It’s day eighteen of lockdown and, in the words of Freddie Mercury, it finally happened. I’ve run out of locations to blog about. As a New Zealand travel blogger, I find this state of affairs unacceptable. Normally, I would venture out into the world in search of new material, but… you see my predicament. May I present, therefore, my prison?

I mean my house. It’s a pretty weird house, actually. It has all sorts of unusual nooks and crannies. It’s a rental, of course. As a millennial, I’m forbidden from owning my own house by our avocado overlords. (Praise be Their Emerald Scrotalness.) I live with two friends and my should-have-been-by-now husband. (Our wedding was supposed to have happened two days ago. Seriously, f**k this.)

Anyway, should you ever want to visit us, (which, you know, don’t,) here’s a handy travel guide of the top ten places to see at our house:

1) The Cell

Honestly, we’ve never fully figured out what to call this place, so “the Cell” is what I’m going with. It’s attached to our dining room, slightly too large to be a cupboard; much too small to be a room. It’s triangular. One of the walls is mostly frosted glass, to make up for the lack of windows. There’s an in-built desk, with an in-built hinge-lidded box on top of it, which puts forward an argument for it being intended as an office, but surely, you’d go insane if you were shut up in there! My should-have-been-by-now husband says you could lock a child in there until they finish their homework.

2) The Scary Downstairs Toilet

We’ve lived in this house for well over a year, and I have yet to use this toilet. It’s a wooden-walled box in the corner of the basement/garage. I once popped my head through the door, saw the cobweb-crossed dinginess and thought, “Nope.”

We have two toilets upstairs, so why put yourself through the trauma?

3) The Mouldy Room of Unrequirement

This place is also in the basement/garage. It’s a useful dumping ground for random clutter, (such as swords, Buddhist prayer wheels and Chinese Baoding balls,) but if you spend more than a few minutes in there, your lungs begin to atrophy. Understandably, the property manager has forbidden anyone from using it as a bedroom. You’d think this wouldn’t be necessary, but before we moved in, the house had, according to a neighbour, at least ten students living in it. (There are four bedrooms. Five, if you use the lounge as a bedroom. Six, if you use the Cell as a Harry Potter-style bedroom.)

4) The Dungeon

This is the area under the house, which takes a fair bit of courage to explore. I mean there’s probably a murderous hobo living in there. (Sometimes, we hear him scratching the at the floorboards from beneath… Kidding.) Below the balcony, behind a vegetable bed, there’s a small door. We call the area beyond it “the dungeon” partly because we’re like that; partly because some of it really looks like the ruins of a dungeon, complete with cell walls. In it, we’ve found such historic artefacts as a boombox.

You know what? I’m so tempted to hide a fake body in there for the next tenants to find.

5) The Narnia of Costumes

Yeah, I have a wardrobe just for my costumes. ’Tis a wonderous place you can get lost in. I’ve got relatively wide range of historical costumes, from Medieval to Victorian, and boxes of accumulated accessories.

6) The Narnia of Toilet Paper

There’s an oddly tall cupboard in the main toilet. ’Tis a wonderous place you can get lost in. One of our cats likes to jump up into it and nuzzle against the heavenly, three-ply clouds. Kidding. Our overlords wouldn’t allow such an extravagance as three-ply toilet paper. (Praise be Their Emerald Scrotalness.)

By the way, I’d like it on record that none of that toilet paper was panic-bought.

7) The Feijoa Tree

This can be found in quite a pretty corner of the garden. (Our garden is massive, for which we are eternally grateful at the moment.) Another of our cats likes to climb it and pretend she can’t get down for attention. Around the time lockdown started, the tree began dropping approximately ten metric tonnes of feijoas a day. My should-have-been-by-now husband responded by making it his mission to eat every single one. He’s made feijoa crumble and feijoa biscuits. He’s ruined one of our pots making feijoa jam. He puts stewed feijoa on everything he eats. And guess what? I HATE FEIJOAS.

I’d never even heard of feijoas until my family moved to New Zealand, and suddenly everyone we knew was pushing buckets of the f**kers on us. You can’t sell them, because everyone has a tree. I have yet to find a single fellow immigrant who doesn’t think they’re disgusting. I reckon Kiwis evolved to eat them out of necessity. If they didn’t, they’d be crushed under an avalanche of them every autumn.

8) The Jungle

This can be found in another corner of the garden. The cats love it. Like a proper jungle, there’s lots of archaeology in there too. You can’t even lightly brush the leaf litter without hitting a beer bottle. Just the other day, we were playing with the cats and a loud thunk led us to uncover a pink coffee mug. Every time we go out into the garden, (and I really wish I was kidding,) we find another bottle cap or piece of broken glass. As I said before, we’ve lived here for well over a year. It’s ridiculous!

We also keep, to this day, finding broken glass on our balcony. When we first moved in, we went around sweeping it all up, but it kept coming back. How? How?! After a while, we developed a theory: the infamous students that lived here before us must have routinely thrown their empty beer bottles onto the roof, and every time it rains more shards get washed down.

9) The Library

This place is mine. A paradise built from years of scouring secondhand bookshops. As of time of writing, I have 941 books, but, in the words of the Little Mermaid, I want more. This library is also my office, and that of my should-have-been-by-now husband. Incidentally, here’s a photo of him in the middle of a meeting.

The room it’s in is the nicest in the house. It was obviously meant to be the lounge, as there’s a gas fire embedded in a marble-veneered mantelpiece, and a fancy-as-f**k liquor cabinet that we use for board games. One section of the liquor cabinet is mirrored, and one full-on swivels, thereby enabling your common or garden boomer to pass off their alcohol problem as middleclass sophistication. Incidentally, one of the cats enjoys riding the swivel cabinet like a merry-go-round.

10) The Gift Shop

What’s a tourist attraction without a gift shop? Our flatmate makes macramé necklaces out of crystals. With f**k all else to do during the lockdown, her bedroom is now overflowing with them. Care to buy one as a commemoration of your visit? No, really, would you? Here’s a link to her Facebook page: Ems Macramé. (Obviously, she won’t be able to mail any out until after the lockdown is lifted.)

So, I hope you enjoyed your tour of our house. Well, maybe “enjoyed” is a little too optimistic. Endured? Hmm. Too much the other way. Presumably, if you made it to the end, you found it at least more amusing than sitting there doing nothing. Thanks.

This will be the last new Poms Away article for a while. I suggest you check out our massive back catalogue. I’ll keep posting the most interesting ones to our Facebook page: facebook.com/pomsawayblog