I PASSED a bloke yesterday that I didn’t like. His eyes were too close together, he was fat, he had thick lips and thick glasses and he wore a ring as big as a leg iron on his sausage fingers. I’ve never met him before and, indeed, I didn’t meet him then. I just happened to pass him on the street. But you can tell. You must have met them – people whom you know at a glance are arrogant, or pompous, or know-alls, or whingers. They don’t have to say anything or do anything. You just know. I looked in my mirror this morning and looking back at me…

THE storm clouds are gathering. I am not talking about political Armageddon. I am talking about those things that bowl over my house every morning, blotting out the sun, the sky, and any fond feelings I had about rain. I thought I understood rain. I read my first book about rain when I was three. Or had it read to me. It said, “The gentle rain from heaven waters the land and makes the grass grow.” That was the gist of it, anyway. The operative words were “gentle”, “heaven” and “grass growing”. It didn’t say anything about savage, steel-girder rain blasted out of black and bad-tempered skies by sudden detonations…

LIFE is like a nappy. This depressing fact came to me yesterday as I surveyed two dozen of them, whiter and furrier than lambs, piled in my daughter’s laundry. She is heavily pregnant and awaiting the birth of her first child. Our first grandchild. I was feeling elated. I stood contemplating the continuation of an ancient lineage; I recalled the smell of babies, which is so delicious I begin to understand cannibalism; I considered the joys of being dragged around playgrounds by someone 58 years my junior until I drop dead of a heart attack. Then I saw the nappies. My whole life flashed before me. I used to look…

OUR best friend’s daughter smokes. This is not a problem for me. I’m never going to kiss her (she’s 14) and I don’t have to live in the same house. But it’s a different story with our best friend. If she knew her daughter smoked she’d have a terminal fit of the vapours. She would also feel like a complete buffoon because, I quote: “It’s not like a mother and daughter relationship. It’s more like best friends. She tells me everything.” And Elvis Presley lives in Rasmussen. I’d like to tell her about her daughter’s secret fag packet, partly so I can watch her expire in a pool of deflated…

MY wife wants to keep chooks. There’s not a chance. We have been there before in those far off days when I could fight a hen and win. And my wife’s memories are of eggs the size of hot-air balloons with yolks the colour of sunflowers. She is being carried away by the chook craze of the new millennium. Everyone’s doing it. Chooks are in high demand. Their market price is higher than hen’s teeth, which are scarce and expensive. I guess it’s something to do with out urban society wanting to re-establish its relationship with country life. And with cockerels that wake you up at 3am, having the lawn…