What The Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing

Once upon a time, a bachelor by the name of Bertram Wooster contributed a piece on ‘What The Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing’ to a periodical known as Milady’s Boudoir. He was the narrator of PG Wodehouse’s legendary Jeeves stories, and generally known for a series of extravagant sartorial disasters that were only put to rights when Jeeves intervened and got rid of, for instance, his white mess jacket with brass buttons.

I have neither butler nor mess jacket, but I share his interest in questions of wardrobe.

Fashion can be a challenge for us blokes. But I have always believed that with a minimum of effort and expense, we can nevertheless always look – well, perhaps not stylish, but kind of okay. And if you’d like to look kind of okay, or have a gentleman friend in your life who might benefit from appearing less ridiculous, then these are the style tips for you.

No brand names

You can’t always avoid brand names. But when you can, do – or at least try to keep them subtle. The problem with brand names is that they file you into one of three categories, all of which are, in my view, unpleasant.

Let’s start with the early adopters. If you, unlike me, have some fashion gold-panning ability that lets you identify the Next Big Thing, and consequently discover the achingly cool new jeans brand that’s big in Japan but no-one knows about here, then you’ll look like you’re trying to impress people. Admittedly, you may actually impress them, but when you wear the distressed denim with the purple safety pin jammed into them instead of a brand label (I’m making this up, but is it any stranger than Ksubi’s Liquid Paper logo?), you make people like me think you deliberately want us to ask where you got them. I refuse to do this.

The second option with brand names is that you give the impression of conforming with everyone else and being unable to think for yourself. I remember when every second guy was wearing Mambo or Okanuis (this is going back a bit) or Ben Sherman or Diesel – it got terribly predictable, and made them look like sheep.

And the third option is that you stick with a brand name once the cool kids have decided that it’s incredibly lame. I can illustrate the horror of this outcome with a simple scenario: imagine being the last man alive who wears Ed Hardy.

But if your clothes have no brands, then they never go out of style. Admittedly they never go into style either, but that’s a trade-off I’ll gladly take.

Conservatism is best

You're aiming for “timeless classic” here. A well-made pair of blue jeans or a charcoal woollen sweater is always going to look good, regardless of prevailing fashion. Whereas if you went along with the "distressed jeans" fad, what you'd have now is a pair of jeans with holes in them that you're now too embarrassed to wear – or should be.

Note that when I say "conservative", I don't mean "suitable for wearing at a golf club dinner". So, no boat shoes unless you're actually on a boat. And even then I'd question them, frankly.

Solid, dark colours

My wardrobe is predominantly black, navy, dark grey and occasionally brown, sometimes with a white or light blue shirt. That’s about it. Well, I do have one fluorescent orange t-shirt that I bought in a moment of madness, but I try not to wear it out of the house.

With this palette, I always dress boringly and predictably, but I rarely look ridiculous. A black long-sleeved cotton shirt and a nice pair of jeans looks absolutely fine in just about any social scenario – you’ll never feel overdressed, or excessively underdressed. Plus, wearing black makes you look a mildly like an arts administrator, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Indifference beats excessive effort

I’m the first to doff my cap to a genuinely well-dressed fellow. I find myself doing so regularly when I visit Melbourne, a town whose menfolk somehow operate on a higher sartorial plane. In Melbourne, you will often see fellows sporting a gorgeous vintage shirt set off by the perfect waistcoat, perhaps coupled with a lovely woollen tie. Every second barman in the Victorian capital has hair Brylcreemed with dazzling precision and a painstakingly waxed moustache.

I appreciate such elegance, but then I imagine the sartorialist spending hours browsing through vintage stores and then standing at home in front of his mirror each morning, trying different combinations, and then spending forever in the bathroom, pruning his facial hair with the excessive care that OCD-fuelled retirees devote to topiary. And I think – surely it’s not worth the effort. Dressing well consumes time I’d rather devote to things I care more about. Admittedly, they include Game of Thrones and trying to finish Angry Birds Space with my nephew. But I still don’t think looking amazing is worth the enormous effort required.

Don’t pay too much

I am happy to waste large sums on the things I love, like holidays and gadgets, but because clothes don’t matter much to me, I resent paying a lot of money for them. This is why my favourite places to buy clothes are the ultra-cheap category killers like Uniqlo, Muji and H&M, which sell reliable, unbranded basics at cheap prices.

None of these chains have come to Australia yet – and yes, I know this makes me seem like a massive tosser. (As I say, I shell out for travel, not clothes.) But let me put it in these terms: imagine an IKEA for clothing.

There’s an obvious problem with all this, and that’s the recent revelations about garment factories in Bangladesh. I’m willing to pay more to ensure workers are treated well. But I’m not willing to pay a lot more for fancy brands. I’ve always felt that no articles of clothing, except perhaps a suit, should cost three figures. They just aren’t worth that much to me. Sure, I’ve occasionally worn properly tailored shirts and that kind of thing, and I can appreciate the quality and craftsmanship and the superior materials – but i’m too cheap to shell out for them. And on the rare occasions I’ve bought an expensive article of clothing, I only stress about whether it was going to get stained or damaged in the laundry.

The exception that proves the rule

Last year, I went to Hawaii, and the tropical heat got to my head, so I found myself purchasing a wide assortment of absurdly bright Hawaiian shirts. Admittedly, they were only $20 or so apiece (despite being made locally) – which some may nevertheless view as overpriced given their appearance. But I had enormous fun appalling my colleagues and friends with their extreme garishness. It was the perfect way to make them appreciate the reliable dullness of my usual wardrobe.

In conclusion

If you follow my advice and stick to the kind of conservative, boring and cheap clothes I wear, then you could look conservative, boring and cheap too!

But here’s the great thing. Virtually nobody ever comments unfavourably on my wardrobe, because it’s just too dull to be noteworthy. And if they do, I just ask them how much their outfit cost and roll my eyes. Because the bottom line is this: if you put considerable time and money into your wardrobe, then you will undoubtedly end up someday wearing a sarong like David Beckham. And that means I win.

Green means go, red means stop

You know what the greatest social event of all time is? A traffic light party.

I’d better qualify that, hadn’t I? I mean the greatest social event of all time for single people. Who are the only people that matter at social events, in my opinion – couples only go to those things to lord it over everyone else, as far as I can tell. And then the joke’s on them, because then they tend to get pregnant and never socialise again except for those nightmarish but mercifully short toddler birthday parties they insist on throwing. Although I’ve noticed I don’t get invited to so many of those since I wrote about them for Daily Life. Funny, that.

Anyway, traffic light parties are amazing for one simple reason: you can tell who’s single.

Let me make another quick qualification: anybody who attends a traffic light party in orange deserves to be ejected instantly. Honestly, it’s even lamer than setting your Facebook relationship status to “It’s complicated”. Nobody cares about your tedious psychodramas. Either you’re up for it or you aren’t, and the last thing anybody needs to hear about is why you’re wearing orange because your boyfriend/girlfriend is putting you through hell and why are you even here anyway? Go home and sob on the sofa.

Or it means you’re a jerk who’s revelling in putting someone else through the wringer. Either way, nobody cares or likes you. So there.

So, a traffic light party with only green and red colours would be the greatest social event of all time. Well, there’s a problem there too, because green looks a great deal less attractive than red, so there’s a danger you’ll spend the entire event yearning for forbidden fruit. And why are you even at a traffic light party if you’re in a relationship, anyway? Oh yes, that’s right – smugness.

Perhaps the ultimate traffic light party needs an extra colour, to even up the score against the hot red-wearers. Perhaps it needs the option to wear black if you’re utterly desperate. After all, when traffic lights are broken, they go black, so why can’t we?

Or perhaps you could also wear white if you’re one of those unusual people who really isn’t into dating or sex much and is perfectly happy being single. That’d be both a challenge, and a subtle hint to others not to waste their time.

Or perhaps you could wear yellow if you have a fetish where you – no, that’s disgusting, let’s stop there. Red, green and black are the only acceptable colours at the traffic light party I’m definitely holding and to which you should totally come.

Traffic light parties are great because... okay, they’re not actually great. They’re usually conducted in one’s early 20s and therefore embarrassing and so everyone gets too drunk and it’s ultimately entirely horrible.

But there’s a broader point here. We badly need a system for ascertaining whether people we meet are in relationships. It used to be easy,when people wore wedding and engagement rings, and tended not to cohabit before getting engaged. Sure, just about every other aspect of those systems for relationships were demonstrably inferior to what we have today – but when there’s a ring on it, you know not to waste your time. Or, I suppose, to go for it, if infidelity is your thing – I’m trying not to be judgemental here.

Otherwise, what happens at parties is this. We (and I really mean “I”, but I’m trying to embarrass myself less than usual when I write about this stuff) approach people who seem attractive, try chatting to them, but not in a way that explicitly counts as flirting in case they happen to be in relationships. We never go right out and ask whether they’re single, because that’s embarrassing too; so instead we just converse about any old thing in the hope that they’ll mention a girlfriend or boyfriend if they have one. Nor will they go right out and say “I’m single”, because that’s embarrassing too. Later on, if you’re really lucky, you can ask a mutual friend if they’re available. Wouldn’t it be better if they had a ring?

Over the years, I’ve – sorry, we’ve – okay... I’ve developed an almost uncanny ability to hone in on the unavailable women at a party. Honestly – it’s almost as though I have extra-sensory perception – or perhaps it’s just that women suddenly invent imaginary boyfriends if they suspect I might be interested? On more than one occasion I’ve spent more than an hour – an hour – talking to women before they subtly mentioned their husband, or child, or on occasion, both. Admittedly some of these people have subsequently become good friends, and that’s fine, and perhaps I wouldn’t have even gotten talking to them if I’d known they were unavailable, and instead opted for talking to single women who ultimately rejected me, and it’s better off that I’ve gained wonderful friends through this process.

But couldn’t the system be a bit less ambiguous?

I don’t give Facebook credit for much besides excellence in ongoing privacy abrogation, but they did try to sort this out in their early days. You can set your status to single / married / engaged / in a relationship or the self-involved “it’s complicated”. There’s a “widowed” too, distressingly. But here’s the thing – single people don’t use the system. Because it’s embarrassing to admit to being needy, and we’d like to pretend that we have all sorts of intrigues going on when really we don’t.

And that’s why traffic light parties are a good idea – because they encourage honestly, wrapped up in the idea that it’s all in good fun because it’s fancy dress. Of course it’s not fun, by the way. If you’ve been single for a while, going out and trying to meet people becomes a matter of steely single-mindedness.

So it’s in this spirit that I welcome the news that Prague is setting up special train carriages for single people. It means you can have a traffic light party on the way to work, every single day! And it’d be so easy to start a conversation – in Australia, anyway. You could just talk about how late the train was, and how horrible the carriage was. Simple!

Actually, the idea’s creepy, isn’t it? When I commute, I just want to listen to music and read. And besides, Australians don’t tend to chat up random strangers. And it may, of course, lead to the sexual harassment that some Japanese cities have introduced special women-only carriages to prevent. Because a significant proportion of men are terrible, and so forth.

Probably traffic light parties are terrible as well, and I’m just forgetting because I haven’t been to one in about a decade and a half. They certainly seem terrible the more I think about them. And they don’t account for same-sex relationships either, which probably need a whole separate colour scheme. I got asked if I was gay at a party on Saturday night, and there I was thinking my poor dress sense made the answer perfectly clear.

We aren’t likely to broaden the system of ring-wearing to anyone in a relationship – which would make life easier (and besides, gay marriage seems to be some years away, Kevin Rudd’s recent conversion notwithstanding) – so instead we’re stuck with the system society has devised: where you simply have to talk to people at great length and hope they’ll mention a significant other, if they have one.

But let me make one simple request of everybody who, at a traffic light party, would be wearing wear red. If you get talking to someone at a party, please find a way to mention your partner within the first five minutes. Work it seamlessly into the conversation with something like “That reminds me of something my partner was saying the other day”, or “I must tell my partner about that, s/he will be fascinated”.

It’s kindest to be subtle, but even “By the way, I’m seeing someone, so there’s no point you chatting me up” will be appreciated. Even “Would you please just give up?” ultimately saves time.

There’s a reason traffic lights were introduced in our busiest streets: they make everything run more efficiently and safely. I only wish the same were true of the fraught process of trying to chat people up.

Sorry; I meant to write “we can only wish”. Definitely “we”.

My life in the Mushroom Kingdom

I remember the first time I saw the videogame Super Mario Bros. It was at the house of two friends from primary school, twins, who lived right next to North Sydney Leisure Centre, where I went for after-school care. Sometimes I’d duck into their house for an hour or two (I’ve no recollection of whether I was allowed to do this) and sit on their sofa and watch agog while they made a chubby little plumber eat mushrooms of dubious toxology, jump on reprobate turtles and leap balletically atop flagpoles as he attempted to rescue a princess from a spiky, bad-tempered dino-lizard. Sometimes they even let me have a go. I felt the way I imagine our ancestors felt the first time they gathered around a fire.

And there was fire in the game, too, or at least fireballs if you ate one of the white flowers – something I could never get to work in real life.

When you think about it, the world of Super Mario and Luigi (the Doug Pitt of videogame plumbers), makes little to no sense. The odd creatures that populate Nintendo auteur Shigeru Miyamoto’s world seem to have been assembled either at randomly, or courtesy of acid consumed in a reptile park.

And yet I was transfixed by the athletic little plumber. Imagine being able to play something that amazing in your own home, I thought. You’d never get anything else done – and reading books would certainly go out the window – but on the bright side, the Mushroom Kingdom would have its monarch restored, at least until Bowser came and kidnapped her again in an endless succession of sequels that has made Mario the highest-selling videogame franchise of all time.

You’d think that she might have made better security arrangements in the interim – after all, the Mushroom Kingdom seems fairly well-resourced, and yet its only defence infrastructure is a duo of tradesmen, who are surely neglecting the Kingdom’s drains and sinks on account of their constant need to rescue the princess.

By 2013 standards, the Nintendo Entertainment System’s graphics were very basic. It can’t have had more than a dozen colours. And yet the machine was absolutely revolutionary – they sold 61 million of them around the world. And it began my lifelong love of videogames. For nerds of a certain age, that bleepy, bassy music first heard in the underground Level 1-2 will always be close to our hearts.

A few years later, in high school, I got my first videogame console. It was a Game Boy – which, with its monochrome dot matrix graphics, might be the only more recent videogame system that made the NES’ graphics look high-tech. But you could play it anywhere, and I absolutely loved it. Super Mario Land was my favourite game, and the first time I finished it was a red-letter day in my adolescence. In those days, you had to play platform games through from the start every time – there were no wimpy saves games.

Like many kids of that era, I became addicted to Tetris, as well, somehow convincing myself that because it involved geometry, it was somehow beneficial to play for hours on end. Although I do use my Tetris skills every time I have to pack too much luggage into my tiny car.

Nearly thirty years after I first saw Mario in action, it’s still my favourite series. I don’t like games that require too much time commitment or detail. If I can’t figure out how to play it in a minute or two, I’m not interested, which is why strategy games and lengthy first-person shooters have tended not to do much for me. I’ve always enjoyed the rule-breaking, open-world Grand Theft Auto series, because hey, we all feel like driving a semi-trailer through a crowded pavement sometimes (or is that just me?) and a recent favourite is Portal 2, which has incredibly simple gameplay but increasingly fiendish and original puzzles, as well as an excellent vocal performance by Stephen Merchant. And of course Singstar’s a favourite because it allows me to inflict karaoke on my neighbours. But simple platform games still get me every time.

I don’t get as much time to play as much as I’d like nowadays, and I’m seriously behind on my gaming – I’ve only scratched the surface of GTA IV, and the fifth episode is on the verge of being launched. But it’s still one of my favourite ways to wind down. The immersive nature of videogames is what makes them so relaxing, I think. When you’re bouncing your way through the Mushroom Kingdom, or driving around Liberty City, there’s absolutely no room in your head to think of anything else. Many videogames require absolute focus so you don’t lose your virtual “life”, and the chance to escape from everyday life from an hour or two is an enormous pleasure.

As I approach forty, I’ve begun wondering whether my generation, the Mario generation, will ever grow out of videogames. The Playstation 4 is close to launch, and the absurdly-named Wii U has an incredible-looking New Super Mario Bros game available for it. (Although at least one writer thinks that 1991’s Super Mario World remains a better option for it!) I doubt I’ll be able to resist upgrading to at least one of them so I can keep my occasional videogame habit alive. After all, if I don’t rescue poor old Princess Peach, who will? Besides the millions of other purchasers, that is.

These days, kids have constant access to videogames from a young age. I know one three-year-old who’s already surprisingly adept at Angry Birds. Today’s kids are growing up in a world where video games are available in your pocket all the time, and on the enormous screens that are already ubiquitous in our homes. Indeed, my phone’s full-colour 3D-generating capacities would utterly humiliate my beloved Game Boy. But video games, those early pixellated pioneers, will always hold a special place in the memories of those of us who still remember the first time we saw a video game being played on someone’s TV and scarcely believed that such a technological miracle was possible.

Realistically, the next time I’ll get to spend hours a day on videogames like I did in my teens and university years is when I retire. Perhaps instead of trudging around a real golf course, I’ll instead choose to play through a virtual one on my Playstation 11? My enjoyment may fade as a busy non-virtual life continues to preclude spending as much time mashing buttons as I’d like, but I certainly can’t see myself giving it up completely. And I hope I’m not the only one who sticks with them, because retirement homes strike me as the perfect opportunity for some intense multiplayer gaming. The term ‘deathmatch’ might take on too literal a meaning in that context, I suppose, but I can’t think of many better ways to go than having my cutting-edge Nintendo Wii U Me Them Together controller prised from my cold, defeated hand.

The CBD is the place to be

When I was a kid, Saturday mornings were sacred. Each week without fail, we started the weekend with a run to the shopping centre. Back in primary school, our regular haunt was Crows Nest Plaza, and if my brother and I behaved ourselves during the long, tedious loop through the supermarket, we were rewarded with a little square of fudge from the health food store. (“Health food” had a slightly different definition in the 1980s.)

In high school, we frequented Woolworths at Neutral Bay, a suburb whose very name implies blandness – presumably when names were being handed out, it sat on the fence. By then, we were old enough to grab our own groceries to toss into the cart. In my case it was almost always peanut butter, in hindsight one of many poor adolescent nutritional choices. We didn’t look in any of the smaller stores nearby because by then, Woolies had developed their trademark stock-everything fresh-food format, and it was just easier to buy the week’s supplies from the Fresh Food People Who’ve Gradually Destroyed The Other, Independent Fresh Food People.

We’d fill the boot with plastic bags and sometimes the back seat as well, and when we got home, we’d carefully transfer our purchases to the fridge and freezer and pantry. The weekend shopping calculation was critical – we had to buy enough to fill our packed school lunches each day and cover each night’s dinner because if we ran short, it meant shelling out for takeaway or wasting an hour or two more on a return supermarket run or, worst of all, braving the local mini-market, which meant paying considerably more to choose from an extremely limited range, very little of which was fresh.

Back then, life was organised around these missions to more built-up areas. We had a few small stores nearby like the newsagent who was our go-to sweet vendor, the perpetually grumpy dry cleaner and the little video store which went broke years ago. But anything more complicated, like seeing a movie or shopping for clothes or going to the post office or browsing in a record store, meant a special trip to another suburb in the car or by public transport.

We lived fairly centrally – just a few stops north of the city on the train. But the places we could easily access on foot were, as a rule, streets of houses like our own. That was how everyone we knew lived, with the exception of one family who had bought an old fire station in the CBD. That seemed exhilarating, and yet eccentric – why would anyone want to spend their weekends in the place where everyone went to work?

Then at uni I moved into a house right next to campus, and my addiction to convenience began at roughly the same time as my addiction to coffee. Everything I could possibly want – or afford, more to the point – was around the corner, in the nearby shopping strip or, at worst, at the mall just down the road. My suburb had supermarkets, a post office, a cinema and even a discount department store, and I soon began to adapt to a life that required no planning. If we wanted to cook, we went and bought exactly what we needed on the day, but given the abundance of great cafés and cheap Thai joints food a stone’s throw away, that wasn’t even necessary. And if I fancied croissants on a Sunday morning, there they were, a short stumble away. As were several pubs, the source of most of those morning after-stumbles.

Back then, we had to pay our rent in cash, but that was easy because the bank was right there. So was the post office, for that matter, so we could pay the phone bill. And during the years of perpetual 21sts, it was easy simply to buy a gift on the way to the party, and get them gift-wrapped on the spot. Scoring pot was just as convenient, I’m told – I was one of those “square” students you hear about.

My student days got me accustomed to a life where everything you wanted was available right there, whenever you wanted. And when I left uni and had to find a place to live, it was a simple equation: if the choice was between space and convenience, then I’d choose convenience. And that’s why my first post-graduate apartment was in Potts Point – which is almost unaffordable nowadays, but back in 2003 represented pretty good value if you chose an older building. It’s one of the most built-up areas in Australia – nearly everybody lives in apartments, and their buildings tend to have shops on the ground floor. I loved the extraordinary array of food on my doorstep, even if I sometimes had to step over people who had passed out on my doorstep to get to it.

At the end of that lease, there was only one place I wanted to go: to the city proper. People look at me strangely when I tell them I live in the CBD, because I’m not a backpacker on a working holiday visa, sleeping in a two-bedroom apartment with nine people crammed into it, or a multi-millionaire in an enormous apartment with panoramic water views. I have a small balcony instead of a backyard, and there’s always plenty of traffic on the street outside, as well as crowds of people in various states of intoxication. But I’m a short walk from a supermarket, a cinema, endless restaurants, and also my work, and I still can’t think of living any other way.

So while people find my preference for convenience over space odd, I find everyone else’s preference for quiet, residential streets and spending hours each week commuting equally unfathomable. And the great thing is, the city keeps getting better. Small bars are been opening in rapid progression, and so are new restaurants and retail and leisure developments. More and more residential building keep going up, squashing more and more people into less and less space, and that means an ongoing increase in convenient facilities, and also Pie Face outlets.

I’ll probably sing a different tune if I ever have children – and if I want to sing tunes, incidentally, there are karaoke bars everywhere in the CBD. I’ll probably conclude that it’d be lovely to have a backyard and a barbeque and my very own Hills Hoist. In fact, I’ll probably end up driving my own tribe to the local shopping centre every Saturday morning someday, the way my parents did. But until that day comes, I’m a devoted city-dweller. Because in the end, who needs space when you can walk to yum cha?

That’s right, I can walk to yum cha. And yet people ask me why on earth I'd want to live in the city. My question is, why don't you?

Where is Spotify for television?

As I was writing this article, I discovered that the rapper Chris Kelly, one of the two members of backwards-clothes-wearing teenage rap duo Kris Kross, had died. Mac Daddy, that is to say, rather than his colleague Daddy Mac. Hearing the news made me suddenly nostalgic for the time in the 1990s when a particular variety of commercial rap tracks dominated the charts – the Vanilla Hammer Era, I call it. Back then, I was able to obey their order to jump around for more than two minutes without feeling exhausted. It was a happier, jumpier time.

Hearing the news made me want to hear ‘Jump’ again. Gratification took me a mere 3 seconds, courtesy of YouTube. Which got me thinking how amazing I would have found that back when they were in the charts, when we had to carefully record songs from the radio onto cassette, or go and buy a bunch of singles.

Nowadays, we can listen to any music we want at any time – and do so legally. Before ‘Jump’ began on YouTube, I had to watch an ad. (By which I mean, I waited for five seconds and clicked ‘Skip’.) But the quality of YouTube videos varies, and it’s not suitable for extended listening – which is where streaming services come in.

We are on the cusp of the music-streaming revolution, a wave so potent that even Apple haven’t managed to get their heads around it yet. In the past year or so, we’ve gained access to an abundance of streaming services nowadays, so many that it isn’t yet clear who the dominant player will be. Spotify, Rdio, MOG (which also has ‘Jump’), Deezer, Pandora and others besides – all of them are legal, and all of them are an extraordinary musical cornucopia.

I keep hearing that Spotify (which is probably the dominant player, thanks to its tight integration with Facebook) doesn’t pay artists very well, but I suspect the licensers have correctly calculated it’s better than nothing – which is the realistic alternative. Plus, imagine a world where just about everybody pays over $100 a year to Spotify or its equivalent, and you’ve got a fairly healthy revenue stream.

After decades of painful adjustment – the Napster and Limewire wars, and Metallica, and all of that – the music industry has finally managed to offer what consumers want – all of the music, all of the time. And once you’re used to the constant availability of just about every song or album you’ve ever heard of, it’s unthinkable to do without it. And so, I’m a streaming service customer for life, or at least until something even better comes along, and I’m sure most of their customers feel the same way.

The music industry tried shaming people into not pirating, and it didn’t work. But now even though I know how to pirate music, there’s simply no point, even if I had no moral concerns. I have no interest in Bittorrenting an album when I can just stream it. It’s not worth the extra mouse clicks, and I don’t care about having the album files on my hard drive. Plus, I can access Spotify or Rdio or MOG (which has free bandwidth on Telstra, incidentally) on my phone when I’m out and about, or in a car, and my illegal download is far less portable, having to be converted and copied and more besides.

As far as I can see, everyone wins from these streaming music services. Even the artist wins compared to how things were before streaming existed. (And perhaps the business model can be tweaked to improve royalties.) As far as I’m concerned, the legal-music debate is over. You know, like vaccination.

When it comes to television, though, we’re still a decade behind. (Actually, Celebrity Splash may have put us two or three decades behind, but that’s another rant.) One thing, though, is clear: Aussie TV and movie viewers want the same instant gratification we now get from streaming music. That’s why we’re one of the world’s piracy hotspots. (C’mon Aussie! Or should that be Arrrr-sie? Sorry, that was a terrible joke. I’m still thinking about Celebrity Splash, and it’s destroying my usual bonhomie)

Let’s take Game of Thrones as an example, because the premiere of Series 3 set piracy records last month. Tellingly, there were nearly as many requests for it from Australia as in the much bigger US and UK markets. Eminent figures like John Birmingham and the US Ambassador have called for the BitTorrenting to finish. And yet it continues apace, just as it did with music. Pirates have minimal capacity for shaming or guilt-tripping.

So, using it as a case study, what are the legal ways to get the new series of Game of Thrones? Well, you can pay for Foxtel, which costs a pretty penny – at least $60 or more to get the channel that offers GoT.

But Foxtel is an increasingly antiquated platform because it doesn’t really play with computers. If you have Foxtel, like I do, and forget to record those Thrones, what then? Well, you can try and find it in the schedule, and series link it, and save them all to your IQ box’s hard disk, and then watch them at some point. There’s also a complex way of streaming recent episodes by navigating through a series of submenus, but they don’t come through at high definition.

Or you can pay $33 for it from iTunes, and download each episode on release. That’s not an awful lot to pay compared with a DVD box set, but it’s a lot compared with free. It’s a lot more for one series than you pay with Spotify, where you pay about ten bucks a months for everything.

What I want with TV and movies is what I have with music now – the capacity to watch whatever I want instantly, at high quality, on any device, with a well-designed, convenient interface. I want instant gratification at a lowish price – something like $10 or $20 a month instead of the more than $100 a month that Foxtel wants to charge. Let’s say that I’d gladly pay up to $50 a month for all the music, TV and movies I could stream via any device.  Give me that, and I’ll gladly pay it forever.

Now, TV is more complicated because of live events and sport. There’s still scope for broadcast, instead of everything being on-demand. And music is rarely time specific, unlike current affairs shows or topical comedy like the Daily Show. Plus, there’s also a shared experience to be had when watching a show like Q&A and ranting on Twitter along with everybody else.

But the number of shows that need to be enjoyed live like this is shrinking. Built into the formula for the TV streaming service of my dreams, I’d like to be able to see those kinds of shows live. But everything else should come on demand, on any device.

This need is precisely why Netflix is proving so enormous in the US. It offers – well, not everything, but a lot, for a mere $8/month. This offer has proven so successful that Netflix now consumes a third of US internet traffic. (And I can’t help wonder how much of the remainder is taken up by, ahem, adult entertainment.) Many people subscribe to both Netflix and Hulu, which costs about the same and offers most commercial TV shows. Americans are cancelling their cable connections in droves, and why wouldn’t they?

Netflix is earning so much revenue that they’re now commissioning their own original programming. The popular political thriller House of Cards is exclusive to Netflix, and they made all the episodes available all at once, interestingly. They’re also making new episodes of the wonderful Arrested Development.

In Australia, Quickflix is trying to replicate the same formula. I haven’t tried it in a year, but at first I found the quality and range limited. I should look again, because I’m curious to see whether it’s improved – especially since they’ve just acquired Game of Thrones series 3. But Quickflix is also making all their customers pay to get disks delivered by post the way Netflix used to, a business model which seems doomed and I’ve no interest in cross-subsidising.

I suspect Netflix will set up here and sweep them from the market before they’ve gained a solid foothold, but the best of luck to them anyway, because they’re probably the closest commercial provider of the kind of streaming service I’d like to see.

In amongst all this, I want a few live channels for broadcast “event television”, news, and sport. They have to be available on any device, too.

Ultimately, someone needs to step up. There are currently too many players and formats and none offers enough of everything at a sufficiently cheap price. In particular, Foxtel seems to be trying to offer lots of different ways to watch live TV, via iPad and X-Box 360 and TBox and several other devices, without embracing the need to build a system that does proper on-demand streaming of their shows. Personally, I don’t care about channels, I don’t want schedules, I don’t need hard disk recording. I just want a mass of content that has every good show from today or the past, streaming immediately, in high definition, on any device. And I’m prepared to pay for that, but not as much as they’re currently trying to charge.

Does that seem too much to ask? Well, now you understand why piracy is so popular, because it offers almost exactly that, for free. Okay, so there’s a worse interface and a delay of a few hours. But still, it’s a lot to ask pirates to give up. And Foxtel co-owner Telstra is well aware of that, seeing as their Bigpond subsidiary sell a 500 gigabyte/month home cable account.

Let’s not forget the ABC’s iView, which is free, available on lots of devices and offers comprehensive content. But it expires quickly, and streams in relatively low definition. (Incidentally, I work for the ABC.) The commercial providers all have their own platforms, too, which is irritating. Hulu-style consolidation badly needs to occur.

Historically, the Australian market has taken longer to get these kinds of services together, because we’re so small. Pay TV came here decades after the US and Europe had it. But in the internet era, there’s no limitation on this kind of service being offered besides commercial negotiation. Both prospective models of the NBN will offer sufficient speed for high-definition video (and I don’t want to get bogged into that debate here and now), so we can guess that a comprehensive Netflix-like service, that offers every TV programme and movie you could conceivably want through the same interface, mightn’t be too far away.

Finally, let’s not forget the key ingredient that makes services like Spotify so compelling: it has almost everything. You can try to stump it, but in my experience, you rarely will. That’s what I want, everywhere, all the time.

The only problem is, I want it now.

Why put it off until tomorrow when you can procrastinate today?

For the last few years, I’ve been trying to write a novel. It’s a bit of a cliché to say you’re doing that to try and impress people, I know, and I regularly do precisely that at dinner parties. But I have managed to finish them before, although I wish I could remember how.

The novel I’m currently writing was supposed to be finished 18 months ago, but I still haven’t finished it. In the meantime, I’ve completed lots of other tasks that objectively aren’t as important to me in the grand scheme of things as finishing my novel, but which I temporarily convinced myself were so urgent that the book could wait. Essential tasks like, say, spending three hours reading about the bridges of New York City and its environs. (Note: my novel is not set in New York City.)

As a result, while I know very little about motivation, time management or writing novels, I have become quite the expert in the art of procrastination. Please allow me to share my secrets with you in lieu of anything important that you might need to do.

There are two levels of procrastination. The most straightforward is finding things that will  prevent you from sitting down at your desk in the first place, or whatever it is you want to do – it doesn’t have to be a novel, and given the state of the book industry, it probably shouldn’t be. I have found that my procrastination skills are valuable for preventing me achieving any number of other goals, such as embarking an exercise programme. But the more advanced level, which is the level at which I’ve recently become adept, is when you convince yourself that these other, objectively irrelevant tasks are in fact an important part of your work process. Nowadays, when I have clearly been doing anything but buckling down and typing, I’m nevertheless able to pat myself on the back for a good day’s work.

Find the perfect working music

I like listening to music when I write, but generally it needs to be vocal-free, mid-tempo, and avoid major dynamic variations, all of which can distract me. Often I listen to jazz piano, because I find that only having one instrument helps with this, and Art Tatum is a particular favourite. But it’s always a temptation to find something new, and tell yourself you couldn’t possibly start typing until you do.

Wikipedia chains

Now, if you’re writing a proper historical novel, or anything that aspires to depth, Wikipedia will not be sufficient for your research needs. If you’re me, and just need to check the odd fact here and there, Wikipedia is perfect. But it is also a brilliant source of ongoing distraction, because every article is full of links to other articles. Instead of simply checking the information you need, enclosing the page, you can instead click on one of these links and read about something else, and then on that article, click another link, and so on, to infinity, or at least the 4.2 million articles Wikipedia currently contains.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re looking up the Sydney suburb of Potts Point, where my novel is set. Its main street is named after Alexander Macleay, who was a member of the Linnean Society, which is into zoology, a subsection of which is herpetology whose meaning I’d forgotten but involves studying amphibians such as the newt. And suddenly I’ve jumped from Research Which Is Helping Me Write A Novel to reading about the toxicity of the newt. (Did you know that they “produce toxins in their skin secretions as a defence mechanism against predators? I didn’t! Fascinating!) Now, the great PG Wodehouse used newts extensively in his Jeeves novels, but it’s hard to see how his little poisonous friends will help me.

I can follow these Wikipedia chains for hours, and unless I step back from the computer and managd to ask myself exactly how the page I’m reading is fitting with the work I’m doing, I will simply keep clicking and telling myself that I’m getting the book done.

Workspace renovation

This is one I’ve been using since high school, when I convinced myself I really shouldn’t begin studying for the HSC until I’d rearranged my bedroom three times to achieve the perfect working environment. If you need additional motivation, just convince yourself that feng shui is real, and that your current environment is stopping you from getting things done. I can guarantee you that moving furniture around will definitely stop you from getting things done.

Game of Thrones

Television is a time-honoured means of procrastination, and early in my writing process,  I found myself lying on my sofa, devouring the HBO TV series Game of Thrones. That helped me waste a few dozen hours. But – and this is where things get a little more advanced – I somehow convinced myself that after I finished the TV series, it was absolutely essential for me to also read the books by George R.R. Martin, to gain insight into how to write bestselling novels with popular TV adaptation. And so it was that I convinced myself that finding out more about House Stark of Winterfell’s protracted struggle with House Lannister of Casterley Rock temporarily seemed a great deal more important than, say, my own work.

The brilliant thing about the books is not only that, well, they’re brilliant, but that they’re very long. Whereas most novels – and certainly mine, touch wood – come in below 100,000 words, the word count for Martin’s work is currently 1,770,000 words, so it has the capacity to distract you for months. It also significantly increased the number of dragons and spooky undead warriors in my novel, which might prove awkward since it’s meant to be a contemporary romantic comedy.

Exercise

Yesterday somebody asked me why I’d embarked on my current exercise kick. You’d think a quick look in the mirror would be enough to convince me that I should hasten to the nearest gym forthwith,  but when writing this article I realised that it’s another form of procrastination. I only have a few hours in my work day to devote to writing before I have to go and do my day job, and if I spend them doing something else inherently virtuous like exercising,  it’s much more difficult to feel guilty about the lack of progress on my book. I’ve also found several studies which argue that regular exercise improves concentration, so I can tell myself that all of the exercise will help with writing a book once I eventually get around to it.

Cooking

I don’t usually bother to cook much for myself, as I’ve discussed previously. But with a novel to write, I’ve become quite the home chef – or at least, a mediocre home chef. It’s very easy to convince yourself that you can’t work well on an empty stomach, which is true, and that it’ll be healthier if you cook yourself, which may also be true unless, like me, your most frequently cooked dishes involve melted cheese.

I’m not alone in this one – in fact, the term ‘procrastibaking’ has emerged to describe the trap of cooking instead of working. Kudos to whoever coined that and added it to Urban Dictionary instead of finishing an assignment.

Grand Theft Auto

I haven’t used this for a few years, but immersive, long video games can be a real trap. Grand Theft Auto appealed because it has a long-form narrative like a novel (hello, ‘market research’) and makes you question – or in fact break – society’s rules. I used to tell myself that driving stolen cars around on pavements stimulated creative thinking outside the square. It certainly helped me break the rule that you need to meet deadlines.

Font and layout

I’m quite proud of this one. Even when you’ve finally written your first sentence, you can then spend a great deal of time playing around with how it looks. I used to try to format my Microsoft Word pages to look like novel pages, with the right size and line spacing and indents and everything. (Now I use Scrivener as my writing software, incidentally – it’s amazing, and has a handy fullscreen mode to prevent procrastination.)

I must have tried out every single text font in Word in an effort to pick the right one, and even printed quite a few test pages to see how they looked. Hint: Wingdings really isn’t much use.

The above should be more than to get you procrastinating like a pro. The best strategies, though, come from within – so please let me know how you procrastinate in the comments below. Reading them should help me defer the writing I need to do for a few days more! But in the meantime, I’d better get back to not writing my novel.

Might as well face it, I’m addicted to latte

I drink alcohol rarely, I’ve never smoked so much as one cigarette, and my experiments with more potent substances have been so infrequent that in certain circles I’m considered a limp Puritan. But there is one substance that’s approximately as essential to my day as oxygen, and that’s coffee.

Before the first flat white of the morning (well, skim flat white nowadays, in a fairly token concession to the get-fit programme I keep writing about in the hope that words on a screen will somehow magically translate to action), my head feels woozy. I’m exhausted even by the daily mental process of figuring out how to physically transport myself into the shower and assemble a set of clothing suitable for wearing in public. And using my brain feels like trying to operate one of those old-fashioned hand-operated rail cars that crawls reluctantly along the track, its rusty cogs grinding and squeaking.

If I leave the first coffee for too long, my body begins to rebel. If I go coffee-free until 10 or 11am, I get a headache which increases in intensity as the day progresses, as though I were Monkey, and Tripitaka were chanting the mantra to makes my headband shrink. Sometimes I even wonder whether I’m coming down with the flu, on account of the persistent headache and general feeling of lethargy.

Cruelly, my brain is working so poorly at these moments that I’m not always able to reason that I feel bad because I haven’t had a coffee yet. Eventually the cogs will churn until I manage to figure out why my head feels cloudy, and limp towards the closest acceptable café for the remedy.

My list of acceptable cafés is ridiculously small, by the way. I am a hideous coffee snob, and live in a part of the inner city that is packed with excellent, albeit expensive cafés, so it’s relatively easy to indulge my absurd quality standards. I have no idea about wine and dress in cheap clothes from mass-market chains, but when it comes to coffee, I consider myself quite the connoisseur, chucking about the term ‘crema’ as freely as confetti at a stationer’s wedding.

Eventually I will order my morning coffee, and the day can begin properly. Within a minute or two of appeasing its caffeine craving, my brain has snapped to attention and I gain the power to address the day. My cerebellum magically transforms into a piece of sophisticated machinery and enables me to do more sophisticated tasks like writing, thinking and deciphering the various National Broadband Network policies – unfortunately “copper” sounds too much like “coffee” for me to be able to think of anything else before this point.

My first coffee tends to be followed in short order by the second, which is often a macchiato or perhaps even a piccolo latte – a delicious variant, but difficult to order without feeling ridiculous, as I discovered when I asked a colleague to get me one and she burst out laughing and flatly refused to place such an embarrassing order.

Midway through the afternoon, my synapses start to become sluggish again, and I stroll down to one of the three thoroughly excellent cafés located at the perimeter of my workplace for a refuelling session. I’m very grateful to be able to feed my obsession so close to work, but then again, outstanding coffee is readily available throughout every major Australian city nowadays. This will be enough to get me through the rest of my day. I’ve learned not to drink coffee after dark, because it makes it difficult to get to sleep.

So, here’s a bit of maths, which I can do because I’ve already had two coffees today, and therefore the operation of the Calculator app on my computer isn’t beyond me. I drink approximately 2.5 coffees a day, since I have fewer on weekends and don’t always have two in the morning. I generally pay $3.50 per coffee, because I go to swanky coffee shops. Multiply that out by 365 days and you get...

YOU GET $3193.75.

Yes, apparently I spend over three thousand dollars a year on coffee. Which seems almost unbelievable, but numbers don’t lie, or so I’ve been told by people who are better at maths than me. Who may themselves be lying, I have no way of telling..

This is an absurd amount, and it seems even more ridiculous when you look at it as $61 per week, or $266 per month. (I’m pretty nifty with the calculator for a mathematical ignoramus.) But perhaps it’s worth it for the sheer joy coffee brings to my life each day?

The chief benefit is that I really like the taste of coffee, whether as an espresso shot or diluted in a long black, and served with or without milk. The unfortunate thing here is that I only like the taste of fancy espresso coffee, made by professional baristas with borderline OCD. I dislike instant coffee, and even the stuff made in plungers tastes sour and bland to me. Worse still is the drip-filter stuff they drink in America, which tastes of drab misery.

I realise that this makes me seem like a wanker – or at least, it might have until a few years ago, because as the ever-growing popularity of swanky coffee demonstrates, Australians’ obsession with the bean is only growing. So, part of what I’m paying is undoubtedly a snob tax.

Also, and this will make me seem an even worse person, I like cafés. I like sitting and chatting and reading the paper and thinking, and I like their atmosphere. Sure, I could drink herbal tea, I suppose, but drinking coffee in places specifically designed for the purpose is something I very much enjoy.

Next we come to the costs, which are measured not just in the rather large number of dollars I pay for the pleasure. I enjoy coffee making my brain work each and every day, and in fact I’ve discovered that the best time to do any writing is immediately after having a coffee, but this has to go into the “cost” side of the equation because of the slightly awkward topic of addiction.

Clearly, I’m an addict, and not just in the sense of “hey, I loves me a cup of steamin’ hot joe,” but in the sense that if I don’t have it, I get withdrawal symptoms. My brain views caffeination as normal. There is a chemical dependency at play.

Now, I could detox, but that would require several weeks of agony, and more self-control than I generally possess. Besides, I don’t really want to give it up – it’s pleasant, and harmless in smaller quantities. It’s not like cigarettes or, say, heroin – there’s a perfectly acceptable level of use. Also unlike cigarettes and heroin it also doesn’t conveniently make you thinner, especially if you drink it with full-cream milk. Or kill you, admittedly, but life is full of trade-offs.

There’s also a question of quantity. Are three cups a day too many? Well, an article I randomly found on the internet says that three cups a day makes you live longer, and this entirely unrigorous scientific approach is good enough for me.

Okay, sure – if it really is dangerous, maybe tell me in the comments section below, unless you want me to die. But I’m assuming two or three per day is okay.

Thinking about it, the obvious solution is to limit myself to one café-made coffee per day, at a cost of around $1000 per a year. And then if I need a second or third, I can learn to live with the taste of plunger coffee or get a home espresso machine – some of the pod ones produce surprisingly good results, and are very easy to use. They can cost several hundred dollars, but given my annual expenditure, I’ll nevertheless be saving.

The most sensible solution, of course, would be to give up coffee. But I enjoy it, and it doesn’t seem to be especially bad for you. Besides, Al Pacino drinks it, and so does George Clooney. So it must be good, right?

The other thing about coffee is that you get what you pay for. Some convenience stores and fast food outlets charge a dollar for machine-made espresso, but the difference with a coffee made by someone who really knows what they're doing is significant. Or at least it seems significant to me. While I wouldn't mind spending less per year with experienced baristas, I don't begrudge paying a premium for quality ingredients and skill, even though some cafés I know are now charging $4 when you drink-in.

Finally, there's the image factor. Drinking coffee is associated with inner-city types who like sitting around and having pointless, pretentious conversations about things like literature, often while wearing skivvies and using words like "ephemeral" and "performative". And that's undoubtedly me. So in the end, if I'm going to be judged as a coffee-swilling wanker no matter what I do, I may as well enjoy my daily cuppa.

Cooking for the extremely lazy

Right now in my life, two powerful forces are currently conducting a battle. My habitual laziness in respect of all domestic matters is locked in a death struggle against my powerful hypochondria.

Well, I probably won’t die – but like I said, I’m a hypochondriac.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was trying to reduce my excessively high blood pressure – a challenge at which I’m succeeding, fortunately. Well, fortunately for me, at least. I’ve also revealed the results of my various inept experiments with gym classes. But as many commenters have somewhat snarkily pointed out, the remaining element in the formula is cooking for oneself.

Now, I live by myself (the subject of yet another plaintive column), and I’ve long maintained that it’s not economically effective to cook for one, especially when you factor your own time into the equation. But the reality is that it’s the only way you can exercise substantial control over what goes into your body. So if you’re trying to watch your intake of things like salt and fat, you really do need to bite the bullet, unless the bullets in question are those tasty chocolate ones, in which case you probably shouldn’t, because those bullets can kill people too.

(By the way, my research into this matter uncovered the website chocolateweapons.com, which I really can’t keep to myself. Because hey – if you’re going to kill yourself with unhealthy food, you might as well do it in style.r)

Anyway – for the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to solve the question of what I can eat at home that won’t take any more time than getting takeaway. Because if it’s labour intensive, and if I can’t chuck it together in less than about ten minutes, the reality is that I’m simply not going to do it. I can’t think of anything more depressing than spending an hour slaving over a stove with a little apron on, and serving a fancy meal with candles and white linen... for myself.

Wraps

Wraps might just be the most practical foodstuff ever devised. They come in airtight plastic packets so you can make a six-pack last for days, they’re considerably less stodgy than bread, and best of all, you can, well, wrap things in them. I know, right?

Within the tasty envelope of a wrap, you can just chuck a bit of salad, and maybe some low-fat ham or salmon or really anything at all, and you have yourself a little parcel of deliciousness. I’ve found it’s particularly well-suited to cherry tomatoes because it doesn’t matter when the insides go everywhere. And you don’t need feel the need for butter or some kind of butter-substitute the way you do with bread.

Best of all, some prepackaged wraps come with paper holders so you can eat the wrap without the need for a plate, saving on washing up.

Tuna with tomato sauce

If you’re like me and trying to eat more seafood, tinned tuna is a simple and tasty solution. I’ve discovered that if you combine it with pre-made tomato salsa, whether you get the kind that comes in a jar or is freshly made in a plastic tub from the refrigerated section, the results are ridiculously tasty. Get the sort that has a hint of chili in it. You can use it as a pasta sauce, or chuck it in a wrap, or just serve it up with a side salad. Seriously – I know this is ridiculously simple, but it tastes amazing. Amazing.

Microwave ratatouille

I really like eating roast vegetables, but they take time. Admittedly you can just chop them up, chuck a bit of olive oil on them and leave them to cook, but it’s still a bit too tricky for my purposes. So I’ve started cutting up capsicum, zucchini, eggplant, onion and a few tomatoes and microwaving them. Purists would probably suggest a bit of garlic too, but I’m a bit too lazy. The results are not quite as delicious as roasting, but sufficiently delicious for me.

Instant salad

I know it’s really, really lazy to buy pre-made salads, and the results aren’t as tasty as if you buy the lettuce and the other ingredients and make it freshly. I also understand that they’re way too expensive relative to buying the elements separately. But that has to be weighed against this critical point: you don’t have to make a salad.

The other day, I bought a really nice instant Greek salad where you just had to combine a few sachets and hey presto – it was like being in Greece and eating at a mediocre taverna! I also added a bit of tinned tuna to make a complete meal a less incomplete meal.

The part where this actually counts as “cooking” and not just “opening a packet” is that you should make your own simple dressing, because the presupplied one won’t be as nice – the Greek salad’s one was way too sweet. Just use a bit of extra virgin olive oil and balsamic, perhaps a hint of dijon mustard and pepper, and you should be sorted. (I used to add sugar and salt too, but now I’m trying to watch out for those things).

The grill pan

As you will have gathered, most of my cooking consists of a concerted effort not to cook with anything more sophisticated than a microwave. But the time comes when you need to do something a little more elaborate. And this is where the grill pan comes into play.

If you don’t know what they are, imagine a mini barbecue with a handle and edges to stop stuff spilling out. I have a non-stick one that rinses clean, and all I need to do is put a bit of olive oil onto it, heat it up and then grill a bit of chicken breast or fish or lamb over my big gas burner. It’s quick, incredibly tasty and involves the element of naked flame that makes me feel like I’m standing at a barbecue – an essential element for men to enjoy cooking, for some unclear reason.

The particularly excellent thing about a grill pan is that it’s easy and quick to cook a portion small enough for one, and then you can grill the other half of the little meat packet at a later time, because nobody seems to sell meat in portions small enough to supply one person, because apparently very few people are big enough losers to need to cook for themselves. Tthere, I said it.

Soup

I used to eat a lot of tinned soup. But you can now get pre-made vacuum-packed soup, which is slightly more gourmet and consequently slightly less depressing. The trick to making soup not feel like the ultimate culinary cop-out is making your own croutons by chopping up a slice of toast.

And yes, I am honestly describing microwaving pre-prepared soup and adding croutons as a form of culinary innovation, which I am recommending to you. And yes, I am well aware that this makes me possibly the most incompetent person writing about cooking in the Australian media.

But surely I get points for honesty, at least?

Bon appetit!

So there you have it – the sum total of all that I have discovered about cooking healthily in my first few weeks of trying. And by now you will have concluded that a) I really can’t cook, and b) I care more about convenience than the quality of the output. These two things are undeniably true. But when you’re cooking for yourself, the only person you have to impress is yourself, and I’m already pretty impressed with myself just because I’m not ordering takeaway.

I intend to keep experimenting with cooking, and perhaps one day soon I may even try a simple stir-fry. The important thing is to have fun! And by having fun I mean getting out of the kitchen as quickly as possible, because no matter how hard you try to convince yourself, cooking simply isn’t fun.

Seven convincing reasons to have babies

Babies! Lots of people are having them. It’s how the human race survives! But just in case you’re one of these strange people who’s inexplicably opposed to the idea or doesn’t want to “give up your life” – if you can even call your sorry, childless existence a “life” – allow me to point out all the reasons why having children is a wonderful thing to do.

You have complete power over them!

As a parent, you have as much absolute power as Kim Jong-Un without the nuclear arsenal or unlikely friendship with Dennis Rodman. When they’re newborn, babies are more portable than most dogs, and will just lie there in a pram or bassinet. Plus, unlike dogs, you can take them into fancy restaurants and just park them on the floor. Not only are they powerless to object, but they don't even have the capacity to articulate an objection.

As they grow up and begin arguing back, you can impose whatever punishments you like. Grounding, limiting television, even imposing a diet of gruel, Oliver Twist-style – all these potential punishments are open to you, and there’s no court of appeal besides the other partner. (Or, in certain cases, DOCS – do bear that in mind.)

It’s also good to be aware that you'll pay for this later when they're teenagers, and won't do a single thing that you say, even if it’s entirely reasonable and clearly in their best interests.

You’ll never be stuck for something to do!

You know those days when you wake up with nothing planned, and spend half the morning wondering how on earth to fill the acres off time? That feeling of wasting the day will soon be a distant memory after your first child emerges from the womb. Instead you’ll have a busy schedule of ferrying your children around to birthday parties, sporting commitments and visits to zoos, museums, parks and the beach. If you should find yourself not doing this at any point during a weekend or holiday, your child will soon set things straight by whining at you until you drive them to the stupid shopping mall to see some stupid movie at the stupid multiplex or whatever.

The universal rule of parenting is that the only time parents ever get to themselves is during brief periods of slacking off at work, and at night after the kids have gone to bed when you get to sit at the kitchen table and catch up on your overdue tax return. Even those times can be interrupted at any moment by a sick or worried child, so don’t ever tell yourself you can relax. If this ever makes you feel a little trapped and overwhelmed, don’t worry – your kids will move out of home eventually, and shortly afterwards expect you to take care of their grandchildren.

You can buy stuff “for them” that’s actually for yourself!

Bigger houses, better (“safer”) cars, in-ground pools, expensive holidays, video game consoles – just about any purchase you desire for sheer materialism’s sake can be justified as being “for the kids”. As long as there’s some benefit in which your children can share, you’ll seem like a wonderful provider instead of a selfish hoarder.

Unfortunately children are infernally expensive to begin with, and soon begin constantly demanding that you spend money on them, so you’re unlikely to have any spare discretionary income to devote to these kinds of purchases. But it’s nice to know that you could blow your cash guilt-free if you ever did have any.

You get constant, adoring companionship!

Your children will celebrate openly whenever you come home, and will be absolutely desperate to play games with you, games that you haven't been able to enjoy since you were a kid yourself. What’s more, for the first decade of their life, you’ll get to beat them every single time whether it’s at chess, tenpin bowling or bareknuckle combat. Even if you were always mediocre at cricket in your schooldays, you’ll have no difficulty removing your six-year-old’s middle stump with a full-paced yorker.

Plus, spending time with your children will allow you to enjoy entertainment that’s normally frowned on for grown-ups, like the Muppets and Pixar movies. The only drawback is that you will also be forced to watch Dora the Explorer.

This joy of simple companionship will come to an abrupt end in your child’s teens, when you will suddenly embarrass them more than anyone else on the face of the earth, but until then, it’ll be great.

You’ll never be stuck for small talk again!

Have you ever wondered what to say to a taxi driver, or bartender, or dull colleague with whom you’re trapped in the lift? When you have kids, you’ll never need to talk about the weather again! Just embark on lengthy updates about your child’s mental and physical development, subtly intended to suggest that your kids are better than those of the person you’re talking to, and that you are therefore also a better parent and person.

If the person you’re talking to doesn’t have children, don’t let that dissuade you – just adopt a pitying facial expression and keep talking about your kids anyway.

The freedom of being stuck for conversation will also apply when you have lengthy discussions with your child about things like dinosaurs and Bob the Builder and minor orcs from Lord of the Rings and how their friends’ parents let their kids do things that you won’t let them do.

You’ll find that your kids ask questions constantly, as though you’re some kind of walking Wikipedia. The best way to deal with this is by giving them false information for fun. For instance, tell them that Alice Springs got its name because of a girl called Alice who had wonderboots with giant springs on the soles that let her bounce high in the air.

You’ll be able to miss any social occasion you like!

Whether it’s a potentially lame party, a tedious family function or an embarrassing school reunion, children give you a permanent get-out-of-lame-social-event-free card. Your dorky colleague will completely understand why you couldn’t turn up to his barbecue when you tell them your kids are sick. After all, who’d rather be at home with vomiting kids than eating lukewarm sausages and drinking warm beer in an all-concrete backyard? Well, you, since it gives you the chance to catch up on the latest episodes of Game of Thrones while occasionally pausing to give your kids a glass of flat lemonade.

Conversely, there will be times when your kids are sick and genuinely prevent you from going to social events that you did want to attend. And they’ll bring germs home from the petri dish of infection that every educational institution in the country is, and make you horribly sick too. But then again, this entire question of going to social events is entirely academic to begin with, because wrangling kids will leave you too tired to ever leave the house in the first place.

You’ll experience the joy of narcissism!

Remember how Austin Powers’ nemesis Dr Evil created a “Mini-Me”? Well, that’s exactly what you’re doing! Your child will resemble you more than anyone else on the face of the earth ever could, unless of course you have a twin. You’ll constantly be thinking “Oh, that’s exactly what I do!”, and when you look them in the eye, you’ll see yourself looking back in miniature. This ego-gratifying similarity begins very early in life – as your newborn lies there and drools incoherently, they’ll remind you of yourself at the end of the office Christmas party.

This similarity is why most people find it easier to be nice to their family than anyone else – it’s almost like being nice to yourself. And the wonderful thing is, when your offspring succeeds, it’ll almost as though you succeeded, which is why stage parents become so obsessive.

This simple fact of genetics will also mean that the flaws you find most problematic about yourself will probably be replicated in them as a constant reminder of your own inadequacy. And you won't even be able to object, because they'll say – but dad, you pick your nose too.

There’s also a chance of your offspring instead overwhelmingly resembling the other parent, which can be lovely except if the relationship breaks down, in which case it’s a constant painful reminder.

This piece is dedicated to my newborn niece, whom I’m sure will be a delightful exception to any minor downside of parenting mentioned above.

Dom's Great Gym Roadtest

Gyms. Some of us hate them, some of us tolerate them and some of us love them on account of Stockholm Syndrome. But they're a good way to get fit, especially if, like me, you can't simply go jogging because their knees are dodgier than an HSU credit card bill.

Now, it turns out that merely being a member of a gym isn't quite enough for you to get into shape. And so, in a bid to lose a few kilograms along with the vast quantity of money that I've already shed from my bank account, I have embarked upon a bold new experiment. I've been trying a wide variety of classes at the gym to figure out which ones work, which ones don't work, and which one are too much work.

Cycling

These sessions are often known as "spin" classes because like political spin, they're almost entirely fictitious. You ride a pretend bike for a pretend number of kilometres up pretend hills and along straights while loud music is played and disco lights flash so you can pretend you’re somehow simultaneously in a nightclub.

Up the front, the instructor will exhort you to go hard and really pump it up the hill, while barely raising a sweat themselves because they're so ridiculously fit. I imagine this is supposed to provide you with something to strive towards, but in my case just renders me resentful.

Who's it for? As long as you have an active imagination, these classes are clearly a great way to burn a lot of kilojoules and get your legs strong. After my 45 minute class, my knee was so overworked that I could barely walk home, leaving me to wish I was spinning the tyres of a wheelchair.

Hot yoga

My body's more inflexible than a parking inspector, so trying to twist it into the various poses was an enormous challenge. Rather than "downward dog", my signature pose was "defeated dog on the way to the vet's to be put to sleep".

While my predominantly female classmates easily contorted their bodies into positions that circus performers might have hesitated to attempt, I often found myself taking a breather, kneeling on the mat and panting. Plus, it was HOT – I also frequently had to wipe the mat with my towel because I'd dripped so much sweat onto it.

The most challenging part of the class, though, was at the end when I had to avoid giggling while the entire class chanted "Om" and then "Namaste". For some reason they all seemed to be under the impression that they were sitting cross-legged alongside the Maharishi on the banks of the Ganges, not sweating in a CBD gym and about to put on a suit and head off to work for a bank.

Who's it for? To my skeptical mind, yoga's about as spiritual as Kings Cross when an American navy ship's in town. But although it's relatively low intensity, I reckon regular prolonged stretching would do wonders for my inflexible, untoned body. In fact, the class left me highly motivated to learn the secret of folding my body into the shape of a paperclip, just like my classmates. As for the “hot” variety, I'm not sure if the heat helps for anything besides working up more of a sweat, but I bet it's a treat in the middle of winter.

Pilates Reformer

This was probably the most pleasant experience – not only do you get to lie down throughout, but you get to play with giant springs! You lie on a "reformer bed" – essentially a bench that slides along rails, and yes, that is as bizarre in practice as it sounds. You can adjust the springs to provide different degrees of resistance to tailor your workout to your own needs, and for someone with a knee problem, this really was the ideal exercise. There are also leg straps that feel a touch bondagey, to be honest, but at least provide variety. This had the least physical impact on me of any of the classes, but perhaps I wasn't setting the springs high enough?

Who's it for? People who like lying down and are able to resist the temptation to play with the huge springs and send them flying dangerously across the room.

Boxing

I think the idea of two adults punching each repeatedly other in the head is both barbaric and dangerous, even if one of them is Mike Tyson and in many respects deserves it. So I approached this class with a degree of hesitation.

But then I put on the gloves and started thumping the pads, and to my surprise, I really loved it. It’s very satisfying to punch people who can't fight back because if they did, you wouldn't hold the pads for them in return. I enjoyed punching the bag too, because as an inanimate object, you're pretty much guaranteed it won't retaliate.

So – boxing is exhausting, and hurt my knuckles, but I really enjoyed it. Maybe those schoolyard bullies were onto something?

Who's it for? People who don't mind sticking their hands into gross gloves and pads filled with your own yucky, stinky sweat, or worse still, somebody else's.

Aquarobics

The last thing you need when you're a bit tubby is to work out in a swimsuit, frankly, or so I thought. After my aquarobics session, I’d like to amend that – in fact, the last thing you need is to be the last to arrive at a class where all the other members are female and pause to watch you awkwardly descending the ladder.

Aquarobics is a clever idea because it's easier to move heavy objects (such as my body!) in water. So in a sense it's a lower-impact workout. But then again, the water offers sufficient resistance that just walking through it counts as exercise, especially if you're doing so sideways while performing star jumps.

For me, it was a pleasant return to my toddle delight at mucking about in a swimming pool with foam floaty things. But I did feel a tad self-conscious being not only the only guy in the pool, but the youngest attendee by some margin.=

Who's it for: A different demographic from me, apparently. But it certainly seems like a good class if you’re new to the gym, and for those carrying injuries it's gentle yet surprisingly demanding.

Cooldown

So there you have it: my first-hand experiences of fitness classes. I think if I could only choose one, it’d be cycling, simply because it left me the most exhausted – but hot yoga and boxing were also gruelling yet satisfying. To be honest, each class had something to recommend it – but I don't know if I can manage five classes a week!

I was left wishing I could combine them and get to punch people from a floating bike while lying down in a heated room. I shall ask my gym whether it can introduce a Hot Boxbikearobics Reformer class.

Disclaimer: The above is based on my actual experiences of actually doing the actual classes, I promise. However it ought to be abundantly clear that not only am I not a fitness or medical professional, but a near-total ignoramus, and therefore this report should be relied upon only for the purpose of laughing at me. 

Why isn't there healthier fast food?

My blood pressure is too high.

Now, don’t worry. I wouldn’t want your own blood pressure to skyrocket in shock at the potential loss of these delightful columns of mine. My readings aren’t so high that I’m highly likely to drop dead tomorrow (I say, touching the plasticised wood of my desk), but they’re higher than they should be. And certainly high enough to do something about it.
Of course, there are reasons for it to be on the high side just now – it's been an exciting week. I was already on the edge of my pew waiting to hear which septuagenarian, socially conservative man would become the new Pope, and then the excitement of a new Chief Minister of the NT in the same 24 hour period was almost too much to bear.

But I got multiple readings over the course of a few days, and the message from the doctor was clear: I need to make some changes. Lifestyle changes, he said – he didn’t want to prescribe medication, not ot when I’m relatively young, at least compared to the College of Cardinals. Do plenty of exercise, he told me, and watch what you eat, especially fat and salt.

Sure, I replied, that’ll be fine. And I vowed then and there to head to the gym at least every second day – a vow which I’ve been able to keep for 10 days now, which by my standards is an extremely long-term relationship.

But changing my diet is a challenge, and not just because I have minimal self-discipline and a devout love for the snacks. The problem is that I’m unable to cook for myself. And while it’s true that I don’t really know how, as I’ve admitted before, that’s not really what I’m referring to. I don’t have time.

Honestly – I don’t. Not just because of this high-paced modern life and all that, but because I generally work from around 2 or 3pm until 10. And this means that every evening, somewhere between five and six-thirty, I undertake a quest for dinner. A solitary but nevertheless heroic race against the clock to eat and get back to my desk within the space of about fifteen minutes. And even though there’s an abundance of food on offer, a cornucopia if you will, the problem is that pretty much all of it is junk.

I mean ‘junk food’ as in ‘fast food’, but also in the literal sense of stuff you could comfortably chuck away. We have a branch of just about every major fast food outlet around the corner from my work, and any one of them will gladly serve me up a hot meal quickly and reliably, at an inexpensive price. It’ll be tasty, at least superficially, and it’ll be filling. Too filling, in fact. And that’s the problem.

While the nation’s food courts are full of healthy options during weekday lunchtimes, trying to find a quick, nutritious meal at dinner time is harder than finding a scandal-free sporting code.

Take the most popular chain. Pretty much any meal deal at McDonald’s will use up around half of your daily kilojoule intake. The Big Mac alone will provide 44% of your daily intake of saturated fats (PDF link), 37% of your sodium intake and 24% of your energy intake. Add fries and a dessert or sugary drink, and you’ll be well on the way to blowing your daily budget for fat, salt and energy just in the one meal. Delicious!

I won’t go into too much more detail about the issues with Maccas’ menu, because Super Size Me already did that, but let me just say that it’s a hard place to eat well. As demonstrated by that poor McDonaldLand character Grimace, who has not only grown morbidly obese from a life of guzzling McDonald’s, but whose blood pressure is evidently so high that he’s turned purple.

Now, I accept that McDonald’s, KFC and the rest of them have their place. I understand that it’s food you should only eat occasionally. What I question is the fact that in our society, these foods are often the only easy food option. I’ve been to several country towns where literally the only late meal I could get after 10pm was McDriveThrough. And driving along any main road, you’ll find multiple outlets that are only too happy to fill your stomach, as well as your arteries.

No matter where you go in the developed or developing world, you can find a branch of McDonald’s, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut. And at any one of those branches, you can find the same menu items and order the same food with the same reassuring taste. And it’s almost all terrible for you.

None of this is the fault of the fast food chains, to be fair. It’s our fault as the consumers who choose which businesses prosper and fail. And McDonald’s tried introducing a healthier menu with sandwiches and salads, and nobody bought them. What does it say about our society that the only food you can find just about anywhere in the world is incredibly bad for you? Since we’re supposed to eat good, healthy good most of the time, and dodgy junk food only some of the time, why is it only the bad stuff that’s on-sale everywhere?

Admittedly, there is one exception – Subway, where it’s perfectly possible to stay within dietary guidelines if you stick to things like ham instead of meatballs and can resist the melted cheese and cookies. But it gets boring to eat a ham sub every day – I’ve tried.

When I was young, I used to eat at McDonald’s all the time. I’m embarrassed to say that I used to choose it even when there were other, better options. That’s probably how I got into this whole blood-pressure/overweight mess in the first place. Nowadays, I’d genuinely prefer a salad, or a bit of fish, or a vege stir fry, or a bit of chicken, or indeed anything tasty and healthy.

(And okay, if I’m honest, I’d prefer a gourmet wagyu burger to all of those things. I’m trying to change.)

But there isn’t anywhere that wants to sell healthy takeaway foods to me. The alternatives don’t exist. And so the unhealthy fast food joints continue to prosper, even though in our increasingly gourmet society we all know that we can and must do better. It’s a vicious circle which is making our bodies literally circular.

We’re all working harder, and eating out more, and supposedly more conscious of our waistlines as they nevertheless continue to balloon. So why aren’t there dozens of chains selling soup, or steamed vegetables, or lean, grilled meat, or salad? Even some of the specialist salad chains – Sumo, I’m looking at you – tend to chuck brie and bacon and cream into their supposedly healthy sandwiches. Even Asian options like noodles and rice dishes tend to be high in carbs and loaded with oil. And don’t get me started on the coffee chains like Starbucks and Gloria Jeans, whose snackfood cabinets will burn through your recommended daily intake faster than Bob Hawke downs a yard glass.

The first person to create a genuinely healthy, tasty fast food chain will either get fabulously rich, if we humans are indeed capable of some modicum of dietary self-control, or do their money because we ultimately can’t resist unhealthy crap when given the option. (If the latter’s true, we’ll probably all die out anyway.) The fact that Subway is now the world’s largest fast food chain, by outlets if not by profitability, is encouraging. I just wish more entrepreneurs would be brave enough to put their money on the line to find out.

In the meantime, my only genuine option if I want to eat healthily and with a modicum of variety at dinnertime is to buy frozen, low-fat dinners and cook them in the work microwave. I’ve tried this before too, and it left me doing something that I didn’t believe was possible – appreciating airline food.

After weighing the options up carefully, I can reluctantly concede that Lean Cuisine and its ilk are marginally better than a premature coronary. But how I wish there was another option.

Seven signs you're getting older

Cultural phenomena make no sense to you

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

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

You eat McDonald's reluctantly

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

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

In is the new Out

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

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

You don't like noisy places

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

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

Your favourite drink is water

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

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

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

Your clothes are neither cool nor uncool

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

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

You buy new music from the same old bands

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

If Men Are From Mars, Women Are Also From Mars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are not a princess

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

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

I said, PRINCESSES!

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

Here’s what the press release says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you no longer get the Hottest 100

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Downton Abbey: The SNES Game

I never owned a Super Nintendo when I was young. I always wanted one, though, and was deeply jealous of my friends who did. Perhaps if I'd watched this video, I would have been more content with my lot. Looking back, the games did get kinda repetitive...

That said, it's a bit hypocritical to mock Super Nintendo games for their tedium when you've performed the agonisingly boring job of programming the Downton Abbey theme in bleepy SNES music...

How I fell out of love with 'Downton Abbey'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten things to do over summer

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

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

1) Become a cricket commentator

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

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

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

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

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

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

2) Learn how to make ice-cream

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

3) Dye your hair

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

4) Invent a meme

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

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

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

Here are some possible subjects for memes:

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

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

INSERT GRAPHIC: MEMEIDEA.JPG

5) Start a blog

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

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

6) Go tenpin bowling

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

7) Organise and backup your photos

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

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

8) Create a new you

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

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

9) Record a critically acclaimed indie album

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

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

10) Come up with your own list like this one

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

Five things I learned at a toddler’s birthday party

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

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

1) Don't get there late

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3) Parenthood involves a ridiculous amount of stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A salvo to the smug marrieds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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