Which is marvellous. Because if we stumble once again at the feet of the French, we can still hang on to one of them - and the Aussies were good to us during the earthquake recovery work in Christchurch so we'll let them have the other replica, and John Smit can go back to Durban with his one.
No mysteries surround the weather for the past week, though.
Yes, it was cold.
But down south it was colder and it was on that snow-covered terrain that a couple of storm-chasing cameramen spotted something strange.
A large cat - "as big as a german Shepherd" - was how one of them described it.
Indeed it did look quite big as it stalked across my TV screen.
A grey-brownish animal and clearly a cat of some sort. And clearly quite large.
The footage they shot reignited previous stories about sightings of big cats down south. Cats such as black pumas and panthers, lynxs and bobcats. Grainy photos and insistent witness reports.
The latest "sighting" adds to the wonderful mystery of the South Island big cats. The escapers from circuses and travelling zoos long passed?
Stray cats who just went feral and became a sort of obese sub-species?
Or a native cat we never knew anything about?
It reminded me of a silly column I wrote about 20 years ago: how a pack of baboons, bound for an Australian zoo, had escaped from a tall ship moored at the Ahuriri harbour in the early 1900s. And how they fled to the undergrowth of Bluff Hill. And how they procreated and there had been sightings of baboons on the hill right up until the mid-60s.
Four days after it appeared, I got a letter from an elderly gentleman who said he had seen some sort of monkey - "could have been a baboon" - in a tree off Napier Terrace in the 1930s when he was a lad.
I was astonished, nay bewildered.
And it got me thinking: maybe, just maybe?
I love a good mystery.
