Most rational thinkers would agree that the measure of a man is found in the birthday presents he buys for his partner.
Forget all the other stuff, forget his work for charity, his contribution to Neighbourhood Watch, his ability to teach his son fishing, in the end it all comes down to birthday presents for the partner, the material manifestation of the soul that rages inside.
My wife has just had a birthday.
She shares this date with Liza Minnelli, but very few famous others - a United States president who is not known to me, Thompson, and just one NBA basketball player, Sutton.
A sorry lot.
No matter.
I celebrate this date with eye-stinging largesse year after year, showing a depth of thought and feeling as deep as the earth's core.
I have spoken to other men on this topic and I fear I stand alone in my method.
They talk of quality or quantity, a really big spend on one thing, like a Lamborghini, or a teeming maze of small things, gasting the partner with so much flabber that the absence of anything decent is not even noticed.
None of these men has ever contemplated doing both, and yet both is all I do.
This year was no exception.
For quantity, I produced a staggering total of 17 presents, and quality was exquisitely represented by a lovely pair of earrings fashioned by a woman who was an original member of both the Chills and the Verlaines, quality of an insuperable kind.
My presents are always fleshed out by sardines.
I make no bones about this.
My wife adores sardines, and our supermarkets carry a wide variety of them.
One year I bought 23, all individually wrapped.
This year it was just seven, partly reflecting my maturity as a man, and partly representing the fact that this year I remembered she really only likes the ones in spring water.
But there were some King Oscars in there, masterful, magnificent and monstrously expensive.
I'll warrant they are the best sardine in Christendom.
The city's two-dollar stores were plundered lasciviously.
You can say what you like about two-dollar stores, but I am surprised they do not all sink through their floors, so full are their shelves of utterly perfect presents.
Some lemon grass incense combined my wife's love of Thai food with her memory of me as a doe-eyed hippie, a memory she presumably cherishes to this day, and a bell, made in China, proved damn near as popular as the earrings.
Let me explain the bell.
We have had my wife's parents staying with us, on the lam from Christchurch's earthquake, and they are not fussed on spicy toreador-fiery food, my specialty.
So I spend the period before dinner playing music very loudly in my office.
Our son is on headphones in his bedroom playing internet poker, and my wife's father is as deaf as a post.
He needs our LG telly remote on 76.
Hence every night my wife has had to roar her lungs raw to indicate tucker is up.
I treasure my wife's lungs, so what more thoughtful present than a bell? Precisely.
Every night us guys are whanged to attention by the ding of fine Chinese technology.
Really, every household should have one.
This year's presents were completed by a book on the Finns I had wanted to read for some time, a bag of tongue-tickling Kahlua marshmallows which I tested vigorously to allay fears of food poisoning, two cakes of chocolate, an IOU for a meal at a fine restaurant, glo-hart lollies because hearts are romantic, and some flowers from a florist who asked me if I wanted vivid or soft.
Stupid stupid question - what real man would ever buy soft flowers? I think women everywhere would agree there is love, sensitivity and kindness wriggling like snakes at the bottom of a barrel with this lot.
It goes without saying Liza Minnelli would have wept with joy.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
