I SAW in the Townsville Bulletin last week how the funeral industry is becoming cool and trendy. I have my doubts about trendy, but cool strikes me as apt. Apparently there is a new TV show, Six Feet Under, that is going to make the funeral business respectable. It’s going to take more than a TV show. Not dying would help, for a start. Do they think we’re all going to chat casually with friends around candlelit dinner tables about coffins and the embalming process and the size plot we’ve ordered? It’ll never catch on. I’m on the side of my wife’s father, an eccentric soul (now, anyway) who left…

MY wife is wearing pyjamas. Call me an old silly, but I have a bad feeling about this. It’s not even a nightie. It’s pyjamas. Made of … flannelette, I think they call it. Pea-green flannelette. Take it from one who is now experienced, it is very difficult to build erotic fantasies around pea-green flannelette pyjamas. No, it’s impossible. I’ve tried. They say to me… soup, and it’s all downhill from there. She says it’s because of the cold (see this space last week) but that won’t wash. I’m sleeping in the same bed (at the moment anyway) and I haven’t worn a pair of pyjamas since I fell off…

I’M freezing! I didn’t come here to freeze. I came here because it was tropical and instead of hypothermia I could have berri berri or malaria. Well all right, I’m not freezing because the temperature has not yet dropped below zero, but it’s all relative. I feel as if I’m freezing and that’s good enough for me. My wife tells me it is warmer here than it was in London yesterday. And that it’s warmer here than it is in Helsinki anytime. You think I care what people put up with in the far-flung, glacier-bound reaches of the world! I came here because it was hot. I like hot. I…

I THINK I have been made a pass at. You can’t be sure when it’s been 30 years since anyone made a pass at you. I might be misreading the signs. She smiled; and she was not sufficiently my junior for it to be the kind of smile you get when they take the bedpan away. And she placed a hand on my thigh. There was a time when a woman’s hand deliberately and provocatively placed on my thigh would have caused more than my head to jump bolt upright, but not now. We were at a friend’s barbecue. People we’d known for years. The kind of place you can…

I HAVE a grain of rice up the back of my nose. It’s been there for 12 hours and it must be eating my brain because I can feel myself going mad. I know of no other hurdle on the running track of life so frustrating as bits of food up the back of the nose. An inextricable shred of mango between the teeth doesn’t even come close. How do these things get there? Over the past 12 hours I have reached with my finger back towards my brain as far as I could go and there appears to be no passageway through which a grain of rice could pass.…