PRESCIENCE. There are probably some incisive definitions of this word around, but I have always preferred the one from Oscar Wilde, and I am paraphrasing, when he defined prescience as being right on the button, mate.
The column a month ago begging the New Zealand sporting public to stop slanging the Black Caps and forever expecting them to choke, fall over, snatch defeat from victory and perplexingly under-achieve, saw record crowds turn out to watch New Zealand play some of the most thrilling cricket in memory.
People who never watch cricket on the telly were transfixed.
After the first twenty/20 win, many were bewildered Brendan McCullum was not knighted.
The Hillaryish hope was we could knock the bastards over, and while knocking the bastards over three times out of seven is one short of whanging a flag into the peak, it was still stirring stuff.
After all, this was an Australian team which had won every game all summer.
They were floating a metre off the ground when they strutted into New Zealand; 3-4 was pretty much on the button, mate, it was a prescient call.
Only the virtually perfect Styris voiced similar optimism before the series began, and they didn't even want Styris in the team.
But nothing approaches true prescience more than last week's column, when I mourned the retirement of Yorick the red letterbox, while still predicting in conclusion that karma would prevail, and the spiffing new designer model created in space-age steel after advice from Stephen Hawking, Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey, would fall flat on its face and Yorick would return.
Which is precisely what has happened.
The new beast, made in Christchurch and to be installed by a Putter-Upper from that same city, still sits on our Scotch chest in the bedroom, and Yorick is back in the holly hedge winking at passing joggers and mock-teasing junk mail deliverers.
The Putter-Upper forgot his tools.
"Putter-Upper," I said politely, "I have heard a workman never blames his tools, but by hokey, I have never heard of one forgetting them altogether."
He looked a bit shame-faced on it, and said there was also a problem with the measurements and that there were no mounting brackets.
I had sent photos and measurements.
They had surely been accurate.
I have been in the letterbox game for two years.
The Putter-Upper said he was going back to Christchurch to figure out a way to do it.
Were this home improvement, I would have been gutted, as project managers frequently are with tradesmen, but this was home deterioration, complete with the beheading of poor Yorick.
"That's fine," I retorted brightly.
"We will merely soldier on as before."
The new one has keys.
"Wife," I intoned gravely when I learned of this thing, "we are not a key family.
"We will lose the keys and ergo never receive mail for as long as we live."
We do lose keys with extraordinary ease, but this was also a cutting reference to a family who stayed at our old house, which had a lock on every room after being a building of bedsits.
The family included a young boy, Ben, a recidivist key thief who could lock a room and evaporate a key like Houdini in his prime.
Within days of Klepto Key Boy's arrival, every room had people trapped inside hammering on doors and crying.
Cult musician Roy Montgomery came down to stay for a gig at the Empire and was forced to scale a lofty balcony to get into his room through a window to retrieve his guitar.
We nearly lost one of Flying Nun's finest that night.
If we ever get this new letterbox hoisted on its poled petard, it will be wise and sensible to dismantle the lock and key system and donate it to a school tombola stall.
Let someone else discover what happens when you don't use prescience.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
