Those of you with long memories and fat filing cabinets will recall our original red letterbox was a crooked rhombus-shaped carpenterial catastrophe crafted from woodpile offcuts by my errant hands and myopic eyes. It was barely a letterbox, more four unrelated pieces of wood which arrived at the same place at the same time by chance, and were consequently glued together by red paint. I loved this red letterbox.
Then my wife had a special birthday, and demanded a flash designer letterbox from, of all places, Christchurch, one which went swimmingly with a modern house, but not with our crooked rhombus-shaped villa, which, I believe, was built between the 17th and 18th centuries.
Indeed, a number of my wife's closest personal friends whispered to me behind cupped hands, on the promise of high secrecy, that they abhorred this needlessly sleek thing from, of all places, Christchurch, and expressed the wish someone would knock it down as soon as possible.
My wife knocked it down last week.
Which is ironic when you think about it.
But don't get me wrong, I'm not pointing any fingers. Knocking over a letterbox is nothing. The most recent World Health Organisation figures estimate that 60% of drivers on the current Formula One circuit have knocked over their domestic letterboxes, Michael Schumacher, not unexpectedly, seven times. No, it wasn't whanging the Toyota Ist into the designer letterbox that curdled my craw, it was the explanation for how this happened.
"I had never come into the drive from that angle before."
Now, I'm not a lawyer, though heaven knows I could be if I had the time, but my gestalt feeling here is that this defence wouldn't stand up in court for more than seven seconds.
"Let's recap, Mrs Dazed And Confused," the prosecuting counsel would say, fiddling with his spectacles, "you normally travel straight up the drive to avoid the letterbox, but on this occasion, you decided to come in on a 45deg angle, so you could drive INTO the letterbox".
Bwahahah! This is like someone burning down a house with the excuse they had never poured petrol on furniture and thrown a lighted match over it.
"I couldn't believe my eyes - boom! House GONE!"
Incredibly the designer letterbox got off lightly, and in fact has been beaten back almost to normality with hammer and anger. The Toyota, however, looks like a 1960s Henry Moore sculpture. I examined the damage along the passenger side of the car and noted it went for quite a long way, almost as if, and this cannot possibly be the case, my wife first hit the letterbox and then decided to thresh her way forward until there was no more scrunching metal noises. Would someone who had driven into the whirring blades of a combine harvester have pressed on grimly in this way?
Well, only those who have driven into a combine harvester will know this.
The insurance assessor confided in me on the promise of high secrecy that, in his estimate, my wife was travelling at around 170kmh when she entered the drive. He was also intrigued by the corrugated nature of the car's rear. I felt I should stick up for my wife at this point. As I say, pointing fingers is not my game. I told him we have been to a number of open homes recently, and that it was hard to turn around in some of those narrow Caversham streets without hitting a lamppost or someone's trailer. He agreed whole-heartedly and opined if the council had any brains at all they would be widening those Caversham streets and not building stadiums.
The original wooden red letterbox is in the basement. I go down there every Thursday and feed it junk mail just to keep its spirits up. Cats have nine lives, they say letterboxes only have two. The time for my cruelly-imprisoned red letterbox to reappear is very close at hand.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
