WELL, it finally happened. My daughter’s partner went to jail. Not for long. Only a month. But it’s only the first time. With the practice he’s getting he should be able to work his way up to 10 years in no time. Drink driving. After all the other driving offences the magistrate finally lost patience. If I’d been there I’d have asked what took her so long. I wasn’t there, though, because your kids don’t tell you these things. You pop in one morning for tea and you say, by way of being sociable: “Where’s Hannibal Lecter?” and she says: “Oh, he’s in jail. Didn’t I say?” He didn’t do…

I HAVE a nice nose. I’m going to cut a hole in a paper bag and stick it on my head. This way people will focus on my best feature. I might even be able to persuade Townsville’s new Gold Lotto millionairess to give up her happy marriage and run away with me. She’ll get a shock, of course, when she takes the paper bag off and discovers the rest of my face is like a Beirut bomb site, but she can always slap the paper bag back on. I got the idea from reading in the Townsville Bulletin about the Best Butt contest at Julia Creek this weekend. They…

IT is 1pm. I should be cutting wood. I should be tiling the shower. I should be replacing the wall where the termites ate it. Instead I am sitting at the computer staring at the screen. At 10.30am I straightened a paper clip. At 11am I folded it up again. It can’t be done, you know. A straightened paper clip is never the same again. I have toyed with the idea of trying another one, to see how well I could reconstruct it. Sort of like a scientific experiment. But I know it will just be another way of avoiding life. I have been here since I realised the wood…

MY wife says I’m one of a kind. It’s the way she says it that bothers me. More relief than admiration. She says it’s the reason she’s opposed to cloning. She says she couldn’t handle the washing or the cooking for two of us, and the sleeping arrangements would be bizarre. She made me realise I’m opposed to human cloning, too. I’d always thought it would be rather fine to have another one — or two — of me in the world. It would certainly do the place a lot of good. Then it struck me with great clarity that if I ever met me, I’d hate him. For a…

IF I meet one more person suffering from a lid-life crisis I shall feel obliged to turn it into an end-of-life crisis for them. I’m sorry if I seem unsympathetic but, damn it, I am having a crisis of my own coping with the plethora of crises in which 21st century, civilised people live. There are being-a-woman crises and being-a-man crises; there are being-busy crises and not-being-busy crises; not-having-a-job crises and being-overlooked-for-promotion crises; and then there’s the mid-life crises. Anyone who hasn’t learned to cope with that after surviving all the others probably ought to be in a mental institution anyway. But compare, if you will, the mid-life crises (and…