THERE are Easter eggs in the shops. I saw them last weekend – about three weeks after Christmas. Banked up like battery hens. I guess we should stop calling them Easter eggs, Easter being nearly three months away. They’re just-after-Christmas eggs; or merely chocolate eggs, for the eating of. Another sweet and sugary comestible to rot the kids’ teeth and build cellulite on the thighs. And another nail in the coffin (or is it the cross?) of Christianity. I enjoyed Easter, as a kid. I wasn’t terribly conscious of its religious implications, but I remember waking up on Easter Sunday to find a pile of assorted Easter eggs and chocolate…

I HAVE this mate. Nice bloke. Brain the size of a grape. His marriage broke up. Nothing unexpected and not what this story is about. This story is about his new partner. She seems bright, but you have to wonder, seeing how he’s cerebrally challenged and she likes him. Loves him, even. He feels the same about her. That’s why he bought her some special underwear. She was coyly impressed; impressively flattered. Even I was impressed. I told him so. “I don’t deserve the credit,” he said. “Louise chose them.” Louise is not the new partner. Louise is a girl he works with. I was stunned. “Are you seriously telling…

I’VE got termites. Okay, so the politicians have let the country go to the dogs, the kids of today are on a joy ride to oblivion and terrorists threaten the very fabric of civilisation as we know it. But I’ve got termites – and they’re threatening the very fabric of my house as I know it. Frankly, I’d rather have a prime minister making a complete dog’s breakfast of the refugee scene than termites making a termite’s breakfast of my walls. I came across them by accident. I was hanging a picture and the hammer went through the wall and there they were: thousands — millions — no, billions of…

THAT’S it that then. The divorce is next week. Someone gave us a board game for Christmas. I love board games. In this age of televisions, headphones, cars and computers, all designed to ensure our interaction with the rest of the world is reduced to the absolute minimum necessary to sustain life, a board game brings a family together. The simple fun of shaking the dice and moving your little counters across the board is a heart-warming and curiously thrilling occupation, especially when you’re in front. And as long as you aren’t playing with someone you love. It was one of those territorial games in which you play on a…

OUR fridge is a war zone. Small crumbs of indeterminate cheeses lurk in advanced stages of opalescent decay within slimy plastic wrappings that are so bacteria-laden they could wipe out the population of China. A bowl of four-day-old remnant salad that would be a credit to an Elm Street horror movie is climbing out of the upturned plate that is trying to suppress it. We forgot to paint a crucifix on it. In the door there are four bottles of what once contained fine wines (red and white), sherry, and ancient port, but that now contain only the memory of Christmas and a few poisonous dregs with which my wife,…