As we stagger through life, moving inexplicably from one blunder to another, the occasional human rises up from the offal pit to play an extraordinary and influential role.
For me, Nevan Rowe was one of those people.
Many will remember Nevan as a DNTV2 journalist in the 1970s, and others more cinematically bent will know her as the female lead in the first New Zealand movie that mattered, Sleeping Dogs.
Sam Neill may have been in that one too - I am hopeless with names.
But the name of Nevan Rowe has never left the memory, because she introduced me to Badedas.
Badedas sounds like a Mexican bandit in a bad Mexican movie, but it is actually a German bubble bath liquid made with horse chestnut, cedarwood and light patchouli.
It smells like a forest, and after you've soaked in this stuff for an hour or two, apart from having wrinkled hands, you feel like ten million dollars.
The bottle is also beautifully designed and very cool. Naturally, it is green.
I started thinking about a Badedas bubble bath about two hours into Leonard Cohen's Auckland concert a couple of weeks ago.
I mean, the man was magnificent, the band sublime, but as I sat 16 rows back, surrounded by moaning, sighing, fainting women - the man looked 98 if he was a day, but who am I to question the weapons of seduction - my facile mind strayed from the thing I had paid one hundred and eighty bucks for to Nevan Rowe and Badedas.
I was a hippie when Nevan told me about this stuff.
She could afford it, pulling down hundreds of thousands of dollars in local television, as you do, probably even to this day.
I only bought it when I found money down the back of a sofa.
But I learned from those sadly infrequent but unfailingly illuminatory experiences that I was a bubble bath man for life.
I know this isn't a man thing, and when I'm with the guys talking about rugby and Cameron Diaz, I don't mention I'm a sucker for a damn good bubble bath.
In fact I have never mentioned this before to anyone.
When my wife sees me lying in the bath, visible only from the eyeballs up under a metre of foaming bubbles, I just tell her that's what happens when you swish soap with very fast hands.
She would not be happy if she knew how much money I spend on expensive German bubble bath liquid.
But a couple of weeks ago, when I had inexplicably run out of this vital thing, I made an important discovery: hair shampoo does the same job.
Specifically, Garnier Fructus, quite often on special and, most importantly, green, albeit bright lime not dull forest.
And because I insisted our new bathroom housed a bath with six powerful spa jets, fighting off an incomprehensible suggestion that we put a faux antique stand-alone thing in the middle of the floor with claw feet to haematoma toes on, I can now produce a metre of bath foam with a mere raised teaspoon of Garnier Fructus.
And with the six spa jets working like opened flood gates at the Benmore dam.
In truth, Badedas leaves me feeling a damn sight more revitalised that Garnier Fructus, but times are tough, and as Brack (which I believe is the media prounciation) Obama has noted, we all just have to suck it in.
I know I'm sucking in Garnier Fructus like there is no tomorrow, and if my skin sheds like it did to that singer in Hunters and Collectors who wanted to be hugged, well, so be it.
As Oscar Wilde said, and I'm paraphrasing, "no man deserves to claw at the Gates of Eden until he has seriously soaked in a towering green bubble bath".
-Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
