"You think I didn't play hard? Take a look at that tub. Bathed yesterday. Got that dirty today." I had to clean the ring afterwards, but it was worth it if I could make a witness say, "Oh my God!!!" I suppose I could have taken a shower, but back then, Aussies didn't have showers. Well, yes we did, but we called them garden hoses.

My Uncle Gregory has a magic way with women, and he is a legendary figure among my friends. Greg the Great could romance women in a convent. You'd drop him off out front and an hour later he'd leave with his arm around a nun. A while ago he got married for the fourth time. Each wife has been ten years younger than the one before. My sister and I are scared that if he gets hitched one more time that we'll be walking his wife to school in the morning.

She'll probably be a good cook, though, with that Barbie Super Oven. I love those cakes the size of twenty-cent coins.

I managed to make quite a few friends in Bald Hills. One, Brian Hammond, lived two doors away. To this day, he remains one of my best mates.

Brian is 100% Aussie. He still eats sardines at 5am with a cup of coffee. He once made his mother a change purse out of a moth ball bag, as a present. Brian took the bag, trimmed it, and laced in a drawstring at the top. What mother wouldn't be proud to carry that? I don't know what he did with the actual moth balls. But, given his grotesque eating habits, they probably wound up in someone's secret recipe, with butter and salt.

When I was at university, I briefly shared a flat with Brian. Our place looked like a salute to stuffed animals. Brian had actually apprenticed at a taxidermist's one summer and took home everything that nobody came back to claim, including a goat. Apparently, taxidermy is a male preoccupation. You never hear a woman say, "You know what would look nice over the sofa? A big, dead fish. Wouldn't that look great?"

I've learnt that women don't like anything from a taxidermist. In fact, if there weren't any women, men would have homes full of dead, mounted animals. They'd spend the whole day showing them off to each other.