If you want to know if you should marry him – study his umbrella. More exactly, study the way he handles his umbrella. Or her. Umbrellas are not gender specific. There are umbrella thugs in both sexes. I met one yesterday. A short woman, of Asian extraction, I think (umbrellas are not race specific either). Boadicea had a chariot, with blades fixed to the wheels, with which she cut down the Roman hordes. This small, angry lady simply poked their eyes out with an umbrella the size of a conservatory. Had she been a driver she would have been in a ute, with big wheels and bull bars like tree…

I’VE been away. Only for two days – in Townsville. I decided it was time I took a holiday; and why would you go anywhere else? I’m glad I did it. When you live in the suburbs it’s too easy to forget there’s a city centre just over there, smack-dab against the ocean, with beaches, grass, fountains … Somehow there’s never any time to go there; sometimes it seems easier to fly to Brisbane than to drive to Flinders Mall (but why would you?). I’d forgotten about the raucous shrieking of lorikeets in the trees at dusk. Flinders Mall might be losing people, but it’s never going to be short…

WHY are we here? I’m not lying on my back watching the glory of the sparkling heavens as whole galaxies wheel across the night sky. I have not just observed the birth of a whale or the miracle of a flower opening. I’ve lost my pencil down the side of the car seat. My question is not prompted by a sense of my own unimportance. It’s prompted by a haunting conviction that the gods have marked me down for something important. And painful. Pain comes in different forms. One of the most exquisite (if you’re a god) is watching people trying to find stuff that has fallen down the side…

My grandchildren are growing up. The eldest is learning to write. “Fat” in thick red poster-paint. It might have been “cat”, which is traditionally the first thing children write after the circular squiggle and the head with arms and legs, but it was hard to tell because she’d changed direction to go round the light switch. And the framed photo. And the bookshelf. She wanted to write granddad, too, but didn’t know how. I’m glad because that would have taken her across the windows, the television and the sofa.  Now what do I do? I’m very proud of her. I don’t want to scrub it off, even assuming I could.…

I’d offer you a biscuit, but I don’t have any. I have crumbs. This is how biscuits come now. When I was a lad you went to a grocer’s shop for biscuits and they were lined up in big tins. Tins full of loose biscuits: digestives custard creams, tea biscuits, shortbreads. A lot got broken of course and you could buy the broken ones cheaper. I don’t remember they ever had crumbs, and if they did they certainly didn’t sell them. They probably swept them up and fed them to the chickens. But we don’t have grocers’ shops any more. We have supermarkets. We don’t have careful grocers in off-white…