The wonderful thing about getting older is becoming so wise and dignified, but it does mean you have to miss out on quite a lot of fun.
Jonty Howley was trying to encourage me to sit on Santa's knee on Buckingham Green during the weekend.
I was a bit tempted as he (Santa, although Jonty is pretty delicious as well) was more attractive than many of the Santas I have seen over the years, but maturity got the better of me.
I had already heard that my lovely niece had got so over-excited about sitting on the big guy's knee that she wet her pants and burst into tears and had to be taken home.
Cute in a 2-year-old, but people might say unpleasant things about a 51-year-old doing the same.
Actually, I was going to start getting all mature this week and write sensible things.
I got the frightening news that our son's girlfriend's mother in Christchurch is reading this column each week and it probably doesn't help his chances of fitting in with her family when they read about the strangeness of his.
Sorry, beautiful Lucy's mother, but he really does come from a pretty dodgy, swampy sort of gene pool.
We have our oldest son and his Japanese girlfriend home at the moment.
Mika is a delight and such a happy, helpful girl to have around that it is quite a relief that her parents are most unlikely to read this and discover the sort of riffraff their beautiful daughter is mixing with in New Zealand.
Congratulations to the organisers of last Friday's Arrowtown Long Lunch.
They had specially ordered perfect weather and the street looked fantastic.
The Joker, Mary Poppins and Princess Leia (aka Chris, Marnie and Sam) were there and looking splendid.
I did sneak a look in Mary's magic carpet bag. Who knew she had a cellphone?
There's nothing about it in the book - no wonder she always had an answer for everything.
I was at the Provisions table and really enjoyed meeting all my table-mates, as well as eating my delicious Moroccan lunch; and it seems everyone else was pretty chuffed with the day.
I hope they do it again next year.
I hadn't realised that we all needed to drink a lot of wine to raise funds for the Trails Trust - it would have been a marvellous excuse to make it a truly long lunch ... although it might have made Saturday morning unbearably long.
I'm still feeling a little uncomfortable and fearful after seeing the photograph of the very big egg a local chicken is said to have laid.
I'm probably not as uncomfortable and fearful as that chicken, but I do hope the owner is not planning to enter eggs like that in my class at the Lake Hayes Show.
When you come from a long line of losers, you do ache for a chance at success, and my chance rests in the six eggs class.
The show is on January 14, so, no doubt, you are all frantically knitting and preserving and cramming your sheep full of bodybuilding steroids already.
I'm thinking of entering my darling in the Most Unusual Pet category.
He's sort of hairy and adorable, although we won't pick up many prizes if he is meant to be doing tricks or obeying simple commands.
Those are quite beyond him and with him as accident prone as he is, I don't think it is sensible to start training him to leap through a flaming hoop or catch a ball in his mouth.
Sometimes I am a bit cruel about him, and, I must confess, when I arrived home on Thursday, he was there to meet me at the airport and had dinner all prepared.
I was staggered and delighted.
We've been together a long time now, and this was a very big first.
Who said that stupid thing about old dogs?
I don't know if you have the same experience, but I often realise there is a completely unintentional link between the books I am reading.
Sometimes it is really small - for example, three books in a row might have a mention of a parrot, or every book might be set in Egypt.
I just piled up the books I had read in the past few weeks and noticed every single one was written by a man, and I loved nearly all of them (the books, not the men).
Men do write quite differently.
They use fewer adjectives and there is a lot more action and much less talk about how people are feeling.
Why is that a surprise?
It's just been republished and is having massive appeal.
Not-very-heroic hero Vatanen is a journalist with a shrew of a wife and a lousy job.
When the car he is in runs over a hare in the forest, he hops out to find the animal and never comes back to the car.
It's a wonderful midlife crisis story and will appeal to anyone who has ever thought they might just like to escape everything in their life and try a new life for size.
There is no attempt to glorify this very ordinary guy and it is all the more human and easy to identify with because of this.
If there is a moral to this funny story, it is probably that some lives are so dreary and miserable that any other life would be preferable, even one without many creature comforts.
Life in the Wakatipu is generally so good it is hard to imagine that right now hideous things are happening to people all around the world.
The movie The Whistleblower is one of the most uncomfortable I have ever seen.
The subject is human trafficking in Bosnia and is based on a true story that can only shock and horrify.
Do go, but don't expect to enjoy it.
But if you would prefer pure enjoyment, two of New Zealand's top female artists, Gretchen Albrecht and Elizabeth Thomson, are speaking at Dorothy Brown's next Thursday night before their exhibition opening at Nadene Milne Gallery in Arrowtown.
Tickets are $8 each, and if you need to earn a bit of money to pay for them, Scotty Steven's excellent new Arrow Mining Company has opened down by the Chinese village and you can try your luck at finding some gold.
He tells me there are huge nuggets being found and with gold at over $2000 an ounce, we can all get very rich.
Maybe ...
But we'll all be the poorer without Scooter Reid, who died on Wednesday morning.
A big sad goodbye to the man who did the lighting for almost every show that ever came to the Wakatipu.
We will miss you hugely, Scooter.
