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Sat 02 Feb 2007The joys of everyday abnormalityTravel:Shortly after I started my postgraduate year at Wits University in Johannesburg, I invited all my classmates to a house-warming party at my flat. Maybe 40 people in all. Five showed up. Later, I nonchalantly asked a classmate why he couldn't make it. "But your e-mail didn't say anything about security," he said.(As it happened, security wasn't great: there was a succession of petty burglaries at the house - including the kidnapping and ransoming of my landlord's dog. These culminated, triumphantly, with the theft of the wheels from my car, while it was in the garage: the garage door didn't shut properly, and the thief slid in through the gap, raised the car on bricks, removed the wheels, and slid back out again with them.)