I KNEW this would happen. I have a bad back. After a lifetime bragging about my good health I’ve been struck by a trapped nerve. Unless it’s a pulled muscle. Or a slipped disc. Or inflammation of something. Or a kidney infection. Everyone knows the answer, but it doesn’t make any difference. I am still stuck in this chair with my knees in my mouth, my spine in the final stages of rigor mortis and only the tips of my fingers on the keyboard giving any indication that I am, indeed, still alive. It has been a week. If I listened to my family and friends I would at this very…

WHAT is a joke? A joke, I hear you reply, is a humorous anecdote; something said for fun. Not in our house, it’s not. In our house a joke is a thing that leaks poison into your porridge; it’s the key to a week of frozen kisses, or several nights of cold bum. In our house jokes have one significant difference to jokes elsewhere – they’re not funny! They may be sinister, caustic, malicious or dumb, but they’re not funny. It’s a curious phenomenon of married life, and I mention it here so you can recognise it in your own domestic affairs and slap it in the gob with a…

I HAVE toothache. You can’t write a column when you’ve got toothache. The most you can manage in creative thinking when you have toothache is going to the lavatory. And I’ve done that. Explain to me, if you can, how using the muscles in your bum can increase the pain in your head… the thigh bone’s connected to the hipbone, as they say. Now there’s no alternative but to sit here while my entire worldview becomes a tooth, or the rotting remains of one. Indeed, if anyone were stupid enough to try to find a positive side to toothache it would be that the mystery of life, the universe and…

I THINK I’ll become a grey nomad. Dump all the material pleasures of life in a real bed, with handy washing machines and microwaves, and hit the road, never knowing when the next stop will be, nor where, nor whether there’ll be any loo paper in the lavatory when I get there. Once upon a time you had to die to achieve this degree of freedom. Now you just buy a caravan. Everyone’s doing it. At least, everyone over 60. Grey nomads, in case you hadn’t heard, are those couples (they seem to always come in pairs) who have grown weary of the daily grind and have hit the road,…

YOU may recall I was going for a Nobel Prize. For Science. On the basis of my discovery of a number of natural laws that have hitherto gone unnoticed. They include such things as: The slowest queue at the checkout shall always be the one you have just switched over to.