Serendipity

Today dawned still and clear so not a day for dressing gowns - just a couple of hours in bed with the Sunday paper then into action by 11 o'clock.

I won this lovely old fire screen on TradeMe some time ago. I had been watching it out of interest as it was such a luscious piece of oak and accidentally clicked the fixed price offer request option when it failed to receive any bids. The seller gave a price, well below the original start price, that was so ludicrously cheap I just couldn't pass it up. That was weeks ago. I feared all the stalling over pick up was due to seller's remorse and that they were hoping I would forget all about it. Today, at last, contact was made for a suitable time. I drove to Ngaio only to find no-one home, so decided to head back down Ngaio Gorge to Spotlight.

For the uninitiated, Spotlight is a shop dedicated to the domestic arts of sewing, decorating and the like. It is a ghastly place with haphazard displays and largely unmanned counters. The air is alive with dust and lint, so even before I touched any stock my black top almost instantly looked as if it had been doing the tango with a full box of tissues in its latest wash. This is a shop I normally avoid at all costs, but since I was so close I thought I might find some nice dressing gown material. No, I'm not sewing a new dressing gown. I have perfectly good one - but seldom get to enjoy it because Millie likes it too. I thought I might be able to make a cunning decoy and regain ownership. Purchase made, I headed back and picked up the fire screen - it really is a stunner.

To ensure Millie would use her new gift, I placed it in a spurned cat basket, popped this on a chair in the living room and told her firmly to keep off. She gave me the "What are you going to do about it?" look and settled in. Now ever since I took the TV off the wall bracket it has been lacking the stand. I disposed of the stand somewhere on moving day and could not find it again. The set has had to lean clumsily against the wall, an adequate but inelegant solution. Had I bothered to search properly, which has been a 'must do' for a while, it is unlikely I would ever have thought to look in a discarded cat basket, high up on a shelf in the garage. But that is where it was. So now, I have a dressing gown all to myself, Millie thinks she has asserted her right to rule and the TV is complete. All this is thanks to a TradeMe seller who was quite unable to compose a simple, coherent text - serendipity.