Dear Meaghan Trainor

Dear Meaghan Trainor,

Thank you for your letter of the 18th instant in which you lay out the terms of your proposed prenuptial agreement.

The terms you propose appear, to our client, to consist of the following key points:

That the following material items be provided:

• A date - we suspect that more than one date is implied 
• A ring
• A bouquet of flowers (annually)

We note, however, that, despite your assurance that you will also be earning an independent income (your "9 to 5"), that you are not proposing to provide similar, or indeed any, material items in return.

That the following assurances be provided by our client:

• That you be told that you are beautiful - daily requirement
• That all disputes be resolved by apology from our client and acknowledgment of the correctness of your position
• That he sleep on the right side of the bed
• That his family be visited less frequently than yours
• That he reassure you of the generally positive state of the world ("everything's alright"), despite your periodic erratic behaviour ("acting crazy")
• That he not indulge in sexual fantasies ("have a dirty mind")
• That doors be held open for you
• That you not be left alone.

While our client retains the greatest respect for you, he is concerned that some of these terms seem to suggest a form of mental instability or even illness on your part. The need to be reassured of your beauty on a daily basis seems to imply chronic insecurity while your prediction that you will indulge in frequent bouts of erratic, even insane behaviour is disturbingly suggestive of an underlying mental health issue requiring counselling and, possibly, medication.

Further, your need to be right on all occasions, that you not be left alone, that our client not indulge in sexual fantasies and that that he be isolated from his family are indicative of an immature, needing and controlling personality, with which a long term relationship would not be likely to succeed.

On a personal note, your attempt to rhyme "date", "babe" and "anniversary" is also deeply concerning.

You appear to be offering, in return for these many considerations:

• To purchase groceries and other items of which my client might stand in need - not, however, to provide meals given your stated inability to cook
• To allow my client to provide you with sexual pleasure ("rock my body right")
• Kisses - although these appears to be only a possibility
• To be the perfect wife - this term is highly vague and non-specific

Your ability to write a hook appears to be non-sequitur to this agreement.

Unless further negotiations can be entered into, we are instructed by our client that the terms of your pre-nuptial proposal are not acceptable and that he will not be seeking to be your one and only, all your life.

Yours faithfully

Messrs Galbraith and Fontenuckle
Solicitors

Let's go all the way

"Let's go all the way" - the pained cry of the stereotypical adolescent male. The implication is clearly that he doesn't want to be led by the libido, to a point and left there, promise unfulfilled and frustrated.

As a male who has, perhaps thankfully, long since passed his adolescence, and who has two rows of seats in the minibus full of evidence that I've been all the way there and back at least a few times now, I feel that I should be beyond that kind of un-fulfilled frustration. 

But I'm not. As an adult male and father, I find myself constantly wanting to say to people "Let's go all the way".

Take cafes for instance. The modern cafe is often a "family friendly" affair with crayons, drawing books, games and, in some cases, adjacent parks for the children to entertain themselves. But they don't go all the way. 

What they need is a hoho. Allow the late Sir Terry Pratchett to explain:

"It contained the hoho, which was like a haha only deeper. A haha is a concealed ditch and wall designed to allow landowners to look out across rolling vistas without getting cattle and inconvenient poor people wandering across the lawns. Under Bloody Stupid's errant pencil it was dug fifty feet deep and had claimed three gardeners already."

These places need a hoho to keep children, who should be occupied drawing houses, climbing rope-pyramid things, breaking limbs and/or beating the daylight out of each other, from wandering into the cafe and disturbing adults who have given up on parenting for a little while and would like to spend some quality time complaining to each other about the price of childcare or the state of the job market.

Without a hoho, it's like the market street of a third-world country where you can't commune with the authentic, Chinese made Egyptian souvenirs in peace because of the endless demands of the urchins around you.

And, frankly, I think the kids would enjoy a garden designed by Berthold Studdley "Bloody Stupid" Johnson.

Back to the minibus reference. Modern conveyances of this type feature roof mounted DVD players and multi-zone air conditioning to keep the kids occupied and comfortable during the frankly tedious hours spent traversing this wide, brown ... featureless ... dull ... hot, dry and generally mind-numbing land of ours.

OK, great, but let's go all the way. I want a perspex screen between the front seats and the back. I need to be able to see them, to make sure that the violence has not descended into actual or grievous bodily harm, but I don't need to hear them. London cabs are the model here. I have no intention of mistreating or abandoning them. I'm more than happy for the kids to have a little water tube each and a pellet dispenser that provides food if they press their little notes up against the switch.

After school care is a great thing. Schools run 8.30 - 3 if we're lucky. Real life and real jobs run 8.30 - 5.30 on a good day. Then there's the commuting.

So we hand the kids, and an outrageous sum of money, over to a group of uni kids earning extra drinking money to take care of our beloved offspring in the period between the start of the teacher's nervous breakdown and the commencement of witching hour.

Take them, feed them, let them run around. Great, but let's go all the way.

Do their #$% homework with them! Do you have any idea how difficult it is, at 7pm, after you've worked yourself up into a 3 drink nervy trying to get dinner, baths, notes, washing and ironing done, to get the kids to do homework? How much do you think they (or I) care about meditating for 1/2 an hour a week or making a multi-phase hydrogen powered space-borne telescope out of crepe paper and toilet rolls about an hour before bedtime?

Or a bloody diorama!

Guys, there is some wisdom in the words of the teenage male. Let's go all the way.

You can't see me

When we're little, we close our eyes when we see something frightening because, once we're not looking at it, we know it isn't there anymore. Hiding under the bed sheet protects you on the same principle. This works well for everything from peek-a-boo through to ghosts and monsters and, in the case of certain conservative governments, climate change - if we just stop looking at it and talking about it, it will simply not be there any more.

Or, at least, it won't get any worse.

The same logic works as we get older. In primary school, we know that teachers live at the school. If we think about it at all, we just suppose that they sleep under the desk at night. They certainly aren't real people like mum and dad. Teachers, we think, just sort of blink out of existence when we're finished with them at 3pm and then reappear, magically ready to torture us again, at 8.30 the next morning. This is why seeing a teacher at a shopping centre on the weekend is a major source of disbelief on our part and, depending how much of a little sod we are, a major source of distress on the teacher's. In fact some teachers have resorted to strictly on-line shopping on their doctor's advice because of their ongoing blood pressure problems.

Child development experts tell us that, as a normal part of maturation, we will grow out of all of this. By a certain point in our lives, we're supposed to be able to reason that things continue to exist even when we're not looking at them - the tree will fall anyway.

What I'm concerned about is that many of us - not just half-witted conservative governments - appear to have gotten stuck somewhere along the road to maturity.

I've commented before on the strange habit adults have of expressing gobsmacking levels of disbelief that a child they haven't seen for a while has grown in the intervening period. This is not surprising as most healthy children will do this with very little encouragement or instruction.

Drivers believe that, if they stop looking at the road for a bit to send a trite text message to a friend - that the other cars will have frozen for that moment in time and will still be exactly where they were. They won't, for example, look up to find they're about to go up someone's bum at a fair rate of knots without so much as a "Good evening" or "Would you like a drink?"

Old people also seem to expect, despite their many years of experience with the world, that things won't change. After being heads-down, bum-up (the bum thing's becoming a bit of a theme, isn't it?) for years working and raising kids, they finally raise the weary face to the world again to find that, despite them not watching with raptorus attention to find out what it was doing wrong, who with and who needs their bum (there it is again) smacked as as consequence - the world has gone and done its own thing. And they get pretty cranky about those young people with their X-bleeper-play-station-screen things.

As a parent I suffer from the same case of delayed development. I find myself, many times a day, opening sentences with "Didn't I tell you to ..."

I have four children. After 13 years of experience, what is it that makes me believe that the children will continue to do what they were doing, whilst under the baleful gaze of their father, once that father has gone off to be baleful at someone else? I should know that, when I'm not there, they will stop pretending to be responsible little adults, dutifully cleaning their teeth or playing nicely with their baby brother, and will revert to being children - doing unspeakable things to one another with the toothpaste and experimenting to find out just how far a juvenile human can go when flung from a skateboard.

I think, perhaps, that I conceive of my children as golems; magical clay men that, once given the magic word of parental instruction, will continue to do the set task until I tell them to stop or until they fall off the edge of the world. It's odd that I continue to be so stupid.

Or perhaps not. I saw the movie "Dark City" again the other day and it reignited my fantasy of just being able to get to a point in the night and proclaim "Shut it down!" and everyone and everything would stop. And the world could just be mine for a while.

Ah well!

A brick by any other name

When is an area not an area? When it's a precinct.

My local council is busily converting the foreshore area around Coffs Harbour into a precinct. Being new to the area and keen to see how my ratepayer's dollar are being spent, I looked up the plans on the internet to see what this precinct would mean to me.

It would appear that the first thing to note is that "precinct" is an important word to use if you want to justify massive overspend. The current works are busily constructing about 100m of paved path connecting the end of the jetty - where many people congregate to admire the ocean and enjoy the sea breeze - to the gates of the railway crossing which are less appealing to, and thus less frequented by, the passing citizenry. Quite why the path is necessary at all is the first mystery as most people drive over the railway line and park their fine automobiles in the free beachside land alloted for the purpose. But even more opaque is why 100m worth of paved path is costing $1,300 a square metre - about $1.3m all up. These mysteries were, of course, solved for me by reading the strategic plan. In a plain, everyday "area", that kind of cost would seem like someone got a sweet deal from Uncle Vinnie who's got a seat on the council but, as it's a shiny new "precinct", that kind of cost is entirely justifiable; these are denser, thicker precinct pavers we're talking about here - probably chosen in tribute to the members of the planning committee.

The concept of 'precinct' is also necessary to justify the money that it takes to turn pastel-shaded artists impressions into rock solid wastes of public funds. The artist's impression inevitably shows Fifties dads in slacks and carefree women in summer frocks feeding a delicious picnic to their immaculately behaved offspring at picturesque picnic tables. If it wasn't a 'precinct', it might be fair to note that the reality is more likely to be several thousand dollars worth of seagull latrine placed square in the path of the prevailing wind and thoughtfully provided with no shelter making it hot enough to fry your children sunny side up on most summer days. But it is, in fact, a precinct and special precinct by-laws will ensure that poor avian hygiene habits, marauding ants and other such joys of nature don't importune we ratepayers when we use the facilities.

The final important aspect of a precinct is that it's not possible without a strategic planning document and a comprehensive set of incomprehensible plans prepared for you by a consultant at something north of $200K a go. In our case, these impressive artefacts show in detail how the new precinct will feature large open spaces, just not big enough to do anything useful like play cricket in, and inconveniently meandering paths that serve no useful purpose as they are neither efficient thoroughfares nor picturesque promenades, with ugly things like  roads moved away to a respectable distance and decently hidden behind trees that our grandchildren might one day live to enjoy . These plans are critical, however, to stop the public noticing that all this precintive brilliance is, in fact, replacing large open spaces, meandering paths and otherwise inoffensive carparking placed conveniently close to places you might actually want to go.

But we needn't worry unduly; no-one has to build all of it. The great thing about a precinct is that it can provide a pretext for pet projects. Just slip them into phase 1 of a multi-phase, multi-year, multi-million dollar pachyderm with albino tendencies and you can get away with having them built for four to five times what it would have cost to have them done on their own - if you could have gotten anyone to take an interest in them in the first place.

My life as a wine bottle

There are times when you think academia - or at least people with jobs at universities - couldn't get any sillier. And then you realise that you're wrong.

We now have a thing called "gamification". If you haven't heard of it, have a look at this helpful definition from the source of all truth in the 21st century.

"Gamification uses an empathy-based approach (such as Design thinking) for introducing, transforming and operating a service system that allows players to enter a gameful experience to support value creation for the players and other stakeholders.^[14] "

I honestly don't know what that means, other than that the author should be indicted for crimes against humanity for using words like "gameful" with apparently serious intent.

Apparently it's the approach of turning things that would not otherwise be games into something like a game on the basis that people will then want to do it. You can use apps to play little games with things like how many coffee shops at a particular chain you've gone into, how many places you've visited around the world, how much learning you've done etc.

Then they award little prizes on a leaderboard. Advanced practitioners even award badges - like the ones you got in Cubs, only worth a lot less because you didn't actually have to butcher and cook your own badger to get one - just drink a lot of coffee.

It's like shopping for wine. Every bottle of wine comes with badges - in the tripartite range of Olympic colours - to convince you of the quality of the vinegar contained therein. Closer inspection will reveal that the badges were awarded by an otherwise unknown wine association, made up of the winemaker and three of her friends, who take it in turns to award each other annual gold medals in the International League of Chateaux de Thames Embankment. It's not like Michelin stars that are awarded by a known organisation - for consistency in creating unlikely combinations of improbable ingredients served on large plates, with accompanying silverware and magnifying glass to help you find the portion. These badges certify nothing, but look good, adorned with laurels and clustered on the top left corner of the label.

Gamification is the same thing. I get a badge for completing a course in advanced navel gazing or for managing to stay awake through three staff briefings in a row. Then I'm invited to share my accolades on a social media platform of my choice - or indeed, on all 26 of them.

But, basically, grow up! Life's not a game! If you still need ribbons for participation and little merit awards for managing not to wet your pants two weeks in a row then you have serious developmental issues; and quite possibly one of the weakest internal loci of control I've ever seen.

The experience of adult life is rewarding, fulfilling, intriguing, joyful, meaningful and triumphant. When you do play a game, it's fun. But not everything is fun. Not everything is game. If you do need to live like a wine bottle with meaningless badges on yourself to assure others of your quality then may God have mercy on your soul.

Prosopagnosia - I need a pill for that

Prosopagnosia is a $@*!

It's  a great word and it means the inability to recognise faces.

Prosopagnosia is something that we probably all have to some degree at some time but mine - very mild though it is - seems to be getting worse.

Don't get me wrong, I can recognise people that I know well - like my wife (except for that one time when I grabbed that other lady's bum by mistake - but the charges have been dropped in exchange for an undisclosed settlement) - but if it's someone I've only seen, say a dozen times, I'm just as likely to have no idea who I'm talking to.

I met a guy the other day, chatted amiably to him - drawing on the little library of banal nothings that I keep handy for this kind of occasion - for about ten minutes. Fifteen minutes after that, I saw him again - this time without his sunnies on - and I had no idea who he was; he had to introduce himself again.

It happened a few years ago too. I had always chatted to my father-in-law's neighbour over the fence. I saw her face and so forth, but when she turned up at the front door I had absolutely no idea who she was. It was like Tim the Tool Man's hatted neighbour.

The same thing happens in movies. If the heroine changes her hair colour or puts on a hat, I'm buggered and I have to confirm with my wife if I'm looking at the same person.

Someone tried to teach me a trick whereby you associate a person's face and name with some kind of cute little mnemonic to help your brain recall it when needed. Apparently you can train yourself to do this really quite quickly and true professionals can recall a whole room full of people on one meeting. I tried doing that but it turned out that the mnemonic rather than the name came back to my mind and I only just bit my tongue in time to avoid saying things like

"Ah yes, She-Of-The-Magnificent-Breasts - nice to see you again"

or

"It's been a while Man-With-Mindless-Opinions, how have you been?"

I'm not sure if there's anything else I can do about it. I'm worried that, as I get older, my facial recognition will continue to get worse and I won't be able to tell my own kids apart. In fact, I can't tell them apart now and I fully expect the boys to answer to any male name I yell out - followed almost always by "stop doing that with the filleting knife!"

Is there a pill I can take for this problem? Some kind of electro shock therapy? Is there an app?

Maybe that's my niche. Use the proximity feature of  smart phone to find out who is around me and what their names are. Like a facial Geiger counter - as you move it around the room it has a little display that shows the names of everyone nearby and, when I get within a certain distance of a particular individual, it beeps or whispers their name in my ear or some such thing.

I'm sure there's a market.

Perfume should be used sparingly

I have a daughter and she's entering the age where perfume is something she wants to have and wear. OK, I'm not happy about that because my shotgun licence hasn't come through yet and I'm still building my porch and my rocking chair, but it seems to be unavoidable.

So my wife is teaching her the basics including the idea that perfume should work at an almost subliminal level. Just use a hint and let the subconscious mind of your impressees do the rest of the work. It is not the done thing to walk like PigPen through life, surrounded by your own electron cloud of scent that announces your presence several hours before your actual arrival.

I think this is a lesson that could well be learned by copy writers. Adjectives are like perfume - just a little at the wrists and a dab on the neck will do; you don't need to PigPen your writing with them.

The toilet spray in my bathroom describes itself as "Delicious vanilla with smooth, luscious cream and revitalising freshness". Firstly, it's toilet spray, not something from a boutique bakery so they are probably the wrong adjectives - unless the user is a chromer with refined sensibilities,

(Chroming - in case the word is not universal - is deliberate inhaling of aerosols, paints, glue etc to achieve some kind of high - and presumably do a makeover job on your brain).

Secondly, there are five adjectives in that sentence and I'm none the wiser for it. The imagery created in my mind is not that of a bathroom that someone - ideally someone else - has brought to a wonderful state of cleanliness, it's just a blur. By the time I've waded through this adjectival treacle, I've lost all memory of where I started.

The vacant shop proclaims, in bold lettering, that I will have an invigorating time enjoying the exciting new retail experience that is opening soon. PigPen! All this means is that the shop is "For lease".Or "leasing" or "leasing now" or "grow your business here" or whichever bizarre variant the real estate agent has come up with.

Just as certain scents age, become the purview of grandmothers and finally go extinct, I think it's time to retire certain adjectives from copy writing. "Advanced" doesn't mean anything anymore, nor does "Premium". Although I might be being a little harsh on that last one. "Premium" does mean "the service you actually want for which you now have to pay more than you used to", but it's not a major selling point for your customers.

People who write the copy on products made for children are the worst. Hmm, more correctly, people who write copy on products designed to be attractive to adults who have no idea what to buy for children are the worst. "Endless Hours of Fantastic Fun for the Whole Family!" PigPen! Nothing is fun for a whole family. Board games are just what the homophone would suggest when you're over twelve and under forty. Unless it's Twister in which case it's only fun for the parents - after the kids have gone to bed. And something is either self-evidently fun to kids or it's not. The adjective doesn't make it more so, in fact it sounds kind of desperate. Rather like the adult wandering, lost, through the labyrinth, dying to find something that will keep the kids busy and out of his hair for more than ten minutes. And you know kids can smell desperation like blood in the water. If they think for a moment that you aren't in control, the feeding frenzy will begin.

In fact desperation seems to be exactly what many of our copy writers are suffering from. They have been given the near impossible task of hyping up something that it inherently nondescript. Shampoo, toilet freshener, Scrabble, socks, tomato sauce .... Somehow, even on a bad day, they must struggle to make your use of said product sound like a truly fulfilling and ego affirming experience.

If, of course, anybody ever bothers to read what they write.

I wonder what their job satisfaction levels are like...

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