Column: Taking the mickey, and everything else

I like to think of New Zealand as a fairly terror-free place to live.
While our comparatively small population means the media cover everything from mass homicides to almost-successful ciggie snatches at the Paeroa Caltex, I'm thankful  I can do the morning milk run safe in the knowledge
I'm not going to trip over a body or wake up in an iced bath with my kidneys missing. But for all our relative purity, New Zealanders seem to have one fatal weakness - taking stuff.
We Kiwis are known for our ownership issues; for decades we have battled with our Aussie counterparts over the real dominion of the pavlova, Phar Lap and Russell Crowe. We do not care that the pav is just a fat marshmallow with fruit, Phar Lap a dead horse with a funny name and Crowe a phone-tossing egomaniac with a questionable talent for accents.
What counts is that they are our fat marshmallow/dead horse/aggressive gladiator and ours alone.
But the condition doesn't stop there; issues within our own country are  as bad.
Thanks to our desperate need to bagsy anything that might be snitched from under our noses, even nature, seemingly the most intangible of things, has been transformed into a kind of commodity; the foreshore and seabed are not, in fact, the bodies of land surrounding the ocean but a physical asset to be claimed by whoever's political party has the shiniest billboard.
It is perhaps this insecurity that has caused New Zealand's rate of theft, our  crime of choice at the moment. A kind of "but what if someone else gets it?" mindset that sends fingers wandering into cars, houses and piggybanks alike.
Just this week an unsuspecting Canadian couple fell victim to New Zealand's great weakness after having a rental car efficiently cleared of money, passports and a custom-made paraglider only hours after landing in the country. Not knowing the thieves in question, it is hard to identify their motivation.
I have an inkling it had little to do with assuming the identity of a blonde Canadian woman or becoming licensed paragliders.
The most obnoxious thing about theft is that like pav, Crowded House and the infamous phone flinger, the things people go to such great efforts to claim are  often of no  use to them.
My car is just another example. My 1989 Corolla was my damp, musty and largely dysfunctional home on wheels. It had witnessed as many accidents as it had kilometres, could be described as white only from a great distance and was the general butt of every joke in the student carpark.
Indistinguishable stains were on every stainable surface, it had a festering kind of smell that was never quite sourced and a jammed cassette player, meaning all musical experiences were limited exclusively to Ronan Keating Live at Wembley.
Belongings transported in the car included a variety of mismatched footwear, a beat-up skimboard, and the comfiest pair of trackpants known to man/woman. A tempting prospect indeed.
And yet despite the borderline uselessness of my car and its contents, despite the fact  the hijackers would have looked considerably smoother in one of the polished, lowered, be-spoilered vehicles parked in the vicinity of our school's after ball, the '89 'Rolla was their chariot of choice, the car they chose to rifle through, drive off the top of Mt Ngongotaha and  set on fire.
The car was worth nothing - in fact, I was probably most upset about the trackpants.
And that's what makes me mad. Much like the paraglider thieves, the ruthless scalliwags probably had no interest in my pants.
In their drunken stupor they wouldn't have  noticed the perfectly worn-in pockets, the lack of waistband string, allowing for maximum sitting-down comfort, those fluffy little ball things you get from washing stuff too many times. No, they would have ignored all these things and cawed with triumph as my beloved Nikes went up in a ball of polyester flames.
We claim too many things in life with no real reason other than the simple joy of having it. While I enjoy the odd festive pav, I would gleefully regurgitate every last bite if it meant I could wear my adored trackies just one more time.
If ever you find yourself in heated debate about the real motherland of your dessert, take a second to think about whether it's worth the argument, or at least keep an eye open; someone's probably stealing your paraglider.