Deck the halls with... nothing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Movember reign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How I sobered up, by accident

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten things I love about summer

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

1) The beach

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

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

2) The heat

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

3) Cricket

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

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

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

4) Summer wardrobe

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

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

5) Laziness

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

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

6) Music festivals

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

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

7) Barbecues – sorry, I mean BBQs

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

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

8) Expats

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

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

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

9) Christmas parties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trying not to care about the hair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 007 double standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talk about our sexual attractiveness

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

Thanks to Ryan Gosling, this process has already begun.

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

Make inappropriate personal comments

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

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

Negging

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

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

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

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

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

Take over the media

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

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

Initiate a vast global conspiracy.

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

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

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

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

How to survive a wedding when you’re single

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

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

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

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

1) Dress loud

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

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

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

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

2) Pre-prepare your small talk

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

 3) Stay sober

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

4) Own the dancefloor

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

5) Hook up

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

6) Avoid people with whom you've had history

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

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

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

7) Be almost the last to leave

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

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

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

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

What happens in Vegas...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Siri, should I get the new iPhone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Election day BBQs: our democratic right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man vs Ikea

The weekend before last, I had an important writing project to accomplish. Well, more accurately, I had three important writing projects to accomplish. Deadlines loomed. If I owned any boots, I would have been quaking in them. It was clear that I needed to spend practically all of my weekend sitting at my desk, responsibly tapping away at my computer. But on Saturday morning, as I sat down at my desk and began limbering up my typing fingers, I realised that something was amiss. The room was untidy. And by “untidy”, I mean that not only were there boxes everywhere from when I’d moved in a few months ago, but several of them were half-unpacked all over the floor.
My mother might have described my room as “looking like a bomb had hit it”, a phrase which I have now seen more than enough action movies to discredit – if anything, bombs remove objects littered around a room. A more accurate description might have been that it looked as though a toddler had run rampant, although in this case the only occupant of the room was 35.

I’d been promising myself all year that I would do something about it. And I remembered a quote by Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and disorderly in your work”. That’s what I needed, I told myself. I needed to reorganise my room.

I imagined myself sitting in a beautifully neat room. How happy I would be, and how productive! My jokes might even be funny, or at least, funnier. There was only one thing for it. I must set forth on a quest. A quest to a better place, a land of order and heavily discounted hot dogs. The de facto Swedish Embassy. Ikea.

I used to think that the Ikea at Homebush Bay was absurdly massive. In Homebush, Ikea is part of a huge shopping centre I like to call The Colossus Of Rhodes because of how I’m hilarious. But Tempe dwarfs it. The café area is bigger than most food courts. It’s on the scale of an airport, except that you are journeying instead to a better version of your own home. Well, perhaps not ‘better’ so much as full of plasticky furniture that I always manage to break when moving house. But still, it’s a pretty impressive place. Apparently lots of families visit their Beijing branch for a fun day out at a furniture theme park – and don’t buy anything. I thought this was ridiculous before they built the Tempe store.

It never seems clear whether Ikea never is a supplier of cheap furniture or a religious cult. When you walk in, there are a heap of posters suggesting you sign up for the “Ikea Family”. Like religion, their Family costs nothing and offers free cups of coffee. What’s more, they promise – well, not quite eternal life, but a much longer returns period, at least. And then before long you’re tithing them 10% of your income.

Nevertheless, I signed up for the Family the first time I visited, because I’m both a sucker for freebies and genuinely starved of affection. But I never remember my membership card, which means I print one every single time I come, which I think rather nicely offsets the patronising posters they have everywhere about helping the environment.

I have two major issues with trips to Ikea, both of which I only ever remember at the point of sale. The first is that they’re always out of stock of at least one essential item. Sure, okay, you can check stock levels online, which is progress, but if you go there without any specific goal beyond “organisation”, then you can pretty much guarantee that by the time you get to the vast warehousey bit at the end and wander down to the very end of the long aisle that always makes me envisage the racks toppling like massive scary dominoes in the event of an earthquake or maybe it’s just that I’m morbid, you’ll see an empty shelf and a cheerful little card telling you to try another day.

Instead, your trolley will somehow be full of a massive quantity of items that you didn’t think you needed. I simply cannot go to the place without buying napkins and light globes, even though I have a vast stockpile of both at home. Nor can I get home without buying some sort of cheap lamp. On returning home I discovered that I’d bought exactly the same model of cheap LED desk light that I already owned and had rejected because it hardly produced any light.

This time, I really outdid myself, buying a strip of flashing coloured LED lights that gave my apartment the exact ambience of a convenience store. And three packets of smoked salmon, because it was on special.

Fortunately, I avoided the most common mistake – buying frozen Swedish meatballs that I never eat, and don’t even like when I eat them at Ikea. However, I did succumb to the second most common mistake, buying a $1 hotdog, and some kind of lingonberry drink, which I managed to regret all the way home. I’ve never heard of lingonberries anywhere outside of Ikea, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised to learn that, like nearly everything else at Ikea, they’re mass-produced in Cambodian factories.

The genius of Ikea, which they boast about in massive signs outside their bathrooms, is that by selling flat-packed, self-assembly furniture, they keep costs down. And the frustrating thing about Ikea, which I should put a sign warning me of outside my bathroom so that I remember it, is that I’m rubbish at assembling furniture.

In my defence, the booklets don’t help. The lack of language and colour makes it harder to interpret the instructions than it might be.

In their defence, I’m hopeless.

But for whatever reason, the first time I assemble any Ikea furniture item, I will inevitably make a major mistake by ignoring something that should have been obvious. This time, I managed to assemble a rack to hold my fancy new sliding drawers with the rails on the outside. Still, I didn’t destroy the item while trying to assemble it, which by my standards is progress. If there’s a way of assembling a Billy bookshelf without fatally chipping or warping the particleboard back, I certainly haven’t discovered it. Which is why my bookshelves have innovative see-through backs.

By the time I’d driven to Tempe and back, and assembled the new storage system that I’d bought, it was 7pm. The next step was to fill the drawers with the contents of my boxes, and make it all tidy and nice. But I was tired, so I went and had dinner. And then I invited friends over to play Singstar. Which meant that I awoke on Sunday morning to a room that was even more cluttered than it had been on the Saturday morning, because it now contained not only the original mess, but the storage system.

I sighed, resigned myself to deferring the tidying project to the following weekend, and sat down to finally get to work. By which I mean that I went out for coffee.

My submission on submission

I read Archbishop Peter Jensen’s piece on marriage in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald with considerable interest, and have been following the heated debate over the proposal to change the word “obey” to “submit” in the Anglican marriage vows. I don’t really understand why non-believers are so eager to condemn marriage vows that they’ve no interest in taking anyway. If Christian women freely choose to promise to submit, then in a society that guarantees religious freedom, that’s their choice.

But what what the Archbishop appears not to understand, perhaps unsurprisingly given his decades in church leadership, is contemporary secular society’s enthusiasm for marriage. "Individualism leaves us with little reason to join our life to that of someone else," he writes. If the institution is in such moribund decline, then why have I attended a dozen weddings in the past 12 months, most of them secular? I could have saved a fortune on gifts and dry-cleaning bills.Now, the marriage rate is certainly lower than ever – although it hasn’t dropped since 2005. But I would argue that this is not because we “choose to bypass" marriage or "need to rethink it”. I believe it’s precisely because secular society understands how serious marriage is that many people choose not to enter into it unless they’re very confident that it will work out. We are well aware that “it really matters”.

Indeed, I’d argue that secular marriage has a meaning that it might not have for Sydney Anglicans, who are warned by Archbishop Jensen and his colleagues that the only valid way to experience love and sex is by marrying. When those who have no moral imperative to marry nevertheless choose do so, they choose to do so out of love alone – often later in life, after a number of serious relationships, and after living with their spouse beforehand.

I don’t know whether Archbishop Jensen has attended many secular weddings. I doubt he’s attended any gay weddings. Perhaps if he did so, he would realise that “making our promises before witnesses and trying to keep them” can be meaningful even without the Bible. Perhaps he’d understand that the 70% of Australians who choose secular ceremonies are able to understand the gravity of what they are undertaking.

And perhaps he wouldn’t assert that “secular views of marriage are driven by a destructive individualism and libertarianism.” To the contrary, civil, secular marriage is an antidote to individualism and libertarianism. It’s inherently anti-individualistic, because it makes coupledom the fundamental basis of one’s life. And it’s anti-libertarian in that it’s a contract where you give up a degree of personal freedom in the interests of approaching life as a couple.

These changes are central to all marriages, both Christian and secular. And furthermore, both Christian and secular marriages fail when couples abandon them due to individual selfishness – or because, in some instances, couples simply grow apart.

What’s more, if secular society is so opposed to marriage, why is gay marriage one of the most prominent civil rights battles in the Western world? Jensen is clearly aware of this, since he has devoted considerable effort to opposing it. Gay couples, for whom the Bible’s heterosexual concept of marriage has little to offer, do not need the Archbishop to remind them how important marriage is at the same time as he attempts to deny them it.

Nevertheless, much of what the Archbishop writes resonates with non-Christians, whether married or single, like me. Many people would agree that “husband” and “wife” are more meaningful and profound terms than “partner” – indeed, that’s precisely why gay couples want to have access to them. Many husbands would view that as their most important role in life. And many enter into marriage because they think it will be better for their children.

As a former Principal of Moore College, which trains the majority of Sydney’s Anglican ministers, the Archbishop is one of Australia’s leading theologians. I’ve no doubt he’s articulated the New Testament’s position accurately. So those who object to his point of view are probably objecting to what the Bible says – or, more specifically, what the Apostle Paul writes in Ephesians.

I’ve no wish to engage in a debate over precisely what Paul meant, and am ill-equipped to do so. Let me instead explain why that passage, and the new Anglican vows, present a view of marriage that makes many people uncomfortable. The analogy that man is to woman as Christ is to the church does call upon both parties to love and serve one another, as the Archbishop points out. But it’s hardly an equal relationship – Christ is perfect, the church sins; Christ is divine, the church is worldly. If Christ is “the head of the Church”, that is surely the antithesis of equality.

Jensen attempts to dispel our discomfort with men being placed in a superior position with the argument that the man’s obligation to the woman is “more onerous”. Yes, great power comes with great responsibility – even Spider-Man can teach us that. But in the end, you still get more power, don’t you? To assert that husbands have the more onerous obligation in marriage neatly illustrates why feminist object so violently, and I would argue validly, to these teachings.

But then again, the Sydney Diocese are comfortable with asserting male superiority. It does not permit women to teach, as per another of Paul’s instructions. Indeed, Paul said that women should remain silent in churches, one of a number of his mandates which have proven controversial over the years. Personally, I find it difficult to relate to an institution which makes such demands of women, and this is one of a number of reasons why I am not a churchgoer.

Of course men and women are different – if they weren’t, nobody would buy books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, and FM breakfast radio shows would have nothing to make jokes about. The important question is whether they are equal.

Sydney Anglicans have recognised this by arguing that their view of women’s role in the church is “equal but different”, and indeed, the Archbishop’s wife and sister-in-law serves on the Steering Committee of a group which is called Equal But Different. Forgive me if I simply suggest that an institution in which women are not allowed to occupy the same leadership positions as men contradicts my, and I suspect many people’s, definition of equality.

Let’s talk now about the vexatious issue of submission. Marriage necessarily involves submission of one’s will in certain circumstances. And this can be enormously difficult. People in committed long-term relationships (whether married or otherwise) might have to live in a town or country where they might not want to live, or stay at home with children when they’re rather be working, or stay in to keep their spouse company when they’d rather go out, or not have sex with somebody else when they feel like it. Even something as simple as restaurant choice can involve submission.

In a broader sense, though, this is an exercise of free will where spouses choose to deny themselves short-term gratification for the long-term emotional reward of a relationship. Marriage, simply put, is a promise to keep doing this into the future. It’s much the same as when we sign up for employment and voluntarily submit our will to our employer’s. It’s in our ultimate self-interest.

Where the argument really loses me – and indeed, where Ephesians really loses me – is the suggestion that this obligation should be understood differently for women and men. (Or indeed, for two men or two women who wish to marry.) There is no argument offered for this beyond the fact that Paul says it must be so.

If I ever marry, I would never want my wife to submit her will to mine simply because I’m a man, which is precisely what Ephesians suggests. I would want any power dynamic that exists to be an equal one. Neither of us should “wear the pants”, we should have a leg each!

Personally, I’m comfortable with stating that I find Paul’s views on topics like sexuality and slavery and the role of women outdated, which perhaps explains why I am not a churchgoer. It’s also worth noting that in Ephesians, Paul requires slaves to submit to their masters in similar terms, which is a position that I don’t see Archbishop Jensen advocating in the newspaper.

Then again, others of Paul’s views are extremely progressive for their era. For instance, he writes in Galatians 3:28 “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

I have met the Archbishop, and have heard him express regret that the Church is not able to make a larger contribution to the debate over these kinds of social issues. But I fear that there is a fundamental tension between secular society’s comfort with its views on human rights and relationships “evolving”, to use Barack Obama’s term on the question of gay marriage, and the Church’s position on the authority of documents written thousands of years ago. I do not know how much each group can teach the other, starting from such different positions.

Nevertheless, I can reassure Archbishop Jensen that on the basis of the secular weddings I’ve attended recently, the institution is thriving. Whereas if civil vows were rewritten to require women to promise to submit to their husbands, I have no doubt that the marriage rate would drop dramatically.

In the land of the giants

If you are a gentleman with precarious self-esteem, I suggest that you never live next door to a bodybuilder. Well, my flatmate and I were never sure whether our next-door neighbour was actually a bodybuilder, but he must have been a professional athlete in some sport where they needed massive blokes to crash into one another, because his body was ridiculous and he seemed to be making a lot of money for doing very little besides going to the gym.

My flatmate nicknamed him El Gigantico, but of course we never called him that to his face. If we'd called him anything, it would have been "sir", because he was huge, big enough to make Jonah Lomu quiver in his rugby boots. He looked like a guy who could kick sand in the faces of the guys who kick sand in the faces of people like me.

We couldn't stop talking about him, with a combination of awe and pronounced jealousy. It wasn’t just that he was so enormous that we had to turn sideways to pass him in the hall. It wasn’t just that he brought an ever-changing assortment of gorgeous ladies back to his palatial bachelor pad. It was the fact that every time I looked at him, it was like looking into one of those funhouse mirrors that distorts you into the exact opposite. When I looked at him, I saw my own lack of muscle definition reflected back. Every glimpse of his physical splendour felt like a reproach.

When I look at someone like Gigantico, or watch those behemoths going toe to toe in a State of Origin match, or even behold Ryan Gosling with his shirt off in Crazy Stupid Love, in that scene where Emma Stone protested that he looked Photoshopped, I wonder what it would be like to have muscles that were visible instead of hidden shamefully below the surface. To have pecs, biceps, a six-pack. For my stomach to feel firm and toned rather than soggily flabby. And, the holy grail, to be able to wear a tight t-shirt without feeling self-conscious.

We hear a great deal about the problematic ways in which women's bodies are idealised in the media. But while there's obviously a difference in degree - as far as I know, fashion mags don't tend to bother radically Photoshopping men's bodies, to cite just one example - we blokes aren't entirely immune to the same pressures. For us, success is defined as being slim, muscular, perhaps lightly tanned, with minimal hair on your body and a full head of hair on your head. In other words, as Brad Pitt. But many Australian men look more like Homer Simpson, with hefty guts, shiny pates and permanent five o'clock shadows. And as funny as he is, nobody aspires to be like him, or even can understand why a hottie like Marge stays with him.

And men's body image does affect our behaviour. If we think of ourselves as relatively unattractive, we find ourselves deferring to men who are in in better shape, the same way we would have stood aside for the alpha males in caveman times. There's no way I'd try to compete with Gigantico for a woman, for instance, and not just because he could pulverise me with both hands tied behind his back. I'd simply expect the lady to go for him, because that's the way the world is. And men are often accused – entirely correctly – of placing too much emphasis on appearance, it's not exactly a one-way street. I've seen internet dating profiles where women specified "Must be in shape", or "No bald guys". Harsh, of course, but I guess it saves both parties time.

That said, I don't think I'd want to become one of those men who sculpt vast rippling upper bodies for their own sake. But I'd be delighted to cultivate a carefree physique that suggested "oh yes, I lead quite the active lifestyle, and these here muscles just cropped up when I was hauling in the mainsheet in the last Sydney to Hobart, or was it when I was rock climbing in the Andes last spring?" In other words, I want muscles, but cooly nonchalant ones.

And this is partly because I've seen how our neighbour got to be so Gigantico, and it terrified me. We inspected his apartment when it was up for sale, and were shocked to discover his dozens of vast white plastic tubs with names like Protein Max and Muscle Up and Body Xtreme. I can only assume he siphoned bucketloads of powdery, proteiny gunk into his gullet each day in between his reps of pumping iron. I'm not prepared to make myself a biochemical experiment in order to make my arms resemble a hearty lamb roast. I'd just like to feel slightly more proud of my physique when I look in the mirror.

In American Beauty, Kevin Spacey's character set himself the goal of looking good naked. That's a lofty ideal, but at this point, I'll settle for looking good fully clothed. For the bulges beneath my shirt to suggest that I'm taking care of myself rather than the opposite. And if I can achieve that, perhaps one day my new neighbours will come up with their own cheeky quasi-Spanish nickname for my exquisite physique.

This piece originally appeared in Sunday Life.

The moral dilemma of blokes on a plane

As a single gentleman who is rather partial to both aeroplanes and holidaymaking, I was cut to the quick by the recent revelation that Virgin Australia won't allow unaccompanied children to be seated next to a man.

I imagined how humiliated I’d feel if I was forced to move seats at the last moment, as some male passengers have been. Generally, I assume, my fellow passengers wonder enviously about the identity of that debonair fellow istravelling by himself on no-doubt-important business. But if I got moved away from kiddies for their own safety, they’d instead be wondering which watchlist I was on.

As I often do when facing an imaginary slight, I got extremely self-righteous. "Fine, Virgin Australia," I said to myself, although not to their customer feedback line. "If you're going to operate on the assumption that I'm a potential paedophile, I'm going to operate on the assumption that you're a terrible airline. And I shall find another carrier that treats potentially dodgy men with a bit more respect. Or, at least, I will just as soon as I can find a less creepy way to express that sentiment."

Unfortunately it turns out that pretty well all airlines have this policy, meaning that the more dignified alternative for the single fellow is driving or walking.

Clearly, this is sexism. It’s also profiling, the approach that’s proven so controversial in the aftermath of September 11. It’s subjected many non-white travellers to regular, intrusive security checks. Having been on the receiving end of one or two of them while travelling on a US airline as aa youngish, bearded, solo male traveller, I can affirm that it’s a truly horrible experience. I can only imagine what it’s like for the people who routinely experience it.

Treating people as innocent until they’re proven guilty is one of the bedrock operating assumptions of a free society. And while I’m fairly comfortable with airlines obtaining confidential information about past sex offenders and adjusting their seating accordingly, I’m bothered, to say the least, by the prospect of a company I’m paying treating me on the basis that I might be a sex offender just because I’m male.

On further reflection, though, I might have firmer grounds for my outrage if the assumption the policy makes about men being relatively likely to be child abusers wasn't quite so thoroughly borne out by the data. The statistics from the Australian Study for the Centre for Sexual Assault say that 98% of sexual abuse against women below the age of 16 is perpetrated by men. Not only that, but around 20% of women have reported experiencing it. That’s a truly horrifying figure. They don’t have data on sexual abuse with male victims, but from the cases reported in the media, it seems reasonable to assume that the majority involve male perpetrators.

In other words, it’s unquestionably true that men are more likely to abuse children than women. Perhaps I’d be better off finding fault with my fellow men than the airlines.

Reading through the data on sexual abuse, though, something else struck me. Such crimes are far more likely to be perpetrated by someone known to the victim rather than a random stranger. In other words, the kids sitting next to their parents – and, let’s be honest, we’re predominantly talking about their father here – are actually more at risk than those sitting next to a stranger. But if airlines started treating dads as prospective child abusers, their markets would collapse instantly – and of course, the vast majority of children are safer with their parents than with anybody else on the planet.

This observation does make me wonder, though, just how far we can obey the data in these situations. There has to be some consistent policy – we can’t just have people who “look dodgy” being moved away from kids, surely? The best solution, I think, for the airline to actively monitor the safety of their unaccompanied minors, no matter who they’re sitting next to.

Our society is now hyper-aware of paedophilia. In schools nowadays, I’m told, no teacher may be alone in a room with a student with the door closed. And thinking about this, I’ve realised that I modify my behaviour on the assumption that people will be suspicious. When babysitting in the past, I’ve found myself clarifying with strangers that I’m my nephew’s uncle, just in case they’re judging me. And the other day, I suggested to a female friend that it might be better if she found an outdoor cafe table next to a playground while I waited in line, just so it didn’t look like I was “lurking”. And ’ve heard lots of stories from friends about how they’ve had to prove to strangers that they were their kids’ father before they’d let the little girl leave with the scary man. We might be overcompensating for society sweeping this issue under the carpet in the past, but I’ll bet the net result is that fewer children are harmed today.

Our systems to protect children certainly need to strike a balance between safety and hurting men’s feelings, but ultimately, the lesser harm in the equation is to people like me. I guess we’ll just have to take that on the chin.

And look, it’s not all downside. Unsupervised children can be incredibly annoying, especially if and they squabble or play noisy games. Under those circumstances, I'd probably ask to be reseated. But if our airlines can find a way to keep kids safe without humiliating men in front of a crowded aeroplane, I for one would certainly appreciate it.

Disaster Stories at the Sydney Fringe

I'm doing a comedy show. Late at night (with one early show). In a shipping container. Where I will tell largely autobiographical stories. For some inexplicable reason.

Ten years ago, while making a series called CNNNN, Dominic Knight was arrested for "aiding and abetting offensive behaviour".

As one of the founders of The Chaser, it's an apt summary of his career.

(Nowadays he also presents Evenings on 702 ABC Sydney and writes novels in a belated bid for respectability.)

In an ill-advised act of contrition, Dominic will share this and other embarrassing stories from his frequently embarrassing life.

He'll probably read them, to be honest. Yes, we said "read". Hey, it works for David Sedaris.

Yes, we know Dominic's not as good as David Sedaris.

Look, he's just hoping he's not booed off the stage, like he was at the Sydney University band comp. But that's another story. Which he'll also tell.

"Not everyone finds ABC's Chaser Non Stop News Network team's stunts all that funny, especially Burwood police."
Sydney Morning Herald

Here's the link to book tickets

Gay or not, it's none of our business

I couldn’t care less whether Ian Thorpe is gay. But I do care about just how much we all seem to care whether he’s gay, and how reluctant we are to believe him. What’s the guy got to do, other than keep saying no for more than a decade? And more to the point, why do we think we have the right to pry into the inner workings of his sexuality, just because he happens to be an outstanding swimmer?

Unfortunately, Thorpe’s had about as much success in convincing the world that he’s straight as he had qualifying for the London Olympics. The pattern’s been the same for years: the question is posed by an impudent journalist, and Thorpe classily denies it.

Even on a show as highbrow as RN’s Sunday Profile, it still comes up:

MONICA ATTARD: But there’s a down side too isn’t there, because, in terms of your personal life, there’s been an awful lot of speculation about your sexuality?

IAN THORPE: Well, there has been. It’s something that, you know, I think people are very quick to judge people. You know, I’m a little bit different to what most people would consider being the Australian male. 

MONICA ATTARD: Why do you think people…

IAN THORPE: That doesn’t make me gay. I mean, I’m straight so… people want to claim me as part of a minority group and want to put labels on people and that’s not what I’m about and I don’t understand why other people are like that.

That interview was from 2002, and our interest in the question hasn’t diminished over the subsequent decade. This week, Fairfax websites published an article that focussed primarily on Thorpe’s successful stint as a BBC commentator under the headline “It hurts that people don’t believe me”. The Telegraph’s original went even further, using the headline “Ian Thorpe: Am I gay? It’s at the stage I just say ‘whatever’”. Since the interview dealt with his frustration at constantly being asked this question, it must have frustrated him all the more to see how it was billed.

The poor guy must be sick to death of this. His publicist asked the reporter, Harry Wallop, not to ask him about his sexuality but that doesn’t help either – by placing the question off-limits, you just invite more speculation. There’s absolutely nothing he can do to stop people asking that question except getting into a high-profile relationship with a woman, and even then there would still be speculation, just as there is with other celebrities who are assumed to be in the closet. I won’t name them here both because it’s unethical and because they might sue – but we all know who gets whispered about.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard rumours and gossip about Thorpe, and people swearing that they know the truth one way or another – and why? What does it matter? What would it prove? Ian Thorpe delivered Australia five gold medals – enough for five Olympics, based on our London 2012 swimming haul – and all we’ve given him in return is grief. Admittedly he repaid us a little of that grief with Undercover Angels, but still – the least we could do to say thanks is to leave the guy alone.

I’d like to think that we now live in a world where it would be okay for Ian Thorpe to be gay, if that’s what he is. But perhaps we don’t, not quite yet. Perhaps he would have lost his lucrative sponsors back in the day. Perhaps his extensive charitable efforts would have been undermined. I do know, though, that if he were to come out, he’d inspire a lot of younger people who were struggling with their sexuality. And while admittedly a few people might think worse of him, such bigotry is resolutely to be ignored. Ultimately, it’s his choice.

Despite the enormous progress we’ve made in the past few decades, the fear of being thought to be gay is still something that many men struggle with. I can admit that there was a time when I was paranoid about people concluding that I was secretly gay because I, like Thorpe, tended not to have many girlfriends. In hindsight, I think that was a reflection of my own homophobia, inspired partly by religion and the bigotry that was commonplace in my single-sex high school. Now, I’d really like to think I wouldn’t care. But then again, people don’t constantly ask me about it. Perhaps I’m not sufficiently well-groomed to conform with the stereotype? Perhaps Thorpey might finally silence the whispers if he really let himself go?

I don’t think he’s gay. Or straight, for that matter. Even wondering about it seems unkind at this point. Especially since, while we’re talking about confessions, I’ll admit to having had the occasional laugh about Thorpe over the years, simply because for a man who was so insistent on denying being gay, he did seem to do a lot of, well, stereotypically camp things. There were the fashion parades and the pearl necklaces, and his somewhat ambiguous relationship with a female swimmer named – and you couldn’t make this up – Amanda Beard.

But I feel guilty about that now. Now, I’m happy simply to say that the question is none of my damn business, and it isn’t any of yours, either. Let’s just hope that Ian Thorpe is getting as much loving as he wants from whomever he wants, and that he’s happy. And refusing to ask him the same intrusive question or whisper about it behind his back would be a great way for us to contribute to that happiness.

The Olympics needs more playground sports

I have been watching the Olympics in Asia, as I mentioned last week, and I have discovered something that’s both extraordinary and disturbing. Which is that not every country determines what events to broadcast on the basis of Australia’s medal chances.

I know, right? You would have thought that in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, they’d be tuning in for every moment of Australian excellence, in the hope of learning a little something about sporting awesomeness. They might also have learned something about winning silver medals, a competition in which we’re currently gold-medal favourites. (Hint: it’s probably better if, when you mount that podium, your facial expression isn’t this one.)

It turns out that for some reason, Asian television networks also focus on events where their country might win a medal. Consequently, my Olympics has been a little different from what I would have seen back home – although they don’t have Eddie McGuire’s commentary, so there is some upside.

I’ve been watching a lot of badminton, volleyball and table tennis, which has brought a lot of fond memories flooding back. First, I remembered that these sports were part of the Olympics in the first place, something we tend to forget in Australia. And I’ve been reminiscing about how much fun they were to play back in high school. I loved badminton – whacking a shuttlecock and watching it float gently down across the net is endlessly satisfying, like tennis with the addition of hang time. And volleyball is great too, although it requires a little more skill than I have to consistently smack the ball back over the net instead of into it.

But my favourite Olympic sport to play is ping pong. My brother and I used to hold huge series at my grandparents’ house, and during uni I regularly skipped lectures to play long rallies in which my friends and I used to compete not to win the point, but to achieve a positively Gillardian volume of spin. It was far more satisfying than attending classes, and I’m not sure that it was any less rewarding in the long run.

The sports that we played as kids seem almost too much fun to be in the Olympics, really. And I suspect that by choosing to specialise in such enjoyable pursuits, Asia might be onto something. How great would it be if you could become an Olympian by playing table tennis for ten hours a day?

Now, it’s become clear that Australia needs to pick some new Olympic events, because our traditional sports are in crisis. Or at least, we have fallen below the ridiculous heights we achieved in 2000 and 2004 after pouring vast funding into sport for our own Games, and now think we deserve to maintain forever. But nevertheless, the Australian public has spoken, and our view is that there must be more gold.

Rather than competing in events like long-distance running that require genuine work, though, why don’t we come up with some new Olympic sports? And if we push for the games we played back in school to be added to the programme, we’re have the most precious thing you can have at any Games: an unfair advantage.

I’ve pulled together a few suggestions so we can start lobbying the IOC immediately. John Coates should feel free to start talking these new sports up when he’s calling everybody to apologise for his son.

Real handball

I’m sure that many people, like me, were surprised and delighted to see handball on the Olympic programme, and imagined it was the same as the magnificent game we used to play in school. But no – Olympic handball is like soccer, only you can throw the ball. Who wants to do that? Well, Europeans, apparently. What the Olympics need is Aussieplayground handball – it’s a sport anybody can play with only a worn-out tennis ball and a piece of chalk.

In the Olympics, there would be both singles and fours categories, of course. Of course, the competition would be professional-level. Which means no intoes or hoonying. And imagine if we had Hawkeye to end those perpetual arguments about whether the ball had its second bounce on your side of the line or your opponent’s.

Brandings

This is what we used to play back before handball’s ascendency, throwing a tennis ball at a wall and then at one another. Brandings combines skill at throwing and catching with that little twist of violence which would make it an outstand television sport. I can just imagine the super slo-mo as the ball raises a bruise on somebody’s thigh.

Australia’s cricketers could form the nucleus of our Olympic brandings team – their ability to pull off spectacular one-handed slips catches and fire the ball at the stumps would make them fearsome brandings competitors. Ricky Ponting has the skills and the temper to be truly world-class – you can only imagine how much he would have liked to peg a ball at Steve Smith after that collision.

Bullrush 

Wikipedia calls this ‘British bulldog’, which I remember it being called when I lived in England as a kid. Forget that – its name is bullrush, and that’s all there is to it. It would favour the sprinters already competing at the Olympics, obviously, and the chance to see Usain Bolt playing bullrush would pack the fans in.

In order to give Australians a chance of a gold medal, we would include not only the classic ‘tip’ version but also the ‘tackle’ variant that some of the rougher kids at my school insisted on playing. It’s one thing to simply tap somebody on the back, but the need to take them down at full speed would give rugby-playing nations a distinct advantage.

Jump Rope

There was a period in the mid-1980s when the government ran a big ‘Jump Rope For Heart’ programme and we all had to skip regularly. That was well and good, but I’m talking about the version girls commonly play where two people hold a long rope and a number of people jump in the middle, performing increasingly complex routines while they avoid the rope. Medals would be given in the single-rope and double Dutch categories. Judging by how things went at my primary school, the female athletes would display a great deal more skill than the men.

Marco Polo

A classic game we used to play at the homes of friends who were lucky enough to have a backyard pool, Marco Polo would be absolutely outstanding in an Olympic-size pool, and give the aquatic centre a reason to open its doors in the second week. Those swimmers like Denis Pankratov who swim long distances underwater are likely to be useful in Olympic Marco Polo, easily swimming right underneath the blindfolded person who was ‘in’.

Catch And Kiss

This was an extremely important game in late primary school as we began to experience those first stirrings of romantic interest in our classmates, and including it on the Olympic programme would give sport that reality TV element of frisson it needs to appeal to the modern television audience. Olympic catch and kiss would also create an event where men and women could compete together for medals – a welcome change to the usual gender divide in sport. Plus, given all the stories about condom consumption, you’d only be handing out medals for what’s already happening in the Village.

Now, I’m aware that these are all children’s games – but a schoolboy invented rugby, if you believe the legend of William Webb Ellis. And while some of these sports might feel a little silly, they’re no more ridiculous than handing out medals for beach volleyball and synchronised swimming.

Bring them on, I say. And I’ll be the first to cheer when Australia wins its first Marco Polo medal. At least it’d give our blokes some chance of winning gold in the pool.

A land without gold

I was planning to go to the London Olympics this week, but then I looked at the airfares, and gave up. Instead I decided to go halfway there, to Singapore. The only thing it has in common with London is that the local English dialect is fairly incomprehensible, and they use those infuriating chunky powerpoints. Then again, the food’s better.

As is par for the course for newspapers the world over, the local Straits Times has been splashing Team Singapore’s Olympics achievements all over its front page. But from the perspective of Australia, or “ theindisputable champions at every Olympics as long as we’re calculating per capita”, I’ve been a little surprised by what counts as a noteworthy sporting triumph in this other island nation.

“S’pore’s women paddlers through to quarter-finals”, Tuesday’s Times boasted on the front page – and above the fold, at that. I was initially confused by the term ‘paddlers’, as I thought that the Olympics only issued medals for competence in swimming, rather than a lack thereof. But then I remembered I was in Asia, and realised that they meant ping pong.

The article went on to point out, with great anticipation, that if Feng and Wang triumphed in their matches on Tuesday night, Singapore would have two semifinalists and thus be assured of a bronze medal. How charmingly quaint, I thought, that in this country, you can be front page news when all you’ve achieved is a toss-up chance for a bronze.

In Australia, we reserve our praise and admiration for gold alone. You don’t even get that much acclaim for silver. Sure, you’ve helped your country with its overall tally, but all a silver medal means is that you failed by slightly less than anybody else.

Just in case I needed to lord it over any Singaporeans I met over the course of the day, I thought I’d research Singapore’s Olympic record. “In your face, Singapore,” I imagined saying, or perhaps I’d quip about their “Singapoor performances”. How I’d sneer! It would be such a magnificent performance that the IOC would have no choice but to issue me with a special honorary gold medal for gloating. Eddie McGuire would call my achievement “magnificent”, since, judging by his Opening Ceremony commentary, that’s the only adjective he knows.

And my research discovered that Singapore’s Olympic record offers precious little to brag about. Tan Howe Liang won silver in the weightlifting at the 1960 Olympics in Rome – in the lightweight division, I planned to scoff. And then it was a long drought until Beijing 2008, when the aforementioned Feng and Wang joined forces with a certain Li Jiawei to snaffle another silver in the women’s table tennis team event.

I’m sure that if you’re as patriotic an Australian as I am, you will already have fast-forwarded to the same incredulous conclusion that I reached: Singapore has never won an Olympic gold medal. (Given the temperature here, I didn’t bother to check the winter records.) They began competing in 1948 and since then, the anthem ‘Majulah Singapura’ has never rung out at any Olympiad.

What I’m saying is that when Emily Seebohm sobbed because she merely won silver in the 100m backstroke, she was upset because she’d merely done as well as any Singaporean has ever done in the Olympics.

But Singapore’s a smaller nation than Australia, you might be thinking. Yes, it is. There are only about 3 million Singaporean nationals as against our 22 million. Let’s call their population 10% of ours, to be generous. Plus, they’ve only competed as Singapore since 1948, and we’ve been there since the modern Games started in 1896. So they’ve competed in around half the Games, and you’d therefore expect Singapore to have netted around 5% of Australia’s 400-odd medals. That would be about 20 – but they’ve only got 2.

In other words, how awesome is Australia?

We do really, really well at the Olympics, by any yardstick. And, in fact, by the literal yardstick – in the Games’ history, we have won the ninth most medals. Let’s all pat ourselves on the back, shall we? Oi oi oi.

I kept thinking about this, and got a bit indulgent, and even more patronising. Good on Singapore, I thought, for being so proud of the two moments of Olympic glory it has managed to attain. It’s not winning or losing (and if it was, we’d totally smash them), it’s about playing the game. Those are the Olympic ideals right there. It’s about competing, not about whether you win the competition.

And then I started to compare Singapore’s attitude to the national disgrace that occurred on Monday morning, when our men’s 4x100m relay team came in fourth despite being favourite. Words like “shock”, “fail” and “disappointment” were used in our headlines. James Magnussen, who Nine’s commentator had predicted would set a world record in the first leg, gave a brusque interview and point-blank refused to explain why he had so shamed Australia.

I mean, look at the official result. Australia finished an implausible 1.70 seconds behind the victorious French. How is that even possible, unless you are willing to accept that in competitive sport, it’s possible just to have a bad day? How can this possibly be explained, unless you happen to view the Australian women’s unexpected victory in the same event as an example of that offensive cliche about how you “win some and lose some”?

As for Magnussen and his colleagues, the blame, of course, must go entirely to them. They owed us gold. We expected it, and they disappointed us. I expect a personal apology, frankly. And furthermore, I expect each of those swimmers to gain a late wildcard entry to another event at London 2012 and to win back the gold that they owe Australia. James Magnussen, I hope you know a bit of Greco-Roman wrestling.

In particular, I blame the team for choosing that unfortunate nickname. If we learnt one thing in Iraq, it’s that so-called “weapons of mass destruction” don’t always show up when you need them to.

Of course here in poor old Singapore, they probably would have been over the moon just to make the final, and downright chuffed if they’d finished fourth. The entire nation would have been thoroughly proud of their swimmers, I imagine. But that’s Singapore. They’ve never won a gold medal.