If only I had heard of David Garrett on Tuesday last week I would have invited him to join me and two Auckland-dwellers for a spot of what they called recession-proofing.
Loosely translated, it means eating and drinking and making merry while your life and that of the rest of the world may be going to hell in a voluminous handbag.
While you are doing this you can look fondly at someone's backyard, wine glass in one hand and tasty nibbly things in the other, and feel absolutely no desire to plant a carrot, a line of leeks or a sliver of silver beet.
Blame the wine and the warm weather, if you will, but you simply have no ability to look towards winter and worry about food.
In any case there is too much to talk about.
We spent some time talking about manners.
As we stuffed ourselves with tasty nibbly things and refilled our glasses through the warm afternoon, we remarked on how awful everyone else's eating and drinking habits were.
We remembered being punished for eating in the street and questioned why some people are constantly scoffing and cannot walk two steps without sucking on a bottle.
Fending off hypocrisy, dehydration and starvation, I attempted to change the subject by confessing I find the preponderance of breasts bulging out of every outfit on almost every woman, regardless of shape, size and wrinkle count, vulgar.
Nobody said much.
I think they dismissed it as cleavage envy, but they were too polite to say so.
Our little gathering was jolly, but it lacked the frisson and undercurrent of murderous desire that might have come had there been a tedious attention-seeking child or a churl in our midst.
Garrett would have been a great extra guest, but we were only alerted to his endearing qualities the following day when he showed he could be both child and churl.
My dictionary delightfully describes a churl as an ill-bred surly fellow.
I have no wish to question Garrett's breeding, but I think he would qualify as a surly fellow, after his performance in Parliament last week.
When the rest of the House rose to give former prime minister Helen Clark a standing ovation over her appointment to the United Nations' third-highest post, Garrett, an Act list MP, didn't.
He was later quoted as saying it would have been hypocritical for him to do so, given he had little time for Miss Clark and what she stood for.
Had he been paying attention? Did he hear Prime Minister John Key's congratulatory speech? It hit the right note.
It was not begrudging or stilted, but generous and warm, without straying into toadyism.
If David Garrett had stood with his parliamentary colleagues would we have thought he had dropped his la-la land Right-wing ideology and returned to his pinko roots?Or might we have thought there is a chap who knows a bit about good manners, who can see there are occasions when it is right to acknowledge another's success even if we do not approve of them.
Like the tedious attention-seeking child, Garrett doesn't get it.
He doesn't grasp that the adults are not amused and longing for someone to have the guts to tell him to go and play in another room.
He may be a slow learner.
Last year, he was criticised for obnoxious behaviour during the filming of a television show after he had been drinking.
He later described it as not being his finest hour, but he didn't believe his behaviour was offensive.
Questioned about the parliamentary slight, Helen Clark deliciously told the Sunday Star-Times she would not recognise Garrett so "it's not of any great moment.
Maybe he will learn after a while in politics that there are some things you do and some things you don't".
I would have been happy to subtly aid in that process.
Garrett could have joined me and the Auckland-dwellers at My Fair Lady.
We could have sung some of the words to help him, including, "without your pulling it the tide comes in, without your twirling it the earth can spin, without your pushing them the clouds roll by . . ."
Gently, I could have referred him back to Pygmalion, the 1912 George Bernard Shaw play which spawned the musical, and to Professor Henry Higgins' advice about manners.
The great secret, he said, "is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another".
And, if that didn't work, I might be tempted to poke my tongue out at Garrett.
I wouldn't care if he called me a hypocrite.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
