CHRISTMAS is coming. The time of bonhomie, festive jollity and presents. Having to like people can be a pain, but I love the presents. And not just receiving them. I love giving them, too. Except to my mum. Every year I go through the same agony: what the hell am I going to give my mum? Every year I come up with the same answer: I don’t have the faintest idea. When you are trying to dream up a gift for an 82-year-old mother, and your brain is empty, eau de toilette pours in to fill the space. The only way my mum could possibly get through all the eau…

FRED, next door, has put his house on the market. We’ve grown used to Fred and Marjorie over the years. We share a comfortable peace. I will probably have to kill their cat one day, when I actually catch it scratching up my veggies, but they don’t have to know it was me. But if they’re moving it won’t be a problem any more, I hear you say. But I didn’t say they were moving. I said they’d put their house on the market. There ought to be rules about selling your house. They should pass a law that says you have to get your neighbour’s approval. I mean, we…

IT’S our wedding anniversary on Tuesday. Twenty six years. We should make it, but it’ll be close. I have locked all the doors and windows but she may still escape before the due date. She has threatened to climb out through the chimney. It used to bewilder me that people made such a big deal about couples who have been married for 50 years. But it’s not hard to do that; it’s easy. The hard part is to do it without poisoning each other’s soup (the only thing you can eat by then is soup).   The hard part is being married for 50 years and still having conversations about the…

I’VE been writing these columns for two years. That’s about 100,000 words. I don’t know why I bother really. I mean, I haven’t changed the world or anything. It’s a lot less words than there are in the Bible, which makes them lighter to carry about with you. But no one is carrying my columns around with them, marvelling over the wisdom they contain. That’s probably why someone called me a wanker in the letters column last week. It’s all right though. I’ve been called worse. Indeed, you have only to read the name that was chosen for this bloody column to see that I am used to insults. At…

DID I tell you we were living with my daughter at the moment? Did I say it was only for a week while we had some building work done? Well, the time has blown out. For one week, read three, going on 52. Did I say the builder doing this building work was my wife? Ah. It’s only a shower, but a shower is the one thing in Australia you can’t live without. You can pee behind a bush, but if you haven’t showered the bush would probably walk away in disgust. My wife wanted the shower tiled. Fair enough. Good idea. I said I’d get around to it. After…