Sime says

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...

I viewed the invitation with trepidation. I wasn't to be a spare appendage at a wedding, but single at a 60th. I'm well versed at fronting up to events on my own. Call me Pat Malone but in reality many years of parachuting in between cosy couples and group conversations have hardened me up, on the outside at least. There is no alternative, walk right in or wilt like a wallflower. Knowing the calibre of the host, I knew his birthday bash would be a rip snorter of an event. And so it was. I had nothing to worry about, until it came to the dancing routine. It takes courage and a little amber liquid to loosen my limbs and discard diffidence. But things can get decidedly sticky on a dance floor: when to move, where to move, how to move, who to move with and when to move off. No sweat? Hardly. Women have no such dread. They flow onto the dance floor in a whimsical way. Completely absorbed, unaffected and free to shake, rattle and roll their beauty in a wonderful rhythm ...

It's a sad fact: I can't handle crickets. The svelte-legged little critters make my skin crawl. Summer's here and they're marching en masse into my house. Hairy Huntsmen spiders, sewer-dwelling roaches and beefy-looking beetles are a doddle to deal with in comparison to Jiminy cricket and his mates. Last week an interloper came down the hallway settled on the grandfather clock and began a jam session with father time. I put an end to Jimmy and the Crickets informal musical event by throwing a tea towel in his direction. This method was employed by my father who was a bit of a wuss when it came to removing an  orthopteran  from the house. Quivering at the thought of picking up the little blighter, a tea towel provided a buffer zone by enabling dad to bundle up Jiminy and set him free outside. One has to work quickly in order for a catch and release to be successful. Armed with a handful of tea towels and a kitchen broom as backup, I lobbed a lump of linen a...

I'm rolling in dough. Decades spent sniffing around Victoire patisserie, throwing money at Morpeth bakery and endless searches for Dr Allinson's infamous brown loaf, have forced me into trying my hand at the art of sourdough bread making. My mother had a love affair with a loaf of bread. Called Crushed Wheat, it was a frigid brown brick of wholemeal blandness. I endured childhood years of lunchtime envy as my cold beef on brown went head to head against my mates' mouthwatering slabs of butter and vegemite slapped between two soft layers of white bread. It was no match, Tip Top was the one. I've suffered from a rise and fall in emotion that is directly linked to the glutinous threads of clag-like dough stretching between my fingers. It's a sticky situation to be in, for the sense of anticipation an amateur baker feels when the flour turns sour and buns are removed from the oven is palpable. Making sourdough requires the crafting of a pre-ferment...

Playing chicken with a brush-turkey is a full-time job as I recently discovered. If birds of a feather flock together then you can't blame a single male brush-turkey for choosing my place to build his dream pad and shop for a bride. A large block of land, plenty of nest building material and water views provide the perfect canvas for him to strut his stuff. Last weekend, Mosman was open for inspection and one bold bird sporting a laterally flattened tail and a resplendent red and yellow fleshy collar resembling mayoral robes landed in my yard. My next door neighbour once owned a pest control business. He reverted to his then company's advertising slogan of "one flick and they're gone" and with a wave of his hand directed the megapode over the fence into my garden. Until this moment there was no cause for alarm as brush turkeys regularly passed through the neighbourhood. Things changed when I discovered that construction of the scrub turkey's nest w...