Medals. Everywhere I look, I see medals.
We live in quaint times when the norm for winning a significant sporting event is a giant gazillion-dollar cardboard cheque the size of a billboard, yet in the Commonwealth and Olympic Games, there is no money, just a medal.
As a registered couch monkey, I remain staggered that someone can cycle like buggery for 50km in 35degC heat and see off an entire field of fiendishly fit opponents, only to receive a mere medal at the end of it.
What can you do with a medal?
Well, you can wear it around your neck for an hour or so, but after that you have to take it off or people will think you are a pillock.
Cassius Clay, as he was then called, slept with his Rome gold medal under his pillow.
But that is about as allowably celebratory you can be.
Most of the time, they just get put in drawers, along with half-used batteries, pens that still slightly work and packets of staples.
And yet I would dearly love to win a medal, simply because I have never won one.
When I was growing up, fit, sharp and hungry, I won a smattering of tiny cups and book vouchers, even the occasional brief tenure of a shield.
But no medals.
I suspect I was not put on this earth to win one.
Even were I to sneak over to the Oval opposite our house in the night and mark out a 100m track with a finishing line and a medal sitting on a red velvet cushion beside it, I am sure I would trip over 20m out and finish face down and medal-less.
Or else some street kid would pinch the medal while I was doing my warm-up.
But a rescue rope has been tossed my way, and my hands are reaching up eagerly.
A medal presentation, even a velvet cushion, may yet have my unassuaged name on it.
On Friday, October 20, 1961, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
Tomorrow is the 49th anniversary of this thing.
And in New Zealand, indeed, pretty much everywhere in the world, if you somehow survive 50 years of type 1 diabetes, a feat variously described in Google as "uncommon" or "remarkable", as in going over the top in World War 1 six hundred times and still being able to dance the hokey tokey, then they give you a medal.
I think it is bronze, but it may be silver.
I am still making inquiries and finding out where they store the forms.
When I was younger I gazed at the occasional photo of this award being presented in the Diabetes New Zealand magazine, and wondered why it was considered so important.
After all, I was sure I would live to 100 like all my friends.
We were all invincible.
Apparently, there is also a medal for 75 years of type 1 diabetes, but these are as rare as the teeth of a hen.
I don't see why: 2036 is not so very far away the way time hurtles by these days.
But for now I will settle for the 50-year medal in one year's time.
I will build towards it like a Commonwealth Games athlete, timing my peak performance for the day of the event.
I will not party like a wild baboon or eat bad food.
I am in training, I will say.
But for what, they will ask incredulously.
For a medal, I will reply.
I will exercise lightly and sensibly with dignified walking, and restore my electrolytes afterwards with Mizone, like Mahe Drysdale, or Powerade, like the All Blacks.
I will have pyjamas designed see-through black like the New Zealand cyclists.
At the awards ceremony, I will thank the 13,000 surgeons, doctors and nurses who have striven to keep me alive all these years.
And I will sleep with the medal under my pillow.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
