KEY POINTS:
It is amazing who you can bump into at the 10-items-or-more checkout queue at your local bottle store.
I hadn't seen Graham Henk, an old school buddy, for more than 15 years and there he was drinking a bottle of bourbon by the nut rack.
I asked him what he had been up to, a stock standard question, but in this case I didn't get the stock standard answer.
Graham had been married four times and his most recent wife had just left him.
He told me that he came home from work early one day to find his wife on the sofa having sex like a wild animal with a collector from the World Wildlife Fund.
The fundraiser's presence in the house was hard to justify seeing as Graham was already a signed-up member putting more than $3500 into the trust fund of a slow-breeding homosexual panda called Misu.
Graham and his wife had all the lounge furniture, including the sofa, Scotch-guarded and tried to put the incident behind them. But because there had been a serious breach of trust their relationship was doomed to fail. She became a lesbian and moved in with his second wife.
Graham told me that he had also lost his job. He had been a self-employed entrepreneur for more than 20 years but with pressure increasing because of the credit crunch he has had to let himself go and hire somebody cheaper. He is now on the benefit.
After his wife left him his bungalow was possessed by evil spirits and then later, after a costly exorcism, repossessed by the bank.
He told me that he was between homes at the moment, a situation that neither neighbour is happy about as it means Graham is living on a fence somewhere in Mt Albert. He told me that I could hear everybody's side of the story on the new series of Neighbours at War.
I tried to console him by saying that he still had his health but I was a little premature with that, as it soon became apparent that he did not.
Graham went on to tell me that he had recently been diagnosed with a rare condition called Paul Simons disease, not to be confused with Al Simons disease, Alzheimers, or Art Garfunkel syndrome.
This condition isn't life-threatening but it certainly doesn't add any years to your life. The symptoms include shrinking on a daily basis and having coldsores on every part of your body except your lips.
Standing at 178cm, Graham probably still has more than two years left before he will need to be classified as a midget but the coldsores will be more problematic as he was never really Cary Grant in the first place.
Top medical researchers are working on Paul Simons disease around the clock and so far have developed a set of loafer-type shoes with a set of interchangeable platform heels. They are making less progress with the coldsores, but have managed to get Zovirax into a roll-on deodorant bottle.
Graham's medical dramas don't end there. He went on to tell me that he lost his left testicle during a Brazilian waxing session.
Apparently the technician was busily removing all the hair around his upper thighs with the super adhesive wax strips when she accidentally brushed passed his left testicle with one of them.
Naturally it attached itself, like a fly to fly paper and - flick of the wrist - was whipped off along with the surrounding hair.
Graham said he would never forget that sound, and to add to his medical woes he had developed a psychosomatic phobia to the sound of Velcro. Because the testicle was still on the wax strip, many of the experts on hand believed that it could possibly be re-attached, but it is also probably worth noting that these were experts in the field of hair removal and artificial suntanning, not medicine.
On the positive side most medical experts claim that a man can often function quite satisfactorily with just the one testicle.
The downside of this for Graham is that he had only one to begin with. The other was lost in a freak accident involving a ranchslider door while he was holidaying at a nudist camp near Nelson in 1986.
An inquiry found that the incident was unfortunate but accidental and that Graham was partly responsible as he "chose to have a cigarette in a location that was neither in nor out".
By now quite a queue had formed behind us so I thought I had better move on. We decided to exchange numbers. He gave me his mobile number, then I gave him mine - being careful to change one of the digits - and then we said goodbye.
