Sime says

The ice-cream headache that hits me is more of a Magnum than a soft serve. After 90 seconds or so the shaft of pain at the base of my brain drifts away, as do I.  It's sink or swim at this point as mind battles body in a persuasive attempt to convince me that ocean swimming in winter is a bright idea.    Life in a bubble is brilliant for I am immersed in thousands of them. Effervescent handfuls of salty spume dart past my goggles with every stroke of freestyle. I feel fast and buoyant, channel thoughts of Thorpedo and kick on. But it doesn't last. Ears give in to a relentless tide, my breathing begins to labour and my nose is subjected to an epic irrigated event. Feeling more like a stone fish than porpoise I persevere for there is too much stimulation coursing through my veins. Noradrenaline and cortisol fuel a fight or flight response. Stop now and I'll sink. Each gulp of air is met by a blinding blast of morning sunshine which cuts through my smeared goggles. The sky...

Sledgehammers smash walls and send my stomach through the floor. Bricks bleed and permeate the air with diaphanous dust that smothers nasal hair. Windows shudder. Floorboards groan. My house is hurting and I feel the trauma.  Three months into a renovation and I’m yet to feel the love for this cavernous money pit.    The heavens have opened, saturating the exposed site and washing piles of sawdust and grit down the driveway. Amputated architraves scream in silence and dangling cables hold naked bulbs, their filaments long extinguished.    It’s agonising to be ‘on site’, surrounded by skirting boards unsheathed, wall plaster ripped asunder and metal roofing peeled back. Hall carpet stripped off like a band aid reveals virgin timber covered in knots. Its rawness is real.   I medicate by trying to envisage a new environment. Sprouting north from the 1900-built carapace will be a new heart of the home: an open kitchen with a lifted section of roof and swathes o...

The glob of goo shot out from the bottle. It missed my hand and left a tacky tail of liquid on my loafer. I grunted, like the guy in the cubicle beside me, and looked for a sheet of paper towel to remove the dribble. There was none. With little choice, I wiped my shoe on the back of my ankle and exited the public convenience.  I'm finding sanitising to be an unpredictable business. Venturing from the cafe to the butcher and onwards to the baker, I am obsessed with sourcing stable bottles of ethanol-infused lotion. A small bottle of sanitiser   hangs from a carabiner attached to my jeans. It's my backup accessory of choice in these COVID -laced times. Busy hands used to require Solvol and Geoffrey was once told to wash his mitts, so nothing has really changed except for fashion. Rubbing two hands together on approach to the pub is no longer a gesture of expectation, it's a race against time. With cupped palms cradling a puddle of germ-busting fluid, magician-like hand mov...

"Hello, Simon Dean speaking", I said. "Hello Dean, it's Simon speaking", he replied. Was it tinitus, a deaf ear or the fact that he worked in the miscommunications department of the same hotel as I did that caused confusion? His sloppy salutation infuriated me. We shared christian names, were supposed to be au fait with hospitality and yet he still couldn't wrap his tongue around a correct greeting. Meeting Simon in the lobby put the name to my face but the moniker was lost in translation via the phone. Without eye contact that either cements bona fide banter or feigns disinterest, speaking to a faceless being, a nobody, just a voice, can be risky business. That was the case for me in the 80s.   Talking on the now near extinct 'land line' filled me with fear. I prospected through a copy of the White Pages for business, selected a company at random and made a cold call in the hope that someone would buy what I was selling. Rejection...

We've been together for more than 35 years and letting go is something I cannot countenance. So I have decided to dismember her. You won't find a butchered body in a barrel or entrails stuffed in a suitcase in the attic, for my relationship has been more platonic than physical. I hold out hope that with the help of a plumber, discarding the bottom section and keeping her top half should be relatively straightforward. I'm a sentimental bloke who is about to rip the heart out of his home and in the process end a longstanding affair with a gas cooktop. The Cannon Rotisserie De-Luxe Gas Cooker is one sexy stove, not a horrible hob. This cordon bleu piece of machinery revolutionised the way my family cooked in the 1980s. It was a Masterchef moment. The installation was cataclysmic not catalytic, for it incorporated an eye-level gas griller/rotisserie that continues to burn brightly. None of this bend over business and sticking one's head in the oven to grill a c...

I peed on him when I was young. He was 20. I was a babe in arms who whizzed upwards, spraying Harry in a golden shower of youth. Since the baptism by urine we have been friends for five decades. I lost a brother but I gained one in Harry. The absence of a common umbilical chord is supplanted by a family tie to the land that spans generations. Nowadays, when Harry meets Simon, I don't always feel an urge to cock my leg in his direction but that does not stop him recounting the story to everyone within earshot. From an incontinent infant I transited through life's early stages: a cosseted city kid and spotty lad with soft hands to carefree student and hardened bachelor boy. Every holiday I chomped at the bit to get to Harry's place, a farm, six-hours' drive northwest from Sydney. He's seen me rise and fall through life, and on a horse. Tuned to his wireless and the ABC,  Australia All Over  with Macca has nothing on Harry. But it should. He'll tip h...