I TAKE it all back! Last week I was faced with a new granddaughter whose name was to be Kiki or Chilly; or Chile; or Chilli (they never did let on how they were going to spell it). I had braced myself. I kept reminding myself that when a baby is six weeks premature it’s no surprise that the name’s not ready. I was relieved, because if she had arrived on time — at the end of May — they might actually have had one of these names carved in bits of furniture, and indelibly laminated on plastic bowls or little mugs. Instead, while they were tossing coins and thinking…

I AM a grandfather again. Did I tell you my daughter was pregnant? Well, not any more of course. Now she’s a mother. Six weeks early. I think she did it on purpose to qualify for a mother’s day gift on May 13, but maybe it was the exercise the previous day; the wading through knee-high mangrove swamps and hauling a canoe on and off a roof rack. It’s her first. A girl, weighing in at five pounds six ounces; and I have no idea what that is in kilograms, which is a good thing because a 2.5kg baby would sound like a bag of flour. And just in case…

I HAVE been shopping. I should have taken the trailer. It’s ridiculous, the amount you can fit in a shopping bag. Even those green, environmentally friendly ones. I had a list, of course. My wife didn’t trust me to remember everything so she wrote it down. I, on the other hand, don’t trust her to write it down sensibly. I mean, 500 grams of carrots? Why would anyone buy 500 grams of carrots? They wouldn’t last five minutes, even if you ate one at every meal. So I bought a couple of kilos. Same with the potatoes. Except that no one — not even my wife — would be parsimonious…

I’M going to make my fortune. I’m going to run courses for old people. To qualify you’ll need to be of pensionable age and have not the faintest idea what ‘UR GR8’ means. I’m going to call them Welcome to the 21st Century. Or possibly Wake Up! Or perhaps Don’t Die! The idea came to me because I suddenly woke up to the knowledge that I have slipped behind. I am an anachronism; some strange and primitive life form from another planet. And what makes it worse is that I was on my guard! I have been aware of all the spotty children whose familiarity with computers would — in…

FOLLOW me through on this one… I hope you’ll think it’s important, even if it doesn’t look it at first glance. The Federal Government has changed the election rules. Until now, whenever the government called an election there was a general bustle among the voting public to get on the electoral register. Especially among young people, who had never been on it before, and among people who had moved home and didn’t want to vote for someone in Tasmania, when they now lived in Thuringowa. At the last election, in the week after it was announced, 83,000 new voters got off their bottoms and registered. Hundreds of thousands of others…