Any bed salesman worth his salt will tell you a bed is a terribly important thing.
We spend a third of our lives in bed, he'll say, so buy a damn good bed.
And he's right.
So aside from the fiscal penury of early marriage, we have always had a damn good bed.
But we've never had a damn good television, and now with a bewildering Cleopatra's carpet of important sport events unfolding before me, I find I am, and will be for some time, spending a third of my life watching television.
So last week I bought a damn good television.
My wife and I generally make these huge financial decisions together, with the lilting music of James Taylor brook-babbling behind us to soften dissension.
I sometimes have flowers in my hand.
But with the 50in plasma television on a one-day-only special at one of those national chain shops that regularly finish at the bottom in Consumer magazine's survey of reliable retailers, rational discussion was out of the question.
The TV was appreciably under a thousand dollars, they were just about giving it to me - the 32in model I was replacing had cost $700 more.
What is it with televisions these days? Are they being made out of asbestos?
I nearly didn't buy it.
My one immovable rule when shopping for home appliances is I walk straight out of the store if the salesperson says they have one of these themselves.
"Is this a good television?" I asked, trying to look as gullible and vacant as possible, as though I had been living deep in a forest since World War 2.
"An excellent television, replied the salesman," who was 14.
"In fact, it's so cheap, I'm thinking of taking one home myself!" Which is not the same as saying you already possess one, so I bought it.
There were still problems to sort at home.
Our current TV had been hopelessly placed in a nook behind the dining-room door.
We told visitors this was because we didn't rate television very highly and just thought we'd throw one behind the door in case we needed vital information during an earthquake.
This, in their eyes, made us intelligent and environmentally aware.
But there was actually no other place for it, except for lounge central, the fireplace, where lived an ugly half-broken rusty woodburner which we hadn't used for three years and which was, in heating terms, no more useful than a flickering match, and which I was incomprehensibly forbidden to touch, and certainly not remove.
Using principles that served Galileo so well, I had measured cabinet and television very carefully, and while there would be a 2cm overhang, I considered this tautologous.
In fact I considered it a design feature of some significance.
My wife however, still besmattened by the concept of a colossal television, screamed and threw her head into her hands.
Worse, she pronounced me oligoneuronal, guilty of a planning disaster from which we would never recover.
This from a woman who reveres Frank Lloyd Wright, the man whose entire architectural reputation was built on overhang.
She left for work the next morning reminding me not to touch the wood-burner or I'd be sleeping in a tree until 2014.
I nodded like Noddy and assured her my word was my bond.
After my friend John had adroitly ripped the grill off the wood-burner - he is very grateful for his early training at the Hillside Workshops - I reversed some unused Merry Christmas paper and glued it over the gaping hole.
John replaced my innovative covering with ply the next day, my wife spent Saturday night painting while I made her cups of tea and whineyed encouragement, and by Sunday we were done.
Pure House & Garden.
And what a picture we now receive on this thing! I still don't rate television very highly, let's be quite frank about this, but like pavlova, it's just so much better when its bigger.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
