Seven signs you're getting older

Cultural phenomena make no sense to you

Middle age comes with the sense that you’re out of touch what the kids are into grows throughout your twenties, but middle age is when the mooring rope finally snaps and you can no longer make sense of trends even when they’re explained to you. On a related note, teenagers baffle you.

Take Snapchat, for instance, an app that lets you send messages which self-destruct after 9 seconds and can never be accessed again. I’ve downloaded it, and sent one or two, and I simply can’t understand how it’s fun. Oh, I know people use it to send, ahem, racy pictures of themselves, but I don’t get why you’d do that, either.

You eat McDonald's reluctantly

As a teenager, I used to love that stuff. There was a McDonald's directly along my route from school to home, and let’s just say that in hindsight, a certain corporate stooge of a clown was definitely not my friend. Even in my 20s, the sneaky late-night cheeseburger was a crucial ingredient in every big night out whose route didn't take me past a kebab vendor first. But these days, it’s only Mac Time when I need to refuel on a country road trip, or I'm stuck in an airport.

Even then, I stop enjoying it about halfway through the burger, and instead start feeling Kilojoule Remorse, that queasy dread that you feel in your gut when you've made the wrong decision. Or perhaps the queasiness is caused by the food, I’m not sure. Each time you eat McDonald's when you’re middle-aged, you promise never to eat it again, a vow that sticks until the next time you spy the golden arches on a major freeway.

In is the new Out

I used to view every Friday or Saturday night spent at home as a massive personal failing. A bare calendar made me feel like I was a loser. And I used to cherish those occasional summer weekends when there were more events on than I could possibly attend, but tried to get to all of them anyway, and so spent most of my time travelling between events rather than enjoying them. Ah, those were the days.

Now, I'm tired. So tired. When you enter middle age and hit the weekend, you’ll find that the prospect of few hours with nothing to do is a blessing. Some days, you’ll just lie on your couch, a book in your hand and some movie on the TV, paying attention to neither. Those, increasingly, are the best days. So, does that make me a loser, as I feared? Whatever – I'll be on the couch.

You don't like noisy places

Even when you are out of your house, you’ll be constantly thinking about how much more fun you could be having at home, where it’s nice and quiet. And your intolerance of noise will be such that you'll spend most of your time complaining about it. Fortunately, thanks to that same noise, your whinging will be inaudible, meaning that your friends probably won’t realise that you've completely gone over to the fogey side of the Force.

But the penny may drop when you take your leave prematurely and head home to watch the social lives of the characters in Mad Men instead of having one of your own.

Your favourite drink is water

I wasn't allowed to drink sugary soft drinks as a child, except when I was given flat lemonade in the event of an upset stomach, a loophole which led me to claim indigestion on an almost daily basis. We did enjoy cordial, though, especially that luminous green Koola variety that looks like the byproduct of a poorly-maintained nuclear reactor. In my adolescence, though, diet soft drinks became a poison of choice. There was rarely a day when I didn't hit the Diet Coke or Pepsi Max, in a can or better still, a large bottle. Sometimes, when I'm really thirsty, I can still hear the exhilarating fizz that comes when you pull the ring tab.

But I don't enjoy cola any more – in fact, it upsets my stomach. Now, I genuinely prefer water, just as my parents predicted I would some day, and I never believed. When I’m feeling like living a little, I even have it with bubbles in it.

As for the hard drinks, the lure of alcohol doesn't tend to lessen as you age, I've found, but your preferred drink changes dramatically. when you first start out, spirits taste like paint stripper unless they're heavily diluted in sugary water, ideally with some sort of antiseptic lemon flavour and a bottle taking its design cues from the Soviet bloc. Then, as you get older, you gradually strip back the number of additives until finally you're sipping neat scotch and scowling at everyone. Or is that just me?

Your clothes are neither cool nor uncool

Back in the day, everybody put a lot of effort into their wardrobes. They either looked super cool, or, if they were me, tried to look cool and failed, somehow emitting a persistent warning beacon which said 'under no circumstances pash this dag'. Nowadays, though, my clothes are boring. I generally wear solid colour shirts, usually in black, navy, charcoal brown or white, and dark jeans or black chinos. That's pretty much it.

Wearing the clothes I wear, there's absolutely no chance that you will look cool, as ever, but you also minimise the chances of looking uncool. Also, you stay comfy, because when you’re middle-aged, practicality trumps fashion. All that remains to make the transition into old age is to start hoisting your belt above your bellybutton.

You buy new music from the same old bands

I still love listening to new music. But I've noticed that increasingly, I'm only checking out the new outcomes by bands I'm already fan of. So if, say, Ben Folds puts out a new album, my credit card is at his disposal. But at the end of a year when just about every critic was raving about Tame Impala's album, my only response was 'who's he again?'.

If Men Are From Mars, Women Are Also From Mars

The American relationship counsellor John Gray – or as he prefers to be known, “John Gray, Ph.D” – came up with a simple explanation in his bestselling book, Men Are From Mars And Women Are From Venus.

I’ve always taken the view that this book wasn’t worth reading. The central metaphor has always irritated me, with its trite gender essentialism fancied up for a pop audience. While I’d never judge a book by its cover, in this case, judging by the title seems warranted.

And yet, an academic study reported this week went to the trouble of properly debunking the theory, and I found reading about it fairly satisfying, so I thought I’d look in more detail at what Gray had to say.

A lot of people have done that – his original book has sold over 50 million copies, and was apparently the best-selling non-fiction book of the 1990s. Which is a little depressing, frankly.

Now, I’m not going to read the whole book. He’s sold enough copies, and if he can be essentialist, so can I. Wikipedia boils his argument down to a few main points. Firstly, men and women keep score differently. Women sweat the small stuff, tallying up little points for everything, whereas men tend to look at big one-off, ‘high scoring’ items. And secondly, men retreat to their ‘cave’ and take time out, whereas women like to talk issues through.

The reason these theories were so thoroughly discredited by this new study is because after surveying 13,000 people, the researchers discovered that people don’t fit neatly into gender groups in terms of “122 different characteristics such as fear of success, intimacy and empathy”.

Now, this doesn’t mean that men and women are exactly the same as one another. If they were, Daily Life wouldn’t have its army of eccentric gentlemen commenters who like to accuse its writers of ‘misandry’. Hello, boys!

Rather, the picture is much more complex. You can’t simply generalise that all women are alike in one particular way, and that no men are like that.

Think about this question of keeping score. Of course there are women who like grand relationship gestures, and there are men who prefer little demonstrations of affection – and moreover, there are relationships where nobody keeps score, because both parties think that the whole idea of keeping score is stupid. That’s certainly my preference, for the record.

And let’s talk about “man-caves”, an irritating term because it suggests that we gentleman are lower on the evolutionary scale, and like to retreat into spaces where we can grunt, scratch ourselves and do metalwork. I dispute that, although we do like to scratch ourselves.

Sorry, that was an essentialist joke. See, it’s so easy to think that way!

Sure, okay – men like having spaces to put stuff in and pursue our hobbies in – and why wouldn’t women, for that matter? (See A Room Of One’s Own.) But the suggestion that us guys retreat into them to avoid confronting problems is such a simplistic stereotype. I can only think of one man who retreated into a cave to avoid confronting a difficult situation, and that was Osama bin Laden.

While some men admittedly don’t like talking things through, some love it. I know this because I’m one of those who enjoy incredibly long conversations about problems; yes, including emotional, relationship-type problems. Does that somehow make me less of a man?

And if men are so thoroughly unable to engage with those kinds of conversations, why would any of us become psychologists – or, for that matter, consult them?

Indeed, anyone who’s familiar with the work of Woody Allen knows that some men, if anything, talk altogether too much about their problems.

In fact, Gray, Ph.D himself is proof positive that not all men dislike talking about this stuff. The guy's entirely unable to shut up about other people’s relationship difficulties. Not only has he written no less than 18 books, but the guy does a live streaming show on his website every single day where he talks about this stuff.

Retreat, John Gray, Ph.D, would you please? Perhaps into some kind of man-cave?

And yet, according to his theory, women are the ones who constantly want to talk about stuff. Well, not always. It’s well known that women in abusive relationships often go to great lengths not to confront the situation, and resist talking about them with anybody, least of all their partner. This is too widespread and serious a problem to gloss over with a stereotype about the ladies loving a good ol’ chinwag.

Then there’s the contrast he makes where men want to solve problems and women just want to discuss them. How thoroughly patronising an analysis. Has Gray surveyed women and discovered that they don’t ever want any of their concerns addressed? And to suggest that women don’t care about solutions is to imply that their concerns are trivial, because it doesn’t ultimately matter whether they’re resolved.

I must confess that I was a bit surprised to discover that Gray is persisting with this Mars/Venus paradigm in 2013. But then again, as he says in his original book, “not to be needed is a slow death for a man”. I very much dispute that, but perhaps it’s slow death for Gray not to be needed to deliver these pop psychology homilies, and so he battles on. How typically Martian of him!

Here’s another thing – if women and men are so different, and can’t understand one another, what can a man such as Gray tell us about women? Because if the gender comprehension divide is as steep as he suggests, the book should be called Men Are From Mars And Women, I Dunno, They Confuse Me.

Then again, perhaps Gray is a hermaphrodite, combining the best of Venus and Mars in his own body and therefore able to understand both?

In fact, gender is not the only determinant of personality. Serious (i.e. non-pop) psychologists who study personality disorders, for instance, will tell you that personality problems like narcissism transcend gender, for instance – a narcissist won’t exactly care for being ‘needed’ (Mars) or ‘cherished’ (Venus).

And more complex analytical frameworks than Gray’s – Myers-Briggs, for instance – don’t even bother to discriminate by gender in drawing its personality types and supplying insights about how we interact.

Mars is a better analogy for human personalities than Venus in that it contains a diversity of landforms, habitats and climates. Also bad for Gray’s model associating Venus with women is the fact that its atmosphere contains toxic sulfuric clouds. But of course the author doesn’t care about what Venus or Mars is really like, just as he isn’t interested in the complexity and diversity of our personalities – and how members of opposite sexes can be alike one another, and how each gender can contain a full spectrum of difference. A binary’s easier to explain, and to sell.

Then again, if Gray, Ph.D. embraced the full nuance and complexity of our personalities and relationship, he probably wouldn’t have sold 50 million pop psychology books. Predominantly to a female readership – and come to think of it, why do so many women buy this guff? Maybe they really are all from Venus.

You are not a princess

Parents of girls, I have some wonderful, gender-specific news for you!

Admittedly, it’s not actually my news or genuine news – I work in the media, so just about everything I write about is in fact spoon-fed to me by publicists, but nevertheless, it’s truly wonderful news for all fans of princesses.

I said, PRINCESSES!

It turns out, and brace yourselves, that Disney is holding “an exclusive Disney Princess film Festival which will take place in Event and Village Cinemas between February 9th and March 17th.” And you should definitely take your daughter if she needs a frontal lobotomy and you can’t afford the procedure.

Here’s what the press release says:

“Themed “I Am A Princess”, the Film Festival reinforces this proud statement of what a Disney Princess stands for. It is a celebration of the Princess inside every young girl, and champions the qualities that make her one: Kindness. Compassion. Loyalty. Bravery.”

All of which is absolutely wonderful news for you and your child if, like Disney, you have absolutely no idea what a Princess is

Firstly, let’s be very clear that there is not a Princess* inside every young girl. That would be weird, and probably illegal. In fact, I would advise that any young girl who thinks she has a Princess inside her be immediately treated for schizophrenia.

Secondly, I have to break some bad news. Despite the marketing slogan and the choice of the disney.com.au/iamaprincess web address, no, you are not a Princess.

In fact, there are a grand total of zero Princesses in Australia, except for the very rare occasions when one deigns to visit us, like in September last year when Princess Catherine visited Brisbane for a regal two hours while refuelling.

The Brisbane Times reported on the day that it was “described as a "very special moment for the Brisbane airport",” although without specifying by whom. Walt Disney’s cryogenically frozen corpse, perhaps?

In fact, Princesses acquire their titles either by birth or marriage, when they become inductees into a feudal system that most countries, including Disney’s beloved America, have dumped on the grounds of being archaic. But in Australia, and other Commonwealth realms, there are simple rules that establish whether you are a princess or not. For one thing, you have to be descended from Sophia, the Electress of Hanover, as provided by the Act of Settlement in 1701. And let’s be clear that per that Act, if you’re Catholic, not only are you most emphatically not a Princess per that Act, but you can never become one. And no, I’m not making this up.

Furthermore, in the UK at least, attempting to interfere with the line of succession is grounds for high treason. So if you love your daughter, you should actively discourage her from making any claim to be a Princess. In fact, Disney’s web address should have been disney.com.au/iaminnowayaprincess.

So now we have established what a Princess is, and that you definitely aren’t one. But let’s look at the characteristics that Disney thinks define Princesses: young girls who display kindness, compassion, loyalty and bravery.

Firstly, being a Princess is not age-specific. Princess Margaret was one until she died at the age of 71. (Not that it seemed to make her life much happier, seeing as she wasn’t allowed to marry the man she loved.)

But as for the other qualities – sure, they’re nice attributes to have. Certainly, America’s best-known (albeit fictional) princess, Princess Leia, has them – and is now in fact a Disney Princess, due to Walt’s company’s Borg-like assimilation of Lucasfilm as part of its ongoing quest to own every piece of intellectual property ever.

However, it is in no way necessary to have those qualities to become a princess. If you read the Daily Mail’s exhaustive history of Catherine’s relationship with Prince William – or, at least, just skim it like I did – you’ll see that in fact all it takes is to attend the same hall of residence with a Prince and then shack up with him and a few mates the following year in “a smart flat in Hope Street”.  And then, except for a brief period where he dumps you, you pretty much become a Princess.

Another proven method of attaining Princesshood is to go to a bar in Sydney during the Olympics. I tried this repeatedly in 2000, but I didn’t hook up with an heir to the Danish throne, sadly.

Because, as much as Disney pretends otherwise, the reality is that we are not all special. This Princess obsession ties in with one of the most persistent and inaccurate ideas in American popular culture – that we are all important, just like Princess Catherine. We aren’t. Our weddings aren’t watched by millions, we don’t get to spend more than $50,000 on clothes in a six month period, and our sisters’ bottoms aren’t the subject of some bizarre global fetish.

The very meaning of the word special is ‘something that is set apart, and not like everything else’, and as our daughters will soon learn from the Kardashians, the reality of the world is that some people get to be special and some don’t. It makes no sense, but that’s just how it is.

Idealising Princesses is also unhealthy in feminist terms, as Kasey Edwards recently wrote in Daily Life. It’s a point rather unsubtly made in the Sesame St video featured in that article, where US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomajor discusses career choices with a Muppet known as Abby Cadabby. I felt its point was somewhat undermined by the fact that Sotomajor was talking to a fairy puppet who is clearly the more obvious aspirational role model of the two, since she can turn herself into whatever she wants and has a recurring role on Sesame St. But regardless, it’s a much healthier message than Disney’s.

If I ever have a daughter, I will never call her Princess, even if I somehow marry into a royal family. I’ve taken this idea from Princess Anne, who requested that her children not be given titles. That’s why Zara Phillips is not a Princess, unlike, say, Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice. Not having a Princess “inside her”, or even on her exterior, did not prevent Zara from being an Olympic silver medallist. Whereas Eugenie and Beatrice are best known for ridiculous hats.

While children of both sexes should aspire to Disney’s ideals of kindness, compassion, loyalty and bravery, the world’s leading children’s entertainment company should figure out a way to promote them that doesn’t involve royalty with its inherent privilege and notions about birth. Princesses embody the opposite of the American dream that anyone can make it – which is itself a somewhat misleading notion.

By contrast, boys never play at being Princes. Our heroes tend to be ordinary guys who turn out to have extraordinary powers, or something along those lines – Harry Potter, for instance, or James Bond. Equally unattainable, admittedly, but at least it doesn’t give us silly romantic notions about royalty.

Clearly there’s no harm in watching Cinderella or Mulan. But can we please stop telling girls that they are Princesses? They aren’t, and nor should they particularly want to be.

* I wouldn’t ordinarily capitalise “princess”, but of course I defer to Disney on such matters.

When you no longer get the Hottest 100

I used to think Australia Day was the ideal birthday. It's a public holiday, it's usually warm, and there are frequently fireworks which I like to imagine are in my honour. And it arrives just as the summer holidays have wound down, giving you one last hurrah before the serious portion of the year kicks in.

That said, 26 January is never going to be a morally unambiguous day. Tacky jingoism and an uncomfortable history of colonisation tend to complicate a day which, in my view, should largely be about giving me presents. This reached its nadir a few years ago, when the day got hijacked by Big Day Out yobbos wearing their flags as capes like bogan superheroes with the power to fly through the air while making ignorant comments about immigration.

Nowadays, my birthday has become less of an occasion for me to seek even more attention than usual, and more of an uncomfortable reminder of the ageing process. My birthday makes me feel ancient, like the hint of arthritis in my left knee, and my inability to see the point of Snapchat. But this year, being born on the day when Captain Arthur Phillip planted his flag in Sydney Cove and declared that he couldn't see any natives anywhere, so he may as well just claim the whole thing, what, came with an additional complication.

Australia Day is also the day when triple j plays the Hottest 100, of course. In the early years, I used to know most of the songs, and buy the compilation CDs so I could pretend to be a hardcore fan of bands I'd previously considered too cool for me, like Nine Inch Nails and You Am I. I’ve been listening in since the first year when they restricted the countdown to the previous year – I loved the 1993 countdown when Denis Leary's 'Asshole' was number one, because I thought that was just about the funniest song ever. Gimme a break, I was 16.

This year, the Hottest 100 turned 20 (in its current songs-from-the-last-year format) and I turned 36, and the premiere kiddie/hipster countdown became a source of confusion. Because this was the first year when I had never even heard the number one song, 'Thrift Shop'. Not only that, I hadn't even heard of it, or even of the artists – Macklemore, Ryan Lewis, and the questionably-named Wanz. Yes, even though it was number one on the ARIA chart last year, too.

What’s more, having heard it, I couldn't see why anybody liked it. I still can’t.

There, I made the ultimate fogey comment: kids these days listen to weird music. Why can't they go back to the good old days of people singing over their guitars, like that nice Kurt Cobain fella?

In previous years, I might have looked up Macklemore, Ryan Lewis and even Wanz on the internet so I could pretend to be informed when talking about them. This year, I still haven't bothered – and it hasn’t been a problem, either, since nobody's brought them up in conversation. All I can tell you is that 'Macklemore' sounds like it might be the mansion next door to Downton Abbey.

More damningly still – and I'm going to be honest, even though this is deeply embarrassing – of the 100 songs that made the cut, I only knew 17. And I'd only heard of the *artists* for about a third of the tracks. So thanks, triple j, for making me feel completely antiquated on my birthday.

What was I even doing listening to the Hottest 100, you may ask. After all, I work for one of the ABC’s decidedly non-youth networks. (Which is, I admit, the only reason I’ve heard of a few of the songs – ‘Little Talks’ and ‘I Got Burned’, for instance, which are on our playlist.) Well, I caught quite a bit of it because of an even more age-affirming decision – attending a Hottest 100 party.

Parties are nice, of course, especially on one’s birthday, when you can imagine that they've been thrown in your honour. And I like relaxed house parties in the middle of summer. This one had more than a hundred people at it, and giant speakers in the backyard blaring out triple j. All of which would be well and good, except that nearly everybody in attendance was more than a decade younger than me. I don’t know whether they were Generation Y or Z or even the one below. All I know is that when I started at university, most of them weren’t even in primary school.

I could see the confusion in some of their juvenile faces as they wondered who’d let the old man with the receding hairline in. Was I a neighbour, or perhaps even a parent? The incomprehension was mutual. As I watched them dancing to the music, and splashing about in the pool, I felt even older than 36.

Fortunately, I had a few friends there, a very small number of whom were even my side of thirty. We chatted on the fringe of the seething morass who were dancing to Hottest 100 songs they knew every word of but which I couldn’t place. And I played backyard cricket with muscly guys in singlets who slogged the few deliveries I sent down that weren’t wide, and made me feel like John Howard. It was fun, but ultimately, I didn’t belong.

After a couple of hours, I took my leave of the few of those young scamps whom I knew, and got into the car which I was still sober enough to drive, and drove to a very pleasant dinner party. Everyone there was within a year or two of my age, had been a good friend for more than a decade. Almost all of them, as is practically standard for thirtysomethings of my acquaintance, had children.

After dinner, I asked the table for a moment of silence, and played them ‘Thrift Shop’. None of them had heard it, and none of them understood how it had been voted number one in the Hottest 100. We didn’t even get all the way through it before I switched the stereo back to good old Mix 80s. I sighed in relief, knowing that here, I was among my peers.

I drove home at the sensible hour of 11pm, because even though it was a Saturday night on a long weekend, some of those in attendance were pregnant, and others had to pick their children up from the obliging grandparents who had been minding them. Spending time with those friends made me feel like the other extreme – a relatively free spirit, a person who at least got invited to and was sufficiently childless to attend parties full of groovy twentysomethings, even if they didn’t really fit in at them.

As I drove, I kept listening to triple j, where twentysomething Nina Las Vegas was DJing a Hottest 100 after-party, and I formulated an ingenious plan to make sure that today’s experience was never repeated. If I spent more time listening to triple j, then maybe, just maybe, I’d know more than 17 songs in next year’s Hottest 100.

How I fell out of love with 'Downton Abbey'

Let me state for the record that I began watching Downton Abbey to write a parody of it. Honestly. I didn't think – ooh, a period drama, I'm massively into those, bring on the silverware and stiff upper lips. Really. Even though for several weeks in 2011, I had the theme music stuck in my head, and seriously contemplated purchasing a faithful hound of my own.

At the time, I was working on a TV comedy show, and I had a Downton sketch idea that I thought was terribly clever, and to cut a long story short, when we tried it, it wasn't. In the service of said idea, I found myself watching the whole of Series 1 in about 48 hours.

I loved it instantly, just as an English aristocrat might fall in love with another, higher-ranked English aristocrat across a drawing-room, even though they're so closely related that they share the same surname. Better to marry the cousin than the chauffeur, though, what?

Upstairs, Hugh Bonneville's Lord Grantham was a model of chubby English rectitude and Maggie Smith was amusingly archaic and acerbic as the Dowager Countess. Downstairs, Mr Bates and Anna's love story was delightful, even if she never seemed to call him by his first name, and Thomas the footman and O'Connor the maid were deliciously villainous, even if it seemed a little unfortunate that the token gay character in the series is also the most morally ambiguous.

Even though it seems ever so classy, Downton is ultimately something of a guilty pleasure, both because I feel a little odd giving two figs about the personal lives of spoiled, poncy aristocrats, and because the series is a soap opera wrapped in nobility and the associated finery. While it's no less obsessively detailed than a Merchant Ivory, the plotlines are so tempestuous that Dallas Abbey might have been a more appropriate subject, as became clear early in the series with a subplot involving Lady Mary's – ahem – unfortunate nocturnal visitor. Quelle scandale!

But yes, yes; I enjoyed it, thanks to the skilful writing, impressive acting and beautiful English countryside. And I am a sucker for a bit o'romance, especially when it involves guys getting to bat way out of their league. After all, like Branson the chauffeur-turned-suitor, a fella can dream.

Besides, tough Aussie blokes are allowed to watch Downton Abbey – Tony Abbott said so. Especially if the opinion polls say they need to increase their appeal to women.

As I went on to watch the second series, though, the show began to lose me a little. The handling of the war and its aftermath got a touch ridiculous, and the twists and turns of the various romances got irritatingly contrived. I won't go into details for fear of spoiling it for those who haven't yet watched – even though from what I have gleaned of the third series, things are well and truly spoiled already. As the series went on, I began wishing that the series' token Irish revolutionary would lead a band of brigands through the oaken doors and claim the place to be an orphanage.

The odd thing about the world of Downton is that the way the Crawleys live, even though it's only a hundred years ago, has more in common with Jane Austen's world than it does with our own. Rituals like dressing for dinner are almost entirely alien to us in the twenty-first century. As time passes in the series, and their time begins to approach our own, the strict hierarchy began to grate more and more, even as it breaks down.

I guess given my surname, somebody somewhere in the past must have been a knight in some courtly sense, who knows – but there's no fanciness in my roots that I'm aware of. Perhaps my forebears were members of that most painful element in all of Jane Austen's novels – those on the outside fringes of nobility who were obsequious supplicants towards their supposed social betters. I'm thinking of that appalling curate from Pride & Prejudice, Mr Collins, forever bowing and scraping to his patron Lady Catherine. How despicable to have such enormous regard for a hierarchy in which you are ranked extremely lowly. It's like caring deeply about television ratings when you work at Channel Ten.

In Downton, class snobbery tends to be the preserve of two often unsympathetic characters – Maggie Smith's snooty Countess and the butler Carson, who seems to care more about upholding the Crawleys' privilege than even they do, the poor fellow. Downton Abbey makes the same point that Austen does – that behaviour is more important than breeding. And that's all well and good, but whether they live honourably or not, the well-bred still get to live in an extremely luxurious bubble.

The other thing is that devoid of the major dramas that the scriptwriter Julian Fellowes regularly visits upon the Crawleys, life in a stately home seems incredibly boring, especially when you have a staff and therefore no chores to do. When the highlight of one's day is yet another family formal dinner when Granny insults you, I'd expect every single heiress to abscond with a handsome under-footman, just to make their lives slightly more interesting.

Ultimately, the rigid class structure in Downton just made made me angry, and the beautiful scenery and manners failed to compensate. The unalloyed snobbery, the hoity-toity fanciness – and even the moments of kindness seem enormously condescending when you think about them, like when Lord Grantham is so touchingly kind as to take an interest in his cook's health problems, presumably so he can guarantee his supply of stuffed quail.

Even the language which seems so charming initially becomes ridiculous on further analysis – honestly, who could stand to continually be addressed as "my Lord"? And the view of several of the Crawleys that their world needs to be preserved to provide employment and structure for those lucky commoners who get a chance to polish their boots is as misguided as it is offensive.

I don't know if I'll get to the end of the third series of Downton, especially given the rumours I've heard about the wacky Christmas special at its end. The only thing that will convince me to keep watching is if somebody can promise me that at the end, the Crawleys fall on hard times, this time without an improbable financial windfall to save them, and end up being forced to wait on their former servants. Seeing the Dowager Countess serving cups of tea to Daisy the kitchenmaid is just about the only thing in their world that I'd still like to see.

Ultimately spending time in the privileged world of Downton Abbey has only made me rejoice that their world has ended forever. I'm also very grateful that my ancestors had the sense to move to Australia, where we only bow and scrape to people if they're good at cricket.

Ten things to do over summer

Today is my last day of work until mid-January, and while I’ve been looking forward to some down-time, now that it’s almost here I’m beginning to wonder how I’m going to fill it. Sure, catch-ups with expat friends where we talk through their ambivalent feelings about Sydney are fun, and there’s plenty of TV I need to watch (Breaking Bad is top of the list). But that will still leave dozens of hours to fill.

Here’s my summer to-do list. See how many you can get through over your own break!

1) Become a cricket commentator

Do you love the cricket? Would you be watching it with mates anyway , and exchanging quips as you do so? Well, then why not broadcast your banter over the internet as an alternative live commentary?

Well, perhaps because it’d be technically difficult (wrong) and because it would take up an extremely large amount of time (correct) and because, well, who’d listen (a good question, but you never know! Even though you can probably make a pretty good guess.)

I know some guys who actually do this. They call themselves TippyTappy Sports, and except on the rare occasions when their ordinary lives intervene, they’ve been calling the whole of the Test series. You can ring them up, too – I did once, because they were wondering if anybody at all was listening and I wanted to . We talked for a good ten minutes, and you can’t do that on the ABC coverage, where the only person who’s allowed to bang on about amusing random stuff is Kerry O’Keeffe.

Next Test match, you can listen to their (NSFW) commentary, or you can start your own. If you do start your own, perhaps you can call up each other’s live call?

It doesn’t have to be the cricket. You can live commentate anything that’s on TV, or just bang on about anything at all. If I was in high school now, I bet you anything my nerdy friends and would be trying to set up our own “hilarious” internet radio station over summer.

Just a quick legal note: I don’t know whether you need broadcasting rights to do this, but I’m assuming it’s legal to do what Roy and HG used to do with State of Origin?

2) Learn how to make ice-cream

Ice-cream is delicious, and apparently not all that difficult to make – if you have an ice-cream maker. My gelato-obsessed friend tells me it’s all about making sure it freezes slowly while being churned so there aren’t ice crystals. There’s nothing better than ice-cream in summer, with the possible exception of frozen yoghurt. And if you make it yourself, you can finally have that strange, decadent combo you thought up. Here’s mine: an Iced Vo-vo ice-cream, with jam, coconut, chunks of biscuit and whatever that pink icing stuff is. In fact, that’s settled it – I’m buying one myself.

3) Dye your hair

I did this one summer at university using a product called Sun-In which made it a hideous tint of rusty orange. I thought that displaying such a devil-may-care attitude to my appearance would help me get a girlfriend – this approach, I later learned, is known as ‘peacocking’. In my case, it didn’t help at all, but it was still fun. Probably best to get the professionals to do it, if you care at all about being attractive.

4) Invent a meme

At the moment, roughly 85% of all internet traffic is devoted to memes. The word “meme”, as originally conceived by Richard Dawkins”, means an “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture”. It was a genuinely brilliant insight about the way concepts spread somewhat like living organisms.

Whereas on the internet, it means a quirky picture with a caption in white capital letters with black borders, in the font Impact. I don’t know why. Ask the internet.

Once upon a time, only designated “comedians” were allowed to be funny in the public sphere. But nowadays, thanks to the “social media” which everybody thinks are so important but exist predominantly to give human civilisation a way to simultaneously waste its time on the same stuff, anybody can create a meme that goes “viral” around the “world wide web” and makes you “internet famous”. You don’t even need Photoshop – just head to MemeGenerator and it’ll do it for you.

Here are some possible subjects for memes:

• The Hobbit – probably the talking point of summer 2012/3. Be sure to complain about how you don’t like the 3D and high-resolution and 48 frames per second screening, that’ll be entertaining for everyone! Here’s Gollum to get you started. Make sure to use the term “Precioussss” about something that is in no way precious!
• New Year’s Fireworks – maybe contrast the joyous optimism of the new year with, I don’t know, asylum seekers or something?
• Justin Bieber – unlike him, making fun of him hasn’t aged a bit!

And look, I made a meme about the kind of people who make memes:

INSERT GRAPHIC: MEMEIDEA.JPG

5) Start a blog

You know how you’ve always wanted to start a blog to express yourself? Keep a journal of all the cool stuff you’re up to? Record your innermost thoughts? This could be the summer to do it! You’ll almost certainly have abandoned it by mid-February, but don’t let me dissuade you that this early stage! I certainly won’t mention that 95% of blogs are apparently abandoned.

If you haven’t time for a proper blog, why not start a Tumblr? My friend recently made one where he captions photos of the royal family, and he’s somehow managing to keep it up. In fact, having done hundreds, he’s arguably too devoted to it.

6) Go tenpin bowling

How long is it since you’ve been? Remember how in high school it was quite expensive, and you could only play a game or two? Well now that you’re a grown up, your budget probably extends to as many games as you can stand until your fingers get sore! There are few better feelings in the world than a strike.

7) Organise and backup your photos

This is a practical yet boring suggestion. People whose homes have been destroyed by fires often nominate the destruction of their family photos as the most devastating loss. In the digital era, there’s no excuse. Don’t just back up to a hard disk – back them up online to Flickr or Picasa or iCloud or Dropbox or Sugarsync or anything really just do it now yes right now and I mean immediately while you think of it or you’ll forget. Ideally, group them all properly first, but that’s not as important as backing up.

So, where’s the fun bit in all this? Looking at the photos. If you’re like me, you probably haven’t bothered to do so since taking them, imagining that someday in the future you’ll have time to enjoy them. Guess what? This summer could be that time!

8) Create a new you

After 35 years of being the same person, I’m getting a little bored with myself. So I’m considering adopting a new identity during the summer. Not all of the time, but for the odd night out here or there. He will be called Enrique, and he will be from wherever in Latin America the person I’m talking to seems least likely to have visited. He will have a Spanish accent and yet be strangely unable to speak Spanish. He will dress in dapper suits and panama hats, wear a rose in his lapel and very much enjoy talking to strangers in nightclubs and being the life and soul of any party. He will call women Senorita or Señora and bow deeply. In other words, he’ll be as unlike me as humanly possible.

If anybody I know busts me, or discovers that Enrique cannot in fact speak Spanish, my plan for avoiding people concluding I’ve grown entirely deranged is to say that I’m preparing for a role, and that my acting coach advised me not to drop character. I haven’t yet figured out what to say when they point out that I’m not an actor.

9) Record a critically acclaimed indie album

Do what Bon Iver did and lock yourself away in a cabin and let the genius pour out of you! If it’s there. If not, you’ll have wasted your summer. But at least you’ll have an album! That you’ll never play to anybody.

While being lauded as a musical genius isn’t all that easy, it’s certainly simple to make an album nowadays. GarageBand is free on Macs and cheap to buy for iPad or iPhones, and there are lots of other options like Reason and Acid. Or, if you want something that’s easy and don’t mind if the results make shopping-centre muzak sound interesting, you could resort to Microsoft’s hilariously bad SongSmith. (Click on that link. You won’t be disappointed.)

10) Come up with your own list like this one

I’ll probably have done everything on this list after about a week, so I’ll need more suggestions – if you have any ideas, please put them into the comments! And have an excellent summer, everybody.

Five things I learned at a toddler’s birthday party

This weekend, I had the pleasure of attending my friends’ son’s third birthday party. It was held in Centennial Park, a location I highly recommend for such purposes due to the top quality playground equipment and excellent landscaping.

Unfortunately there was a strong breeze which blew much of said landscaping into our faces, but it was still a delightful occasion. And for me, a learning occasion. I hereby pass my learnings on to you.

1) Don't get there late

For a toddler birthday party, there is no such thing as “fashionably late”. There’s just “late”, which is the same as “too late”, which is roughly the same as “arriving when the party is already being packed up”. I don’t generally spend Sunday mornings anywhere besides my apartment, but because I know that toddlers’ patience can be wafer-thin, I planned to get to the 10.30am Sunday function by no later than 11.

But I was delayed both by because of my dilemma over what I could possibly buy for the birthday boy (see point two below) and my belated realisation that there probably wouldn’t be coffee on offer, and that I would definitely need some of it before contending with a dozen excitable children. The first reason was a mistake, but the second displayed excellent sense.

Consequently, I got there by 11.30, and even though the advertised time was 10.30 to 12.30, it was clear by 11.50 that the event was all over bar the shouting – which at some of these events literally involves shouting.

I arrived halfway through a game of pass the parcel, which was being blatantly manipulated by the mother so that every child got a gift – thoroughly undermining the integrity of the parcel-passing process, I felt, but no doubt best for the sanity of all concerned.

These events are always short to begin with – they’re the first parties I’ve ever been invited to with a non-negotiable finishing time. And really, if you can’t spare at least 90 minutes of the 120 which is the maximum these things ever involve, you probably shouldn’t bother going.

So, I have vowed to do better next time, and to buy one of those old alarm clocks with the two mechanical bells which I can put just out of arm’s reach.

2) Buying presents for three-year-olds is hard

There is almost nothing as pure as the expression of joy on a child’s face when you give them a gift that they absolutely love. Which is a lucky thing, because otherwise, our entire retail sector would probably collapse.

The problem is, as I have previously noted, is that toddlers nowadays tend to have – well, not literally every object available on the market, but definitely more than 50% of them, so if we’re rounding up, I can say that they have literally everything without being guilty of too much exaggeration.

What’s more, in the era of the iPad, you can’t just grab a DVD the way you I used to. (Books fall in to the “they already have everything” trap – I’ve tried.) And I don’t really see the point in giving a child a 47th toy car, or a 132nd stuffed toy. With the benefit of hindsight, I should have gone to my usual go-to quirky-present vendor, the Oxfam Shop. But instead, I was desperate, and opted for something I swore I’d never buy: a gift voucher.

I know, I know. Terrible. Thoughtless. But every parent I know uses an iPad as a portable instant baby pacifier – sure, there’s a degree of guilt there, but who can resist when the effects are so profound and instantaneous? – so I figured that some extra iTunes credit would help with shovelling still more Pixar movies and episodes of Charlie and Lola or Dora The Explorer or Peppa Pig onto their tablet for a rainy day. And at least I can be sure that he’ll like whatever he gets with it.

3) Parenthood involves a ridiculous amount of stuff

I don’t know how parents do it. The sheer amount of gear they have to tote around the place is just overwhelming. Nappy stuff, hygiene gear, a range of toys and books to try and anticipate the child’s whims, playmats, prams, strollers, cots, food and drink, and then other random stuff. Add to that the mountain of stuff you need to cater for a picnic and a small mountain of presents, and you have an exercise in logistics that would stretch the capacity of some smaller armies.

And yet parents somehow do this all day long – unpacking, setting up, wrangling and then packing up and moving on to the next appoinment, often with just one arm because the other is holding the child.

It was impressive enough when my friends only had one child. Now that many of them have had a second, some of whom are newborn while the other is a fast-moving toddler who thinks nothing of making a break for the nearest busy street, I’m even more in awe of what they manage to accomplish.

Whereas I was patting myself on the back on Sunday morning because I remembered to bring sunglasses.

4) Attending toddler birthday parties is, in many respects, an act of loyalty

If you’re a friend who only visits occasionally, the child probably doesn't care whether you're there, even if they remember who you are. Not when there are relatives and other children and delicious snacks and, most importantly, and let's not kid ourselves that they aren't the most important aspect of proceedings – presents.

The parents are grateful when childless people like me attend these events, with whatever small proportion of their brains isn't busy being frazzled. But they’re also a little surprised, because they recognise that you could be sleeping in, or having brunch, or going sailing, or really anything else with your Sunday morning. They may also pity you a little, because of the possibility that you haven't got anything much else to do.

I do enjoy toddler birthday parties, even though it’s almost impossible to have a proper conversation with one’s friends. But when the children get older, attending their birthday parties will become far more attractive as a social occasion. When kids form gangs that are capable of whizzing around the place, playing elaborate games with no need for parental attention, that’s when we’ll all be able to linger on the sofa, open a bottle of wine and settle in for a good long chat. I’m looking forward to it.
5) Parents and single people lead very, very different lives

As the parents finally packed away all of their accoutrements into their Sensible Cars and strapped their kids into their protective seats, getting ready to head to another child’s virtually identical birthday party, I found myself relishing my relaxed schedule. Would I see a movie? Would I do some shopping? Who knew?

In the end, I ended up going for a wander around Fox Studios and discovered that it wasn’t as nice as I remembered, and that there wasn’t a movie I especially felt like seeing. Instead, I spent fully half an hour contemplating the purchase of a giant beanbag that I definitely don’t have room for. As I stretched out on its ridiculously large surface, its folds enveloping me in such comfort that I briefly considered getting rid of my dining table just so I could fit it in, I realised that I do enjoy my freedom. Because I bet a lot of party-stressed parents wouldn’t have minded swapping places and devoting thirty minutes to nothing more taxing than lazing around on an enormous lump of foam.

A salvo to the smug marrieds

If you’ve never worked in the media, allow me to lift the magician’s curtain a little. You might imagine an army of intrepid newshounds who pound the pavements with nothing more than a camera, a notebook and their trusty fountain pen, searching for stories and doggedly following up every lead, while wearing a battered but fetching trenchcoat and a trilby with a little card tucked in the band which reads ‘Press’.

But you’d be wrong. Today’s media organisations are made up of vast open-plan floors where no writer could ever possibly concentrate for more than one consecutive minute, full of harrowed functionaries attempting to file half a dozen stories per day while continuously revising the ones they’ve already written for the ravenous, insatiable beast that is the internet.

The average journo of today is on the phone to three contacts at once while trying to finish typing up a completely different story and simultaneously searching job websites for a new career, because everyone knows the media is going down the toilet.

Working journos also have to find at least five hours in every day for posting pictures of kittens playing in sock drawers on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest – but not LinkedIn, or they won’t get that new job they so desperately crave.

What I’m saying is that they’re very busy, so busy that they have precious little time to come up with ideas for stories, let alone actually leave the building to pursue them.

Fortunately, a secondary army stands ready to assist. Because for every one desperately stressed journo in this country, there are at least a dozen publicists bombarding them with press releases. The emails they send are often customised to a journo’s precise requirements, and they’ll even go so far as to suggest a list of interview questions. Lazy journos cut and paste their helpfully pre-written paragraphs, while the more conscientious practitioners change a word here and there so they won’t get caught by Media Watch.

Publicists are like those parents who pre-chew a steak for their offspring to make it nice and easy to digest, but gross when you think about it. But without them, our media simply couldn’t function. It’s not like you follow up every press release, of course – that would be impossible. But when they serve you up your content on a platter, and it’s tough to resist.

Nowadays, I receive emails from publicists regularly. And I was genuinely touched that they’d gone so far as to personalise the messages with a “Dear Dom” until somebody told me about the mail merge function in Microsoft Outlook.

I was also surprised that they thought I might be able to help them in some way, instead of rendering their product just that little bit less cool, like I do with the clothes I wear.

Nevertheless, there are times when a press release fails to entice me to promote anything, and instead just irks me. This week I received an email suggesting that I have a chat with a certain gentleman, whom I will not name, about how wonderful his life was. Or at least that’s how I interpreted it initially. The suggestion was that we discuss some new research from Deakin University which looked at marriage and its correlation with happiness. Its key finding was that people who have been married for more than 40 years are happiest. This person whose publicist contacted me has done similar research, apparently, and has come up with a bunch of tips for how to make a long-term relationship work.

Great, I thought to myself. Not only am I surrounded by smug married people at every social function I attend, not only do they fill my Facebook feed with photos of them hugging one another and their perfect progeny – now they’ve started emailing me at work as well.

And yes, I’m aware that it might seem a touch narcissistic to interpret a perfectly generic publicity pitch through the lens of my own situation, but if my life isn’t all about me then I’d greatly appreciate someone clarifying that for me. Preferably while talking a great deal about me in the process.

Marriage is all about being “happy ever after”. That’s how our society defines it – and one interesting thing about the Deakin research is that it reveals that most married couples are actually at their least happy in their first year of marriage, as the reality of making that commitment kicks in, and they discover that it isn’t just a question of trotting merrily through a field of daisies.

Growing up in a family and society where it was very much the norm, I’ve always idealised marriage. I would be happy someday when I was married, I told myself. So conversely, while I was not, I could not possibly be happy. The secret to life, as I understood it, was all about finding somebody else, about finding the yin to your yang, the Tennille to your Captain. Without a wife, I was incomplete.

That message is driven home by every rom-com I watch, by every photo I see in a gossip magazine of lovestruck celebrities clinging to one another, by every couple I pass snuggling on a park bench while you’re kicking a soft-drink can along the path for lack of anything better to do on a Saturday night, or perhaps that last one is just me.

But here’s the thing. If it doesn’t happen for you, then the only sensible response is to find other means of happiness and fulfilment. Other people can help, be they friends, family, colleagues or pets, but in the end you have to be okay with moving through life as a unit of one. With booking one seat on a plane for your holiday, with asking the maitre’d for a table for one, with lying in a double bed by yourself when you stay in hotels. With going and watching a movie by yourself, and analysing it in your head as you walk home instead of talking it through with a companion.

Sure, all of this may not be ideal, but you know what? It’s fine.

The only alternative is hating your life, and keep focussing on what you lack instead of all the great things you’ve got going on. Since my life is actually fairly excellent, and rolling as a solo slice of yin is just fine, at least for the time being, I’ve had to learn that it’s perfectly possible to be happy without being married, and that being single isn’t necessarily an inferior state of being.

The other alternative, of course, is to simply rush into a relationship that isn’t right, just so you won’t be alone. And that’s the problem with this survey, of course. Sure, marriage might make people happier, I wouldn’t know. But there’s plenty of evidence that it can make you unhappier too. Single lives might be a bit empty at times, but they surely aren’t as miserable as an unhappy marriage can be, with two people tearing at one another until finally they break loose. When you're single, there are no fights, and there are surely fewer tears.

And so I began to think critically about the Deakin research, instead of just pitying myself. The survey found that people who had been married for 40 years or more were happiest. Okay, fine. But to be married for that amount of time, they must surely have been alive for at least 56 years; in all probability closer to sixty-five or seventy. That means they’ve probably retired, or close to it. They’re probably fairly wealthy, having benefited from the housing boom that’s still making city living so unaffordable for my generation. They probably have grandchildren. Of course they’d be fairly content with their lot in life!

What’s more, anyone of that age would have grown up in the aftermath of World War II, and seen Vietnam and all those other conflicts as well. If you’ve lived through, or near, a time of war, of course you’re going to appreciate what we have now more than somebody who’s thirty ever could. What’s normal for us surely feels like a hard-won gain for older people. They’ve also got more perspective on the incredible convenience of modern life. Even a dishwasher is enough to make you feel pretty satisfied with how things had worked out for you, I’d imagine.

Besides, they're in a position where society demands they feel happy, nearing the end of a long life, and it takes a lot of guts in that scenario to put up your hand and tell a stranger doing market research that you aren't.

The lesson I ultimately draw from the Deakin research is not in fact that we should all marry for forty years plus to be happy, but that the rest of us should all be happier with the world we actually live in, and stop taking so many things for granted.

So what I’m going to do now is go outside and have a walk in the park in the midday sun. I’ll remember to be grateful that I’m almost too old for military service, and never got called up. And I’ll be glad of my friends, and family, and the comfortable life I lead. And if any researcher from Deakin Uni asks me whether I’m happy, even though I’ll be walking through the park by myself when I take their call, I’ll say hell yes.

Oh, and the guy who I was supposed to be talking to? As I read more about his life, it turned out that he’s been through some incredibly tough times as well. His first marriage broke up, they had fertility problems and he spent some time in prison. So it’s not surprising that he feels pretty happy about how his life has turned out now. And while I’ve never had any of his ups in life, I reckon I’m okay with that if I don’t have to go through the bad times he’s been through. Perhaps I’ll write an advice book of my own, and send him a press release?

Deck the halls with... nothing

There’s nothing that I want for Christmas. Absolutely nothing. Peace on earth would be nice, or even a modicum of politeness during Question Time, but I’m not holding my breath.

Same goes for my birthday a few weeks later. A nice meal with loved ones would be lovely, and I’ll even settle for a mediocre meal with people I’m vaguely fond of, but I don’t want gifts.

That’s because the honest truth is that I simply can’t think of anything I need or want. I’m by no means fabulously wealthy, but if you get to your mid-thirties without a family of your own, and aren’t the world’s greatest saver, you tend to accumulate most of the gadgets and thingumajigs you could ever want. In fact, I’m already oversupplied with items I can barely justify having bought in the first place. (Top of that list is my Wii, which I haven’t switched on in over a year and, what’s more, has a really, really dumb name.) And I’m not even a proper hoarder, I’m just a bit lazy.

Rethinking my approach to possessions is the only sensible conclusion from what I’ve been doing this week: clearing out a storage cage in the basement of my apartment building. To make a somewhat embarrassing confession, I haven’t actually entered the space in something like six years. Which means that a fairly large cache of my earthly possessions have been been sitting and gathering dust for as long as I was in high school. Which surely means that there simply can’t be anything there that I need.

As a helpful confirmation of this assumption, my building used to have security problems, so a number of thieves went through my cage and concluded that I had nothing with any resale value besides an ancient laptop, which they kindly saved me the trouble of chucking out.

I was sure there must be some precious mementos in there, though, so I decided to sort through the carnage instead of just chucking everything out. The vast majority of it was paper. Dozens of books, reams of old lecture notes and a few decaying school exercise books, for starters. The latter I decided to keep, to one day be donated to the museum that will doubtless be set up to commemorate me. For instance, I wrote a rather cheerful school report on my Year Six trip to Canberra, even though I firmly remember spending the entire time moping because my eleven-year-old crush had a thing for the Vice-Captain.

There were hundreds of pages of old bills, bank statements and receipts which I suppose might be of use to an identity thief. (Honestly, anyone’s welcome to my identity – it’s not like I’ve been doing all that much with it.) There were all my textbooks course readers from six years of studying law, which I very much hope never to use again. And there was an extraordinarily detailed collection of utterly random crap, from receipts to business cards, to various technological knick-knacks that are now obsolete. My MiniDisc copy of the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness turned out not to be so infinite after all.

Furthermore, my storage cage once had a vermin problem, presumably due to my own negligence, meaning that a significant volume of the stuff has rodent poo scattered throughout it. There’s also a strong smell of urine, either from the same rodents or perhaps the thieves, irritated that their hard work opening all my boxes yielded so little that could be resold in exchange for narcotics.The various ransackings over the years have led to the partial ruining of a few precious things, sadly, like the trove of photos I found from my uni days. I’d like to think that the digital photos I now store in the cloud will outlast me, whereas these photographic prints have faded away at roughly the same pace as my hairline.

One conclusion I couldn’t help making is that the sooner that all documents are electronic, the better. There were literally kilos of official pieces of paper in there that I will never need again unless there are questions over whether anybody deposited $5000 into my bank account 15 years ago. And I’m not sure they’re worth keeping on the off-chance that I become Prime Minister.

On returning to my apartment, I couldn’t help asking myself what the point is of the possessions I give pride of place in my living space. I’ve got dozens of DVDs which I carefully accumulated in my early twenties, but I never watch now that I have cable and streaming devices. Nor do I listen to CDs anymore – these days, nearly any album I could possibly want is right there on Spotify. I used to love getting CDs for Christmas, but now there’s no way anybody can give me an album that I can’t already listen to for the same flat fee.

Besides, my tastes have changed since I accumulated most of my record collection. Once upon a time, I used to be a massive fan of Sting’s solo work, whereas now, I scratch most of his CDs intentionally.

The exception to this is my book collection, which I couldn’t bear to lose. But even there, there’s no denying that it’d be a lot easier to move house with a Kindle.

Most of the clutter in my life, then, is in the process of being replaced by digital media. What other possessions do I care about? There are a few artworks by friends and family which are undoubtedly my most precious possessions. There are my musical instruments, even though I barely play them because I never managed to start that credible indie band I was planning. And that’s about it.

What’s more, when I think about the people I’d usually give Christmas presents to, I can’t really see that they’ve got any room for more stuff either. Even – and indeed, especially the children in my family. Now that our toy aisles are full of dirt-cheap, plastic items from China, I can’t imagine how any kid manages to play thoroughly with every item they’ve already been given, let alone getting more. There’s barely enough room in most infantile bedrooms for a cot, let alone yet another train set or Toy Story figurine or Octonaut Underwater Base Thingo.

Consequently, I’ve decided that the gifts I give will be intangible. Tickets to an event, or something like that. Something that doesn’t take up space in our lives before being consigned to the tip, the way I’ve just consigned a large volume of the flotsam and jetsam of my life to landfill. Something that guarantees I’ll spend time with the people I want to spend time with. And that’ll do.

So this year, I’m entirely comfortable with the prospect of Santa’s sack being empty. As long as there’s the usual abundance of ham, turkey and miscellaneous relatives, I’ll have an entirely happy Christmas.

My Movember reign

Today I looked in the mirror, and a strange, moustachioed man looked back. Add a red cap and it could easily have been Super Mario staring back, taking a brief breather between repetitive Princess rescues. And then I remembered why I look like that. It's Movember, and so, for the first time in my life, I've allowed my upper lip to blossom while subjecting the rest of my face to the razor.

Signing up for Movember, I've discovered, makes you part of a not-so-secret brotherhood. All month, I've been nodding sympathetically at a number of other blokes in my workplace who are sporting similarly malnourished sproutings beneath their nostrils. We don't even need to check whether we're doing Movember – I mean, seriously, why else would anyone grow a moustache? And in particular, grow it in isolation?

When I agreed to do it, I was planning to simply shave off most of the beard I was sporting back then. But then a pedantic colleague pointed me to the rulebook, which clearly states that all participants must start clean-shaven. And so it was that I found myself timidly subjecting myself to a cut-throat razor-wielding barber, who made my cheeks smoother than they've been since I was in primary school.

By embracing Movember, I am embracing one of the things about my body I find most irritating – the speed at which my facial hair grows, which tends to give me a five o’clock shadow by lunchtime. The curse of hairiness kicked in early for me. I remember being given my first electric razor the summer before I went into Year 7. (Yes, that number is "Seven".) Even then, my face had already begun to accumulate the fluffy down of adolescence.

Since then, I’ve either embraced stubble or had to shave every day with a blade – I've never found an electric shaver that could cope with my stubble. That "shaves as close as a blade or your money back" offer would have seen me reclaiming my dough in record time. And as a double-whammy, I have very sensitive skin which inevitably gets irritated by shaving. Back when I first started out, I regularly had more bits of tissue stuck to my cheeks than Norman Gunston.

It's odd that I haven't done Movember before now, actually, as there is no other charity drive for which I am so perfectly genetically equipped. I can't endure the 40 Hour Famine without feeling dreadful hunger pangs, and even though I'm hardly a committed drinker, I'd miss the odd beer during Dry July. But if all I have to do to raise money is endure one moustachioed month, then hey, count me and my over-active follicles in.

In fact, after twenty-odd days of growth, my moustache looks downright intentional. Some friends, in fact, are even advising me to keep it. Although since the more the moustache grows, the more I look like Borat, I have serious doubts abou whether the pro-moustache lobby has my best interests at heart.

The other problem with moustaches is that while they were delightfully daggy ornaments back when Movember started in 2004, best known for gracing the countenances of people like David Boon, Merv Hughes and 'Baby' John Burgess, they're now the province of hipsters. On a recent trip to Melbourne, I spotted dozens of florid mos, some of them waxed or even twirled. They're now a form of affectation, like wearing plate-glass spectacles or sporting a trilby.

This is perhaps the biggest argument against keeping the mo, other than the obvious aesthetic ones – they're horribly high-maintenance. My mo already needs trimming – see, I told you I was fast! That and having to shave every morning has added at least ten minutes to my morning beauty routine, what with foaming up the cream and applying liberal qualities of after-shave balm in a desperate attempt to stop my skin from turning bright red because it's gotten more irritated than a cabbie whose radio can't pick up Alan Jones.

More to the point, it's made me need a morning beauty routine in the first place, and that alone has deprived me of several precious minutes of sleep. (And no, I don't expect anybody who regularly uses makeup to sympathise…)

Nevertheless, it’s all worth it, for the month at least, because Movember does support a worthwhile cause – men's health. While I've no sympathy for men's rights advocates when it comes to most issues – those who argue that "feminism has gone too far" and begun oppressing men display such staggering, deliberate ignorance about the nature of the world that it's hardly worth even bothering to argue with them – it's undeniable that men are very bad at dealing with their health problems. Even worse, in fact, than we are at dealing with household chores.

Prostate cancer kills too many of us, and in stark contrast to the great success breast cancer campaigns have had in raising awareness among women, wilful ignorance remains the default position for many men. This lack of engagement is even more pronounced when it comes to Movember's other primary cause – mental health. Admitting that you're not coping is still highly stigmatised among men. It's a rare man who'll 'fess up if there's a problem, even to a close mate. Sometimes the warning signs aren't really there to begin with, and all too often, they're simply ignored. The stereotype that men would rather talk about sport than their feelings still has far too much evidence to support it today.

Since it began in 2004, Movember's raised a remarkable $302 million to try and address these problems. And it's gotten men talking about uncomfortable subjects by giving us something fun to joke about. I'm very glad to have undertaken the experiment, and it's certainly shown me a new side of myself, even if it's a side that looks like a Soviet-era railway ticket inspector.

I’m pretty confident that like the Eastern Bloc of which it's so uncomfortably reminiscent, my moustache will be confined to the dustbin of history on December 1. Until then, though, viva Movember and viva the ridiculous custom that is the moustache!

You may check out Dom’s regrettable facial growth and make sympathy donations here.

How I sobered up, by accident

Over the past few weeks, I've been feeling really great for some reason. I've been rising far earlier than my usual eight o’clock, often at six or seven, which has meant that while I usually miss an hour of Ten Breakfast, in recent weeks I’ve been able to boycott the entire thing. And at night, I've been getting to sleep almost as soon as my head hits the pillow, whereas it often takes me hours of lying there and visualising trampolining, pirouetting sheep shouting “Go to sleep, you idiot, you’ll feel exhausted tomorrow!”.

Actually, I kind of miss those sheep. But the rest of it is all good. Best of all, I think I’ve slimmed down a bit. When I look in the mirror, I’m pleasantly surprised for once – as well as unpleasantly surprised by my bounteous Movember moustache, but that’s another story. I’ve run into friends in the past month who’ve asked me if I’ve lost weight – which I think is one of those taboo questions, because if the answer is ‘no’, it suggests that they think you’re ordinarily enormous. In this case, for once, the answer is – yeah, I think I probably have.

I certainly haven’t been trying to be healthy, so I couldn’t work out what it was that was putting a spring in my step, except perhaps spring itself. I haven’t been exercising more than my usual minimal amount, and I’ve been working unpleasantly long hours lately. But after a bit of thought, I think I’ve figured it out. It’s the fact that I haven’t been drinking.

Now, I didn’t make any conscious plan to cut out the grog. I didn’t sign up for Ocsober or Fashionably Late Dry July or No-booze-vember or any other month-name-pun-based sobriety drive. I wasn’t trying to turn over a new leaf, or purge my toxins or realign chakras or anything along like that. And I certainly haven’t gone teetotal.

But when I look back over the past six weeks or so, I can only think of one evening where I had more than two or three drinks – and on the vast majority of days, I didn’t end up drinking anything at all. There was one evening when I had a cocktail or two and got a touch emotional, shall we say, but other than that, it’s been weeks of glorious, albeit accidental, sobriety.

Since realising this, I can’t help wondering whether this is how things should be all the time. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that my ability to bounce back from a night on the turps has lessened considerably. I’ve never been all that big a drinker – or to put it another way, I’ve always been “soft”, in that delightful parlance men use to exert peer pressure – but I guess I was regularly having a bit of a drink on somewhere between two and four days a week. But now I’m wondering whether it's worth it when for the next few days, I'll be stumbling around with a brain that feels like it's got the handbrake jammed on.

The really scary thing is how much alcohol affects my mood. It's been living up to its 'depressant' title a little too much for my liking. Not only can it make me excessively frivolous and indiscreet, but I sometimes wake up the morning after a boozing session feeling downright stabby. With a really bad hangover, I can even find myself relating to Morrissey. It seems that having a few drinks and getting a bit exuberant burns through my following day’s cheerfulness quotient as well.

The National Health and Medical Research Council has guidelines for alcohol consumption that I’ve always felt seemed highly ambitious in a booze-happy country like Australia. For adults, they recommend no more than 2 standard drinks a day on average, in order to avoid long-term detriment to your health. And to avoid injury, they recommend no more than 4 on any single occasion.

The first time I saw these numbers, I wondered whether I’d missed the memo, and the NHMRC had been transformed into Australia’s peak body for unrealistic killjoys. I also wondered what their Christmas parties must be like. But now that I am inadvertently complying with their guidelines, I can’t help feeling that there’s a lot to recommend them. Perhaps they’re realistic killjoys after all?

Of course now that I’m thinking of making a conscious choice to cut down on my alcohol intake, as opposed to achieving it through a busy period at work and inattention to my social life, my resolve will probably waver. And with Christmas parties and the Bacchanalia that is New Year’s ahead, it’ll be quite a challenge.

But I want to remember how great these past few weeks have been, how much more energy I’ve had getting out of bed in the morning, and how much more positive I’ve felt about facing the day. I want to remember what it’s like to feel productive and efficient and even a little healthy.

And above all, I’d like to have access to 100% of my brain function during 100% of my waking hours, if that isn’t too much to ask  Which is why I would like to propose a festive season toast to those NHMRC guidelines, if I may. Just the one, though.

Ten things I love about summer

Earlier in the year, I confessed to having something along the lines of seasonal affective disorder. Winter makes me grumpy and resentful. Well, even more grumpy and resentful than usual. About as grumpy and resentful, in fact, as Karl Rove on election night.
But as I look out the window, the intense sunlight reminds me that we are mere weeks away from my favourite season, and I thought I'd bookend my earlier diatribe against winter with an ode, or laudation, or acclamation, or [insert your own favourite pretentious word meaning to heap a whole pile of praise on something here], or even panegyric. Because summer is the best season, and it is just over three weeks away, and I'm going to be on holidays, and – well, yay. Which is not a word I often use.

1) The beach

This has to be number one. Not only are Australian beaches lovely, of course, but the little secret we tend not to mention in Tourism Australia's ad campaigns is that the subtropical parts of our fine country can be, well, a bit cold for quite a lot of the year. Whereas the best days on the beach are, of course, the days of full, blazing sun – and, ideally, warm water temperatures. Such conditions, my friends, are only possible in summer – at least where I live in Sydney, and points further south are even less hospitable to the beachgoer during the off-season.

Sure, let's not admit to potentially-economy-boosting tourists that our beaches can be chilly at other times of the year. But amongst ourselves, let's admit that beaches are a summer thing, okay? And on a good day – well, this image speaks for itself.

2) The heat

Warm weather was elusive last summer throughout much of the country, and it only drove home just how much I love the temperatures of our finest season. Sure, heat can be tiring, and my skin starts to burn after approximately five minutes of sun, but sunshine always puts me in a cheerful mood. Life seems jolly and full of delightful possibilities when the weather is warm. I realise this is irrational, but I don’t care. I love it so much that I can even understand why people like the Gold Coast.

3) Cricket

It's perfect that the most time-consuming of all sports takes place right when we have blocks of empty days to fill. Test cricket is an absolute marathon for the viewer, who risks being literally stuck in front of the TV if they have a leather lounge suite and no cooling system. (If that isn’t clear enough, let’s just say that sweat can sometimes have adhesive properties.) Test matches last for up to thirty hours over five days, and at their best, offer great see-sawing drama as teams gain and lose the upper hand.

During the winter months, nobody has that kind of time to invest in what is essentially a contest to see how far you can hit a lump of leather with a piece of wood. But in summer, cricket performs a valuable excuse to sit on the couch for protracted periods of time, staring at the screen because it's more socially acceptable than just blankly staring into space.

If you find Test cricket a tad dull, wash your mouth out! If you still find it dull, and are beginning to resent the taste of suds, one-day cricket and Twenty20 offer, respectively, slightly more action and arguably too much action. So there, modern cricket has something for everyone. Well, everyone who likes cricket.

4) Summer wardrobe

It's impossible not to feel relaxed while wearing warm-weather clothing. And I believe this even though the shape of my feet is such that I find thongs unpleasant to wear, which I realise renders me borderline un-Australian. (But remember that I love cricket, okay?)
Shorts, short-sleeved shirts, open-toed shoes and sunnies are fundamentally more pleasant clothes to wear than the heavy clobber of winter. Plus you aren’t allowed to wear them in wanky nightclubs, which surely only proves how excellent they are.

This summer I will be rocking Hawaiian shirts (I’m sorry, but there is no other verb which may be used in association with Hawaiian shirts) for three whole months. So I’ll be looking just about as tropical and relaxed as I feel.

5) Laziness

In summer, laziness becomes socially acceptable. In other seasons, it’s downright unacceptable to lie and read a book for hours on end. But in summer, under a tree or a beach umbrella, idleness is seen as just about the ideal state to be in. It’s not perceived as being lazy, for some reason; it’s seen as relaxing.

I sometimes wonder whether those who live in constantly warm climates simply spend the entire year chilling out. (That’s certainly the impression given by the operators of Ibiza nightclubs.) One of these days I intend to find out...

6) Music festivals

I assume that when music promoters contacting the world’s top bands to ascertain whether they’ve any interest in making the long trek down to Australia, nine months of the year, they couldn’t think of anything worse. But given the chance to escape the unpleasant northern hemisphere winter and tour around sunny Oz, they’ll eagerly jump onto the nearest 747.

I sometimes wonder whether we as a nation have gone overboard, and should perhaps consider keeping at least one weekend over summer free of amazing music festivals, just to give ourselves and the nation’s sniffer dogs a chance to recharge. But no – it seems to be a given about life in Australia that summer will be jam-packed full of excellent events, and winter will be fairly dull. So we may as well enjoy things like the Big Day Out and Homebake and St Jerome’s and Meredith and Peats Ridge and Soundwave and everything else during the three months they’re available to us.

7) Barbecues – sorry, I mean BBQs

Meat, fire, bread and tomato sauce – what’s not to like? Plus there’s plenty on offer for vegetarians – salads are an equally important part of barbies nowadays, and In particular, potato salad, at least until it gets warm and becomes an ideal petri dish for bacteria. Summer and barbecues are as indivisible as barbecues and flies.

Not convinced? It’s the one occasion when men actually get off their arses and cook.

8) Expats

You know those annoying high-achievers you used to be friends with at school and uni? You know how they now live overseas and post exciting Facebook updates from exciting places and you’re incredibly jealous of them for 50 weeks of the year? Well, over summer, they’ll come crawling back because it’s the one time of the year when there’s far more happening here than in New York or London or wherever.

Sure, they’ll make lots of patronising comments about how much smaller Australia seems now, and you’ll want to punch them in the teeth, but once you get through that, it’ll be lovely, just like it used to be. Because the funny thing about expats is that, unlike people who live here with whom you might lose touch, expat friendships are somehow preserved in aspic, ready to be reactivated on their return.

After their brief visit, they’ll leave, pretending to be torn about where to live as they head to the airport. And then next Christmas, you’ll do it all again.

9) Christmas parties

‘Tis the season of abundant snacks, booze and bonhomie in the workplace! Keep your pants on while in the vicinity of the office photocopier, and Christmas parties are a fine thing. Unless you find yourself trapped among colleagues who’ve gotten just that little bit “emotional” after one sherry too many, there’s no shortage of fun in sight.

In fact, the Christmas spirit inhabits the work place throughout much of December and even January, by which I mean everybody slacks off and/or wears silly costumes. Summer is such a wonderful time of year that even being at work during the season can feel like being on holiday – that is, unless your job involves having to find interesting things to talk or write about, in which case, I’ve found, the season can be somewhat nightmarish. Best to use up all your leave, then, and make the most of summer!
So, there you have it – summer is easily the best season. End of story, QED.

And yes, I'm fully aware that I promised ten things, but have only listed nine. See item #5 above.

Child's play really is... child's play

There is a secret nobody ever tells you about kids. We've all heard the parents of young children protesting about how they never get to go out and have fun anymore, and about how they have to spend every waking moment running around after their children - every moment that the child is awake, that is, which often coincides with moments when the parent would much rather be asleep.

While both of these things are true, there's another side to it which I've recently discovered. Until now, parents out there have been hogging this information for themselves, as ammunition to use in their favourite pastime – complaining to their pals who aren't parents about how their 'lives' are over now that they've taken the almost-always-voluntary decision to reproduce.

I'm sharing this information with my fellow Childless-Australians in an attempt to win the guilt-trip war. And just to remind you all, the deal is that we never, ever admit to feeling unfulfilled without children, okay?

The parents' secret is this: while children are demanding, there is considerable upside involved. Because large proportions of the time they spend with their kids is devoted to playing games. Old-fashioned fun games that, surprisingly enough, haven't gotten any less enjoyable since we were in primary school.

That's right. You may have abandoned Lego and handball and chasings and wrestling and swinging on swings and see-sawing on see-saws. But they haven't abandoned you. What's more, they're as good as ever.

I discovered this after spending over an hour playing hide-and-seek with my nephew on the weekend. He's almost three, or as he would term it, "a big boy now". And I want to get one thing straight from the outset: I won. Comprehensively.

Sure, there are some advantages that come from being older. I have sufficient patience, for instance, to be able to hide for minutes on end without moving or speaking, whereas he is currently unable to resist running out every thirty seconds to see where I am before returning to his hiding place. On that form, he certainly wouldn't cut it as a ninja.

If I were his hide-and-seek coach rather than his adversary, I would also point out to him that his definition of a hiding place also leaves a little to be desired – he tends merely to choose spaces in which he fits, rather than spaces in which he fits and cannot be seen.

Perhaps his biggest weakness, though, is his tendency to hide in the exact same place where I just hid. And while imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, I can vouch for the fact that it's no way to win at hide-and-seek.

But in case you think that playing hide-and-seek with my nephew is like taking candy from a baby, only instead of candy it's crushing victories, let me point out that he has a few natural advantages of his own. For starters, he is far, far smaller than me; probably less than 20% of my volume, which affords him many more places in which to hide. I'm obliged to hide behind cupboard doors and the like, whereas he could simply conceal himself in a laundry basket or a large planter pot. And although I spent most of the game finding him immediately and pretending I hadn't so as to make my 'seeking' period last longer than fifteen seconds, there was one occasion when he hid in the tiny gap underneath a TV cabinet where I genuinely couldn't figure out where he was.

What's more, that same juvenile lack of patience means that he tends to ignore the ’count to ten’ section of the hide and seek rule book, and instead skips immediately to the ’coming ready or not’ part. This means that he often simply follows me, and thus and observes the place in which I'm hiding. Which tends to ruin the game somewhat. And while I congratulated him each time on finding me , I have to confess that I did so with a slight sense of resentment, and pondered an appeal to the third umpire.

The toughest part of playing against him, though, is it he tends to forget precisely how the seeking part works. If he can't spot me immediately, he tends to run around shouting my name with increasing levels of panic. It requires all the self-control I can muster to harden my heart and not emerge immediately to put him out of his misery. But I refuse to do that, because while that may make him fret in the short term, that kind of mollycoddling won't enable my beloved nephew to develop the concealment skills he may someday needs to become a special forces soldier. The enemy isn't going to pretend not to spot him in order to prolong the fun of the game, are they?

And here's the great thing – by playing hide and seek for a prolonged period, and giving his parents a break, I made myself seem like a Good Uncle. Onlookers may have concluded that I was heroically sacrificing my free time to bring a smile to a child's face. Not so. I genuinely enjoyed my triumphant return to a game I'm sure I haven't played since my age measured in single digits. It was fun. Really, really, fun.

Outside of organised sports and overly-involved videogames, we adults rarely allow ourselves to enjoy games the way we did when we were children. The tedious minutiae of everyday life tend to get in the way of more important things like getting really good at power shots on the handball court, or building the most excellent sandcastle ever.

Playing games with children is a license to return to those idyllic days after years of pretending to grow up. We are having kids later in life than we used to, which is a pity, because I imagine once upon a time we used to transition seamlessly from playing games ourselves to playing games with our children.

Well okay, the reduction in teen parenthood is probably a net positive social development. But spending a decade or more without regularly playing games is nevertheless a regrettable byproduct of our relative delay in reproducing. Society's rules say that we can't play games unless we're doing it with kids. But with my nephew around, I can invent pointless yet excellent games like the one where I pretend to be an angry troll and chase after him as though we were on Twitter and he was a B-grade celebrity. (Being a troll is the ideal role for me – curiously, the grumpiness seems to come naturally.) What's more, having a small child at hand to amuse permits you to spend hours playing in a playground without appearing to have a major psychological problem.

So next time you hear a parent complaining about having to stay home with their child, I suggest you be sparing in your sympathy. Because they're probably building a pillow fort, watching cartoons and eating ice-cream, and goodness knows that's a better offer than many of the so-called 'grown-up' nights out I've had recently.

Trying not to care about the hair

I’ve loved swimming ever since I was a kid who visited North Sydney Olympic Pool. And if you’ve never been, you should – it’s right next to the Sydney harbour, almost underneath the Harbour Bridge. It’s a pool where lots of world records have been set by former greats of Australian swimming, whose photos adorn the corridors. And every time I enter the water, I imagine myself as an Olympian, albeit one of those Eric the Eel-style novelty entrants who hails from a country where they don’t have pools.
The best way to get fit, in my view, is by doing laps of a 50m-long pool. No other form of exercise so quickly becomes a question of survival. In my case, the instinct to avoid drowning kicks in after about the first twenty metres. You can push your body harder, I’ve found, by tricking it into thinking that you’re swimming to shore to save your life. And I’m still a little scared of the deep end, which makes me all the more eager to struggle to the safety of the wall.

I returned to the pool on the weekend after months of absence. That first swim back is always a humbling experience. There’s no other form of exercise fit that requires you so publicly to showcase your lack of fitness as a precursor to doing something about it.

After getting changed and looking disappointedly in the mirror, it was with a somewhat heavy heart, not to mention other elements of my physique, that I slouched timidly onto the pool deck. It was a great day for a swim, being unseasonably hot, and my local council pool was crammed with frolicking families. They splashed and screamed as I sidled past – and I don’t think the screams were a reaction to my appearance, although I can’t be sure.

Earlier in the year, I was going to the pool two or three times a week, and had gradually worked up to the point where I could swim a kilometre, albeit with regular pauses to pant more frantically than a husky in the middle of summer.

I’m too embarrassed to admit how many laps I managed – let’s just say that the number of laps was in single figures. I felt humbled. Yet again, I had abandoned my progress towards fitness, forcing myself to start over again. For me, exercising has always been a game of snakes and ladders, only where the ladders have been replaced by even more snakes.

After a few laps, I was standing at the shallow end, lungs desperately trying to oxygenate my exhausted body. I wanted to do another pair of laps, but I wasn’t sure I had it in me. As I was trying to muster the willpower, I looked across to the next lane, where a much buffer gentleman in his 40s or 50s was preparing to take off for his next effortless lap. I smiled at him, my countenance acknowledging that one of us was a fair bit better at this whole swimming lark than the other.

He grinned back and asked me a question. “Did you have to pay extra, mate?”

This confused me. I had been coming to this pool long enough to be familiar with the pricing scheme, and while there are a tempting range of discounts for frequent visitors, I had never heard of any surcharge.

Having neither any clue what he was going on about, nor sufficient breath at my disposal for a detailed follow-up question, I opted to cover my bases with a non-specific “Huh?”.

Smirking, he jabbed a finger in my direction. “Because of the hair!” he said.

I winced. Yes, okay, I am unusually hairy. Yes, this is relatively visible when I am clad in a swimming costume. But no, they do not impose an additional charge for excess body hair.

How would that even work, anyway? Why would an extra charge be required? I’ve racked my brain and I can’t come up with anything. If you’re going to insult me, random sir, please take the time to do it in a way that makes sense.

The pool guy could tell I was somewhat taken aback. He immediately backpedalled. “I’m pretty hairy myself,” he said, untruthfully. Sure, he had a little bit of hair on display, but there was no doubting which of the two of us was better evidence of the theory of evolution.

I smiled back, pretending not to be offended, following the old schoolyard maxim of laughing off slurs so as not to let people know that they’d cut you to the quick.

“I’m sorry, that was inappropriate,” he said.

Yes, yes it was, I thought. But I just smiled more widely and said “Don’t worry about it, mate”.

Ever since I was in high school, I’ve been copping comments about being hairy. In my Year 12 yearbook, more than half the comments from the people with whom I’d spent the past six years referenced it. I thought they might have chosen to remark on my hilarity, or my friendliness, or hey, even my nerdiness – but no, it seemed that when they thought of me, that the first thing that came to mind. Oh, except for the one guy who called me ugly.

For some reason, hairiness is not a taboo topic for personal comments. I’ve always wondered whether people view it as a helpful observation, as though I’d somehow missed the fact that my body has been covered in copious hair since my adolescence. Or perhaps they’re just trying to be funny, which is a difficult comedy challenge when their only audience is me.

Overtly sexist, racist and homophobic comments tend to be taboo nowadays, except perhaps in certain circles within Federal Parliament. But snide remarks about people’s appearance seem to be more socially acceptable – Germaine Greer certainly seemed to think so on Q&A. I’ve made them in the past myself – they can be low-hanging fruit for jokes – but having been on the receiving end has shown me that they’re best avoided.

The hurtful thing comments about your appearance is that they mock a characteristic that you can’t change, and I’m not counting one friend’s intending-to-be-helpful suggestion that I get whole-body electrolysis. Such comments often zero in on the thing we feel most uncomfortable about ourselves, the thing that we are most bothered by when we look in the mirror. Especially if, let’s say, that mirror is at a swimming pool, and you’re wearing a swimming costume.

It would be good if people like me who are blessed with comment-worthy physical characteristics could develop thicker skin, of course. But it would be better, from my perspective, if random strangers could stop making comments about the layer of hair that is atop it.

The 007 double standard

It’s an odd coincidence of timing that right when Australian politics has been embroiled by the most intense debate about the treatment of women in political life that I can remember, our cinemas are welcoming back that most reliably sexist of public servants, James Bond. Skyfall, the 23rd ‘official’ Bond, opens next week with Daniel Craig, Judi Dench and Adele channelling Shirley Bassey on the soundtrack.I can’t imagine commentators objecting to the ‘misogynist’ label being applied to Bond – or Ian Fleming, for that matter, especially if we use the broader definition freshly endorsed by the Macquarie Dictionary, where it means ‘entrenched prejudices against women’ rather than hatred. Even M herself has used the label in 1995’s Goldeneye, when she tartly observed that Bond was “a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the Cold War”.

And fair enough, too. In the early Bonds, women are there to be pursued, and to inevitably yield. Oh, and to be given some of the most absurdly suggestive names ever given to fictional characters, like Holly Goodhead, Kissy Suzuki, Honey Ryder and, worst of all, Pussy Galore (here’s a fuller list).

Admittedly, Ian Fleming was distressingly literal with men’s names too – unsatisfied with calling his gold-crazy villain Goldfinger, he based his first name, Auric, on the Latin ‘aurum’ into the bargain – but it’s extraordinary how long this cartoonish approach to the series’ female character has endured. Only a few Bonds ago, Denise Richards was cast as a nuclear scientist (yes, really) called Dr Christmas Jones so that Pierce Brosnan could quip – brace yourself – “I thought Christmas only came once a year”. Seriously, that line would make even Prince Philip cringe.

And while there’s the occasional female spy, like Tatiana Romanova in From Russia With Love, but she is duped from the beginning by SPECTRE, and her presence allows Bond essentially to win the Cold War with his gonads.

They’ve upgraded him somewhat since the Connery and Moore days, not least because the brilliant casting of Dench as M has made the ultimate authority in Bond’s world female. And in more recent years the producers have tempered Bond’s machismo with a range of powerful female offsiders, like Michelle Yeoh – here’s a compile of her taking out five villains – but nevertheless, Bond remains the ultimate Hollywood alpha male.

It’s not just the sexism, either – his casual regard for violence is also disconcerting. Nobody else in the history of cinema has coolly dispatched so many bad guys, and in some of the early movies, he even hits women. Unless you’re Vladimir Putin, James Bond is exactly not the greatest role model.

So why, then, have his movies endured for fifty years, longer than any other movie series? (Full credit to the Carry On series, which tallied up an astonishing 31 instalments, but unlike Bond, their sexism wore thin after a few decades.) And why am I, as somebody who’s generally fairly averse to sexism and violence, extremely excited about going to see Skyfall?

Bond is everything I’m not, with the exception of British. I’m very glad that there aren’t really villains building high-powered lasers on the moon (although we did recently put one on Mars, Curiously), because if it was down to me to stop them, the bad guys would pretty much vaporise everything. And I would never need a license to kill  – I’d prefer a license to sit down for a coffee and a good old chat. So it’s unsurprising that I’ve always been fascinated by Bond to the point where I’ve read all of the novels multiple times. I even loved him in the cheesy Roger Moore era, that coincided with my childhood, although fortunately not to the point of wearing safari suits.

I grew up idealising Bond a man of action, who was always on the side of right. Men wanted to be him, and I was no exception, not least because fictional Bond girls wanted to be with him. Why couldn’t I have sexy silhouettes dancing abstractly through my title sequences, I wondered. And when I was first getting into cocktails, I even ordered, with no irony, a martini that was shaken rather than stirred, because I genuinely thought that if Bond had it that way, it must be the right way to have it.

The series’ producers have also struggled with the ethos of Bond in a world that’s made significant social progress since the 1960s. With Timothy Dalton, who took over for The Living Daylights in 1987, they tried to introduce a sensitive, new-age Bond, played by a serious actor who only romanced one woman per film. The problem was that audiences found him boring, and so they went back to a more dashing version with Pierce Brosnan. In his two outings as 007, Daniel Craig has grappled successfully with this dilemma by exploring the psychologically damaged side of the character – in 2012, it’s okay to be violent if you show the stresses that result from it. In Casino Royale we saw his Bond earning his license to kill, and struggling with his need to murder instead of wisecracking about it.

The difficult question with the Bond character, of course, is that sometimes our society needs cold-blooded secret agents. And never more so than during the Cold War, when espionage took the place of open hostilities. As unpleasant as that era was in hindsight, and extensive as were the moral compromises on both sides, it cost fewer lives than open hostilities.

The need for Bond-type figures has become apparent during the conflict with Al Qaeda, too – and indeed, the 9/11 Commission has highlighted the intelligence failures in the days before the attacks. If we learned anything from 9/11, it’s that sometimes the far-fetched mass-destruction scenarios from Hollywood movies can in fact come to pass, and we need people to infiltrate those groups and try to prevent attacks from occurring.

Whether or not bin Laden should have been assassinated in quite the manner that occurred in Abbottabad will probably always be a question of intense debate. I still wish they’d arrested him, but if indeed armed opposition was encountered, as was reported, I’ve no objection to Seal Team Six being given a license to kill. Furthermore, the success of that mission relied on people playing a dangerous double game on the ground, like the brave doctor who helped locate bin Laden.

Bond-style targeted assassinations are problematic, and are supposedly prohibited for the US Government by Presidential order – but few people would question the need for any security apparatus whatsoever, especially in places like the Middle East where intelligence is needed, and there are networks of activists who warrant our support.

The really scary thing, of course, is that the 007s of this world has to some extent been outmoded by airborne drones, who can kill from afar without endangering a highly-trained operative. Perhaps rogue drones should serve as the antagonist in the next Bond film?

I have seen Skyfall described as a Dark Knight-style re-evaluation of the Bond story, and I hope proves to be so. We know now that killing bad guys and shagging bodacious babes is far more morally complex than Sean Connery and Roger Moore made it seem. And while the early Bond books and movies can remain somewhat archaic pleasures, the character still has a place in a society that is still grappling with real threats, just as Fleming did during his intelligence career. With less preposterous villains, less one-dimensional female characters and, above all, fewer painful puns, there’s every chance that 007 might be with us for another 50 years.

What if women treated treat men the way men treat women?

At a time of intense debate about sexism in public life, with extravagant praise and condemnation of Julia Gillard’s attack on Tony Abbott still reverberating in our ears, I began wondering what could be done about it.

Even the most cursory glance at Federal politics over the past few weeks will make you want to move to a remote island off Vanuatu without any internet, phone, radio or television, and, based on this week, especially Q&A realise that in certain spheres, we have a very long way to go indeed.

Sure, it’d be nice if we could just wave a magic wand and achieve gender balance in public life, it really would. But even a world that was created by a woman and literally has magic wands, that of Harry Potter, has been accused of sexism. So clearly it’s a complex problem.

We men have had our chance to make way, after decades of feminism, and I think it's reasonable to conclude that we simply aren't willing to do that. So, I began to wonder, perhaps it's time we men started getting a taste of our own medicine? In the spirit of the scientists from the Manhattan Project who leaked the US' atomic bomb designs to the USSR, here are some tricks from the male playbook that you might like to use against the men in your life. Because there are two ways to achieve equality: either one side is lifted up, or the other is dragged down. So, let the dragging commence!

Talk about our sexual attractiveness

The hotness or otherwise of women has always been a question of public debate, even when they’re just trying to put on a comedy show. Women might want to start making, for instance, comments about the “f**kability” of male newsreaders, like the former head of Nine News, John Westacott, infamously did. And hey – women might also like to comment freely on the sexual attractiveness of Westacott himself.

Thanks to Ryan Gosling, this process has already begun.

(Warning - the title of the website I just linked to contains a swear word. But it also contains Ryan Gosling.)

Make inappropriate personal comments

As Germaine Greer has helpfully reminded us with her comments about Julia Gillard's posterior, there's nothing like a few biting personal comments to unfairly undermine somebody. All women need to do is isolate the things that men aren’t happy about with our bodies. Let me offer a few suggestions. Firstly, we are incredibly sensitive about losing our hair (trust me, Advanced Hair aren't raking it in because of our overwhelming respect for Warnie.) So women might like to use terms like "chrome-dome", Captain Baldie", "ol’ shiny-head" and “you there with the reflective scalp”, just to use some of the phrases that have been hurled at me already today by my own subconscious.

We blokes are also extremely sensitive about our weight. While we have used our control of Hollywood to try to pretend that morbidly obese men are jolly, nothing could be further from the truth. So go on, slug us in the gut about our guts.

Negging

This is a subtler technique. There are men out there, such as Neil Strauss who wrote the pick-up artist exposé The Game, who have taken this to an advanced level through “negging”. That’s a technique where you make a backhanded compliment designed to undermine your target and make her seek your approval by having sex with you. Bizarrely, it apparently works.

(Speaking of Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone negs him rather well in Crazy Stupid Love where she says that his body looks Photoshopped – that is, amazing, but ultimately fake.)

Negging lines to use on guys might include “That’s a lovely tie, did your mum choose it for you” and “Hey you remind me of a famous Hollywood actor. I think it’s Danny de Vito.”

See what I just did there? I made a mean joke about Danny de Vito’s appearance. Turning men upon ourselves, Greer-style, could be another effective technique.

Finally, another thing you might like to do in the service of degrading men is make mean jokes about male genitalia’s resemblance to miscellanous shellfish. But be warned that you may end up having to resign as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Take over the media

As many people have commented in the aftermath of Alan Jones’ comments about Julia Gillard’s father, talkback radio is a highly male-dominated field. (I should note that I am part of this problem.) Women have enormous audience power, and if a large proportion of women in major capital markets chose only to listen to female announcers, radio stations would be forced to introduce them.

Then perhaps we would get a female Alan Jones who could accuse men of "destroying the joint". Given the state of the planet and that men have dominated global politics for much of human history, it would be a more reasonable accusation, unless you think the fellas in power are doing a bang-up job with the economy and environment. Plus, I think Kyle’s really holding Jackie O back.

Initiate a vast global conspiracy.

I’ve often wondered what would happen if women used the fact that, statistically, there are ever so slightly more of them to exercise power. Women could, for instance, set up a huge global favouritism network – let’s call it, for argument’s sake, the "matriarchy". It could subtly affect everything from job interviews to TV ratings to election results, like a female-only version of the Stonecutters.

It wouldn’t be a programme of deliberately excluding men, of course. It's just that women might tend to find women more reliable, because they went to school with them, and prefer socialising with them anyway, and so of course they naturally gravitate towards them.

Besides, men’s natural place is at home anyway. They are clearly more suited to staying at home and playing with the children, because as we always hear, men mature more slowly than women. Who are the people who spend their adulthood fixating on inane sporting contests and obsessing about breasts which are, of course, primarily designed for feeding infants? Men.

Of course, an alternative approach would be for men and women to join together in removing the barriers and building a better society. But that seems too much like hard work, and you know that we men generally aren’t up for that.

How to survive a wedding when you’re single

 Weddings are a wonderful celebration of joy and commitment. But those who are single may find the contrast between the happy couple’s boundless joy and their own uncertain future a little stark.

If you are single at a wedding, you have only two options. You can either be the fun single friend/relative, or the sad one. That’s it. There is no middle ground. And trust me, it’s better to look like the life and soul of the party and be crying on the inside than to be looking like you’re on the verge of actually crying.

What's more, weddings make the perfect stage for you not only to pretend that you’re coping, but to subtly remind all those in attendance that marrying means sacrificing some of the freewheeling awesomeness that swingin’ singles enjoy. And yes, this may involve faking it a bit. But we all do on big occasions – you don’t really think that every single twirling couple out there on the dancefloor has a happy marriages, do you?

With these tips in your pocket or handbag, you will not only survive somebody else’s wedding – but thrive. I advise you to laminate them so that your tears or nervous sweat won’t make the ink run.

1) Dress loud

My inclination when dressing for formal occasions is usually to go subtle. A dark suit, a white or light blue shirt and a restrained tie is how like to I roll. On women, I generally endorse simple, elegant dresses in black or a dark colour.

But when you’re single, that's the wrong option. You want to communicate not only that you’re confident and awesome. Your job is to dress as the captain of the Fun Express, and suggest that anyone who’s not on board is missing out. You want everyone to be thinking not only “how on earth are they still single?”, but “I bet they know where the best after-party is.”

I’m not saying go garish. Flashing or spinning bow ties are out, and especially one that does both. But if you’re a guy, why not consider a pink or lemon shirt, or a loud tie, or perhaps a jaunty hat? Dressing overly formal can work, like full tux regalia or perhaps even tails, or you might like to go jauntily casual with an open collar, or perhaps trainers instead of leather shoes?

For the ladies, I reckon a bit of colour. Crimson, perhaps, or maybe even a bright orange or yellow? If you’re going floral, make it tropical. Steer clear of blues and greens – too conservative. There’ll be plenty of time to wear your duller outfits when you’re in a relationship.

2) Pre-prepare your small talk

I don’t mean in some strange psycho antisocial way. I just mean that you will constantly be required to summarise what you’re up to in fifteen seconds or less, so for heaven’s sake figure out how to make your life seem awesome, even if it isn’t. It's a little thing called "marketing". If you’re completely stuck, say you’re either saving up for a big trip around the world, or writing a novel but can’t tell them what it’s about in much detail just yet. Both of those claims are not only excellent conversation-starters, but impossible to disprove.

 3) Stay sober

There’s nothing sadder at a wedding than a single who writes themselves off. Sure, people may wonder whether you were secretly in love with the groom or something romantic and doomed like that, but to lose control is to concede defeat in the mission of emerging from the wedding with pride. The other great thing about keeping sober is that it will reduce the chance of you sobbing and hitting on the bride's mother.

4) Own the dancefloor

This one is really important. If you can’t dance, dance ironically; it’s fine. If you feel self-conscious, have a cheeky vodka shot before you go out there. (Note Tip #3.) Dancing is a wonderful way of subtly hint to all the couples in attendance that your life is better than theirs, because you regularly go out dancing when they don’t. For them, this is an exciting night out, but for you, it’s just another Saturday spent as King or Queen of the dancefloor. And I say this as somebody who spent the whole of his teenage years doing this – do not linger on the side of the dancefloor. Nobody bothers to water a wallflower.

5) Hook up

Look, why not, if the option’s there? Just make sure neither of you’s too drunk, so it doesn’t look desperate. In particular, dancefloor pashes are to be avoided – very undignified at your age. (See Tip #3 again.) I guarantee that anyone who’s married will, on some level, be slightly jealous that you’re still able to get action on a whim.

6) Avoid people with whom you've had history

Here’s the caveat to Tip #5: do not hook up with exes, for heaven’s sake. Weddings heighten your emotions, and that makes it more likely that you’ll consider going back somewhere that you sensibly decided you didn’t want to be.

 I’d steer clear of former crushes who once rejected you as well – you might discover that you’re not as over them as you thought. Although, by all means hook up – it’s a belated victory!

 Weddings are not a good time to take stock of one’s life. You might be entirely happy with the decisions you’ve made under most circumstances, but everybody wants to be clutching somebody’s hand when the bride and groom make their vows, in the same way that everyone wants to kiss somebody on New Year’s Eve. These events can be an emotional minefield, so for heaven’s sake, stay away from mines.

7) Be almost the last to leave

You’re single, so you’re a rager, right? And the last few hours of weddings are almost always the most fun, especially if you’re relatively sober and in a position to laugh at everyone else. (Tip #3 vindicated again!) But make sure you aren’t the last person out the door, and have to be evicted by a bride or groom feigning yawns, because that will only reveal that you’re trying to put off the moment when, after a day of more company than you know what to do with, you’re alone again.

When you do finally leave, always say you’ve got another party to go to, and invite other non-single people to come with. They will inevitably say no, both because they won’t be allowed by their partner, and because all of the romance of the day has probably put them in the mood for a spot of the ol’ shagging. If for some reason they say yes, note that their relationship might be on the rocks just in case you’re interested, and then pretend to text a friend, only to "discover" that it’s an extremely exclusive party and you aren’t able to bring plus-ones. Then suggest a drink elsewhere. Maybe back at yours...

In summary, your job is to lift everyone's mood, not kill it. And who knows, perhaps you’ll do such a great job that you’ll impress another lonely single and end up with a wedding of your own? Let’s not kid ourselves, you almost certainly won’t. But hey – what is a wedding for if not blind optimism in the face of depressing statistical reality?

Good luck, and remember – if you’re single, mingle!

What happens in Vegas...

When you get off the plane in Las Vegas, there are pokies in the airport. Right there at the arrival gate. Literally the first thing you see is a bank of slot machines and a bunch of dead-eyed travellers getting in that last flutter before they head back to whichever drab middle American city they hail from.

Right then and there, I made the snap decision not to gamble during my first-ever trip to Vegas last weekend. It makes a fool of many a man, Sin City, but I would be strong. I would place not one dollar into the coffers of the gambling industry.

(I was disappointed to discover that my colleague was only kidding about there being slot machines in the airport bathrooms as well. It’s probably just because they haven’t thought of it yet.)

Given my general aversion to betting, why was I even visiting what used to be the centre of world gambling until the Chinese Government decided to let Macau fleece its own citizens? I was joining a group of gentlemen friends for a “bachelor party”, as they call them in the States. We weren’t after a Hangover-type experience, although I’d gladly have met Mike Tyson and/or a tiger. But we did want to hang out, and go to some clubs and nice restaurant, and generally bond before consigning one of our number to the altar.

I won’t go into the details of the various shenanigans that occurred, because as everyone repeated like a mantra everywhere we went, “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”. Besides, it might be somewhat embarrassing to reveal just how tame a dozen thirty-something men can be.

There is trouble to be found in Vegas, of course, and I did find myself regularly thinking of the tragic, recent story of the 22-year-old AFL footballer John McCarthy, who died on a post-season trip to Vegas with Port Adelaide. Despite Las Vegas’ offer of hedonism without consequences, there are plenty of reminders that this is not always the case.

Admittedly, it’s a remarkable place, and I saw a lot of truly extraordinary things. It’s incredible what can be achieved with an unlimited budget and no sense of aesthetic restraint whatsoever. The Luxor has an enormous glass pyramid which dwarfs the Louvre’s in scale. The Paris Las Vegas resort has a replica Eiffel Tower, bang smack in the middle of which is a nightclub where I made an idiot of myself shimmying to R&B numbers. Caesar’s Palace has extraordinarily real-looking Roman antiquities, although I felt the effect was somewhat undermined by the escalators. And the Venetian, extraordinarily, has a network of indoor canals and a fleet of gondolas propelled by authentic singing gondoliers. It’s the kitschest place on the planet, with the possible exception of North Korea.

But the problem with it all, the thing that kept making me uncomfortable, is that every ridiculously opulent feature you look at, every jaw-dropping feature like the absurd roller coaster at Circus Circus and the replica Manhattan skyline in New York, New York, was paid for by gambling losses. Nevada’s casinos take in a billion dollars a month. Just one proprietor, Sheldon Adelson, makes so much money that he can afford to give $70 million to support the Republican Party. And while I’m sure a lot of that money came from high rollers who can presumably afford it, a great deal of the money being raked in undoubtedly comes from people who probably couldn’t afford to go to Vegas at all, let alone walked in the doors of the casinos.

As much as it’s a town of excess, the place is also a monument to weakness. I wasn’t immune to it, and so I became only the latest in a long line of people to abandon my principles in Vegas, and played a little bit of blackjack with all of my friends. (I ended up earning the princely sum of $30, so in many ways, I showed those Vegas fat cats a thing or two.)

We got talking to the dealer – a really nice guy who’d been in the town for years and ended up working at the Hard Rock Casino because he preferred a more relaxed atmosphere where you turn up to work in a t-shirt. And he told us a few tales that were horrifying enough to ruin our sense of bachelor-party bonhomie.

He told us about one patron who had bet $17,000 on a final hand, gotten a 20 but then been beaten by the dealer’s 21 at very long odds. He had burst into tears, blubbering right onto the gaming table. Security arrived to escort him away. And finally, after a long pause, the dealer told us that one day, he’d had a patron walk away from his table, head up to his room and end his life. It’s a common occurrence when you’re a Vegas dealer, apparently. We had no idea what to say.

All of the glitz of Vegas, with its wonderful nightclubs and its fascinatingly strange architecture and its dozen bizarre Cirque du Soleil shows and its surprisingly cheap hotel rooms, is merely a lure. It’s the cheerful multicoloured feather baiting a treacherously sharp hook. I don’t know whether organised crime still runs the place, but it’s worth bearing in mind that many of the people who made Vegas what it is today ended up either behind bars, or gunned down themselves.

(The wedding chapels I can’t explain, except that it’s a place where people make rash, expensive decisions.)

This has all happened because in 1931, the state of Nevada decided to give up its moral responsibilities to its citizens, and to the rest of the world. It’s understandable in a sense – it happened during the Great Depression, when its economy was on the verge of collapse. From then on, things snowballed to the point where the “tourism industry” is still Nevada’s largest employer today – and since the place is essentially a desert, nobody’s visiting for the scenery.

I had a great time, but in the end, all the pleasures that Vegas has to offer are guilty ones. At a time where a second Sydney casino is being discussed, and efforts to crack down on problem gaming seem to have encountered legislative stalemate, the place gave me pause for thought. The ubiquity of poker machines in Australia is something that demands more investigation, because while we are no Nevada, there’s no shortage of misery to be found underneath the glamour of our own gaming rooms.

There’s a rather charming line in Steve Martin’s movie L.A. Story where one of the characters says that Los Angeles is a place where they’ve taken the desert and turned it into their dreams. Las Vegas is a chunk of desert that’s been turned into a nightmare. And while groups like our bachelor party will no doubt continue to visit it for a weekend off the leash, it’s hard to view the State of Nevada’s 1931 decision as a wise one.

Siri, should I get the new iPhone?

I've spent just under a year with a very special woman. A woman I went everywhere with, did everything with, and entrusted with heaps of deeply personal stuff. But now, I'm beginning to tire of her. And I’m considering throwing her over for another. A younger model, so to speak. Taller, thinner, and, if I’m honest, just that little bit sexier.

It's not just looks – she's smarter, too; a great deal quicker, and – look, I'd probably better stop this already-tortuous analogy before every reader at this 'proudly female biased' site despises me even more than they did before I started.

The woman I'm talking about is called Siri, and trust me, she'll be fine with being dumped. Because she was invented by Apple, and that's what they do – it's their business model.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm considering getting rid of my iPhone 4S, despite it being objectively fine in every single respect, and getting one of these newfangled iPhone 5s. And when I say "considering", it's only to try and imply the tiniest modicum of self-control. Because I know full well that I will be lining up tomorrow for the latest Apple smartphone, like the addict that I am, the same way I have every year since the iPhone 3G first arrived on the shores and I spent 12 – yes, twelve – hours queuing for it.

Twelve hours sounds absurd, I know. I thought it'd only be two or three hours, but there were massive delays, and well, who wants to abandon a queue after waiting in it for four hours, and... let's just say that I ended up sleeping on the floor of the Apple Store.

In my defence – although I acknowledge that my position is fundamentally indefensible – I'm a nerd. (Hang on, this is supposed to be a defence). I'm one of those people who actually bothers to try every new feature, which is why I'm the only person I know actually uses and likes Siri. In fact, I've written this article using her voice dictation function, just to prove a point. And while she doesn't understand me most of the time, the same thing happens with a lot of women.

Technology is the only genuine addiction I have. (I say that as though merely one or two were acceptable!) I've never smoked a single cigarette, rarely drink much, find gambling tedious and steer well do drugs Sophie and women my brain even more patchouly ability

(I left that bit uncorrected to show you just how wrong Siri can get things).

What I was trying to say, Siri, was that I don't do drugs lest they render my brain even more petulia outplaced Inaudi, I mean even more peculiar a place then it already is.

(Okay I give up – from now on, I'm typing the old-fashioned way.)

To give you a sense of just how pervasive my addiction is, I'm already trying to convince myself that if only I had an iPhone 5, the dictation function I used to write the first half of this article would be flawless. So I'll tell myself that I really need a new iPhone in order to do my job effectively. It's not a self-indulgence, it's an Important Work Tool.

There are solid reasons to upgrade to this new iPhone 5 – the ability to use faster 4G networks is practically enough on its own, and I like the idea of the larger screen as well. And yet I know that all of these justifications won't ultimately make me feel okay about my upgrade mania. The real reason for wanting the latest gadget is that the mere existence of a better device will gnaw at me until I finally give in.

A friend who's an Anglican minister recently suggested to me that Apple was somewhat like a secular religion, and there's something in that. They promise to make your life better, they idealise a departed, prophetic leader and have a network of impressive temples around the world. (And unlike any church I've ever been to, Apple Stores offer free WiFi.) And both Apple's logo and the Garden of Eden involve a fruit with a bite taken out of it. I reckon I could really get on board with an iReligion if they promised eternal battery life.

I think the underlying problem is that I genuinely believe that each new gadget will enable me to achieve the things I want out of life. That if I only had a really nice laptop, I would make myself sit down every day and do the novel writing that I wish I hadn't fallen behind on. That if I had the latest model of Kindle, I'd read many more important books. And if I got a phone that had a snazzier camera, the life I captured with it would be that much more amazing. (I think that's why people love Instagram.) And I keep telling myself these things even though every time I give into the temptation, the belief's always immediately proven untrue.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so hard on myself. It's the ultimate goal of our culture to want the shiniest objects, isn't it? The rule in Australia seems to be that you're allowed to enjoy whatever lifestyle you can afford. I don't have kids and I've never embarked on any form of renovations, so a new mobile phone every year isn't going to break the bank. This mentality is why Australia has some of the lowest savings and highest credit card debt of any country in the world.

But then I remind myself that I was perfectly happy using my phone for calls and texts back in the day, and perhaps the occasional game of Snake. I didn't need to constantly check emails and Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Google+ and all of the other junk that infests every device I have. (I'm exaggerating a bit – seriously, who's still on Google+?) I didn't need to browse news websites on the bus. Sometimes, I was alone with my thoughts, and my mind could wander somewhere other than Wikipedia.

The biggest risk, I reckon, is that my desire to achieve satisfaction in life through material possessions will transcend the fairly manageable bounds of regular phone upgrades and move onto things like houses and cars and jobs and all of the other trappings that people pursue in life. So perhaps I should hold off to take a stance against materialism, against the shallow disposability of our culture?

As with most of the important decisions in my life these days, I ultimately decided just to ask Siri whether I should upgrade to the iPhone 5. "Allow me direct you to Apple's rather fabulous website," she said.

So my current iPhone 4S' doom has been sealed - by itself. And I've successfully outsourced my conscience to my new religion. Praise be to Steve the Father, Siri the daugher, and the Holy iCloud.

Election day BBQs: our democratic right

Saturday afternoon was a busy time for me. I had a friend coming to stay, and an apartment to tidy, and most importantly a brand new episode of Rake to watch. The last thing I wanted to do, or perhaps the second last thing after accidentally deleting the latest instalment of Richard Roxburgh's antics from my PVR, was leave the house.

Then I remembered that it was election day, and I only had two hours until the polls closed. Under most circumstances I'm a bit of a political junkie, and even go to the trouble of voting below the line in Senate elections just to give myself the satisfaction of putting certain candidates last. But it was only for my local council. Perhaps this was the day to neglect my democratic duty and to risk the fine?

What would Cleaver Green from Rake do, I asked myself. He'd no doubt prioritise his own satisfaction, especially if there was a chance of a shag or of losing a bout of fisticuffs somewhere in the equation. Things were looking dim for my prospects of democratic participation.

But then I remembered the deal. The sacred compact at the heart of Australian democracy. The bedrock upon which our nation's system of representative government is built. We turn up on election day, stand in line longer than seems in any way necessary and stand in a small cardboard booth scrawling numbers on a piece of paper. And in return there is a sausage sizzle on the way out.

Now, it's possible to cheat at this process and have your snag on the way in. That way madness lies, my friends. If you get your slice of greasy deliciousness before voting, there's a chance you'll turn around once you've consumed it and head straight back out the gate of the local public school.

My plan was to would stand and wait and vote and then, as a reward, buy myself a charred sausage wrapped in a soft cheap slice of white bread, daubed with no-name tomato sauce. And as my teeth sank into it, I would be grateful for freedom. The freedom to vote, and the freedom to support community charities by consuming random abattoir offcuts ground up and stuffed into a synthetic skin.

To do this in style, I decided to visit the largest polling booth in the state, which would surely also have the largest array of sausage options in the state. And so it was that I made my way to the Sydney Town Hall. The queue was vast, hundreds of people long and snaking around three sides of the block. It was so long that I considered risking the fine just to save myself an extremely tedious hour. Then I remembered that the other end of the line, there would be a sausage with my name on it. (Not literally, because that would be slightly macabre.)

I joined the queue. I shuffled slowly forward over the course of the next half hour. I reacted with dignified forbearance when someone pushed in front of me, by which I mean I made sarcastic comments under my breath.

I voted. I won't say for whom, because it's a secret ballot. Let's just say that I voted for democracy itself.

When I left the chamber, I was astonished to find that there were no sausages off whatsoever. Not one. Not even a lousy lamington stand.

I felt outraged, and wounded, as though I'd been punched in the guts, which is admittedly also the feeling I get after eating certain undercooked sausages. And it was then that I realised the direction of my life, which had arguably been somewhat lacking up to this point. I would draft a constitutional amendment so that compulsory voting was matched by compulsory charity sausage sizzles. The AEC would be obliged to ensure that there was as many sausages as ballot papers available, and the odd vego option to boot. If the people are required to vote, they should be fed. It's only fair.

It wasn't just the Town Hall, by the way - I complained on Twitter, naturally, and discovered from my replies that the sausage shortage was evident at several primary schools. Some locations offered only a cake stall, which is pleasant, but ultimately, in my view, just can't provide sufficient grease.

As I trudged homeward feeling unfulfilled and resentful, I began reflecting on the joy of the barbecue. It was a lovely warm September day, the end of a long winter without much in the way of sausages and sizzling onions. Summer was around the corner, and with it the great Aussie social institution that is the barbecue. Though my day had proved sausage-free, summer would surely deliver further bangers and perhaps even mash.

I've never been much good at barbecuing - I once undercooked a steak so severely that I made myself sick. And I have to admit that this makes me feel like less of a bona fide Aussie bloke.

I don't know what it is about men and barbecuing. Personally, I am committed to equality in all domestic chores, of course. But I don't think that it’s unjust to my fellow males to suggest that for many of them, standing behind the grill sporting a novelty apron is more or less their only contribution in terms of cuisine besides beer runs to the bottle-o.

I've never fully understood why the average Aussie bloke prides himself on his ability to char a stick of plasticised pork, or perhaps a slab of steak or fish, but demurs from cooking anything else. Perhaps it's the fact that barbies are often social events, and the grill is usually located smack back in the middle of the backyard, allowing mine host to be the life and soul of the party. Or perhaps it's a strange throwback to tribal days when our forefathers would hunt for meat to bring back to the campfire? The modern equivalent of which is grabbing a vacuum-wrapped plastic tray from the local supermarket.

While admittedly many men have embraced cooking in the post-MasterChef era, time-honoured Australian male tradition obliges me to master just two culinary arts: carving the Sunday roast and barbecuing. And although I aspire to culinary excellence in other areas, last Saturday, I couldn't help imagining myself behind one of those grills someday. If I ever become a father, I hope that some day I'll be able to man - and I do mean "man" - the barbie at my local polling booth, raising money for my kiddies' school while I sell every voter a perfectly-grilled slice of democracy wrapped in a piece of white bread.