Carpet.
Now there's a thing.
I love carpet.
But now there are all these polished wooden floors, with rugs you can slip on when carrying canapes, snapping your spine like a twig.
Dunedin's beautiful, arctic-cold villas have had their carpet ripped up and replaced by not-beautiful, arctic-cold, shiny wooden floors.
Crazy.
Still, we are meant to be a hardy lot, forever seeking out suffering.
It's a wonder the council's slogan-seekers have not come up with "Dunedin, Sparta of the South".
It does run quite seamlessly off the tongue.
Removing permanent floor coverings is probably cheaper and it's obviously cleaner.
People spill stuff; it's one of the things we do best.
When a guest turns up for dinner clutching a bottle of red wine, I go straight to the Stain Removers section of the Yellow Pages, the ones who work after hours, and write their number on the back of my hand.
"Oh, I am so sorry," the guest will bleat two hours later, having swished their Burgundy glass of Two Paddocks on to our carpet while trying to describe something memorable, big and wide.
No problem, I will retort, I have the stain remover's details on the back of my hand.
Spilling red wine on other people's carpet is as common as cruise ship passengers wearing white sneakers.
The trick is to have carpet that swallows up stains like a dolphin swallows fish.
We had one of these at our last house, a rich, deep, heavily patterned design which hinted at grandeur and wealth and never needed cleaning.
The Otago Deaf Society rooms in Manor Pl have one almost the same.
Our carpet called out for red wine, as well as aggressive and vivid members of every food group.
As time wore on, guests would remark on how you never saw this kind of carpet shade any more.
This was because of the food that flourished within its pile.
Colourist painters spent a lifetime trying to put a hue like this on canvas.
When we moved to our new house, we had beige shag pile carpet in the bathroom, garnished with hair dye stains.
I thought it was magnificent.
You climb out of a bath on to shag pile carpet and you know you have made it in life - only rich and successful people have such a thing.
My wife, however, had it ripped out and replaced with slippery vinyl.
We also ripped up the carpet through the rest of the house, inexplicably choosing the lightest-coloured pattern-free carpet I had ever seen.
But that's what all the carpet shops have now.
Wife, I riposted, everything will show on this, even lint.
She said we would just have to be careful.
Last week, we had the carpet cleaners in.
The grandchildren from Chicago, and a succession of undisciplined guests, had turned our floors into The Poseidon Adventure.
There were badly removed Rorschach blobs of merlot, shiraz and pinot noir everywhere.
I felt our carpet was finally developing its own character, but my wife decided it was dirty.
We got an estimate from the Yellow Pages.
A man arrived, measured up and gave me a quote that was 216% dearer than what the nice lady said on the phone.
We had disarrayed ourselves for a full day removing furniture for the clean, so when he told me the price, I couldn't really tell him to go away to where the sun don't shine because we didn't come down in the last shower.
But an estimate is not a quote - people will know this from Curb Your Enthusiasm, series four, episode eight.
A more civilised city than ours would have this as a mandatory bumper sticker.
The off-white carpet looks pretty good.
There are no children flinging once-bitten Central Otago fruit from high chairs scheduled to stay, and I have been trawling the two dollar shops for a letterbox sticker that reads "NO GUESTS".
We will die alone, but we will be warm and stain-free.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
