Since then it has been a terribly slow climb out of the black pit of not knowing how to or when to or why not to. There are probably rules, but I have never looked them up, preferring to fly by the seat of my pants, an item of clothing in my wardrobe so often back to front, without a belt, or just broken, that really, there was never any real chance of my getting it right. I was destined to be a serial Wuss.
You can bluff your way through these things if you're smart. But you can't bluff your way through if you are nearly blind and extremely shy. I have an oyster sack of anecdotes to back this up.
I remember, for example, being chased around our lounge twice by the acclaimed writer Christine Johnston, who had arrived for a prestigious dinner party. I saw her coming and I bobbed and weaved around furniture to get to the other side of the room, where I ostensibly rearranged some tombola stall ephemera above the fireplace.
She kept coming. I doubled back and made it to the stereo to ostensibly change the CD. For God's sake, Roy, she wailed, I'm trying to give you a HUG.
Hurrumph. Most acclaimed writers are so bound up in their craft they can't spot a Wuss.
Years later, this woman trounced me in a national 500-word short story contest. She won a barbecue, and my entry was one of twelve cellotaped to the window of Borders Bookshop in Auckland. I know she only did that coz of the hug thing.
I bear no grudge, in fact I have long forgotten everything about that 500-word short story contest. I spit on competition.
Then there was the time when I approached the guest speaker at a Fernhill Community Group meeting. I had met her once or twice, worthy of a hug I thought, she had spoken well, but was then kept at bay by what felt like a cylinder of gladwrap prodding at my stomach. She had proffered a hand. Oh, it's a HUG, she said, eye-blinking and bewildered by my aggression.
I have no peripheral vision, I never see the proferred hand, a fatal weakness in a nearly blind Wuss.
I have a close personal friend who begins a backswing with her always-full-to-the-brim bag whenever I advance for an end-of-evening hug. It's because I'm English, Roy, she says.
But I have hugged English women and not been whanged on the head by a heavy bag. Perhaps my close personal friend thinks I am a faulty hugger, that my technique is unsound?
Has she watched me with others and pursed her lips? Paranoia and a self-image that could slide under a snake is part and parcel of the Wuss. I mean, I just sort of clutch, squeeze a bit if I have known them for over 25 years, lip-squiff lightly on one cheek, not unlike a butterfly landing on candy floss, and run.
Is that wrong?
Wot?
Lip-squiff on the other cheek as well?
You mean, like European people? Good grief, that's ridiculous, all manner of things can happen to a near-blind Wuss should he attempt a rocky trans-facial crossing.
Unless the lip-squiffee follows you with a sympathetic balletic sway, you are going to headbutt her and be banned from that house for life.
The fact people take 40 minutes to leave (Dazed And Confused, October 2, 2012 ) is largely down to hugging, which can go on forever. People forget if they have already done it because they are drunk so they do it again.
I'm not saying ban the hug, I LOVE the hug, I'm just saying start teaching it from birth, like going weeze in the toilet, not on Dad's thigh. Darwin Schmarwin, some things just have to be learnt.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
