Brian Holden: Never bored enough to prefer jail

Bored? Yep, we all know the feeling. Even when there are new mountains to be climbed, the "it's all been done before" syndrome kicks in.

In our house, however, the state of boredom tends to last for minutes rather than hours, while some people deny having one single bored moment in their whole lives.

Indeed, there are some whose lives are so full on, their feet hardly touch the floor for the rest of the day after swinging them out of bed at 6 o'clock each morning. No doubt about it, the world has become a busy place, with so much now to see and do. So why then are there poor souls who, despite good health and mental state, have difficulty in charging themselves sufficiently to get out there and live?

For some, even a train charging through their front yard twice daily, and a rock band performing in between, isn't enough to get them going.

Such a sorry case hit the news last week of a Whangarei man who was "sick of playing Xbox" while on home detention, being granted his wish to serve the rest of his sentence in jail. The Whangarei police station got a call from a Hikurangi man last week to say he was bored serving home detention, was sick of playing Xbox, and would rather serve the rest of his sentence behind bars.

The 19-year-old had already served 10 months of an 11-month home detention term and, with one month to go, "had run out of Xbox games to play".

He told police he was about to breach home detention if he wasn't picked up and taken to jail. He got his wish and is now nicely tucked in at Ngawha Prison. A bizarre choice indeed, but perhaps the man simply wanted to be in the company of others, making the choice not as silly as it sounds.

For sure, I do get bored and even sick of my own company at times. But the day I choose jail over the comfort of my own living room - Xbox or not - will be a sad one indeed.

Life is so often about getting things into the proper perspective when it comes to risk taking. A Rotorua woman took a puff of a cigarette recently and noticed smoke wafting up from a hole in the middle. What appeared to be a maggot was working its way into the filter.

She and her friend vented their disgust, suspecting that the unwelcome beastie had eaten its way through the packet. The girls were not impressed and notified the tobacco authorities but, when a representative went to inspect the packet, the consumer would not allow them to exchange the product or to examine the cigarettes and confirm what happened.

Cigarette beetles do exist, which can lay eggs in stored tobacco. It could be that the maggot-like creature was larvae from this source.

One has to ask, why all the fuss? While nobody likes the thought of creepy crawlies in their mouth, the harmful effects are probably nil. The disgust that the two women are on about should be directed at the toxic chemicals that lurk in that same cigarette - 7000 in all! Here are just a few: Formaldehyde, benzene, polonium, vinyl chloride, chromium, arsenic, lead, cadmium, carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, butane, toluene and methanol. The two young ladies who made such a song and dance about their "disgusting" experience would have been better off ditching the ciggies and opting for the bug instead.