I HAVE the bloody hiccups. Or hiccoughs, which is the alternative spelling given by The Macquarie Dictionary. Frankly I don’t care how it’s spelled as long as it goes away. But it never does. There’s an unwritten law with hiccups that says they never go away until you stop wishing it, then they sneak off quietly while your back’s turned. Did you know there are nearly four million entries on Google if you search “hiccups” but only 113,000 if you search “curing hiccups”, which goes to show you can’t. If you search “curing cancer” you get more than two million entries, which suggests to me that people have more hope…

Ask me one on sport … But bear in mind I am not one of those weird people who paint their faces in the club colours, or who yell at the ref, or who call their child Taekwondo because they love it more than … well, their children. Ask me an easy one, like: the Olympics started yesterday. Where are they being held this year? Okay, okay … Er… China? But that’s about it on the sports front for me. If I’d admitted this four years ago, when the Olympics were at Athens I would have been ashamed. Everyone knew who was running, who’d been accused of taking drugs, which…

High achievers bother me. I’m surrounded by them. Maybe I have a phobia.Maybe I’m a very low achiever and from down here everyone else simply looks like a high achiever. There’s this girl in my office. She labels the stuff she puts in the office fridge. With the date. Other people chuck stuff in the fridge and leave it there until it crawls out unaided; she files it in there and makes a note in her diary to remove it on the sell-by date. This, of course, is merely frightening. On its own I could handle it. I could say she was obsessive compulsive.But she can do complex equations, and…

IF anyone else tells me we needed it, I’m going to drown them. That won’t be difficult. Just shoving them out the front door will probably do it. I always knew this was the problem with Australia – and probably Australians. They don’t know when to stop. Shane Warne, John Howard, Big Brother …  rain. They just go on and on until you’re heartily sick of them. Not that this is really rain; not in the real sense of the word. Rain has gaps. I mean, it’s a series of individual drops, possibly falling in rapid succession. What we’ve been having is actually a waterfall – the fact that it’s…

THIS is me. The porno version. Some people tell me the porno is now – 64 years later – with clothes on. I expect there’ll be a mob of well-meaning community members outside my home tomorrow, with a rope. And possibly the Townsville Bulletin will be in court charged with corrupting public morals. I am prepared to risk it. Those people who want a piece of me should be aware also that this photo has travelled across the world by internet – as has the photo of my granddaughter. An extraordinarily beautiful photo, taken by her mother from directly above, of this beautiful babe lying on her back on a…