AS the size of televisions increases, dining tables get smaller. This is a natural law, like the one that says everything in the world may contain traces of nuts. I’ve even seen peanut packets that state it, which is a relief, I suppose. But it’s sad about the dining tables. We are approaching the point of no return, when at least one wall of every house won’t need plastering because it will be floor to ceiling, corner to corner plasma screen. And the dining table will fit in the doll’s house. This is because we have misunderstood the role of the dining table. People think they’re for eating at, and…

 TODAY is May Day.  Well, no actually. Here in Queensland – and in Canberra, New South Wales, South and West Australia – it’s Labour Day. They call it May Day in Northern Territories and Eight Hour Day in Tasmania, which is probably the best name for it, as it celebrates the first day of May 118 years ago when trade unions in the US and Canada decided eight hours was a legal day’s work. There are, of course, some unenlightened places in the world where it is still called merely Saturday. Serves them right! The Labour Day idea didn’t reach Australia until the following year – 1887 – when Labour…

INFANTICIDE isn’t that serious, surely? On the league table of capital crimes it would have somewhere down around eight or nine. Especially when the victim is anything from two to three years old. I mean, they’re cute until they’re two, then something happens to them. I think they get hijacked by alien beings. Back in the days when your average peasant believed in witches, there was a general belief that the fairies snuck in and stole good children, leaving changelings in their place. Identical beings in every way except that they have personalities like the creatures from The Alien. The way you found out was, you threw the kid on…

I HAVE labyrinthitis. Coming from the word labyrinth it ought to mean I am good at mazes, but it doesn’t. It means I have trouble doing what comes easily to most two-year-olds: standing up and walking without running into things. It’s either labyrinthitis, which is a virus attacking the inner ear, my doctor says, or I’ve had a stroke and the back of my brain – the bit that controls balance – looks like a Baghdad post office after the explosion. No matter, the end result is that I spend my time bimbling round the house like the ball in a pinball machine, occasionally ricocheting off the walls and lurching…

WE are drowning. And it’s not in computer technology or plastic bags or petrol fumes. We’re drowning in pills. Go into any chemist – or even your local supermarket – and you’ll find more pills than varieties of chips, or types of jam, or packets of biscuits. And you can’t blame the doctors. I’m not even counting the pills that actually cure you of things. I give you, for example, my wife’s pills. As I write she is consuming tablets of amino acid, chelated zinc, vitamin C with rose hips, vitamin B6 pyridoxine hydrochloride, sugar-free chewable vitamin C, natural vitamin E, balanced B complex, brewers yeast, PPMP (Potassium phosphate and…