Footy tips not too good. Only 3 out of 8. Bah. I don’t like this anymore.

On my way out to the west on Friday night, suddenly realised apart from my shoes and socks, I was entirely dressed in blue.

Spent a substantial amount of Saturday daytime lazing. And a substantial amount of Saturday nighttime feeling very very very damn seedy. I suspect vast numbers of people in surrounding suburbs heard me chucking my guts up in the night.

Sunday more lazying between doing household errands. Including washing the car. With buckets, of course. Been about six months since the last time, so apart from the marks left by the apparently diarrhoea-suffering birds in the tree above where it was parked on Friday night, it was definitely due for a wash.

It must be the heat, but I thought as I walked home this morning that I saw a bloke wearing a Barry Manilow t-shirt.

Nah, can’t have been.

I met an Important Person today. In a crisp white shirt, clean dark trousers, shiny shoes (at least I assume they were, I didn’t look closely), neat tie. We sat in a spotless boardroom in a high building and talked about Important Things. He had a cold. After a few sniffles, he pulled a hankie out to blow his nose. Deep brown. Wrinkly and scrumpled up.

Perhaps the crisp white shirt etc is just the outer layer of the Important Person, and the person’s inner scruffiness is revealed when they pull out their hankie.

Or perhaps the hankie was just well used today, because he had a cold.

My lesson from Thursday night: when wearing a nice woven silk tie, don’t lean across a table with a rough edge for a protracted period of time. This course of action may well result in the little threads becoming broken, loose, or otherwise completely stuffed up.

Actually maybe not completely. It just looks a bit… well, wrinkled. At least from some angles. I’ll see if I can batter it about with an iron or something.

I’ve just finished reading The Year Of Living Dangerously. Yes it’s true, I’m not a particularly fast reader. That is, I don’t seem to have (or make) much time to read. Most of it’s confined to the trip to and from work, which is only about 15 minutes each way. And some of that on the way home is taken up by reading the trashy (but free)MX. So, it’s taken me a month or so to get through it.

What sparked me off reading the book - seeing the movie, and the character of Billy Kwan being based on my father - has faded somewhat as the story has weaved its way to the September 13th attempted coup. He was still there, but less prominent in the plot, and the rich characterisation which introduced his character has reduced.

It’s not Kwan’s beliefs (political and otherwise) which are based on dad, but rather his mannerisms. I’m happy to say that my dad doesn’t have the same strange fascination with dwarves that Kwan has — in fact my dad says this probably comes from Koch himself, who although not a dwarf, is a tad on the short side, and may have a bit of a hang-up about his height.

Anyway it remains an interesting read, especially as Hamilton walks head-long into the coup attempt. As I said when I started reading it, the themes are still very much present in the world today: the clashes between western and other cultures, the moral questions over poverty, and the involvement of journalists in the stories they cover. Definitely recommended.

I got the slippers. Of course, since they don’t have any holes (well, okay, just one hole, where I put my foot in), they feel almost too warm.

It’s been a few weeks since the new City Link toll road opened - without tolls until the government’s sure they’ve won the election, of course (ooh, what a cynic) and I’ve driven on it a few times now. The thing that strikes me about it, despite all the hoopla, the massive publicity and media coverage is… well… it’s just a road. A new and very expensive road. Big deal. And it’s only half finished.

My sister has just gone back to Sydney after visiting for a few days. While she was here she finally opened a package that had been waiting for her for a few months - a diploma from a course she did. When she opened it, she found that they had misspelt the title - wait for this - "Professisonal Writing"!

My birthday is next Friday, and this year I’ve found it necessary to ask for a new pair of slippers. All of us in my family let each other know what we’d like - because we know how hopeless we all are at buying things for each other. It’s not that I’ve asked for slippers because I can’t think of anything more exciting or dynamic or entertaining that I’d like for my birthday. It’s just come to the point where slippers are the thing I most need.

My existing slippers are an aging pair of "ug" boots. It is not exaggerating to say that they are more hole than boot. On cold winter days when I go downstairs to get the newspaper, if it’s windy I can feel a draft than enters the hole by what’s left of the heel and flows along the sides of my foot to another hole next to my big toe. I wouldn’t bother wearing them but they keep the bottoms of my feet warm.

Actually, what would make a great birthday present is to win the footy tipping. With one round to go next weekend, I’m just one point in the lead, closely followed by the cleaner, who is one mean-arse tipster. Of course, since I’m leading, I suppose that makes me a meaner-arse tipster. No, in fact it probably makes me the meanest-arse tipster.

The Micallef Programme, a kind of Australian A Bit Of Fry And Laurie but without Laurie has reared its ugly wacky zany head on broadcast television again, Friday nights on the ABC. I’ll be watching every show to (a) see if I can spot myself in the audience - we went to a taping a few weeks ago, watch out for the "Price Is Right" bit and (b) see the hilarious sketch comedy moment where the priest places a fallen crucifix back on the wall by nailing it up…

The fly. Useful though it is, it can be very embarrassing when forgotten. Just why is it that selective amnesia can so often cause one to forget to do up one’s fly? This is a question that has vexed scientists ever since it was invented. There’s meant to be a routine that we all do as we walk out the door. You know the one. The mental checklist: "Keys?… wallet?… handkerchief?… watch?…" and of course the one that every few of weeks falls off the mental check- list: "fly done up?"

So I’ve come up with an alternative strategy. If the fly beats the Primary Zipper Status Check, a secondary check is carried out in a quiet street on the way to the station. God forbid if anyone regularly looks out of their window at about that time of morning. Every day they’d see a reasonably neatly dressed young man on his way to work, who appears to have an unhealthy obsession with the upper section of his trousers…

But any of that is better than last week’s effort, when I was beaten by the Secondary Zipper Status Check, and got all the way into work, and sat through a Christmas breakfast and a meeting before I noticed the rogue zip at half-mast.

Things could be worse. About a week ago, I was walking through one of the city’s busiest streets, Elizabeth Street… and there, in a parked car, was a man doing one of the most elaborate nose-pickings I have ever laid eyes on. This wasn’t just the casual "pick, yep, nothing there, just checking there was nothing hanging out…" No. This was a fully-fledged seek-out and destroy mission, obviously done in the hope that absolutely anything in there would be scooped out. The sort of probing that picks up individual snot molecules. For anyone else contemplating it: Don’t. Don’t pick your nose in the car. Why? Because the windows are SEE-THROUGH, that’s why. (That’s why they’re windows, in fact…)