Dominic Knight

Like the infamous Black Monday stockmarket crash, the events surrounding my first crush began towards the end of 1986, and ended abruptly in 1987. I spent Year Four and Five in London, and like most of the boys in my class, I “fancied”, as we termed it in our ridiculous Cockney patois, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed classmate called – well, I won’t name her, because if the quick Googling I just did is correct, she’s married, and it would seem wildly inappropriate if she somehow read this article.

Besides, she might hold a torch for me, and… whoa, it’s only the second paragraph and things are already getting weird. Let’s rapidly back out of this particular line of thinking. Continue Reading →

I first flew overseas in 1985. I was eight, and my parents had decided to move to London. I boarded the Qantas plane with a sense of enormous excitement. Every detail was fascinating to me, from the safety cards to the inflight magazine to the strange compartmentalised food. I can still remember being engrossed by the kids’ channel on the inflight audio system, which involved a game where you had to evade the nefarious Black Knight.

I was somewhat confused by the morality of this, being a Knight myself, but of course, I understood what they were telling me – that a black knight must necessarily be bad, whereas a white knight would of course be good. And that, folks, is how racism starts. Continue Reading →

A few years ago, when I was in my early thirties, my generation’s relentless instinct for coupling and childrearing, aided and abetted by our ceaseless expattery, reduced me to my last two Fun Single Male Friends Of About My Age Who Also Lived In Sydney.

Tim and Sandy – not their real names, to add an unnecessary air of mystery – had both recently returned from stints living overseas, and they were damned if they were going to settle down just because they were back in their hometown. And I was determined to join the resistance they were so bravely leading.

I wasn’t sure whether we were dinosaurs in denial or the last fun people heroically struggling against the dying of the light, I suspect. But right when I needed them, those two guys became my last bulwarks against the onset of middle age. Continue Reading →

This should have been a wonderful week for the Prime Minister. She should have been tripping merrily through a field of political daisies, as difficult an image as that might be to conjure of our workaholic Prime Minister. On Monday, she announced the imminent delivery of the landmark National Disability Insurance Scheme – which has achieved rare bipartisan support in this most fractious of Parliaments. And then on Tuesday, the Reserve Bank dropped interest rates, exactly as she and Wayne Swan had hoped it would – and by 50 basis points, double what most experts predicted.

Some economists may question the government’s insistence on bringing the budget back into surplus, but politicians know that a reduction in mortgage repayments matters far more to the average voter than the country’s abstract macroeconomic health. Besides, if the budget isn’t brought back into surplus, Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey and Wayne Swan will say mean things about Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and black holes. So by her own metaphor, the PM is not only full-forward for the Western Bulldogs, but kicking a clutch of sweet, sweet goals. Continue Reading →

I don’t want to seem a wowser, a square or a prude, although I am in fact all three of those things, but I despise smoking. I despise it even more than I hated watching the Nyan Cat video for a solid hour, and that’s saying something. (The lengths of research I go to for this column!)

In Japan, it’s considered rude to smoke in public. You won’t see people lighting up on the pavement, outside their offices the way you will here. You won’t see them jamming a ciggie in their mouths as soon as they get off the train, because they’re so pathetically addicted that they couldn’t bear to be without tobacco for a whole hour. Instead, you’ll see Japanese smokers clustered together in certain designated ciggie-leper colonies, many of them glassed off, with a forest of ashtrays so that the butts aren’t simply chucked randomly onto every public street the way they are here. Continue Reading →

I got a call from the plumber at 8.30pm the other night night. He could repair my bathroom taps the following morning. I was impressed, having only put in the request earlier that day. When suited me, he asked. I work in the afternoons and evenings, so I replied that before midday should be fine. Could he do it first thing? What do you mean ‘first thing’, I replied, apprehensively. ‘7.30,’ he responded.

I grimaced a little, knowing that saying yes would sentence me to an extremely abbreviated sleep, but I needed to get it done. For weeks, my bathroom taps had been like the cartoon ones that Bugs Bunny often finds in the desert. Bugs would turn them on frantically, dying of thirst, and then one single solitary drip would make its way into his gaping mouth. Later in the cartoon a huge gush comes out of them – that was what I was hoping to achieve. Continue Reading →

Whenever you make an outlandish claim on the internet, you will get the same snarky response – “pics or it didn’t happen.” The English writer and commentator Charlie Brooker discovered this a few days ago when he claimed on Twitter to have concocted a chocolate and mackerel paté. He duly posted this photo.

So, if you claim to have a tattoo of Hello Kitty in an attempt to seem quirky, or claim to have met One Direction in a misguided attempt to connect with a misguided tween, or claim, as I once did in a highly unsuccessful attempt to gain the favours of a certain young lady, to be a relative of Prince William’s, you can expect to be asked to provide photographic proof. In which case all I can suggest is “Photoshop and it did happen.” Continue Reading →

I consider myself something of a trendspotter. I like to keep my ear to the ground, find out what the Kids Are Into These Days. So let me give you a little exclusive, the lowdown, the skinny, about what I’m tipping to be the next Harry Potter or Twilight. It’s a little series called The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, it tells the story of a rather special young lady named Katniss Everdeen, who…

Oh look, I can’t keep this up. It’s already earned $250 million at the box office, and, remarkably for such a massive blockbuster, has had excellent reviews, scoring 85% on Rotten Tomatoes. You’ve probably already seen the trailer, if not the film itself. But if you haven’t heard about it, just read the Wikipedia entry or one of the 27,700,000 articles that come up when you Google ”hunger games suzanne collins”. To be honest, I’m just trying to compensate for the fact that I hadn’t even heard of it until a month ago. Although if I had, the oft-cited comparison with Twilight would have put me off. Continue Reading →

Humanity has achieved so many extraordinary things in recent times. We’ve invented space travel, self-driving cars and the little red light that tells Kyle Sandilands when to shut up. But I would argue that of all the rich bounty which science has bequeathed to humankind, there is nothing finer than karaoke.

Sure, I wouldn’t win that argument, but, in the best spirit of amateur karaoke performers everywhere, I’d give it a solid go anyway. Because karaoke gives everybody the chance to be a star. A star with a dodgy synthesised backing track, a voice swamped by clunky digital reverb, and music videos that only ever seem to feature trams trundling around San Francisco, but a star nonetheless. Continue Reading →

I hate The Shire, and it hasn’t even been filmed yet. I hate it even more than the Mayor of the Sutherland Shire does, and she hates it so much that she’s threatened to put a boom gate over all of the bridges in her area to stop them filming there. I hate it even more than I hated Sylvania Waters, unless you remember that the Donahers laid the ground for all the other reality TV that’s followed, in which case we really should hurry up and invent time travel so that somebody, presumably Bruce Willis, can travel back and make sure it never happened. Continue Reading →