MY daughter has moved house. Actually, that’s not exactly true. I’ve moved house. I have hired the truck, loaded the truck, driven the truck, and unloaded the truck. I have paid for the truck. My daughter has bossed me about. Her daughter has bossed me about. So has her son, and they’re only three and two years old. stations sells is fuel. I am trying to look upon it as a Valuable Experience. I have learned things about moving house. First, get a man in. Get several men in. Burly ones, and deaf ones. Ones, that is, who won’t hear when a three-year-old tyrant says: “But I want my koala…

Townville’s new statue of Robert Towns has only been standing five minutes and it’s already covered in poo – and not a pigeon in sight, either. And my money says there’ll be more to follow before the birds get their chance. It was bound to happen. Got to hand it to the city council – it might be run by socialists but thank God they’re sensible socialists. If they were the politically correct kind we wouldn’t even be living in Townsville by now. They would have erased the name because of the stigma of being associated with the man who brought South Sea Islanders to work in the cane fields.…

MY wife is coming to dinner. Those who know me will know this isn’t as odd as it sounds. We’ve been apart for two months. To be precise: two months, two days, and five hours, as I write, but who’s counting? It was mutual. We were Not Getting On. Not Getting On is an occupational hazard after 28 years of marriage. The usual remedy is to watch television; but we didn’t have a television, so that didn’t help. Now she is coming to dinner. I have planned everything. I don’t want anything to go wrong. The chicken is in the oven. It needs another half hour. She should be here…

WE live in a leisure age. Now that the western world is reasonably well off and has its weekends to itself, most people take up a hobby. They buy a jet ski, or they go fishing, or they take up painting. My family has taken up health. I thought health was something that happened by accident, while you were getting on with other stuff. But no… it’s a leisure industry. Yoga is a pathway to health; acupuncture is a pathway to health; Chinese herbal medicine and feng shui are pathways to health. Even Ayurveda is a pathway to health. Never heard of Ayurveda? I thought it was one of those…

DID you know that all the water you drink has been drunk before you? It might have been a million years ago, by a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but even so… It would either have sweated the stuff out, or widdled it against a handy tree. The sun would have done its trick with the heat, turning the sweat and wee to vapour, and 65 million years later – bingo! Tyrannosaurus Rex excretions turn up in the Ross River Dam. Be grateful the process takes a while. Think how much worse it would be if it took a couple of days and you ended up with some by-product created by the grizzled…