I HAVE a bottle of champagne and I’m goint to drink it (you can see from the immediatre error that I’ve already started). I’ve also just eaten a plateful of scrambled eggs (my favourite – not as good as my wifle’s, but getting better). Why am i celebrating? Couple of reasons… one, (and primarily) I think I am passing through some kind of gateway; and as I don’t here a resonant voice calling “Colin”, or a thin wheedling one either, I can sssume it’s not God, the other bloke or my wilfe. I am, I think, Moving On. There are people out there who believe that the first step in…

LOVE handles? Those are love handles! I thought they were fat. I’ve had ‘em for years and they don’t make me swim any faster. That’s not to say I don’t feel every sympathy for Grant Hackett, whose fat has been caught on news cameras ‘in repose’, so to speak. It happens with faces. That moment when you’re not scowling but people think you are because your face is ‘in repose’. I’m sure that 10 seconds later Grant would have spotted an attractive woman somewhere in the crowd and his chest would have been out and his stomach in, instead of the other way round. It happens to me every time…

I SEE the Olympic torch relay has not been entirely wasted. We now know that some flames will burn no matter how cold the air. Apparently they created a flame from a gas that will burn in “frigid, windy, oxygen-thin air” such as will exist on Mount Everest, which is where the Chinese are taking it, presumably surrounded by guards. “Frigid, windy…” sounds a lot like the reception they got in America. Or England. Or Australia. Or… almost anywhere it’s been, actually. But there are other bonuses to this disastrous, pathetic, Olympic-standard embarrassment Ñ I hear moves are being made hurriedly to introduce some new sports to the Olympic arena.…

The Federal Government’s 2020 Summit is over! The newspapers have been full of it. They’d have been more useful if they’d been full of fish and chips. Hands up if you thought it was going to achieve anything (Labor MPs, keep your hands down). This is what we’re dealing with: the government won the right to govern at the election. It then invites all its mates to come and have ideas to justify all the things that the government wants to do anyway. And it tells us these are all the best thinkers we’ve got, so our future is going to be really rosy. This is one of the ideas…

I’ve had a near-death experience. I learned a lot. And no, I am not a better person, my past didn’t flash before my eyes and I didn’t think of my mother. I though: “My God, this is going to hurt!” and I thought how I was going to be a mere smear on the road And instead of being a better person I was filled with rage the colour of a boil. If the driver had stopped and got out of his car I would have beaten him to death with the lash of my tongue. As it was he kept going and I satisfied myself with hammering on his…