Wendyl Nissen: Wholegrain whodunnit the staff of family life

Loaves of bread are capable of attracting enormous interest from some people. Fans of The Last Supper, for instance, or starving people, who are often seen ripping huge chunks off sturdy loaves and cramming them into their mouths.

Home bakers have been known to become obsessed with their loaves, tapping the crust and listening to it with the intensity of a doctor putting his ear to a bronchial lung.

And then there's my family, who recently became fixated by one particular loaf. He was a handsome devil. Big, broad, wholemeal in his construction, he was soft to the squeeze and had an irresistible smell that said "Eat me!"

But nobody would. Because the bread had arrived in the dead of night and I've always trained my children not to consume things delivered in the night because they are usually babies or drugs.

My husband found the bread hanging on the gatepost when he went to get the newspaper. The bread was naked, except for the recyclable plastic bag he was hanging in. My husband gave him a home.

"How lovely," I cooed, hugging his fresh-baked self to my nose, drinking in his lovely newborn smell.

"One of the neighbours must have dropped him off," I continued, forgetting that I was living in the big house in Grey Lynn and not the Little House on the Prairie.

"Don't eat it," my husband cautioned. "Someone could be trying to poison you."

I examined the bread for evidence of syringe marks or plugs where cyanide may have been inserted.

"Don't be ridiculous," I said, laughing heartily at the prospect of someone hating me so much they'd want to kill me. "Ha ha, you silly old thing."

But I didn't eat it.

Instead the bread sat on the kitchen table awaiting its fate as we began to canvas the adult children about its origins.

As we told each one of the mysterious find, they claimed no knowledge of depositing a loaf of bread on the gatepost, but all were keen to offer the opinion that one child in particular was to blame.

One of our daughters was most likely to have been given the loaf by one of her multitude of friends who work in restaurants, decided she didn't want to take it to a party and flung it over the gatepost in a drunken state on her way past.

"That's great," she replied when we finally tracked her down late in the afternoon. "So I'm the family drunk now, am I? And not only the family drunk but a family drunk who throws loaves of bread in the middle of the night. That's just great."

"Well, there was that time ..." we proffered.

"I guess you do have a point."

Soon the adult children, their partners, friends, interested flatmates, the homeless guy from the park and someone's uncle arrived in our kitchen to look at the loaf and, for a moment, we were in the CSI laboratory.

Time of arrival was narrowed down to sometime between 11pm and 6am. It was ascertained that the loaf had been baked in a bakery, not at home, because of its criss-cross marks on the underside, but not a supermarket bakery, more an artisan-style bakery.

"It was nicked from outside a restaurant where it had been delivered," suggested someone.

"Then they stopped off outside our gate for a pee, hung it up and then forgot to take it with them," added another.

"Let's look inside," I suggested, but not before taking a quick sweep on what we would find. Severed finger won most votes, closely followed by a chicken's foot, human faeces and a goldfish.

Our handsome loaf was torn from limb to limb, his new family no longer caring what became of him.

"Well that's a bit of a letdown," announced my husband as we stared at the bread's doughy and delicious-looking insides, free of finger, foot, faeces or fish.

"I can't believe you thought someone was trying to poison me," I snapped, suddenly deeply ashamed of our collective fear and destructive suspicion.

And then I took it outside and fed it to the hens, who were delighted.