NOW look, I am no longer going to suffer people coming into my kitchen and turning their noses up. I am not ashamed, nor am I some kind of pervert. I just feel comfortable with a plastic bowl in the kitchen sink. It’s useful. It means I can… well, fill it with water, for a start, without having to put the plug in. They pop in for tea and you can watch them as their eyes scan the kitchen in an idle, tea-drinking sort of way – until they hit the sink. “What’s that doing there?” they demand, in a voice that suggests the cat has left something unpleasant in…

WELL, that’s over then. And a good job, too. Forgive me if I can’t be excited about performing my civic duty. It’s not as if the major political parties are coming to me for advice or the wisdom of my advanced years. All they want from me as my contribution to the weighty and sombre matters of state is a number written on a piece of paper. It’s good to know I’m in control of my own destiny. It’s even better to know that with any luck I won’t have to do it again for another few years. There must be ways we can make voting a more palatable experience.…

WHY did they ever call the damned stuff ‘canned music’? Cans sit on a shelf and you take one out as required, choosing, as it were, baked beans or spaghetti hoops. ‘Piped music’ is better. It implies something that pours relentlessly out of a tube upon which someone forgot to attach a tap. But how about ‘intravenously drip-fed excessively-decibelled, inescapable, nerve-jangling, mind-numbing music’? That about sums it up. You could drop the word ‘music’. I had reached the conclusion that the only place you can escape the tin-drumming horror of radio station jingles was in the lavatory, but no – I went into a public lavatory in one of our…

A SHORT time ago I said some cruel things about Christmas cards. Now I want to say some things about the people who have to deal with them, and with all the other bizarre stuff people hand over the counter before Christmas. I don’t know where they find post office staff in Australia but they appear to have discovered a genetic pool of human beings for whom nothing is too much trouble. Maybe they implant it when they hire them. Want a box that precisely fits the hexagonal bottle of perfume, the umbrella and the giant mango you’re posting to Auntie Mabel in Perth? No problem – let’s just wade…

I WAS brought up in age when an exotic fruit was a homosexual from Thailand. And in a country where the best you could expect to get (exotic fruits, not Thai homosexuals) was a tangerine: a fruit so remarkably unexotic I think it’s now extinct. So I was bound to become a mango junkie the moment I stepped off the plane. It’s not fair to introduce pasty-faced northern hemisphere migrants who have lived sheltered lives, to a world with mangoes in it. It was bad enough in Sydney, where a mango is still an import, but in Townsville, come mango season, they call to you more seductively than the courtesans…