LET me describe to you what will happen in my house about 5am in five days time. It will begin slowly, with low murmurs and tense whispers. There will be feet on the stairs. They will be trying to be quiet while at the same time not giving a rat’s bum whether they succeed. Someone will giggle. Other voices will join the first ones. Bear in mind that I will still be in bed with my wife – a place we fell into only three hours previously. They’ll give up trying to whisper quietly and they’ll whisper loudly. In the general hushed bedlam you’ll be able to identify clothes being…

IT won’t work. This is 2003. There are regulations, rules, national boundaries, for heaven’s sake. It’s sad to say, but Santa Claus is doomed. For a start, I doubt he has the visas. I mean do you know how long it takes to get a visa to enter Australia! He’d need to be filling in the forms for next year on Christmas Day last year! Except that he’d be wasting his time. He’d never get a work permit. There must be dozens of old blokes with beards and — most importantly — Australian citizenship, who could do what he does. Possibly better. He gave my grandson a little wooden train…

THERE’S a new social and psychological disorder abroad in the world. It joins the ranks of road rage, computer rage and government telephone‑answering-machine rage. The only good thing is that it’s seasonal. You can only get it at Christmas. It’s Christmas-carol rage. It’s highly infectious and may contaminate anyone who goes near a shop over the Christmas period, but it’s particularly virulent among shop assistants. When you think about it, if they shut a soldier in a room and forced him to listen to John Farnham singing Good King Wenceslas continuously for a month it would be regarded as torture and a breach of the Geneva Convention. But if you’re…

DEAR Dr Syd Millar, I’d like to thank you, as chairman of the International Rugby Board, for bringing us probably the most exciting world championship final in the history of the game. Pity you had to be there, though. Couldn’t you just have directed events from Ireland, where you live? Then you wouldn’t have embarrassed yourself and everyone else with your appalling presentation of the runner-up medals to the Wallabies. I’d like to apologise to the Wallabies. I said some cruel things about them last week in a pre-match spirit of sporting bonhomie. Then I watched them play and I was ashamed of myself. Not half as ashamed as I…

FOR a start, we invented it. It’s called Rugby, you see, after the town. Not Sydney or Thuringowa.. The Thuringowa World Cup? I don’t think so. And it’s not football. That’s a round thing kicked about by fairies. Or it is in England – the land where they invented it. No, it’s rugby. Or rugger, actually, as opposed to rugby league. And in the land of its birth, rugger is considered a gentlemen’s game, so what they’re doing with it in Australia I can’t imagine. Trying to improve themselves, no doubt. ‘Twas ever thus… for more than a 1000 years English gentlemen have been battling the peasant classes, who had…