Why I'm a fan of Game of Thrones, and not fantasy

I always hated He-Man. An action figure that time has largely forgotten, he – sorry – ‘He’ was the lord of Castle Grayskull, and spent the 1980s battling Skeletor, whom he always defeated, and irrelevancy, which ultimately vanquished him.

The other boys in my primary school collected He-Man much as they collected head-lice, but I always despised his page-boy blonde haircut and bulging muscles. His appearance would have reminded me of Clive James’ famous description of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a ‘condom full of walnuts’ if I’d known what a condom was at the age of eight.

I mention He-Man not just to pat myself on the back for rejecting plasticised machismo early in life, but because that’s where my lifelong antipathy towards fantasy literature began. While many of my sweaty teenage boy classmates spent their lunch hours swapping Magic: The Gathering cards and rolling AD&D dice with an unfeasibly large number of sides, I was never interested.

I dutifully ploughed through Lord of the Rings, but couldn’t stand the parts where Tolkien goes on about obscure Elvish genealogy and Tom Bombadil – in other words, 85% of it. My anti-fantasy bias was so great that it even deprived me of Terry Pratchett for many years, which I acknowledge this was a mistake, not least because he spends a lot of his time mocking the genre.

I’ve always suspected that the thicker the book, the less point there is in reading it. I reckon The Great Gatsby says far more in 47,000 words than most fantasy authors’ lifetime output of books thicker than phone directories. Which is why I can’t understand my all-consuming love for Game of Thrones, and the series it’s based on, George RR Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire.

I mean, come on – the very title reeks of black Doctor Who t-shirts drenched in adolescent boy-sweat, doesn’t it? And yet, it’s excellent.

It took me a while to get on board. A friend who shares my bias had to tell me over and over again that no, I really would enjoy it; yes, even though there’s magic, swordfighting and dragons. And it took an episode or two before I realised that there was more going on than yet another tedious battle between the goodies and the baddies that’s inevitably won by the Chosen One.

At first it seems to be the story of a good family, the Starks, that takes on a bad family, the Lannisters. But then we discover that some members of the supposedly bad family are both noble and witty, and that the other family has Issues, and then more families are added into the mix until it’s no longer clear which side you want to win, and the reader begins wondering whether power itself is worth the effort and risk.

By the second-last episode of the first season, I was hooked. That episode ends with one of the unexpected deaths that has become the series' trademark. I won't say who dies to avoid spoiling the surprise, and besides, anyone who's seen it will be unable to forget. But after the series was over, I was so desperate to find out what happened next in Westeros that – gasp – I started reading the books.

Which proved extremely entertaining, to my relief. Martin ends each chapter with a cliffhanger, which keeps you reading just one more chapter until it’s 3am and – come on, seriously, why is Dany dealing with yet another dull slave city instead of heading over to Westeros and fulfilling her destiny?

Yes, I said ‘destiny’, like a proper fantasy fan, and I’m fine with that, because Martin’s series is ultimately about reality. Even though the very first scene involves terrifying blue-eyed ice zombies, and one of the characters’ hobbies is raising dragons, Martin’s novels are all about examining human nature in a feudal, magic-infused society.

There are competing conceptions of duty – to one’s country, or one’s family, or the abstract idea of what’s right. There’s betrayal, duplicity and religious faith – and at least two of the religions really seem to work, curiously. Whereas in Tolkien the noble side inevitably triumphs, yawn, in the world of Game of Thrones, principles can be a fatal inconvenience. Despite being an unreal world, Westeros is full of realpolitik.

Our society contains very few pure-evil Sauron and Voldemort types, as much as Vladimir Putin seems to be trying. And Martin’s books feature a series of uncanny comparisons with contemporary politics, as advisors attempt to manipulate the situation to their own advantage and multiple leadership challengers emerge. The Seven Kingdoms of Westeros gets caught in a ‘debt and deficit disaster’, and Tyrion Lannister finds an innovative means of stopping the boats that might well give our own government ideas. It’s like an episode of Insiders where Piers Akerman and David Marr fight to the death.

Most fantasy stories focus on a few big players, following the ‘great man’ theory of international relations where you can just look at the Gandalfs and Aragorns. But Martin insists on showing us what he calls the ‘smallfolk’, the ordinary peasants who keep getting pressed into fighting wars with which they have no connection, or being randomly slaughtered by invading armies.

This sensitivity to the fate of ordinary people gives the reader a sense of the constant nightmare that protracted conflicts like the Hundred Years’ War and Iran-Iraq War, must have been for ordinary people who don’t care who’s in power, and just want the fighting to stop so they can tend their meagre crops.

Of course, Game of Thrones is also famous for its sex scenes – and while the constant nudefest is perhaps a factor in its record ratings, the plot elements, at least, are an essential part of the series' examination of power. In the powerful families, marriage is about diplomacy rather than romance. Desire is a powerful motivating factor, and the society's rigid moral rules are regularly broken by powerful warlords, exactly as they are in our own society by NRL players.

The Seven Kingdoms of Westeros are a world whose moral complexity and ambiguity approaches our own. The story George RR Martin has constructed is so intricate and nuanced that I’ve no idea how he’s going to tie all the threads together. (He may not either, which might explain the delays to the next volume, The Winds of Winter.) Martin says that the ending will ultimately be bittersweet, and in that sense, it will no doubt resemble real life yet again, like the bittersweetness of wanting to watch Game of Thrones legally, but it’s only available on Foxtel.

Martin has given us our world as it must have been lived in the feudal era, with the addition of dragons and ice zombies. Which is why while I’m still not a fan of fantasy, I’m definitely a fan of Game of Thrones.

We should care more about state politics

Wait, don’t stop reading! Let’s forget I said “state politics”, and instead said “delicious snacks”

We treat state politicians vendors of delicious snacks as though they were mediocre players in an amateur theatre production – the Woop Woop Players doing A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Legislative Assembly, or, given the penchant for bloodshed in politics today, perhaps Hackbeth.

And fair enough, too – in recent years, when they’ve made the news, it's usually because of some scandal that made state pollies seem dodgy, or hopeless, or in many cases, hopeless at being dodgy.

In many cases, the chaotic nature of state politics would be hilarious if we weren’t paying them quite so much, and if there weren’t quite so many important things they should be doing. Like baking more delicious snacks, am I right?

Because as off-Broadway as they can seem, state parliaments decide many of the policies that affect our everyday lives, and our families'. State parliaments are the ones who run our hospitals and schools. They’re in charge of the police forces that are supposed to keep us safe, and they run the transport systems and most of the roads that get us around. They’re supposed to protect our environment, and ensure that regional areas aren’t left behind in our highly urbanised country.

What's more, they're the ones charged with shaping our cities – with preserving its heritage and encouraging innovative development. State governments built the Harbour Bridge and the MCG. And they're the ones who sometimes flatten beautiful old buildings in the dead of night.

And in this asthmatic’s favourite piece of legislation set to take effect this year, they're the ones banning smoking in outdoor dining areas, which will take the cough right out of my morning coffee.

What’s more, as the operators of TAFEs, they’re the ones directly responsible for training the chefs who make us delicious snacks. See, there really is a link!

Besides, the politicians who inhabit state parliaments probably have more in common with you than their federal counterparts. For starters, like more than 22 million Australians, they haven’t much interest in living in Canberra.

There’s an election on in NSW in a few weeks, but living here, you’d barely know it. There’s minimal news coverage, and even the advertising blitz seems half-hearted. Over the past few weeks, we’ve spent paid far more attention to the contest between the white-gold and blue-brown dress tribes than thinking about which major party we’d like to govern.

The Premier, Mike Baird, is apparently to be coasting towards a comfortable victory, largely because there hasn’t been a major scandal in his term so far, an intriguingly novel approach to NSW politics.

He’s aided by the fact that his opponent, Luke Foley, has only been in the job since early January. Foley has spent most of that time pitching to an electorate who’s at the beach, or wants to be. It’s a task made harder not only by NSW Labor leaving office with a reputation roughly equivalent to Enron's, but by the fact that, as he is “acutely aware”, virtually nobody knows who he is.

That wouldn’t be possible in federal politics. Bill Shorten’s only been Opposition Leader for a year and a half, but almost everyone in Australia already knew his name when he won the position – his prominent role in the Rudd/Gillard spills certainly boosted his name recognition.

Ironically, while we don’t care about state politics, those constant spills have meant that federal politics is consuming us like never before, courtesy of our relentless news cycle, augmented by social media and cable news. A Canberra coup is Christmas for political junkies, although it’s not turkeys that are slaughtered so much as prime ministers.

Last month the media dropped everything and hotfooted it to the lawn outside parliament house for yet another potential spill. All the breakfast programmes duly set up their cameras to cover the big story, and the excitement was palpable. Even after the challenge burnt out, the leaks and speculation continued for days.

State politics has delivered just as much drama in the past few years, with spills of its own and dramatic election results like we saw in Queensland. The NT even had that bizarre moment where the Chief Minister refused to be sacked, and battled on. And yet we still pay minimal attention beyond election day.

State politics is never going to seem as important as the tier of government that conducts diplomacy and sends our military into battle. But we should check up on our second-tier pollies more frequently than the hour or two it takes us to vote every few years. Every commuter stuck in traffic or on an overcrowded train, everyone with a kid in school, and everyone who might wind up in a public hospital (that is to say, all of us) should realise that their state government is the one with the power to make those things better, and get engaged in the process instead of merely delivering a shock on election night.

I’m not suggesting we care as much about state politics as the things that really fascinate us, like intriguing two-tone dresses and those snacks. I just wonder whether we mightn’t get more from our state governments if we paid them a little bit of attention now and then.

Of strangers and dogs

Nowadays, people often smile at me when I’m walking down the street. I make an effort to smile back, naturally, because I assume they’re readers, awestruck by the shock of seeing someone they admire so much on the street right in front of them. Or maybe they’re trying to play it cool, and subtly acknowledge that they definitely know who I am even though they don’t want to make a fuss. That’s fine. They know, and I know, and a smile is enough.

Occasionally they’ll say something like “So cute”, which is totally unnecessary, but, hey, that’s their opinion, and of course I’m flattered.

Recently, though, I’ve started to realise that these random expressions of admiration tend to happen only at certain times, and are immediately followed by an admiring look downwards. And while I have excellent taste in footwear, I have to acknowledge that it’s not me. It’s the dog.

The dog is an Australian terrier so ridiculously cute that it’s a wonder he hasn’t been signed for commercials in which he bats his adorable eyes at the camera while promoting mortgages or kibble or something – incidentally, his rates are reasonable, please contact me if interested.

Note: the actual dog in question is far cuter

Since I’ve come to accept that the dog is far more interesting to random pedestrians than I am, I’ve discovered that dog lovers have negotiated completely different social rules to those accepted in regular human society. They’re more than happy to bowl up to you, or burst out in conversation, simply because you happen to be walking a dog. It’s as though I automatically welcome the interactions because I operate a charity dedicated to brightening up people’s days by creating random moments of canine adorableness on the streets of Sydney.

There I am, walking along, minding my own business – and the dog’s in whichever park he sees fit to deposit it – and complete strangers will just begin cooing at me. What’s stranger still is when people simply assume they’re fine to touch him without asking. They’ll swoop down like an opportunistic seagull for a head pat, without wondering for a moment whether he is up for it.

Presumably most dogs are, but this dog is a rescue. Unfortunately, he’s learnt that he can’t always trust humans, because even his boundless adorableness was not sufficient to protect him from horrible mistreatment by a previous owner – which is why if you’re interested in a dog of your own, incidentally, I’d urge you to contact your local shelter because there are lots more like him out there.

When you’ve had the life experiences that the dog has had, you don’t take kindly to sudden movements from strange humans, and I think he shows a great deal of restraint not to nip their hands and teach them a little lesson about respecting his personal space.

Being caressed on the street by a complete stranger would be considered grounds to summon the police for a human,but among dog lovers, it’s perfectly acceptable. I find it odd, but presumably most people who walk dogs love nothing more than someone they haven’t met interrupting them to lavish praise and pats upon their hounds.

The other time when random strangers feel free to interrupt me, of course, is when I’m wandering around with a child. Strap on a Baby Bjorn, put an infant in it, and suddenly everybody wants to have a chat, or perhaps toustle its hair. If there are any politicians in the vicinity, there’s even a clear and present danger that they’ll kiss the poor defenceless child.

This is especially strange when the child is not your own, because everyone will immediately assume that they are, which forces me either to say nothing and falsely take credit for the parenthood I’ve so far failed to achieve, or issue a series of clumsy clarifications. These become all the more awkward when the person you’re talking to is female, because there’s a tendency for the disclaimer to seem like a horrible come-on – “Actually, madam, I’m the child’s uncle, which as it happens, means that I’m totally in the market for reproduction, should that be of interest.” In my experience, these moments are only slightly less awkward than when you’re out with a female friend and her child, and everyone from waiters to passers by assume you’re the father.

I especially notice these unsought interactions with strangers because when I’m walking along a street, it’s extremely rare for anyone to interact with me in any way at all. Practically the only time a stranger will ever say anything to me is when I’ve been too busy tweeting or something and nearly knocked them over, and fair enough, too.

But I’ve come to realise nowadays that this experience of wandering around without interruption is not universal. As a white, relatively hefty man, I’m permitted to float around in a bubble of self-absorption, but as that recent video revealed, the situation can be quite different for women, as many men feel at liberty to pass constant judgement on their appearance. The same experiment was repeated recently by an orthodox Jewish man in Paris, with similarly dispiriting results.

It seems to me that at the very least, we need to be consistent. Either we treat everybody with the same pronounced indifference that I enjoy when I walk through the streets, or we decide that everyone should be available for random conversation, all the time. But if you’re one of those people who finds cities unfriendly, and wish people would stop you in the street to say ‘G’day’ the way they apparently do in country towns (something I’m yet to experience, but perhaps that’s just me), then my advice is to get a dog.

Not only are they humans’ best friends, as advertised, but you’ll soon find that you have an endless supply of unwanted new friends, too.

How I failed to celebrate my 38th birthday

This year, on Australia Day, I celebrated my 38th birthday. Well, I say “celebrated”, but it was a miserable effort. I emailed a few friends two days before to see if they wanted to do anything, only to discover that 90% of them were out of town, either because of the long weekend, or because they wanted to get out of hanging out with me.

In the end, I went to the beach with a few friends, most of whom were planning to be there anyway, and some other friends dropped by my place because they were in the area. I went out to dinner with my family, too, because they’re easier to pin down.

It was a perfectly lovely series of occasions, and if I hadn’t set my expectations absurdly high because it happened to be the day upon which I entered the world back in 1977, I would have viewed the entire proceedings as entirely satisfactory.

But because it was my birthday, I felt a little flat. I even felt a bit unpopular, a not unfamiliar sensation from my younger life but one I hoped I’d banished when I started hanging out with equally nerdy people.

Now, that’s silly, I know that. I’m adequately popular by any proper measure, like the number of one’s Facebook friends who took thirty seconds out of their day to say hello after the site reminded them to do so.

But then I got to wondering. Was the fault not my friends’ refusal to keep their schedules free just in case I bothered to organise anything, or indeed my poor organisational skills? Did the fault lie in the very notion of birthdays? Is there just too much pressure placed on our own personal New Year's Eves?

When you’re a kid, adding another year to the meagre tally of your age is cause for celebration. I was delighted when I transitioned from 6 to 7, for instance, and was able to feel more like the grownup I so desperately wanted to be. Later birthdays came with rights, like when I became a teenager and gained the right to have the sex I wasn’t having, or when I turned 18 and gained the right to smoke the cigarettes I’ve never tried, or when I turned 21 and gained the right to ask my parents to pay for a party. Good times.

But now, each extra year added onto the total simply reminds me that I’ve got fewer left up my sleeve. I’m hoping Joe Hockey’s right about us living to 150, but on the currentfigures, I’ve only a little over half my life left. And why would I celebrate a reminder of my own looming mortality?

The thing about birthdays is that they’re one of the very few occasions for being the centre of attention which our society condones. If it’s your birthday, you’re well within your rights to ask your friends to join you for a fancy dinner, or in a swanky bar, and some of them will even buy you drinks. If it isn’t your birthday, though, they’ll wonder why on earth you haven’t left them alone – or if you’re really so desperate to see them, at least offered to cook.

Besides birthdays, we make an effort for other people’s weddings, engagement parties, book launches, farewell parties, baby showers, and that’s about it until their funerals. Otherwise, once we hit your late thirties, we just keep comfortably to ourselves, occasionally arranging to catch up but certainly not pulling all the stops out.

So, since I abjectly failed to organise a half-decent birthday event, I’m going to have to wait 11 months before I can try again. And then I’ll be 39, and that’s a silly age for a celebration – so I’ll have to wait until my 40th.

As ever, at least according to some members of the federal government, the Queen offers a better way. Her birthday is April 21, but we always celebrate Official Birthdays on the second Monday in June – except in WA, quaintly. And indeed, every Commonwealth realm chooses a time of its own to celebrate – well, it’s not really Elizabeth’s birthday, so I don’t know – perhaps just her very existence?

Why, then, can we commoners not emulate our gracious monarch and designate certain days as Official Birthdays, upon which we prevail on our friends to attend a function in our honour?

As someone whose birthday often coincides with a summer long weekend, I may choose to have some date in winter as my Official Birthday. Not only will that ensure maximum attendance, and therefore presents, but given how sparse the social calendar is at that time of year, some of my guests may even be glad to join me. Furthermore, by dissociating the date of my celebration from my actual birthday, I will be able to process the trauma of my freshly-augmented age in blissful solitude.

An even better solution than Official Birthdays would be for everyone to be allowed to hold self-indulgent celebrations for themselves whenever they please, without the social stigma. But very few people I know have the social cachet to pull this off. This undoubtedly works for hip hop stars and members of the Dubai royal family, but I know very few people who are able to lure their friends into dropping everything for some kind of P. Diddy style White Party. More's the pity.

So in future, I’m going to forget birthdays and try and hold regular, small gatherings of friends throughout the year. Now that I think about it, the last time I cajoled everyone into coming to a big birthday party, I barely managed to speak to most of them for more than a minute or two. And my actual birthday can instead be devoted to the endless debate about Invasion Day. Which it already is, unless somebody, I don’t know, knights the Queen’s husband or something.

So once we hit 21, let’s stop celebrating our birthdays. We should need no pretext to entertain our friends, and even if we’re looking for one, the date of our arrival becomes less worthy of celebration with the passing of each year.

That said, I would like to officially notify all my friends who forgot my birthday this year to give me a shout out on Facebook before Friday, or I’ll delete you.

Some great news about dealing with hair loss

Good news, fellas! (And also for the ladies that love us, amirite?!) Those unsightly chrome domes are a thing of the past! And it’s not just a sportsman paid by a laser-peddling company that’s saying so, but a dermatology professor at a proper hospital.

An even more credible source than Warnie has emerged to help blokes who notice that their hair is receding. Or that their bare scalp is expanding, if they want to be glass-half-full about it.

An article published by Fairfax this week reassures us gentlemen that there’s no need to worry about baldness any more. "The take-home message for boys staring at their bald fathers' scalp and wondering what their genes have in store for them,” says Professor Rodney Sinclair, is "don't panic, but don't leave it too late."

Apparently there are two effective pharmaceutical treatments which can not only arrest hair loss, but promote hair regrowth. Finasteride is a tablet that is taken daily, while minoxidyl is a lotion which you apply to your scalp.

Hair loss is undoubtedly unpleasant, and can be quite debilitating. It can make men feel unattractive, and indeed, less masculine – ironically, since it’s caused by testosterone, but nevertheless, it’s unpleasant. And now, if you’re willing to take tablets and rub chemicals into your scalp, it need not be a problem.

I have only one minor quibble with the good professor’s article. As effective as these two drugs apparently are – albeit despite some side effects which we’ll get to later – I have come up with an even more effective regime to deal with hair loss. I am in a position to absolutely guarantee it, because it’s the one that, after considerable research, I adopted myself.  

When you start losing hair, you could adopt a daily two-drug regime designed to stop this scourge from depriving you of your hard working follicles. Or, get this – you could decide not to care.

That’s right! Rather than feeding yourself chemicals and rubbing them into your scalp morning and night, you can simply shrug, adopt an ironic grin, and make some comment about it all being the price you’re willing to pay for being a seething morass of studly-as-all-heck testosterone.

Now, I’m not trying to downplay the psychological impact of hair loss. It sucks, it really does. When I realised at about the age of thirty that I was going to be prematurely bald, it threw me bigtime. The irony of my body supplying an unwelcome surfeit of hair in lots of places where I didn’t want it, and then at the same time denying me the very same substance on my scalp, struck me as cruel indeed.

A helpful doctor suggested I try minoxidyl, which I duly did (it’s available from pharmacies without prescription). I worked my way through a large bottle, rubbing it into my head, day and night. I’m not in a position to say whether it worked or not, since I didn’t use it for long enough. And that’s because when I imagined shelling out for this fairly pricey stuff for the rest of my life, and having to use it twice a day, I ended up deciding – screw it.

Screw it, even though I’d have to take extra precautions against sunburn – I went and bought heaps of hats.

Screw it, even though most bald men on the big screen are evil (thanks for the blow to my self-esteem, Dr Evil).

And screw it, even though I worried that it might reduce my attractiveness and self-confidence even beyond the considerable limitations that already seemed to be in place.

Screw it, I decided, because there was something about the sheer vanity involved in carefully applying chemical fertiliser to my head that really didn’t appeal. I decided that anybody who wanted to be with me would have to overlook my lack of hair, just as they’d have to overlook a multitude of other things.

So instead of buying more minoxidyl, I went and bought myself a pair of clippers and accepted my doom. And it’s one of the best decisions I've ever made.

It seemed like an even better decision when I read the article by the good professor, because there was something about minoxidyl that I hadn’t quite realised. See, it doesn’t just promote hair growth on your scalp. It promotes it everywhere.

Professor Sinclair fairly blithely solves this problem as follows: "Hair removal laser has led to a renaissance in the use of minoxidil tablets, as doctors can now effectively manage the unwanted hair that was previously a deal breaker."

Yeah, wait just a moment, Prof. So my alternatives are that the annoying hair everywhere grows even more aggressively, or that I have to have laser treatment? How many thousands of dollars would it cost to get everything lasered, exactly?

And even if I had shelled out for this, I wouldn’t feel like myself anymore. I’ve had an abundance of body hair since my somewhat early puberty. It’s a part of who I am. And while I’ve suffered the mockery of many people because of it – the comments in my yearbook were a tad depressing, since they revealed that 90% of my single-sex school classmates could only think of a comment about that, instead of, say, my engaging wit or fabulous personality – I find the idea of no hair utterly unthinkable. So thanks, but no thanks, Prof.

Seriously, lasering everywhere? What kind of solution is that?

Then there’s finasteride. I trust drug companies – after all, their asthma drugs help me breathe – but I don’t trust them so completely that I want to take one of their products for decades for purely cosmetic reasons.

And remember how I said that balding made some men feel less masculine? Well, it turns out that finasteride has been linked with several kinds of sexual dysfunction, as Professor Sinclair acknowledges. There’s a detailed US NIH review of this here, and I won’t try to summarise it except to say that even the small percentage chance of an impact is, in my view, too high when, as the report says, "male pattern hair loss is only a cosmetic condition”.

Furthermore, the NIH says "It is better to avoid the drug for any patient who has prior history of oligospermia [and] infertility, particularly if he is newly married and is trying to raise a family.” Yeah, thanks, but no thanks.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the professor’s third option: hair transplants. I have, if anything, an abundance of follicles which show every inclination to keep growing lustrous hairs, but if I may give a considered opinion on a medically sensitive matter, eew. I especially can’t be bothered with this option. Again, it just seems expensive and vain.

I don’t want to downplay the psychological impact of balding. I’ve been there. I’ve looked in the mirror and felt rotten. I’ve been shocked when a screen in a lift showed the view from the security camera above, and I realised just how bare the top of my scalp had become. It’s far from fun, and if there was an instant way to snap my fingers and get all my hair back, I’d be more glad than I can say.

But surely it’s smarter to try and treat those feelings than the condition? (And, by the way, may I congratulate the Fairfax web team on a brilliantly insensitive bit of clip art to accompany the article? That pic of a despairing bald guy is just the thing balding guys’ self-esteem needs!) Shouldn’t we try to promote acceptance of our bodies the way they are? And will taking these treatments even make these feelings go away, if we’re constantly living in fear that the drugs will stop working?

We all have to come to terms with ageing. Balding is highly noticeable, but it’s nevertheless just one part of the ageing process. Even if I had a full head of hair, the sad truth is that most of it would be grey, anyway – and no, I definitely wouldn’t bother dying it. either.

So instead, I’ve decided to make my follicular hero a guy whose hypermasculinity simply cannot be challenged, and who hasn’t a single hair on his head – Vin Diesel. (His character in the Fast and Furious movies is called Dom, too.) Mess with bald dudes, and you’re messin’ with Vin. (Take note, Fairfax photo editors).

Vin doesn't give a damn about your minoxidyl or your finasteride, Professor. He’s too busy pumping iron, driving awesome cars and charmin’ tha ladies.

Okay, so there are very few Vin Diesels in Hollywood, admittedly – but Bruce Willis looks pretty great bald too. That’ll do me for role models.

So guys, the drugs are there if you want them, and it’s good to know that they work. But there are so many things to worry about in life, why worry about your scalp? Maybe spend the time and money you were going to spend on all of that medication in the gym, like Vin does, and I bet you’ll be too busy feeling awesome to give the state of your scalp a moment’s thought.

2014: The Christmas Cracker jokes

Every year, I sit down to Christmas lunch in the hope that along with the turkey and pudding, I'm about to enjoy a delicious comedy feast when my family pulls apart this year's crackers and reads out the jokes contained therein.

Every year, sadly, they're the same old jokes. And I do mean literally the same old jokes. I swear that every Christmas since I was a kid, we’ve had the following, usually multiple times around the table:

What did one wall say to the other wall?
I'll meet you at the corner!

(I'm going to include exclamation marks after each joke as a form of 'boom-tish'.)

What do you get if you cross a kangaroo and a sheep?
A woolly jumper!

What's yellow and dangerous?
Shark-infested custard!

(I'm not sure whether the latter technically qualifies as a joke, but I am sure it'll be hidden in a gaudy cardboard tube at our family lunch today.)

So, in a bid to make all our Christmases come at once, I've come up with some brand new jokes for you to read out at Christmas lunch.

The list is full of punchlines that are little more than tenuous puns. But I didn't create the Christmas cracker genre, and it's beyond my power to change it. I can guarantee you, though, that at least these jokes are slightly fresher than that shark-infested custard.

What did one Obeid say to the other Obeid?
"Subpoena tough year!"

Why does the Catholic Church disapprove of the Coalition?
Because there are two female Bishops, and the Abbott has a wife!

What's the only card game that hasn't been banned in North Korea?
Kim Jong Uno!

Why does Schapelle Corby feel rich even though she wasn't paid for her TV interview?
Because she still has a Mercedes!

What's Luis Suarez' favourite food?
Chewna!

What's the one time when you use a bucket before you're ill?
When you're doing the Ice Bucket Challenge!

What do Blake Garvey’s marriage proposals and his real estate contracts have in common?
There's a cooling-off period!

Why couldn't the Australian boy band tour Siberia?
Because they don't get five seconds of summer!

According to the ICJ, what was the only scientific thing about Japan's scientific whaling programme?
The name!

What do you get if you combine APEC with the G20?
A novelty shirtfront!

What is Tony Abbott's favourite night of the year?
The knight he just recommended for the Order of Australia!

What's the difference between Oscar night and the next Australian election night?
On Oscar night, everybody's pro-Shorten!

How is the metadata retention bill like an envelope?
It’s intended to go through without anybody looking inside!

What did one bigot say to the other bigot?
I can't tell you, because section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act remains in effect!

What’s Vladimir Putin’s favourite Justin Timberlake song?
Crimea River!

Why would a politician repeatedly suggest that women's main concern is the household budget?
Force of Abbott!

According to the Opposition's latest asylum-seeker policy, when is it acceptable to conduct turnbacks?
When you're Labor!

What was the biggest security threat at Russia's Winter Olympics?
Russia!

What's the difference between John Howard and Clive Palmer?
One's always out walking, and the other's always walking out!

Which vehicle needs pyjamas to travel anywhere?
A Bob Carr!

What protects against the sun and rain, but is useless against China?
An umbrella!

What do Barack Obama and Frances Abbott have in common?
They didn't have to pay to attend the Whitehouse!

How did Craig Thomson feel after his latest court appearance?
Fine!

Which white flower is native to Australia but pretends not to be?
The Iggy Azalea!

What’s the worst thing about being James Packer’s friend during the holiday season?
When he invites you to his place for Christmas punch!

A bromance is born: When Tony met Stephen

This week, the Sydney Morning Herald claimed that Tony Abbott is conducting a ‘bromance’ with his Canadian counterpart, Stephen Harper. It’s not the first time the Herald has used that term to describe their relationship, such is the depth of brotherly bonhomie between Australia’s PM and the leader from the land of the maple leaf. Evidently our PM has a depth of affection for his colleagues that he only usually reserves for his wife, his daughters, and dawn triathlons.

The unusual camaraderie between the two leaders extended to hangsies when Harper was here for the G20, and Abbott has gone so far as to praise Harper as “an exemplar of centre-right leadership”. Given the polls, and the recent phenomenon of even Andrew Bolt and Karl Stefanovic taking a swing at him, Tony Abbott must be relieved that somebody in public life besides Peta Credlin really seems to like him.

Bloomberg went even further in its depiction of the Abbott-Harper bond, depicting the two leaders inside a pink love-heart. This probably wouldn’t have thrilled our PM, who has previously admitted to feeling “threatened” by homosexuality. But it’s rather sweet to think of the two of them putting aside the customary formality of international diplomacy and developing a genuine friendship.

I wonder what they get up to when they’re together. Do they take turns watching rugby union and ice hockey? Do they watch tough guy movies with Jason Statham in them, and trade boasts about how they’re definitely going to shirtfront Vladimir Putin? Or perhaps they go for long bike rides together, during which Tony delights in lapping Stephen multiple times?

It can be hard for Prime Ministers to have buddies. The somewhat unexpected friendship between Kevin Rudd and Rhys Muldoon produced not only a children’s book with the distinctive title of Jasper and Abby and the Great Australia Day Kerfuffle, but a poignant moment when Muldoon rushed to Rudd’s side on the evening when he lost the Labor leadership. In his hour of need, when Rudd seemed almost friendless as his colleagues abandoned him for Julia Gillard, his bro came through.

Bloomberg’s pink love-hearts notwithstanding, the idea of a ‘bromance’ is entirely platonic, of course. I suspect term arose used partly via pun value, but most of its humour arises from the awkward way in which men tend to make friends. As much as we talk about mateship as a defining Australian value, warm public affirmations of friendship are still rare among men.

Unlike many women I know, most Australian men would hesitate to share a double bed with a male platonic friend, for instance, and wouldn’t dream of holding down the street holding hands the way women sometimes do. Even when men hug one another, we have to call them ‘man-hugs’ and deliver them with a sense of irony because of our reluctance to express too much affection. And unlike Taylor Swift and Lorde, we don’t tell everybody about our BFFs.

Some might suspect that men’s inhibition about expressing the same kind of affection that we readily show to our kids, parents and partners springs from some fear of people suspecting that we’re gay. Perhaps there’s something in that – or indeed, perhaps there was once, and the reluctance to express our affection towards other men has remained even despite our increasing tolerance when it comes to sexuality.

We men weren’t always like this, of course. In primary school, I remember having an Official Best Friend. His name was Luis, and we’d play Battle of the Planets at little lunch, and sleep over at each other’s houses – playing Ghostbusters on his Commodore 64 was a particular favourite of mine.

Even in my (all-male) high school, guys had specific best friends, and everyone knew who they were. One of my close friends even maintained a league table, and kindly informed me when I went up and down his friendship list.

In adulthood, I’ve retained many of my old, male friends from school and uni – but it’s much harder to make new ones than it used to be. I meet some dude, often in a work context, and I think oh, it’d be cool to hang out with them, maybe grab a beer sometime. Maybe we do it once or twice, but it’s rare that we make the effort to stay in touch.

I suspect that’s because for some reason, it feels weird to be too enthusiastic about a new friendship. It’s as though once you hit your mid-twenties, you have to start being nonchalant about everybody. It seems a pity. I certainly don’t go around saying that people I’m fond of are “exemplars” of anything, which might well mean that when it comes to bromance, Tony Abbott is far less repressed than I am.

In recent weeks, another close male friendship besides our Prime Minister’s has been in the news, and for the most tragic of reasons. The cricketer Phillip Hughes’ friendship with Michael Clarke transcended even the usual close bonds that are forged on the sporting field. Clarke refers to Hughes as his “little brother”, and his eulogy for the fallen batsman last week was one of the most emotionally affecting things I’ve heard in a long time.

While I was listening, I had to pull over because of the tears in my eyes. And now that our cricket captain, that bastion of Aussie male masculinity, has displayed such extraordinary love for his comrade, alongside that extraordinary outpouring of affection from across the cricket world, perhaps other men will become more comfortable with displays of affection in our everyday lives too.

Men don’t generally tell other men that they love them, but we should, far more often. And if we examine the warmth and affection that our Prime Minister evidently bears for another, perhaps all of us men might find the inspiration to get back out there and embark on a few fresh, exciting new bromances of our own.

How to dodge your way through uni without actually cheating

I was shocked by the report on Wednesday that there’s a thriving business selling university essays. There have always been rumours about this kind of thing happening, so I guess I’d always assumed that some students outsourced help. But the semi-industrial scale of the operation was surprising, to say the least. MyMaster apparently raked in $160,000 last year, which is more than many university teachers make.

Was I the only person who thought the prices seemed competitive, too? After all, a 3000-word bachelor-level essay is only $585. The way university fees are going, it would cost you less to pay someone else to do the degree for you than it would to enrol in the first place.

The other thing about MyMaster that I find truly extraordinary is that they charged different amounts for different grades. We all know that essay marking is somewhat arbitrary – how on earth can they guarantee, say, a credit? I certainly didn’t know how to do that back in my undergraduate days.

The timing of these revelations was also somewhat ironic, at least from my own perspective. As someone who graduated from one of the targeted universities only last Friday, I was disappointed to learn, too late, that I could have just paid someone else to write my thesis. So easy! So unethical, yes; but so easy!

But you don’t need to hire MyMaster to get through university. Instead of paying some dodgy operation to defraud your institution, why not use these tips to scrape through, absolutely free of charge?

Please note that I do not guarantee a distinction, or even a pass.

For the purposes of these examples, I’m imagining that you’re trying to write an essay on the subject of whether or not Australia is made of cheese. For the purposes of your own academic career, I should clarify that as far as I know, it is not.

Use the readings

Almost all university courses come with a helpful selection of readings. In case it’s not obvious, you are expected to, um, read them. That’s why Arts is considered full-time despite having something like a dozen contact hours.

Now I have to confess that I often didn't quite manage this simple and entirely reasonable request, so I would flick through them in class and find a few choice passages about which to volunteer comments when the time came. The same approach works for essays. You need a few cheese-related quotations, and if you don't entirely read the article to get a broad cheese sense, who's going to know?

Well, the lecturer, if the article's author goes on to disprove the earlier contention – but that's not hugely common. And since the alternative is handing the essay in late or failing or paying MyMaster, this is probably your least worst option.

Use the readings’ bibliographies

Each of the supplied articles will contain references to more articles about the proportion of Australia that’s made up of cheese. Flick through those and find a few more gems to quote, or solid points to adopt (and reference). It'll impress the marker more than you deserve. Even if they pick you as a faker, it’ll be a superior class of fakery, and that should deserve some kind of grudging respect. After all, they were undergraduates once too.

Use Google Scholar to find new articles

When I was an undergraduate, going and finding fresh viewpoints on the subject matter required real effort – in my case, a last-minute trip to the library, and hunting through various journals, or on the shelves in the same Dewey Decimal category as the set texts. But now we have full-text searching of academic articles, it’s so easy to do this that you’d be a fool not to.

Google Scholar is great for finding citations, and then your own uni should have journal subscriptions that let you download PDFs or full-text. Honestly, students these days don't know their own techno luck. Why, in my day we had to use photocopiers!

Agree with your lecturer

Lecturers love nothing more than the sound of their own voices, regurgitated back at themselves on the page. You shouldn’t cravenly agree with the exact argument your lecturer ran – after all, university is all about displaying evidence of independent thought. So instead, quibble with one incredibly minor detail. For instance:

While Australia is certainly made of cheese, not enough consideration has been given to the proportion of cheese that makes up the geological record of comparable countries. The extent of Australia’s cheesy exceptionalism certainly warrants further study.

Of course, you can disagree with your lecturer’s point of view – you absolutely have that right, and if you can prove a contrary argument, you will highly likely deserve a high distinction; although you’ll probably be marked down to a distinction by your sulky marker. But disproving the lecturer’s thesis takes a great deal of effort and original research, and if you are the kind of person who does that, there’s absolutely no point you reading this article.

Refer to your lecturer’s own publications

Unless you’re doing a PhD, only one person is going to read your essay, so flatter them by showing that you’ve read their stuff, or at least flicked through it to find a few choice quotes. Just make sure you do it in the third person, so it’s not completely transparent. For instance if your lecturer is Dr Smith, you might write:

Smith conclusively argues, in what has become a highly influential piece in the literature, that the geological evidence ultimately proves that Australia is largely made of cheese. Or, as she puts it, with characteristic rhetorical flair, “Australia is not so much the Lucky Country as the Lactose Country”.

Write without doing any research at all

Why be flummoxed by a stack of academic references when time is limited? If you hand in a decent essay with zero research, you’ll probably get a pass, at least. You presumably have at least some interest in cheese, if you’re studying it. Perhaps even a few opinions.

It can be quite liberating setting out on an essay without the encumbrance of what other people think. And you might well have time afterwards to go back in and retrospectively insert a few quotes and reference that support your point of view.

The problem

Now, there's an obvious flaw in all my suggestions. Did you pick it? If so, congratulations, you get a free diploma, which you may Photoshop and print out yourself.

The issue is that doing all of the above requires a certain level of English language ability. You need to be able to quickly skim through academic writing and churn out at least some version of written English.

MyMaster sounds like it is catering  to some who do not have these skills. If so, then ultimately we must surely blame the universities. If they are admitting students without even bothering to check their English ability – for which a simple Skype interview would suffice, with speaking and typing components – then they are devaluing the prestige of their own degrees. And that's offensive to those who work very hard to get them, and even to people like me who follow the dodgy approach I've outlined above.

How to write a novel in one month

It’s often said that everyone has a novel in them, but it’s probably more accurate to say that everyone fondly imagines that they do. I’ve certainly lost count of how many times I’ve had conversations with people where they talk about how they totally want to write one, and outline some of their plans – and, in the back of their minds, are clearly already walking onto the podium to accept the Booker.

But then their ambition peters out into the same five words we always use to defer non-urgent, hard-seeming things: “If only I had time”.

I used to be one of those people who would bang on and on about wanting to write a novel, but never managed it. I used to be certain that if only I could pause my oh-so-kerazee life to open the spigot of my creativity, sheer genius would flow onto the page, and plaudits would inevitably follow. It was in the same category as my much-cherished plans to become incredibly fit, learn Thai cooking, enter Tropfest, make a credible indie record and learn jazz piano, none of which I have managed thus far.

What’s always particularly daunted me about the idea of writing a novel is the word count. The average novel is around 70-80,000 words, and while I’ve known people who managed to churn out even more than that for a PhD (around 100,000 words, as a rule), it took them at least three years of backbreaking toil and a significant portion of their sanity to do so. I’m comfortable writing pieces of around 1000 words, like this one – but seventy of them, back to back, in a way that makes sense? That seemed ridiculously hard.

I sat down to start a novel just over a decade ago, but about 10,000 words in, it got confusing and hard and I got busy. The superficial problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to make the plot make sense, but the real problem was that I just wasn’t putting in the work.

And it’s an awful lot of work, I now know, because I ultimately found a way to trick myself into writing one. I enrolled in a creative writing masters’ degree, and my sheer pride, along with the money I’d invested in course fees wouldn’t let me drop out – so, by the end, I had the draft of a novel.

I found a way to overcome my tendency never to finish anything, and I’m still enormously proud of the novel I produced – writing that many words, which I’ve now done a few times, is undoubtedly the hardest thing I’ve ever had to accomplish.

But while I ended up paying quite a lot of money to a university so they’d impose deadlines on me – a system which worked brilliantly for me – there’s another, free way to force yourself to do something that you might not have considered possible.

I was astonished a few years ago when I discovered a community of people who gather each November to write – get this – a novel in a month. And they didn’t even choose a long month – November contains a mere thirty days, which means you have to write 1667 words a day to get there.

Yes, that’s right – sixteen. Hundred. Words. A. Day. It’s kind of like Tough Mudder with wordprocessors and without electric shocks. A seriously hardcore, almost cult-like way of accomplishing a goal.

And yet people manage to write the 50,000 words, and they’ve been managing it since 1999, when a guy called Chris Baty and 21 pals in San Francisco did it, dubbing the month of their labours National Novel Writing Month  or NaNoWriMo for short. Last year, more than 300,000 people signed up.

Ah, but how many finished, you may wonder? 14%. So, not all that many, but still – that’s 42,221 people. The number that really amazes me is that 3.5 billion words were written which, but for NaNoWriMo, probably would never have seen the light of day.

The best thing about the crazy-brave NaNoWriMo approach is that it makes the solitary drudgery of writing a novel a task that can be shared with others. NaNoWriMo participants gather the world over – including across Australia – for “write in” sessions, where they encourage one another to churn out words. There’s a system of rewards, which you unlock by pasting in the text of your novel (sure, you could cheat by pasting in something like this  but why would you?), and if you finish, you get a little virtual trophy. 

Even if you don’t want to meet up with other writers, you can tell other people you’re doing it in the hope they’ll keep you honest. Which is why I’m telling you that this November, I’ve decided to join them. And I reckon if you’ve always thought you wanted to write a novel, you should, too.

There’s a map of worldwide word counts for November 2013, and I can see from it that some Australians managed to finish their fifty thousand words. So, it’s been done before, even though it’s a beautifully warm month here in Australia – the opposite of the horrible weather in San Francisco that led them to choose this time of year for NaNoWriMo. I hope to be among them, and hope as many people as possible will join me.

You probably have lots of objections at this point – here are a few I thought of, and how you can overcome them.

But I don’t have the time!

Nobody has the time. Nobody. I know people who’ve taken leave to write novels, and ended up faffing about on a full-time basis. There is never a good time to write a huge number of words, so you may as well do it now. Starting tomorrow, on the first of November.

But I don’t know how!

This is the true beauty of NaNoWriMo, I reckon. There isn’t time to mull – you need to be typing continuously. Some novelists painstakingly plan their masterpieces, but if you’re going to do it in a month, there isn’t much time to plan. You just have to come up with a vague idea, and bash it out.

My first novel evolved from a 1000 word rant by a guy who hated playing terrible music at terrible 21st birthday parties, and I somehow got 70,000 words out of that. Once November’s finished, you can edit – but until then, don’t even think about it, just keep writing.

If you’ve read a novel, ever, you probably have a decent idea how they work. You need a protagonist (whether it’s a first-person story from their perspective, or just a main character), a situation and a challenge which somehow threatens their situation. Then you explain how they overcome, or fail to overcome, the challenge.

Yeah, I know narrative structure is more complex than that – but it’s a good way to start your thinking. If you want to know more about how to structure a novel, here’s a simple guide, and here are four common kinds of plot.

But I don’t have Word!

Well, that’s no problem, as it’s far from ideal for writing a long document. What you need is Scrivener. It works on Mac and PC and has a 30-day free trial, perfect for NaNoWriMo. Also, it’s cheap. Here’s an article I wrote about why it’s the best novel-writing software there is.

But I don’t think I can do it!

Yeah, you can. But even if you don’t get to 50,000 words, you’ll still have made a start, and that’s the main thing. 

But I honestly don’t know how I’ll find the time!

Everyone has to find their own way to make themselves write, but here’s how I do it: I go to a place that serves coffee. I don’t much like buckling down and working, but I do like coffee – so I’ll take my laptop to a place that offers it but not free WiFi (essential, lest you be distracted – and don’t kid yourself that checking Facebook is “research”), and type while the caffeine is bouncing around in my brain. And the idea is not to stop until I’ve hit the limit.

I seriously doubt my ability to do that for thirty consecutive days, but I won’t find out until I give it a shot. Starting tomorrow.

But… but… but...

There are some people in life who react to an impossible-seeming challenge with abundant common-sense reasons why it’s a bad idea, and there are others who rush on in with gusto. I’m usually the former, but this November, I’m going to try to be the latter.

Will you join me? At the very least, you might begin writing a novel about someone who wants to write a novel in a month, but keeps getting distracted. It’s a sad ending, admittedly, but if we bust our guts for a month, we might just be able to come up with some happy ones.

In the company of men

On Saturday night I went to my high school reunion. Which means it's been twenty years since we all endured the HSC. Twenty years of noses at the grindstone in many cases, dramatic shifts in careers for others and for others still, escaping the rat race entirely. Twenty years of relationships, marriages, children – even divorces in some cases. And we can no longer claim to be young, even if some of us still act like it.

On my way to the event, I ran through the school reunion clichés in my head. Based on Hollywood efforts like Peggy Sue Got Married, Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion and Grosse Point Blank, some people would drink too much, some would not have moved on from the glory days of high school, and others would dance cheek-to-cheek with their high school sweethearts before kissing passionately underneath the mirror ball in the high school gym and finally achieving the fulfilment they'd been craving since they were teenagers. And fade out.

Except that the last bit was pretty unlikely, at least for most of us. Because I went to a single-sex school.

So, on Saturday, I walked into a room containing eighty guys, all of whom I knew, and no women. That felt weird. Really weird. And yet, this was how school had been every day for six years.

Well, in the interests of accuracy, there was one woman in attendance last Saturday.  In other words, the gender breakdown was roughly that of the Federal Cabinet. One of my schoolmates, either via bold non-conformism or a misinterpretation of the invitation, had brought his fiancée, who nobly conducted small talk with lots of men she'd never met before.

After half an hour of wandering round in a daze, I settled back into the old male milieu. Once I did, I had a great time. So many of those old social divisions, which I’d felt so keenly in the early years of school when I was bracketed as a nerd, had melted away after twenty years. There were lots of people working in finance, law and IT, and it no longer mattered how they'd gotten there, or how cool they'd been along the way.

Let's face it, practically no guy besides Robert Downey Jr or Jay-Z can pull off being cool at 37, a fact my classmates and I went on to demonstrate by heading to a bar with a dance floor which every single one of us avoided as though, with apologies to Sophie Ellis Bextor, there had genuinely been a murder there.

All this week, though, I keep thinking about how different my life was when I went to a single-sex school. Having attended co-ed primary schools, I'd enrolled in an all-male high school with great trepidation. Girls had been of huge importance to me since my first ridiculously intense crush in Year Four, and my growing interest in women had been exceeded only by my growing shyness around them. The prospect of six years cloistered away with my own sex was a concerning prospect.

I remember my mother asking the Master of the Lower School (yes, it was that kind of institution) how we were supposed to socialise with girls. He said, with an entirely straight face, that we could meet them on the train.

To be fair, my school was full of were always tales of CityRail Lotharios from the leafy Upper North Shore. But I lived a mere two stops from school, and was horrifyingly timid. How was I going to charm one of the brown-clad students catching the train to Sydney Girls’ High in five minutes each morning day?

In short, I wasn't. The most I ever got was an occasional embarrassed hello to some far-too-cool-for-me type I'd known in primary school. And so it went for most of my schooldays.

We did the occasional drama production with girls’ schools, but due to a notorious cast party in Year Nine, the years of bigger roles for which I'd endured dozens of ignominious walk-ons happened without women on stage at all. It was only at university that I began to build a solid group of genuine female friends.

My parents and I agonised over same-sex education. Ultimately we felt the opportunities on offer were just too compelling, and I haven't yet really regretted that. My school, though, would have been so very much better if it had been co-ed. The overemphasis on sport, the victimisation of vulnerable kids, the emphasis on maths and science over humanities, the rampant homophobia – I suspect my school was better than some in most of these areas than others, but my friends and I agreed on Saturday night that it hadn't quite been good enough. I'd like to think all of these areas, and more, would have been significantly better with girls in the classrooms and playgrounds.

There are endless debates over co-education. Some say it benefits boys to the exclusion of girls. This may be so, although there are plenty of co-ed selective schools in NSW with exceptional results  But surely such concerns can be addressed by good teaching, and must be weighted up against the social impact of single-sex education, which is far deeper than just a few shy, scared teenage boys like I was.

Boys' clubs have survived in Australia to a remarkable extent. I don't mean those all-male institutions like the Savage Club that boasts Senator Brandis among its members – they, clearly, are on the wane.  I mean informal, cosy coteries of "good blokes" who drink and banter together, and are always happy to do one another a favour. I often enjoy those interactions, but they trouble me when they become a means of hoarding and exercising power.

Boys’ schools condition men to be instinctively comfortable in such environments – mine certainly did for me. Surely it's not a coincidence that a government which has drawn criticism for the lack of women in its ministry is full of men who attended the kinds of schools I did?

And while there were more women in the last government, especially its final incarnation, they were still nowhere near parity. The union movement has traditionally been just as full of boys’ clubs as their political opponents. And has the word "powerbroker" ever been attached to the name of any women from Labor’s dominant NSW Right? There's a reason why the term "faceless men" is gender-specific.

It's not just politics, of course. We still have boys' clubs throughout our workplaces, sporting and cultural institutions and religions. The attitude that led to my high school, one of Australia's earliest, being founded to train future leaders and therefore only admitting men still prevails more than it should.

But the biggest problem with limiting oneself to the company of men is that while it can be fun as a one-off for a bucks’ or reunion, ultimately all-male environments often aren’t simply as interesting. As a rule, there’s too much discussion of sport (which men often default to when they can't think of anything else to discuss) and not enough making fun of The Bachelor.

Conversations about just about every aspect of life suffer when they don’t include a female perspective, just as they do when everyone speaking is from the same cultural background. Spending time exclusively with your male friends is the social equivalent of eating only pub food – and it’s not a coincidence that the two things so often go together.

Thinking about it this week, I'd need a lot of convincing to send a child to a single-sex school. Of course it depends what's on offer, as it did for me – but single-sex education reinforces artificial, archaic divisions. It seemed pretty old fashioned when I started in 1989; it'll seem much more so by the time my hypothetical kids are in school.

And while I had a great time at my reunion, I’m sure I’d have enjoyed it even more if I’d had lots of old female schoolfriends there, too. Because life is co-ed, after all, and if our schools are preparing us for it, they should be too.

Why I’ll never be a backpacker

I visited Australia’s most famous beach the other day, and felt like I was overseas, albeit in an odd country where diamond-shaped kangaroo warning signs and keyrings of little thongs with “Bondi” painted on them seemed to be the major currency.

While maps show it as part of Sydney, the reality is that Bondi belongs to the international community. Like Khao San Rd in Bangkok and Arambol in Goa, it’s been utterly colonised by backpackers and the businesses that sell them cheap phonecards and crappy souvenirs.

Backpacker enclaves have common features the world over. There are always tatty cafés offering fry-up breakfasts accompanied by banana milkshakes and Bob Marley. There are always odd little travel shops offering cheap prices on a hand-written board that seem a total bargain unless you know how to search the internet.

And there are always shops selling t-shirts that nobody would wear except backpackers, every single one of whom will be wearing the exact same wacky one. “Same Same But Different” and the fabulously witty “iPooed” were one-time favourites, as was the Red Bull logo before it became available here and we realised it was nothing more than an odd-tasting caffeine drink.

Still, backpackers are friendly and cheerful, and it’s one of the few areas in life where people from many different countries can genuinely gather together and share their common goals and aspirations, like finding untouched surf spots and discount ganja.

In a sense, the backpacker world is a lot like the UN, if it had ended up with France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Australia on the Security Council.

But as charming as I still find backpacker culture, there’s one aspect where I’ve realised I have to draw the line – the accommodation. As I wandered around Backpacker Central the other day, I looked up the staircases of the hostels, and it brought back unpleasant memories of sweating under a slowly-rotating fan in hostels too dimly lit to facilitate a proper inspection for stains.

The bunk beds are invariably uncomfortable, of course. Some have slats which are placed so widely apart that part of the mattress sinks between them, leaving the edge of the board to jar into the small of your back. Others have wired bases that have inevitably developed permasag. The mattresses are generally designed for children, and if they’re ever more than an inch thick, it’s because they’re swollen with a bedbug colony.

While the beds are either metaphorically or literally noxious, for me it’s the sharing that is truly uncomfortable. As a relatively self-conscious person, I didn’t much enjoy having to bunk with strangers even in my early twenties, but nowadays the idea’s unthinkable. I do love my fellow man, but I don’t love having to sleep in the same space as him (seeing as dorms are usually gender-divided), or hear him snoring.

And yes, I snore myself, and yes, that’s a bit hypocritical – but I don’t have to hear myself, do I?

And the shared bathrooms – wow. They’re permanently in a condition that’s somewhere between a terribly negligent house party and the portaloos on the final day of a music festival. Even if mud and urine aren’t caked on the floor – and they will be for several hours of each day, at least – there’ll be a constant risk of tinea. What’s more, while I concede there’s no definitive scientific evidence (yet), I’m still convinced that communal showers transmit Ebola.

Proper backpackers don’t care about any of this, though. On their travels, they’ve already survived far greater health challenges, like cholera, dystentary, those parasitic fleas that burrow into the soles of your feet and prolonged exposure to Goa trance.

Of course, what backpacker accommodation has going for it is that it’s cheap. Which is great, because it lets backpackers stick around for months at a time before going and picking more fruit up north. And I have to confess that there have been times when I’ve browsed through the Sydney rental guide and seriously considered taking up permanent residence in a hostel just to pay non-astronomical rent.

But unlike backpackers, most of us who travel are relatively time-poor and travel-budget rich. I don’t mean we have lavish budgets – I certainly don’t. I just mean that if we’re only travelling for a week rather than quasi-indefinitely, we can afford to get a place where we have at least a bed and bathroom to ourselves.

Because let’s face it, “communal” means “like a commune” which means “acceptable to hippies” and therefore means “unacceptable to everybody else”.

And that’s why when I plan a holiday nowadays, I would rather spend fewer days travelling and not have to risk a sleepless night listening to some Bulgarian dude snoring/scratching his mosquito bites/listening to phat beats on his massive but non-enclosed headphones/picking up.

But all of that said, when I looked at those Bondi backpackers sitting at outdoor cafés and pubs, blissfully carefree expressions on their faces, laughing with mates they probably just met the night before, I couldn’t help being a little jealous of those who have lives where their only responsibility is not working through their savings too quickly, or doing a spot of bar work to eke out just a few more months of travelling. Of lives spent far from mortgages and careers, with the promise of a near-endless procession of lazy days ahead.

No wonder they’re happy. Even despite their living conditions.

I never spent more than a week or two backpacking while I was the right age, and nowadays, I have responsibilities I’m not really willing or able to neglect.

But perhaps that means that I don’t understand a truth that all backpackers know as intuitively as they know the Oz Experience timetable. That when some random dorm-mate shouts out loudly in Czech at 3am during a frenzied, chemical-induced dream, what you actually hear is the sound of true freedom.

Hopelessly intimidated by Bunnings

If we all have our own personal hell, uniquely and fiendishly customised to our own preferences, mine will be a Bunnings. An endless Bunnings, with aisle after perplexing aisle, stretching out beyond the horizon on either side with cute little handwritten signs that try and pretend that the company isn't an enormous corporate monolith, and yet no handy sign pointing me to the one thing I’m looking for, or anybody to help me find it.

In other words, it’ll be exactly like an ordinary Bunnings. Except instead of a few snags on the barbie for a community fundraiser, the demons will be holding a sizzle of sinners’ souls.


Bunnings terrifies me because it proves exactly how incapable I am of improving my home. You can buy timber, paint, fancy new lights, outdoor furniture, complicated storage systems, even entire buildings like sheds and pergolas, none of which I will ever buy and set up myself. 

I didn’t know how to use any of this stuff back when I was studying woodwork in high school and was only required to bang a nail into a wood, and I’ve lost even that ability in the subsequent years. And yet in Bunnings, there are dozens of entire categories of personal inadequacy, all helpfully signposted, from decorating to tools to kitchen to bathroom to outdoor living. 

There’s even a gardening section, which I find especially confronting because not only do I have no clue which plants to buy for my windswept city balcony, but if I do a bad job looking after my plants – as I inevitably will – they will die, and I don’t need withered plant corpses on my ungreen hands. No living creature deserves the fate of being entrusted to me.

And then right when I’m feeling at my most emasculated, and am thinking about the plants I won’t buy because they’ll certainly die, I suddenly notice that there are weapons everywhere. And I’m not just talking about the dozens of chainsaws, hedge trimmers and whipper snippers on offer. (Sure, they don’t sound scary, but those things can flay innocents like a Bolton from Game of Thrones.)

Those of us who grew up during the brief, glorious peak of the slasher film during the 1980s will know that every seemingly-innocuous hardware item has been adoped by some terrifying onscreen monster at some point – those movies had an awful lot of sequels. Over the years, they worked their way through wrenches, hammers, shears, pitchforks, hoes, spades – pretty much every single item in a standard garden shed.

Multiply that effect with Bunnings’ vast volumes stacked up to the ceiling, and you have all you need for a major panic attack.

Nevertheless, despite my aversion, I braved the belly of the beast a few weeks ago. And it really was a beast – the Alexandria branch, one of the biggest anywhere. It’s so massive that there’s even a vast second level, even though I can’t imagine what they keep up there that isn’t already for sale on the voluminous ground floor.

Now, I’ve admitted to my general hardware hopelessness – but there is one thing I can do. I can hang pictures on plasterboard walls, as long as they’re not too heavy. And really, it’s about as simple a DIY task as it gets – all you need to do is scan the wall with a stud finder to make sure there isn’t any metal underneath the surface, and then screw in the anchor and attach the picture to it. Easy, even for me.

The problem was, Bunnings somehow didn’t have the thing I wanted. Oh sure, there were about forty different kind of plasterboard anchor, but I didn’t understand how to use them, and my relatives who are more expert than me have warned me that the other kinds left big holes in the walls. Plus, my pictures are precious, and I don’t want them to fall off, taking most of the wall with them.

So yes – even in the overwhelming enormity of Bunnings, they didn’t have either of the two kinds of anchor I like, trust, and know how to use. I eventually found a salesman to help me, but he seemed not to know what I wanted, let alone which of their dizzying array of products would be best suited to my task.

And so I left, and went to a tiny hardware store, the kind run by a guy who’s been there for decades and knows every single item he has in stock. The kind, in fact, that has been nearly obliterated by the Bunnings behemoth. The whole transaction took me less than ninety seconds, and then I went home and started hanging pictures.

I’m sure I’ll return to Bunnings again someday, ideally with a relative who can help me navigate around those foreign, frightening parts. And only after I’ve tried a small, local hardware store run by somebody who’s used and thoroughly understands the products they’re selling.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure that if you know what you’re doing, Bunnings is brilliant, and you can go to the exact right section with the kind of informed, clinical precision I display when visiting computer shops. I’ve just found that in order to use a giant DIY store, you genuinely need to know how to do it yourself.

How to decorate so people think you're amazing

A recent survey of the sort that retailers conduct to make us think about the products they sell found that 48% of Australian men have placed items in their bedroom with the explicit intention to impress prospective sexual partners.

This number almost surprised me, because it would suggest that as few as 52% of Australian men are thoughtless boors. Except that this figure is challenged by the additional information that the items left out to try and impress prospective partners included surfboards and medals, both of which are entirely wrong unless your surfboard has been sprayed by Banksy or your medal is displayed for reasons of irony, because you won the medal for Being A Li’l Aussie Trier (Despite No Conspicuous Merit At Anything) in Year Two. It's probably also okay if you're a war hero or Olympian.

The same survey found that 28% of Australians have been put off a prospective partner by the state of their bedroom, which is also somewhat intriguing because it implies that the number of people who hook up and head back to some rando's place while being too smashed even to notice the bedroom is as low as 72%.

In other words, it’s worth getting the details right. Consider yourself the curator of the museum of your own life.

I learned that this stuff matters quite a few years ago, when a woman I was rather attracted to spending a great deal of time perusing my bookshelf at a party, while I pretended not to notice while suppressing an absolutely agonising volume of self-consciousness, but also remaining at a convenient distance unless she wanted to ask me any questions about my excellent taste. I don’t know whether she formed favourable conclusions – but they certainly weren't favourable enough to get a pash.

If you’ve visited Brett Whiteley’s studio in Surry Hills, it’s full of cool stuff. His own artwork, of course, but also groovy bric-a-brac. Try applying a critical eye to your own space and ask yourself – if I died, could this house be instantly turned into a museum of me that would impress visitors for centuries to come? If not, you need to get to work.

After all, we live in a society of snap judgements, and this applies above all else to our homes. Who hasn’t felt judged when a plumber calls and, while addressing the lake of sewage that has accumulated in our living room, makes some idle comment about the poster on your wall? Yes pal, I know Pulp Fiction’s a classic film, and that’s why I put the poster there. Now make like Mr Wolf, and sort my mess out.

Since we live in a superficial society where people form instant impressions of us based on our material possessions, I’ve put together a definitive guide. Don’t make the mistake of displaying items based on your actual taste, unless your taste is so good that Wallpaper* did a shoot at yours last week. Instead, allow my highly sophisticated, thoroughly neurotic self-consciousness to inform your own.

Books

Highbrow is good, of course, but the classic trap is to display impressive books you haven’t read. Placing something like Infinite Jest or Finnegan’s Wake on display will probably get you an impressed “ooh”, but that’s worth nothing if you have to admit that you haven’t actually read it. So make sure you skim through, or read a few reviews so you can parrot on demand. Your prospective lover almost certainly won’t have read it, and in the unlikely event that they seem not only to have read it, but genuinely understand it, they’re probably out of your league anyway.

Go for acclaimed novels which display your cultural sensitivity and global interests. And I don’t just mean books about people from other countries by white people, like Alexander McCall Smith’s Number One Ladies Detective Agency series. Include some Haruki Murakami or Fatima Bhutto or Khalid Hosseini or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on your shelf  – and make sure you at least know how to pronounce their names.

But it’s not all about Booker winners. It’s equally important to show a sense of humour. PG Wodehouse works for this, and does Stephen Fry or Colbert. Make sure you make your humour selection gender-balanced, too – the recent memoirs by Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling and Sarah Silverman might be a good start.

Music

For the music you actually listen to, use a streaming service. That way nobody can judge you based on your Katy Perry consumption – unless you make the mistake of having all of your selections posted to Facebook, in which case you are going to need to start this whole process from the beginning with a different partner.

Get a few CDs, or if you’re really trying hard, some vinyl. The key here is to span genres – make sure you have a bit of jazz, classical, hip hop and world music, even if your choices are fairly obvious. And spice it up with one or two records that nobody’s ever heard of that you can rave about to make it seem like you’ve got excellent taste. That’s why for a few years, I went to great effort to feign love for the Japanese girl-punk band Shonen Knife, before ultimately conceding that they weren't worth the effort and I definitely shouldn't have bought the t-shirt.

Art

There’s no shame in having cheap posters if you can’t afford actual artworks – just make at least some of them are about things other than sport and/or fantasy movies. Yes, the Lord of the Rings trilogy was excellent, and so was the Tahs' victory; but no, that doesn’t mean you need a series of posters.

And have some proper art. If you have no idea, just go to the MoMA or Tate Modern Store online and find something you don't hate – maybe something comic-inspired by Roy Lichtenstein, for starters. And if your collection includes one of those pictures of dogs playing pool or poker, make sure it’s balanced by something amazingly avant garde so that it’s clear you were kidding.

But really – even a montage of free postcards can make it look like you have some kind of aesthetic sensibility. Just something more than, I dunno; a surfboard and medals.

Furniture

Let’s make this easy. Just try and have some, some, furniture that isn’t from Ikea, Freedom or Fantastic Furniture. Even if it’s terrible and you found it by the side of the road, just pick something that distinguishes you from Edward Norton in Fight Club.

Oh, and beanbags are are an absolute no-no unless you’re in a share house and under 23.

Knick knacks

Here’s an important rule of life – whenever you go somewhere exotic, get a souvenir, even if it’s extremely cheap, just so you can talk about your travels and seem experienced. It doesn’t matter whether the thing is lame, like a snow globe or a Thai Coke can or something – you can make fun of it and show you don’t take yourself seriously while secretly taking yourself incredibly and painfully seriously.

Your object just needs to raise the question of where you got it, which will enable you to launch into a travel anecdote and there’s nothing your guest can do because they asked.

In conclusion

Please note that I haven’t included any of the items I currently display in my house to make people think I’m brilliantly erudite and live a fascinating life of gallivanting around the globe like some kind of Santa who delivers laughs and penetrating insights instead of presents. That’s because I don’t want anybody copying them. Instead, copy my technique, and you’ll be impressing people in no time.

Just don’t forget the most important rule, which is to make your carefully cultivated collection of stuff designed to present you in the best possible light look like some old flotsam and jetsam you’ve randomly cobbled together because you’re too busy being awesome to put any thought into how your place looks.

And when your guest is impressed by the article you’ve placed there for that explicit purpose, for goodness’ sake – feign surprise.

Why on earth do people take camping holidays?

There are some people whose idea of a holiday is having to do everything for yourself. These people find it relaxing to go to a place where you have to perform an even more time-consuming version of your everyday domestic chores, with vastly inferior equipment and no dishwasher. And these same people, rather than sinking their tired bodies into a comfy bed or sofa at the end of an arduous bit of travelling, would rather build an annoyingly elaborate shelter for themselves before they can so much as close their eyes for a few moments.

These people are called campers, and they are wrong.

I recently spent four days camping at a music festival, and while I very much enjoyed the festival, I was once again reminded how glad I am that humans invented proper housing, with soundproof walls and without mud.

Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote in No Exit that “hell is other people”. He should probably have specified that “hell is other people in the tent next to yours who won’t shut the hell up at 3 o’clock every morning, but instead giggle drunkenly about things that couldn’t possibly be considered funny unless your brain was addled with alcohol and/or other chemicals and, let’s face it, wasn’t exactly over-endowed with much intellectual acumen to begin with.”

Okay, so his phrase is pithier, but I bet mine is more heartfelt.

No Exit is set in a locked room, but it should have been set in a tent, because at least a locked room offers proper shelter. Tents turn into a furnace after roughly five seconds of sunlight, and offer precious little protection against cold. Whenever it rains, somehow the water will get into your tent, as predictably as Lara Bingle getting into trouble with traffic police.

Admittedly, my tent didn’t leak, but every single time I left it, my head or the hood of my garment somehow rubbed against the sheet of canvas that covered the opening, transferring moisture onto my head. Why you’d use a fabric that water passes straight through for that purpose I cannot fathom, but it’s just yet another annoying aspect of the hellride of al fresco misery they call camping.

We as a species didn’t spend millennia evolving from aquatic to land-dwelling creatures in order to go and sleep somewhere soggy.

When the first European settlers arrived in Australia, they camped. One of Sydney’s most charming beaches, Camp Cove marks the place where they spent the night before moving on to Sydney Harbour on 26 January 1788. As Bill Garner points out in his charming survey of camping in Australia, Born In A Tent, the first European settlement was the proverbial row of tents.

But here’s the thing – as soon as they could manage it, everyone with enough money built themselves a permanent dwelling.

Getting proper camping gear is so expensive, too. The first time I camped after it was compulsory during school, I bought a sleeping bag that claimed to be rated to zero degrees. Where I was staying went down to about two degrees at night, and I soon learned that the manufacturers had interpreted the number to mean that at that temperature, you probably wouldn’t die of hypothermia, touch wood. It was the most painful evening I’ve had since I decided it’d be hilarious to watch Battlefield Earth.

So it was back to the camping shop for another sleeping bag, and a special camping towel, and backpack, and gumboots, and by this point, I’ve spent enough for at least a week in a cheap hotel.

And even with proper gear, you never avoid the feel of that squishy, muddy, cold earth penetrating through a tarpaulin floor like some kind of malevolent sandpit.

Cooking while camping is the most annoying rigmarole imaginable, with lots of fiddly bits and pieces, but even going to the toilet is irritating when you’re sleeping outdoors. What’s more, when you camp, you’re resigning yourself to feeling, smelling and being filthy until your holiday slash ordeal is over.

Now, I accept that camping has its uses. If you’re on a polar expedition, or conducting urgent research in a remote corner of the Pilbara, or even temporarily without housing, then clearly, it’s great. At music festivals, it’s probably a better option than staying miles away and waiting in interminable bus queues. What I don’t get is why people do it for recreation. Is ordinarily life not challenging enough without going out of your way to make every little aspect of your holiday fiddly and annoying?

Perhaps you imagine I’ve no love of the great outdoors. Incorrect. I’m happy to gaze appreciatively at a picturesque vista from my comfy hotel room. I’ll even go strolling through the magnificence of Mother Nature on occasion, especially if there’s a band playing outdoors at the end of the trek.

In fact, I think my unwillingness to sleep bang smack in the middle of nature should be interpreted as a sign of great respect. I’ve no desire to be Mother Nature’s uninvited guest.

After all, even the most eco-conscious camper has some level of impact on the landscape. Whereas I tread very lightly, and then head to a place with a proper shower.

In defence of the Daggy Friend

Keira Knightley sings in her new movie, and is really quite good. No, honestly. And even if they did AutoTune her vocals to bits, I’d have to say that they did a great job. She sounds a lot better than Scarlett Johannsson covering Tom Waits, at least.

The film’s called Begin Again, and it’s deliberately adorable. Keira plays Greta, a shy singer-songwriter who, at the start of the film, is dating her college sweetheart and fellow singer Adam Levine, who’s headed to New York to make it big.

Well, he’s called Dave in the movie, but he’s a twit with an implausibly high voice, so it’s just Adam Levine beneath the tiniest of cinematic fig leafs, really.

Obviously Greta didn’t read my polemic against the Maroon 5 singer, because she’s surprised when he dumps her like a total douche. Even though Greta is not only a brilliant songwriter who supplies him with better songs than the mediocre guff he writes himself, but has the looks of Keira Knightley, he cheats with some record company floozy because men are fools, or at least Adam Levine is.

Distraught, Keira leaves the fancy apartment that the record company paid for, and runs to the only other person she knows in New York, her Daggy Friend. Steve is played by the stubbly, plump, jolly James Corden, a fellow Brit who’s also come to the Big Apple to try and make sweet music – and in reality scrapes together a few bucks via busking.

Nevertheless, he gladly puts her up on the sofa of his tiny, tiny apartment, and so she doesn’t simply wallow in misery, he drags her out to a bar. Then, during his set, this paragon of human virtue invites her up on stage to sing a song because he thinks she’s so totally brilliant. Nobody notices except disaffected record company exec Mark Ruffalo, who that very day has quit the label he founded because it’s all rubbish and so forth, and yet hears Keira and suddenly believes in music again.

Yeah, this film sounds terrible right now – but I did honestly quite enjoy it. Anyway, Keira and Mark make a record together, setting up all over New York City to record al fresco with the sound of the taxis, kids playing, and whatever happens to be out there. It’s adorable, if highly derivative of the cult Take Away Shows.

Here’s the thing – despite Daggy Friend Steve being the pivotal figure who picks Keira/Greta up when she’s been discarded and gets her back on her feet, and performing on all of the dainty little manic pixie dreamgirl songs she records all over NYC, we never hear anything more from him. He’s off to the side of every shot. In fact, he’s so irrelevant to the overall movie that they haven’t even bothered to mention him in the synopsis. He may well be in love with her, but we don't find out because the screenwriters essentially forget him halfway through.

But Steve was my favourite character. He’s the only person in the whole story who’s cheerful, and seems to in any way care about anybody else. He isn’t given his own romantic plot, and certainly not allowed a romance with Knightley. His only function, it seems, is to be there in her darkest hour, and then just help out, like some kind of useful butler.

There’s all manner of age-gap-disregarding sexual tension between Greta and Ruffalo’s character Dan, but Steve’s just there to smile along supportively, and play keyboard. Pathetic, really. I kept wanting to shout at the screen “Hook up with Steve, Greta! Good old Steve! He won’t leave you for some floozy!” And he wouldn’t have, either. His sheer gratitude would have lasted decades until his excessively big heart gave out, possibly with the assistance of excess cholesterol.

The original title of Begin Again was Can A Song Save Your Life?, but what it really should have been called is Yes, A Daggy Friend Can Save Your Life And Then We’ll Never Hear Anything From Him Again.

Begin Again is only the most recent example of this, of course. Like Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Garth in Wayne’s World, McLovin in Superbad, Daggy Friends are there as enablers and sidekicks, but ultimately get ignored when the action heats up.

In the Harry Potter books, Ron Weasley initially appears to be the Daggy Friend, and ultimately gets to hook up with Hermione Granger who is – let’s face it – far more awesome than Ginny Weasley. But Ron is actually the Comic Relief Friend, a far better character – Harry’s real daggy friend is Neville Longbottom, who gets randomly paired up with someone called Hannah Abbott, an almost entirely perfunctory character, just so JK Rowling can have a neat ending.

In fact, Daggy Friends have been left by the narrative wayside for centuries. In Romeo and Juliet, Benvolio’s the one who convinces Romeo to even go to that stupid party, and tries to be a peacemaker between the Montagues and Capulets, and then we pretty much forget about him. Sure, that means he doesn’t have to die at any point – but still – it’s a typical Daggy Friend gig.

The phenomenon is hardly unique to male Daggy Friends, of course. In both Emma and Clueless, the ingenue character is abandoned as soon as Emma/Cher realises that they have their own romance afoot. Uptight Shoshanna in Girls belatedly got some action from Ray, but she’s still regularly left out of many episodes entirely as Lena Dunham focuses on her less one-dimensional characters. And in Mean Girls, Cady leaves behind her two Daggy Friends, Damian and Janis, and even though there’s an ultimate reconciliation, we barely see them once Cady becomes friends with the Plastics.

For too long Daggy Friends have languished pointlessly in the shadows, which is why I’ve been so glad to see Jon Snow’s Daggy Friend Sam getting a romance of his own in recent episodes of Game of Thrones. And the new Star Trek movies put Daggy Spock together with Attractive Uhura, despite James Kirk having a thing for her. Uhura is a rare movie heroine who realises that the daggy, stable love interest is the better bet. As Spock would say, it’s simply logical.

Daggy Friends are kind and loyal, and they deserve better treatment in Hollywood. We need more movies like When Harry Met Sally, where both Harry and Sally’s Daggy Friends are paired off. Otherwise, we’re teaching everyone that loyal friends, the ones who are there when Adam Levine entirely predictably walks out on you, can just disappear from your life when they’ve fulfilled their purpose. It’s time Daggy Friends got not only the limelight, but the love interest.

Oh, and when not playing a Daggy Friend in Begin Again, James Corden is a Tony-winning phenomenon who’s more talented than Keira multiplied by Adam squared by Mark. So really, who’s the Daggy Friend now?

Did I waste my youth by not being wasted?

In my early twenties, there was a brief, glorious period when I went to dance parties. Raves, they used to be called, if my fading memory serves. They were so cool, I thought; and so, briefly, I was so cool – even though, in hindsight, tickets were on sale to the general public.

My approach was to have a drink or two along with copious, overpriced bottles of water, and dance until dawn while hoping the lighting was dim enough to hide the mediocrity of your dancing. In fact, I think that’s why the strobe light was invented, to make it impossible to see dancers in motion. I’ve always been very grateful.

There was a dance party (even the term seems so archaic now) every few weeks. seemed achingly cool at the time. There was Tweekin’ at Club 77 near Kings Cross, and Disco Kitchen which packed out a city pub and Scissors Paper Rock at the much-mourned Dendy in Martin Place and, most curiously, Sabotage at the food court of Skygarden, a shopping centre that’s now part of Westfield Sydney.

Yes, I went to all-night dance parties at a food court, and yes, I genuinely enjoyed it, even though the kebab stand was closed.

In truth, I was hardly a regular – I probably only went to about a dozen of these kinds of things all up – but I still remember how intimidating I found it, and how desperately I wanted not to stand out as someone who didn’t belong. And I still remember how exhilarating it was when finally, with the aid of a gin and tonic or two and the sheer energy of the music, I danced enough to the trippy house music (or whatever it was) to stop feeling self-conscious. It was an incredible feeling, topped only by the taste of a greasy breakfast on the way home after the venue closed at dawn.

But the sheer delight of staying up all night and jumping around sweatily to excellent music wasn’t enough for many of the participants, of course. They would take ecstasy to add a certain – well, I don’t exactly know what, because I never had the guts to try it. Presumably it was a heightened version of the joy I was feeling, coupled with that intense grumpiness that inevitably follows when you come down, as though you’ve used up your week’s supply of pleasantness and have to spend the next few days glowering at other people.

There were plenty of opportunities to partake myself. People would sidle up to me on the dancefloor and offer pills. The first time this happened, I loudly replied "SORRY WHAT WAS THAT?", thus entirely ruining the dealer’s attempts at subtlety. He correctly interpreted it as a no.

Other people kept telling me how great it was, and how I was missing out. And there was one point when I considered trying a half, or perhaps even just a quarter, but the fear never quite left me. Everyone knows that those pills are cut with all kinds of other rubbish – and of course, the more adulterated they are, the more money the dealer makes. What’s more, the narcotics industry isn’t exactly known for its stellar after-sales service.

“If you could buy them from a chemist, and you knew they were pure, I’d give it a go,” I’d tell people, lest other people take me for the total square that, of course, I was. “But I’ve heard too many horror stories.” A few years passed, and we all stopped going to dance parties, and I never got the chance.

My other problem was that people who took ‘e’s didn’t seem like the greatest advertisement for the product. Sure, they seemed to be having a brilliant time within their own heads, but the dumb look in their eyes and tendency to hug you for far too long a time made them seem like they were carrying some kind of brain injury. Paying a lot of money to lose significant amounts of mental function and your dignity didn’t seem like a compelling offer.

In subsequent years, cocaine seems to have become the social drug of choice. I had the same concerns about purity, but coke’s effects are, if anything, even more troubling than ecstasy, at least to a casual observer like me.

As has, I think, been more than adequately portrayed by The Wolf Of Wall Street, the biggest problem with cocaine is that it makes you insufferable. It’s obnoxiousness in powdered form, and while I’m sure it’s amazing to have that “feeling of invincibility”, it’s far from amazing to be around people who are acting like the love child of Donald Trump and Kyle Sandilands. I’ve occasionally been at events where I’ve realised that lots of the people around me seem to have sniffly noses and a constant need to visit the bathroom, and that’s when I generally decide that it’s time to head home.

Now, while I’ve never tried anything else, I should admit that I did try marijuana at university. But I didn't inhale. Honestly.

Everybody mocked Bill Clinton when he said that – but in my case, I didn't inhale because I genuinely didn't understand what you were supposed to do. I stuck the thing between my lips mouth and sucked a tiny bit of smoke in, and it promptly left my mouth without actually entering my lungs. Which is why when it was finished, I said “gosh, that mustn't have been all that strong, I don't feel any different.” Thus revealing to my younger friends not only that I had no idea how to ‘toke on a doobie’, but that I'd wasted a substantial portion of their expensive ‘jazz cigarette’.

Fortunately, they were too busy giggling to notice.

Shortly thereafter I developed adult-onset asthma, providing me with the perfect excuse for further indulgence – which, given how affected my lungs now are by any kind of smoke and even by what optimistically passes for air in China, is probably a good thing.

I don’t have any major moral gripe with people who take drugs now and then, except that I don’t tend to enjoy being around them while they do. As Lisa Pryor has pointed out, some people use them recreationally without suffering any real adverse effects. I certainly know a lot of successful people who indulged occasionally when younger, and more or less grew out of it.

That’s a bigger debate than I can address here, but some of the arguments that led to the removal of alcohol prohibition certainly have some resonance when applied to other drugs. And I do tend to buy the argument that adults should be able to do what they want with their bodies – especially since they currently can and do, anyway.

But as time has gone on, I’ve never found much reason to regret my youthful abstinence. Now I’m 37, I’m clearly too old to begin experimenting. Being home in bed has never seemed to appealing.

Some of my friends talk nostalgically about their days of excess. I am left to talk nostalgically about my days of abstinence. I’ll never know how much fun I missed, but I had sufficient fun enough, without ever accidentally drooling on one of my friends. In hindsight, that’s not such a bad deal.

Ten things I learned travelling with kids

Over the Easter break, I went travelling with my four-year-old nephew and one-year-old niece. (And their parents, obviously.) I thought it’d be a wonderful chance for some family time, and it was, but in many respects it was a handy reminder that there’s plenty of upside in the fact that I can still travel solo. Because parenting is always harder than I realise, and parenting while travelling is harder still.

And yes, I know that I’ve written before about how much I’d like to be a father. Yeah, um, about that. Let’s just say that while I’m sure that dandling my own child on my knee would be brilliant in lots of ways, I now realise that having young children would make one of my favourite activities a far trickier proposition.

1) Kids have different interests from grown ups.

Whether I’m travelling or not, my first agenda item each morning is the same: finding a half-decent cup of coffee. When I’m overseas, I’ll settle for any drinking receptacle that contains any variety of caffeine – I’ve even been known to settle for Mountain Dew on occasion, and let me tell you, actual dew licked directly off a mountainside would taste better.

But sitting down for a lengthy chat over a hot beverage is an energetic four-year-old’s version of hell, only instead of demons roasting you over a flame, it’s grownups saying “mmm” a lot as they read guidebooks.

Even you’re when actually moving around, visiting temples, museums and other cultural sites are equally dull for kids – and look, I can understand that, I really can. In fact, I clearly remember being frustrated by my parents’ interminable delays when I was a kid. In reality, I probably never waited more than three or four minutes, but at the time, it seemed like an eternity, plus a few extra decades just to really twist the knife.

I am now one of the people inflicting that on my bored nephew and niece, and I’d feel terrible about that except that sometimes I really need a coffee, and hey, they’re only kids.

2) There are a lot of toy stores

By contrast, my nephew’s agenda has the same item at the top every day. We tried to find different toy shops to visit so that we, at least, had a bit of variety, but he was perfectly satisfied by the slightly different configurations of Ninja Turtles and Lego and Ninja Turtles Lego that appeared in every single shop. Until he was no longer satisfied with merely browsing, and turned his mind to adding to his collection. And let’s just say that the message that we’re living in a time of austerity budgets has not yet been accepted by my nephew.

3) There is also a lot to be said about toys

One of the things I really love about spending time with young children is that if they like you, they’re extremely eager for you to share in the excitement they have about things like; oh, let’s say, toys. Entertaining a child requires the grown-up to be able to sustain protracted conversations about things like the Star Wars canon – a subject which, I’m glad to say, I’m relatively well-versed in, especially since my nephew isn’t yet old enough to watch the movies. I haven’t yet introduced him to Jar-Jar Binks, though, because I don’t want to ruin it for him.

4) Getting around is s-l-o-w

One of the really difficult things about travelling with kids is travelling with kids. Long plane rides with limited sleep are my idea of a nightmare, but somehow parents endure this, probably because they think they’re going to get at least an hour or two of blessed relaxation at some point during the holiday that lies ahead of them.

But it’s not just the plane trip that poses challenges – while getting from an airport to one’s accommodation is simple for grownups, it can be a major hassle with young children. Will you get a cab? Does it have child seats? Will all of you plus your luggage fit? Probably not in a standard cab. So, will you get a maxi taxi or a hire car? How do you organise that in a foreign language, anyway?

Let’s say you get a train instead. What if it’s so crowded that you can’t sit down and your kids are howling or wriggling and there are lot of stairs and you have heaps of bags to lug and a portable cot and a stroller and everybody in the train carriage is clearly resentful of your presence? Even getting from A to B can be far harder for parents than I ever realised.

5) But young children are fast

My nephew may not go on to represent Australia in an Olympic sprinting contest, but from my perspective, he can do one hundred metres in the blink of an eye. Or, if I’m slightly more honest, while my eyes are momentarily elsewhere. He has very little fear of the world yet, so if he sees something interesting over yonder, bang – he’s there.

Combine that with the fact that he finds just about everything extremely interesting, and you have a kid who not only needs to be watched like a hawk, but regularly sprinted after. Still, chasing him was the most exercise I’ve had in years, and it turns out that when I’m fuelled by terror at something awful happening to him, I’m surprisingly quick across the ground myself.

6) I am scary

There’s no way around this one: my one-year-old niece finds me terrifying. My all-time record for holding her without her bursting into loud sobs is around thirty seconds, and I think that for 29 of those seconds, she didn’t realise I was holding her. I hope things will improve when she starts talking, but until then, she’s being held by some kind of Godzilla demon.

7) Tablets make great babysitters

What did parents do before the advent of smartphones and tablets, honestly? A little dose of Peppa Pig can transform a restless child almost into a statue. It’s altogether too effective, really – it makes you worry about whether it’s somehow harming the child. Interactive games (which are also available from the Peppa Corporation, fortunately), seem a slightly better option. But I’ve learned that sometimes, the only thing worse than a child staring at a screen is a child not scaring at a screen – and by a considerable margin, too.

8) Try distraction instead of confrontation

I did gain one insight from the trip that may well come in useful if I’m ever a parent myself. Rather than confronting my nephew, I learned that it’s sometimes better to try and be lateral. So instead of saying “no, we can’t go into that lolly shop”, it’s better to instead say “bet I can beat you in a race to that pole over there”. Five seconds later, he’s forgotten about the shop.

Of course, this is simple stuff for parents, and they often have to simply confront a child when they’re doing something they’re not allowed to. But for an uncle, it was quite a neat trick. Maybe that’s why I remember playing lots of fun games with my own lovely uncles and aunts – they were cleverly trying to get me to do stuff.

9) Kids need routine

Especially involving baths, pyjamas and bed. My nephew and niece just had to be back where we were staying by 6, or the whole schedule would get out of whack. By 9, they were asleep and their parents were available for dinner, if we could find a place where we could bring sleeping children. This means that bars, clubs, and pretty much anywhere smoky or raucous was out. I was very grateful that, post-dinner, I could bid parents and kids farewell and head out to some bar or karaoke joint.

10) Having young kids limits your choice of holiday

When kids are incapable of independent movement, it’s not so hard – you can push them in a pram or stroller, or wear them with a Baby Bjorn. But as soon as they’re capable of independent movement, things get far more difficult. As a result, the kind of holiday where you stay in one place and chill out at the beach/by the pool/etc is probably fine, but anything more ambitious is hard. Like, really hard. Just like having children is.

So ultimately I learned that if I want to backpack around Nepal or go on safari in Kenya or learn surfing in the Maldives or anything that isn’t sitting in a resort with excellent facilities for children, I’d better call my travel agent now.

Of men and... makeup

If you ask a management consultant how to grow a business, they'll have two broad strategies for you. (I know this because I was one once, albeit for only long enough to learn how to make PowerPoint slides and drink too many 'bonding' tequila shots.) You can convince your existing customers to spend more, either by increasing their consumption or up-selling them to more expensive products, or you can grow your customer base.

And now that you've read that, I'll be invoicing you for $10,000.

More specifically, if you asked a management consultant how to make the beauty industry more profitable, they'd probably tell you that lots of people already spend a huge amount of money on a great many expensive products, so the best bet for expansion would be to target people who don't currently buy cosmetics – the great unwashed, so to speak – or at least uncleansed, unmoisturised and untoned.

For years now, big cosmetic companies have been doing this by targeting women in developing countries, to whom many household name cosmetics company have the audacity to sell cream that promises to lighten their skin. But there's another group with hefty disposable incomes who could, if successfully tapped, potentially double the size of the markets for overpriced unguents: first-world men.

Now wait just a minute, you might be thinking. Surely men aren't going to buy makeup. Surely they'd be paranoid that people would question their pathetic manhood. And you're probably right, the burgeoning metrosexual plague notwithstanding.

But while we blokes aren't about to start slathering foundation over our sandpapery, pockmarked faces, it's undeniably the case that cosmetics for men are a substantial growth industry. The likes of Clinique, Nivea, Kiehl's and even Tom Ford have been developing their men’s ranges. And it's not just cleanser and moisturiser – they're selling blokey bronzer, and amazingly, there’s apparently a market for facial masks, or even 'masques'.

The golden rule they use, of course, as noted in Drew Magary's recent GQ article, is that they don't call it makeup, which is kind of like how Pepsi helps men pretend that they totes aren't on a diet and drinking lame Diet Pepsi, but instead choose to drink Pepsi Max because of their manly commitment to, um, maximumness.

Honestly – if you're applying skin-coloured stuff to conceal blemishes, it's makeup, fellas. Own it.

As Elial Cruz notes in another article about the phenomenon, cosmetic companies market to men with the same playbook they use when marketing to women. 'All of these products are designed to smooth, cover-up or darken,’ he notes, ‘the implication being you're not tan enough, your skin is not perfect enough.' 'Evenness' is the key buzzword, and amusingly, there’s also a concerted effort to make it look like the fella isn’t wearing makeup.

I can imagine that some female readers may be rolling their eyes and saying – oh, you poor dears, the nasty makeup companies are preying on your low self-esteem? And fair enough, too.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that the impact or experience are comparable with the juggernaut that is the female-centric beauty industry. Not being a woman, I'm in no position to assess its impact – but the attempt to extend these kinds of marketing games to men is certainly new.

But what I am familiar with is the impression they’re attempting to create, which is that the target falls beneath Derek Zoolander's gold standard of being "really, really goodlooking".

Whether or not we are objectively good-looking has little relevance, really – if you feel that you're less than stellar-looking, then you will lack confidence, and be romantically hopeless, and stuck in a vicious circle that makes you a prime victim for unscrupulous pedlars of makeup.

And really, how scummy for a corporation to make a buck by playing on these kinds of psychological vulnerabilities? I particularly object to the idea of bronzer – in an era of widespread melanoma, who gives a damn how 'bronzed' we Aussies are? If anything, a tan should be taken as a sign of foolishness, whether it's because you brave the UV rays or are silly enough to stand in a little booth while a machine sprays rust-coloured paint all over you.

The strangest product of the lot is Clinique's product that hides dark spots. I don't even get what that's for. Freckles? Moles? Post-footy bruising? And then there's the anti-ageing cream. When I want to feel younger, I play video games or watch a Pixar movie. A cream offers me nothing.

But while I resent the idea of concealing imperfections, I am a convert to the notion of skin care. Having (as previously noted) dry skin, I can feel the difference whenever I remember to apply moisturiser, and my adolescent oil-slick of a face would have been far worse if I hadn't diligently applied cleanser every morning during my youth.

And what the hey, I'm man enough to admit that I like it when my skin feels soft and supple to the touch, dammit. So I'm all for a bit of manly moisturiser, and if that helps the areas beside my eyes look a bit less like the dancefloor at the end of a crow-only disco, then that's fine.

But if I was going to begin concealing my biggest physical vulnerability, I'd be investing in wigs rather than skin-toned concealer; or perhaps some kind of portable mirror to make my significantly asymmetrical visage look a bit less lopsided.

Besides, I'm 37, overweight and balding. How good do they think I think I could possibly look?

Then again, many men are all too happy to conceal their hair loss with techniques ranging from chemistry to transplantation, so perhaps the makeup companies are onto something?

So by all means, tell me that your products will make my skin healthier. You can even pretend it'll stave off the ageing process if you like. Just don't tell me I need them to hide the full force of my physical appearance, such as it may be.

Because here's the thing – I am beautiful, no matter what they say. Just like Christina Aguilera, words can’t bring me down.

Or more realistically, I now accept that I'm as beautiful – or otherwise – as I'm going to be, and overpriced cosmetics are unlikely to make a lick of difference.

What ho, Jeeves, monocles are back!

Apparently monocles are back in. Yes, really. Men, I'm assured, are deliberately leaving the house with a tiny circle of glass chained around their neck so they can squint through it, wilfully ignoring the decades of heady success that the optometry industry has had with stereoscopic glasses.

It’s highly likely that waistcoats and pince-nez are back too, and probably even spats and plus fours, as privileged young men the world over have begun to blow their (parents’) hard-earned income on fashion items that were once found in the voluminous wardrobe of Bertie Wooster, or perhaps even Little Lord Fauntleroy.

This part of the ‘young urban male’ or ‘yummy’ phenomenon, something that definitely exists and is not just one of those awkward media labels written by lifestyle writers desperate to identify a new trend, although it definitely is that as well.

As New York magazine (which is painfully hip itself) aptly put it, “According to HSBC, Yummies – dear God, it hurts to type – are reshaping the retail landscape for luxury goods, thanks to their vanity and penchant for trend-chasing.” We men are all toffs now, apparently. Or at least my fellow fellows with greater wardrobe budgets than I have.

I thought 'yummy' had been already been bagsed for a hideous social trend as part of 'yummy mummy', but HSBC would beg to differ. And it's curious that this phenomenon was first observed not by fashion bloggers combing the neon-soaked streets of Tokyo or the microbreweries of Williamsburg, but by a bank. But then again, who better to identify a trend like this than an organisation with access to millions of credit card statements and noticing a sharp uptick in purchases of pocket watches?

This trend should come as a rather firm riposte to those Members of the Opposition (a group which, for this purpose at least, includes Malcolm Turnbull) who have poked fun at the return of knights and dames is some kind of retrograde step. Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen tried to argue that it was as passé as bringing back vinyl records. Um, hello, Chris, have you not been to a hipster pour-over coffee lounge lately, or a party in a warehouse-cum-pop-up jazz venue? Those places behave as though the compact disc had never been invented, let alone Spotify. 

Perhaps we can blame Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby movie, which was such a remarkable showcase for the wardrobe genius of Catherine Martin. Or perhaps we should put it down to Downton Abbey? Personally, when I watch the Crawleys dining, I tend to think “thank goodness menswear has evolved beyond the dickey”, but clearly some youngsters out there are bent on imitation.

We’ve all heard about metrosexuals, men who pay attention to grooming and wear nice clothes, and let me tell you, that was definitely a real thing. Just go to any university campus and see how well-dressed and nice-looking the fellas are nowdays a far cry from the flannie-clad slobs that were there in my undergraduate days. Why, they seem to even moisturise!

But yummies are taking it far beyond mere metrosexuality. They're buying seriously upscale brands, the kind of thing you might find duty-free in Dubai Airport, and dress as though they were heading to a croquet tournament.

Even so, it’s a fairly big call to say that “Rather than being in a minority, men who buy grooming products to boost self-esteem or feel more attractive are now in the majority,” as the report does. But the true yummy doesn’t just slap on a bit of face wash to get rid of the pimples on his forehead. He gets facials, and often.

Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon wrote a noble piece called ‘Stop trying to make monocles happen’, which like all good articles, references Mean Girls. Even though she was attempting to quash  the phenomenon, she conceded the devastating proof that monocles aplenty can currently be found on Etsy. (But of course they can.)

The other reason I’m inclined to believe in the ‘yummy’ phenomenon is because I have a friend who is at its epicentre. Several years ago, Nicholas Atgemis set up a company to manufacture Italian silk bow ties and sell them online. It’s called Le Noeud Papillon, which is French for ‘butterfly knot’, and is not only stocked all over the world, but has opened a bricks and mortar outlet in Vaucluse. I interviewed Australia's foremost bow impresario exclusively for Daily Life.

DK: Why did you decide to start selling bow ties?

NA: At the time I started making bow ties, the men of true sartorial style, or perhaps one could say ‘Old World’ style, were so few and far apart that they were almost covertly operating like a group of clandestine French Resistance operators under Nazi occupied France. We wanted to change that attitude and to celebrate men who dress well.

DK: Have you seen any evidence that 'yummys' are a real phenomenon?

NA: The word is just a new buzz word… what we are seeing is young men turning to websites such as StyleForum where they educate themselves on the finer points of menswear before they purchase. Then, empowered with greater knowledge from these forums plus numerous menswear blogs which are all very accessible, they are becoming some of the toughest shoppers in history. They know a lot more about fabrics, cut, sewing techniques and above all, they have learnt to dismantle pricing structures which makes them very dangerous. These guys don’t want to pay off-the-rack prices.

DK: Is there a better term out there?

NA: The ideal word for it is ‘renaissance’ men. Because essentially they are re-generating interest in age-old areas such as tailoring and personal grooming. These things existed for my grandparent’s generation but with my parent’s generation everything moved towards the corporation and ready-to-wear/off-the-rack. Now the buzzwords are ‘custom’, ‘bespoke’, ‘hand-made’ and ‘tailored’ – and corporations have cottoned on so now they are using the same language. But what I like about these ‘renaissance’ men is that they are re-birthing old information but also generating new information at the same time. Another word for this phenomenon is the ‘peacock’ and to appreciate this fully you need to watch the blogs which snap the photos of men who turn up to Pitti menswear in Florence twice a year.

Following Nicholas’ advice as always, I looked up Pitti and - whoa. Seriously, whoa.

Nicholas has also at times favoured the term ‘dandy’, and has directed his army of loyal blog readers to helpful coffee-table books such as I Am Dandy, which like all books nowadays, is based on a blog. It catalogues the phenomenon worldwide and features a gentleman somehow rocking off a light-blue suit on its cover. Nicholas himself, I am proud to report, was photographed by its author at the Waldorf Astoria.

Through his blog, I’ve discovered shops like Mr Porter, a hilariously high-end menswear boutique whose website has a section not just for boat shoes, but espadrilles. Indeed, Nicholas' most recent blog post is about a custom-made beaver felt hat that he obtained from Toronto, Canada.

So, young men's interest in fancy accessories is here to stay, it seems. But if you don’t believe that this is really, truly a thing, allow me to introduce further a piece of incontrovertible evidence. King Gee is introducing a range of skin-tight ‘compression workwear’ for ‘industrial athletes’. If even tradies are wearing fancy gear that takes optimal care of their bulging pecs, we blokes really must be becoming dandies.

So make some extra room around that fancy dining table of yours, Crawley family, because the yummies are here. And yes, Mr Carson, of course they are dressed appropriately for dinner at a pre-war stately home.

How to be a knight (or dame) by someone who already is

This week, the Prime Minister announced that he has restored the imperial system of honours – something he was apparently able to do unilaterally, subject to the Queen’s approval, a curious reminder for anybody who might have forgotten that we do indeed live in a monarchy. But it’s been several decades since we last had any newly-minted knights and dames, and those who do still live among us are advancing in years.

Consequently, there are not many people in our community with the suitable heraldic knowledge to induct our new honorees into the chivalrous ways and rich traditions of the knighthood.

Hence, as a proud member of a family who have been Knights for many generations, I proudly offer my expertise to all knights, dames, and would-be knights and dames who might be looking to pull up their imperial socks ahead of the receipt of such a pre-eminent honour.

Consider this advice a grace note, if you will, in our national reaction to the Prime Minister’s plan.

Chivalrous language

Dames and knights must at all times use language fitting of the great tradition that has so honoured them with inclusion. So if you’re an eminent person who thinks you’ve a chance of being recognised pre-eminent, start using words like “vouchsafe”, “forsooth” and “prithee” in everyday conversation. Do not say “mate”, say “vassal” or “knave” as appropriate. And it should go without saying it’s “thou” or “thee”, not “you” (or "youse").

It might help accustom the public to discourse of this nature if senior members of the government set a more courtly tone in public discussion. For instance, instead of saying “This is a bad tax” on the campaign trail, they might choose to say the more formal “Verily this be the most dishonourable of imposts”.

Maintain an honourable bearing

A knight or dame must behave with suitable dignity at all times. In particular, knights will find that the joke "night night, knight" will get old. Nevertheless, knights must grin and bear it as a matter of honour. Trust me on this.

Similarly, dames will soon find that they’ve heard more than enough of the song ‘There is nothing like a dame’ from South Pacific.

Get a sword

Possibly even two. But you definitely need one – for centuries, a sword has been the defining feature of knighthood. In an age of gender equality, it will also shortly become a defining feature of damehood, just as soon as a few dames behead vassals who dare to suggest that dames are lesser members of the warrior class than knights.

A practical tip – when travelling by plane, it’s best to put your sword in your checked baggage. You will fail airport security scans if you try going through a metal detector, and if you behead the impudent dog who dared to try to take your sword from you, as is your undoubted feudal right, you may nevertheless find that the airline refuses to fly you in future.

All tables must be round

If you have a rectangular or square table, dispatch it to the tip forthwith. Or give it to the Salvos Round is the only shape for a knime’s table. Not even oval, as all must be equal when gathering around the festive board.

Well, except that knights and dames are, by their very definition, marked out as social superiors. And at the same time, they are marked out as the inferiors of the monarch. But within the boundaries of the Dames and Knights of the Most Excellent Order Of Australia itself, they are totes equal.

Get a horse

Again, this is a non-negotiable part of knightly life. Even if you cannot ride one, you should walk around holding it by the bridle, lest the peasants laugh at you. Until you can procure a suitable steed, it’s perfectly acceptable to substitute a pantomime horse, if you have two vassals handy to wear the costume. Even a hobby horse or pool pony will do. The important thing is to maintain the equestrian elements of the tradition.

Perform acts of chivalry

Most of those elevated as knights and dames do so already, of course – but there are practical considerations to take into account. For instance, Dame Quentin Bryce has long been known for her array of colourful garments. But because dames, like knights, are required to lay down their coats in mud puddles should the monarch wish to cross them without spoiling their shoes, she may choose to augment her lemon-yellow coat with a Drizabone for such situations.

Choose an appropriate name

Sadly, the lack of dames and knights in recent years has meant that many who might be elevated to the honour have entirely inappropriate names. By way of an example, consider the notion of Sir Shane Warne, or Dame Kylie Minogue. It doesn’t quite sound right, does it? Although, that said, nobody seems to baulk at the idea of Sir Elton John – although his birth name, Sir Reginald Dwight, would be far more appropriate.

Consequently, those who anticipate receiving knighthoods or damehoods might like to pre-empt their pre-eminence by changing their first name to something more appropriate. Lancelot, Gawain or Aethelred will be suitable for knights, while prospective Dames might like to follow the finest monarchical tradition by changing their names to the names of the most acclaimed of the realm’s various queens regnant. You may choose from Elizabeth, Victoria or Elizabeth.

Get into lute music

It is important that all knights and dames become familiar with the courtly arts, and lute music is a very important element in them. Those who have not previously had much experience with the ‘guitar of chivalry’, as knights (well, I) have called it, will be glad to learn that Sir Sting of The Police recently recorded an album of lute music. (Yes, really.)

Defend the realm

The incoming Governor-General, General Sir Peter Cosgrove, has already performed this duty admirably, of course, and as the monarch’s Australian designate he will act as commander-in-chief of the Australian military. However, those without his lengthy and distinguished military experience are nevertheless required to ride into battle with honour when the occasion demands. In this event, it also helps to have a suit of armour handy at all times. Seriously, all times.

Even at a dinner party, anybody who disses Australia or the monarch should rebuked sternly, albeit honourably. You may also wish to unsheath your sword.