The grumpy old men’s club

We meet every month for a meal at the Curmudgeon Hotel. We are all men of a certain age, silver haired, distinguished in our own eyes and pompously prejudiced. We take it in turns to sound off about our own selfish certainties...

Continue reading

The Horses’ Revenge

I had just started my first job and some of my co-workers wanted to go away all together for the weekend. Cheryl had been a pony club member as a youngster and she urged us to go horse riding in the Grampians, a beautiful...

Continue reading

My radio mother

My first radio did not give birth to me or teach me to walk or give me food or love me as my beloved biological mother did. But my radio mother was unquestionably motherly and even grandmotherly. She was large and rounded and...

Continue reading

The Concrete Cottage

Our first house, in Brunswick in inner city Melbourne, had suffered at the hands of a succession of renovators. The main problem was that it had been concrete-ized, probably in the 1970s. The charming Victorian facade features...

Continue reading

Teapot therapy

Stress has been described as “hurry sickness”. We hurry, we get stressed, we hurry harder, we get more stressed. Finally all that hurry stress is converted into energy and our brains explode in a spectacular display...

Continue reading

Vegetable vexations

Of course we could grow our own vegetables. We had seen celebrity gardeners on TV do it. It looked so quick and easy when the whole process was shown in fast motion. One minute the celebrity gardener was turning the first spade...

Continue reading

Instant answers

I simply wanted to know what sort of live music was happening at my local bistro. It had a sign out the front advertising “Friday Live Music”. We all know to look online for instant answers. I looked up the bistro...

Continue reading

Serendipitous success

Don’t you love stories of success, especially when it is unexpected? Every day on his dairy farm, Pioneer Charlie walked past an old weirdly shaped fallen tree trunk on his way to the milking shed. In his imagination the...

Continue reading