WHAT’S the point? MY wife arrived back yesterday after a month in the UK. So I made the bed. She had warned me the place better be tidy when she got home. I looked around and it was tidy. Why, then, was I nervous? Because tidy is a relative term. My desk is tidy inasmuch as I know where everything is. It’s… on my desk. To my wife, tidy is a surgical expression. She expects tidy to incorporate the glint of polished steel, the glow of burnished timber, the detritus from the washing up cleaned off the draining board. How could I have known that? Did she mean clean? If…

I HAVE had two near-death experiences that I can remember. In one I nearly drowned in a river while several hundred holidaymakers watched. I remember looking up through the thickening waters at the receding sun and feeling really, really silly. In the other I watched the tree rushing towards my windscreen and thought, “This is really going to hurt.” (and actually, it didn’t). But the reason I mention it is because my past did not flash before my eyes and — more particularly — I did not think about my mother. There were several reasons for this (not thinking about my mother). She would have been furious. She would have…

FILING cabinets don’t work. I have lived with them all my working life — God knows why — and I can say this with authority. It started when I first acquired a house and considering myself suddenly a man of substance I decided a cardboard box would no longer do. I bought a filing cabinet, a stack of files, a packet of those little plastic bits that slide on top and those slips of card that go in them with the letters of the alphabet. I filed stuff. The telephone bill, the electricity bill, the rates. The car rego. Now I can’t find the bloody thing. I’ve looked under C…

MY credit cards have been stolen. According to ritual I should be panicking. I should spend a few frantic hours ringing financial institutions and alerting them to the possibility that my accounts might be illicitly drained of funds. There are two reasons I won’t be doing this: I don’t want to make them laugh; and although I call them credit cards, they’re really only little plastic rectangles. Until last night I had a credit card wallet in my trouser pocket that was so fat it felt like a groin tumour. But there was only one credit card in the lot. Among the treasures the thief will have acquired is an…

I COOKED a chicken. I don’t know what all the fuss is about. Just because your wife’s away for six weeks that’s no reason to starve. She was going to leave me whole meals in the freezer but I told her to stop fussing. Any fool can cook a chicken. They ought to write something big on the outside though, to tell you there’s a plastic bag on the inside, with the neck in it. The plastic bag melted, but I hadn’t bothered with stuffing so it didn’t matter. It made a mess of the neck, but the cat ate it anyway. I was going to have the whole works:…