AFTER five years my daughter and her boyfriend might be splitting up. He doesn’t know yet. Nor does she. It’s very sad. She is my daughter so, of course, she can do no wrong. And he is very nice bloke. Not your average beer-swilling, sport-loving, singlet-and-tattoo-wearing ocker Aussie. He hugs people when he meets them. I suppose you can’t have everything. But he is sensitive and thoughtful and genuinely the kind of man you’d be proud to have as a son-in-law or a husband. Despite his ears. So how can they both not know this is about to happen? Because my daughter is not sure. He’s her best friend, she…

PAGE 5 of Meg and Mog Play Hide and Seek says: “Meg, Mog and Owl play hide and seek in a castle.” There is a picture of Meg on a broomstick (Meg’s a witch) and a cow and a rooster and a little house. It’s a children’s book. An early reader. Publishers of early readers have failed to grasp a simple truth: three-year-olds like my granddaughter have memories like a Venus flytrap. They memorise early readers from the title to the words at the end that say; The End; including the page with the copyright details and the bit that says: “no portion of this work may be reproduced without…

I HAVE seen the future! And it’s not pretty. Actually, it’s boring. The future is people sitting hunched over mobile phones, palm pilots and laptops. What’s wrong with that? I hear you say. Very useful things. But there’s more. I have seen what they are doing with these useful things. I have done my research. I have shoved my head in their field of vision on buses and trains and in cafes and caught them at it. The might be useful things, these mobile phone, palm pilots and laptops, but what they are being used for is – playing games! Is this the vision of the future the technological geniuses…

I owe you an apology. I’ve been avoiding you. More accurately, I’ve been avoiding telling you what’s going on in my life. That is, apart from inconsequential trivia like why it is that we change our cars more often than we change our toothbrushes. And it’s odd that I’ve been reticent, because things are going very well. Maybe that’s the reason. I have grasped the underlying truth that news is more interesting when it’s bad. Ask any newspaper. Ask Dr Patel. But it’s time you knew the awful, boring truth… Things are great! Things? I hear you ask. What exactly do you mean by “things”? What exactly do you mean…

WE are changing the bed. We’ve had this one a long time and though we like to cuddle each other in bed (yes… things are that good!), we like to have a choice about it. In our present bed that’s impossible. Everything rolls into the middle. Bodies slap together like jelly magnets and stay that way until you claw your way out in the morning. So… the bed must go. Except that I can’t find the allen key that undoes the bolts. It’s one of life’s Natural Laws. The people who make beds, and especially the allen keys that come with them, add an ingredient that causes the allen keys…