Most seriously rational thinkers, and here I am musing loosely on Schopenhauer, Heraclitus and Nietzsche, would agree that the measure of a man's senility is his ability to play darts.
In the former Ida Valley Railway Hotel - from where I have just returned after eight days of searing heat and humiliating fiscal slaughter at the Omakau trots - we play a darts game on New Year's Eve called bastards.
Some will know it as killer. You wipe out other players by hitting their number.
Over the years, this tournament has attracted some truly stellar humans.
We have housed two from the upper echelon of the New Year's honours list, a Paul Holmes who wasn't that one but someone from England, a man who once played sport for New Zealand, a Phil Taylor who wasn't the lager-bellied world darts champion but someone from Auckland, the deputy editor of North & South magazine, and Barney the farmer.
When I was young and fit and hungry, I ran up a record in this tournament which I'll warrant has never been challenged in any sport.
In the first six years, I won three times, came second twice, and sixth once. It is perhaps germane that we look at those minor placings.
One second came when I was tired and emotional, the other saw me having to beat a 9-year-old boy who had run sobbing to his room when eliminated the year before.
For me to knock him over for the shield - yes, we have a shield - with the whole bar chanting his name and calling my parentage into question, would have been like setting fire to Princess Di's flowers.
The sixth came when I was prised from a sickbed and carried into the bar, unable to see, unable to breathe, and virtually unable to lift a dart.
That I was able to thrash 13 opponents that night, some of them women, was a testament to my mouth-watering skill.
I throw a dart in an unusual way, bringing it from halfway down the back like a javelin thrower.
I abhor that incy-pincy way proper dart throwers flick the dart from the nose with imperceptible wrist.
I like to launch a dart, I do, and with the blunt old darts we use, unless you launch a dart, it won't stay in the board.
Competitors roar with laughter at my primitivism, but the proof is on the shield.
I am the only one to have won three times. But the game is always bigger than its players.
So I loosened the reins after my third win and revealed even greater skill while subtly losing.
Some years I didn't play at all, merely moving imperiously through the crowd like Billy Mitchell in the marvellous doco King Of Kong.
I hadn't thrown a dart for five years when I consented to flesh out a small field on the eve of 2009. I still felt young and hungry and fit.
This was possibly because the field of 12 included two octogenarians with walking sticks, a pregnant woman, and a six-year-old girl.
Barney, the farmer, popped in but didn't compete. This is a busy time of the year for him.
Last New Year's Eve he finished work at two in the morning.
When I threw my first dart, a chill ran through my right arm. I felt old and feeble, though in truth, still a little hungry.
Maybe I could slowly work my way back into form as the weaker players were eliminated?No I couldn't.
I was the first one eliminated. My son hit my number with a crushing treble and I was gone.
I sat at the bar for the rest of the night reading the only book on the shelf, a 2007 phone directory. There was a number there for Age Concern.
I wrote it down.
Apparently they can get you into the movies cheap.
-Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
