It was time to update my will. This is part sober citizenry but - let's be candid - it's also the chance to replace old whims with new whims.
There is a friend in need. The nephew has disappointed. Did I really leave two thousand to the Society for Cruelty to Animals, or was that a typo?
Immediately I sit down with my solicitor and accept the ritual cup of tea, he starts with: ''Do you want to be buried or cremated?''
Honestly. There you are, agape, the Monte Carlo halfway to your mouth, and asked to choose between the hole and the hangi.
Well I'm not mad about either. I don't want to be put in a box and left to rot, and nor do I fancy an oven, even if it's someone's Miele.
Cremation perhaps, but on no account are my ashes to be stored within range of Minty. I don't want people to say: ''He was licked up by a Jack Russell.''
No, scatter me round the sand trap on Millbrook's second, where I'm at home.
If you must spruce me up for the ceremony, ignore the suits in the spare wardrobe. There's a pair of red polka dot socks which make me feel good, and a lumberjack shirt the Duchess says I shouldn't be seen dead in.
She has a point, but on the other hand you should stand out from the crowd when you reach the Pearly Gates.
A will is a magnificent chance to get things off your chest. Ludwig van Beethoven didn't start with ''To My Beloved''.
The composer scorched friends and relatives with: ''You men who think I am malevolent, stubborn and misanthropic''.
Louise Strittmister, an American feminist, struck out her family and gave everything to a sisterhood charity.
''All men should be killed at birth,'' she declared. Of her father she wrote: ''Blast his worm-stinking carcass and his whole damn breed.''
A forthright woman, Louise made it perfectly clear where she stood. The judge decided she'd also made it perfectly clear she was bonkers.
So perhaps I'd best not speak my mind. After all this time, I don't want it ruled unsound.
I learned some of the dos, but more of the don'ts, from my father's willsmanship. Being a country parson, he led a life unstained by money. But he left a small construction, technically a house, on a less fashionable part of Waiheke.
It is difficult to see into the minds of your parents. I suspect my careful dad worried that the sudden unleashing of his real estate fortune would derail our senses.
So he wrote a protective plan that mapped the future of his house down to the third generation. The will's opening sentence would better have read, ''It shall come to pass that after Abraham begets Israel, and Israel begets Esther ...''
Tell me, was this far-sighted or short-sighted? I shall be dead long before I can complete my role as my father's executor.
Perhaps this matters little, because I can't remember where I've filed the document, much less the name of the solicitor, surely into his third bottle when he penned it.
It's said we selfish baby boomers don't actually need wills because we plan to waste the lot indulging ourselves. While that seems desirable, it's clearly impractical as none of us knoweth the hour.
If we could be reliably informed when there's just one month left, any reasonable person - not just a boomer - would book into a suite at the Royal Hawaiian. And yes, another bottle of Krug, plus one for the nice housemaid too.
But that's all dreaming. The document is done and dusted. It contains a clause about ''predeceased'' relatives which is so densely legal I can't make head nor tale of it. In the spirit of my father, I've left it there to tease.
Oh, I almost forgot. I promised the ex a mention in my will.
Hello Dear.
John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
