No man worth his salt plans purchases ahead, or even uses a shopping list on the day. A real man buys on instinct alone, without thought, without reason and without any intention to use what he has bought for more than 45 minutes.
I have been such a man for a very long time.
My particular sphere of interest has been musical instruments. I am, quite simply, fascinated by them, guitars most of all. And when Records Records was raging and punters were selling me their music to ward off an electricity shutdown or even flat eviction, I always tactfully inquired if they were selling anything else as well.
Invariably there was a guitar in the car.
I was similarly lustful in op shops and auctions, so by the end of the 1990s I owned four electric guitars, too many keyboards to count - most rewardingly a small Yamaha that boasted backwards guitar among its sound effects - a mismatched set of drums, including two called Ludwig, a cowbell, a 12-string acoustic guitar and two six-string acoustics, a violin, two sets of bongos, a chromatic harmonica and a sitar.
Yes, a sitar. It should be pointed out at this stage that I could barely play any of these instruments, but the sitar was the exception.
You can drop a book on a sitar or just flail an errant hand at its ever-resonating strings and it will sound like authentic Indian music.
Consequently I played the sitar for much longer than the 45 minutes I usually granted a new purchase before boredom and frustration set in.
Westerners' inability to actually recognise Indian music was confirmed when I saw Ravi Shankar and his two musicians at the Dunedin Town Hall. T
hey came on stage and noodled quietly for about 20 minutes, and then everyone cheered and cried wooooo! There could even have been a wolf whistle.
"I think that is on his fourth album," said a pony-tailed yerd sitting next to me. "I believe it is called Raga of Tendulkar."
The great man told us later over dinner on the top floor of the Southern Cross Hotel (now there's a namedrop) that they had merely been tuning up for the concert to come.
Records Records exited my life, and I had not, in fact, bought a single musical object in three years when I popped into the neighbouring Salvation Army Family Store close by three weeks ago.
And there I saw an autoharp. Old, battered, rusty and probably seriously out of tune, but an autoharp. Fifty dollars. Being first and foremost a rational thinker, I went home and researched autoharps. And through that I found FastFret, a resin-like product you rub on the strings of an autoharp to make them new and clean. I bought a bottle and went back to get the autoharp.
It was gone. Some might say I should have bought the autoharp before the bottle of FastFret, but they would be splitting hairs. Besides, FastFret is designed for guitars, and I still have one electric guitar, a black Gibson Les Paul copy.
Once upon a time these strings were soft and silky, but no longer. It says on the bottle FastFret will make them soft and silky again.
Plus I will be able to play faster! Very small hands and laziness means I only play three thingsthe intro to Ralph McTell's Nana's Song, the intro to Led Zeppelin's Black Dog, and the Bach-stolen guitar break on The Byrds' She Don't Care About Time.
I play them all slowly and very, very badly, almost exclusively on the E string, which requires the dexterity of Les Paul himself.
I would rather own an autoharp, but if this return to purchasing useless musical objects will result in my acquiring blinding guitar speed, then it will be worth it.
So far, I am just making more mistakes. But, hey, Rome wasn't built in a day.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
