Cleaning up the jagged shards and myriad smithereens peppering the bed was deeply disturbing. Sharp glass and comfy beds just don't belong in the same sentence.
The hole was patched temporarily before dark with a handy painted canvas from the studio reject pile.
However nothing says dereliction more clearly than broken windows. Nothing promotes it faster either in vigorous Northland where rampant flora and fauna must be battled relentlessly.
Perhaps an insurance claim, followed ideally by a glazier pronto? After all, we've paid household insurance for 30 years (at roughly $100 per month, $36,000 by my reckoning) and never made a claim.
Surely pigeon strike qualifies for a return on that vast wasted expenditure, not I hasten to add, paid voluntarily but initially compulsorily when we signed on for the mortgage back in the dim dark ages, imposed, of course, primarily to protect the bank's money rather than our home.
Oh no, they said, fix it yourself or you'll lose your no-claims bonus. What bonus we said? You mean if we claim we pay more, but if we don't claim we pay anyway, on top of funding and fixing our own damage? What manner of devilish rort is this? Why have insurance at all if we can't afford to claim it?
Now the mortgage is over though, insurance is no longer compulsory.
Since enriching others by gambling on our own misfortune with tidy sums that could be spent far more usefully on essential maintenance makes no sense, I'm keen to cancel it and deal with the cards as they fall.
Anyway, I say insurance is terrorism - profitable protection money extorted by fear.
It raises the cost of everything and promotes waste. If there were no insurance in Christchurch, every last speck of rubble would have been recycled instead of dumped in landfills, and people would have rebuilt creatively instead of still waiting - in limbo - in cracked palaces three years after the quake - for the bureaucratic nightmare to unravel.
Insurance creates continuing demand with the unsustainable illusion that everything is replaceable, and rebuilds funded by insurance are counted on the plus side of economic growth when in fact replacement is merely treading water in anyone's ledger, no matter what column the shonky figures are shifted into.
Actually the economy might function far more creatively without insurance (and without interest). Let's ban them both.
Unfortunately the family thinks otherwise. Meanwhile, while we argue the toss at home, the functional (and rather fetching) canvas window is unlikely to deceive even the drunkest low-flying pigeon.
