Dear ABC, This email started its life, many years ago, as the transcribed harrumphing of a Baby Boomer (in the…
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Mum: This is a very good haircut. What will this cost, Lucy? How much?
Lucy: Four and six.
Me: And what about in post Victorian England currency?
Mum: Oh, don’t be silly, Papa. You said four hundred and six, didn’t you?
Lucy: Yes. Silly Papa. Naughty.
Me: $406 sounds like a LOT for a haircut!
Mum: Well this is more than a haircut.
Me: Fair enough. So $406, Lucy?
Lucy: Four and six marse-mallows.
Read More…a rickety old campervan with black, felt-lined interior walls, a very low ceiling and a smell like an unwashed sock-poppet inside (I never worked out where that smell came from). This was the Life Education van, and as a primary school student, your approach to it depended entirely on what year you were in.
Read MoreOther traditional insults and pointed adjectives aren’t even close: fuck, shit, motherfucking, corporal javelin. Pff. My grandma uses all of them. And she’s dead. She just shouts them from her grave as an animated skeleton.
Read MoreParenthood is a classroom like no other, and much that you learn within it is applicable to your daily life. Like saying that an audible fart was a frog noise, for example.
Read More[My daughter and I] start throwing Duplo bricks at Mum’s creepy bald doll, which is slumped in the corner of the room like a drunk auntie at a party she wasn’t invited to…
Read MoreWe passed the pavilion and began to climb the hill towards our house when we all noticed a cricketer having a wizzle up against a fence of a nearby house. He wasn’t particularly well hidden – there was just a barely living clump of bush obscuring his dude – but we probably wouldn’t have noticed him had it not been for the fact he was emitting wind with gay abandon.
Read MoreA year ago, almost to this day, the stork came. It was 2.30pm on a Sunday. That evening we were cuddling a snowy-haired girl and eating stork for dinner. Well, you know how bad hospital food is.
Read MoreThe word “we” has absolutely no place in describing or announcing the birth. One partner goes through 8 to 30 hours of unrelenting agony before forcing a juvenile member of the species through a very small bodily opening. The other stands bedside, grimacing, patting, squeezing and cooing.
There is no “we”.
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