WHILE my wife was away for three weeks I consumed one loo roll from a pack of six (and no, I didn’t eat it). She’s been back a week and the other five are gone. What can you do with five loo rolls? In a week! About 300 sheets of it are down to me, by my estimation. The rest — enough lavatory paper to join Maggie island to the mainland — is hers. I want to know what she does in there, but there are some things you don’t ask, even if you’ve been married 24 years. Especially if you’ve been married 24 years! I made a list. You…

I want to know where mossies go when you swat them. This isn’t some deep theosophical concern with mossie afterlife. I do not want to know what mossie heaven looks like. The blood-sucking little sods could only be happy somewhere resembling a Hannibal Lecter movie. I don’t want to go there. Nor am I concerned with the mossies you actually hit. I know where they go. They’re spread all over my bedroom walls. The place looks like it’s inhabited by a couple with a blackcurrant fetish. But where do the ones go that you miss? It’s a miracle — they just vanish! One second they’re an easy target under the…

So that’s it then. Another year down, very nearly. Only a few million to go. Not that we’ll have to worry. A few more years and we’ll be out of it. It’ll be someone else’s problem. Assuming, that is, we survive global warming, meteor strikes, genetically engineered foods, US elections and Seinfeld repeats. Eventually, of course, it will be something else’s problem. Given that it’s taken only a few thousand years for us to mutate from shambling simian fortresses with shaggy eyebrows and knuckles scraping the ground into, well… us; and given the accelerated rate of change, it seems reasonable to assume that in another few thousand years we’ll resemble something…

TODAY is the fifth day of Christmas. On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me – five go-old rings. Except that I don’t have a true love, and five gold rings sounds a bit like an epic by Tolkien involving the forces of evil; and I’d rather not go there at Christmas, thank you very much. And in the absence of a true love, it might be handy if this were Tuesday already, because the eighth day of Christmas promises eight maids a-milking. Knowing my luck they’d be built like Friesian heifers. It’s a lot of nonsense, you know, these 12 days of Christmas. Like most…

MY daughter has asked for my help. She makes her own bon-bons (crackers where I come from – I’ve heard ‘em go crack but I’ve never heard ‘em go bon) and she wants me to supply the jokes. Perhaps you think I should be flattered? But in our family cracker jokes have a reputation for their diabolical badness. Their nauseating imbecility is rivalled only by Daddy jokes. Daddy jokes are the dreadful little gags told by fathers at the tea table, particularly when your best friend from school, or the new girlfriend you are trying to impress, happens to walk into the trap. One drops one’s amusing little pearl into…