Archive | Life columns & features 14-15

“There’s so much junk,” moans a dear friend, packing up her home. “Why do people keep all this rubbish?” I’m helping her do a clutter bust. I’m the worst clutter-buster on the planet given that: (a) I’m a hoarder who can’t see why anyone would want to throw out their 35-year-old teddy bear and (b) I am allergic to dust. Continue Reading →

TO many, the term “Conscious Uncoupling” sounds like a huge pile of psychobabble mixed with deluded New Age naivety. It left most media people and couples therapists shaking their heads when Gwyneth Paltrow used it to describe what she and her soon-to-be-ex-­husband Chris Martin were doing. Continue Reading →

IT’S been confirmed. We don’t just go to work to make money, we need satisfaction. Gallup research has shown that there’s a strong link between corporations’ success and staff happiness levels. Lost productivity due to employee disengagement costs more than $300 billion a year in the US. Continue Reading →

Bette Midler used to sing a song I loved: “You’ve got to have friends…” which we all sang along to as teen­agers, surrounded by lots of buddies. Continue Reading →

My teenage daughter recently went to what marketers described as a “Hippy Festival”. What is a modern-day hippy festival? I asked her. Continue Reading →

I NEARLY killed a young woman the other day. It was her lack of foresight but I can’t get over the shock of it. Continue Reading →

THERE was a time when my relationships were going through a rough patch. It wasn’t my man or daughter or friends. It was me. I suddenly found that everything in the world around me was not to my liking. Continue Reading →

MY mother says: “No one ever really changes.” But I’ve just been travelling with a friend who has. She survived a very aggressive form of cancer; and there’s not a second of life — good or bad — that she doesn’t cherish. Continue Reading →

WHEN my father died I was trying to be strong and brave. The eldest child and executrix of his will, I wanted to get everything done and organised efficiently. I was not in any space to grieve because there was just no time or space. Continue Reading →

It was a phrase used about Schapelle Corby that has finally done me in. A news story promoting a Seven Network segment about her first day of freedom bragged that the show captured “extraordinary vision of her throwing herself into the ocean off Seminyak”. Continue Reading →