubbing the carpet, I asked Cousin Thorkild about famous Danish inventions.
"We invented drink-driving," he boasts.
Cousin Thorkild is a reprobate.
There is nothing he hasn't done, or been arrested for.
He has been arrested at sea; he has been arrested in Buenos Aires.
His longest stretch was 40 days in a Danish prison, after going out drinking and failing to return to his ship.
The prison bed was comfortable and he had a television in his room.
The prison authorities suggested he mix in with the other inmates.
"I'm in bloody prison," shouted CT, "I want my privacy!"
After years of drinking and debauchery, Cousin Thorkild has diabetes.
The spare room dresser is covered with pharmaceutical paraphernalia, a cornucopia of drugs to be ingested and injected - a bit of a worry if you live in my neck of the woods, especially considering the goings-on down the street (it might seem risky to include such information in a newspaper, but judging from the way they shout, "Wanna buy some cannabis?" at passersby and the number of times they get arrested, some of the inhabitants don't have the brains for reading).
I do wonder, though, what these criminal masterminds make of Cousin Thorkild, as he wanders the neighbourhood in his ugg slippers and pyjamas.
Whatever they think of him, you can be sure that he doesn't give a damn.
