THEY’RE not serious surely? I mean, these are intelligent people. Doctors, social workers, teachers and the like. Politicians, too, but they must have another excuse. Girls don’t get pregnant because there’s $3000 at the end of the experience. They get pregnant because, as my grannie used to say, a climax is when you can’t stop — even when your mother walks into the room. I don’t even like John Howard much (I bet he would have stopped!) but at least his $3000 baby bonus has exposed the conservative rednecks in our society — even if they are in the Labor Party! Dear Mr Latham, I had five children. Well, we,…

HOW hard can it be to make a telephone cord that behaves itself? We can make intricate and complex bits of machinery that worm their way through our internal organs taking photos as they go. We can send equally complex ironmongery to Mars to take pictures of it (though I don’t know why we bother). Why, then, can’t I have a telephone cord that is straight, and that stays that way. I am looking at my telephone cord as I write. It resembles a small and tightly knotted brain. Every morning I stand on my chair and suspend the handpiece from height of 2.5 metres. It spins like a Dervish…

IT can only get better.If anyone says this to you, it’s all right to kill them.It is up there with a whole mountain of cosy little platitudes whose terseness makes them sound wise, but which merely hides their stupidity.The fools who trot out this stuff don’t realise that unless you’re dead it can always get worse; and once you are dead you won’t be complaining about it and they won’t be talking to you anyway — unless they are more of a halfwit than they already appear to be. So when you have just written the car off and your wife has left, "it can only get better" is just…

CAN I talk about lavatories? Or is it toilets? It’s forbidden in our house to call them toilets, but it’s a losing battle. The whole world — the Australian world anyway — calls them toilets. To me it sounds like a prissy euphemism. But I suppose that’s how lavatory started, too. Not to mention privy, water closet, loo, convenience, powder room, and endless others. The Americans call it the rest room, which might be true if yours is the kind of house where the rest room is full of magazines. Personally, when I go there I am very, very busy. But perhaps I am too graphic. And that’s another thing,…

I KNOW the secret of a long and happy marriage. Call. The single most frequent question from the mouths of angry wives is: "Why didn’t you call?” Or, more precisely, “WHY DIDN”T YOU CALL?!!!#$^%&*!!!!” I wish I knew, dearest. It would have saved a lot of pain, and I don’t mean yours. Is it a boy thing, or is it just me? The good intention is there. I really do mean to call, but first of all it’s too early, then it’s a bad time, then it’s too late, then there’s no phone… “NO PHONE?!!! WHAT DO YOU MEAN, NO PHONE!!! THE WHOLE OF THE CIVILISED WORLD HAS A PHONE.…