Archive | Life columns & features 14-15

My partner and I have just come back from driving again — across Italy. For the past five years we’ve been finding our way around exciting countries such as Cuba and Mozambique. 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 →

Something happened when I was in India recently that made me reconsider how I act in the world. I’d been queuing up for a long time at the door of a concert and once inside, secured a good place upfront. Continue Reading →

ONE of my favourite stories was written by author and western Buddhist monk Jack Kornfield in his book A Path with Heart. Kornfield, from an American Jewish home, had come to realise there was too much pain in his family. He was Ivy League educated, but ignorant when it came to his emotions. Continue Reading →

I HAD an acquaintance who killed a young man during a pub brawl by stabbing him with a knife. Continue Reading →

POLITICAL correctness has gone rampant. The UN believes that it should be illegal for parents to smack a child and that children should have the same protection from “assault” as adults. At the same time as horrific details of child sexual abuse are coming to light by way of clergy, and celebrity paedophile rings, loving parents who smack their child for running across a road could be dobbed in by teachers or neighbours and prosecuted as criminals — and then what, guys? Fifty lashes? Continue Reading →

There’s something about the marital bed that is not conducive to great sex. In fact, the whole house is a dampener when it comes to libido for many couples. When I ran Triple M’s Sex Show many moons ago, I heard from callers time and again that after a day of work, kids, and duties, let’s go to bed meant “Let’s go to bed”. Continue Reading →

My cat, which is a very large breed of cat (8.5kg, the size of a small lamb), has slept at the foot of the bed for eight years. In the months leading up to “the event”, I noticed he had been making his way up the middle of the bed, which didn’t worry me as he slept between myself and my partner, which was kind of cute. Continue Reading →