I'm disorganised. Pity me
In Year Seven, I went to a high school where I didn't know a soul, so had to make a name for myself from scratch. I was like Rabbit, Eminem's character in 8 Mile when he first goes to the rhyme battles, only instead of baseball caps and baggy jeans, everyone was wearing a tie and what Scott Morrison would call an ill-fitting suit.
I'm proud to say that it took me just a few weeks to establish the identity that stayed with me until the end of the year. I was the Kid With The Messy Desk.
I was also the Kid Who Looked Ridiculous While Singing In The Choir Because He Opened His Mouth Too Widely, as some kind older kids were delighted to tell me, but the Messy Desk brand proved to be the enduring one.
My desk was a genuine hazard - at times, also a biohazard. The authorities had given me the only desk in the room with storage on a shelf underneath, instead of concealed under a flip-up lid, and somehow in just a few short weeks, it was overflowing with junk. The surface, too, was festooned with random paraphernalia, to the point where my deskmate got a texta and ruled a red demarcation line along the halfway point, just to stop my bits of flotsam from overflowing into his space. (He moved to Canada shortly afterwards. The record does not show whether it was partly, or entirely, to escape my desk.)
I can't recall how things disintegrated so quickly, or what all the mess was besides textbooks, or why I somehow had so much more of it than anybody else. But I instantaneously transformed my new desk into a junk shop for one crucial reason: I'm chronically disorganised.
This means that I'm regularly confounded by tasks that ordinary grown-ups manage easily. Tasks like renewing my driver's license.
In 2011, I obtained a new license, two weeks after my previous one had expired. After a fortnight of walking, catching public transport and being unable to get into pubs and bars, I finally dragged myself down to the motor registry and sort it out. I chose the five-year option, vowing that next time around, in far-off 2016, things would be different.
Well, I renewed my license a few weeks ago, and I'm happy to report that things were indeed better. This time it only took me twelve days after the renewal date. At this rate, I'll be renewing my license on time by roughly the point when I'm no longer allowed to drive.
Being late with a renewal causes you minor inconvenience. The same thing can't be said for tax.
Most of us manage to file returns on time, either through general law-abiding competence or courtesy of the incentive of a refund. Your disorganised person, though, will catch up every few years after the ATO makes repeated threats, generally via phone after the letters they sent weren't acted on. Then it all becomes a terrible rush, and we, I mean, 'they' don't have time to claim many of the deductions to which they may be entitled.
If owed money by the ATO, you'll get less interest than you would have received by banking it, but that's a modest price to pay for financial hopelessness compared to what happens if you're someone who's meant to "Pay As You Go". To that money, the ATO often applies a General Interest Charge, currently a little over 9 per cent - this can add up very quickly.
Worse still, if you don't do your accounts properly, there's a temptation to spend money that you don't really have, because it belongs to the tax office.
The ATO are generally fairly reasonable if you chat to them, and can apply payment plans and so on - but the price for being disorganised is still generally a hefty one.
In recent years I've paid for help with this stuff because it was getting entirely out of control - it's obviously cheaper to do it yourself, but outsourcing tax stuff is certainly cheaper than not doing it yourself.
We disorganised folk end up paying more in other ways, too. Nothing good happens to unpaid parking tickets, or cars that haven't been serviced, or teeth that haven't seen a dentist. Unopened mail can contain a multitude of ticking financial time bombs, and medical problems that disorganised people let slide can even kill us.
As frustrating as we disorganised people can be - and I'm told that's "very" - the people who end up getting most frustrated is us. We exasperate ourselves every time we have to pay a late fee, or to replace something we can't find under our piles of mess, or have to talk our way out of the inevitable consequences of being a bit hopeless. It's not a great way to live.
Modern society is constantly punishing us for not quite having figured out how to survive it. If we got our acts together, we might be able to organise for the condition of chronic disorganisation to be recognised as a legitimate source of the occasional fee rebate, or other varieties of institutional pity. But there's no chance whatsoever of that.
Furthermore, we're harmless people. No disorganised person ever masterminded an invasion, and clearly there is no place for us within the world of organised crime. In fact if we commit any crime, we're likely to have failed to prepare properly and get caught instantly. Once in jail, guess who's getting the penalties for a messy cell?
We can't start businesses whose success drives others to the wall, and instead just bumble through life, hoping that there isn't anything we should have known about that is going to cost us lots of extra money, but powerless to check.
So next time somebody inconveniences you with their disorganisation, please either have pity on them or help them out. Because nobody will appreciate a feat of successful organisation more than us. I remember walking through the Sydney 2000 Olympics fascinated that we'd managed to pull it off.
But then, I'm equally impressed whenever I see a well-organised workspace. Because nowadays, of course, I'm the Grown-Up With A Messy Desk.
How to survive Election 2016
Brace yourself, Australia. The 2016 federal election is roughly seventy days away, and if you want to know how long that is, it's several weeks longer than your longest holidays in high school - even if you went to a private school.
It's going to be gruelling even if you adore politics - even junkies can overdose. Several respected political reporters will be reduced to gibbering heaps by campaign's end, and several commentators will be transformed from gibbering heaps into reasonable people.
If you aren't into politics - that is, if you're normal - it will be like being slowly having your teeth pulled, without anaesthetic, while the world's most boring person reads statistical manuals to you. And because the Commonwealth for some reason doesn't fund dental care, you'll have to pay for the pleasure.
The only possible way to survive is by following this guide.
Leave
If you can, do. And if you can't afford to travel for the next 70 days, it's entirely possible that the agony of this campaign will qualify you for refugee status on the basis of avoiding physical suffering. The great thing is that wherever you go in the world, nobody cares about Australian politics, so except for the minor news item when the result is known, you'll be completely insulated.
Go to jail
I'm not condoning you committing a crime and getting locked up - indeed, it would be a crime for me to do so, and I'm hoping to exercise the previous option. I'm just noting that if you were on the inside, you wouldn't hear much about the election, especially in solitary confinement.
Is it worth it so you can avoid Election 2016? Only you can judge. Along with the actual judge in your trial, obviously.
Become an expert
In this era of 24-hour news and endless websites full of insta-analysis, the need for pundits exceeds the number of people who are willing to pay attention to Australian politics, let alone who can discuss it competently.
Just speak confidently about 'reduced quotas' and 'preference exhaustion' whether you understand them or not - the chances of getting busted are very slim - and you could find yourself on The Drum, Australian Agenda, any number of radio stations and websites or even election night. Just don't think it'll make you a celebrity.
Offer to test virtual reality headsets
The other day I got to test some virtual reality headsets that take you to the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef. That was stunningly beautiful in its own right, but the added bonus is that with those luscious images near your eyeballs and David Attenborough's voice in your ears, there's absolutely no way that anyone will be able to talk to you about negative gearing. It's almost worth getting it permanently attached.
Become a very fast voiceover artist
Very few people can talk quickly enough to deliver a line like "written and authorised by Brian Loughnane, Liberal Party Canberra" in roughly one second (see the end of this now charmingly retro video for an example). If you can do this, you'll have an abundance of work every three years.
Get involved in polling
They tend to need extra staff over the election period - but when entertainment is in short supply during a long and arduous campaign, you can also prank them. Tell them that you plan to vote Pastafarian, and that your preferred prime minister is Supreme Leader Snook. Or maybe boost Ricky Muir's primary vote so he feels good about his popularity, even if it means he might come crashing back down to earth on election day.
Become a campaign supplier
There's one group in our community who lick their lips especially lasciviously whenever an election's called - corflute manufacturers. Two-and-a-half years in every three, they do it tough, but whenever election time comes around, they get a cash bonanza.
Sausage manufacturers also do well, as do makers of bunting and tiny pencils. And if there's a change of government, or just of prime minister as is more common nowadays, it's easy to make a quick buck selling shredders in the ministerial wing. Suppliers of marble tables should also stand by.
Run
I don't mean run screaming, although that's certainly an option. I mean run for office.
But only if you run for the Senate. Not only is this election (probably) a double dissolution which makes getting elected twice as likely, there's a brand new electoral system that nobody except Antony Green understands. (Indeed, he's argued that a DD will leave the government worse off in the Senate, which may show that the government themselves haven't quite figured out the sums.) And that means everyone else will suck up to you, just in case you're elected.
Just pick a party name that's likely to lure at least some identifiable bloc of the electorate to vote for you, like the Free Nachos For All Party or the Make Pirating Game Of Thrones Legal Alliance or the Death Penalty For Turtleneck Wearers Team, and you'll be courted for weeks, except by the Greens in the latter example.
The numbercrunchers will worry that you'll get the balance of power, because who knows how things will work out? Not certain incumbent crossbenchers, it seems, several of whom probably just voted to put themselves out of a job.
Take a genuine interest in the governance of this great nation
This is of course the best way to cope, and involves the minimum inconvenience, because you can go about your life while devouring much of the deluge of daily content, analysing the policies and personalities that make our democracy tick and deriving satisfaction from the contest of ideas in Canberra. Unfortunately of all the options listed here, this is the hardest to achieve.
Why are we still paying for stuff with pieces of plastic?
Cash is king, the old saying goes. Well, it's time that particular monarch was overthrown. How is it that in 2016, when we carry the internet in our pockets, we still conduct transactions by exchanging brightly-coloured pieces of plastic with numbers written on them? And how is carrying a jangling bunch of metal coins around in any way efficient?
Coins and notes were useful instruments in their day, but that day is over. Increasing numbers of us no longer carry notepads and pencils wherever we go, or look at the mechanical hands of a wristwatch when we want to know the time, and it's time for the practice of carrying cash to follow these devices into the dustbin of history.
But it's coins that irritate me most. They're heavy and bulky, and they accumulate so quickly. Retailers are still playing those silly games where things cost $4.95 instead of $5, so we're constantly getting pointless 5 cent pieces. After an average day, my pockets are full of those bulky 20c and 50c coins. I've got a jar at home that I lug to the bank a couple of times per year – the whole thing is just annoying.
Admittedly, I've never been good with cash. For some reason, I'm incapable of getting more out of the ATM before I've exhausted my current supply. And I'm so irritated by ATM fees that I'll often do without a refresh until I happen to pass one of my bank's machines. For days on end, I'll try to get by via tapping my credit card for sub-$100 transactions. Which is getting easier and easier – I often go four or five days without a cent on me. So any muggers are likely to be very disappointed.
Australians have been some of the world's most enthusiastic adopters of tap-and-go credit cards. Our banks are putting Paypass and PayWave machines everywhere, and it's increasingly possible to pay for everyday transactions without them. Not only is tap-and-go incredibly convenient, but everything's already logged for accounting purposes. Sure, that means that big multinational credit card providers get to clip every ticket, but it will ultimately mean that taxpayers have to spend less money minting banknotes and coins.
The founder of Pablo and Rusty's café, Saxon Wright, is opening a cashless café in Brisbane where people will be able to pay with tap card or cups with embedded chips in them. As Wright points out, it's hard to imagine why small businesses would want to handle cash instead of dealing with tap-based payments unless they're paying their staff cash in hand. Doing without cash frees up time spent on accounting and visiting the branch to bank your takings. And you can already go cashless in many cafés, in fact – not just because they support tap and go, but many places let you order via a phone app like Hey You instead of paying up front.
Cash dates back to Venice, apparently, where instead of exchanging actual bars of silver, merchants instead swapped pieces of paper instructing their bankers to make payment on demand. As time went by, it seemed easier to simply swap these promissory notes than having to bother with the actual silver bars.
That quaint tradition lives on today in a visible form in Hong Kong, where banknotes are issued by three different banks, each of which says something like "HSBC promises to pay the bearer at its office here". I've never been able to understand in which form the bank would pay a bearer, since you're already holding a banknote, but then again, I don't get why you'd have three different types of $100 note, either.
But Hong Kong is leading the world in getting rid of cash, too. The Octopus system, originally invented as a public transport smartcard like our own Opal and Myki, now permeates many aspects of life in the city. Every convenience store lets you pay via Octopus, every vending machine does too, and you can even use it in McDonald's. Jointcredit/Octopus cards are available from all major banks, and they automatically refill out of your account. Increasingly, there's no need for Hongkongers to carry cash at all.
The HK authorities also sell Octopus SIM cards for phones, which allow users to simply tap their phones to catch public transport or perform common cash transactions. Apple, Samsung and others have also developed systems that let us tap our phones to pay, and this will allow a limit higher than the Paypass/PayWave $100. Before long, we won't even need to carry credit cards for many transactions.
Personally, I can't wait until I only need to carry my phone and keys, and no cash or cards whatsoever. My wallet currently contains just shy of 20 different cards, very few of which I ever need. I don't even need my Medicare card when I go to my GP nowadays. Why can't my phone just contain a scan of it, or something?
But it's cash that needs to go first. Experts say that except on those rare occasions when computers are down, the only people who really need to use banknotes in this era of electronic transfers are tax evaders and criminals. Think about the last time you had a $100 note. ATMs don't issue them, and I reckon I haven't had one in my wallet since I last took out money over the counter three years ago.
And yet the RBA says that there are 300 million $100 notes in circulation – about a dozen per citizen. No wonder experts have suggested getting rid of the higher-denomination bills as a means of choking funds for organised crime and terrorism.
I never want to have to go hunting for an ATM again, because cash, the king, is dead, or nearly as good as. Long live our new tapping-based overlords, I say. And if anyone's planning to mug me, it's all good – I'll just take out my phone and transfer you a few bucks.
The piece on procrastination I've always meant to write
I've always been a procrastinator. I've been meaning to write about this problem for a while, but never quite got around to it. And then, out of the blue, Daily Life suggested it - presumably after several years' experience with my work habits.
And yes, it's true - my approach to any task is to work out how late before the deadline I have to start, and then start considerably later.
At uni, I got to the point where my standard approach to any essay was to start the night before - even the 6000-word ones. As the years passed, I began them later and later, until I wasn't starting until dawn on the due date.
From the outset, let me be clear - this is a really bad idea.
My honours thesis was a particularly painful exercise. Given a year to write 15,000 words, I somehow found myself writing the final 10,000 the weekend before it was due at 5pm on Monday night. I narrowly avoided disaster, and got it in - albeit a few hours late, meaning that I missed the slap-up dinner that the department had thrown students to celebrate their thesis submissions.
My procrastination can take any form. Friends, Friends, family, Modern Family, reading, playing guitar, planning out the inevitably terrible concept hip hop album I've been meaning to record since I was 16 - anything. My favourite diversion in recent weeks has been the New York Times crossword, a distraction that helpfully resets every single day.
But I think the most reliable means of procrastinating is Wikipedia, which is a distraction in a useful research tool's clothing. You consult it entirely legitimately about the subject matter, but then start clicking links, and before you know it you're satisfying the curiosity you never knew you had about what John Stamos was up to between Full House andFuller House.
The most satisfying thing about being a procrastinator is that you can imagine how well you hypothetically would have done if you hadn't left a task until the last minute.
My thesis didn't set the academic world on fire, but people were at least surprised that I'd managed to get the thing done in such a short time. Which I now realise is somewhat like giving an uncoordinated child an award simply for turning up to sport. (I have one of those somewhere, too.)
But as a former flatmate of mine observed when we were both meant to be studying for exams but instead were playing elaborate computer games (Civilisation on his part, someStar Wars thing on mine), assuming you'd have done better with more time is a false assumption if it's something you've never, ever managed to do. It's as empty a boast as saying you can bench press a lot for someone who never trains. Yeah, sure, great - but so what? In the end you're still not lifting very much. And of course the appropriate response isn't to be impressed, but ask why on earth you won't train more consistently.
There have been times when being a last-minute specialist has been hugely useful, like a couple of years ago when I was asked to host a two-hour radio programme with 20 minutes' notice. (The first segment was, 'When have you ever been asked to do anything at incredibly short notice?')
But on the whole, it's something I'd gladly change about myself. I don't want to be maniacally planned and methodical, but if I could somehow wind my sense of the latest point at which I could feasibly start a task back by a few weeks, I'd save myself an enormous amount of stress, and sleep.
So, given my lifelong involuntary membership to the Procrastinators' Club that nobody ever quite got their act sufficiently together to set up, I was astonished to read an article in the New York Times by somebody who taught himself to procrastinate.
I know I'm not the only one out there - otherwise the market for that esteemed publication's fine crosswords would plummet - but I couldn't quite believe that somebody organised would choose to join us.
But, although I can barely imagine it, it turns out that there is such a thing as a 'precrastinator'. The author, Adam Grant, is one.
Just as I put myself through anguish throughout my six-year uni course by starting essays as late as possible, he says that precrastinators' lives become unbearable as soon as there's an incomplete task on the horizon. Grant is the opposite of me, a self-control shaman who submitted his dissertation two years early.
Two. Years. Early.
To me, that feels roughly as achievable as getting selected in the Olympic hurdling team - for the Rio Olympics.
But avoiding incompletion angst isn't the only reason why Adam Grant wanted to become a procrastinator.
He cites studies that say procrastinators achieve more creative outcomes. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright, according to Grant, produced his greatest design only when his client drove over and forced him to sit down and draw. It's not just that procrastinators do surprisingly good work for the minimal time that they've put in, it's that they often do their best work ever.
I have to say that this accords with my own experience. When a deadline looms, my brain somehow switches into hyperdrive and ideas somehow reveal themselves through sheer urgency, perhaps due to all that sloshing adrenaline.
In fact, I experimented with this article by writing it a day before it was due. It was very dull until I edited it close to the deadline - I'm not going to admit how much. If you think it's still dull, let's say I left it that way deliberately.
So there's a benefit to putting off until tomorrow what you can achieve today. Not only will you probably nail it in the end, but you'll get to spend some precious hours filling crosswords, too.
But please don't start those last-minute essays at dawn on the day they're due. Not only is it unnecessarily agonising, but the more people who can do it, the less proud I'll feel of my extremely trivial academic achievements.
Putting the 'mine' in mindfulness
This is the decade of mindfulness. The practice, which derives from meditation, is being credited with all kinds of benefits – helping with depression and stress, pain management and even physical fitness. It’s apparently the mental equivalent of going for gelato.
So what precisely is mindfulness? Hmm, or perhaps, omm. It’s not easy to pin down.
Wikipedia defines it as “intentionally bringing one's attention to the internal and external experiences occurring in the present moment”, which is roughly as clear as mudfulness.
Reachout calls it a “special way of paying attention that can help with how you cope with everyday life or deal with tough times”, which sounds good, but doesn’t explain what you actually do to achieve these effects. Their article goes on, slightly less nebulously, to suggest that it’s about blocking thoughts of the past or future, and trying to be a value-free observer of your surroundings.
As far as I can gather, it’s like we’re supposed to access the rational person we become when we counsel friends not to worry about their horrible breakup, or whether they’ll ever meet anyone again, and concentrate on getting over it – only for ourselves.
So, how do we do that? How do we become the detached David Attenboroughs of your own brains?
Forget your hippie meditation classes and hipster colouring-in books. I have some simple ways to clear your mind of clutter and focus on the here and now.
Breathe
We do it all day, every day, and so rarely think about breathing. Take a moment to do, now. Slowly fill your lungs, and imagine each little alveolus sac swelling with air. The oxygen is moving into your system. Thanks, oxygen.
Now slowly expel the carbon dioxide. Get lost, carbon dioxide.
Now, if anyone’s nearby, start wheezing, and make choking sounds. You could try saying ‘Can’t… breathe…’ in a strangled voice. Then, just before they dial 000, explain that it’s a mindfulness technique you’ve been working on. You’ve been paying close attention to your own breathing and now you want other people to pay attention to it, too.
Meditate
Meditation is where you focus the mind on something specific. I have my own version of this, which I call me-ditation. I can think about myself endlessly, and reach what I believe is a higher plane of consciousness while doing so. For instance – what are my strengths? What are my other strengths? Which of my strengths is strongest?
I won’t focus on past failings or fears for the future. I’ll know that in this moment, I am truly awesome, and nobody can stop me thinking that about myself unless they interrupt me with reality, which is why I insist on not being disturbed during my me-ditation practice, which can sometimes last for many hours.
Play solitaire
Life is like a game of solitaire, isn’t it? (Just think about that for a moment, and nod appreciatively). We lay out our own cards and play them as best we can, ultimately answering only to ourselves.
Which means that we can cheat, without getting caught out by anyone besides ourselves. It’s a helpful reminder that life isn’t fair, and that you may as well look after yourself by taking advantage whenever you can. (Don’t blame me, blame the capitalist system.)
Visualise a beach
Thinking of a beautiful calm beach on a perfect day is one of the most common guided meditation techniques. That’s well and good for some, but for my own guided meditation, I prefer to visualise Alex Garland’s novel The Beach, which tells the story of an idyllic community of backpackers living on a Thai beach that slowly descends into a hideous, brutal nightmare, leading to many of their deaths.
It’s a good reminder that no matter how good it seems, life is only a bit of poisoned food away from descending into a toxic hellscape, even if you’re as handsome as Leonardo diCaprio, and I find that soothing somehow.
Erase someone else’s colouring-in book
Colouring books are very fashionable at the moment, but it’s not often known that they work both ways. Rubbing out someone else’s painstaking work is not only faster than colouring yourself, but lets you work up elbow grease, which is handy exercise.
Sure, they may have carefully coloured in the patterns for their own mental wellbeing, but now that they’ve finished, they should be happy that you too have been able to derive spiritual satisfaction from their work by returning the book to its pristine, unspoiled condition.
And I find that if I focus on the moment, I don’t worry in the slightest about whether they’ll be annoyed by me doing this.
Get sunburnt
There is nothing that will make you more conscious of the here and now than sunburn. You’ll be keenly aware of every single movement you make, because just about all of them will be agonising. And you’ll be observing yourself, concluding that you should apply lots of aloe vera and make sure you slip, slop, slap next time.
Don’t forget that sunburn is also an extremely natural, organic process and helps us reconnect with ancestors who didn't have access to fancy modern things like blockout. It will make you glad you’re not living in those times.
Start a worm farm
You will quickly find it hard to focus on anything besides the immediate moment of wondering why on earth you started a worm farm, and what's the point of worm farms anyway, come to think of it, why are worm farms even a thing, and isn't it horrifying that if you cut a worm in half you just get double the number of worms, that’s incredibly freaky, burn the worm farm, burn it now.
And so the circle of life continues. Poignant, isn’t it?
Or it'll go well and you'll make money, mostly by convincing other suckers to buy your worm farm starter kit. Which may not strictly be ‘mindfulness’ but certainly is lucrative.
Hang on to a ledge by the tips of your fingers
No past, no future, just now. That’s how it feels to be suspended over a ledge by your fingertips. Try to observe yourself outside your body. You’ll see you, clinging on, and perhaps you’ll reflect on your position as a metaphor for the precariousness of life.
Perhaps someone will call the fire brigade, or perhaps they won’t – it’s out of your control. Don’t worry about that. Your job is to cling on. Just as we all do.
When embracing this practice, I tend to choose a ledge about 2m off the ground, but I visualise myself much higher for the same effect (see earlier entry about cheating at solitaire).
Strum the banjo
You've always wanted to play the banjo, or is that just me? I’m not very good at knowing what other people want, usually because I’m in the moment, focussing on myself.
Well, as every mindfulness devotee knows, there's no time like the present. Get that banjo and play it. Play it a lot, no matter how terrible it sounds. You’re Steve Martin, only funnier, better at the banjo, and also you never starred in a remake of The Pink Panther. Visualise it and it’s as good as true.
Also, constantly playing the banjo with zero skill will make everyone around you much less happy with their lives, so you’ll seem to have it together by comparison.
Come up with a better definition of mindfulness
Perhaps you could try to come up with an explanation that makes it sound less like a fortune cookie or a George Harrison song, and more like the valuable psychological technique that many medical experts now agree it is.
I guarantee this will be such a challenging mental task that you won’t possibly be able to think about anything else, probably for days. You’ll observe yourself pondering endlessly, but not be able to stop.
Then, when you’ve cracked it, could you please edit that Wikipedia entry so that it makes sense?
Unlike this article, mindfulness is a genuinely helpful discipline. The Black Dog Institute has some useful notes here (PDF), and the Mayo Clinic is instructive too, while and BeyondBlue has some mindfulness resources including an app for new mothers. You may also choose to consult your doctor.
Forget aged care. This is awesome care.
“Help the aged”, Jarvis Cocker sings in the Pulp song of the same name. “One time they were just like you.”
His examples of those similarities in the next lyric aren’t necessarily great – “drinking, smoking cigs and sniffing glue” – but it’s a sweet sentiment nevertheless.
The rest of the first verse is “Help the aged, don't just put them in a home, can't have much fun in there all on their own.” And that’s the part I’ve always wondered about.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in aged care facilities in the past few years, and I’d have to say that they leave me conflicted. They supply care to the aged, as advertised, but does outsourcing the day-to-day assistance mean that families, in the end, don’t care enough for relatives who once had us as their top priority?
On one hand, a place where absolutely everything is done for you is my idea of paradise, and tallies beautifully with my lack of life skills. They handle cooking, laundry, cleaning, bathing, dressing – whatever’s needed to make you comfortable. There are activities and outings, and one home I’ve visited even bakes fresh muffins on the premises, which is the most brilliant method of placating anxious, guilty relatives imaginable.
At times I wonder whether these facilities would be willing to take an unusually incompetent 39-year-old, or if I could make a buck by opening a place catering to inept younger people like mes? Not so much Moran Care as moron care?
But there are times when they seem nightmarish. Laminex-clad departure lounges stinking of boiled cabbage and industrial antiseptic, where we abandon our relatives except for birthdays and Christmas. In the meantime, our so-called loved ones are lfet to wonder whether we’ve forgotten them entirely or are just a bit selfish, until eventually their memories go and it doesn’t seem to matter how often we visit, so we don’t quite so much.
Then I remember how challenging dementia can be, and conclude that in such cases, there’s barely any alternative. Until there’s a cure, many of us will get to the stage where we need round-the-clock care, and are a risk of wandering. Which means somebody else decides to place us in locked facilities, making us effectively prisoners, but it’s for our own good, and… well, this is why I’m so conflicted.
To be fair, many of the aged care home residents I’ve met seem to be having a ball. Rather than being stuck in their own homes, where they’d be alone most of the time and everyday tasks are a challenge, they’re in a social whirl, a kind of octogenarian version of Paris in the 1920s.
It’s the late-in-life equivalent of those beautiful days in our late teens and early twenties where we spend every living moment with our peers and friends, and it can be ours again if we move to aged care homes.
Except that most of our friends are likely to be in different aged care homes. But still, in places like that, you’ll never be short of bridge partners, which I’m sure is a wonderful thing. I haven’t had a decent game of cards in years.
An hour or so after I walk out the door of an aged facility, I’m back to being self-absorbed again. But there’s always a transitional period in between my concern for whether my relatives are enjoying life and the resumption of my usual narcissism, a sort of halfway point where I wonder, in a brief flowering of empathy – how would I cope with their situation?
The answer, generally, is not very well. The average aged care home is located somewhere very quiet, in a nice suburban street, and while I'm all for soundproofing, I can't imagine wanting to live somewhere that far from things like cafés, shops, theatres and cinemas. I'd much rather live a short mobility scooter ride away from a multiplex, ideally one with an amusement arcade attached. I fully expect to go almost daily, especially if they have Street Fighter XXIII.
I remember once seeing Gough Whitlam, in his nineties, sitting in a wheelchair at the opera. He seemed utterly captivated, and I thought – wow, that’s something to aspire to.
By the time I'm that old, the bands I like will probably all be dead and buried, but I'm happy to be wheeled to any You Am I or Blur covers band I can find. So I'd like my aged care home to be in the inner city, please. I'd gladly park myself somewhere in a skyscraper, preferably above a mall, ideally one with yum cha.
My colleague Wendy Harmer wrote a piece a few years back that envisaged multiple generations living in the same tower blocks. Great idea, I reckon. My grandkids shouldn't get away with monthly visits. I want them an express lift away, in an apartment whose entry system can't be blocked against an annoying but doting old man.
Then there’s the food. Fewer steamed vegetables and roasts, and more exotic food, please. Thai, Italian, Mexican, and maybe a bit of my generation’s current favourite - gourmet fast food. Yes, we know pulled pork and duck fat fries will reduce our lifespan, and we are more than happy to make that deal, thanks.
And let’s not forget the decor. I understand that for most of my grandparents’ generation, floral still-life paintings and redwood furniture topped with white lace is the very definition of niceness. But for my aged home, I'd like stainless steel, please, and a bit of warehouse chic, maybe some groovy exposed brick. Pop art on the walls, ideally via massive hi-def screens that rotate through Lichtenstein, Warhol and maybe a bit of Jeff Koons to keep us on our toes. Classic movie posters would be another option – maybe Pulp Fiction or A Clockwork Orange? Not especially soothing, admittedly, but the posters would remind all of us of our share houses many decades ago.
I realise that all these requests may make me seem like a massive tosser. Fine – give me an aged care home I can share with the other tossers, where people can come and talk to us about pretentious European holocinema,. It'll be amazing.
I’m not exactly excited about getting old. And sometimes, I worry about being transported to the aged care homes of today, stuck in a bingo game that will never end or trapped in a giant doily.
But I don't think our tastes shift all that much as we age. So the aged care homes of the 2050s will surely be fairly different to the ones that cater so well to today’s aged customers.
In the end, I’m pretty confident that if you give me a big screen, speakers hooked up to a streaming service, a comfy reclining bed and fast internet access, I’ll be as happy as can be.
Oh, and some freshly-baked muffins. Some things never change.
Why hasn't my band made the Hottest 100 yet?
Every year, the arrival of triple j's Hottest 100 fills me with sorrow. Not because my near-total ignorance of the songs in the countdown is a sign of my ever-increasing age, although it is. Nor because for the past few years, nobody has invited me to a bangin' Hottest 100 party, although they haven’t.
No – I mourn because every year, the Hottest 100 features a grand total of no songs by my band. Zip, zero, zilch.
It’s been that way for ever since the countdown started. A whopping 2300 songs in all, and my band has none of them. How is that fair, when Powderfinger have something like six hundred?
Now, triple j and its listeners can’t be held entirely responsible for this slight. The fact is, despite spending much of my teenaged years and twenties playing bass in various uni revues, jazz combos, weird theatrical productions and other ill-advised projects, I never actually started a proper band or recorded any music.
In other words, my number of Hottest 100-eligible recordings to date is also zero. But this wasn’t for want of trying. And when I say trying, I really mean dreaming.
If all it took to become an international pop sensation was sitting in one’s bedroom, strumming an acoustic guitar with fingers too chubby to strum the notes cleanly while feeling sorry for oneself, then I’d be Taylor Swift. Or, more likely, Ryan Adams doing mopey covers of her.
Like Taylor, I wrote love songs, although unlike Taylor, mine weren’t so much about breakups as never-happeneds. Like Taylor, I wrote songs about the haterz, although in mine, I didn't manage to shake them off.
Unlike Taylor, I never spent time recording country music, though, so there’s that.
The closest I came to rock ‘n roll superstardom was playing one gig at Bar Broadway near Sydney’s Central Station with a singer-songwriter friend. Performing under the name ‘Mending’, we weren’t too bad, I think; and the name of the band seemed to promise better things to come.
But my friend retired from performing serious music immediately afterwards, and has never done so in the 15 years since. I’m not certain that it was my fault, but I’m not certain that it wasn’t, either. My musical career, at least, would remain resolutely unmended.
My one other rock gig was the time some friends and I went into the legendary Sydney University band competition, birthplace of the Cruel Sea and the Whitlams, under the name The Be-Dazzlers. Even though two of the other four bands didn’t bother to show up, we lost to a band known only as With Pins. In contrast, we were short of talent, rehearsal time, adequate songs, and pins.
That said, it was a miracle our gig happened at all after the car with all our gear in it broke down outside the uni gates. It was also a miracle we survived after the crowd began throwing things at us midway through our set.
We didn’t deserve any better. The only sustained effort I’d put into the occasion, despite being lead singer, rhythm guitarist slash bassist and main songwriter, was the goatee I’d grown especially. In my defence, it was still more than our lead guitarist, who only managed to get an amplifier the day of the gig.
Even though it was the mid nineties, we found out that there were limits to the whole ‘slacker rock’ thing. But as terrible as we were, I still reckon we were better than Bush.
It’s a shame I couldn’t get a proper band together in the nineties grunge era. That really was my time. Not only was I was very good at angsty self-loathing, which seemed to be the qualification for musical success back then, but my wardrobe of misshapen knits and unironed flannies had somehow become the latest fashion.
Plus the brilliant thing about grunge rock is that you don’t need much in the way of guitar skills. Just basic chords through a dodgy distortion pedal will do, meaning that for once, my inadequacy was entirely sufficient.
And of course even though I was half-decent at the bass, I wanted to play guitar – who listens to Nirvana and wants to be Krist Novoselic?
I've had to accept in the years since then that my rock dreams are dead. But listening to the past few years of Hottest 100 countdowns has given me fresh hope. Forget bands – we are now in the era of the knob-twiddling producer.
Flume, Chet Faker and Gotye have all done brilliantly in recent years, to name but a few. It seems that all you need to make the countdown nowadays is digital music software, a weird stage name and hundreds of hours to pour into mucking around with a computer.
Facial hair seems to help, too; and I'm certainly sorted for that as required.
I’m qualified. I've got GarageBand (which is free, after all), the awesome nickname ‘Dom Juan’ which a friend gave me – ironically, obviously – and the hundreds of hours I currently spend aimlessly surfing the web. If I redirected these attributes to music production, why couldn't I make next year’s Hottest 100?
Well, my lack of musical talent, for starters. But my dreams always unjustifiably assume I've got lots of that despite all the evidence to the contrary, so why not give it a go?
So – Hottest 100, here I come! Just as long as I can solve one more problem besides the whole ‘writing and performing a great song’ issue – or at least coming up with a song as good as The Rubens’.
On Australia Day 2017, I’ll turn 40. Surely that’s way too old to get played on the national youth station?
My best hope of countdown immortality now, surely, is if triple j’s middle age-oriented stablemate Double J launches its own list of the year’s hottest songs.
So, bring on the Lukewarm 100! Dom Juan is on his way.
16 predictions for 2016
2016 is here, and promises to be a year of intense competition. We've got national elections both at home and in the USA, the two-week carnivale of the Rio Olympics, and all those pending legal contests between hoverboard manufacturers and their unhappy purchasers.
It's a year of big prizes, like the $2 billion American Powerball draw, and big disappointments, like that of just about everyone who entered it.
While nobody can truly predict the future, especially those unscrupulous people who'll try to charge you for doing so, I've donned my Nostradomus hat and peered into my tisane leaves to try and forecast what's likely to happen in the year that, whatever happens from here, can definitely be said to have followed on from 2015.
1. Australia will underperform at the Rio Olympics
While we will perform extremely well for a nation of 24 million people, it will not be enough for a public that is addicted to constant sporting victories. There will be a huge public outcry and a public tarring and feathering for any Olympian cheeky enough to return from Rio without at least one gold medal.
2. The 2016 federal election will be closer than expected...
The polls are far from close now, so anything resembling a contest will fulfil this prediction. Possible reasons for a tightening of the race might include yet another bout of internal instability (likely), the government's apparent enthusiasm for increasing the GST (very likely) and the shock re-emergence of Godwin Grech (who can say?).
3. ... But Malcolm Turnbull will be re-elected
In Wentworth, at least. And just in case that looks like I'm sitting on the fence, I'm tipping an increased majority – Wentworth loves a winner.
No, really – the Coalition's likely to be re-elected unless it boldly pitches for major economic reform, with an increase in GST at its centrepiece that enables their opponents to run a scare campaign – so you can see why I thought the result might be closer than it looks now.
4. Tony Abbott will stay in Parliament
Believing that all he has to do to once again unseat Malcolm Turnbull is to sit and bide his time, a strategy which will only prove unsuccessful if Malcolm Turnbull remembers that this was the exact strategy he adopted against Abbott.
In the meantime, Abbott will spend the early part of the next parliamentary term writing a sequel to Battlelines. His defence of the Abbott government will be called Never Stopped Stopping Things.
5. 'Shake it Off' will top the Hottest 100 at last
But via Ryan Adams' doleful cover version. Some wit will then mash up the two versions and take out the 2017 title as well.
6. Jon Snow will return in Game of Thrones Series 6
Because of course he will, probably courtesy of Melisandre's freaky magic. The new series will be slightly less gory than the last one, and also slightly less interesting. Australians will still pirate it voraciously, but take far less joy in doing so.
7. The next book in George RR Martin's series won't appear by 31 December 2016
The Winds Of Winter will continue to prove that like winters in Westeros, Martin's series has no regularity, can last for far longer than anybody expected, and may well never end.
8. John Farnham will celebrate the 14th anniversary of his 'The Last Time' tour
And will mark the occasion with a special commemorative tour, the 'This Is The Last Time I Call A Tour The Last Time Tour Tour'.
9. Facebook will become completely autonomous
In mid-2016 the world's most intrusive social network will stop needing our assistance, or asking our permission, to post baby photos, 'like' statuses that make us look politically correct, check into locations like first class lounges that make us look like we're showing off, and posting long self-pitying screeds. It will also allow us to automatically reply to the latter with platitudes about how we really love the person and yay.
In 2017, we will completely outsource our entire emotional state to Facebook's algorithms, and I for one will be glad about all the time that will save.
10. An explosion of public outrage will lead to Mark Latham leaving The Verdict
The outbreak will involve intense attacks on any or all of the following: middle class feminists, mental health conditions, Labor politicians past and present, people who live anywhere besides Western Sydney and people who live in Western Sydney but do not, in Mark Latham's view, deserve to.
I feel, though, that the tea leaves are slightly unclear on this point – it's also possible that the whole of The Verdict will be axed except Mark Latham, who will be given his own show.
11. The Twenty20 fad will wane
While it's currently enjoying huge popularity, T20 will shortly prove too involved for our ever-diminishing attention spans. Instead, we'll play a new version that lasts for no more than 45 minutes. Bowlers will bowl from both ends simultaneously, 'tip 'n run' rules will apply, and fielders will be allowed to run out batters if they hit them with the ball while they're running between wickets. The injuries will add a degree of danger that will help to make things more exciting.
12. Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination...
And do so comfortably, despite having taken policy positions that have appalled even many within his own party, for the simple reason that he is more famous and less boring than the rest of the field put together.
13. ... And step aside for Hillary
Once Trump wins the nomination, he'll finally look into what it means to be President of the United States and discover that he would be not only required to work full-time at a workplace without his name on the front in massive gold letters, but would be expected to place his assets in a blind trust. Yeah, nah.
14. At long last, Leonardo DiCaprio will win an Oscar
But only one for Best Costume Design for the work he did growing that beard for The Revenant. It's so bushy that you can't see his smirk, making this the greatest DiCaprio performance ever - a dizzying triumph of facial hair sculpture!
Also at this year's Oscars, a woman who is a far better actor but gets paid a fifth of what he gets will win Best Actress. Probably Jennifer Lawrence so we can all guffaw at her wacky pratfalls yet again instead of treating her with the respect her talent ought to command.
15. The new iPhone 7 will be a mere 5mm deep
But will achieve this by needing to be charged every 15 minutes. Rumours of it losing a traditional headphone jack will come true, and it will also lose all buttons, the speaker, the camera and the microphone. Instead Siri will intelligently anticipate your needs and deliver any relevant content and services to you, which will work very well if all you want is an upgrade to the forthcoming iPhone 8, which will be 2mm thick and able to be folded for origami.
16. There will be a new cooking show
Undoubtedly the most inevitable of these predictions. I'm tipping a cooking/weight loss combo show which explains how to buy kale and instead of eating it, be sustained by sheer smugness alone.
I was a teenage thespian
Pick the odd one out: Nicole Kidman, Rose Byrne, Geoffrey Rush, Baz Lurhmann, Toni Collette and me.
Geoffrey Rush, obviously. The rest of us all spent our formative years studying acting at the Australian Theatre for Young People. And many other luminaries of the Australian stage have passed through ATYP's doors.
I began attending classes in early high school, accompanying a friend who was a little older than me and more serious about becoming an actor. But I had 'trod the boards' a little as a child, with an acclaimed walk-on role as a mesmerised animal in The Magic Flute and a bit part in The Skin Of Our Teeth for which I adopted a terrible American accent.
Both of these breakthrough performances occurred in the student hall of residence where my family spent a few years in London. During that period I also played Prince Charming on the primary school stage, largely because nobody else was willing to do it.
Encouraged by a series of pats on the head from grown-ups which I now realise were motivated by kindness rather than any genuine potential, I eagerly agreed to accompany my friend. Every weekend for several years, we caught the train in to ATYP HQ at 200 Cumberland Street, right next to the Cahill Expressway in Sydney's The Rocks.
I vividly remember the crappy space where ATYP was headquartered in the early 1990s - a disused office building with crumbling walls that had shed a thick layer of dust over every surface. It was condemned, and rightly so, but the owner eked out a few extra bucks by renting a few floors to an impoverished acting school before the wrecking ball came.
My parents were eager to encourage me, probably because I'd shifted from a co-ed primary school to a boys-only high school and they didn't want me to entirely lose what few social skills I had around girls. And indeed, throughout my early years of high school, acting class provided me with a series of fresh crushes around whom I could practice remaining awkward and silent. It was the one performance I really mastered.
The classes were great, though. Each week, we were challenged to try something different, and become somebody else. We worked on scripts and we improvised using Theatresports games like Space Jump, where we had to join a scene and improv something new, and Expert Double Figures, where two people had to provide the arms for another pair's characters, which was hilarious, if a little sweaty.
I remember one classmate turned every single exercise into an intense coming out drama - I hope the conversation with his parents went well when he was finally able to have it for real.
When I wasn't coughing up an asthmatic storm because of the concrete dust everywhere, I loved it. I signed up for their school holiday programmes, and took extra classes wherever I could. One term, I signed up for a class called Corporeal Mime - I still don't know what that is.
Another year, I joined a street theatre troupe which performed a show at such prestigious Sydney pedestrian malls as Hornsby, Chatswood and Darling Harbour.
Our show was called Episode #66, in a nod to a pulp tradition I didn't really understand then. The heroine was Cockroach Woman, and I played her dastardly nemesis, Griller Carlos. The climax was a knife throwing scene where I tied a hapless victim to a board and threw machetes at her - which, due to ingenious stage machinery, duly popped out from the board beside her until Cockroach Woman's heroic intervention, to the tune of her theme, 'La Cucaracha'.
Getting cast as the villain was a recurring feature of my time at ATYP. In my final year there, in Year 10, I signed up for a series of group-devised productions which were performed at the Sydney Theatre Company's Wharf Two space. We may not have been serious actors ourselves, but we were performing in the very same building as people who knew what they were doing! I couldn't have been more excited.
We split into groups and wrote a series of four plays over a few months. My recollection of the plots is sketchy, but as one of the few men involved in the productions, my role was unambiguous. In our play, Dark Clouds & Chameleons, I played a child-molesting father. In another, The Perfect Woman, I played a leering minor character in the tale of a woman who had gaffer tape over her mouth symbolising male oppression until the last scene of the play when she dramatically tore it off, free at last.
In short, we teenagers were discovering feminism, which meant that I meekly agreed to play a series of sexist villains.
Those plays led to the most exciting party of my teenage years, a party I still can't believe my parents let me attend, and in hindsight, they definitely shouldn't have. It took place in a groovy terrace on South Dowling St in the inner-city suburb of Surry Hills, which was much edgier back then, and didn't have a single pub with craft beer on tap.
I'm certain I was the only person there who not only abstained from the ubiquitous ciggies and widely available harder substances, but didn't even drink so much as one light beer, let alone indulge in some of the fumbling behind closed doors that I was blissfully oblivious to at the time, but later heard out about from the gossip network.
This formative experience led me to develop a theory that was entirely vindicated at uni - that almost everyone involved in amateur theatre is doing it for the after-parties.
Many of my classmates were talented. Some went on to international fame, while others are stalwarts of the Sydney theatre scene nowadays.
I, by contrast, was rubbish. Not that I didn't keep trying. After six months of acting classes, I auditioned for my school's Globe Players, and was given a walk-on role in Sheridan's The Rivals. My job was to walk into the on-stage inn, and up the staircase. On opening night, I tripped halfway up, after which my improvising skills abandoned me.
In Year 11, I played my finest role - General Haig in Theatre Workshop's remarkable Oh What A Lovely War. Again, I was the villain, and my role involved walking around in military uniform, shouting in a plummy English accent as I dispatched innocents to their death. The reviews were faintly positive. I was ecstatic.
Except for a brief uni experience in a production of Kafka's The Trial that was as horrifyingly impenetrable as Joseph K's experience of arbitrary arrest (I played a stern, shouty judge), I never acted again.
But studying at ATYP as a teenager has given me a lifelong love of great acting, and a keen appreciation of exactly how far it is from my own abilities. That said, I live in hope that someday, somebody will need a cartoonish, overacting villain, and I'll get the chance to tread those hallowed boards again.
Ten things that happened at my wedding in India
Last month, I got married.
Regular readers might wonder how on earth I went from every second column whinging about my dire personal life to blissful matrimony - the answer is 2.5 excellent years with a woman named Divya, whose family hails from Chennai, formerly known as Madras, which is the capital of Tamil Nadu state and the sixth-largest city in India.
One day late last year, we decided to get married. And given the choice between a three-day traditional ceremony in India and a relatively brief event with a celebrant here, the choice was obvious.
(Actually, we chose both, the latter being necessary to make it legal.)
This meant I had a lot to learn, seeing as both sides of my family were predominantly raised Anglican. Here are some of the things that happened when I got to - well, not walk down the aisle - walk around a sacred fire, in fact.
1) It goes for three days
I've heard that some varieties of Hindu weddings have events stretching across a whole month, but our wedding lasted for three days. It began with a mehndi, or henna ceremony - a party at the hotel where many of us were staying, at which the female guests got their hands painted with henna.
Then, the following evening, there was an engagement ceremony or nichayathartham, at which I promised to return for a marriage ceremony the following morning. Then, at 7am - yes, 7am - the following morning, we began the ceremony in earnest. The various ceremonies took until lunchtime and were then followed by a formal reception dinner back at the hotel.
2) It was vegetarian - and dry
It was much longer than a typical Australian wedding, of course, but there were two other major differences that our overseas guests had to adjust to. Firstly, all the food was vegetarian, as are my wife's family, and secondly, there was no alcohol.
And, despite being advised that it was going to require three days of not drinking, quite a few brave Australians volunteered to attend.
One of the major lessons for me was that there's incredible variety within the Hindu religion, which has no overarching hierarchical structure - there are no archbishops, let alone Popes. For instance, I was told that in the neighbouring state, Kerala, traditional Hindu weddings can often take a matter of just a few minutes.
3) Hands and feet were painted with henna
The mehndi is traditionally a North Indian ceremony, but it seems to have been adopted elsewhere, probably because it's really fun. Divya's family had already had a ceremony at their home the evening before, meaning not only that she looked spectacular with ornate decorations up to her elbows and knees (within which somewhere the letters of my name were concealed!), but that she was free to welcome our guests at the first event.
Two canopies were set up inside a function room and there were two women at each station, meaning that their 'customers' could get their hands painted simultaneously. Everyone's designs were different, and yet somehow the artists managed to make the patterns match on each hand.
As this was going on, a DJ played Bollywood tunes (and a bit of Daft Punk as the party progressed), and everybody ended up on the dancefloor. At 4pm. Sober.
It was a great lesson for all of us, especially a certain self-conscious groom who was meant to lead the group in Bollywood dancing. And yes, me doing that made for some wonderfully awkward photos.
4) We wore incredibly colourful outfits
Saris must be among the most beautiful garments ever conceived, and of course my bride looked gorgeous in each of her eight or so wardrobe changes throughout the event. I honestly don't think it's possible to look anything but elegant in a sari, and they looked terrific on our guests from a wide variety of backgrounds.
As for me, not only did I get to wear some excellent outfits, including some rather fetching Nehru jackets atop kurthas (traditional shirts), but our guests embraced the Indian wardrobe with unexpected gusto. The local retailers of Indian formalwear must have thought that all their Diwalis had come at once.
During the wedding ceremony itself, I managed to negotiate wearing a simple white shirt rather than exposing my pasty skin to direct sun for four hours, which I really feel was in everyone's best interests, but my lower half was wrapped in an extraordinary length of cloth called a veshti which had been dyed an auspicious shade of yellow in turmeric overnight by both our mothers (thanks mums). It took two brave men to get me into it, and after trying it, I fully expect Aussie blokes to embrace the veshti someday with the same vigour that visitors to Bali have embraced the sarong.
5) I travelled by bullock cart
At a typical Western wedding, the bride gets to make a grand entrance - but at our wedding, the arrival was all about me! The tradition is that the groom's family travels to the bride's home, so it makes sense for him to get the big entry at the engagement ceremony.
The one question everyone asked me before I left for India was whether I'd arrive on a horse or an elephant. Apparently the latter is still an option, although an increasingly unpopular one given welfare concerns, but the idea of a traditional bullock cart seemed wonderful, especially since my family could accompany me on it.
The procession was led not by horses, but by traditional poikkal kuthirai dancers dressed as horses, and accompanied by loud piping on an instrument called the nadaswaram which made everything highly festive.
It was a brilliant way to arrive at the wedding hall, so much so that I'm still waiting for the Uber app to offer a bullock cart option.
6) We had a very short engagement
We've all heard of lengthy engagements - Audrey Tautou made a movie about one once - but ours only lasted for about nine hours. On the evening of the second day, we gathered at the wedding hall (mandapam) for the wedding to be formally announced, which involved reading out the names of our ancestors for three generations back. Rings were exchanged, along with jewellery, more clothes, food items and even toiletries just to prove that we were going to be well looked after, and I formally promised to return for the wedding.
Traditionally, the bride and groom's families stay at the wedding hall until the end of the wedding - mine went back to the hotel overnight, while Divya's stayed at the beautiful traditional Kerala-style seaside home that was our venue.
And that meant we had to be up at 5am and onto a bus at 6 to get there by 7 for the start of proceedings. Everyone made it, impressively - which was great, because after all, I had promised I'd be there.
7) I called the whole thing off... and then called it back on again immediately
The wedding itself involved a great many ceremonies, largely conducted in Sanskrit, with a few directions in Tamil. As I understand neither language, some of Divya's relatives helpfully translated for me. We had to build a holy fire and distribute various offerings into certain sacred receptacles, and the sound of the Sanskrit chants was mesmerising.
The one thing I got to do in English, though, was the kasi yatra, a ceremony where I announced I was going off on a pilgrimage to pursue further religious studies and renounce worldly pursuits. Armed with a copy of said scriptures, a parasol to shield my hairless pate from the hot sun, and the most uncomfortable sandals I've ever worn (because I was renouncing the comforts of this world), I set off for the gate, announcing that I'd changed my mind, and that the scriptures were my priority henceforth.
At the gate, though, my prospective father-in-law stopped me, and suggested that marriage was a superior state, and that I'd have his daughter as a partner through the travails of life. Of course I agreed, and back we went.
8) There was a swing!
A common feature in South Indian homes, the swing is called an oonjal, and it's a wooden plank big enough for two. We gently rocked backwards and forwards to symbolise the ups and downs of life. I was very much feeling the ups at that point, especially as I'd just taken off those sandals.
9) We sealed the deal with a thread and seven steps together
The actual moment of marriage - the equivalent of "I now declare you man and wife" occurred at the "auspicious time", when I performed the mangalya dharanam, and tied a yellow thread around my wife's neck. I only tied the first knot though - the second and third are tied by the groom's sister to symbolise that she is joining the family. As I don't have a sister, my sister-in-law officiated.
I promised three times to take care of my wife, and after this we took seven steps together, each one representing a promise not unlike the western marriage vows. I then placed her toe on a grindstone, and we promised to be as solid and firm as that slab of rock so we can always depend on one another.
10) We joined our families
One of the biggest differences from the wedding traditions I've previously been familiar with is that there's much more of a role for the whole family. The bride and groom's parents are involved at various points throughout proceedings and sit on a dias to symbolise their blessing for their children. (Unfortunately my father was unwell and could not attend, so my aunt and uncle joined my mother on the dias, while my dad watched from Sydney via FaceTime - a truly modern situation!)
My brother and nephew accompanied me on my "pilgrimage", and we received the blessings of five married women from each family. Divya's cousin was also very much involved in the wedding ceremony itself, in particular during a part where we threw puffed rice into the sacred fire to represent prosperity in our new lives together. I honestly felt that I was joining a family.
So, after all that, I feel well and truly married… and in a few weeks we'll say a few more vows, this time in English, to make it legal. (If we lived in India, we could register the marriage there, but having something here seemed a nice option.)
It was undoubtedly the most extraordinary wedding I've ever attended. I'm very grateful to Divya's family for organising such a spectacular occasion, and to everyone who travelled a long way to be part of it.
As a result of all this, I can promise no more mopey columns about being single. From now on, I'm going to be one of those infuriating smug marrieds.
I want a nightclub for old people
Once upon a time, I used to go to nightclubs. By which I mean establishments with a 'disc jockey', as I believe they're known, who mixes different musical items together in a seamless progression of beats, soaring vocals and, because a lot of this happened in the 1990s, incredibly crappy synths.
Once upon a time, I could wear a t-shirt, cargo pants with an abundance of convenient pockets, and suede sneakers, and be considered adequately dressed to enter a licensed premises. And once upon a time, despite the licensed nature of said premises, it was clear that the vast majority of other patrons were instead choosing to obtain their intoxicants from helpful private contractors.
Nowadays, largely empty weekends spread out before me, and I wonder whether I might be able to go out somewhere to listen to a bit of music and have what used to be called a 'boogie'. Sure, in my case, that means my body jerking spasmodically at intervals which bear only the faintest resemblance to the beat. Still, I'm having fun, even if my flailing limbs pose an injury risk to others.
The problem is, I've no idea where to go. I made a rare visit to a proper young-people nightclub a few years ago, but I didn't really know or relate to any of the music, with the dubstep beats or whatever they're called.
Yes, I know that sentence makes me sound middle-aged – which was another problem. Being 20 years older than most patrons made me feel both ancient and creepy, and that was far from relaxing. Plus, the whole thing started well after my bedtime.
What we need is a nightclub suitable for people a few years either side of 40, where we can all gyrate badly together, pretend that 'Sing It Back' by Moloko is still the height of dancefloor cool, and expressly forbid the music of Flo Rida.
This nightclub for the aged should be absolutely pumping by 9pm, and wind up by about 12.30 or 1 so people can get home and relieve their babysitters. It should have fancy cocktails made with huge sticks because we still think that's the coolest thing imaginable, as well as a range of overpriced bottles of water for nostalgia purposes.
What's more, there should be absolutely no drugs besides our prescription pain medication. Because honestly, we're too old, and it's undignified. We'll be drooling of our own accord before long, I promise you.
The lighting should be extremely dim and flattering to increasingly wizened faces, and there should be a range of soundproof seating areas where people can have a decent conversation without any interruptions from that doof-doof-doof stuff we were dancing to at the beginning of the night, when we had energy. Plus we'll need a fully-equipped First Aid station with a defibrillator, as well as a few physios for when we sprain a muscle on the dancefloor.
Back in the day, one would never dream of arriving at a nightclub before midnight. Nobody was there, and it suggested you didn't have a long list of earlier engagements. Whereas nowadays, let's not kid ourselves – it's a minor miracle if people of my age are out past one. While many have protested against the impact of Sydney's lockout laws which kick in at 1.30, the embarrassing truth is that I've never been in a situation where I wanted to get into a venue after the lockout began.
In fact, rather than reliving our brief 1990s heyday, people of my generation might be better served by returning to the original days of the nightclub, back in the 1920s. The kind of establishment where there are little round tables with candles on them, and people dress up properly.
I'm not afraid to say that donning a sharpish suit and heading downtown for a night of hot jazz and proper, Arthur Murray-style dance steps sounds magnificent. I'd be more than happy to foxtrot or cha cha if the band plays slowly enough and I can copy somebody's steps. Plus, there would be martinis, and that's never a bad thing.
It's entirely possible that I'm ignorant of lots of exciting, underground jazz clubs out there, but I can't think of a single place anywhere in Australia where you can go and dance to live music like this. I don't mean wobbling to the tired strains of a covers band murdering Madonna's 'Holiday'; I mean old-fashioned dancing to a jazz band, whether a traditional combo or, better still, a full-on Duke Ellington-style big band. You can go and hear recitals of jazz, sure, in a fancy concert hall, but a lot of that music was originally meant to be danced to, late at night.
Maybe in Paris or New York City there are still places like that. Definitely Havana still has nightclubs where you can go and listen to salsa bands playing into the night – I went there once upon a time, and it was a lot of fun, even though I was easily the worst dancer in the place and everyone else was either a tourist or sufficiently high up in the government to have fistfuls of dollars to blow on overpriced mojitos. No doubt in Vegas there are still a few establishments offering late night jazz as a way of luring people into the casinos. But if there ever were venues like this in Australia, I fear they're long gone.
There's another problem, of course – who to go out with. Most of my friends have long since made it clear that having kids means no, nearly all of the time, often with an incredulous look as they realise that I live in a vastly different, childless universe of social possibilities. I think to myself oh, surely your partner can take the brunt of sleepless kids for an hour or two occasionally, but then realise that the real issue is that kids have left them in a state of perma-exhaustion, and that going out late means even fewer hours of sleep before they're dragged from their beds to entertain toddlers. Fair enough.
So I'm too old to frequent the DJ-powered nightclubs of today, and old-style jazz-filled nightclubs don't exist outside Mad Men. But least we still have pubs. The live music may be some miserable bloke whose dreams of a spectacular performing career have diminished to a life spent blasting out yet another version of 'Khe Sanh' to people who are too busy talking to listen, and the only dancing on offer may be involuntary wobbling as you stagger from your table to the bathroom, but at least pubs are full of people going out and having a good time, even as we grow older. In our pubs, the glass can be half full, and that's not a bad thing. And when I get home, I have the option of listening to a little bit of jazz before I go to sleep at a somewhat sensible hour.
But if anyone starts a nightclub for old people, I'll be there as soon as you can say 'age-appropriate footwear'. At least until I have kids of my own.
Nine brilliant new ideas for cooking shows (if I say so myself)
No doubt about it, we love cooking shows. MasterChef is still a juggernaut, netting more than two million viewers for its finale earlier this week, and then there's My Kitchen/Restaurant/Cafe/Sandwich Maker Rules. They've been followed immediately by a whole new bunch of food shows, because as any TV programmer will tell you, the best way to make programmes is to simply ape what's been done before.
That said, Seven and Nine's new entries - Restaurant Revolution and The Hotplate - have been criticised by some as derivative of MasterChef and MKR, which means we need a few cooking-based reality shows with some slightly more original ideas. I humbly present the following for consideration.
My Reheat Rules
This environmentally-conscious show will use the mountain of leftovers from all the other cooking shows on television. The contestants will be challenged to perform one of the trickiest tasks in modern cooking - reheating frozen leftovers. They get one chance to pick the heat and time settings for the microwave so that the food's cooked through and not too cold or hot. Points will be deducted for any spillage left on the rotating glass plate. Successfully defrosting a snow egg without melting it will win you immunity from that round's evictions.
InstaChef
In this very 2015 cooking show, there will be no judging process whatsoever. Instead, the show's contestants will post photos of all meals on Instagram, using the filter of their choice. Whoever gets the most regrams and likes wins. The food will never be tasted by anybody.
Send It Back!
In this programme, the judges sit at a table, order entirely random and arbitrary dishes and sending them back on the flimsiest of pretexts. The winner is the chef who can accede to their absurd demands without spitting on the plate.
MasochistChef
Young, up-and-coming chefs have to prepare complex, creative food with Gordon Ramsay constantly shouting obscenities right in their face. In the more advanced rounds, he will use a megaphone. Finalists will have their families called in so that Ramsay can belittle them in front of the people they treasure most. If they can thrive on the abuse, they'll be set for a lifetime in the restaurant industry.
Restaurant Refinance
Contestants are challenged to save the restaurants that previous cooking show winners opened when their victories made them overconfident. Prudent financial and ego management will be needed to help these ex-celebrities (who no longer make it to social pages) stave off financial ruin. Competitors are prohibited from using social media to resurrect the public's dwindling interest.
Cha Cha Challenge
Budding chefs must devise delicious new items that can be served on yum cha trolleys and don't taste terrible after circulating around a huge room for an hour. As is standard at yum cha, all items must include pork and/or prawns in some way, even when the person pushing the trolley says they don't. For the final challenge, contestants have to attempt to make chicken's feet palatable to diners without Chinese heritage.
The Meal High Club
Sure, these trainee chefs can whip up a delicious three-course meal in any cuisine you like, but can they make it not taste terrible when served in economy class? Definitely not, if every airline I've ever flown on is any guide. Still, perhaps they'll be able to come up with something more innovative than bland chicken with anonymous sauce on a bed of bedraggled rice.
Cecil's Revenge
A food show which involves no actual cooking, this programme gives African lions the chance to showcase their expertise in obtaining, preparing and devouring al fresco meals. In the grand finale, the most ferocious lions will be given a chance to demonstrate their skills on certain American dentists, who won't have their bow and arrow to protect them this time.
TofuChef
Is there anything you can't do with tofu, the wonder product that can substitute for any meat you like? Well, yes, actually. But in this show, chefs will be challenged to make tofurkey, tork, tofeef, tossages, and other lame soybean puns in a doomed attempt to seamlessly mimic a carnivorous diet. Any contestant expressing a sentiment like "But why would a vego want to eat fake meat anyway?" will be immediately evicted.
What I learned hanging out with a 5-year-old boy
This week, I spent a day escorting a five-year-old boy around Sydney. Courtesy of school holidays and a last-minute change in plans, I was called up from the childcare reserve bench. My challenge: to ensure not only that my nephew was kept safe and sound (basic childcare), but that he had a reasonably good time (advanced childcare).
Safe and sound wasn’t too hard – it meant that we had to hold hands crossing the road and on the escalators, and he promised not to run off in exchange for my promise to follow wherever he wanted to go in return. A solid negotiation, I thought.
But the challenge of killing most of a day in the city was a daunting one, especially since rain was forecast.
Imagine my delight, then, upon realising that there was a vast Lego exhibition on in the Sydney Town Hall, especially for the holidays. It turned out that all my nephew’s friends were going, apparently, and so of course we had to, as well. After all, I wanted to be one of those fun uncles.
I loved Lego growing up. We had an avalanche of the stuff, and I spent thousands upon thousands of hours constructing my latest acquisition, characteristically discarding the instructions early on in the piece to freestyle additions that no Lego structural engineer would have signed off on. Stepping on one of those two-button-bricks was probably my most frequent childhood injury.
Back then, Denmark’s greatest cultural export to the world only came in regular, now known as City, and Space Lego. Nowadays, just about every successful movie franchise except Magic Mike has its own Lego spin-off. So I was keen to get up to speed on what on earth ‘Lego Chyna’ was, besides misspelled.
So it was hard to say who was more excited upon arriving at the Town Hall for the Lego exhibition, the five-year-old or the 38-year-old.
Unfortunately, both the 10.30 and 12.30 slots were sold out, forcing us to return at 2.30 – in four hours’ time.
For me, an unexpected few hours in the city is easily solved via a café, multiple hot drinks, and reading. I’m very comfortable being one of those terrible people who hog a table for hours and then, right when the wait staff are on the verge of making a pointed comment, ordering a cup of peppermint tea so I’m technically still paying rent on my space.
That plan, I quickly realised, would not wash with a five-year-old whose known tolerance to sitting still generally cuts out two-thirds through the first flat white.
What, I wondered, would be fun for my nephew – but also, since I’m not the world’s most selfless person and there was a lot of time to kill, fun for me as well?
Fortunately, he had a strong opening gambit. Before going and looking at several millions bricks’ worth of Lego in the exhibition, he suggested, why couldn’t we go and look at some Lego?
It was hard to fault his logic, and there was a specialist store nearby, so off we headed to whet our appetites. As he patiently explained the subtle distinctions between Ninjago, Ultra Agents and Super Heroes, I took careful note of all the items my nephew wanted for his next birthday, as he requested, even though it’s not for nine months.
After individually considering every single one of the Lego items on sale (and most of the Duplo too, as he has a younger sister), we went off to the ABC Shop. Amidst the endless Peppa Pig merch, they had a number of tablets set up to allow kids to view iView programmes, which offered fifteen minutes of blissful respite for me, albeit perched on a tiny stool.
Next he wanted to visit a bookshop, which was a surprise, but a welcome one. There are still some excellent, enormous ones in the city which are surviving in the face of Amazon. He sat and patiently read at least a dozen books – well, flicked through the pictures, at least, which is about all you can ask of a five-year-old. What’s more, only two-thirds of them were about Lego, Star Wars or Lego Star Wars.
Next, we went to a department store which was having a toy sale, ie more Lego, and, just to mix things up, we dropped in on a hotel which had installed an enormous Lego rocket in its foyer.
By now it was lunchtime, and my commitment to being a fun uncle extended to a cheeseburger and fries, although I insisted on water instead of lemonade as a token concession to nutritional balance. The burger came with a Minion toy, which provided the standard three minutes of fun before being relegated to my pocket.
There was still an hour until our 2.30 Lego exhibition, and I was totally out of ideas. But then I somehow remembered that my nephew was quite the fan of Timezone. Plastic crocodiles were whacked with a hammer, balls were lobbed into plastic cups and a descending claw game proved its usual unsatisfying self. Before we knew it, it was 2.30 – time to go and look at even more Lego.
Despite spending most of the day beforehand looking at and talking about Scandinavian plastic bricks, I thought the exhibition was excellent. Australia’s pre-eminent Lego artiste Ryan “The Brickman” McNaught had assembled a greatest hits collection of planes, trains and automobiles, along with the Sydney Opera House, the Colosseum and many other delights. They were great to inspect, when we could see them through the crowds of primary-aged kids.
What’s more, the challenge of counting the little green spacemen hidden in each exhibit was equally difficult for both of us. I had the advantage of height, but he was able to peer under the models to spy their little green heads. I like to think we made a formidable space search-and-rescue team.
When I was heading home, I realised that I’d really enjoyed doing stuff my five-year-old nephew loved. Sure, my tolerance for Lego is significantly lower, but I really enjoyed the exhibition. What’s more, there’s absolutely no way I could have visited without a child in tow. And I’m not above visiting arcades the way I used to as a teenager, but let me tell you, you definitely feels less pathetic when you’re also supervising a child.
After his safe return, I was roundly praised for giving up a day to entertain my nephew. Little did they realise that I enjoyed the whole thing nearly as much as he did.
So, next holidays, I’m volunteering to babysit. Especially if there’s a Lego exhibition on.
An Undo button for all seasons
This week, Google introduced 'Undo Send' as a standard feature in Gmail. It’s more like an Undo Godsend for those times you accidentally email the wrong person, or notice a shocking typo just as you’ve sent the message, or suddenly realise your message was way too harsh and you should sleep on it and redraft it in the morning – or is that just me?
In such situations, 'Undo Send' gives you a few precious seconds to reconsider. Having used it in the development phase, it’s surprising how often it comes in handy – in fact, I sincerely hope that other companies will follow Google’s lead. 'Undo' should be part of every email application, especially at my work where every month or two someone accidentally sends a message to several thousands of users, before presumably being taken into an IT dungeon somewhere and flogged with a mouse cord.
But it’s not just in the realm of email where the ability to reverse things would be invaluable. Here are a few other social situations where Google, with their omnipotence, should be finding a way to allow us to take it back.
Drunk texts
It’s well and good to be able to rethink an email, but the messages which get us into the most trouble are the ones we transmit from our mobile phones late at night. And a few seconds to reconsider is nowhere near enough – we need to be able to expunge them from the record the following day, when we wake up to realise we’ve sent six increasingly desperate messages to that ex we swore we’d never contact again. Better still would be the ability to delete the photos your colleague posted on Facebook of you pouring goon into your mouth at 3am while zooming around the company car park in a shopping trolley.
Speeding tickets
Wouldn't it be great if instead of getting stung for a few hundred bucks and three points, we could just be like 'Whoops, my bad, lol' and hit 'Undo Dangerous Driving'? I guess this would only be viable if you could also undo the frequently terrible consequences of speeding, too – but Google is working on driverless cars, so who knows what they might have up their sleeve?
Tattoos
Not only are almost all tattoos based on life circumstances a likely future source of pain – Johnny Depp’s Winona Forever tattoo is instructive, even though he later wittily changed it to Wino Forever – but they look increasingly terrible as they fade. With a Tattoo Undo function, any tattoo can be temporary.
Overeating
Let’s face it – in the affluent West, we’ve no self-control when it comes to food. Thanks to the greatest medical revolution in history, some of the most significant causes of death now relate to our habit of gorging ourselves. Since we seem unable to eat until full and then stop, an ‘Undo Stuffing Face’ function would be helpful after that one dumpling too many, and then the six more we eat after that. It’s certainly far more elegant than the Romans’ solution.
Asking somebody out
Not when it works, obviously, but there are few things more awkward than when you put it out there, and your target’s expression, mixing discomfort and pity, immediately makes it clear that you’ve made a terrible miscalculation. This is probably why most Australian courting rituals now involve sufficient alcohol to allow total deniability the next day.
Leadership challenges
It’s 23 June 2010. You, Julia Gillard, have the numbers to depose Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister. You go ahead, but realise that the backlash will poison your time as leader, that instead of salvaging the next election you’ll struggle with a near-unworkable hung parliament, and that Rudd will hang around for years before gaining ultimate revenge. ‘Undo Spill’ would be a handy option at that point, wouldn’t it?
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Sequels are hard, they really are. Prequels are even harder, apparently – just ask Peter Jackson. But Episode I had Jake Lloyd’s bowl cut, that pointless podracing subplot, that strangely garbled Natalie Portman accent, those bizarrely racist aliens and the icing on the crapola cake that was Jar-Jar Binks. Many hardcore fans suggest you don’t even bother watching it anymore. Undo, undo, undo.
That time I went blonde for summer
Not only was it a mistake, but it was a mistake compounded by my decision to apply Sun-In rather than getting a proper dye job. I would have gladly pressed ‘Undo Hairstyle’ not only on my decision to do it, but my theory that it’d be oh-so wryly indifferent to my physical appearance. Instead I looked like a double idiot, having done a terrible job of executing a terrible idea.
Dinosaur parks
There’s apparently some flaw deep within the psyche of certain humans that inexorably tempts them to stock a remote island with genetically-engineered dinosaurs, no matter how many times this has previously ended in disaster. Survival generally requires a terrifying battle against the odds… wouldn’t it be easier just to click 'Undo Playing God'?
Madge and Harold from Neighbours’ Christmas record, ‘Old-Fashioned Christmas’
Just undo, seriously.
The Simpsons did it, and now they're done
As the longest-running sitcom in the history of television lurches towards another season, one thing is increasingly clear: friends don't let friends make 27 seasons of The Simpsons. In recent years, the show's become like that favourite '90s band that insists on releasing inferior new albums years after its heyday. In short, The Simpsons are the Smashing Pumpkins.
In 2015, more episodes of The Simpsons is probably the second-last thing our civilisation needs, just behind that book of 352 Kim Kardashian selfies. There are already 574 episodes in the can, so many that you could watch non-stop for eight days and still not get through them all. Surely our appetite for even this most brilliant of series has been satiated?
Once I used to read those news stories about the latest ingenious developments brewed up in the writers' room with great delight. But the latest batch of announcements was dismal. "Homer and Marge are to separate!" said one batch of articles, with Lena Dunham appearing as the Other Woman. Goodness me, marital strife between Marge and Homer – is that for the 324th or 325th time?
And come on, it's a sitcom. Hence the subsequent, obvious clarification that it was only going to be for an episode or two.
What I'd like to hear producer Al Jean clarifying is why the series is continuing at all when his only other 'teaser' announcements about Series 27 were that Spider Pig is coming back (as though there's any more juice to be squeezed from that one brief joke) and that Bart will die.
Yes, the death gimmick again, which only serves to remind us how great it was the first time. The 'Who Shot Mr Burns?' concept had the whole planet talking back in 1995. And Bart will be killed by Sideshow Bob, but only in a Halloween episode. Who cares, honestly?
22 more episodes this year, and another two seasons on order thereafter, are enough to depress even Ned Flanders. And all the more so since the man who voices Flanders and other inhabitants of Springfield has left the show. Harry Shearer is irreplaceable, as is inadvertently proven by this video of voice artist Brock Baker auditioning to take over his characters. If even the actors are over it, why continue?
The Simpsons arrived when I was in Year Seven, just two years older than Bart. He was a skateboard-riding rebel, just like I would have liked to be, and definitely was not. But it's been with us so long that skateboarding went out of fashion when I hit my mid-teens, then came back in with double-ended boards, then went out again, and now I'm too old to know whether it's in or out anymore. Yet throughout, Bart kept riding that same board in the opening titles, as though nothing had changed.
Bart can remain a ten-year-old boy forever, because animated series can look the same forever. But it still changes, because the creatives involved change, and because society changes. When it began, The Simpsons joined Married With Children on Fox as a brilliant satire of the American sitcom. It was razor-sharp in so many respects – the glibness of Reverend Lovejoy, the corruption of Mayor Quimby, the evil of Mr Burns and his nuclear power plant, the lack of respect for the aged and Grampa in particular, the chain-smoking of Patty and Selma, the regular crushing of Lisa's idealism, and the increasing sense that Marge found being a housewife limiting and frustrating. The show somehow managed to take aim at middle America yet still deliver the genuine affection, despite all their flaws, that gives all good sitcoms heart.
There are so many unforgettable, brilliant episodes of the show – browse these 25 just for starters – that it's heartbreaking to see it get so stale. Because nowadays, without refreshing the regular characters, the social satire has become toothless. The series should probably have finished once Family Guy (which falls somewhere on the spectrum between a homage and a clone) got funnier, and it definitely should have finished before they did that crossover episode together.
The show has done absolutely everything, even putting out a genuinely good big screen adaptation in 2007. There is nothing more to achieve, and nothing more to say, and now it's time to let the Simpson family go, because despite living on Evergreen Terrace, they are not.
To make sure I wasn't being unfair, I watched a random episode from series 26, 'Waiting for Duffman'. There were a few half-decent gags, including a funny attack on cyclists, and it does an okay job of parodying event television – but overall, it just reminded me of another, better episode where Homer becomes a mascot, 'Dancin' Homer'. There's a passable Game Of Thrones title parody, but it wasn't as good as the one they already didthree years ago. And worst of all, most of the jokes were lame, and a few absolutely clanged.
It all smacked of repetition. They've already done multiple episodes about Duff Beer, of course – like the Duff Gardens one – and in fact there's at least another one where Homer has to remain sober like he does in 'Waiting for Duffman'. "I'm not sure how many times we can watch Dad get chased by an angry mob without it causing psychological damage," Lisa says at one point, neatly summing up the problem.
South Park once made an episode called 'Simpsons Already Did It' fuelled by their frustration at just how many ideas The Simpsons' brilliant writers had come up with. That South Park episode aired way back in 2002. 13 years later, The Simpsons is the one that's stuck doing things that The Simpsons already did.
Even Rupert Murdoch, who was so brilliantly parodied back in the day, is stepping down, and so should his network's most brilliant creation. There's no need for sorrow – the cast and crew are legends and millionaires, and with 574 episodes in the can, their work will be on our screens forever. (Although let's face it, programmers are probably going to stick to the first 300 episodes or so.) Television's greatest family will never leave us, but it's time the family behind the scenes of the best show in the history of television shuffled off to the Retirement Castle before they're remembered as the show that stuck around too long.
Okay, before they're primarily remembered as the show that stuck around too long. After all, why watch a new rehash of an old Simpsons episode when you can just watch the old Simpsons episode?
The Simpsons did it, and now they're done
As the longest-running sitcom in the history of television lurches towards another season, one thing is increasingly clear: friends don’t let friends make 27 seasons of The Simpsons. In recent years, the show’s become like that favourite 90s band that insists on releasing inferior new albums years after its heyday. In short, The Simpsons are the Smashing Pumpkins.
In 2015, still more episodes of The Simpsons is probably the second-last thing our civilisation needs, just behind that book of 352 Kim Kardashian selfies. There are already 574 episodes in the can, so many that you could watch non-stop for eight days and still not get through them all. Surely our appetite for even this most brilliant of series has been satiated?
Once I used to read those news stories about the latest ingenious developments brewed up in the writers’ room with great delight. But the latest batch of announcements was dismal. “Homer and Marge are to separate!” said one batch of articles, with Lena Dunham appearing as the Other Woman. Goodness me – marital strife between Marge and Homer – is that for the 324th or 325th time?
And come on – it’s a sitcom. Hence the subsequent obvious, clarification that it was only going to be for an episode or two.
What I’d like to hear producer Al Jean clarifying is why the series is continuing at all when his only other ‘teaser’ announcements about Series 27 were that Spider Pig is coming back, as though there’s any more juice to be squeezed from that one brief joke, and that Bart will die.
Yes, the death gimmick again, which only serves to remind us how great it was the first time. The ‘Who Shot Mr Burns?’ concept had the whole planet talking back in 1995. And Bart will be killed by Sideshow Bob, but only in a Halloween episode. Who cares, honestly?
22 more episodes this year, and another two seasons on order thereafter, are enough to depress even Ned Flanders. And all the more so since the man who voices Flanders and other inhabitants of Springfield has left the show. Harry Shearer is irreplaceable, as is inadvertently proven by this video of voice artist Brock Baker auditioning to take over his characters. If even the actors are over it, why continue?
The Simpsons arrived when I was in Year Seven, just two years older than Bart. He was a skateboard-riding rebel, just like I would have liked to be, and definitely was not. But it’s been with us so long that skateboarding went out of fashion when I hit my mid-teens, then came back in with double-ended boards, then went out again, and now I’m too old to know whether it’s in or out anymore. Yet throughout, Bart kept riding that same board in the opening titles, as though nothing had changed.
Bart can remain a ten-year-old boy forever, because animated series can look the same forever. But it still changes, because the creatives involved change, and because society changes. When it began, The Simpsons joined Married With Children on Fox as a brilliant satire of the American sitcom. It was razor-sharp in so many respects – the glibness of Reverend Lovejoy, the corruption of Mayor Quimby, the evil of Mr Burns and his nuclear power plant, the lack of respect for the aged and Grandpa in particular, the chain-smoking of Patty and Selma, the regular crushing of Lisa’s idealism, and the increasing sense that Marge found being a housewife limiting and frustrating. The show somehow managed to take aim at middle America and yet still deliver the genuine affection despite all their flaws that gives all good sitcoms heart.
There are so many unforgettable, brilliant episodes of the show – browse these 25 just for starters – that it’s heartbreaking to see it get so stale. Because nowadays, without refreshing the regular characters, the social satire has become toothless. The series should probably have finished once Family Guy (which falls somewhere on the spectrum between a homage and a clone) got funnier, and it definitely should have finished before they did that crossover episode together.
The show has done absolutely everything, even putting out a genuinely good big screen adaptation in 2007. There is nothing more to achieve, and nothing more to say, and now it’s time to let the Simpson family go, because despite living on Evergreen Terrace, they are not.
To make sure I wasn’t being unfair, I watched a random episode from series 26, ‘Waiting for Duffman’. There were a few half-decent gags, including a funny attack on cyclists, and it does an okay job of parodying event television – but overall, it just reminded me of another, better episode where Homer becomes a mascot, ‘Dancin’ Homer’. There’s a passable Game of Thrones title parody, but it wasn’t as good as the one they already did three years ago. And worst of all, most of the jokes were lame, and a few absolutely clanged.
It all smacked of repetition. They’ve already done multiple episodes about Duff Beer, of course – like the Duff Gardens one – and in fact there’s at least another one where Homer has to remain sober like he does in ‘Waiting for Duffman’. “I’m not sure how many times we can watch dad get chased by an angry mob without is causing psychological damage,” Lisa says at one point, neatly summing up the problem.
South Park once made an episode called ‘Simpsons Already Did It’ fuelled by their frustration at just how many ideas The Simpsons’ brilliant writers had come up with. That South Park episode aired way back in 2002. 13 years later, The Simpsons is the one that’s stuck doing things that The Simpsons already did.
Even Rupert Murdoch, who was so brilliantly parodied back in the day, is stepping down, and so should his network’s most outstanding creation. There’s no need for sorrow – the cast and crew are legends and millionaires, and with 574 episodes in the can, their work will be on our screens forever. (Although let’s face it, programmers are probably going to stick to the first 300 episodes or so.) Television’s greatest family will never leave us, but it’s time the family behind the scenes of the best show in the history of television shuffled off to the Retirement Castle before they’re remembered as the show that stuck around too long.
Okay, before they’re primarily remembered as the show that stuck around too long. After all, why watch a new rehash of an old Simpsons episode when you can just watch the old Simpsons episode?
Ten Reality TV Ideas Even Better Than Married At First Sight
Many people wonder why television broadcasters keep producing terrible reality TV shows. The answer is simple – because they rate. And what’s more, the more terrible they are, the more they rate. This maxim has recently been proven by Married At First Sight, a show on Channel Nine with a premise so disturbing that it’s compelling. So much so that it was renewed after the first episode scored 1.5 million viewers.
So, how can the industry possibly top/sink beneath Married At First Sight? I’ve gazed into my television crystal ball and come up with a few suggestions.
(Note all concepts below © Dominic Knight 2015. Bigshot TV executives should speak to my agent* upon immediately realising that they want to buy them..)
Tattooed At First Sight
Marriages are relatively easy to undo nowadays - but agony is guaranteed when you try to get rid of tattoos! Twelve young people meet twelve veteran tattooists. They spend an hour getting to know one another and then the tattooists get to tattoo whatever they like, wherever they like. But look out – one of the tattooists will end up being tattooed with the same designs they ink on one of their client/victims!
Divorced For No Reason
A happily married couple agree to "divorce" - that is, spend three months apart for no reason beyond viewers' entertainment. They're both encouraged to get back out there and go a little crazy with the ol’ dating to "get back on that horse". Then, at the end of the month, they have to decide whether to separate permanently. Maybe their happiness was just a mutual illusion? It's hard to come up with an idea that debases the institution of marriage more thoroughly than Married At First Sight, but this might just do it!
Dog Eat Dog Food
Could you survive on dog food and crawl around on hand and knee for 13 whole weeks, unable to speak because you’ll receive a severe electric shock when you do anything more than bark, growl or whimper? Of course you can, as long as there are regular walkies! At the end of the series, contestants will get to decide whether they want to return to their human lives or live out the rest of their days as a doggie. Except they won’t be able to speak while deciding, so the producers may deliberately misinterpret their intentions...
Very Important Parents
Kids from ordinary, happy families are adopted by über rich celebrity foster parents for 30 days, and taken out of school to go jetsetting around the world visiting theme parks, riding ponies and helicopters and, in the grand finale, getting to go backstage with Beyoncé who will ask them the ultimate question - do you want to keep living like Jay Z and me, or go back to your real mum and dad? Obviously they have to go back to their real parents because the show's budget isn't unlimited, but those families whose kids chose to leave will not only win four tickets to Bey's next Australian tour, but be left with a lingering mutual resentment until the end of their days.
Dancing With The Scars
We’ve all seen dancing competitions, but not one with stakes as high as these! Literal stakes spread all over a huge pit in which contestants are trapped while they’re forced to do ever more complicated and dangerous dance routines. Ropes will only be lowered down if they get consistent 9s from the capricious judges.
The Spotlight
Ten ordinary Australians are plucked from obscurity and placed in the national spotlight. They appear on every major TV and radio show in the country, are paid to drink in the VIP areas of exclusive nightclubs during "promotional appearances" and are constantly being begged for autographs and to appear in selfies. Then, after six weeks of this, it abruptly stops, and we watch as they try to continue their celebrity careers in the face of universal indifference. Hosted by Sara-Marie Fedele until midway through the season when she's abruptly replaced by Grant Denyer.
Ten To One
Could you run a television network? Channel Ten gives ten young hopefuls a week each to run the station, on the balance of probabilities that at least one of them will do a better job than the people responsible for Ten Breakfast and win the prize/punishment of staying on.
The Garbage Compactor
We all know the famous scene from Star Wars where our heroes are stuck in a room whose walls are slowly coming together. We construct a replica at Seaworld on the Gold Coast and see whether our plucky contestants can improvise a way out using only popular hardware items supplied by sponsor Bunnings Warehouse before the walls pulverise them and/or the strange tentacled creature drags them underwater.
The Real Big Brother
Contestants are trapped in the dystopic supercontinent of Oceania, eking out a miserable existence producing propaganda for the Ministry of Truth until a brief and delightful romance sees them confined in the Ministry of Love for brainwashing. We watch their every move recorded through the ubiquitous telescreens.
The Reality Show Reality Show
The contestants are locked in an underground dungeon and fed stale bread until they come up with an idea for a reality show that's good enough to go into production and achieve ratings as strong as Married At First Sight. After the show they created goes on air, they'll be released, but obliged to spend 18 hours a day editing the tedious raw footage from their show into something vaguely airable. At the end of the series they'll own a generous 0.1% of the rights to their show, potentially setting them up for life (depending on how well it does).
* Obviously I don’t actually have an agent. Hey, do you want to be my agent?!
Ten reality ideas worse than 'Married at First Sight'
Many people wonder why television broadcasters keep producing terrible reality TV shows. The answer is simple – because they rate. And what's more, the more terrible they are, the more they rate. This maxim has recently been proven by Married At First Sight, a show on Channel Nine with a premise so disturbing that it's compelling. So much so that it was renewed after the first episode scored 1.5 million viewers.
So, how can the industry possibly top/sink beneath Married At First Sight? I've gazed into my television crystal ball and come up with a few suggestions.
(Note: all concepts below © Dominic Knight 2015. Bigshot TV executives should speak to my agent* upon immediately realising that they want to buy them.)
Tattooed At First Sight
Marriages are relatively easy to undo nowadays - but agony is guaranteed when you try and get rid of tattoos! Twelve young people meet twelve veteran tattooists. They spend an hour getting to know one another and then the tattooists get to tattoo whatever they like, wherever they like. But look out - one of the tattooists will end up being tattooed with the same designs they ink on one of their clients/victims!
Divorced For No Reason
A happily married couple agree to "divorce" - that is, spend three months apart for no reason beyond viewers' entertainment. They're both encouraged to get back out there and go a little crazy with the ol' dating to "get back on that horse". Then, at the end of the month, they have to decide whether to separate permanently. Maybe their happiness was just a mutual illusion? It's hard to come up with an idea that debases the institution of marriage more thoroughly than Married At First Sight, but this might just do it!
Dog Eat Dog Food
Could you survive on dog food and crawl around on hand and knee for 13 whole weeks, unable to speak because you'll receive a severe electric shock when you do anything more than bark, growl or whimper? Of course you can, as long as there are regular walkies! At the end of the series, contestants will get to decide whether they want to return to their human lives or live out the rest of their days as a doggie. Except they won't be able to speak while deciding, so the producers may deliberately misinterpret their intentions...
Very Important Parents
Kids from ordinary, happy families are adopted by über rich celebrity foster parents for 30 days, and taken out of school to go jetsetting around the world visiting theme parks, riding ponies and helicopters and, in the grand finale, getting to go backstage with Beyoncé who will ask them the ultimate question: do you want to keep living like Jay Z and me, or go back to your real mum and dad? Obviously, they have to go back to their real parents because the show's budget isn't unlimited, but those families whose kids chose to leave will not only win four tickets to Bey's next Australian tour, but be left with a lingering mutual resentment until the end of their days.
Dancing With The Scars
We've all seen dancing competitions, but not one with stakes as high as these! Literal stakes, spread all over a huge pit in which contestants are trapped while they're forced to do ever more complicated and dangerous dance routines. Ropes will only be lowered down if they get consistent 9s from the capricious judges.
The Spotlight
Ten ordinary Australians are plucked from obscurity and placed in the national spotlight. They appear on every major TV and radio show in the country, are paid to drink in the VIP areas of exclusive nightclubs during "promotional appearances", and are constantly being begged for autographs and to appear in selfies. Then, after six weeks of this, it abruptly stops, and we watch as they try to continue their celebrity careers in the face of universal indifference. Hosted by Sara-Marie Fedele until midway through the season when she's abruptly replaced by Grant Denyer.
Ten To One
Could you run a television network? Channel Ten gives ten young hopefuls a week each to run the station, on the balance of probabilities that at least one of them will do a better job than the people responsible for Ten Breakfast and win the prize/punishment of staying on.
The Garbage Compactor
We all know the famous scene from Star Wars where our heroes are stuck in a room whose walls are slowly coming together. We construct a replica at Seaworld on the Gold Coast and see whether our plucky contestants can improvise a way out using only popular hardware items supplied by sponsor Bunnings Warehouse before the walls pulverise them and/or the strange tentacled creature drags them underwater.
The Real Big Brother
Contestants are trapped in the dystopic supercontinent of Oceania, eking out a miserable existence producing propaganda for the Ministry of Truth until a brief and delightful romance sees them confined in the Ministry of Love for brainwashing. We watch their every move recorded through the ubiquitous telescreens.
The Reality Show Reality Show
The contestants are locked in an underground dungeon and fed stale bread until they come up with an idea for a reality show that's good enough to go into production and achieve ratings as strong as Married At First Sight. After the show they created goes on air, they'll be released but obliged to spend 18 hours a day editing the tedious raw footage from their show into something vaguely airable. At the end of the series, they'll own a generous 0.1% of the rights to their show, potentially setting them up for life (depending on how well it does).
*Obviously, I don't actually have an agent. Hey, do you want to be my agent?!
Sorry, Hillary - grandmas were always cool
Even if she never becomes President, Hillary Rodham Clinton has achieved many extraordinary things. She made history by winning a Senate seat after serving as First Lady. As Secretary of State, she became enormously popular with the American people. And she is now odds-on favourite to be the Democratic nominee, and the first woman from either major party to achieve that honour.
But there is one claim made of the woman who put "18 million cracks" in the glass ceiling the last time she ran for president which I simply cannot abide. And that is the claim that she's making it 'cool to be a grandmother'.
Heidi Stevens' article in the SMH last week claimed that Hillary would give grandmothers "street cred", while some commentators have used the term "Cool Grandma" to describe her. People magazine has been talking about her as a potential "grandmother-in-chief", and the candidate herself used the hashtag #GrandmothersKnowBest to weigh into the vaccination debate.
Yes, she's a grandmother, courtesy of Chelsea's daughter Charlotte. And it's worth taking a moment to acknowledge what a groundbreaking thing it is to have a woman of any age as the presidential frontrunner.
But the claim that Hillary's potential seat behind the famous Resolute Desk in the Oval Office will somehow endow grandmothers everywhere with a fashion status that they don't currently have is absurd - because grandmothers are already incredibly cool.
When I was a kid, there was no doubt that my two grandmothers were the two coolest adults I knew. My dad's mother Gwen had a house with a swimming pool, making visiting her quite literally the coolest thing we could do. My brother and I spent hour after hour in that pool, until even the wrinkles on our fingertips had wrinkles.
Indoors, she had a massive walk-in pantry with an entire wall of biscuits. In those screw-tight jars, the enticing feel of which I can still recall whenever I browse through the biscuit aisles of any supermarket, you would find pretty well every single biscuit available on the Australian market. Iced Vo-Vos, Ginger Nuts, Milk Arrowroots, Jatz, Kingstons, Honey Jumbles, Mint Slice – they all had their place. For all I knew, there was a conveyor belt up the back that led directly to the Arnott's factory. Given the constant access to biscuits, it's a good thing we burnt off all those calories in the pool.
Each morning, she and my grandfather used to fill out the crossword, and she'd let me help her. When I got it wrong, it didn't even matter because she had this cool biro with an eraser. It was the best.
Every school holiday, she'd take us shopping at renowned malls like Macquarie Centre and Chatswood Chase. She'd let us drag her around surfwear shops for hours (it was the '90s, so boardshorts were a thing), and never mind when, faced with the dizzying range of flavours on offer at the enormous food court, we always chose McDonald's.
One day, in Westfield Chatswood, she bought me Madonna's Like A Virgin for Christmas. This shocked her own offspring, who had presumed she wouldn't have been into the racy Material Girl. But of course she was cool with it, because she was a Cool Grandma.
My other grandmother Clare had an enormous collection of children's books, because she was a children's literature academic. She encouraged me to read from a very early age, and whenever I went over, there was always some new book to check out. I always wanted to read everything, because I loved nothing more than to win the approval of my ever-encouraging grandmother, and as a reward I wound up with a lifelong love of reading.
She and my grandfather had a series of excellent dogs, most significantly a golden retriever called Bart who was so good-natured that he didn't seem to mind when my brother and I subjected him to indignities that no animal should be asked to endure, especially when Bart was in no way a "horsie".
Later on, they moved to the country and we'd visit them for days on end during the school holidays. Crucially, they bought a ping pong table, which meant hour after hour of tournaments with my little brother, who would generally beat me, leading me to try and modify the rules of the sport in my favour.
Once she and my grandfather bought my brother a rocket kit for Christmas, but the first time we tried it, the rocket went incredibly high up in the air and landed so far away that we never found it again. But she just laughed, because she too was a Cool Grandma.
My grandmothers always came to our school plays, even the one where I had a walk-on role for 30 seconds, at the end of which I fell flat on my face while trying to climb a staircase. They were always there for my brother, my cousins and me, and their constant babysitting efforts must have helped my parents enormously.
So if you want to argue that a grandmother has what it takes to run the free world as Commander-In-Chief, then that makes all kinds of sense to me. Both my grandmothers were educators, and I'm sure they would have been more than comfortable staring down a four-star general in the Situation Room.
A number of commentators have pointed to Hillary Clinton's adoption of the grandmother label as a way of embracing a degree of relatability, even folksiness, that wasn't there last time she ran. Her life is nothing like ordinary Americans', and hasn't been since way back in 1979 when she became First Lady of Arkansas at the age of 31. And there's nothing wrong with that – surely her vast experience is part of her pitch to voters. But it's important to at least appear to be one of the people, as George W Bush did so successfully, even if objectively, a President's kid who went to Yale was about as 1% as you could get.
In other words, becoming a grandmother is making Hillary seem cooler. Perhaps this new, friendlier identity will make undecided voters warm to her. Maybe she'll convince middle America that grandmothers even know best when it comes to the State Department's email policies and Benghazi?
There's a good chance that Hillary Clinton will make history at the end of next year. But as she tries to woo the American people, we should ask not what Hillary can do for grandmothers. Rather, it seems that the collective awesomeness of the world's grandmothers might make all the difference for Hillary in 2016.
I was a high school debating geek
In my youth, I was not the flabby, docile creature you see in the little photo atop this page. I was a warrior. I trained at least once a week, often more, and went into battle each weekend to defend what was right. I would dispatch my enemies with scornful panache, and sometimes facts gleaned from The Economist. For I was a high school debater.
A flabby, docile debater, admittedly.
Chairperson, ladies and gentlemen, here's how it went down. On Fridays, I donned my foppish debating tie, which boasted purple and white stripes for reasons I'm still unable to comprehend, and hung around for hours after school, supposedly reading up on current affairs but in fact tackling the all-you-can-eat record at the local Pizza Hut.
Then, as night fell, we would either drive off to another fancy school or welcome them to our fancy school, so the Games, or at least the Talking, could Begin.
It seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, but in hindsight, debating seems a bizarre pastime. One team speaks in favour of a proposition, and the other against. For example (because debaters always need examples): "That terrorism should be a capital crime". Each team has three speakers who take turns trying to convince the audience that their side is right, and their opponent's is wrong. It's supposed to be how parliament would be if it were a place for genuine pro-and-con debate instead of the high farce that is Question Time.
Debaters like to think of their pastime as a forum for rhetorical skill and engagement with the marketplace of ideas, except that this kind of pure argumentation is generally miles removed from what happens in high school debating. Instead of arguing about the facts or morality, which tends to be beyond 14-year-old debaters, we argued about the definition.
The affirmative team usually twists the terms of a debate to stake out the indisputable high moral ground for themselves, so in this case they might define "terrorism" to refer only to instances where dozens of innocent victims have been killed, or they might be really irritating and argue that terrorism overwhelmingly affects capital cities.
Rather than arguing the opposite to what the affirmative argued like they're meant to, the negative team tends to make the exact same indisputable arguments that we heard from the affirmative, like "killing innocent civilians is bad", except they claim that the arguments belong to their side. So the teams will argue about what they're supposed to be debating, instead of debating it.
Then, after six tedious speeches with minimal interaction between them, some self-important ex-debater undergrad will get up to adjudicate. They'll make a few snarky criticisms to prove that they're way better at this debating lark than schoolkids far younger than them, and arbitrarily award the debate to whichever school their uni mates went to.
Only then does the real debate begin: the debate over which team should have won. The losing team's coach and parents will harass the adjudicator to try and convince them that they got it wrong, even though nobody has ever reversed a decision.
The adjudicator will often employ snooty phrases like "Back when I was in the state schools' debating team" and "Accepted practice in international debating", while yielding no ground, and the fight will continue over the little quarter-cut white-bread tuna sandwiches that are the standard debating meal, washed down by bitter, watery urn coffee. Occasionally, the losing team will stick up a Scotch Finger at the adjudicator.
The theory is that debating teaches kids to think logically, to see both sides of an argument, and to analyse the flaws in opposing cases. But it seems perverse for such a valuable intellectual exercise to be conducted as a competitive sport, because what it instead teaches you is to always think that you won.
I did debating every year at high school. It seemed very important at the time, and I desperately wanted to be better at it than I actually was. Like many things that seemed important during my protracted adolescence, I thought it was a proxy for intelligence, and to a thoroughly stupid degree, I wanted to be considered intelligent.
Especially by girls, of course. My schooldays were almost entirely free of any contact with the opposite sex, but sometimes we got to debate against those mysterious creatures in drab uniforms, which was a huge thrill. Why we thought bright, outspoken women would be attracted to arrogant little brats who were trying our utmost to ridicule them in front of an audience, I don't entirely know. I do know, though, that at least in my case, they weren't.
The teams with better arguing and speaking skills generally win, not the team on the inherently stronger side of the argument - which is troubling when you consider that we use a debating-like adversarial system in our courts to arrive at the truth. School debating tries hard not to conclude any kind of truth, but instead to reward whichever team argues best. How can we possibly be sure that in our courtrooms, the most high-paid, experienced advocates aren't the ones which prevail? How do we guarantee that a rhetorically nimble QC won't out-argue a less experienced lawyer who just so happens to be right? If you watch enough debating, you'll be convinced that being right is of very little importance when it comes to trying to convince an audience.
In hindsight, my biggest problem with debating is the kind of person I was trying to become when I was into it. I genuinely believed that my team won just about every single debate - and that we deserved to, because we were smarter and better. So adjudicators who gave a debate against us were stupid, or biased. Unlike sport, where it's hard to blame the umpire for 100% of the decision when your opponents have clean-bowled most of your batsmen (the usual situation during my brief cricket career), in debating you can always blame the adjudicator, and we did.
Given that, you won't be astonished to learn that the Venn diagrams of "debating geeks" and "arrogant gits" overlap significantly. It was common in my schooldays to begin a third speech (the final pair of speeches is mostly devoted to rebuttal rather than substantive argument) by saying something like "Chairperson, ladies and gentlemen, the negative's case today has sixteen fundamental flaws", and then list them. Impressive and effective as a debating technique, perhaps, but try it in any other social context and everybody will just hate you.
Although if you're good at producing scathing lists, you might get a job at Buzzfeed.
What I've come to appreciate in my post-debating life is the uncertainty and complexity of most real-world problems - which are the two things that debaters are trained to gloss over. And I certainly don't want to be the kind of person who believes that whatever opinion I happen to hold is the right one, and that the people who disagree with me are stupid or biased. Even though I probably still do far too much of the time.
Chairperson, ladies and gentlemen, I had to learn to grow out of high school debating. To doubt myself and listen to the quieter, less certain voices, instead of the boldest and brashest. And I'm still far from certain whether I should have been so desperate to be good at debating.