Sime says

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...

A fastidious farming friend invited an enquiring mind and my traditional self to enjoy a 'boys weekend' on his property. Wives and girlfriend were otherwise engaged, so we locked in the opportunity to enjoy some male bonding time. Add water to this all-bloke recipe for mateship and you'd leave  Farmer Wants a Wife  in the shade. There might be a scarcity of H20 in the bush but this did little to dampen our spirits. A menu plan of toast on tap, cereal for dinner and mini magnums at midnight was supplemented by a barbecue of sizzling sausages and a visit to a pub nearby. Four chooks with streamlined cloacas kept us in eggs and a verdant vege garden on site provided a health dose of greens.   For two days and nights we sliced, diced and iced a plethora of issues both current and past. The genuine interest in one another's lives and cerebral interplay of viewpoints was as stimulating as it was insightful. Here we were, mid 50s, balding, greying, flossing, fartin...

Twigs twitch, limbs sway. A ringtail possum takes cover within the woody womb. Lily Pily  Acmena Smithii  has been rooted to my garden for close to a century. A capturer of carbon, and of footballs, it is a keeper of peace within an ever-changing neighbourhood. Standing at more than 12 metres high and 8 metres wide this  significant  tree is a defiant giant that stretches from boundary to boundary. It consumes the block and commands respect from neighbours whose verdant thumbs lay fixed in beds of manicured moraya and buxus. An arbiter to arborists who shape its form, the artistically striking perennial speaks to all who perch within or walk beneath it. The tree's mushroom-like shape envelops a variety of fauna dressed in feathers and in fur. It shades colonies of ground-dwelling plants from blistering hot days and has been a buttress for pint-sized humans who built cubbies in days gone by. This colossus in my life emits an orchestra of sound all year: a w...

It was a blue sky day, our jaws dropped and we all said “fcuk”. Vertiginous fjordland punctuated by emerald waters lay below me. There were no danger signs nor disclaimers, no fences or manicured pathways. Just drop-dead scenery framed by a distant blue glacier. It was a setting that took my breath away and sucked at my stomach like a vacuum-flush toilet does in an aircraft.   There were no apologies for dropping the F bombs. We had climbed our  Everest  and the gobsmacking view necessitated the voicing of multiple obscenities.   With two of my closest friends we had reached Trolltunga , a mythical place where a horizontal slab of granite pokes out of a snow-capped mountain in Hordaland county, Norway. Hiking 23 kilometres in snow, climbing 1300 vertical metres and standing on a precipice capped a moment in life that was impossible to emulate. Guided by an effervescent German girl and a Norwegian mountaineer, our climbing party comprised three Aussies, a ...

"I don't do sex", she said. I wasn't seeking intercourse but with her mouth on my ear I did wonder if I was engaged in some form of Norwegian foreplay. Thanks to a SAS pilots strike I was stuck in Stavanger, south of Bergen, and needed an Airbnb for three nights. Having booked a place, only to find I couldn't enter the premises due to the owner's ineptitude, I landed at another Airbnb with my friends. They had booked a one-bedroom basement studio with an outside spa for a night. The owner Bekka, a Norwegian girl of Viking-like stature, was concerned at my accommodation dilemma and offered to put me up in her house above the studio. She refused to accept payment. It was a free night's lodging before moving downstairs when my friends departed. To repay her generosity I offered to buy Bekka a drink. It was a small gesture and I'd be tucked up by 10pm. That was the plan. By 9pm I was getting thirsty when Bekka arrived at the studio door wea...

Je m'appelle Paul Lefebvre . I'm hooked on the  The Bureau , a cerebral French spy drama on SBS. Mon Dieu, c'est incroyable . It's sex on a stick or in this case multiple USB gadgets used by the DGSE, FSB and CIA in an addictive game of alphabet soup and counterespionage. Each episode is a history lesson, counselling session and language class in French, Russian, Arabic and pigeon English. It's multi lingual, multi faceted and masterful in plot. 40 episodes screened across SBS 's  On Demand service have harpooned my social life for weeks on end. Nothing comes between me and binge sessions. That was until last night, when my Smart TV played dumb, locked me out and erased my network settings. Fearing Syrian subterfuge and Putin's mob attempting to steal my bread recipe, I changed the sim card on my wi-fi device, smashed my phone, grabbed a new pay-as-you go handset and left the house. The mule dropped me at my sisterons place in Northbridge...

I was on a 'boys' cycling weekend in Thredbo and bunked in with another lycra lad for three nights. You couldn't swing a cat in the room and after one night there was enough purring going on to have me climbing the walls. Sleeping beside a bloke who snores does pose the question "what's up your nose?" In this case, I think there was a lot. It was torture. My regulation eight hours of heavenly slumber dragged into what felt like 24 hours of blackness. Seconds became minutes, minutes turned into hours and the hours were infinite. The sun was my only saviour. Things did get off to a sombre start. All was quiet until the reverberations started. A mozzie can be met head on with a can of Mortein but a freight train driven by a snorer can't be derailed. After about five minutes I heard the train in the distance. Heavy breathing. At low decibels the sound was almost melodic. But before long I found a steam locomotive was lying at the opposite platform....

Waiting for my 18-year-old friend to arrive and witness his rite of passage from school to university life, I found myself morphing into a 54-year-old 'fresher' checking back into college.   Sitting on a bench in the open courtyard I couldn't stop smiling. Music thumped through an amplifier, students bounced about and greeted new arrivals with glee. There was plenty of love drifting about in the dry Canberra air. With the emergence from my chrysalis almost complete, Oscar appeared, a second-year senior resident with one arm in a sling and the other cradling a glass of water. He'd obviously been keeping a watchful eye on Dustin Dean looking for Mrs Robinson. Handing me the refreshment, I thanked him and enquired about his injury. To which this strapping blond surfy type from the south coast mentioned rugby as the cause. He was a smooth talker and a rugby player – both viewed as majors at university. My friend soon arrived with his father and appeared visibl...