Weapon of choice

After almost 25 years on earth, I may have found my sport.

I’ve attempted everything from netball to tennis and darts. Results were mediocre at best. The closest I’ve been to finding my sporting niche was table tennis, with a net strung up on our old dining table. I pursued this sport with fanatical enthusiasm, which admittedly probably had something to do with being in Year 12 at the time.

My new sport suits me in every way – you can play it at any time in the comfort of your own home. The equipment is cheap and you don’t need to motivate yourself at all – the rules of the game do that for you.

My favourite time to play is just before bed, in my pyjamas. With racquet in hand, it’s like my own personal squash court except that instead of the sound of the ball rebounding off the walls, there’s the snap crackle pop of another mosquito biting the dust on my electrified racquet.

Yes, this is a blood sport.

All you need to survive in our house: electric racquet and craft materials.

A good night’s sleep for me at the moment has to be preceded with a good ten minutes of waving the racquet around, then a head count of dead mosquitoes on my bedroom floor.

Apparently there’s a bit of a dengue outbreak going on in Dili at the moment. If you’ve had the opportunity to look at or smell Dili’s drains recently, it’s not much of a surprise. They tend to get so blocked up that the water stops moving completely and sets into a thick bluish sludge. Occasionally some brave, community-minded soul will start pulling the sludge and assorted sludgeriffic items out of the drains in an effort to get things moving. As you can tell, it doesn’t really work.

This was once water.

We received a list of advice yesterday on how to avoid mosquito bites. One of which was to tuck your trousers into your socks. I’ll be sure to pass that on to Steve Urkel. And the next time I combine the unbearable snugness of socks with the heat trapping capacity of long pants (in Dili, these are mutually exclusive events), I’ll remember to do some tucking in.

In the meantime, I’ll be practising my serve every night before bed.