Here's what you'll find if you hack into my email

The American government knows absolutely everything about you. Let’s just all conclude this now, shall we, instead of letting that harrowing realisation dawn on us gradually, with every fresh document leaked by Edward Snowden? It’ll save us all time if we just imagine that everything which passes through our in and outboxes is BCCed barack@whitehouse.gov.

I assume this post is getting scooped up by some kind of NSA auto-web-searching drone, by the way, so – hello, spooks! I’m extremely harmless. But you’ve probably already concluded that.

(By the way, if you visit the National Security Agency’s website, you will discover that they are promoting Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Which doesn’t mention that the biggest threat of people breaking into your most personal material could well originate within their very own organisation.)

Today’s revelation is that the NSA can monitor pretty well everything you do with the likes of Google and Yahoo by scooping it up at the point between Google’s private cloud of servers and the public internet – the point where, in the diagram in that last link, there’s a little hand-drawn smiley face which struck fear into my heart, as though it were carved into a Halloween pumpkin.

So, since the spooks know all me already, I’ve decided that I may as well come clean and tell everyone. So, here are the five most embarrassing kinds of emails on my server.

1) Emails about work that resulted in no work

Is there anything more galling than a politely-worded form rejection email after a job application? Your hopes are dashed in sterile bureaucratic language, and they use phrases like “regrettably”, “at this time” and “due to an overwhelming amount of interest” in an effort to mask the underlying message: that you aren’t good enough.

Well yes, there is – an email where you’re told your services are no longer required. Most companies will have the decency to fire you in person, of course – but when you’re a freelancer, sometimes you just get an email. I’ve got a few of those sitting in my archive as well. Generally they mention the desire to come up with a “new direction”, but what they’re really saying is “we’re planning to go in any direction but you.”

2) The audit trail from ill-advised online purchases

That DVD of a movie by renowned auteur Wong Kar-wai that you bought off eBay for an amazingly cheap price that turned to be recorded on a camcorder in a cinema? That hilarious t-shirt you bought that never fit because you said you were an L when in fact you are clearly an XL, if not an XXL? And, especially in my case, the mobile phone attachment you ordered but never used before the phone became obsolete?

The electronic records of every single one of these purchases will sit in your inbox forever, long after you’ve consigned the item to the bin or given it to someone you don’t much like for Christmas. I should have gotten a refund at the time, but now there’s no taking back my shame.

3) Failed attempts at flirtation

If the NSA agents were to search my email or Facebook accounts using the term “catch up”, they would discover many emails exchanged with members of the opposite sex in which I, unsuccessfully, attempted to hang out with them by trying to take advantage of the fig-leaf of friendliness.

The particular tragedy of the “conversation” view that prevails in messaging services nowadays is that you can see the whole of the email exchange, from the initial hope to the moment where is sputters and dies, along with your dreams. Almost all of them end up with me saying something like “yeah, great, let me know when you’re free”, to which the person replies something like “Cool, will do”, and then never does.

In the moment, they’re letting you down kindly – but read together, they form a fairly dispiriting pattern.

On rare occasions, such emails actually resulted in physical meetings, which invariably ended in nothing more physical than that. But those embarrassing conversations, thankfully, are not to be found in my email account.

4) Emails from internet dating services

Surprising as it may seem, there’s a level below email rejection from actual people you know, and it is this. You never get an email from an internet dating website that actually has a message from another human being, of course. That wouldn’t get them as many clicks as if you logged in. So instead they’ll say something like “You have received a message from ridiculouspsedonym6969”, and you’ll have to log in to discover you don’t have anything remotely in common with whoever ridiculouspseudonym6969 is, and that they look like they have no sense of humour, terrible taste (often expressed via an overfondness for pink), or a major personality disorder – and sometimes two or even three of the items on this list.

After this happens fifteen or so times, you’ll learn not to get your hopes up. But until then, every fresh arrival in your inbox is another impossible dream.

5) Emails you forgot to reply to

As embarrassing as the electronic records of failed romances are, the emails that most embarrass me are the lovely ones I never replied to because I got distracted, or was busy, or just didn’t have my act together. Every single one of them is a reproach, an electronic proof that I’m a thoughtless, disorganised jerk.

Occasionally there’s a reply from me months later saying “Oh hi, so sorry, this somehow slipped through the cracks,” or worse still, I might blame the spam filter. The real reason is  – well, sometimes I’m a bad person who probably deserved all the rejection he received in point #3.

So there you have it, National Security Agency. These are the worst electronic records you could possibly uncover. So, do your worst, you can’t hurt me any more. Unless you release that one incriminating email I sent to an ex where I told her how I wanted to m /// THIS REST OF THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN DELETED BY THE UNITED STATES NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY. NOT BECAUSE IT POSES ANY THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY, JUST BECAUSE IT’S EXTREMELY SAD.

Scenes from a mall

You know that famous MC Escher engravings of staircases that wend up and up and then turn downwards and then winds around and then somehow, perplexingly, ends up exactly where they started?

Well, if you made those stairs ramps, surrounded them with a branch of every bland chain store you've bypassed while wandering through other malls (I’m looking at you, but not literally looking in you, kikki.K and Dust. And The Reject Shop, couldn’t you have at least tried?) and filled the hole in the middle with a strange sculpture of a wireframe globe atop a huge multi-tiered wedding cake, you would have the exact architectural plan for the Macquarie Centre.

I spent an hour there this morning, on a trip that I thought would take approximately ten minutes, and I’m still suffering flashbacks. I got lost, and then eventually found a direction board, and then couldn’t understand it, and thought I’d figured it out, and then got lost. And it reminded me of everything I hate about malls.

If you’ve never visited Macquarie Centre – and you probably haven’t, because it’s designed in such a way that if you have ever been there, you’re more than likely still wandering around, trying but not succeeding to find the exit – let me paint the picture for you.

It's a mall in the Sydney suburb of North Ryde, which is a place companies go to inhabit large corporate parks so that instead of being drones in CBD skyscrapers, their employees can experience a bit of grass when they walk from the carpark to their foyer, and glimpse trees out the window.

Technology companies and drug companies and biotech startups have spread out their generic two or three-storey glass boxes in what is fair to call Australia's version of Silicon Valley, at least architecturally.

The one respite from all of this corporate parkery is Macquarie Centre. It's where our tech sector goes to shop and frolic, alongside the students of Macquarie University who initially transformed the area into a centre of knowledge instead of generic quarter-acre blocks like the rest of Ryde.

I remember when I first visited Macquarie Centre as a child, in the 1980s. It seemed like paradise back when my group from the Macquarie Uni Vacation Play Centre used to go there on excursions. They had an ice rink, and above it, there was a McDonald’s which overlooked the ice rink. I couldn’t possibly imagine anything else my heart could possibly desire.

In my teenage years, they added in a cinema and a burger shop called Fuddrucker’s which was funny to say because it sounded almost like a swear word, but isn’t.

But when I went there today, I found myself wandering around in a state of confusion and frustration. If I ever knew my way around, I’ve certainly forgotten.

There are two kinds of mall: ones you know well, and ones you don’t. If you have an up-to-date mental map, you can park in the perfect place, enter right near the shop you need, grab the things you want with ninja-like speed and get out of there.

But if you don’t know your way around, it works like this: it takes ages to find a park, and then you park somewhere that, after a long walk, deposits you straight into the middle of a department store. You will wander around in a state of confusion, looking for the exit of the department store. Eventually, you will exhaust every other possible direction and emerge into the main mall.

There, you will see an atrium with a coffee shop in the centre that looks so depressing that the staff will highly likely make your latte using their own tears.

Looking up, you will see the sky – and it’s the only view you’ll get of that for some time, so store the memory away for when you’re lost later and can’t even find the atrium, let alone your car.

Around you, the mall will zig-zag off in random directions, none of which are clearly signposted. You will be able to see shops selling mobile phone accessories, cosmetics, mobile phone accessories, cheap knockoff sunglasses, mobile phone accessories, a nail salon, whatever weird colour-coded things Smiggle sells, mobile phone accessories and mobile phones.

While you will be able to see many things you do not want, you will not be able to see the thing you want, nor any means of locating it.

And what especially irks me about malls, of course, is the idea that this design is probably deliberate. The name of the TV show The Gruen Transfer comes from that moment when, on entering a mall, the combination of the intentionally-confusing layout, the muzak, and your general sense of frustration about the circumstances in which your life has deposited you in the middle of a shopping mall lead you to forget the reason you were there in the first place.

Which perhaps answers my question of why anyone ever shops at The Reject Shop.

There has to be a better way of doing retail than building these behemoths, surely? Can we not do a run to the shops without also needing 200 other shops alongside the shop we intended to go to in the first place?

Well, apparently we can’t. These are the “retail formats” that are destroying our main streets, where everything was located in straight lines, and you could actually find your way around.

Instead, it seems we’re condemned to wandering around endless malls, looking for exits and bathrooms, and failing that, bargains. I went there to buy a present for a friend’s new baby, and for the amount of time it took to find it, I could practically have knitted something myself.

But I did buy several things I didn’t need, and experience a wave of nostalgia looking out at that ice rink. Which still has a Mackers overlooking it, by the way.

A star is trying to kill me

Why do we never do the things we know we’re supposed to do?

We all know we shouldn’t eat food that’s high in fat and sugar, but we still regularly shovel deep fried rubbish down our gullets, and junk food is so popular that nowadays lots of trendy restaurants and pubs do an upmarket version where suckers pay upwards of fifteen bucks for a hot dog.

We all know we shouldn’t smoke, but clustered around the entrance of just about every office building in every Australian CBD you can see people puffing away, spending a fortune on contracting cancer.

And we all know we shouldn’t drink, but visit any pub on a Friday or Saturday night, and you’ll see that this message hasn’t exactly sunk in either.

No wonder doctors experience such high levels of stress when hardly any of us take their advice. The poor things, they should go and play even more relaxing rounds of golf than they already play.

But I’m in no position to criticise anyone for ignoring repeated, obvious health messages when I just went and got my skin checked this week for the first time in ten years.

Ten years! When I’m a pasty white person whose skin burns more predictably than the Australian bush in summertime.

I don’t tan, I freckle and/or burn. And so I spent my childhood dutifully applying 15+ (as it then was) sunblock to my body, and donning hats, and wearing long-sleeved shirts when everyone else had bare arms – and I still regularly got burnt enough to make my skin peel. I’m a person who definitely needs to get checked top to bottom for suspicious moles – I’ve received this warning repeatedly – and yet I haven’t been to get myself checked out for a decade.

This is stupid, reckless – and inconsistent with my general approach of being paranoid. Even low levels of risk freak me out – I’m unable to catch a plane without anticipating all manner of disaster scenarios. So why on earth have I not acted on one of the few things I genuinely ought to worry about?

This week, I grasped the nettle. My GP has a reassuring diploma on his wall suggesting that he has special training in the area, so we booked in half an hour for a thorough inspection. I stripped down to my undies, and he brandished a digital camera and a magnifying lens, which he used to snap anything that looked dodgy.

I’ve never done any modelling, you’ll be shocked to learn, so the idea of someone using a camera to take multiple photos of my semi-nude body was a little disconcerting. But he’s a trustworthy fellow, so I’m fairly confident he only took close-up photos of the brown, discoloured bits of skin, and not any unflattering shots of moi in underpants.

And given my general discomfort with the whole situation, I was grateful that he at no point advised me to pout or “make lurve to the camera”.

There were probably about a dozen things he photographed – the idea being that we’ll do it again soon so he can see if any have changed. It all seemed very sensible, and he was extremely professional about it, even when I was required to semi-drop my dacks so he could check my posterior for moleage. All in a day’s skin medicine, naturally.

It took about twenty minutes, after which he sat me down and cheerfully said he’d only found one thing he needed to cut out.

I was shocked. I thought that at worst, there’d be something or other that he needed to spray with his trusty can of liquid nitrogen, like a Ghostbuster dispatching an errant slimer with a laser beam. But apparently the particular thing he found wasn’t the kind of thing you can freeze off – it needs to be excised so it can be sent to a lab for testing, while I’ll get a few stitches in the skin. Unpleasant, but not major in the scheme of things.

Sure, I guess when you have skin like mine, have been sunburnt in the past and haven’t had a skin check in a decade, a mere one item needing surgical removal is arguably a fairly lucky result. But I wasn’t feeling overwhelmed by good fortune, I must say, as I contemplated my imminent session under the knife.

I booked in a date next week to get the strange little discoloured patch cut off my back. The chances of it being genuinely problematic are fairly slim, I’ve discovered via extensive Googling – but I’m still berating myself for being so stupid as to go ten years without a simple checkup that I know I need.

I mean, they’re even Medicare-subsidised.

I’ve watched a lot of action films. So I know that if something is trying to kill you, whether an evil Terminator from the future, a terrifying mandibled alien bent on trophy-hunting, or just some weird dude with an airpump, the best course is to take evasive action.

Well, the sun is trying to kill me. It’s been trying to for years by blasting my skin cells with toxic UV rays. And not only have I let it do that on all too many occasions, but I haven’t taken a simple test that would intercept any harm that it’s caused.

Especially if you’ve got vulnerable skin like mine, consider this a cautionary note and book in a skin test. Increasingly what’s killing us the affluent West is our own laziness, whether it’s through our excess consumption of things that are bad for us, or not taking advantage of the advanced, convenient, publicly-funded medical infrastructure that exists to detect skin cancer.

So please, don’t be as dumb and lazy as I was. Just convince yourself that your doctor is a paparazzo who likes working on an incredibly small scale, and get it done.

I am a wine ignoramus

Nothing makes me feel like more of an idiot than a conversation with a sommelier. In my work I sometimes get to chat with astronomers, and even when they talk about things like dark matter and the expanding universe, I feel more in my element than when someone is patronisingly guiding me through a wine list.

You’ve no doubt spoken to one if you’ve ever visited a restaurant that’s either genuinely fancy or has tickets on itself – sommeliers are those waiters who’ve done some kind of TAFE course in wine who turn up to your table and make you feel inadequate.

Their job has no English word – the wine-snob industry prefers just to use the French term, which I would argue speaks volumes about their profession.

Oh, look, I appreciate expert sommerlierage sometimes – when you get a good one, they sometimes recommend spectacular wines that prove a memorable addition to the meal. The problem is, in many respects, mine, because I know practically nothing about wine.

To prove it, here is the Official And Comprehensive Dom Knight Guide to Wine.

White: often tastes sour and a bit dodgy. Chardonnay’s a bit of a cliché and tastes dubious, especially when cheap. Don’t much like it. When I drink a few glasses on a hot day, I often feel a bit queasy.

Red: Usually prefer it, unless it’s one of those vinegary ones. Don’t really go for the overpowering ones, and I think that includes cabernet sauvignon. Merlot got a bad rap in Sideways. I quite like Côtes du Rhône , whatever that is.

Rosé: Nah.

Champagne: Broad yes, unless it’s too yeasty. It’s possible that what I mean by “too yeasty” is dry.

Regions: Generally prefer European reds to Australian because my palate isn’t that sophisticated, so I don’t like “bold” or “powerful” terribly much.

Palate, nose, fruit, breathing, decanting, cellaring: No idea.

The really sad thing is that I did once go to the Wine Society and take an introductory wine appreciation course, but I can’t remember anything about it except what corked wine tastes like – “yuk” is the easiest way to describe it. Frankly, if you can’t tell whether or not a wine is corked, your taste buds aren’t functioning correctly.

I had visions of being a bit of a wine connoisseur, of being the kind of guy that other people willingly hand the list to at restaurants, knowing they’ll be in expert hands. I’d pore through the menu, tut-tutting here and there and nodding appreciatively in other places, before ordering a bottle that was thoroughly excellent and yet surprisingly good value.

But I ultimately found myself conceding two things. Firstly, it was too much hard work. There are so many different varieties, and regions – it would take me years to get to a level of basic competence.

Plus, Australians are into wine. The chances of me being the most expert oenophile (a word that wine buffs use for wine buffs, because “buff” is kind of a silly word outside of the gym context) at any social gathering are fairly slim without considerable effort.

And here’s the second issue, the thing that feels difficult to admit – I don’t like wine that much.

I do like champagne, and certain reds (I’ve no idea which kind, I’m afraid), especially with a good meal. If there are glasses of wine sitting on a table, I’ll generally take one, usually the red. But if you told me I could never drink it again, I’d be absolutely fine with that.

After years of feeling inadequate whenever anyone hands me a wine list, I made the decision to move straight past wine and onto spirits. I started with gin and vodka, which are fairly straightforward and are often served with fizzy mixers, which I enjoy. And then I’ve recently cultivated a taste for whisky.

There are only about half a dozen different broad types of whisky/whiskey, as far as I can tell – I’m sure serious Scotch experts would take great umbrage at that suggestion, but honestly, it’s much less complicated than the whole of the wine universe.

In fact, I have come to genuinely enjoy the taste of whisky, which can be enjoyed in small, intense sips, and I have some Scottish heritage, so I can ramble vaguely on about my ancestors in the Highlands and the family tartan.

Most usefully, though, whisky demands respect. Whereas once people used to look down on e for being a wine ignoramus, now I simply say that I prefer spirits, and they immediately conclude that I’m the kind of guy who regularly sits on Chesterfields in hunting lodges, sipping single malts of distinction. I can work with that.

And whenever I’m confronted by a sommelier in future, I’ve figured out what to do. I shall fix them with my most intimidating gaze, and say “Everyone says you should just order the second cheapest bottle on the menu. But I’m a bit of a connoisseur in these matters, so why don’t you bring me the third-cheapest?”

Remember, it’s only a game

Everyone who plays or follows competitive sport, on any level, needs to take a step back. Take a deep breath. Every single one of you. Because you’ve taken things too far. In fact, you’re ruining it.

Sport has jumped the shark. And players have vaulted further over it than any human rightfully should, fuelled by peptides, human growth hormone and an approach that says that you’re a mug if you don’t do anything that’s not expressly prohibited by the rules, no matter how unethical it may be.

In an attempt to get an edge, clubs have been re-enacting the 1980s movie Weird Science, giving their players “supplements”, and if not breaking the rules, then certainly flirting with danger – much as the two geeks do in Weird Science.

In John Hughes’ movie, the nerds increase their computer-simulated lady’s boobies for the purposes of “humour” – but sports scientists are enlarging footballers’ biceps to similarly absurd proportions – for real.

And the unsavoury revelations keep coming. This week, a murky story surfaced about the Roosters, rugby league’s most consistent team this season, and human growth hormone. Essendon, my AFL team, have already been excluded from the finals and fined after various irregularities. Right now, the country’s two most popular codes seem dodgier than a late-night kebab.

Fans could be forgiven for wondering whether there’s any genuine joy to be had in winning a premiership in this year which contained the “blackest day in Australian sport”. Should it be the players who are feted with a ticker-tape parade, or the geeks in the backrooms who have devised concoctions of ever-increasing complexity? Alongside the coveted Dally M and Brownlow, should they hand out honours for the most devious sports scientists?

Worse still, we’ve seen this week that this absurd competitiveness has extended well beyond professional sport. There have been reports that a schoolboy basketball competition has been manipulated in ways that contravene the spirit of friendly competition.

In response, five of the seven other Sydney GPS private schools have refused to play The Scots’ College, a remarkable situation given the GPS’ gentlemanly pretensions.

It reminded me of when I was in Year 11 back in 1993. That was Scots’ centenary year, and their rugby team improved remarkably amid similar rumours of “music scholarships” going to likely Wallabies prospects. In the end, the school won its first premiership in six years – and that was its last rugby title until this year.

I never heard any official confirmation of whether or not Scots had done anything improper back then (although Paul Sheehan referred to it back in 2002). So let’s just say that to win their one premiership in 26 years in their Centenary year was a delightful piece of serendipity.

I also remember that when that Scots team played my school, the relatively nerdy Sydney Grammar, in round 2, something like half of our First Fifteen contracted season-ending injuries.

That situation made me angry at the time, and it still does when I read about the basketball competition today. A mismatched rugby game can be genuinely dangerous, and our bookish team were never any threat to Scots’ title hopes.

Nowadays, the school has a professional sports scientist on its books. I’m not suggesting there are any peptide-style shenanigans afoot at Scots. But it seems totally absurd that a school should employ a sports scientist to get an edge in something as trivial as high school sport – especially one who previously worked at a first-grade NRL club!

As you can see here, Scots even has an indoor altitude chamber. At a high school. An artificially high school, evidently.

How ridiculous. For one thing, Scots is already located high on a hill so the boys can enjoy water views.

(The school is evidently not enjoying the media attention – the webpages for its “high performance centre” have disappeared. Fortunately, Google’s cached version survives, and makes for an interesting read.)

I know that Scots is not the only offender, and the other schools’ objections a reminiscent of rich, spoiled kids squabbling.

But here’s the thing – when you take sport too seriously, you ruin it. Victory seems ugly, and losing becomes bitter. It rankles to lose to someone when it doesn’t feel fair and square.

Anyone who played sport at school will remember those terrible parents on the sideline, shouting at the referee and getting far too emotionally involved as they urged their offspring to triumph where they themselves had once failed. Those petulant parents should have been made to go and sit in their Lexuses. Instead it seems that their mentality is running the show.

Winning a premiership is nice. It’s a cause for celebration, sure. But it doesn’t actually mean anything. Even the NRL trophy is not that big a deal in the scheme of things. Scale the importance of that down by several hundredfold and you’ll get a sense of how much these schoolboy plaudits should matter.

It’s a quest for bragging rights, I suppose – but as Scots may well be finding, bragging is hollow if the people you beat think you flouted the rules.

I’m not saying they’re cheating, but I am saying they’ve lost proportion – just as professional sporting teams have.

I used to think the professionalisation of sport was a sign of progress – that players could earn a decent wage nowadays. Now I fear that too much money sloshing around ruins sport. Perhaps we should turn our attention to amateur competitions where fun and friendliness is a higher priority than victory.

And as for Scots, perhaps they should get rid of their sports scientist and instead employ someone whose only job is to remind everybody involved in the school’s sports programme that it’s only a game.

A rugby or basketball premiership ultimately doesn’t mean all that much in the scheme of things. And if it does, the person you should be adding to your staff is a counsellor.

We are all spoiled children

A confession: I’m one of those people who frowns when they see bad parenting. Or at least what I consider bad parenting, from my relatively ignorant perspective of not being a parent at all.

And I’ll go even further than frowning – at times, I’ve even been known to tsk.

Whenever I’m in a shop and I see a child throwing a tantrum in what seems a cynical strategy to get the latest toy, I will shake my head, with what I hope, but cannot guarantee, is sufficient subtlety that the exasperated parent won’t notice my self-righteous disapproval, and think to myself how much firmer I’d be in the same situation.

The child might cry, or beat the linoleum floor with its fists, or even say “I hate you, daddy,” but I would remain as unmoving as one of Clive Palmer’s imitation dinosaurs.

I’ll also gladly tell anyone that when I was a kid, we didn’t have anywhere near that many toys, and how we appreciated each and every item our parents purchased for us. Whereas kids these days are spoiled.

They’re so materialistic nowadays, so rapidly dissatisfied with what they already have, even though their personal collections are large enough to stock a neighbourhood toy store, to the point where finding something they don’t already have can be a genuine challenge. And yet they’ll still hassle their parents to add to their massive stockpile.

And it’s not just me who thinks so. A genuine, card-carrying mother, Sarah Macdonald, recently wrote about this for Daily Life – about her own children. As I read about their demands for teenage retreats and soft eggs, I felt vindicated in my disapproval. If I ever have children, I thought to myself, they’ll be different.

I should perhaps have been alerted by the title of Sarah’s piece, “Do all middle-class parents have spoiled kids?” The reality is that most families today can afford more possessions than my memory of childhood. As a nation, our average disposable income has increased at a consistent, and remarkable, rate. And I’m sure toys have gotten cheaper with the advent of mass-production in vast overseas factories.

Whenever I go shopping for kids’ toys, I’m genuinely shocked by how inexpensive they can be. I’ve previously admitted to buying my nephew a drum kit for his last birthday – what I didn’t mention is that it left me with change from thirty bucks. I don’t know how they even make money out of that, and given the conditions in many sweatshops, I probably don’t want to.

So if toys are cheaper and we are wealthier, it’s little wonder that presents have become a weekly thing instead of something saved for Christmas and birthdays.

The other factor is the sophistication of the modern marketing machine. When I was a kid, ads were generally limited to ad breaks in TV shows, and I was only allowed to watch the ABC, so my parents were only subject to nagging when my school friends had things I wanted.

Nowadays, the marketing is relentless. To give just one example, my nephew’s crazy about Angry Birds – but when you play those games now, every second thing you click on is a link to some form of ad for more of their games. He’s constantly being catapulted out of the game and into YouTube, where there’s an ad for another game in the series which then offers a bunch of links to toys. In particular, there’s a kid who reviews them for a series called EvanTube HD which has – no exaggeration – nearly 250 million views, delivering advertising revenue that no doubt keeps young Evan in all the figurines of porcine Darth Vader he wants.

Kids these days have been transformed into little sleeper agents who are activated whenever they go near the toy aisle, a fast-food outlet or those lollies that unscrupulous supermarkets display at the checkouts.

There’s no point blaming the kids for it, or indeed the parents, who generally have the best intentions. How many of them have attempted to stop their sons playing with toy guns, or keep their daughters away from Barbies? But such efforts are doomed to failure. It’s like trying to use an umbrella to resist a cyclone.

I thought about my nephew’s love of Angry Birds (for which I’m responsible) and the fancy tablet computer he uses to play it, and I suddenly realised that I’m no better, even though I’m 36 compared to his 3. The only difference is that instead of needing to chuck a tantrum in order to get the latest toys, I just pull out my credit card.

The disposable income figures I talked about earlier are especially advantageous if, like me, you’ve steered clear of parenting into your mid-thirties. The desire for instant gratification and lack of satisfaction with what we have is equally true of me, which is why I’m pondering a phone upgrade even though mine is only a year old.

Our society’s obsession with big houses and shiny cars and nifty gadgets shows that the kind of materialism that makes me shudder in the toy department continues on a grander scale once we transition to adulthood.

All of which leads me to conclude that the person I should in fact be tsking and shaking my head at is myself. And to the crime of materialism, I can also add a secondary charge of abject hypocrisy.

I hope I never become complacent about our transition into a generation of Veruca Salts, but if I’m planning to do something about it, I should probably start with my own behaviour. And go easier on parents. Sometimes the price of a toy is well worth it for a bit of peace.

Why I keep buying print books

Yesterday, I got home after a long day at work and read a book in the bath. It was Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, which turned out to be fairly harrowing, dealing as it does with the harrowing impact of the bombing of Dresden in World War II. But then again, it has plunger-shaped aliens from the planet Tralfamadore in it, so that’s something.

It was a wonderful read, and kept me in the water long after my skin had turned wrinkly. And it occurred to me that there’s simply no way to enjoy the great pleasure of bath-reading with a tablet, unless you’re rich enough to have a few dozen of them on hand. It’s best done with a paperback, one that you don’t mind getting slightly damp just in case you can’t quite manage to keep one hand dry. (Keep a towel within reach is my tip.)

At a time when the publishing industry has been struggling with the sales of books that aren’t about angst-ridden vampires, problematic sado-masochistic relationships or celebrity chefs, and even those few who make time to read nowadays have been gravitating towards e-books, it’s worth remembering what’s great about reading printed books.

Our media consumption is becoming internet based, as we increasingly stream music and download television. It doesn’t really matter whether a programme is downloaded or watched off the air - you’re still viewing it on the same screen. And while there are subtle differences between playing vinyl and streaming from Spotify, you’re still listening to the same recording through the same speakers.

But a printed book (“p-book”, for the purposes of this article) and an e-book offer different experiences when you consume them. Both have their place, and I certainly love taking my e-reader when I travel, but I doubt I’ll ever stop buying and reading printed books, even out of the bath.

Every book on my shelf has a memory attached to it. I remember where I bought them, who I was with, what kind of a day it was. Which is another thing that’s wonderful about p-books – the experience of buying them from bookshops, a pleasure that no website “recommendations engine” can hope to replicate. When I’m browsing in a bookshop, I’ll discover titles that the bookshop’s staff recommend not because they’re bestsellers, not because they’ve profiled me, but because they love them. That’s an irreplaceable service, and while the days of mega-chain bookshops have already gone forever, and I miss the scale and range of those massive Borders that were only with us for a decade or so, I’m sure that smaller, local, independent bookshops will survive. I certainly plan to keep supporting them.

I love a brand new book, with that unique freshly-printed smell, but I also love second-hand books. Browsing through an emporium of musty tomes is a pleasure that an e-reader cannot hope to replicate – and second-hand is cheaper than buying e-books, too. You can’t resell e-books – in fact, you may not even be able to pass them on to your children, unless they’re going to juggle multiple Amazon accounts, for instance. And what happens if Amazon goes broke?

I loved reading books for school that my parents had once enjoyed, and if I ever have children, I hope they’ll go on to plunder my own collection someday. P-books also turn satisfyingly yellow as they age. I love the tactility of books, too – their covers, often with brilliant graphic design, the beautiful layout and fontography. E-books all look and feel the same, a one-font-size-fits-all approach.

One day I plan to have a study lined with bookshelves, containing the perfect easy chair and reading lamp, but I already have a few bookshelves in my living room that form an enticing wall of colour, bulging with pleasure and potential. While e-readers usefully save space for those who live in small apartments, as Anthony Powell observed, books do furnish a room. E-readers do not.

Even if we don’t always find time to read nowadays, exploring a bookshelf lets you imagine long, lazy days of reclining and becoming immersed in a book. Sometimes a friend will notice a title on my shelf and borrow it, a pleasure that e-books cannot afford. You can get a p-book signed by the author, or give it as a Christmas present, and while gifting e-books is wonderfully convenient for friends who live overseas, you can’t stash them under the tree on Christmas morning.

Of course, they have their place. I read A Song of Ice and Fire (the source for Game of Thrones) on one while travelling, and lugging the thousands of pages of sci-fi around would have been a huge hassle. Uni textbooks were an annoying burden back in the day as well. The ease and convenience of online purchasing is a huge plus, but whenever I buy an e-book, I feel like I don’t really own it, and can’t get the maximum enjoyment from it.

What I’d like to see happen is what happens with vinyl albums nowadays, whereby if you buy a physical book, you also get a code for a bundled e-book copy. I’d like to be able to read a book in print when at home, and keep reading on a tablet while away. And I’d feel more comfortable with the print copy sitting on my shelf in perpetuity.

So while I’m actively adding to my e-book library, I’d still rather read a book in print. It’s simply a more pleasurable experience, and I like being able to slot them into my bookshelf when I’m done, where I can simply glance at the spine and remember the enjoyment I got from reading it. So while e-books have their place, especially when travelling, I’m a p-book man for life. At least until they invent a submersible e-reader.

For the love of dogs...

My family and friends divide neatly into the dog-mad and the dog-skeptical. I have always been very much in the latter camp, considering hounds rather like permanently unruly children – they’re well-meaning and friendly, but they simply can’t control themselves.

They jump all over me, they run around indoors and frequently knock things over, and they drool everywhere. Especially, it seems, on my pants.

At mealtimes dogs try to scab food from the table, trying to catch your eye as if to say “brother, can you spare a rasher of bacon?”, and when I sit down in a comfy chair afterwards, they come and jump on me, and/or drool on my leg some more.

They do it from love, I realise, but their love sometimes seems indiscriminate and overbearing. Sometimes when you love someone, you need to give them a bit of space. Dogs don’t really do space.

I’ve always felt that the best place for exuberant dogs was outside, where you can play with them when you feel like it, and not the other way around.

Whereas cats, in my opinion, are magnificent just about all of the time. Sure, you have to work to win a cat over in the first place. Nothing truly worthwhile in this life comes easily.

But when you’re friendly with a cat, it’ll fit neatly on your lap, and purr endearingly. In the depths of winter, cats will snuggle up next to your feet, like a self-powered hot water bottle. Or, they might not. A cat is like a flatmate – although admittedly one you have to feed. Sometimes they want to hang out, and sometimes they do their own thing.

Sure, sometimes “their own thing” involves dragging dead birds and rodents into your living room, but we all receive presents we don’t like now and then – the best thing to do is just re-gift them.

And what’s more, unlike most flatmates, cats are fastidiously clean.

Receiving the affection of a cat is precious. Whereas dogs are always “on”, so to speak. When you get home, they’ll flip out every time – which is heartwarming on one level, but also seems a little undiscriminating.

While I am admittedly awesome, dogs constantly behave like 13-year-olds in the presence of One Direction. It’s a good thing they can’t operate cameras, because they’d constantly be letting off flashes in our faces and asking us for just one photo, like members of the pupperazzi.

(Sorry about that pun, but it’s the kind of wordplay dog fans love. Which is why every second pet shop is called something like Under One Woof or Paws For Thought.)

What’s more, it’s become clear in recent years that I’m allergic to the majority of dogs. They make my eyes itch, and sometimes trigger my asthma. Even my body’s involuntary responses, it seems, aren’t so big on canines.

All of these sensible reservations about dogs matter not a jot to some people I know, who are entirely happy to have dogs underfoot, and the more the merrier. They love taking them wherever they go, and they seem to view the obligation to walk them at least once a day as a delightful chance to spend quality time in the fresh air rather than an inconvenient burden.

But in recent weeks I've found myself softening. Having spent a bit of time in the company of a small cross-breed-but-mostly-Australian terrier, I've discovered that certain dogs come with considerable upside. Having somebody following you around and gazing adoringly at you isn't exactly the worst thing. Going for walks can be a good way to stretch your legs on a lovely sunny day. And if your dog is small enough, it can curl up on your lap too, just like a cat - only they're always up for it.

Best of all, it turns out that some dogs are hypoallergenic. Hound-elluia!

(Sorry, but we dog fans love our puns.)

The pooch in question is a rescue dog, and I've discovered recently that supply generally outstrips demand. So if you're thinking of adding a little drool factory to your household, do check out your local shelter.

Meeting a rescue dog has made me realise that while I haven't always been a huge dog fan, a lot of people are genuinely cruel to them, which seems especially horrible when dogs are so unquestioningly affectionate. Such people deserve to be reincarnated into chew toys.

I'm not an unqualified dog convert - given a free choice, I'd still go for a cat, as much because I doubt my own ability to offer sufficient time and energy. They're lower maintenance - never needing walks has its advantages, and if you're busy, you won't feel as guilty.

But I have begun to understand how the other half live. So much so that I've even begun to offer scraps of bacon from the table. And I love bacon.

In the end, dogs offer boundless affection and companionship. And why on earth wouldn't you be up for that?

Oh dear, I think they've won me over.

We was robbed

Don’t it always seem to go, Joni Mitchell once sang, that you don’t know what you got til it’s gone? That lyric works in abstract terms as a reminder to enjoy the moment and be grateful for the good things we have in life. But when thieves ransacked my workspace this week, I can affirm that I knew precisely what I had well before it went, and could consequently itemise precisely what had gone for the police report.

In the rich smorgasbord of human existence, the feeling of being robbed is definitely the offal course. Walking into a familiar space and noticing that some of your things are no longer in their usual place is a wrench in the guts that turns into weary resignation as you trudge around the space trying to figure out what was taken, while you’re glued to the phone breaking the bad news to everyone.

My home wasn’t robbed, fortunately, although that has happened to me before. Instead it was a shared office space where I hang out with friends who work in the arts doing things like painting and writing, and while I haven’t been there often in the past few years, it’s still a home away from home where we can play ping pong, listen to music - or could, before the speakers were stolen. It’s where I go to write articles like this one, at least before my computer was stolen.

I don’t know whether the thief has figured out how to access my files, but if they do, I very much hope they’re enjoying my three novels and hundreds of self-indulgent columns. Then again, if Johnny Break-and-enter is listening to the whiny songs I recorded on my hard drive in my teens and early twenties, he’s probably suffering even more than I am at this point.

Fortunately, I have all my files backed up both elsewhere and online, so there wasn’t much harm done, as much as I dislike the prospect of some unknown villain browsing through thousands of my photos and videos. They’ll think very poorly of me when they realise that absolutely none of them are in any way erotic.

Whether you think my backup obsessiveness makes me seem paranoid or merely prepared, I do not much care. Because once again, my lack of faith in my fellow human-beings has been entirely justified, just as it was when Australia lost the Ashes and Redfoo was invited to become a judge on the X-Factor.

For many years, I have approached life on the basis that I am going to be robbed, all the time. That might not make me, say, terribly cheerful, but it certainly makes me prepared for burglaries. Upon returning home each evening to discover that my apartment is intact, I feel no relief, merely the certainty that they’ll get me the next time, or perhaps the time after that. Because they will, as sure as eggs are eggs and ‘Hold The Line’ by Toto is a winning karaoke selection.

I learned to expect a constant stream of thefts when I owned my first car, a Mitsubishi Mirage, in the late 1990s. I was enormously fond of it, but it had one significant issue that was not mentioned by the salesman - the stereo. There was no problem with it - to the contrary, it was excellent. So much so that it was a particular favourite of thieves, who just loved purloining it even when I’d detached its detachable face. Apparently my car door was quite easily opened with a coathanger, although more often than not the thieves just smashed a window. Which I felt lacked finesse.

During my three years of owning the car, the stereo was stolen - well, I’ve lost count, but it was at least four times. Sydney’s egalitarian car thieves, bless them, were happy to nick my stereo no matter where they came across it. Once it got ripped off in a dodgy back street in Redfern, and another time it was nicked in one of Woollahra’s poshest streets.

It got to the point where I went back to the car expecting the stereo not to be there, and even if it seemed like it was, I didn’t trust the evidence of my own eyes. Which is perhaps why Mitsubishi named that model ‘Mirage’.

All these thefts have taught me that you shouldn’t buy anything extremely valuable, because it’ll just get stolen. Even when it comes to jewellery, it’s simply not worth it - spend your riches on holidays. And you should always have insurance, so you can replace your things when they are taken. Most importantly, you should back up your files as many places as you can, in a manner that is automated.

If you’ve never been robbed, then I doff my hat to you - but there are sufficient horrible people in this world to get around to you eventually. Just be prepared for when they do. At that point, you can dust yourself off, and say - well, at least I saw it coming. And if you’re the kind of person who constantly boringly nags others to back up their files, then the theft of your computer is, if nothing else, a wonderful opportunity to be smug. And I enjoy those so much I could almost thank those thieves if they hadn’t also taken the speakers I use to blast out ‘Hold The Line’ while I work. Burglars, like love, aren’t always on time. But they’ll get you in the end.

Ten ways to avoid Election 2013

I love elections. Well, I usually love elections.

But this particular election – well, I’m not about to rip out my eyeballs and stuff them into my ears so that I can’t see or hear another moment of it. That would be foolish, and besides, when I was in hospital recovering, there’d be a TV in the ward, and even if I couldn’t hear or see it anymore, I could smell the election coverage.

Since this election campaign’s been going for either three or a bazillion years, depending on your perspective, I’m going to assume you’ve figured out who you’re voting for and just want the blasted thing to be over. So I’ve come up with ten ways to tune out of Election 2013.

1) Relocate overseas

Every single day of the campaign, I’ve found myself searching online for flights to some idyllic getaway. I’m thinking about another country, ideally one of the ones Mark Zuckerberg is trying to ruin by connecting to the internet. Some remote beach where they don’t have news websites, but do have those cheap waterfront cafes where you lie on enormous cushions.

If you do decide to escape from Australia for the duration of the campaign, choose your destination carefully, though – billboards of Australian politicians have been known to crop up in unexpected places.

2) Get fit

What better time? It’s still cool outside, so you should be able to spend hours in the gym (avoiding the exercise bikes in front of the televisions) or pounding the pavement. If you are a jogger or cyclist, just stick to routes where it’s unlikely you’ll encounter Tony Abbott.

3) Become nocturnal

Even KRudd has to sleep sometimes, so if you venture outside between the hours of 10pm and 6am, you should be able to avoid the election. The only caveat is to stay well away from Martin Place in Sydney, because they film Sunrise there and Brekkie Central is always chock-full of pollies pretending to be normal human beings.

4) Spend 10,000 hours doing anything

You know that theory that to become excellent at any task takes 10,000 hours? Well, I’ve worked out that there are exactly 369 hours between 9am this morning and when polls close at 6pm on Saturday 6 September. That’ll get you off to a flying start, and you’ll only have 9631 hours to go before becoming excellent at the thing of your choice!

I plan to spend that time learning how to play the drums, and my theory is that it’ll be all that much more enjoyable if I invest in a drumkit with Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd’s faces on it.

5) Slow down iconic songs

Whether by accident or visionary genius, somebody put the 45 of Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ on 33 and discovered that it sounded amazing – like a guy whose heart has been smashed into smithereens. (Explainer for kids – “45” and “33” are terms which involve these things called ‘records’ which have nothing to do with the Olympics and – oh, look, they just slowed the song down by 25% the way you can with certain digital audio players.)

Which reminded me that Dolly Parton once gave a big smooch to our Deputy PM – no, I must not be distracted by anything to do with politics. Perhaps if I slow down ‘Jolene’ to Barry White speed, it’ll take my mind off Albo and lipgloss.

So, why not slow down a bunch of other songs yourself, and try to create the next global internet meme? You could learn to DJ at the same time (see “Become nocturnal”).

6) Have yourself a Wet August

I would never advocate the excessive consumption of alcohol, because that would be socially irresponsible – but let’s just say that if you chose to spend this entire month pursuing the opposite of Dry July, a lot of people would sympathise.

7) Write that novel you always wanted to write

If you’re like me, you spent years moaning about how you thought you had a novel in you, generally in an attempt to impress attractive people with how creative and soulful you were. (Hint – it doesn’t usually work.) Well, National Novel Writing Month usually takes place in November, but my advice is that this year, you should bring it forward. Cloister yourself away from everything and everyone, and make it happen. Just make sure your novel isn’t itself about an election.

8) Watch a great TV series on DVD

You need the kind of show where you’ll just watch episode after episode, only pausing to sleep. Under normal circumstances, I’d recommend The West Wing, but you’ll struggle to stop yourself reflecting on how much better political speeches are when crafted by Aaron Sorkin. Perhaps a more appropriate choice would be The Walking Dead, although again, the legions of undead shuffling ominously around the countryside might remind you of the leaders and their accompanying press pack.

Ultimately I recommend Seinfeld, because unlike this campaign, it’s deliberately about nothing.

9) Refuse to leave your room

In Japan, some people simply withdraw from society, a phenomenon known as ‘hikikomori’. They generally rely on kindly parents to feed and shelter them, so why not tell your folks you’ll be moving home for a bit, and bring along a lock for your bedroom door? To be a proper hikikomori, you need to leave society for at least 6 months, but until 8 September is all you should need here.

The biggest challenge will be keeping your job, but claiming that the election has made you nauseous is highly likely to be plausible.

10) Volunteer for charity

If you spend the next few weeks helping the homeless, working in a soup kitchen or anything along those lines, you can almost guarantee your experience will be entirely disconnected from the process of our would-be leaders gallivanting around, promising to make everyone’s lives better. Even if the local MP turns up for a brief photo-op that uses the people they’re supposed to be helping as a prop, you can bet they won’t stay for more than 20 minutes.

Six awesome things about new parents

I recently wrote a piece about six annoying things new parents do, and offered some advice on how to avoid them. The majority of comments said something like “you don’t realise how hard it is”, “Yeah, well, non-parents are really annoying too, so there!”, or "suck it up, princess". (In reply, Essential Baby published a piece titled 'New parents need empathy, not telling off' - Ed) 

But it’s important to be balanced, especially during election season, so I thought this week I’d list six things that are wonderful about new parents. Give yourselves a slap on the back, guys! If you can somehow muster enough energy to even lift an arm, that is.

1) Reduce crowd numbers

If you’ve ever looked for an inner-city parking space on a Saturday night, or have tried to book a reservation for a hot restaurant, you’ll know that our cities are becoming far too crowded. And if you’ve tried to buy tickets to events like Splendour in the Grass that sell out in a matter of minutes, then you’ll know – there are just too darn many of us.

But you know who isn’t out there, booking the last tickets to that new blockbuster movie the night it comes out before we can, or making the last day of a big art exhibition so crowded we can’t even see the paintings? New parents. They’re at home, diligently minding their kids. Bless them.

Of course they have their own overcrowding issues at adventure playgrounds and big shopping malls and IKEA, but who in their right mind would want to compete to go there?

2) Making childless people feel cool

I’ve never been cool. At parties in high school and early uni, I was always a bit of a wallflower. But you know what happened to all those dudes who were great with the ladies? They went ahead and married those ladies, and then their social lives dwindled away when they had kids. So who’s the one hitting up the nightclubs on a Saturday night? Little ol’ me.

Well, I used to be. Now I’m just too tired. But still, I could go if I wanted, in theory. My point is this – when I talk to my friends with kids, they make me feel like my entire life is spent sipping champagne in a succession of VIP limos, just because it’s objectively more fun than theirs. Unless you count the fun they have hanging out with their kids.

3) Boost herd immunity

There’s one thing I’ve learned since young children became a regular part of my world, and that’s that there is no better medium for the rapid dissemination of illnesses. In an era when lots of children go to childcare – a very welcome development in many respects, of course – real viruses can spread as rapidly faster than a video of a One Nation candidate who thinks Islam is a country.

On a superficial level, this is annoying, because it means you’ll catch every single influenza strain doing the rounds. Some parents I know have even recently contracted retro ailments like mumps. And tummy bugs will constantly attack your entire house, not only confining you to your bed of pain, but then forcing you to leave it at regular intervals in order to do endless loads of laundry.

But this is ultimately a good thing, because it leads to more robust immune systems. The more antibodies that develop in a population, the more resilient it becomes. By turning your homes into biohazard units, you are the guinea pigs that are developing resistance for all of us.

4) Guarantee the future of the human race

By putting themselves through the exhausting rigamarole of having children, new parents are ensuring the survival, and ongoing superiority, of we humans. The rest of us are benefiting from the hard labour of those who bathe, feed and protect the leaders of tomorrow’s world. Without the parents’ efforts, cockroaches, rabbits or pigeons might take over as the dominant species on the planet. Just remember when you’re cleaning up yet another filthy disaster – you’re not just doing it for your kid, you’re doing it for the whole of humanity.

5) Excellent entertainment content

Harry Potter, Pixar movies and the Super Mario Bros games are just three examples of content that I, and many adults, enjoy which could not have been produced without a constant supply of children to provide a market. In this sense, many grown-ups are sponging off the efforts of parents everywhere, and I and my fellow immature grown-ups are truly grateful.

6) Simulate a zombie apocalypse

Thanks to new parents, we now know how to deal with listless, drooling, wild-eyed drones, shuffling amongst us. We childless folk also know how to deal with parents trying to convert us to their way of life – just as zombies bite non-zombies, many parents try to convince us non-parents that our lives won't be complete until we have a child, and are shuffling along the street, pushing a pram. This, I am convinced, is the perfect preparation for life once the true zombie takeover begins. So thank you, parents/almost-zombies.

The six highly annoying habits of new parents

So, you’ve got young kids. Congratulations!

But everyone around you already knows that you do. They can see it in your dazed, exhausted eyes, and hear it in the artificially optimistic tone you adopt when talking about how wonderful parenthood is.

You probably assume that all your single friends are happy for you, and maybe a little jealous. On one level, they probably are. But on another level – and I hate to break it to you – they find you approximately as annoying as a Billy Ray Cyrus CD. That’s scratched, and skips.

(Note – that’s a very 1990s reference, because most parents haven’t been in tune with pop culture for at least the best part of a decade, and probably haven’t had time to figure out how to get music from the internet.)

In this column, you will discover all of the things you do that annoy your childless friends, but which they haven’t felt comfortable raising with you. Some of them may be delighted not to be going through what you’re enduring, while others may want to have children but be unable to for various reasons, meaning that you’re inadvertently rubbing it in.

So here’s the definitive list of the stuff you’re doing that’s driving your childless friends bananas, and which you should probably stop. And when I say “bananas”, I mean not just the fruit, but like when your child smears banana everywhere. You know what I mean.

1) Don’t talk too much about your kids 

Nobody is as interested in your children as you are, with the possible exception of the grandparents. Even your other friends who have kids only put up with you yammering incessantly about yours because it gives them license to do the exact same thing, and attempt to one-up you in the unspoken contest between all parents about which of their offspring is the best.

There’s nothing wrong with updating your friends on your children, of course. Like anyone who’s not a total narcissist, we like to hear what the people we care about have been up to. But there needs to be a time limit, particularly when this is generally a one-way conversation. When you start talking about feeding strategies and sleep difficulties and the tiny amount of developmental progress your child has made since the last time you updated us, we don’t really know what to say. So we just nod and say something like “Isn’t that lovely?”

It’s like when somebody tells you a dull story, belatedly realises and says “I guess you had to be there”, only you never belatedly realise. And we didn’t need simply to be there, but also be closely related to the child, and to have recently had our definition of “fascinating” rewired by sleeplessness and hormones.

Don’t get me wrong – you should talk about your kids. Of course you should. Just, and trust me on this, not for more than ten minutes per encounter. Oh, and to be clear – that’s not ten minutes per child.

2) Don’t bring the kids to unambiguously adult events

You’d be annoyed if someone turned up to your kid’s third birthday party drunk and started dirty-dancing on the hors d’oeuvre table, so the opposite degree of consideration needs to apply at events where that kind of behaviour would be appropriate.

In general, any evening function is a no, unless they’re young enough to sleep or old enough to play mindless video games and only speak when they’re spoken to for five seconds before going back to their game.

I recently went to an evening birthday party where most of the guests were parents, all of whom had ditched their kids for the night. As a result everyone had a brilliant time. If even one child had attended, all the parents would have felt a sudden rush of guilt and started leaving. Don’t be the parent that just can’t bear to dump little Timmy with their grandpa when the occasion demands.

3) Don’t let the kids take over your house

You know how when you’re on holidays at the beach, you come back and tread sand everywhere? That’s what children’s junk is like. That’s understandable. Kids have the attention spans of gnats, so they’re constantly tiring of one toy and bringing out another one without putting the other one away first.

Nevertheless, if you have your non-childless friends over, you need to tidy up. We don’t want to cower in between piles of children’s toys. Of course we understand that as soon as we leave, your children will empty several enormous buckets all over the living room floor, but please, while we visit, let’s just briefly pretend that there’s a semblance of control.

4) Don’t let them colonise your workplace either

Some colleagues decorate their workspaces with so much of their children’s paintings, photos and paraphernalia that it’s practically a museum display. It’s great that you love your kids so much that you want to be constantly reminded of their existence when’re sitting at your desk and look in any direction at all, but it’ll make people wonder whether you even want to be there.

The answer’s no, of course – we all understand that, and feel the same way – but in order to stay sane there’s kind of an ongoing agreement in the workplace to pretend that we’re all happy to be there. Turning your workspace into a shrine to your infants, if nothing else, reminds us of the outside world.

5) Don’t fail to control your kids in public

When your children misbehave, it’s not only annoying and noisy, but it makes us feel incredibly awkward. It’s not our place to tell one of your children to stop trying to assassinate the other. It’s very much yours.

Childless people understand there’s only so much you can do, and there’s no need to be some kind of brutal dictator because that’s embarrassing for everyone as well – but couldn’t you at least try to impose something resembling order? Otherwise we’ll have to say something and you’ll get all huffy and defensive.

6) Don’t put your kids on Facebook

It’s. Creepy. And it makes us look creepy if we accept their friend requests. Plus, when they’re teenagers and actually allowed to use the site, they won’t want all their parents’ pals in their friends feed, surely. Just post your inevitable, incessant stream of photos from your own account.

Childhood games forever

I have a new Australian sporting hero. It’s been a long time since Steve Waugh’s retirement, but finally, the former cricket captain’s steely-eyed place in my heart has been filled. When I grow up, I want to be Feliks Zemdegs, even though at 17, he’s 19 years younger than me.

On Sunday, Feliks won a gold medal – yes, gold, a colour largely unknown to, say, Aussie swimmers in recent years – at the World Rubik’s Cube Championship in Las Vegas. He solved the cube that was a feature of just about every birthday party during the 1980s in a mere 7.36 seconds. Go and watch the video, it’s awesome. And it’s not like it’ll take up much of your time.

If that wasn’t impressive enough, Feliks also went on to win gold in the 4x4 category. That doesn’t mean he somehow solved the cube while bumping up and down in an all-terrain vehicle – it turns out there are extra-hard cubes with 16 squares on each side, and even 5x5 ones known as “The Professor’s Cube”.

Now, I don’t know how Feliks got so amazing at solving Rubik’s Cubes in only a few short years. I’d rather believe that he’s prodigiously gifted than believe that he’s spent just about every waking moment of his adolescent life playing with plastic toys that most of the rest of us abandoned forever at around the time of the bicentenary. And I’d like to know whether he chose the Rubik’s Cube or whether, like the wands in Harry Potter, the Cube chose him.

Perhaps his parents had a Cube dangling above his crib from an early age, or perhaps he picked one up from a coffee table as a toddler and never put it down. Perhaps he took it up to impress girls, ultimately discovering that it only impressed those very few girls who were also into rapidly solving Rubik’s Cubes, if indeed there are any.

It doesn’t ultimately matter, because he’s the best in the world at his art, and which of us can say that?

If his time wasn’t so thoroughly impressive, I might even have wondered whether his win was largely a result of Rubik’s Cubes’ relative unpopularity nowadays. At first I wondered whether his victory might be akin to winning the World Championships of Solving 900,000 Piece Puzzles in that very few people could be bothered competing.

But no – the kid’s a pro. Well, I doubt he’s literally a pro, in that he can make a living merely at being good at Rubik’s Cubes. But it was extremely impressive nevertheless. I still remember spending literally hours trying to solve those things, and I never even came close.

With our cricket and rugby teams losing in recent weeks, and the Brits triumphing at Wimbledon and in the Tour to boot, we Aussies need to take our sporting icons where we can find them, and that means in the sport of Rubik’s Cube. If we have the world’s fastest competitor in a sport that seems more or less to involve organised finger-twiddling, then I say congratulations, Felix – and long may your fingers twiddle. In fact, so prodigious is his ability at using those dancing digits to spin the Rubik’s Cube exactly the way he wants it, I’d seriously consider drafting him into the remainder of the Ashes series.

I’d like to see the Australian Institute of Sport hire Feliks to set up some kind of Centre of Excellence in the sport of Rubik’s Cube, and perhaps other childhood leisure pursuits. Who knows – perhaps within Australia’s 23 million inhabitants there might also be lurking a potential gold medal winner in the sports of yo-yo, elastics or hula hoop.

And there are world championships in chess – so why not other board games like Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit or Hungry Hungry Hippo? I was pretty nifty at Pictionary back in the day, I’ll have you know, and I still rate my skills at manufacturing plausible ridiculousness while playing the greatest board game of all, Absolute Balderdash. We could probably unearth a Dungeons & Dragons champ somewhere in the suburbs too, lurking well away from natural light.

Finding new sports to compete in needn’t be restricted to merely sedentary activities. Bullrush is another juvenile pursuit that should have been played to world championship level. It was always one of my favourite pastimes, and it should be developed to the level of a televised, professional pursuit. I’m sure that some of my former classmates are more worthy of being paid for their skills at ducking and weaving than, say, the NSW State of Origin team.

And I would have loved to keep playing handball after primary school. If handball courts around the country were like those public basketball courts they have all over America, I’d gladly head down there to try to hustle the locals in a scene reminiscent of White Men Can’t Jump. The tough-talking locals would assume that Pudgy Balding White Men Can’t Hit Power Shots, and I’d prove them very, very wrong.

Feliks Zemdegs, I salute you and I only wish there were more like you. Because the more gold medals and world championships in unusual activities there are, the greater Australia’s chances of winning some of them.

I have questions about skincare products

Last weekend, I made the mistake of walking into an upscale cosmetics shop. I got a little bit excited because it was some fancy brand from New York that had just opened here in Australia. Everyone at the lunch table on Sunday had heard of their products except me, and their collective enthusiasm gave me the strong impression that regular use of said cosmetics would definitely transform my skin, and probably my life

Skincare is important to me because, in the spirit of the oversharing that has by now become customary to regular readers of this column, I have very dry skin. I thought it was because I have Scottish skin, but on Googling “Scottish skin dry”, I’ve discovered that dry skin is more of an issue with Scottish terriers, which is a touch disconcerting.

But whether or not my ancestry is Scottish or Scottish terrier, the problem remains. So I’m always in the market for fabulous skincare products that make my skin – I was going to say “moist”, but that’s just icky, even though the stuff I use is called “moisturiser”. And “wet” doesn’t sound appropriate, either. So let’s just say that I wanted my skin to be not-dry, however that’s defined.

After lunch I went and checked out this new shop, feeling like Harry Potter did on first entering Diagon Alley, only with eczema on my skin instead of a lightning bolt. The staff wore lab coats, which I felt might have been somewhat overstating their qualifications, but they were certainly friendly, perhaps because there were very few customers.

I gravitated towards the small rack in the corner marked “MEN”. As is always the case in cosmetics stores, they had special male products for male skin that might just be the female products rebadged in special male packaging so as to look male and definitely not female. I appreciated the differentiation.

One of the white-coated characters offered me a free consultation, and, as I almost always do when I hear the word “free”, I said yes. What followed was a bizarre process where she put a range of different creams and liquids on the back of my hand while painstakingly explaining to me what they did, none of which I understood.

Let me try and recreate the laboratory process. There was a cleanser first of all, whose purpose seemed fairly self-evident. Then there was a toner, which was a chemical-stenchy liquid whose purpose entirely eluded me  – tone refers to shade, and it was clear, and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how it would improve my muscle tone. To be honest, it smelt more like photocopier toner than anything else.

Then there was a separate tube of moisturiser and a scrub with little rough beads in it and something called Transformer. She explained that if I applied various combinations of these products throughout the week, my skin would be as smooth as a radio station that played nothing but Michael Bublé.

(Who, I must say, has excellent skin.)

There was only one problem with her expert prescription for my life. I simply can’t see myself spending ten minutes applying a complicated range of skincare products each morning. I’m more than happy to slap a bit of something or other on my cheeks while showering, but I don’t want to overthink things. Besides, what if I toned or moisturised before I cleansed by mistake, and the entire process fell to pieces like a US whistleblower’s asylum application.

I said I’d think about it, and went back to staring at the shelf, trying to make sense of it all. The twenty-cent piece-sized area of my hand where she had applied all the products felt great, admittedly, but strange. It was almost too pure, like it was the hand of an 11 year old choirboy.

The shop assistant’s chemistry experiments on my hand involved a mere fraction of the products on offer for men. The shelf also contained body cream and shaving cream and shaving oil and post shaving cream and eye cream and eye depuffifier (that’s not a word but it promised to do that!) and foot cream and anti-wrinkle cream which I can’t for the life of my imagine any man purchasing, but perhaps they do.

In the end, after reading every single label on every single product, I bought a small bottle of moisturiser to try on my dry skin and a small tube of face stuff that seemed like it had a bit of everything in it, including suncream. These two items alone cost – you know, I’m not even going to admit to the precise amount. They cost as much as a nice meal. For two.

To be fair, the moisturiser seems excellent – almost worth the money for someone with eczema. It’s like this magical de-Scotlandifying cream that gently placates my hyperirritable skin. I suspect I’m using too little of the face stuff to have properly tested it because I’m so freaked out by how much the stuff costs, but it may well be a decent product as well.

I walked out of the shop, thoroughly confused about skincare – and that was after exploring only the simplified blokes’ range, not the dozens of items available for women. I may decide somewhere during the process of using these supposedly magical products that I can’t live without them, but right now, the skincare stuff in the supermarket that costs $5 for a giant pump pack is looking pretty good value for money.

And perhaps I should just leave my skin well alone. After all, it’s my Scottish heritage. These moisturiser peddlers can take my money, but they cannot take my freedom. Even if it’s just the freedom to have, well, really dry skin.

'Minority Report' could soon be how the majority of us live

In the 2002 movie Minority Report, advertisements literally heckle the hero, John Anderton, as he walks along beside them. They know his name, his preferences, and altogether too much about him - a vision which the likes of Facebook and Google have already made excellent progress on translating into reality.

To further illustrate the horror of this, if you imagine it being Tom Cruise instead of the part he plays, the personalised advertising network might have popped up with ads for elevated shoes and super-high-bouncing couches, but known under no circumstances to show him a trailer for a Katie Holmes movie.

While our society hasn't quite managed holograms that accost you, I can only assume the blueprints are sitting on a workbench somewhere as we speak. Because every week or two, advertisers figure out some new way to colonise some hitherto peaceful space within our society with their incessant yammering. And the somewhat stalky behaviour exhibited in Minority Report has a parallel in the recent behaviour of the US department store Nordstrom, which admitted to monitoring its customers’ location within their stores by monitoring their Wifi connections.

The other day I was at a petrol station filling up my car. No sooner had I detached the pump from the bowser than a screen sprang to life above it, forcing me to endure non-stop jingles as I stood there resentfully. Apparently it wasn't enough for the petrol station to be slugging me the exorbitant price that petrol goes for nowadays, no - they had to snatch a few extra cents by annoying me as I stood there, consuming their product.

Advertising is on the walls of public toilets, on the screens in front of us as we catch flights (you’d think that paying thousands of dollars for airfares might remove the obligation to watch ads before inflight movies on long-haul flights, but no), and on our screens. The other day I used a movie app on my phone to figure out which film to watch, and found that I had to watch another 30 second ad before watching the movie ad for the movie!

It has colonised sport to the extent that now we speak of the Airline Wallabies playing an International Bank tour match in the Other Bank’s Stadium. The Socceroos aren’t formally known as the Australian football team, or anything like that - apparently they belong to the airline as well. These teams’ press releases and tickets and social media accounts use the sponsor’s name as well - there’s literally no way of avoiding the marketing. If you go to the ground, ads are painted all over the grass, are visible as distracting animations along the sideline and even display constantly alongside the action on the big screens. And of course the post-match interviews are conducted in front of those stupid, ugly, tedious backdrops littered with sponsors’ logos that have become as much a fixture in modern professional sport as betting and doping scandals

I presume before long, teams will drop any identity beyond their corporations’, and we’ll see different brand names competing on the field. Already, several Japanese baseball teams are simply owned by large brands, and represent them on the field.

I’ve no doubt that somewhere deep within the UN or the Trilateral Commission or whoever it is that really runs the world, some innovative advertising representative is negotiating to change our calendar so that each day, year and month is named after a brand instead of a number, as in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest where years are named after things like adult nappies. After all, one man’s dystopia is one marketing guru’s innovative brand exposure solution.

I still can’t quite believe it’s true, but the other day there was a report of German train commuters who had leaned their heads against the window glass hearing advertisements piped directly through their ears using their bones to conduct the sound. Imagine the horror of just leaning your head to get a few moments of zoning out on your tedious daily commute, only to have ads funnelled straight into your cerebral cortex.

The only hope is that instead of the onslaught of advertising influencing consumer sentiment in a favourable direction, it will instead create a backlash - of the sort of which Naked Communications generated this week when it tried to swap interviews with Kevin Rudd for advertorial.

Perhaps when we shop in the supermarket, we will begin choosing the brands that aren’t so rude as to interrupt us, or book our holidays with the airline that isn’t so arrogant as to insist that national teams be referred to exclusively with its name. Perhaps we will appreciate a sponsor who gives a brief, interesting presentation at the start of an sporting event, and doesn’t subsequently insist on their stupid ugly logo visually polluting the jerseys and the field and the scoreboard and the sidelines and the presentations and practically every frame of the contest we’re watching for a rare chance to relax in our otherwise frantic, overstimulated lives.

I for one will try to follow this mantra whenever I can. Although fear that my brain is becoming so addled by advertising that I literally can’t even remember the names of any other brands.

Why I do not most ardently admire and love Mr Darcy

We need to talk about Mr Darcy. That much was made abundantly clear by the news this week that a four metre-high statue of him emerging, dripping in that famous puffy white shirt, has been placed in the famous Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park.

Sarah Lyall, writing for the SMH, aptly summarised the rampant Darcyphilia that has followed that scene ever since the BBC’s adaptation in 1995: “Mr Darcy... caused serious chest palpitations among those viewers who were not dead, and remains perhaps the only time a man dressed in a damp, puffy white blouse has ever looked truly hot on screen.” Which I think is horribly unfair to Jerry Seinfeld, but I digress.

It's clear that many women still haven't gotten over the sheer sensual, ovary-melting delight of a sopping Colin Firth. The Daily Mail (the world’s foremost authority on the trivial) published a survey in January which found that Mark Darcy was women’s favourite fictional gentleman, a result only 95% percent undermined by the fact that the sadomasochistic Christian Grey from Fifty Shades was close behind.

Mr Darcy is hardly ideal – he’s a barely-reformed monster. But I have to concede defeat on one early point: Colin Firth. He’s intelligent, classy, passionate, with that fancy accent and smouldering eyes – look, I’d probably turn gay for him. (Col, if you’re Googling yourself, please contact me via DL headquarters, okay? And also, swoon).

This isn’t an article about whether Colin Firth is the ultimate guy, because he probably is. He was extraordinary in The King’s Speech, excellent in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and wasn’t even all that bad in Bridget Jones’ Diary, which is really saying something.

So let’s look at Jane Austen’s Darcy, if we can somehow divorce the original character from Mr Firth and his fetching aqua-blouse. Elizabeth Bennet disliked him intensely at first, and she was correct. The novel’s title supposedly details both of their character flaws – but while Darcy’s certainly proud, Lizzie is far from prejudiced, because she bases her reaction on his behaviour on several occasions. Indeed, in the value system of her society, there should be a strong bias in favour of her liking him.

At the Netherfield ball, he refuses to dance with Lizzie, which is just rude – not to mention foolish in the extreme if we’re talking Jennifer Ehle – and then makes critical remarks about her appearance. That, is the behaviour of – to use language that would not be welcome at Longbourn, let alone Rosing’s – a pompous jerk. Honestly, that would be rude at a dodgy 21st party in 2013, let alone in the excessively formal, polite world of Regency England.

Then, he tries to prevent Bingley from marrying Jane, which is appalling. Jane is lovely; any notion of social status dividing them is absurd, as she is a gentleman’s daughter. Also, his suggestion that Mrs Bennet was embarrassing was hugely unfair. If any of us were judged by our parents’ capacity to make us squirm on occasion, who among us would ever marry? I bet if Mr Darcy Senior and his wife had survived to make it into the story, they would have been more unpleasant than he is.

Next, he proposes to Lizzie, but rudely. Again, a pompous jerk. If you can’t be nice when asking a woman to marry you, when can you?

Now, let’s look at the case for the defence – all the things that later endear him to Lizzie. He relents on Bingley – well, whoop de do. And he goes to considerable effort to sort out the nefarious Mr Wickham and making him marry Lydia. Yes, but he was partly responsible for creating the problem there, wasn’t he? As he acknowledges, he should have warned them.

And what’s more, he was in love with, and wanted to marry, Lizzie. Oh sure, he kept the Wickham stuff a secret – but that was a precursor to a big reveal, wasn’t it? ”Hey, you know that thing where your sister shamed your family? Sorted.” It’s kind of like how I fix women’s computers to impress them, only with fewer calls to tech support.

All the nice stuff he does for the Bennets, like being so gracious as to let them visit his stupid big estate, and paying off the other jerk in-law, was entirely motivated by self-interest. He surely hadn’t entirely abandoned hope of convincing Lizzie to marry him, so it would have been far more awkward for him to marry into the Bennet family himself if Lydia and Wickham hadn’t gotten married.

Seriously, name me one thing Mr Darcy does that’s genuinely kind and isn’t motivated by his love for Lizzie. She told him he was a twat, so he set about making himself less twatty, but honestly, so what? That’s what we all do when we want to impress someone – we pretend to be a better version of ourselves, at least for long enough to get them to sign on the bottom line.

Oh sure, he’s a nice brother too, but our families, and particularly our adoring younger siblings, are the easiest people to be kind to in the world. The real test of Mr Darcy’s character is what he does to a social inferior that he doesn’t have the hots for – and we see that when he first meets the Bennets.

So, to summarise in a thoroughly unprejudiced way, Mr Darcy can go jump in the lake. Again. Ideally never to emerge.

Although if what women truly dream of is meeting someone who is openly rude to them, tries to ruin their sister’s happiness and then is helpful and kind only a long time after they’ve professed to love them, then I guess men everywhere should be grateful that the bar has been set so low.

Can't sleep, I'm too busy watching cat videos

The internet has given us so much. It’s plugged us into a limitless repository of information on any subject, it’s enabled us to find out what’s happening all over the world in real time, and it’s given us access to an infinite library of cat videos.

What’s more, the smartphone and tablet revolutions have taken made the internet almost ubiquitous. Now we can access those cat videos on the street, in bed, in the waiting room of the psychiatrist whom we’re seeing because of our obsession with cat videos – just about anywhere we can get phone access. The internet truly offers just about anything. anywhere – and the exciting thing is, we’re only at the beginning of this revolution. Before long, we won’t be watching cat videos – we’ll be the cat.

But one thing the internet has not given us is better sleep. This week, a prominent Australian researcher warned that the light generated by backlit smartphones and tablets can mess with our body clocks. Professor Shantha Rajaratnam of Monash University says that the light emitted by these screens can disrupt our body clocks. Apparently the effect is worst with the blue spectrum of light, which is precisely what these devices generate, and when it’s shining close to our faces, which is precisely how we hold our phones and tablets.

While I gather some of the research underpinning this conclusion is fresh, I’ve been hearing this theory about our bodies interpreting screens as daylight for years. And I haven’t yet been successful in acting on it, even though I often have difficulty getting to sleep.

When I can’t sleep, I get bored, so of course, to allay the boredom, I pick up the phone that’s charging by my bed and look at it. And it works brilliantly to quell my boredom, but quells what remaining sleepiness I have as well.

I’m sure most of us know the sensation of being physically tired and yet mentally alert from staring at a screen too long. That tension headache that feels like a vice is being applied to your forehead, the sense of pressure building up behind our eyes, the painful dryness of your eyeballs, and that haggard feeling while your mind keeps racing. You know it’s unhealthy, but it’s difficult to stop. That’s precisely what it feels like after I’ve spent hours reading my phone screen – and it’s worst of all in an otherwise darkened room.

Facebook can become tedious – when you’re lying there late at night, you’re predominantly looking at posts by friends holidaying overseas –  but Twitter provides a constant stream of information, much of it fascinating. After midnight Australian time, Twitter is busy in the US and UK, and news stories flit across the feed, tempting  me to read them and find out what’s happening. Or I’ll discover something funny, and then that’s me comprehensively distracted, potentially for hours.

One of the biggest traps when I can’t sleep is, strangely enough, Wikipedia. I’ll often look at something because there’s a news story on Twitter that makes me want to know more about another country’s history, or some scientific phenomenon, or some forgotten piece of pop culture, and then I’ll keep clicking on links within Wikipedia articles in a long chain, until I’m looking at something completely different. I’m scared that some day, I’ll start doing this, and literally won’t be able to stop.

I’ve just looked through the history on my phone’s Wikipedia app, and in the last 48 hours, my Wiki reading has included the following: Arthur Boyd, the Phantom Zone prison dimension in the Superman comics, Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman, Les Misérables,  lactose intolerance, former South African President P.W. Botha, the humourist Danny Wallace, poker, Ecuador, the technical definition of a patent and Sonny Bono’s time as the Mayor of Palm Springs.

Approximately 0% of these topics have any practical use, and probably fuel some fairly surreal dreams when I am finally able to sleep. For all I know, I may well have dreamed of a lactose-intolerant Tori Amos being trapped forever in the Phantom Zone.

And yes, I am honestly saying that these research missions have been preventing me from sleeping, even though I concede that this activity would have made the average person drift off in no time. My threshold for entertainment when on an insomniac Wiki-binge is astonishingly low. I once spent a solid hour reading the fake history of the various disputes within WWE (“kayfabe”, I now know it’s called”), which is a form of quasi-entertainment in which I have absolutely no interest during daylight hours.

Reading about how The Rock was good, and then went faux-bad (and in fact the story is far more complex than that) is, objectively, not a better use of my time than sleeping. And yet it’s what I do, time and time again.

If wrestling wasn’t distracting enough, emails drift in around the clock – and my phone is not yet smart enough to distinguish between the ones that matter and the ones that are a 3am mailout from some stupid videogame website to which I gave my email address 8 years ago. I always find, for some inexplicable reason, that I need to check.

Then there’s the chatting. Every month, I seem to spend more time typing text messages to people who via Skype or Google Chat (I refuse to call it “Hangouts”, despite their recent rebranding) or Whatsapp or LINE or Facebook Messenger or some other newfangled app. The current phase of internet evolution seems designed to rip away those last few remaining shreds of the ability to concentrate that we have left by making it easy for people to interrupt us.

Nowadays, my phone barely even rings anymore. It’s probably not even accurate to call it a phone anymore, when it’s primarily a handheld computer. Star Trek’s label of ‘communicator’ is probably more appropriate. And ‘distractor’ is more accurate still.

Smartphones are a wonderful antidote to boredom on the bus, or waiting at an airport, or indeed whenever you find yourself at a loss for something to do. But they’re also a powerful antidote to sleep. If I want to sleep properly, what I will have will have to risk, ultimately, is a tedious period of lying there with my eyes closed before I can finally manage to sleep. And I’ll have to embrace the notion that doing this is healthier than distracting myself with a gadget.

Somehow I’ll have to convince myself that checking my email, or reading the latest tweets from Egypt, or replying to some random message from a friend in a different timezone, can wait until the morning. And if I can’t do that, then I will simply have to banish my phone to another room when I need to sleep.

Julia Gillard's moving experience

This week, spare a thought for the political staffers in Canberra who have been subjected to sudden, dramatic change. Spare a thought for the dozens of Members of Parliament who will be doing the same thing after the forthcoming election, whenever it is. And spare a thought for Julia Gillard, Tim Mathieson and the now-deposed First Cavoodle, Reuben. All of them will be spending the next few weeks and months navigating through one of the most unpleasant, stressful experiences any human will ever have to ensure.

I’m not talking about losing one’s job, as troubling as that must be – I’m talking about moving house. I honestly can’t think of a more cruel humiliation to make somebody endure after what Julia Gillard has just been through than forcing her to move, more or less immediately, out of her formal residence – undoubtedly the most fancy digs she will ever inhabit.

The loss of one’s job is sudden and painful, but moving is a slow, agonising grind, a tedious, miserable, seemingly endless process of packing up every single possession you have, lugging it around, and then unpacking it again. While the sympathy her supporters may feel might perhaps be tempered by the acknowledgement that she forced Kevin Rudd to do exactly the same thing three years ago, the weeks ahead will undoubtedly be enormously challenging for her.

I hope the Prime Ministerial budget extends to movers who will take care of everything, and that she didn’t have many personal effects in the Lodge to begin with. Can you imagine anything more soul-destroying than having to box up all the official presents you’d been given, to carefully wrap the framed photos of your days of triumph (although perhaps not the ones from 2007), and to lug them all out to the dodgy van you’ve borrowed from your mate?

While this is going on at home, at the same time, she will have to change offices in Parliament House, and move her treasured Western Bulldogs paraphernalia back into a regular backbencher’s suite. And then in a few weeks, she’ll have to box all of it up as well, as she leaves politics. And then after the election she’ll be packing up her electorate office. A series of painful series of moves awaits our first female former Prime Minister.

I’m in a position to sympathise with the protracted form of torment that Julia Gillard and her parliamentary supporters and staff will undergo in the weeks to come, because I have been moving this week, and it’s an experience I wouldn’t wish on my most reviled enemy. For various boring reasons, I’ve moved house at least once a year, on average, since 1997, and if I have learned one thing from life, it is this: nobody should ever move house.

Well, perhaps we should move out of the family home at some point after reaching adulthood for reasons of practicality, but I even doubt the wisdom of that, to some degree. Because, in short, it is relentlessly awful.

For me, moving goes like this. First I take all my major items of furniture and all the stuff I use everyday – my favourite clothes, my computer, my TV, my stereo. That’s quick, easy and satisfying, and generally takes only a few hours. Then I set it all up in the new place, and sit back, usually watching a few TV programmes just to “test” whether it “works”.

Sure, the books are a pain, and moving the fragile kitchen stuff is always a bit of a hassle – but most of it is fairly straightforward. After I’ve done that, I’m perfectly happy, and congratulate myself on having created a lovely new environment in which to live.

But then I have to go back, reluctantly, to the old place and contront the utter chaos that remains. Unfortunately, over the years, I have accumulated a literal truckload of junk. Old gadgets that don’t quite work but seem too valuable to throw out, mementos from school and uni, knick knacks, presents that never really found a place in my life but seem callous to discard, and above all, mail that never seemed of any importance. Boxes and boxes of it, unsorted. And then here are the random lamps and old printers and soccer balls and bedlinen and DVDs and – just, stuff. It takes me hours and hours to move all of this stuff, and when I’m done, my new abode is crammed wall to wall with, well, crap.

In short, if anyone ever wants to try another adaptation of Stig of the Dump, you’re most welcome to film in my apartment.

I know I should go through it all, and file, and sort, and above all, throw away – but really, who has the time? I try and spend my weekends relaxing, not doing agonising physical labour. Besides, I did a major purge only last November, and despite this, I still seem have retained roughly half a tonne of stuff that I clearly have absolutely no need of.

I know this, because I’ve just moved approximately a whole uteload of stuff that I literally never touched in the 12 intervening months. It just sat there, reproaching me, and I never even unpacked the boxes. And yet I don’t dare to consign them straight to the tip, because somewhere in there will be an exercise book I wrote stories in when I was in Year Two, and the school magazine I worked on, and above all, lots of photos of family members and friends who are no longer with me. They are worth keeping, I think. At least, I hope.

If I’ve accumulated all of this junk during a relatively short, uneventful life, I can only imagine how much paraphernalia builds up when you’re Prime Minister – and how psychologically troubling every single memento must be when you are forced from office. Perhaps in time, Julia Gillard will come to view her time in the Lodge fondly, but right now, I have no idea how hard it might be to open any of the boxes the movers will soon deposit in that oft-discussed house in Altona.

Right now, I would gladly sign any undertaking never to move again, even if it means someday cramming a family into my tiny apartment. Any hypothetical kids I may have can sleep in loft beds in the living room. And if I am ever Prime Minister, I solemnly undertake never to move a single possession into The Lodge, just because I couldn’t stand the psychological agony of having to move it all out again.

Why do men wear ties?

Julia Gillard’s comments at the launch of her Women for Gillard initiative have put the spotlight on men in blue ties. And it’s certainly true that blokes who haunt corridors of power tend to disproportionately favour baby-blue as a tie colour. Tony Abbott is notably fond of blue ties, having worn a stripey one on the cover of his book Battlelines which I found curiously reminiscent of his old school tie from St Ignatius’ College, Riverview. He wore it again at a campaign debate in 2010.

Now, I must now confess that there’s a reason I was able to recognise a Riverview tie, and that’s because I went to a fancy private school myself, and we used to debate against boys in those stripey blue-and-white ties. Who, due to the superiority of Jesuit rhetorical education, would always win.

I do feel a bit of a bind about the “old school tie” thing, because while I recognise the problematic nature of the patriarchy, and realise that my schooling perpetrated a powerful boy’s club, I really enjoyed school and very much value my network of old school friends. I was fortunate enough to meet some extraordinary people during those years, and I’m delighted that I can stay in touch with them. And I have to concede that what this means is that I’m quite attached to my old school tie – figuratively, not literally, since my old school ties were made of black polyester and looked pretty ratty even when brand new.

That said, I always wished my school had been co-educational, and I still think that gender divisions in education are an anachronism that inhibits social progress and gender equality (but that’s a topic for another column). If the scourge of single-sex education had been blasted into the history books where it belongs, then the metaphor of the “old school tie” would also be destroyed, and so it should be.

And I would hope that everyone was lucky enough to leave school with a network of close, like-minded friends with whom they stay in touch, regardless of which school they went to. But I recognise that my good fortune in getting into my high school plugged me into a network from which I benefit to this day.

“Old school ties” are such a potent symbol, though, because in our society, powerful men almost always wear neckties. Julia Gillard’s point this week was that if she was removed from the political process, we’d be back to being run by a bunch of blokes in ties: ironically, and perhaps entirely deliberately, that argument holds whether she were replaced as Prime Minister by Tony Abbott or Kevin Rudd.

Now, there’s nothing stopping women wearing blue ties themselves, of course, and admittedly, they can sometimes look rather elegant doing so. But on the whole, women have been too sensible to make neckties a part of their everyday wardrobe.

And this brings me to a question that first confounded me at the start of Year 7, when it became clear that I would have to wear a tie every day for the next six years of high school: why wear ties in the first place? Which sadist made the rule that ties looked smarter and more ‘proper’ than open necks?

Everyday male dress has no other purely ornamental elements, unless you count the cummerbund, and I absolutely refuse to do so. And yet, for some reason, blokes persist in fastening bits of coloured cloth around our necks in the morning – and for some reason, we have been coerced into believing that we look more serious and formal when we’ve done so, rather than less, which is in fact the case.

The necktie tradition is about as practical as making men in high-powered jobs tie a brightly-coloured bandana around their head in preparation for a big, serious meeting – and Peter FitzSimons has already helpfully demonstrated exactly what that would look like.

(Okay, so lots of lawyers still wear white wigs, but honestly – if it wasn’t for the law of contempt of court, people in the dock would openly snigger at them.)

Imagine if every man who held a serious corporate job wore a national flags tied around their neck like a football fan, or Cub Scout scarves fastened with woggles, or beach towels. They’d look thoroughly ridiculous. Why, then, have we convinced ourselves that neckties in an elongated diamond shape looks professional?

I asked this question the other day, and a woman replied that they’re like a giant arrow pointing down below our waist. That’s the most plausible explanation I’ve heard.

Then there’s the bow-tie, which looks and is treated as being far more frivolous than the tie, but is actually less silly when you think about it, because at least it doesn’t flap around and get in your way. You can’t accidentally tip a bow tie in a bowl of laksa, for example, which happened to me during my brief corporate career.

The tie has its origins in soldiers’ neckwear, and the modern form dates back to a fashion that began with Croatian mercenaries, and was picked up by the French monarchy in the form of the cravat – a word which, interestingly, has its origins in ‘Croat’. But that’s no justification – based on this image from Wikipedia, Croatian mercenaries also got around in knee-high boots and cloaks that made them look like Little Red Riding Hood, and we don’t see merchant bankers donning either of those things today.

So, neckties are a throwback to military days – which is surely all the more reason to discard the custom of wearing them. Really, we need to move on from ties. They only get in the way, and is it really so bad for men to have their shirt buttons visible?

Instead, men who feel the need for colourful ornamentation should do what I myself have begun doing in recent years in an attempt to be just that little bit more rock ‘n roll in my day-to-day life, and wear brightly coloured boxer shorts.

I’m sorry, that might be too much information. But a world where powerful men wear undies with cartoon superheroes on them would, in my view, be a far more civilised and sophisticated one than the one we live in now, where if a man wants to be taken seriously, he has to tie a garish piece of silk around his neck.

The Joy of Unclehood

Some of my friends had children early, a development that was generally greeted by the rest of us with bemused pity. My fellow childless friends and I would visit homes inundated by kiddie knick-knacks, and then, as we headed home, wonder how on earth they coped with the avalanche of Duplo and dirty nappies, grateful to be retreating back into self-absorbed normality.

When you're still somewhat young yourself, the prospect of having to sacrifice sleep and socialising to provide for a creature that at first can't even talk and then has a vocabulary largely limited to discussing Peppa Pig seems roughly equivalent to being under house arrest, only with less free time for watching grown-up TV.

But then at a certain point, you realise that having children around might not be the most hideous thing imaginable, and then your friends start having them, and you start thinking that it might in fact be manageable, seeing as you're much more competent than your friends and your own children would be considerably more delightful than theirs.

Finally – and this is the stage in which I've found myself lately – it becomes a case of peer pressure, and it's like being the last person to get a Game Boy, except now it's an actual boy, and while they're not nearly as good at playing Tetris, they still seem kind of fun.

For some of us, the decision to reproduce is a logical next step following the orderly progression from cohabitation to engagement and then to marriage, as we gradually undertake a transformation into becoming exactly like our parents. For others, parenthood arrives unexpectedly, and suddenly, forcing a radical adaptation.

But for some of us – the lucky ones, in my view – there is a halfway house between carefree irresponsibility, and the full-time burden of parenthood. And that is being an uncle or an aunt.

I remember the day my nephew was born, a little over three years ago, with great fondness. But the day that really sticks with me is the first day I was left alone with him, a few months after that. His mum had to run off to do some urgent task or other, and I had no clue what I was supposed to do, and was absolutely terrified that I'd drop him, or somehow cause lasting psychological damage. Then, when he immediately began crying, I somehow figured out that the task was simply to occupy him, so I just wandered around the room, showing him things to distract him until he cried, at which point I moved on to show him something else. It worked, more or less – even though I kept showing him the same three or four pictures, fortunately he seemed not to remember that he'd seen them before. I felt like a childcare virtuoso.

As an uncle, I've experienced a lot of the fun of playing games, and reading stories, and sneakily feeding while distracting, and coaxing to sleep, and hanging out with young kids. And I've had to cop very little of the sleep deprivation and hideous clean-ups involved in parenthood. What's more, I've rarely had to do it for more than a few hours at a time, which has tended to suit me just fine. These experiences have given me confidence that I could cope with the full-time gig if I had to, but made me appreciate my freedom as well.

I was lucky to have an abundance of uncles and aunts growing up – seven, to be precise, plus their partners on top of that, and they were lovely to my brother and me. Being babysat by one of them was always a special treat, especially since they never quite understood our parents' strict television-watching rules. I'm hoping to carry on that tradition of not applying parental discipline for many years to come.

In fact, one thing I particularly like about unclehood is that it's almost expected that you'll be annoying in various ways, like when I got my nephew a drum kit for his birthday this year. He loved it, and his parents seemed to think it was funny – that might wear off as I keep giving him an upgraded, louder version every few years.

Recently I introduced him to Angry Birds, which is his major obsession at the moment. I've argued that it's a superior pastime to passively watching movies for a child, and it's teaching him geometry. Really, though, I just like being able to play Angry Birds in the middle of family occasions, and looking like I'm being a nice uncle who's spending time with his nephew.

I have a niece now as well. She's only a few months old, and I've been reminded that just having her hold my index finger in her hand while she lies on her back and smiles is a wonderful source of satisfaction, insofar as it means she isn't crying. I'm looking forward to introducing her to video games and noisy toys a few years hence as well.

Unclehood and aunthood aren't statuses we choose, of course. If your sibling is in a stable relationship where children are possible, anything you do to encourage them to reproduce will inevitably seem weird and/or creepy – besides, dropping unsubtle hints about storks is the kind of thing parents do in excessively familiar wedding speeches. Just sit back and hope it happens, and then you'll be in for a treat. You'll finally get to win the argument about which kid has the more rock'n'roll lifestyle, while simultaneously getting to experience what's essentially an edited highlights reel of parenting.

Whether or not you ever get to have children of your own, the uncle/aunt relationship offers maximum emotional upside with very little downside. And if occasionally you wonder what it'd be like to have someone calling you mummy or daddy and clinging to you as though their very life depended on it, I've found that any such pangs can rapidly and effectively be salved when you leave your sibling to it and take off for a night out.

Unclehood might be the closest I ever come to parenthood – it's impossible to know. But I am sure of one thing, which is that I can't imagine life without it. It's a wonderful feeling every single time my nephew runs up to give me a big hug hello, and I'm willing to admit that it can also be wonderful sometimes when, after my arms are exhausted from throwing him up in the air and catching him, I can simply hand him back to his parents.