The beauty of sucking at things
Barry’s keyboard About this time last year, I got bored of the guitar and bought a Yamaha Piaggero…
Whatever happened to Alternative Ann?
Compliant me, defiant me I have a friend who used to call me “Alternative Ann” back when we…
Coronarhythms
I know everybody is saying Good riddance! to 2020 but for all the chaos, I like to think…
Do what gives you life
Do what gives you life. That’s what some of my expat friends used to say, with tongue in…
Pinch yourself and hit send
One my favourite simple pleasures in life is rediscovering songs from the 90s - and in particular, the one-hit wonders. My most recent nostalgia hit is Pinch Me by the Barenaked Ladies. Remember them? Yeah!
Ten years ago to the day, I posted this brief status update to Facebook (in the third person - I guess that's how we did it back in the olden days).
Intriguing! So ... what was my youth all about again?
Reclaiming convenience
If you’re anything like me, you’ll occasionally stumble into extended conversation with a random. It doesn’t happen quite…
Law, Music and other big nouns
Article 72 of the Third Geneva Convention (on the rights of Prisoners of War) specifies that POWs must be…
First date poetry and other awkwardness
I once went on a date where I was asked to read some poetry aloud. It was one of the most awkward things I've ever had to do.
Reading out somebody else's poetry was intimate in all the wrong ways.
The Eurovision you know and love
The Eurovision you know and love.
The song was perfect. The dress was perfect. The hype was perfect.
Okay, so in hindsight we were never going to win the thing. But for a long moment there they really made us believe it was possible.
And the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest 2016 is … a Korean-born Australian? One who would have celebrated not with champagne but with a glass of lemonade?
It was too good to be true. For all the logic that Eurovision famously doesn’t follow, this perhaps would not have been in the spirit of Europe - not the Europe of the twenty-first century ...
Hillsong: Behind the hype
Lights. Camera(s). Action. Coloured light sweeps the stage, the drum kicks into gear, the first guitar lick penetrates the…