Author: Stuart McCullough

Saturday, November 17. That was the auspicious day on which I encountered my very first Christmas Carol for the year. I had made a dash for the local supermarket and was engaged in the eternal struggle that is ‘white versus multi-grain’ when I heard the mordant tones of ‘Joy to the World’ wafting through the aisles like a giant dose of audio flatulence. Christmas may well come but once a year, but apparently no such restriction applies to Christmas Carols.
Continue reading “The Tale of a Christmas Turkey”

Don’t speak to me of horse racing. Ever since Mother Nature mercilessly cruelled my ambition to be jockey with a mid-teens growth spurt, I can barely stand to look at a clotheshorse, much less the real thing. Just as a retired boxer cannot sniff even the slightest scent of liniment oil without his chest swelling with regret, whenever the spring racing carnival comes around I find myself thinking of what might have been.
Continue reading “A Day at the Races, A Night on the Tiles”

It’s Bono’s fault. In 1987, the lead singer of U2 unwittingly created the template for young men who saw themselves as inwardly sensitive and poetic. In the music video for their song ‘With or Without You’, Bono wore a leather vest without a shirt and had a ponytail. He also had pierced ears. Suddenly, wearing a ponytail and getting your ears pierced was a way to tell the world that, just like Bono, beneath your adolescent exterior lurked deep pools of untapped emotion. And while such young men may, indeed, have seen themselves as inwardly sensitive and poetic, the world at large simply viewed them as idiots. I should know – I was one of those idiots.
Continue reading “Hard of Earring”

The worm has officially turned. For safety’s sake, it has used its indicator and checked its mirrors before doing so, but there can be no doubt. From this moment on everything is different. Assumptions that have set like concrete over the past four decades now count for nothing. It is officially year zero. That’s because my brother, Cam, turns forty this week. Although many families would celebrate this milestone with cake and some kind of present, I choose to recognise it in an altogether different fashion. Forget signing a card. Or even buying a present. This year, my brother’s birthday is about one simple thing: sweet, sweet revenge.
Continue reading “My Life As A Tyrant”

There’s a moment – when man and machine are so completely fused that it is no longer possible to tell where flesh and bone end and steel and oil begin. It’s a kind of alchemy that cannot be imitated and, once lost, can never be retrieved. I had such a bond for a time. Not with a hotted up Commodore, Falcon or even the family Tarago. I had it with a ride on lawn mower.
Continue reading “Lawn Free: Bliss at Five Kilometres an Hour”

It has come to this. After thousands if not millions of years of steady progress, the human species finally has given up on evolution and decided to grind to a halt. It is clear to me that there can be no going forward after this. As obstacles go, this one can only be described as ‘insurmountable’. For we may have survived plagues, wars and natural calamities with barely a misstep but there is little hope that we’ll ever get over ‘Gangnum Style’.
Continue reading “The Decline of Human Civilization – Part Three”

We made it. Despite everything, we have managed to endure eleven long, tedious months. I’ll be honest and say, at times, I wondered whether we’d ever finally get here. But we have. Thank goodness. For I have long believed that there are eleven months of the year that do little more than take up space on the calendar. When all is said and done, there’s only one month that truly matters. You can keep February. I care little for May and July and can take or leave March and June. They are trivial, meaningless months. The only month that is truly indispensible is Rocktober.
Continue reading “For Those About to Rocktober”

I’d never thought about it much. For the most part, my walls were covered in wallpaper. The chosen pattern, selected in a moment of panic, was of light blue cricketers. This would have made sense if I was fond of either cricket or Smurfs, but as I was not particularly drawn to either, it was simply misleading. No one else had panicked when picking wallpaper. Of my brothers, Cameron chose motorbikes and Lachlan selected spaceships. My sisters chose Holly Hobbie. Only I acted in haste.
Continue reading “Poster Child: Travels with a Slightly Effeminate Humphrey Bogart”

Science is all about taking humankind to a better place. Sometimes this means that long-held beliefs are challenged and that orthodoxy is upended. In the case of the beanbag it meant that we, as a species, had to overcome our prejudice and accept that not all chairs need to have legs. Beanbags were so much more than just a piece of furniture – they were the future.
Continue reading “Viva La Beanbag: Prince of Chairs”

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Why Beelzebub hasn’t made the switch to bitumen is, quite frankly, anybody’s guess. I’ve no idea what kind road surface you get from ‘good intentions’; whether they play merry havoc with the suspension system or offer a superior driving experience, I simply couldn’t say. Then there is the also matter of the road less travelled. Sometimes such a road is less travelled for good reason, such as a lack of quality paving (there are, after all, only so many ‘good intentions’ to go around) or a faulty GPS. But I can’t blame either of these. For me, the road less travelled is precisely that because of brutal combination of being risk averse and laziness.
Continue reading “Postcards from the Road Less Travelled”