I have resolved never to use these words again, or God strike me dead and send me out to sea in a cardboard coffin.
Topping my bucket list by a considerable margin is my desire to put a keyboard in every room of our house.
This has nothing to do with my wife's plaintive question (Dazed & Confused, July 16) as to whether my intention is to store so much junk in the house the walls will burst like over-microwaved popcorn, this is merely to do with putting a keyboard in every room of the house.
Music, after all, is the food of love. Dave, Dee, Dozy, Mick and Tich said that.
Yes the piano has finally arrived.
After dropping a hint heavier than the piano itself that this would make my recent birthday a joy to unwrap, a hint unpicked up, I was forced to go out into the city all by myself and buy one.
Hayward's Auction House produced a fetching little John Spencer and Co piano at the end of July, and after frenzied and energy-draining bidding later described by Kevin Hayward as the most spectacular he has witnessed in more than 60 years atop the auctioneer's pulpit, the piano was mine for $70. 1897.
A very very good year for pianos.
The Spencer was ensnuggled into our bedroom by three very strong men the same day, candles in the candelabras lit, yes it has candelabras, as do most Steinway grand pianos I think, though I wouldn't put money on it, and a beautiful saloon bar-room ambience began whangling from every key.
I kept turning to the left expecting to see women of the night descending a staircase in flowing petticoats, saloon doors swinging ominously behind me, guns clicking for a Wild Bill Hickock dismissal .
Our bedroom has become Wild West heaven. And me, the piano man, with 1000 songs dancing from both wrists.
''It's broken,'' my wife said.
I ignored her.
She doesn't play the piano and has never learnt.
She wouldn't know a broken piano from a can of mustard.
I can only suspect she was referring to a metallic echo on six of the keys which sounded like someone had dropped a spoon on to the wires, an utterly magnificent effect most real pianists would adore.
Liszt for example, the man who came on stage with three pianos knowing he will have destroyed two of them before he had finished.
Or Jerry Lee Lewis, who booted many a piano into kindling with his back alley rock'n'roll vamping - these men thrived on thrilling broken piano sound, they were the geniuses of their craft.
The man who came to fix the metallic jangle reverberating echo noise, not broken, was from the Chills, James.
He said it wasn't the strings, closer inspection revealed someone had poured a glass of very powerful alcohol, probably absinthe, that most creative of toxic substances, through the join in the lid, and this had hardened on the felt pad things.
Steaming and careful scratching with the piano tuner's most intricate tool, the fingernail, sorted the problem.
''It's not broken any more,'' I said to my wife when she returned home that night.
And I played her God Defend New Zealand with all the passion I could muster.
And then Puff The Magic Dragon just to show the sheer versatility of the instrument. And me.
And that night, after practising Czerny scales all day to strengthen the fingers, I switched off the bedroom lights, lit the candles, and played my seamlessly-segued Beatles medley (starting on F minor, Michelle, Yesterday, Nowhere Man, Girl, then back to Michelle), purring my wife's duo-syllabic name for Michelle the last time through.
I finished sublimely, on F major, and turned to the bed with a toothy gleam worthy of Liberace at his gleaming toothiest.
She was fast asleep.
Music by candlelight does this.
But I swear she was smiling.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
