First aid for parents

First aid is a set of skills that any parent should have. This course is designed for new parents of young children and presents, in order, an approach to dealing with almost any childhood medical emergency.

Sympathy. Provision of sympathy is your first recourse. Adopt a position in front of and slightly to the side of the injured person. Bend down to their level and, while patting the near shoulder, utter “There, there” in a concerned voice. For more advanced practitioners, you might consider expressing specific sympathy for the injury in question; “Ooh! You hit your head. That hurts, doesn’t it?” Avoid, if you can, stupid questions such as “Did you hit your head?” when the child has a lump like a grapefruit blossoming over one eye.

Kiss It better. Purse the lips together and apply to the affected area. Remember, however, to make sure that the affected area is not covered in blood or some other nasty childhood bodily fluid or is not, in fact, in close proximity to a source of any of those fluids. It’s important to remind the child of the efficacy of this placebo by following your kiss with the words, “There, all better now!”

Appeal to maturity. If you feel like a great deal of fuss is being made about nothing, or you just don’t really want to deal with the situation right at that moment, the next step is to stand up straight, chest out with a meaningful and mature look on your face and then say “Come on, big boys/girls don’t cry about things like that.” Of course, if your little darlings are regular watchers of soccer on TV, they’ll know that you’re lying and you might have to skip this step.

Plaster, Band-aid, whatever you call it. Nothing works like a Band-Aid. It not only stops bleeding and prevents the ingress of infection, it removes pain, wipes away tears and gives the injured the feeling of credibility that comes from having their injury taken seriously. A Band-aid, especially if it has a prominent picture on it in bright colours, can be worn with pride like a war wound.

Ice pack. An ice pack can serve the same purpose as a Band-aid. Particularly at school, there is a great deal of healing power in the attention you get walking around with a hospital-looking object clasped to your head. It helps if the injured party is being supported around the playground by a friend or too. This will cure everything up to and including a fractured skull – or at least make the complaint go away for a while.

Convince the child that the injury isn’t real – or that it isn’t as bad as they seem to think it is. “No honey, it’s not broken, you’ve just bruised it. A night of sleep is all you need.” Of course, you’re going to feel really stupid when she comes back from hospital the next night with a plaster cast and a crutch but we’re only interested in first aid here, you’re not expected to deal with serious stuff like that.

And none of this applies after 9pm. The only possible response to a childhood injury at that time of the night is a 5 hour wait in the emergency room stuck between a drunken bum with a nest of rats in his hair and breath that’s stripping the paint off the furniture, and a psychotic houso who’s wailing in an attempt to convince the doctors that the pain in her bruised foot is bad enough to require large doses of morphine and a private room.

Signwriters of Australia - save us

From the cave paintings at Lascaux through the hieroglyphs of the Pharaoh to the mystery of Linear B, what we write on our walls will be, in centuries to come, how archaeologists come to understand and judge our civilization. what will they think of us? Sign-writers of Australia, I call on you to secure our posterity.

 

Retail is not exciting. Sport is exciting. Roller coasters are exciting. Maths - particularly calculus - is exciting. Yet another chain store selling cotton-so-thin-it’s-water-soluble "fashion" is not exciting. Please don't paint signs saying

 

"Exciting new retail experience opening here soon!"

 

I don't have an endless series of problems; not everyone needs "solutions" in their business title. Waste management solutions, tile and bathroom solutions, sex deprivation solutions, crime management solutions, sobriety solutions. Also known as bin men, tilers, whores, cops and pubs. Save us from "solutions", I implore you.

 

I don’t want to go on about spelling and apostrophes – you know whereof I speak – but please take special note that store names are singular- even if they end in ‘s’. "Mathers has moved" not "have moved".

 

Billboards are high speed experiences. At 100 kph the best you can expect is that I will get a business name and a logo. My wife has never said to me,

 

"Honey just double back a second, I need to get the phone number, web address, full product list and insanely complicated directions to the fish and chip shop in the next town."

Billboards are also advertising to travellers. When I roll into town, I could conceivably need petrol, food and accommodation. Unless I've brought a posse and an iconic tune that will be whistled badly for generations to come, I'm unlikely to need legal services, and there are no conceivable circumstances under which I will need help with my tax return. God only knows what the PhD students of the future, writing about our road trips, will believe we were doing.

 

Thai restaurant names are not funny.  "Thai me down", "Thai Riffic", "Why Thai", "Thai the knot" or "Tongue Thai'd". Our distant descendants will find that the lifetime of effort spent understanding our language will have been to no avail other than to read cheap puns. Please save us from being relegated to the Benny Hill category of ancient peoples.

 

And, if you're going to use a tiny font on a roadside sign, at least have the honesty to write "you are about to have a very bad car accident".

 

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The Doc Martin Protocols

I am a great fan of the Port Wenn medic and my wife thinks that there is more than a little of him in me. Fair enough, I can accept that. That being the case, I would like to propose a new set of social protocols to make conversations clearer, more effective and to prevent people taking unnecessary offence; the Doc Martin protocols.

SBI. If I flag SBI, then the conversation that follows is a Strictly Business Interaction. Just fill the prescription. I don’t want to know about your kids, I have no interest in village gossip and the weather is a matter of sublime indifference to me. We are not, in this case, interacting as two human beings; I have a business need that I think you can fill. End of story.

WIA. Well Intentioned Advice. Children can be given advice on such matters as unsuitable friends, inappropriate clothing choices or bad financial decisions, why can’t adults? I am more than happy to receive such advice if offered in a spirit of honesty and generosity and, if I give it under the banner of WIA, it comes in the same spirit. Adulthood does not guarantee omniscience and there are far too many people sitting around, cringing at the disaster someone, who is supposedly a friend, is walking into, and doing nothing about it. WIA them. You are welcome to do the same to me. Offence not intended and none is permitted to be taken.

JDC. Simply I Just Don’t Care. If you a raise a topic with me that is of passionate interest to you and I have listened for more than three minutes, I have the right to call JDC. You have the same right with me. It’s a direct way of saying “You can talk about this for the next hour and I won’t be any more interested than I am now.” It doesn’t mean I don’t like you as a person or that your interests are not important, it’s just that they mean nothing to me and we would have a mutually more fulfilling interaction if we moved on to another topic of conversation.

NTA. I Need Time Alone and lots of it. That doesn’t make me a sociopath it makes me an introvert. Sometimes I don’t feel like talking to people, particularly people I don’t know well because that’s a lot of hard work. Other times, even people I know well are liable to be eviscerated if they want to talk to me. I neither need nor want to interact all the time. The purpose of this protocol is to, without offence, allow people to decline social invitations or leave parties early because they have just had enough of other people.

OHD. In some interactions involving technical matters, One of us Has a Degree. If you continue to offer your inexpert opinion on something I have studied for some years, you are going to make a fool of yourself. You are also going to try my patience to the point of meltdown. You do have a right to an opinion but that’s not to say that your opinion is right. If one of us has expertise and the other doesn’t, I think we can call OHD and move on to the next thing, can’t we?

IGA. Is this Going Anywhere? I know we are fellow human beings, we share many of the same joys and sorrows in life as countless billions have done before us and doubtless many will into the future. Children, work, money, spouses, health etc. I don’t need half an hour of small talk to re-establish our mutual humanness. After a couple of minutes, I’m going to call IGA by which I mean, “Are we going to get to a deeper level in this conversation or start to have an informed debate?” If the answer is “no” then I want to move on to the next interlocutor; there’s nothing for me here.

TOV. If I have been forced to listen to an idiot talking for too long then I will get up and leave. Why? Because it’s That Or Violence. Chickens that cluck and cluck and never actually lay anything tend to get their heads chopped off. If you witter away, never saying anything, never challenging my opinions, never providing inspiration for my thoughts to go off into unexplored territory, then I’m going to cut the conversation short before I do something similar to you.

I'm just not that noble

Why is the environment movement doing so badly? Their gains are made at a snail's pace and are undone like a kindergarten kid's shoelace the minute a neo-con government gets into power?

Is it because the messages of the greenies are bad? No. Most of them amount to

• Don't poison the air you breathe;
• Don't flood your own basement; and
• Don't eat all the popcorn now, save some for later in the movie when you might be hungry.

These are perfectly reasonable and sane messages of the kind comprehensible by most primary school graduates. The problem is not the calibre of the messages it's the assumption that people's actions are driven by reason and sanity.

In fact, let's take driving as an example. Hybrid or electric cars are offering me the soft, warm inner glow of morality and about 0.75 horsepower. The powerful V6 on the other hand, is offering me the chance to be admired by, and therefore possibly to sleep with, leggy women in body hugging evening wear or - and sometimes this might even be preferable - the chance to drive a car through gorgeous countryside, without my kids in the back seat fighting or my wife checking my speed all the time. There's no contest. If the Prius isn't going to get me laid, then the future of the planet can go hang.

I feel for the orang-utans, they're cute! But the tropical islands of SE Asia are also offering me beach resorts at Cosco prices, every third drink free and the chance to delude myself that the sultry beauty massaging my back might actually be attracted to me. Even if she does find me irresistible, the ape's not getting her jokes laughed at over cocktails in the Sunset Bar.

The anti-fur campaigners have the right idea: “I’d rather go naked …”.

"Hey, there's no fur on her, at least as far as I can see, so I'm sure as Hell not going to wear any."

Job done! But fur is a battle won isn't it? Maybe we could get the girls to move on to leopard skin? Banning even faux leopard skin - in fact especially faux leopard skin - is a cause I'd happily support.

Alcohol gets me access to good parties full of beautiful people - I can see it on TV, must be true. From what I see of the environmental movement on TV, saving wilderness areas gets me access to mud, leaky tents and strange hairy people who are boycotting soap, shampoo and probably deodorant and who are very difficult to distinguish from the primate inhabitants of the forest they’re protecting. Just hand me that beer.

Look at the mining industry.  All those impressive big machines, important looking men in hard hats holding blueprints and pointing at bits of the landscape. 
 

That says money, it says professional, it says respect and a six figure income.  I say, "Yes, honey, become an engineer." Adorable though the turtles and dolphins are, they aren't bringing social prestige to my daughter or private education to my grandkids.  There are WAY too many marine biologists doing the filing or making excellent coffee and as for some of the aforementioned hairy fellas, don’t even think about bringing one of them home.

What the environmental lobby needs is a naked  5'11" woman in a hard hat, driving a hybrid car to a solar powered resort and handsome,  well groomed men socializing with other beautiful people at the picket line cocktail party. Then you've got a hope of saving the spotted owl.

 

If houses were built by the medical profession

Well sir, that’s your foundation down. All looking good.

Great. But it’s not a complete house. We’re going to need some walls, aren’t we?

Oh definitely, but that’s not my area of specialisation. I’ll write you a referral to a wall guy.

You can’t do the whole thing?

No, I just do the basics. You’ll need to see a specialist for the rest.

So you’ll call him and give him all the information about the plans and the building and so forth?

No, no. I’ll write you this letter and you can make an appointment.

How will he know what’s already been done?

It’s in the letter.

In detail?

No just a summary. Look, he’ll go through it all with you when you get to see him.

So we start again?

To an extent, yes. He needs to do his own diagnosis.


Three weeks later, at the meeting with the wall guy.

I have your letter. Seems you’re hoping to build a house?

That’s right, I’ve given all the details to the last guy.

Yes, well I don’t have those in front of me, just go through what you’re hoping to build.

[explains]

Right, well the foundations appear to be OK. But you’re going to need to be measured up for some windows, I’ll write you a referral.

Didn’t the foundations guy get a whole stack of surveying done?

Yes, but I don’t have the results and he probably didn’t ask for window measurements so I’ll get you to have the measurements done to make sure we have everything we need.


Two weeks later, once the windows have been measured up.

Excellent. They appear to be the right measurements.

So what do we do now?

Well now we schedule you to get some walls built. Do you have private insurance?

Yes.

Great, well I can probably start next Thursday. Based on what we find on the site, we’ll put up the outside walls then we’ll make another appointment to get the internals done.

When will it all be finished?

Honestly, it depends what we find. If the foundations are OK, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of months. If there a problems with the foundations, we’ll have to start again.

Do you think there might be problems with the foundations?

Well, they’ve been sitting out there in the rain for a while so we’re never really sure. Just grab the 20 page admission form on the way out.


Three months later – the walls are up.

I think those walls look very good.

Well, yes, but I don’t have windows or a roof. I thought we measured for those?

We measured for windows but that was just to make sure that we left the right space for the window fitter to come in.

You don’t fit windows?

No, not my area.

Roofs?

Definitely not. Specialist area. I’ll need to refer you to a roofer. They can be a bit difficult to get into, long wait sometimes. We’ve only got one or two practising in town – problems getting liability insurance, working up that high.

Won’t we get water damage on the frames and foundations in that time?

It is a possibility.

Well, what do I do about that?

Look, I’ll write you a prescription for a tarpaulin. Apply that to the site. It’s not a complete guarantee but it should tide you over ‘til you get to see the roofer and the window fitter.

What if the whole thing starts to fall down in the meantime?

Oh well then, if it’s an emergency, you go to our emergency department. They’ll assess the situation.

So I tell them the whole story from scratch again?

They’ll need all the information, yes.

What will they do?

They have two options, they can shore the structure up and send you back to your foundations guy or they can complete the build themselves.

They can do the whole job?

Certainly. They have all the specialists and all the equipment on site. I work over there two days a week.

So why don’t I go to them in the first place?

No, the ED is only for critical cases.

So we have to wait until it’s all falling apart before we can do the whole build in one go?

Yep, that’s how it works.

He kept himself to himself

It is inevitable that, in the aftermath of the latest shock discovery of women kept chained in basements for thirty years, or the Black Widow with half a dozen husbands stuffed up the chimney, that a bewildered neighbour will say “He was very quiet. Never any trouble. He kept himself to himself.”

I just want to scream at the TV, “Why are you so surprised? That was the warning sign!”

Our heads are dangerous places; we should not keep ourselves to ourselves. Our personal internal realities were put together by Microsoft; they are not naturally stable, sane or well regulated environments.

People selling unlikely products with the dubious quality of not being available in stores know this well. Like vampires, they lie in wait until dark, until the wee small hours of the morning when you’re watching TV because you can’t sleep, the house is quiet and the world outside seems a long way away. Then they come at you out of the shadows and tempt you with the unearthly delights of tightened abs, knives that will take the front of your shoes off or vacuum cleaners that will not only suck up everything - including unwanted party guests - but will turn your home from black and white to colour and give you a sexier set of legs to match. While you’re in their unholy grasp, they lure you into three easy payments of $39.95 (plus $466 postage and handling) and you’re theirs. If you had someone to check this idea with, it would never have passed the laugh test.

Rare indeed is the person whose own company is good company. For those few, the internal heavens explode into coruscations of brilliance and wonder and we get the likes of Cavendish, Einstein or some of the authors of our finest works of literature. For many though, the internal realm is haunted by dark shades of self-recriminations, unrequited desires for power, simmering, acidic pools of vengeance and untamed, stalking libidos.  And it’s made worse by access to the Internet where one can choose to see only what one wishes so see – and disregard the rest.

Even for those whose sanity has not been forced into involuntary redundancy, living life informed only by a computer screen and never being contradicted by another human being has some unhealthy consequences. Anyone who has a manager can confirm this:

“The report said the project has missed its milestone!”

“Yes, but it’s only by a day and we’re back on track now. If you come out to the site you can see …”

“I don’t care what I can see on site, my report says we missed a milestone. I can’t give that to the board!”

“Well, the reporting template was due three days before month end and the milestone came in one day late.”

“Just fix the report. I don’t want to hear excuses, I need to meet my KPIs.”

Early Christian mystics and Himalayan gurus also, famously, kept themselves to themselves, sitting atop poles or in high mountain caves, occasionally dispensing wisdom - probably in exchange for gifts of haemorrhoid cream. And they came up with some pretty peculiar ideas, but nothing that might have had some practical use like elevators, telephone advice lines or what to do with the growing pile of sh*t at the bottom of the pole.

We need to feel like we’re being watched. Not in a creepy NSA kind of way but just enough to keep us in line. For most people, knowing that someone’s watching keeps them from such minor transgressions as picking their noses, running around without their daks on or buying yet another “Best of the 80s” album in the hope that the music will bring back the intense emotional experiences and joie de vivre that characterised adolescence. For others, they need the angel on their right shoulder to keep the devil on the left from taking control and talking them into becoming a taxation auditor or other acts of iniquity.

Dawkins et al argue that we don’t need God or religion to behave in a moral way, our own informed consciences should be enough. Maybe so, but some consciences are informed by demons and, without Don Camillo’s Christ reprimanding them sometimes, bad things ensue.

We are, to quote Sir Terry Pratchett, not naturally paid up members of the human race. We need to be bounced around some by the Brownian motion of society to remain sane. “Keeping himself to himself” is a symptom of a deep and disturbing problem, not a neighbourly virtue.

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Notes:

“daks” is an Australian slang term for pants.

Don Camillo is the lead character in a series of eponymous short stories by the Italian journalist and author Giovanni Guaresci. Don Camillo is the parish priest of a fictitious village in Piedmont (Italy) and the crucified Christ over the altar of his church speaks directly to him and regularly admonishes him for his sins. Very funny and worth reading – here’s a sample http://www.peteyandpetunia.com/DCamillo/Don%20Camillo.htm

The Terry Pratchett reference is to “Men at Arms”

OK I admit it, I'm lost

I thought my luck was in last Tuesday. I went to buy a pie and a chocolate milk for lunch and the attractive young lady behind the counter asked me “Would you live to wave or insert?”

Now I normally have to pay for dinner before one of those two options is presented to me and, as a man of forty with a married look on my face and one too many of those meat pies under my belt, I don’t get that kind of offer very much. I was flattered.

Thankfully, just before I embarrassed myself in front of a large lunchtime crowd, I realised that she was asking me how I’d like to pay for my cholesterol hit. I fumbled my way through the PayWave process (which allows you to become indebted with a mere flick of the wrist) and made off before someone read my mind and wrote a blog about it.

When I first got an ATM card, it was all good. I knew my PIN, I got which side the magnetic stripe had to be when I used EFTPOS (usually on the second try) and that was that. I also carefully developed an impossible to forge signature for credit purchases. Now none of that is good enough. I can wave my card at the machine and not sign anything, I can swipe my card and sign or I can insert my card and sign or PIN – an acronym which, against all the odds, has become a verb as well. Soon my signature will become defunct and I’ll have to PIN – which apparently doesn’t just mean posting random photographs on a virtual wall somewhere – or just wave my card in the general direction of a store. Sometime early next year, I expect my bank to announce that simply staring too long at products will automatically charge them to my credit card. I wonder what I’m going to do with all those bras.

I also got it when my bank told me I needed a password for my online banking. I love online banking; I never have to talk to a living soul or feel that slightly queasy feeling you used to get when you knew the teller was looking at your balance.

Now, a password isn’t good enough. Firstly, it has to be a pass code that Alan Turing and the ladies of Bletchley Park would give up on in despair. It needs to have three capital letters, two non-alpha-numeric characters and no resemblance to my name, your name, my kids’ names or, indeed, any word in any known dictionary. Then I have to have a four digit PIN to complement my password and I can’t just type it in, I have to click the buttons on the ever changing virtual keypad. Then, every so often, I have to be able to remember what I thought my favourite flavour of ice-cream was on that confused day, five years ago, when I set up the security questions.

And I have to do this for every single service I have; mobile phone, social media, banking, electricity account, kids’ school extranet, university servers etc. They all have different rules and passwords and they all need to be changed at random intervals.

Could we not just have one day a month when every password on the planet is changed and one standard for what passwords must look like? I’d even be happy to pay an extra $100 a year in income tax for the government to manage some kind of identity verification service.

When I finally get access to my money, such of it as the kids have left me, I go on the increasingly futile hunt to find something to spend it on.

I want to buy a new widget so, being a man of the 21^st century, I run a quick Google search. Now I have to try to differentiate between the people that are truly selling the product to me, those who are just advertising the product on someone else’s behalf, and those who are advertising the fact that other people are advertising someone else’s widget and are making money every time I click through yet another layer in their labyrinthine maze of pop-ups, prizes and surprising offers only available to men over 40 living in my area.

Including this one. What the hell? Does she have a polar bear coming out of her arse, is it an emphatic statement of “no means no”, or is there a metaphor there I’ve failed to grasp.

 

So I’ve defeated the Minotaur and gotten to an actual retailer. I am tantalised by their offers, impulsively add exciting merchandise to my cart – it took me, as an Australian, some time to realise that we weren’t talking about the virtual version of the suicide machine my brother and I made to roll down hills on there – and eagerly proceed to the checkout.

Now I have to choose whether I’d like it delivered express, super express, deluxe or regular post. There’s no explanation of what the difference is or how they propose to get stuff to me any faster than planes can fly, so I just have to assume that the extra money I pay for the super express is used to bribe Customs officials to put my parcel on the top of the pile. I sort out how I’m going to pay for the goods, create yet another account (and choose another flavour of ice-cream) and then the site tells me that the goods can’t be shipped to my country because Australian Lego bricks are a different size to those sold in the US or some mate of the Prime Minister’s has the market for those books sewn up in this country or some other highly technical and utterly incomprehensible reason.

 

So I give up. As a married man I hate to admit it, but I’m not driving at this point so, I admit it: ‘I am completely and utterly lost’. I might just stick to beer. I can still get that at the pub on the corner – for the moment.

Please share this via email, social media or carrier pigeon so that we can crowd source a solution to the polar bear problem

As the crisis unfolds

We interrupt your regular broadcasting to bring you this breaking news.

1000km off the north Queensland coast there is a low pressure system that might, if the winds hold and the atmospheric pressure stays constant and the monsoon trough doesn't move and Jupiter aligns with Mars, turn into a cyclone sometime during this week. There is the very real possibility that it might come over the Queensland coast at some point between Cape York and Brisbane.

Our rolling coverage of sweet bugger all starts with Jemma Alford live from Townsville.

Jemma: Thanks Bert and allow me to congratulate you on "very real possibility" in that intro and segue; conveys a sense of urgency and crisis without actually saying anything at all. Let me continue to build an atmosphere of impending catastrophe by delivering a report laced with words like "braced", "anxious" and "smashes".

Well, as you can see, the locals here in Townsville are going about their daily lives pretty much as usual but out there, just off the coast, catastrophe could well be building. Let's inject some verisimilitude at this point by cutting to an interview with a meteorologist standing in front of some computers showing some high tech graphics of swirling clouds and other geeky sciency stuff.

Meteorologist: Well there's nothing there at the moment but, yes, the possibility does exist that a cyclone could form out there in the Coral Sea over the next few days. It's a very unstable situation out there at the moment and the level of uncertainty is high.

Jemma: An unstable and uncertain situation, something that will be preying on the minds of anxious locals here over the next few days.

Bert: Thanks Jemma. We will cross back to Jemma for further updates as the situation unfolds. In the meantime, let's try to give the illusion of substance to our fact-free diet here by showing you a montage of shots from previous cyclones. We'll add some dramatic music and a three-testicle voice over to enhance the effect. For those not really paying attention or actually listening to anything we're saying, you'll start to believe that we genuinely have something to talk about.

[montage]

Bert: I'll just nod a bit with a meaningful and concerned look on my face for a few seconds to add gravitas to that. We'll cross now to the Queensland Premier who has flown to the site of the hypothetical disaster, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and hard hat to make it look like he's going to do something useful.

Premier: Certainly this is a potentially grave time for Queenslanders. I've activated the emergency plan and the people in our ops centre are standing by ready to assist. There's a bit of stock footage of the centre available if you need to give viewers the sense of people rushing around managing things. There will be a crisis meeting of the state cabinet this afternoon.

Bert: The Premier there. I'll avoid asking the obvious question about how a meeting, crisis or otherwise, is going to make an iota of difference to anyone - particularly because cyclones are well known in this part of the world and the plans have been in place for years. Back to Jemma now in Townsville.

Jemma: Thanks Bert. That last point is particularly telling. I was going to interview the head of the local SES but he refused to say anything like "potentially destructive" or "urgent preparations" or "expecting widespread damage" so we had to let him go. I have with me, instead, the head of the local amateur meteorologists and cyclone obsessives group, Mr Jed Tyler. Mr Tyler, do we have a real crisis on our hands here?

Jed Tyler: Certainly, Jemma. All the modeling shows a storm crossing the coast sometime between 2 and 2.30 AM on Monday. It should cross just over us here in Townsville.

Jemma: How strong is it likely to be?

Jed: I think this is the bit where you asked me to mention Cyclone Yasi? Excellent. Well, we're looking at a system that's a category1 or 2 but could spin up to category 3 which is similar to what we experienced here in Townsville during Cyclone Yasi which was a 4. We had a lot of damage in that storm. A lot of Townsville is low lying and areas like here on the beach could well cop the brunt of the storm. Storms at category 3 or even 4 are very destructive and if we were to get one, we would certainly see large numbers of houses damaged, trees down and many thousands of people would have to be evacuated.

Jemma: Thanks Jed, that was fantastic. Lots of good emotive words and vivid imagery there and we know from experience that the viewing audience will ignore the qualifiers and the uncertainty and just gorge themselves on the sense of vicarious panic. Back to you Bert.

Bert: Yes Jemma, well done there. Local residents will certainly be bracing themselves in preparation for the cyclone which could slam into the coast any time over the next few days. We return you now to your regular scheduled programming.

It's the end of the world

And I looked and I beheld the father sitting on the lounge and at the right hand of the father sat a cup of coffee.

And the father spake saying "There will be silence in heaven for half an hour"

And the heavenly host praised the father singing

"Blessed are you who have spent all day chasing the kids around.
For you have taken them to sport and put band-aids on their injuries
And you have admired the Lego creations and
Doneth thou the housework"

And the father sat.

Then the lamb opened the seventh seal

And I heard a voice like unto thunder say

"Daaad"

And I beheld a child with a Samsung Tablet who had, against divine instructions, accessed the PlayStore and found a new game. And the child spake saying

"Dad. This one's for free. Can I download it? Because Alex got one and it's not fair"

And to him was given the power to take away peace from the father for five minutes.

Then the father raised the cup with his right hand.

And I heard a voice like unto thunder say

"Daaad"

And I beheld a smaller child on a push along pirate ship. And poo followed close behind.

And he held in his hands a pair of sandals that he was determined to put on but was as yet unable to due to his infancy.

And to him was given the power to take away peace from the father for ten minutes.

And the father saw that it was good and peace returned.

For thirty seconds.

And I heard a voice like unto thunder say

"Daaad"

And I beheld a third child and he bore a stick. And he spake saying

"He hit me with this"

And I heard the voice of the father saying "Hurtest thou not the brothers or the sisters."

And the father attempted for the final time to drink his coffee.

Then a voice like unto thunder spake saying

"Daaad"

And I beheld a fourth child - an adolescent who could not otherwise be summoned by all the trumpets of the heavenly host.

And she bore a swimming bag and shoes. And she spake saying

"Dad. Rowing starts in half an hour"

And the father poured away his coffee, rolled up his newspaper and, with a countenance like sack cloth, went forth.