By the skin of our teeth

In Holland we were insured five times over. Health insurance, house contents insurance, anti-burglar strips fitted on the door, smoke detectors in the house, even a fire extinguisher on every floor of the house.

So we arrive in NZ. So we rent a new home. Internet not connected yet, so no easy comparison of contents insurance possible. So I’ll wait with that until we are reconnected. Also I have had no time yet to get some fire extinguishers here. But oh well, what’s just one single week? And so it happens…

For a few days we had someone staying with us. On a Saturday morning she went to town. We stayed at home. There was a bit of a strange smell in the kitchen, but we couldn’t really make out what it was. We had just bought a brand new fridge (for the first time in our lives), so I thought it was still fuming out some factory oil or something.

At noon we wanted to get a little nap. The smell still was present. We almost had fallen asleep, however, Emma wasn’t really at ease yet. Once more she went to search for the smell’s origin. It turned out to be the room of our houseguest, because she had forgotten to turn off her electric blanket!

I turned off the blanket and almost walked away, but just to be certain I looked underneath the blankets too. I couldn’t believe my eyes! The electric blanket had charred completely, taking with it two duvets, a woollen underlay, a cotton underlay, and the foam mattress!! Because some fresh oxygen could reach the smouldering mess now, it immediately started to smoke badly (and yellow??). “Emma! This has to go outside!! NOW!!!” Within 10 seconds the whole shebang lay in the back yard.


Boy oh boy. The charring had almost reached the carpet underneath the mattress, and it had almost reached the surface of the topmost duvet too. If Emma had discovered it two minutes later it would have started to really burn. With the NZ house building style (a lot of wood) the whole house would have burnt down. All that in the one week of our whole life that we didn’t have insurance. We did come to NZ to build ourselves a new life, but that new wasn’t the idea, really... :-)

Man, did this event scare us. Just to think about what could have happened, even more so if we already would have fallen asleep… We were “lucky” beyond imagination. We are very grateful for the outcome.

OK, it is a pity about the burned stuff, but that’s all it is: stuff. And not even a lot of stuff at that. No one has been hurt, which is the most important thing of all! Thinking about it, makes me realize that life is one big collection of events that just barely go right… I think I have destroyed four pans in my life by burning food in them beyond recognition, once I came home from work and the stove was still on with nothing on it, on several occasions Emma has left the iron on at full heat for the whole day (now we have one that shuts down automatically), on Gloucester Street (the room we lived in for the previous two months) I myself have left the blanket on for a whole day. Stupid stupid stupid, but it happens… it just does.

Immediately I arranged for the first house contents insurance I could lay my hands on. The best way to make sure nothing bad happens to you is to be insured for it anyway… just like taking a tyre repair kit with you ensures that you will not have a flat tyre at all ;-)