I THINK I know why my wife left me. It seems she wants control. Does that mean she thought that I was controlling her life? I guess I’ll never know. But I hope not. I couldn’t even control the dog while it was alive! And the irony is that they were all things I wanted to control. I certainly never wanted to control her. I simply wanted us to have a wonderful time together, with moments of exceptional passion and closeness to act as milestones along the way. Instead we are both living alone, 120km apart. One in the bush, one in the city. I got too close to other…

It adopted me on Tuesday as I walked to work and has been with me since. Nope. It’s the same fly. I’m sure of it. I’ve seen a lot of it and I’m beginning to recognise it in the same way you can recognise your own labrador from all the other labradors. And in the past couple of days I’ve been having second thoughts. I mean… maybe it’s trying to tell me something. Something more profound, I mean, than: “I’ve just pooed on your fried egg.” Then a worse thought hit me: maybe in the food chain of reincarnation a fly is higher up than a person! We are, after…

MY five-year-old grandson is holding his willy. I don’t have a problem with this. Yet. I believe all small boys do it. Small as in young; I’m not referring to the size of his willy. He might develop a complex. In fact, no one is referring to his willy at all. Ever. Nor the fact that he never lets go of it; for exactly that reason – he might get a complex, and we couldn’t have that, could we? Instead he’s going to be a social outcast when, at the age of 35, he attends cocktail parties (pardon the pun) with a drink in one hand and his penis in…

TODAY is the fifth day of Christmas. On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me – five go-old rings. Except that I don’t have a true love, and five gold rings sounds a bit like an epic by Tolkien involving the forces of evil; and I’d rather not go there at Christmas, thank you very much. And in the absence of a true love, it might be handy if this were Tuesday already, because the eighth day of Christmas promises eight maids a-milking. Knowing my luck they’d be built like Friesian heifers. It’s a lot of nonsense, you know, these 12 days of Christmas. Like most…

YOU know what happened 125 years ago today? Thomas Alva Edison (the man who gave us the electric light bulb) created the first strong of Christmas lights. I looked it up. Google doesn’t say whether his wife made him climb on the roof, or whether he broke a femur in the process, but I doubt it. It would have been paltry by our standards. He probably had half a dozen faintly glimmering lamps, each the size and weight of a goldfish bowl, festooned over the Christmas tree. And snapping the branches, no doubt. The whole family probably marvelled at this phenomenon for hours. Not any more. If you want to…