When I went to university, they paid ME to be there. Three times a year I received a cheque, which was promptly spent on wild living.
Now, when I idly scan the cost of completing the degree I failed to complete in the 1960s because of wild living, I notice the cost is extraordinarily high. How ironic then, that I have found a way to educate myself superbly for one dollar.
The Salvation Army store in Princes St puts out books every day. They do have Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy on the shelves, but the meat and drink is in the boxes on the tables, five for one dollar. Five! Let us look at the five I bought last week, a quintet which taught me more about life than three years at Otago University ever could.
Rock Star by Jackie Collins. Every now and then, often in the solitude of the Ida Valley when nobody will see me, I will strap myself into a Jackie Collins. She writes expertly on the entertainment industry, and that is my patch. And all her men are 6ft 2in tall with substantial muscles.
I am 5ft 5in and spindle-thin. No muscles. It is important I read Jackie Collins to see what it is like to be big and hunky. I want to read what sort of action these men get so I know what to ask the man-maker for when I come back next time.
The strength in Jackie's writing is her scorn of subtlety and her respect for the reader's lack of intelligence.
Sure her books are big - this one is 456 pages - but she writes in a language that tadpoles could understand. Her rock star hero Kris Phoenix has just jetted into Los Angeles from London, where he had left his live-in lover Astrid. Astrid, writes Jackie, had not exactly let his motor idle, so he is less interested than he should be in his Los Angeles live-in lover Cybil Wilde, who he has just found in his bed. Cybil wakes up and presses her breasts against his naked body and it's hey nonny nonny until page 456.
Having recently read some damning stuff on Jackie's sister Joan in a Warren Beatty biography, I wondered whether the Collins girls had ever had a father.
Talk about a small world - the second book of the five was the memoir of Joe Collins, the actual father. A Touch Of Collins. Joe worked in the heart of British entertainment for more than 50 years. He sure knew how to cut a deal, no wonder his bitch goddess daughters were so good at it, and he also recognises true talent.
Sophia Loren and Racquel Welch turned down the role of Alexis in Dynasty, but they wouldn't have done it as well as Joan, says Joe. A Touch Of Collins taught me how to succeed in the entertainment industry, which, as a budding autoharpoonist getting better every day, I desperately need to know.
The next two books I am loathe to mention because they are scabrous and cheap (Once Upon A Mattress by Kathleen O'Reilly, and The Sicilian's Bought Bride by Carol Marinelli), but they did show me there are other ways to win a woman's heart than the passive Y-shape servility of Jackie Collins.
Book five however was the real educator. The Joy Of Being A Woman And What A Man Can Do by Ingrid Trobisch.
This one came out 35 years ago and it tells me stuff about women I would never ever have learned at university, like how they have many emotions during sexual union which intertwine like petals on a rose.
Man, it seems, has just one. Ingrid also taught me about the Kegel muscle. I brought this up at a prestigious Mexican dinner party a week ago and only a third of the women at the table knew about it. But she knew a lot. And now, so do I.
Shop wisely on education, spend no more than one dollar.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
