I can do one or both of two things in the unlikely event that I want to eat a feijoa. I can go down to my local Woolworths and pay $7.10 per kilogram for them, or I can walk out my front door, take two steps, and fight a mischief of rats for them.
I hate feijoas, so I am disinclined to do either in order to acquire them. I just wish they would go away of their own accord. You see, I live next to a feijoa hedge, and it’s feijoa season. As a consequence, we are currently inundated with feijoas falling from the hedge and covering our driveway and paths.
The feijoas don’t stay intact for long. They are soon crushed underfoot or under one or other of our two cars. Either way, they create, in their death throes, a horrid mess. A mess which, for reasons I find hard to fathom, it is apparently incumbent on my wife to clean up.
Why my wife? Because I, at my age and with my build, am unable to pick them up. But it goes deeper than that. You see, we live in a gated community—and it is a community, a good community. Most of us get on very well with each other. Except for one thing: we—my wife specifically—are the only ones who pick up those bloody feijoas.
Nobody else has shown the least inclination to do so, despite—and it is a large despite—the hedge being a communal hedge, owned and shared by the community.
And there lies the issue. This gated community of ours is not the only owner of this hedge. The other owners are the rats that reside and proliferate in the hedge and, more recently, in the engine well of one of our cars.
You may think all of this is of little significance. And perhaps it is. But not to us. We loathe feijoas with a passion—and on that subject, why can’t we have passionfruit instead?
At this point, I’m considering a petition to have the hedge replaced with something more civilised. Passionfruit. Lemons. Plastic. Literally anything that doesn’t launch green grenades at my driveway and invite rats to move into my car.
Until then, my wife will continue her daily feijoa patrol, the rats will continue their feijoa banquet, and I will continue to be the only man in New Zealand who can stand ten metres from a free feijoa tree, watch people pay $7.10 a kilo for the things, and still feel that everyone involved is being ripped off.
