Still Life With Cat

1: Two of the nicest people I ever met live in a place called Gargunnock in Scotland. I'd lost touch with them, and a few weeks ago was ...

Two apologies: (a) Comment moderation has been turned on, I hope temporarily. (b) A couple of regular readers here will have noticed tha...

9.40 pm and the presents are wrapped and the cards written on. The prawns have been cleaned and so has the toilet. The tablecloth has been i...

Now I know that with the Great Big Non-Story of Nick Riewoldt's Willy (and of course that's what this is really all about: is it tha...

Fans of Jimmy Webb might remember his 1970 album Words and Music (so vividly recalled by the magnificent Ten Easy Pieces 26 years later) o...

When a friend asked me last week how I felt about the whole Julian Assange thing, the best I could come up with was 'conflicted'. Wi...

Even if it were a meme without a difference, I haven't seen or done one of these for ages and right at this very moment am grateful for ...

Eighteen years ago, when my parents were mere spring chickens of 65, the most recent in a long line of family moggies padded off to the big ...

Cast your mind back six years to Boxing Day 2004, when a tsunami caused 230,000 deaths in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and ten othe...

As is my wont round this time of year, I've been looking back at the bloggy ghosts of Christmases Past, thinking back to what was happen...

In the first of what will no doubt be several Yule-themed posts, we bring you the latest, and seasonal, tale of Simon's Cat, here . Th...

Assange and the sexual assault charges: essential reading . Hat-tip to my Facebook (and real-life) friend Ken Gelder. Here's the money...

Guy Rundle sums up my own highly conflicted views on all this today on Crikey: These moves are evidence of the situation your corresponden...

Ahhh, the signs and portents of a new calendar month. The first swooping magpie of September. The first bluetongue and redback of November. ...

If you missed the Magda Szubanski episode of Who Do You Think You Are? (as did I until just then, not currently having a telly), then now i...

It was brought to my attention this morning in a crueller light than usual that the whole ageing thing has finally caught up with my hair. B...

This is wrong on so many levels I don't know where to start. Like his immediate and indeed only superior (structural, that is, not mo...

If you are badly in need of a laugh (which, at the moment, I'm), this should do it. Inexpressible thanks to the lovely Ampersand Duck ...

One of my Facebook friends, a children's writer whom I've never actually met and who has several hundred FB friends herself, seems t...