Most rational thinkers would agree that of all the human qualities, politeness is by far the most counter-productive.
Politeness creates a parallel universe of surreal self-deception which eats away at the very fabric of life itself.
For the past three months, a savage viral illness has slimmed my already Biafran frame by 13kg.
I have, however, continued to totter into town for coffee and gossip, meeting hundreds of close personal friends at every turn.
Not one of them has mentioned I am rake thin and physically inappropriate.
Instead they talk of sport, the appalling new family on Coro - I swear the father is Joe Cocker - and how our council could possibly believe the new stadium is fiscally 50 times more important than the Regent Theatre.
Perhaps I don't look so bad, I thought to myself, perhaps I have turned the corner.
But no, I was evaporating like pavlova under a hot tap.
Had my close personal friends not been so damagingly polite, I may well have healed earlier and quicker; the tough love thing.
Roy, you look like crap, for God's sake pull yourself together, I can't bear the sight of you.
I would never have thought I was getting better if someone had said that.
How man presents himself to the world at large is influenced far too much by politeness from others.
Fashion designer Tanya Carlson was a regular coffee date when she was in Dunedin, and I always tried to look like I belonged in New Zealand Fashion Week too when we sat in the Octagon.
One day I confessed this, and she pointed out I had a large glob of red paint on my left shoe, a remnant from a hurried touch-up that morning on the oft-discussed red letterbox.
But I had to ask, she wouldn't have mentioned it otherwise.
The open fly is an ongoing demon for man, who has so much going on in his head that sometimes doing up a fly just gets left behind.
I would estimate I have had an unfulfilled fly at least three thousand times, and yet only once has someone ever been so impolite as to inform me I am in this state.
It was at Strictly Coffee three years ago, at first just an inaudible whisper from the man behind the counter, then, after I requested much more volume, a proclamation that entertained just about all of Bath St.
And yet, who knows what trouble I could have got into over the rest of that day had Counter Man been polite? Men also suffer constantly from food stains on upper body clothing.
Early '80s feminism ended women checking their partners before sending them out into the world each morning, and even though that particular upended barrow was righted by the turn of the century, I remain unchecked each morning simply because my wife leaves the house an hour earlier.
Selfish, I know, but it is what it is.
Men do need to be checked because they have far too much going on in their heads to worry about such mental minnows as food stains.
As someone who is nearly blind and always wears black from the waist up, I have suffered more than most, but not once has anyone been impolite enough to mention this defect.
Impoliteness, a cutting comment from them that they could tell what my last four meals had been, would have brought me to my senses and made me, eventually, sartorial, and not, as I am now, sauce-stained.
But, sadly, I am all talk, I use this abhorrent social politeness myself.
Last week, while being treated for an unrelated oral imperfection, a skilled professional person accidentally cut my tongue open.
The skilled professional person filled my ears with apology and my tongue with stitches.
"Don't worry about it," I said brightly.
"Tongues heal very quickly. At least I've got my health."
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
