HERE is a natural law of married life you need to memorise: work clothes (that is, the ones you wear for doing messy jobs) are always the ones you’re not wearing. We will leave, for a moment, the fact that one’s wife never refers to your office clothes as work clothes. She obviously doesn’t think one works at the office. It’s revenge, I think, for the days when husbands used to say, safely, “My wife doesn’t work. She’s a housewife.” But as far as work clothes go – they’re those others. Which others? I hear you ask. Good question, but no one has worked out the answer to that. It’s…

MY shoe squeaks. It’s driving me nuts. I hope the rest of the world, which is subjected to only fleeting moments of squeakiness as I pass it by, is more tolerant than I am. If not I may be lynched by the end of the week. My wife is already talking about having my foot amputated. “But it’s my shoe!” I protested. “I could just buy a new pair.” “Yes, but I’m learning to hate you because of your bloody shoe!” No wonder we’re hard on fundamentalists. It’s not because they’re religious nutters. You can’t dislike someone because life has sent their head funny. You dislike them because they’re so……

NINE out of ten drivers are yelling at other drivers. It said so in the Townsville Bulletin on Wednesday. That means one poor bloke, who is clearly milder than light beer, is copping all the abuse. Unless it’s a woman, of course, which would have a certain NQ logic about it, except that I know who it is. It’s me. And it’s not fair. You think I don’t meet bad drivers? I do. All the time! In fact nine out of 10 is an underestimate (which means I must sometimes be yelling at myself). But hang on – we’re not actually talking about bad drivers. We’re talking about drivers with the social…

I DUNNO… I’m having trouble getting excited about the game against Parramatta. I mean… Cowboys versus Storm had something… a certain je ne sais quoi; shades of Clint Eastwood and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (I suppose ‘the ugly’ was the ref). But Cowboys versus Parramatta? It’s as exciting as Cowboys verses Paluma. And from there it’s only a short step to why we call them Parramatta when every other team in the known universe is named after something with teeth, or claws, or tusks, or weight, or attitude. Or guns. It’s because if you didn’t call them Parramatta, you’d have to call them The Eels. Eeels? You…

WHY would anyone grow a lettuce? I mean, really? It takes six weeks to grow a lettuce. Even in Tropical North Queensland. And even then it’s a small one. Six weeks to grow a vegetable two people can eat in 30 seconds. People will say: “Ah yes, but you don’t have to do anything. It just grows.” Which is nonsense. I have a row of lettuces. They’re in a cage. A vault. A vault made of chain-link fences, with a wire-mesh roof, a padlock on the gate, and a gatekeeper with an axe. Me. And this is only the bit you can see now. The tip of iceberg lettuce! Before…