Most of us have memories of staying in a caravan park. Whether it was as kids, parents, schoolies or backpackers, the caravan park is something that we share as a common piece of our past. Some of the memories are fantastic, like your first kiss on a summer holiday to the coast, in the dim and cool confines of the canvas annexe beside your parents’ van. Some memories are dreadful, like tents collapsing in the rain, algae in the pool, or worst of all, getting tinea from the amenities block on that one time you forgot to wear your thongs in the shower. It’s rare to find someone who grew up in Australia who doesn’t have at least one story about staying in a caravan park.

Caravan parks are undergoing a renaissance as a growing number of Baby Boomers take to the road in an assortment of vans and motorhomes, while their kids begin the cycle with their own families, in tents and camper trailers. Unlike hotels or holiday units, where holiday makers carry on the same isolation typical of our normal lives, in a caravan park everyone lives partially in public, sharing their space with strangers and in turn, observing and being observed by those around them. There are some lessons that we could learn from caravan parks as we look to build a more equitable and sustainable future for our society.

First of all, let me make it very clear: I do not have a problem with science. Secondly, let me make it even clearer: I have a problem with science.

It would seem that today science has taken over all aspects of our society: industry, government, even the medical establishment; I ask you, when did we as a people decide to grant dictatorship to this insidious discipline? When did we decide to abandon personal responsibility, individual freedom, and Christian conscience to the dogmas of “the scientific method”? I hate to be the sort of person who points out the similarities between the scientific establishment and Hitler, but it seems as if in today’s technophiliac, test tube-obsessed, petri dish-worshipping world, there is nobody else willing to take up this most vital of cudgels.

In the last six weeks of 2011, I attended six weddings. Week after week I found myself donning a suit to spend the day eating, drinking, making merry and dispensing presents like it was Christmas. And then I did it all over again, because it actually was Christmas. Well, except for the suit.

Now, I’m not mentioning this marital marathon to boast about my popularity — after all, if I was a boastful person, I wouldn’t be so popular, would I? I’m raising it because while each individual event was delightful, the cumulative effect was bizarre. I felt like I’d overgorged on joy, much as I also overgorged on wedding cake.

Now, each wedding was entirely lovely. Each featured heartfelt, sincere vows and lovely music, and I’m even counting the couple who walked down the aisle to the theme from Star Wars. There were funny, moving speeches, with the one I made a particular highlight, for me at any rate. And each event gave me the chance to catch up with lots of old friends, most of whom I was surprised to learn I still quite like.

My summer of weddings wasn’t exactly a unique experience, of course. We Aussies like to cram our nuptials into those precious weeks when the weather’s warm and expatriate friends are in town to update us on how much better life is in London and New York. One couple chose a date a week before Christmas only to discover that both sets of parents had gotten married on the very same day. Which was a lovely, romantic coincidence, despite suggesting that both kids had forgotten their parents’ wedding anniversary.

And then, of course, there’s the question of the evolutionary future of pigeons.

A while ago, through a series of unfortunate circumstances, my editorial consultant (see image to the left) had to be confined to the house for reasons of prophylactic hygiene. Consequently, he and I have spent the daylight hours of the last eleven weeks like a pair of isolated lighthouse keepers, which is to say composing sea shanties, threatening to murder each other and periodically going mad.

Today, finally, was his day of release. We parted company after breakfast, I with a promise to stay in touch, he with a placatory wee on the door mat.

Time is a mighty river, and I am an ominously unpiloted rental kayak floating past the picnic area.

It’s my first day at a new job, writing the content for a website that helps young people who’ve had an experience of psychosis. I’ve blagged my way into the job through a psychologist friend, and as I run down my hill past a bubbling, mooing foam of quantum farm animals to the train station, I am increasingly possessed by the belief that when I get to the office I’m going to be immediately fired for not knowing anything at all about psychosis.

On the platform, two minutes early, I pull out the thick sheaf of academic papers my boss sent me. ‘Just give them a quick scan,’ he had said. ‘No problem,’ he had said. He had also said, ‘They shouldn’t give you any trouble.’

The first one is called ‘Non-Orthogonal Factor Analysis Of Something You Can’t Even Pronounce Because You’re A Fraud And Also Ugly’. It’s full of tables, Greek letters and that symbol that looks like ‘less than’ but has an extra line underneath because it hates me.

I’m a Film Theory graduate. Right now, sat on a bench on a windy train station platform staring at the exposure of my deception, I see myself in a very long shot indeed.

Another figure enters that shot, sees me and my papers and walks over.

‘Hello,’ he says.

He is standing one millimetre too close to me. His smile is one millimetre too jolly. He is wearing one too many scarves. Oh God, I think, I’ve got a ninety-minute train ride between me and failure and I’m not going to be able to read all these papers on mental health, which are my only chance of bluffing my way through the day, because here, to accompany me, is a nutter. I don’t believe in a higher power influencing our lives, but if I did I’d be cursing its perverse sense of poetic justice right now. Curse you, Batman.

King Henry I of England, known to later generations as Henry Beauclerc, the Lion Of Justice, succeeded his flamboyant brother William II under deeply suspicious circumstances. However, over the thirty eight years of his reign he created the Chancellor of the Exchequer and presided over the beginnings of the Common Law justice system and the rise of the Roman Church’s power in England. A deeply pious man, much respected by clerics of the time, he also holds the record for siring the greatest number of illegitimate children of any English monarch.

Henry I (1069 – 1135) was the youngest of the four sons of William the Conqueror, also known as William the Bastard because he was the illegitimate son of the Duke of Normandy and a tanner’s daughter. William inherited the Dukedom of Normandy, which at the time covered about a third of modern day France and then famously conquered England in 1066.

After the Conqueror’s death, the oldest son, known as Robert Curthose because of his short legs, was given the Dukedom of Normandy. The second son had been supposed to inherit England, but died when a stag in the New Forest misunderstood the rules and killed him while he was out hunting, so the third son, William Rufus (because of his red face) became the King of England. Henry was given 5,000 pounds in silver and told to figure his future out for himself.

If I had to nominate the biggest challenge facing the world today, it would be: problems. Problems today are at near-historical highs, and it’s getting to the point where, if drastic action is not taken to arrest this problem epidemic, we may be doomed to live our lives with the spectre of problems hanging over us forever.

But what can we do with these problems which beset us? Well, I favour an old-fashioned approach, and I think the best way to deal with problems is: solutions. I realise this may not be a popular stance, but I say horses for courses, and in my experience, the most efficient and timely way to address problems is with solutions. It’s not the only way, obviously — there are other time-honoured methods of tackling problems, such as hysteria, swearing loudly, and sword-fights — but I maintain it’s the best.

Now I realise some of you might be saying at this point: hang on Ben, we can’t just apply ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’ as if tossing a large blanket over the head of a rowdy buffalo. You’re saying, all of the problems we have are distinct and unique, and they require separate, targeted solutions, a different solution to each problem rather than this all-in-the-same-chum-bucket approach. ‘Solutions’ is no solution, you cry — we need to get specific!

You are saying these things, of course, because you are very stupid. That’s not your fault — your mother probably took a lot of Prozac — but nevertheless, dull-witted and dribbly-brained as you are, you are totally failing to grasp the nub of the issue. And admittedly nubs can be hard to grasp, especially for chubby fat-fingered imbeciles like you.

There are days in my life when things go swimmingly.

I find the right number of coins in my purse to feed the parking meter. The sun peeks out on my one and only laundry day. Sydney’s roaring traffic suddenly clears to give me a clear run home on a stormy night.

And then there are other days, like the one I had this time last year, when my sister passed away. Black is the only colour to describe it.

But do not fear. I am not about to ruin your double-shot macchiato with a tale of immeasurable sorrow.

And then suddenly the shaking stops and there isn’t a goat next door.

For most people, this won’t appear to be a problem. Not having a goat next door has become, in this modern world of iPads, Twitter and ironic moustaches, the expected state of affairs. In fact, very rarely do you hear our young people of today walking past a house, looking into the garden and saying, “I expect their goat’s probably round the back.”

No, our young people of today say things like “Ooo, what a lovely bed of iPads in that garden”, on account of it’s all modern now.

But it is a problem for me, because until the moment I realised there wasn’t a goat next door, I hadn’t technically been aware there was one, because there wasn’t.

(Now, at this point I can understand many of you might be considering your options. It’s a new magazine, you don’t know if it’s been worth your money, and you’re naturally leery of one of those wanky columns where the guy just likes to bugger about. Don’t worry though, this will soon come to a neat ending where all the jokes tie up neatly and it turns out I was just being a bit silly. Just like one of those columns in the Good Weekend magazine, which you love.)

I live, and this is important to know, in the Dandenong Ranges. If you’re unaware of it, that’s a sort of idyllic semi-rural eyrie just east of all those suburbs Chris Lilley and Gina Riley don’t really like, filled with the simple bucolic charm you might have seen in shows such as Midsomer Murders. It’s not like that Northcote they’ve got in town, with its restaurants and tram.

When I moved here from that modern Preston a couple of years ago it was difficult, what with my colourful clothing and children on the street making signs to ward off the Evil Eye, to know what to expect from village life.

One of the more striking features of life on my street was the appearance and then equally mysterious disappearance of various farm animals on and around what are essentially suburban front yards.

One neighbour brought a cow home for a weekend, let it wander around their lawn for a bit, then made it vanish again come Monday.

Across the street there is sometimes, but by no means always, a strange and eldritch Shetland Pony. Once there was a boy I’d never seen before, standing next to it, holding a Frisbee, just staring at me. I almost built a panic room.

Once I looked up from a bit of idle ironic moustache growing to find what I still insist was a llama staring at me over the fence. When I looked again, several weeks later, it was gone, so I was unable to gauge the reaction of the llama to my by-then fully established handlebars.

Where I live, where I choose to live, where thankfully my presence is tolerated, would be described, if this was America, as ‘backwoods’. There are five commas in that opening sentence, and that’s the sentence I’ve really thought about. So we are possibly not in snappy, easy to read magazine territory. There may not even be pictures. My advice would be find something simpler somewhere else in the publication because that opening sentence is like a beacon of light compared to the structure of the article. Still here? OK, let’s press on. To recap:

I live in hillbilly country, for better or worse.

Randy Newman wrote a song one time that opened with the lines “We talk real funny down here, we drink too much and we laugh too loud” and there you have both a description of where I live, and why I live here. There is plenty of elbow room. Many are crazy, hardly anyone gets hurt. There is a small population spread across a glacial, mountainous island. It is hard enough to cut a road through to a lot of it – and a road is your most basic communication pathway – so much of the information revolution has not happened here. Much of it won’t, because of the technical difficulties, and the lack of any possible economic gain.

We know you have it though. We are not so far away that we can’t see you, mainland Australia, and your smart phones and internet–that’s-faster–than–a–pigeon. We can see the back of you as you march into the future. Confusingly, because we are in the same temporal zone, you don’t get further away and the sight of you marching into a future that we can’t see looks exactly like you’re trampling your perfectly good present into the dirt.

So I live in a place where we still make our own fun. In fact we make most of our own everything, but let’s settle on fun for now. We get our good duds on and go visit the neighbours, small groups of people gather to play appalling music (in private mostly thanks to modesty and the threat of violence) and football exists at a very local level.

You’re eight or nine years old, slight and small of stature, asthmatic and allergic to a whole raft of things. Shy.

You have a friend, your best friend, a bullet-headed, nuggetty little scrapper named Fitz. They leave you alone when he’s around, but when he’s not, you’re a red rag.

The worst of them once picked you up and threw you from one end of the classroom to the other when the teacher was out of the room one day. You hit the floor with a thud and mostly just slid across the floor to the wall. It hurt.

It was like that.

Years later, someone tells you that this same guy wound up getting pinched for stealing cars and spent time inside. You think, “I hope he got the living shit beat out of him while he was there”.

You’d forgotten his name, and you’ll forget it again in an instant. You certainly can’t remember it now.

You wonder whatever became of Fitz.

You used to tell him stories that you made up during lunchtime. He liked those.

I hate this dance we do.

It starts with something small. Something barely noticeable. Sometimes it even masks itself as something positive. Like maybe you suddenly decided to clean the house from top to bottom. To the untrained eye that’s a good thing. But this isn’t my first rodeo and I know better. I know this was a compulsion you couldn’t control. An imperative mandated by the demons that echo through the corridors of your mind until you comply. It would be fine if you wanted to make the house sparkle, but that’s not the case. You HAD to do it.

I try to shake it off by rationalizing that at least it wasn’t something harmful. Like the time I came home from work and noticed your swollen hand. You told me you got so angry you just started punching the bedroom door. Nothing specific caused your anger. Which is scary. And I won’t even get into the senseless arguments we have on an increasing basis.

Do you ever get the feeling you’re being conned? I don’t mean in the normal, everyday, “Oh I just paid for a relaxing two-week holiday in luxurious tropical surroundings and now I have leprosy and am getting raped by a spider monkey” way. I mean in a deep, insidious and comprehensive way that once you discover what it is, will rock you to your very foundations and make you question the nature of reality. Ever get that sort of feeling?

8:13am Awake to see disapproving blue eyes looming over self. Daughter demands to know when self is going to get up and why she has to be late to school ALL THE TIME. Fall out of bed, wrap self in dressing gown and ugg boots, stumble into kitchen, followed by disapproving daughter. Lean heavily on coffee machine.

8:17am Short but intense battle to extract son from computer headphones. Firmly ignore wails about vital importance of finishing Minecraft thingy, stuff son into blazer and herd children out the door to the car.

Wordcount = 86,150

Typing is not writing in the same way that a cocktail shaker is not a jug of margaritas.

Discuss.

Anyone who is interested in writing something is, at some point, going to have to type it (anyone who has tried to read a grocery list scrawled on the back of an envelope by someone under 40 will know that handwriting has sadly become extinct in my generation, its evolutionary advantage lost in the rapid migration of homo sapiens from parchment forests to the Information Super-Savannah).

There’s a wonderful irony in parenting, that we want to imbue our children with a strong moral code and yet we will tell them bare-faced lies when it suits our purpose. We tell ourselves that the deceptions are for their own good, whether to entertain them or shield them, and that it is alright to hide the truth, despite the fact that one of the first morals that we try to teach toddlers is honesty.

A while ago, my life took a rather dramatic turn, as I became a father for the second time. And then one more time a minute after that. Yes, twins – the perfect way to infuse your wholesome dreams of joyful family life with a cruel, bitter irony.

Gambling is a strange addiction. When you say “addiction” most people think of drugs, legal or otherwise. Cigarettes, alcohol, prescription drugs, ecstasy, heroin, cocaine... you get the picture. The thing that’s common to all of these is that there’s a physical component to the addiction. Your body craves the drug, and so you give it more. As a long-time smoker, I know all about this.

When I was 16 two of my friends died when the car in which they were passengers flipped over. I was in the car behind. The driver of their vehicle raced off to beat us home, a challenge the driver of the car I was in didn’t accept. We didn’t see the crash occur, but we were on the scene within moments.

Know what I hate? Of course you don’t and it’d be pretty presumptuous of you to think that you do, unless you’re psychic and you’re not, because nobody is and people who say they are are something I really hate. But that’s not what I was hating in the first sentence back there, I was hating something else, which I guess just goes to show one very important fact: I hate an awful lot of things. Hundreds, in fact, one of which is positive attitudes towards life.

But the one thing I hate that I am choosing to focus on is this: Successful people.

In essence, my message is, Successful people? What the fuck?

I ask you… what kind of person wants to come and do a house evaluation at eight o’clock in the morning? And indeed, what kind of person arranges for someone to come and do a house evaluation at eight o’clock in the morning?

Our bank and my so-called husband is who.

Problem was that the morning in question I’d been woken early by the kids and the puppy and had found myself in a restless mood. It was the kind of mood that, in the past, would have inspired me to turn a bruise into the face of Jesus Christ with a magic marker.

This is indeed a worrying world that we more or less live in; beset by problems, confusion and myriad difficulties that could be easily solved if only people listened to clever writers like me.

For example, you know something I’ve noticed lately? Common sense is – if you can believe it – not that common. Take a moment to digest that. See what I’m getting at? I thought of that myself. And isn’t it just the perfect way to sum up the world? If only we had more common sense, how much better off we’d be. If only we remembered the lessons of our parents and our grandparents and our great-grandparents and so on and so forth back through the generations. In fact, the further back you go, the more sensible people were, until you reach about the 1300s, when people had so much common sense they had discovered the secret to cold fusion technology but were unable to implement it because of creeping political correctness.

Mornings…similar to what they were before I had children, in that I am still frequently late for work, but different in that the excuses are far more complicated…

Me: *lying in bed, firmly sleeping through the alarm again*

Bella: *Dancing up and down next to my bed clutching her bottom, mouthing silent howls of despair and looking very much like a frog with digestive problems (my Bella is the most adorable person in the entire history of adorable persons, but she’s got very long thin arms and legs, long thin hands and feet, huge eyes and a wide mouth and, without trying very hard at all, she can look a lot like a frog)*

I am writing this on my shiny new lap top, bought with money from my shiny new voluntary redundancy. It is Day Two of my absence from my much-loved job, although I should clarify that it wasn’t the WORK that I loved, but the people I worked with. I think of them fondly as ‘a bunch of mixed nuts’. They made our office environment a fun, sociable and wonderful place to work. I loved it so much I stayed for seven years, which is strange for me, as I usually get itchy feet much earlier than that.

But my lovely workmates are not the topic on conversation here – today’s article is bought to you by Rainy Days.

Lately, LovelyFriend and I have found it tricky to get together. Last week, however, we managed to get the planets in alignment, Uranus was lodged in someone’s Chakra and my Chi got eaten by my neighbour’s moggie. LovelyFriend and I ensconced ourselves with a bottle (ok, 2 bottles..maybe 3...) of champagne and made up for a month or so of disconnection. While it sounds all very nice, we actually went a little too hard for a little too long and stayed up almost all night (on a school night, mind) and spent many, many, many days paying for it afterwards.

Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year are coming at us like an out of control locomotive and I, for one, am wildly astonished. Where on earth did this year go?

It’s always at about this time of year that I swear up and down that I will do all my festive shopping early. However, I am still a tad traumatised from the time I actually managed this and bought my toddler niece an insane looking soft toy Giraffe with crazy-weird hair, sticky-outy bugged-out-eyes and disturbingly long legs, completely unaware of their family tradition of naming a toy after the person that gave it to them....*sigh*. No wonder the child is still afraid of me; to her I am the scary Love-Child of Macy Gray, Marty Feldman and a Tanzanian middle-distance runner.

So, I’m going to be 40 in a couple of weeks, and I’m not taking it well. Not at all. Drunkenly ranting at my husband about the lost opportunities of my youth and how he’s undoubtedly about to ditch me for a 19 year old arts student has been the source of some uneasiness in our house recently, so I thought it might be time for me to find a nice displacement activity to occupy my time.

Then I tried to find a dress to wear to my brother-in-law’s wedding and was reminded that ever since I decided that I would like to have clothes that fit properly and look OKish, shopping has become less fun than trying to wear a bikini made out of cats.

No, this is not a short history of all the arses I have known. Firstly, that wouldn’t be short, and secondly, I don’t like having bricks thrown through my window.

This is a short history of the buttock, the bottom, the derriere, the butt, the caboose, the blurter or the stinkhole.

Hey, wow!! It's a damn good thing we got hold of her before this happened. The NDM just won the Best Australian or New Zealand Weblog category of the 2010 bloggies. Congrats NDM, it's well deserved! - Eds

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Let’s get this straight: Telstra came to me. I did not go to Telstra.

I was simply minding my own business when a cheerful Telstra representative gave me a courtesy call informing me that my mobile phone contract was up for renewal.

“Would you like a new phone? Look! Shiny-shiny!”, he said, trying to lure me into another two year contract.

So, everyone familiar with the Tribune will notice that we are now printing in colour. Doesn’t it look lovely? Notice the colour artwork people, appreciate it, maybe even sniff it a little bit, all that colour is made of blood, tears and cussing.

I have recently come to the conclusion that having too many options can be a bad thing.

As I sit here, a blustery and rainy Melbourne day thrashing about outside, I am pondering the myriad possibilities available to me, and to my nearest and dearest.

As I was writing my hastily constructed diatribe on Snowtown on the night of last months deadline, three things occurred to me. Firstly, the best writing you ever do is unlikely to coincide with the shortest amount of time you’ve ever given yourself to finish it.

Secondly, writing about travelly type stuff is quite fun, and the Tribune has never really had a regular column on the subject.

Snowtown

By the time you read this my beautiful wife and I will either have, or be very close to having, our very own small person. So, understanding the possibility that there may be a subsequent reduction in the amount of time available to drop everything and go on holiday, we decided over summer to, well, drop everything and go on holiday.

Assorted Idiocy from court and the street, showing you just how hard our justice system works to protect us from the deeply stupid.

This should actually be Village Idiots, rather than the singular form, as I’m going to make reference to a group of people who have proven themselves to be no more than a collective of Village Idiots.

As I’ve mentioned in the past I currently work in hospitality, and it does mean at times I have to take deep breaths and suck it up when confronted by an acutely moronic customer. I wish I could say that these times are rare.

Or: How I came to be locked in a room with four dead credit cards, a shivering bank manager, a supercilious Sandra Sullyesque bitchcow, a terror inducing telephone and a lot of shouting.

I get paid monthly, which means I have one fabulous week each month, and then I live off my credit card for the next three weeks. Which is fine, as long as the bill gets paid (which it does) and the bank doesn’t decide to fuck me over, just for fun (which they did).

Sometimes, and I do mean sometimes, I work pretty hard. In fact, there have been weeks where I reckon I’ve nearly earned some of my paycheck. So it is with much dismay that I note each week the substantial portion of my yieldings that have been withdrawn by the Government.

In the short year that the Tribune has been in publication it has, as is well known, risen to become a beacon of informed debate and social comment. In this vein our beloved editors have thrown down the gauntlet to write on the subject of drinking. How does one respond? As a budding writer who has only really recently discovered the joy of the craft through this publication, I feel the weight of expectation to analyse such a multi-faceted issue in a way that both captivates and challenges the reader. In doing so, I hope to catalyse a higher level of thinking on such an important issue within the community.

I’m writing here to prove to you just how much fun you can have without alcohol.

First up: Coke

It was a sunny Friday lunch-time, I’m all the way in Torquay without my parents, at my last day of my school camp, “borrowing” Coke cans for the 2-hour trip back home. So far, my mates and I have filled up our bags with 6 Coke cans for social enjoyment. I’m pretty much addicted to coke so I can’t help myself. I sneak over to the eski for 1 more, or 2, or maybe 3.

How do you get my husband, my mother and pornography in the one story? More easily than you might think.....

First, some background… Those of you familiar with The Tribune will know that we owe our beginnings to our beloved local wine bar - The King of Tonga (164A Tennyson St, go check it out, don’t forget to mention this publication and garner more free drinks for your editors).

Learn from your mistakes. We all do it, from a very young age. This is why young humans are so short; they can fall over a lot without hurting themselves too badly, and eventually learn not to fall over at all.

Don’t eat the yellow snow. Don’t lick frost on ski-lifts. Be polite to the crazy man with the gun (well maybe that one doesn’t really afford you the opportunity to learn, but you get the point by now, surely).

Pretty early on in my career, I learnt that it’s not a good idea to leave yourself logged onto a computer in a common area of the office. I learnt this when a particularly grumpy, in fact downright fucking scary, manager called me into his office.

In keeping with the Digital Age, we lifted Luke’s article for this month off his honeymoon/travel blog, where we can all see the photos of him and his lovely bride, read about their travels, reassure ourselves that they are safe and send them messages.

Then, after they come home, they get to keep it as a honeymoon/travel diary.

Doncha just love the interwebs? - Eds.

I don't know what it is with our writers and going off to honeymoon with the communists. What’s wrong with a nice two weeks on Great Keppel Island, drinking Southern Comfort with coke and stuffing yourselves at the seafood buffet? - Eds

Editors of the esteemed Kings Tribune might be surprised and honoured to read that my new husband and I picked up a copy of their superb publication on our wedding day, and that it has travelled with us on an onerous 28 hours' journey through international airspace, so that we now write a missive from our honeymoon destination - beautiful Havana, Cuba.

3am. Our house. A few weeks ago.

Me: Justin! Stop bloody snoring! {insert viciously sharpened elbow into ribs of lovelyhusband}

Justin: Huh? That’s really funny. The police-shaped miniature Chrysler ashtray I bought at the shopping centre isn’t working anymore.

The children were screaming. The girls were hysterical with laughter, the boy was letting out howls of horror that came from the depths of his soul. This is not right, we thought, it’s usually maniacal laughing from the boy and heart-rending sobs from at least one of the girls…

As regular readers of this epistle may know, we have several pets. Sadly, the suicidal fish finally managed to put an end to its existence last month and was buried in the garden - for a while anyway. Until the dogs dugs it up and left it by the back door in case someone wanted a tasty treat during the night.

There’s an art to the spitball. It must be aerodynamic, and shaped to suit your particular pen tube. It must be firm enough to fly true, but moist and squishy enough to induce disgust when it finds its target. Entire geography lessons went unheeded as we unleashed volley after volley at each other, and the floor was thick with the disgusting things.

Very very annoying morning. Husband, children, self and dogs all pounding around house, anxiously searching for shoes.

Finally piled everyone in car and clanked off to start day.

Angry yelling from back seat distracts self from soothing redecorating fantasies.

Many moons ago I heard the call to serve my country. As it turns out, at that time, the country needed someone to lug heavy shit around the bush and stand around in the sun. So I joined the Army.

Actually, that's not entirely true, the Air Force told me they wouldn't let me be a pilot anymore, and the Army offered the chance to continue boozing up with my mates in Canberra for another year or two. But that's another story.

Or, more appropriately, how to live with a woman who is living with PMS.

On the fourth Thursday of every month there is a good chance you will see Justin sitting at the King, looking alone and scared. If you see him thusly, stop, buy him a beer and maybe give him a hug. He needs it. His wife has just turned into a homicidal/suicidal harridan and chased him out of his own house.

As many of the loyal drinkers around Elwood’s finest ‘Booze and Talk Crappery’ (aka The King of Tonga) will know, my lovely and I are betrothed to be married in a few short months.

First, let me make a confession.

I have not, before now, written for a newspaper. As you read on, this will become clear and it will highlight one of the significant shortcomings in my abilities, that until now, has precluded me from doing so. That being the ability to write well.

When lovelywife and I met, we were in our mid-thirties with a fair bit of living behind us and three kids between us already messing up the lounge room and our social lives.

Once we decided to stake our claim on each other, we had to look at options.

As most parents of sons will know, it is often only during the drive to and from school that you can get any decent conversation out of pre-adolescent boys.

Most other conversations revolve around the provision of food and managing the complaints department (WHY can’t we have chocolate biscuits for breakfast, WHY are girls so stupid, WHY can’t I drive the car, WHY do I have to go to bed, WHY can’t the puppies sleep in my room, WHY do I have to have sisters anyway, etc etc…).

I used to make fun of people with little dogs. It was a sport of mine, to pick on those members of society who were clearly unable to choose a socially acceptable pet.

It wasn’t that I was anti-animals, for I had more than my fair share of pets; guinea pigs, rabbits, dogs, cats, chickens, a Shetland pony and even a duck (who thought it was a human and met a grisly end after being duck-napped and eaten by our neighbours for Christmas dinner, when I was 6 years old – but that’s another story).