Breaking Bad: NZ

My Dear Princess and Dear Fellows,

See, this is a step in the property purchase lark that you don't have to do in the UK. This is because you have a lovely organic drug industry in the form of coke and heroin. Here in NZ, the kids have to manufacture their own fun in the form of "P" (which stands for "pure meth").

It's a HUGE problem here, and consequently when you get the mandatory housing report prior to buying, most buyers also request that they have their new houses swept for P, in case Walter White and Jesse Pinkman had previously been using your abode to cook up that blue ice. The toxic residue can get right into the surfaces and is very dangerous.

You will be relieved to know that this was not the case and our house was found to be clean. 

A few weeks ago, Lemon told me the story of when she bought her house. It had been unoccupied for a few years, which should have warned her that there might be something fishy about it. But Lemon loves a bargain, and it was a really good price. 

"It was a bargain," she told me. "But I started to think there might be something a bit odd about it when we called the phone company and found that a three-bedroom house had nine different phone lines installed."

And then there were the half-dozen padlocks on the garage. And all of the hot-lights and growing equipment in there.

"Sis, it's a tinny house," said Lemon's brother. 

So that's NZ-speak for a marijuana growing enterprise. And look, in just a couple of years it will be LEGAL here and we will be applauding such entrepreneurship. But at the time, Lemon overlooked such things and turned that tinny house into a proper home, and she raised a happy family there. 

I can only hope our Paraparaumu house will be half as happy as hers. It would be REALLY happy and filled with laughter, if we were growing marijuana of course, but hey, I can wait a couple of years.

S.