I AM defined by my underwear. I didn’t know this until I found my daughter using my pants to clean the engine dipstick. She’d taken them off the Hills Hoist. “But I thought they were rags!” she said. “You are talking about my clothes!” “But they’re old people’s clothes.” “I am an old person! Well, nearly.” I didn’t think any more about it until I found seven new pairs of underpants lined up on the bed. I didn’t know they were underpants. I thought they were handkerchiefs. I picked up one of the new pairs. Why they call them a pair I can’t imagine. There wasn’t enough material to make…

I HAVE a wart. Don’t ask me how or when. It just turned up. I looked down last month and there on the inner joint of the little finger of my right hand — was a wart. How do they do that! Do they fly in during the night, like miniature space ships? Or do they erupt like volcanoes while you’re in the lavatory, or the bath? Bluurp, and there it is — bloated as a tick but much more indestructible. Everyone is being very kind but I know that, secretly, they are disgusted. I can see it in the people who shake my hand. Their fingers wrap around mine,…

OH come on! You can’t lock people indoors just because they’re under 18. Not even if it’s 10pm! I know they’re hardly people at that age but the thing is… they’re not doing anything wrong. Well, yes, of course they are doing things wrongs, but that’s in the design. Not their design – our design. We’re designed to think they do. Not only that, we’re designed to forget that we did exactly the same things — or very similar things — when we were that age. Now someone is going to pull a mouth like a cat’s bum and say, “Oh no, we knew when things went beyond a joke.”…

YESTERDAY was Queensland Day. Happy birthday Queensland! – Not that anyone seemed to care. I looked it up on the State Government website. It wasn’t there. I even searched “Queensland Day” and it came up with Queensland Day 2001. It does have Queensland Week. Just for the record, it was exactly 144 years ago yesterday that Queen Victoria cut the cord between NSW and Queensland. In a display of regal humility she decided she liked the name Queensland, and dumped ideas to call the place Cooksland, after the bloke who found it. Cooksland might have had a lot more going for it. I mean, think how easy it would have…

IT’S not plastic bags that are taking over the world, nor discarded ballpoint pens. It’s hubcaps. I never realised this until one fell off. Oh, I’ve seen them at the roadside from time to time and thought no more about it, but when mine fell off I went looking for it. I found 13 hubcaps in the 100-metre stretch where I know I lost it. And that was only on one side of the road! Mine wasn’t one of them. Mine, no doubt, had gone scything into the bush, felling koalas and kangaroos and 100-year-old gum trees. You could probably walk from Townsville to Broome on a pavement of hubcaps.…