In the raggle-taggle garage sale of academia that formed my three-quarters of an arts degree at Otago University, there was a year studying Plato.
Studying, yet sadly retaining very little.
But I do remember his Philosopher-Kings, simply because I immediately wanted to become one.
Plato's utopian state had three categories of citizens : Artisans, Auxiliaries and Philosopher-Kings.
Artisans were dominated by their appetites or desires, and therefore destined to produce material goods.
Most of us in 2010 fall into this category, if we can find a job.
Auxiliaries, a class of guardians, were ruled by spirit in their souls and possessed the courage necessary to protect the state from invasion.
The modern equivalent of these sterling humans are All Black forwards, especially Brad Thorn.
And finally the Philosopher-Kings, the leaders of the ideal state, had souls in which reason reigned over spirit and appetite, and as a result possessed the foresight and knowledge to rule wisely.
In Plato's view, these rulers were not merely elite intellectuals, but moral leaders.
Humans of inestimable wisdom.
When combing the internet recently for a deck chair, it occurred to me that I had finally acceded to Philosopher-King status, the common deck chair embodying everything Plato would have sought for his intellectually elite fully developed 2010 man.
After scorning deck chairs all my life at Christmas family picnics, many of which are about to take place here in the next few weeks, as the preserve of The Old, The Feeble and The Useless, I am now, deck chair under my arm, eagerly awaiting that first Christmas picnic to receive acknowledgement of my newly-acquired apical status.
Of course, some sugar-sodden child will leap into it the minute it is produced, thinking it is a trampoline, and I can only hope one of the kindly parents, an Auxiliary ideally, will say to his son, get off the deck chair, Aristophanes, that belongs to Grandad.
And it does belong to Grandad, only Grandad.
I bid successfully on a suspiciously cheap brand-new one that was delivered to me by a furtive man on a bicycle, itself barely bigger than the chair, and our remarkable summer has seen me sinking into it repeatedly, surrounded by cell and landline phones, book, food, drink, newspaper, sunscreen and hat.
As Oscar Wilde once said, and I'm paraphrasing, a possibly stolen deck chair is for sinking into, not leaping out of every five minutes to get stuff you've forgotten to bring outside.
It is at just the right angle to enable zen rest but also a view of the street down the drive.
The latter is important as courier vans are now powering up there regularly with Christmas presents, and were they to find a man becalmed in a deck chair at the top, they might not be able to stop in time.
I don't mind I won't be playing cricket at Christmas family picnics with the children this year, I am delighted to know I won't have to work the room like when I was young and fit, going from one group of relations to another trying hopelessly to remember their names, or rescuing our son from a teutonic wasp attack that time he climbed out of an Avon river canoe at the Christchurch Botanical Gardens and walked straight up a bank that was nothing but wasp nest.
I will lie back beatifically, shaded and sun-warmed, people will bring me provisions, because I am old, feeble and useless.
I will dispense great wisdom and wry incomprehensible asides destined solely to confuse the young, while stroking my chin and laughing at jokes only I can understand.
I have reached Plato's ultimate state of being.
I am not sprawled on a rug, standing against a tree or sitting on thistles, I am in a deck chair, and in my deck chair I am complete.
And if someone asks me to explain how Plato's timocractic soul becomes oligarchic, I shall wisely pretend I am asleep.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
