Some of you might want to wash your hands after reading this. I do some of my best thinking in the toilet. The lavatory is definitely the smallest room in the house, unless of course you have a wine cellar, and even then, you don’t go to the wine cellar to think, do you? Ensconced in the loo with the door shut, one can sit and contemplate, for as long as one likes, really. Someone…
Four hundred million dollars is a useful amount of money. In the hands of people who know how to distribute money for a good purpose, it could be dispersed in a myriad of ways. They might take up to 20 percent off the top to administer their charities, but that’s a subject for another time. For example, $400m, equivalent to about a 20% of the Australian Government’s public housing budget, could be used to alleviate…
The prediction in 1940-something that Mother’s new bairn would be born in late October may have caused some angst. In Scotland, those of a superstitious nature would have been in a ‘swither’ (a state of nervous agitation). But “no worries” as we say in Australia. I was born the day before Halloween, with 22 hours to spare. My friend Ingrid says that apart from it being her birthday, October 31 is a ‘non-event’. But her…
The following should not be construed as medical advice. If itching persists, see your doctor. One Sunday morning in October 2013 I woke early with a weird sensation behind my ear. Half asleep I picked the tick off that was embedded in my scalp. Less than a minute later my body erupted in a full-scale hives-like rash, my lips began tingling and I began wheezing. I jumped in the shower to see if that would…