Papa Joe's words of wisdom

OPINION: My parents passed on no wisdom. I don't know how they resisted the urge. If I had kids, I'd cram them with wisdom, my wisdom, the thrice-distilled essence of experience.

Wash your car  with rain, I'd tell them. Never  leave home without a bottle- opener. Trust only dogs.

The kids would ignore me, of course, but the wisdom would lodge in the skull, and several decades later, when my bucket was all but kicked, they'd drive round to my place one rainy afternoon to say: "Gee Dad, you were right."

"I know," I'd say and I'd pat their dogs and borrow a bottle- opener.

And then perhaps over a glass of shiraz they'd ask if I had any more wisdom to pass on before I popped off and I'd say: "Well, as a matter of fact I have. Avoid yellow carpets and gadgets advertised in brochures."

"OK Dad," they'd say. "Have a good afterlife and thanks for being the wisest papa in the whole wide world."

My house, you see, has a yellow carpet. I didn't choose it. I wouldn't have chosen it. The sort of people who choose yellow carpet have a maid and no dog.

They don't wear gumboots indoors. And they never crack open that second bottle of shiraz because they know it will prove less stable than its predecessor.

My carpet is slowly becoming less yellow, but it is doing so in patches. The reason is habit. When I come in from a dog walk, my gumboots always take the same route to the fridge.

When my dog sneaks a bone in from the yard, he takes it to his favourite chewing spot. And when that second bottle of shiraz falls over, it always does so by the same armchair.

The carpet now resembles the pelt of an elderly lion with a skin disease. A few months ago I decided the lion was too sick to live with, so I invited a carpet man round.

He measured the house with a natty little laser device then pressed a button and converted the square metres into the price of recarpeting. At which point the lion perked up. I gave the carpet man a bottle of shiraz for having wasted his time.

I've since covered the sickest bit of the lion with a rug I found in the garage. I don't know how I acquired the rug. I didn't buy it and I'm confident no one gave it to me, so I suppose I must have stolen it.

I find it hard to imagine when or how, but it was a wise theft. The rug's a similar colour to shiraz and it's got one of those abstract Islamic designs that take a bone-stain nicely.

There are nevertheless two problems with the rug. One is a corner that went missing because I dropped a jug of gravy.

During the evening the dog got most of the gravy out with his tongue. During the night he got the rest out with his teeth. But nowhere in the Koran does it say that a rug must be rectangular.

The other problem's more serious. Play one game of tug-of- war with the dog and the rug scrunches up.

It resembles the sort of frozen sea that kept Shackleton stuck in the Antarctic. And the stiff waves of my rug can bring a man down even if the shiraz he's carrying is the first of the evening.

Enter the mail-order brochure of gadgets. You know the sort of thing - the all-in-one pedicure tool and travelling defibrillator, the vegetable slicer-cum-dehumidifier, the save-thousands-by- cutting-your-own-nostril-hair-at- home kit.

I skimmed the pages without feeling the tug of temptation but then, whoa, my gullible old heart went boom bang a bang, and "Dog," I said, "I've found just what we need."

I filled in a form and ordered a rug dewrinkler. It might sound like a Dutch liquor baron, but I hoped it would calm my rugged sea.

Ha. Fat chance. The thing arrived today. It consists of four plastic triangles. I had to attach the triangles to the corners of the rug, one of which, of course, I didn't have because of gravy.

The easi-peel paper on the double- sided sticky tape peeled off easily after the application of fingernails, then tweezers and finally teeth. The dog took an interest but did not help.

On the underside of each triangle was a mass of little prongs that would dig into the carpet beneath and grip.

Tossing a dog biscuit into a far corner of the room, I straightened the rug, trod down the triangles, seized the tug-of- war rope said: "Here, boy."

Thirty seconds later I was back in Shackleton's sea. Gadgets in mail-order brochures don't work. That's why they're in mail- order brochures. And the best carpets are brown. Tell your kids. They'll thank you one day.

- © Fairfax NZ News