A close friend, let's just call her Erasmus, suggested coffee last Wednesday afternoon.
She said she would be there at 1.38, which was in keeping with her quasi-anal desire to be polite, precise and pin-pointedly reliable.
She arrived at 1.52, steam rising from her head, eyes bulging like balls of beetroot.
''Sorry I'm late,'' she panted.
''I've been at the gym.''
Why on earth go to the gym?
The logic of gym exercise has escaped me for years.
It's like vitamin supplements - if you eat normal food, you do not need vitamin pills: If you walk, you don't need a gym.
I have never set foot in an exercise gym, yet as I compared Erasmus' and my bodies and general joie de vivre last Wednesday afternoon at 1.53, I couldn't help but notice I looked six hundred times fitter and healthier.
She was, to use a medical term known only to surgeons, near death.
I did, however, go to gym at high school.
I doubt if in a life scarred by ludicrousness and skull-numbing folly I have ever done a more useless thing.
More uselessly.
I was the only boy in the class who couldn't vault over those wooden things they called horses, but which weren't horses.
I know horses.
I bet on one in the Melbourne Cup last week, Red Cadeau, and won $57.
This vaguely pyramid-shaped thing called a horse could have its height raised for the class show-offs, but I couldn't even get over it in its un-raised state.
I just didn't see the point.
It was like mathematics.
''C'mon Colbert, let's see if you can do it this time,'' said the PE teacher, who, truly, was called Mr Blue.
Jim Blue, look him up.
''I'm trying all I can, sir,'' I would reply, and then run at the wooden horse like Usain Bolt, pulling out at the very last minute with despair in both eyes.
I could see in both eyes back then.
''It's no use, sir, I just can't get the timing right.''
And the rope!
What twisted mind invented a rope up to a 20ft-stud ceiling to be climbed at speed with roaring and cajoling from below?
At what point in life would I ever need to climb UP a rope?
Perhaps during a fire when the lower storeys of the building were completely aflame but it was quite safe on the roof?
Spare me such idiocy.
A boy in our class had a note excusing him from PE. I don't know whether his mum wrote it or he ran one off himself behind the fives court, but the teacher believed it, even if the note directly affronted that thing about a sound body producing a sound mind.
The boy must have been sound already - he later ran Television New Zealand and the National Orchestra.
And then there are weights.
I bet they have those in them places Erasmus takes her body to the limit in.
I read in the Sunday Times two weeks ago about the former Nugget and Tall Black Konrad Ross, whose life later fell on hard times, seven years in a Californian jail.
Tall Blacks legend Glen Denham said Ross had a magnificent body, he could just look at weights and he'd grow bigger.
Well, when I look at weights, I grow smaller.
It is why I am small today, having looked at weights in sports shops for years while buying equipment for sports I DO play (golf, table tennis, darts).
Every time I see a gargantuan barbell, I shrink two inches.
And now I am two feet high, like Natalie Portman.
Did you see her on Graham Norton?
Erasmus said if I wanted to understand weights, I should watch Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron.
She said it was really good.
So I did.
Erasmus is hardly ever wrong.
But this may be the silliest movie I have ever seen, especially when Arnie says the pumping of blood into his veins during body building is like having sex all day long.
He especially likes it when people are watching.
No.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
