Chistchurch usurper leaves Yorick waiting in the wings

The red letterbox went down last weekend.

Yorick, as I came to know him when word filtered down from the north that my wife's family was buying her a new designer model for her very significant birthday, had served us well for nearly two years.

Perhaps not well, but no-one would disagree he had served us. He never argued, he never demanded the remote.

I took the news of Yorick's redundancy with the phlegmaticism for which I am globally renowned.

In fact, not a wisp of angry phlegm left my mouth.

It mattered little to me that my ingenious creation hewn from scraps in the woodpile and painted in the loudest red the Resene Paint Shop could muster was to be replaced by a designer coffee table magazine abomination from, of all cities, Christchurch.

Worse, I was informed it was constructed from materials used for space shuttles and neurosurgery, costing more than a cheap Japanese import car.

I just smiled a thin smile, pulled Yorick out from his hole in the holly hedge, and trudged up the drive with him under my arm.

It was my wife's very significant birthday, not mine.

I am nothing if not a man who metaphorically lies down before an advancing M1 Abrams Battle Tank and says, bring on that brand spanking new letterbox, for I am wetting my pants with excitement.

Yorick was the disfigured end result of many different improvements, though I use the word improvement very much in its loosest sense.

He initially had to fit into a defined space between a broken fence grille and a vaguely decorative pole, and as such, his shape was unusual.

You could hold Yorick up to the sun and you would be confronting one of the most alarming shapes in letterbox history, very nearly a rhombus.

But nobody ever held Yorick up to the sun. His life was spent jammed into a hedge.

I worked on him until the very end, touching up the paint days before the familial hordes arrived with their new glob of space-age tin.

I was very proud of Yorick.

He was a mathematical design - I used a ruler - though perhaps more Escher than Frank Lloyd Wright.

In January we thought we had lost some Christmas cards from someone reaching through the large front opening.

It is a known fact people love stealing Christmas cards, so I put the small back on the front, thus narrowing a gap people could put their entire arms into to an opening only the smallest wave of junk mail could penetrate.

A few days later I added a new back, a piece from the woodpile that was nearly just right but not quite.

Then, three days from the very significant birthday, I removed the back because I knew the family would be holding Yorick up to the sun and derisively cawing that the back was nearly just right but not quite.

Alas poor him, I knew Yorick well.

The tin thing is slick, shiny and middle class. It would definitely vote National.

I'll grant you the numbers won't tarnish, like Yorick's 2 and 7, which despite what the Two Dollar Shop claimed, were not made out of gold.

But I swear by the rust-infused distressed look, so I may just change the numbers over late one night when I am very, very drunk.

But this new one is made in Christchurch, only disaster can ensue.

At high school I once drank gin made in Kaiapoi, which, OK, isn't Christchurch but pretty damn close, and I did very badly in my exams.

It sears my craw to see something made in Christchurch greeting me every time I walk up our drive to a beautiful old house that was made in Dunedin.

Karma will prevail, our winter will buckle this pretender senseless, and the call will go out for Yorick to return. I have put him in a very safe place.

He will be ready.