Most rational thinkers would agree Joe Bennett is the finest columnist in the world today.
That he can be this while working from Christchurch remains a staggering conundrum that not even Stephen Hawking nor Paul Henry could divine.
But we should not be impugning our neighbouring city in any way, so I will drop this subject right now.
But how can work of this quality be produced in Christchurch, a city which year after year heads all World Health Organisation research studies in everything from intellectual impairment to one-eyed sporting analysis?
No question has burned more slowly and painfully into my soul than this one over the past five decades, and I guess the only possible answer is that Joe is not actually FROM Christchurch, praise the Lord, but has finally arrived there after collecting wisdom from all over the globe.
And he has gathered this wisdom carefully and diligently and released it to his readers in the measured and life-improving way only a teacher could muster, Joe of course not only having taught, but taught at the veritable bastion of Christchurch and all that therein dies, Christ's College.
So really, Joe could write these columns from the Chatham Islands and still stand atop the column podium every year with raised fist.
Two, not one, two Joe Bennett columns before Christmas addressed his recent slow sliding into slob, or, as medical specialists call it at international taxpayer-funded conferences, getting fat. Joe tried many things, but the waist number on his trousers continued to ebb upwards.
I was very amused, nay skull-scratchingly mummified, by Joe's tale, for I have spent my entire life trying to become fat, or more accurately, fatter.
Only a stomach transplant, an operation attempted only in rare Indo-Chinese villages at this point on account of its supreme danger, could seemingly manage this, as I have eaten, at high speed, and drunken, sometimes at an even higher speed, food and drink of the most heinous nature.
Ironically, at Dunedin Hospital I am trumpeted in front of final-year med students as the diabetic department's finest fellow for controlled blood sugars, my glycated haemoglobin number literally off the charts.
Technically, I don't even have diabetes. Herewith is Roy, our poster boy, cackle the endocrinologists, for whom constant poetry is a delightful adjunct.
Little do they know, or rather, little do they believe, because heaven knows I brag about this outlandishly, that I have a half-eaten pavlova in my inside jacket pocket, and am contemplating whether to buy white or pink marshmallows at Centre City New World immediately my talk to the med students is over.
Nine years ago, however, there was a slim chance of fat. As my kidney transplant approached, I sought out other transplantees to find out what I was in for. The general consensus would be that I would get fat. A 25% increase in body weight seemed common.
Your face will turn into a pumpkin, said one kind man over the phone.
Well, I was overjoyed. Like most Biafran-constructed middle-class Labour voters, I dreamed incessantly of having a face like a pumpkin. That my tummy might move out with the face was splendid news.
But alas, my endocrinological make-up has stood firm against this by-product of organ replacement as strongly as it has withstood sugar and bacon fat : I weigh the same now as I did at birth, though mercifully, I am fractionally taller.
But on Christmas Eve came another branch sticking out of the cliff I was falling off - a junk mail called Bye Bye Diabetes.
''Are you tired of diabetes? Tired of eating grass all day, like a rabbit? Or a cow? Tired of taking pills that only make you sick to your stomach?
''Well, what if I told you to stop dieting? And forget about sickening pills and insulin shots? Would you think I'm nuts?
Click HERE To Watch A Shocking Report!
I have a feeling if I read (and pay for) this and do the exact opposite, I might just be a pumpkin all over. And that would be absolutely lovely.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
