A friend, Emily, dropped around to return The Royals by scandalmongress Kitty Kelley.
A rapacious read, she said.
I must get on to it soon, I am sorely in need of a rapacious read. Who would have guessed Prince Phillip was born on a kitchen table?
I was running way behind on household drudgery when Emily rang the bell. Three specks of unexplained dust had appeared in one of the spare rooms, and I couldn't live with myself until I had vacuumed them into oblivion. Dust does not vacuum itself. If I had a dollar for every time I have been told that, I would be an exceedingly rich man.
Consequently, I greeted Emily in lesser clothing, specifically an oversized strangely-coloured seaweedy $9.95 top from K Mart, something I wear often but never ever in front of people, because I am a columnist, and columnists must maintain a strong dress code or else the whole profession will just fall into the sea.
Were I ever to have a line of clothing at the iD Fashion Show, and there is every possibility this may one day happen, for I am nothing if not a man who relishes a real ball-breaker of a challenge, you would see this in the programme as After The Bath by Colbert. For these are clothes I slip into after a bath. I bathe late, hence after the bath is close to midnight when very few visitors have been known to ring our doorbell. And the ones who do are far too drunk to notice what I am wearing. Or even who I am. A man is completely safe from derision when he wears After The Bath by Colbert at the right time.
And yet After The Bath by Colbert has merit as a line of clothing any time of the day.
After all, in relatively recent times, we have witnessed through bewildered fast-blinking eyes, clothes worn backwards, shoelaces left untied and jeans with jagged holes up and down both legs.
Distressed clothing. Massively expensive clothing. And right now we are dealing with pockets where you can see what's inside and man leggings.
I will just clench my teeth and refuse to believe crocs ever happened. Beside all that, my food-stained mis-shapen tops, flopping track pants and Warehouse fluffy slippers are positively conservative and almost smart.
I have envisaged the whole project launch of After The Bath by Colbert right through to completion. Like the electric razor guy who kicked off owners advertising their own company on television, I would do all the advertising myself. You would see me first as a tiny thatch of hair poking out from a bath filled with Bubble Licious, coconut and shea flavour, which I discovered on special at Postie Plus, now called just Postie, and which I will swear on my dog's grave is the finest bubble bath I have ever bubbled in. The thatch would rise slowly until a face had formed, my face, the face of a man about to step out of the bath and into a new line of shatteringly fine designer clothing, After The Bath by Colbert.
Normally one would put ugly food-stained tops and paint-stained track pants on furtively and fast, but this being a designer line, I glide languidly into each item, one crease at a time, like a man testing reputably fine food. The differently-coloured woollen socks, one long one short, are affixed with a twinkling beckon of the eye, sloozing into the fluffy slippers with an eroticism than plainly precludes these ads ever being legally played before midnight. Which, after all, is the time After The Bath by Colbert is put upon the body. Clothing for the man who comes alive when the clock strikes twelve. Yes.
Emily didn't say a word when she handed me the book. The focus group has thus been appeased. Roll on iD Fashion Week 2012.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
