I’VE decided to start my own business. It will be the first time, although I did once consider making my fortune by making — and selling — rope ladders. The only thing that stopped me was my wife, who threatened to have me certified. I don’t see why. I know a bloke who hires out doormats and no one thinks he’s crazy. Mind you, he’s rich. But I wonder what his wife said when he first came up with the idea… Did she say: “Brilliant! You’re a genius. We’ll be wealthy!” Or did she say: “Oh God, not another one!” It’s a Well Known Fact that making your fortune is…

THIS is ridiculous. I’ve read books about the Tropics. They steam. The people who live in them wear sarongs and sweat a lot. The have lotus blossoms stuck behind their ears. Well Townsville is in the Tropics. I looked on a map. It’s 600km inside the official tropical boundary (which is at Rockhampton, by the way). Why, then, am I bloody freezing? I was born in country where ice can form on the inside of the windows; where people wear overcoats and the only thing they get stuck behind their ears is icicles, but I don’t remember feeling this cold. People my age retire up here for the climate. I…

I TROD mud into the house. Two weeks after vowing to change my ways and be a better husband, I’ve ruined the carpet. I have been sent to the Naughty Chair. It’s time we executed Super Nanny. This stuff might be all right for kids but if I someone tells me one more time that my behaviour is not asseptable, then my behaviour is going to become so unasseptable it’ll make Rasputin look like Christopher Robin. For those of you who have lived the past few months in a cave three-quarters of the way up Mount Everest, Super Nanny is television’s English answer to the Horse Whisperer. For children. She…

I AM not in a home. That is to say, I am not in the kind of home where someone else wipes your bum and they ask your relatives if you take sugar in your tea. I am in my home. It feels good. Life feels good. I am thinking of connecting the fence to the mains power and padlocking the gates, so I can never get out again. You may recall my wife and I have been living apart for some months. A short while back I invited her to dinner in the pitiful garret I have inhabited since. I contrived to wreck the entire evening, starting with the…

I USED to think log fires were romantic. North Queensland has cured me. For a start, log fires in North Queensland are hot. Too hot. You might imagine you’re cold occasionally about this time of year, but you’re not. A woolly jumper is as efficacious as fire for warming purposes, and it will create less ash, fewer burns, better temper and no fetching and carrying. It must be because I’m an ex-Pom that I have this troubled relationship with fires. In a country where ice can occasionally weld the windows shut, a fire seems like a good idea. But here, it’s a bit like unsatisfactory sex: a lot of effort;…