I HAVE black fingers. If I touch plants, they die. As I survey my lounge room I can see a forest of sticks in pots. They vary in size from the ice lolly sticks to timbers like pit props. Anyone who didn’t know me would think my bean crop, when it comes up, was going to be magnificent. The reality is that nothing grows in these pots. Not even disease. Weeds die. I see other incompetent pot plant growers and at least they have all kinds of other, unhealthy, unwanted green stuff growing rampant around their sticks.But my pots are as barren as the moon, and I did it. When…

A FRIEND tells me that DVDs are the best thing since sliced bread. I think he’s easily pleased. I mean, if sliced bread is your yardstick then there’s not very much that comes lower on the league table. My old favourite, line dancing, scrapes in ahead of sliced bread (but only just). Having no bread is better than having sliced bread. Walkmans, Big Brother, soft ice cream and politicians are all odious in their individual ways, but they come in several lengths ahead of sliced bread. I suppose we forget. These anaemic, air-filled, soggy sections of wan ex-wheat are so endemic we don’t even think about life before sliced bread.…

I TOLD her it was me or the dog. Big mistake. Not that I am actually going to pack my bags and leave. I might be more stupid than the dog, but not that stupid. I just don’t think I can bear the way it grins at me any more. I used to think it was merely vacuous, but it’s become more… triumphant since I had this conversation (with my wife, not the dog). I said I was sick of hairs over everything. I said anything that could make the house stink like a stable full of old blankets should be sleeping on the verandah… It was the silence that…

SHE was about 12, I guess, although nowadays the eight-year-olds look to me like 12-year-olds and the 12-year-olds look like 16-year-olds. And she was with her mate on the bus, explaining life. Or, possibly, death… “You’ve got to knock the good people out. That’s why we gang up on you.” Having dealt with the elimination of the opposition she asked, ‘Can you make your tummy go in a skeleton shape?” I wanted to turn round in my seat and say: “If anyone hangs around you for long it won’t just be their tummy that’s in a skeleton shape,” but I restrained myself. Instead I sat and shivered at the thought…

BY lunch time today I will have killed someone. I hope it’s the little sod next door. I remember last year when he stood at the gate and told me there was as a cat widdling on the lettuces. I rushed round to the back yard wielding an axe to discover the lettuces were unblemished and the world was at peace. Back at the gate the lad from next door was wetting himself with delight as he gasped, “April fool, April fool.” I should have hit him then. With the axe. It’s come round again, in case you hadn’t noticed. And in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s today. My dictionary…