I HAVE seen my first Christmas card — the harbinger of the festive season. I should write to the newspapers like they do in England when they hear the first cuckoo, which is the harbinger of spring. The difference is that cuckoos turn up in limited numbers but Christmas cards drop out of the sky in pallet loads. One day the shops are doing business as usual, the next they’re wall-to-wall festive yo-ho-hos with bits of holly, candles and tinkly bells. People complain the magic is disappearing from Christmas but the way all those cards suddenly appear while you’re blowing your nose is pretty bloody magical. Do they really come…

PITY about CHOGM. I was looking forward to it. All those heads of government milling about on the streets. CHOGM, if you haven’t come across it, is the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. A suitable acronym, I think, carrying with it the hack of a majestic, or ministerial cough. A bloody sight better than GBRMPA (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority), which reminds me of the kind of aggressive dance music brass bands play. Also, in case you missed it, CHOGM was going to be held in Brisbane this week, until the powers-that-be decided to postpone it for a bit because of possible terrorist attacks. I think that was the…

I CAUGHT my daughter licking her plate. Did she inherit this prehistoric behaviour, or did she learn it somewhere? If it’s learned she certainly didn’t learn it from us. And if it’s inherited , then it’s from some disgusting skeleton in one of my wife’s cupboards. There are no closet plate-lickers on my side of the family. I’ve seen the photos: my great-grandparents in their starched collars and Sunday suits – they couldn’t even have licked their lips. I suppose it could have been inherited somewhere else, if you catch my meaning. I shall have to offer a plate of something to the man who changes the gas bottles. If…

I BLAME the parents. We used to give kids tin drums to bang on when they were… well, kids. They expressed themselves by beating seven bells out of the damn things while we smiled fondly and urged our friends to agree how cute they were. Then tin drums went out of fashion and kids had to have toys that were educational, or that told you when you pulled a little string that they were going to grow up to be a fashion model, God help us. Now we’re stuck with an entire generation of deprived young people who think drums are musical. Why couldn’t it be harps, or flutes? Even…

THE screen is blank. I have just finished writing 2000 words. I was pleased with it. Then I did something with my fingers and the monitor emptied. It is staring back at me now with its large Cyclopic eye, inscrutable as a Zen master. I asked it was it thought it was doing but it didn’t answer. I want to hit it with a wrench. I am a clumsy typist. Years of pounding a keyboard have not given me the fingers of a concert pianist. They have given me a set of little hammers with the sensitivity of baseball bats. Did I hit the full stop? The caps lock? Both?…