AMAZING really, that we can pay people to make such a cock-up of things. I don’t mean Phil or Kim or John. They’re politicians. We don’t really expect them to have brains. What we expect is for them to employ people who have brains. The kind of people who can look at a sinking shipload of people, rescued by a Good Samaritan, near an island named after the man who told us about the Good Samaritan, and with an unerring instinct for getting it wrong can advise our leaders to say: “Sod off!” Were there really political advisers out there who thought this was a good idea? I don’t mean…

TASTE is a funny thing. I don’t mean as in taste buds, although that’s funny, too. Did you know Americans universally hate vegemite? They react to it like dingoes to dog bait. But no, I mean taste as in music, paintings, wallpaper, coffee tables and toilet roll holders. I have been visiting friends — friends, mark you — who have just bought a new house. Actually it’s an old house, but it’s new to them. As friends we have much in common: grey hair, cars, debts, children. But, I have discovered, not taste. I thought so at first. They invited us round to see the new/old home. And they did…

AS a young man (that is, pre-thirty) I sailed tall ships. I scrambled like a monkey 40 metres into the whistling skies to furl sails on yards that pirouetted over the ocean like a drunk crossing a freeway. And I did it without a safety harness. We all did. There was only a lunatic faith in our own immortality and grip like a pitbull terrier on a Pekingese that kept us from pasting ourselves thinly over the deck, or plunging into the grey waters of the Atlantic Ocean while the ship, under full sail, became a galloping dot on the horizon. I know I shouldn’t boast, but I was a…

IN my next life I’m going to be more particular about the world I’m born into. I want a world in which there are no shelves. No, let’s go the whole hog: I want a world in which there are no flat, horizontal surfaces. Add to that no flat, bare walls, no thumbtacks, no sticky tape, and none of those little lumps of dough that are supposed to stick stuff to your wall, but that actually drop off slowly while leaving an irremovable stain to remind you forever of its inadequate presence. Oh, and no fridges. At least, no fridge doors. We’ll ban fridge magnets while we’re at it. In…

I have a friend called John. I’m thinking of having him stuffed. There aren’t many Johns left. They have gone the way of war-time austerity, single-channel TV and the waltz. Other endangered species are David, Joan and Mary; all being swallowed alive by migrants — from another solar system, I think — with names like Shavonn, Raylene and Dwayne. It was bound to happen, what with genetic engineering and chemicals in the food chain. Don’t get me wrong. I know Shavonn. Personally. Nice lady. Apart from that business when she killed her parents with an axe. Well, you would, wouldn’t you; if they called you Shavonn? Until she was old…