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A number of people survive in this world under the misguided belief that they have a book in them. Don't take me literally; 400 pages, of 12pt Helvetica isn't clogging their spleen. They don't have a best- selling hardback jammed under their rib cages, pressing against their bladders. It's stored in their heads, hidden in their memories. Resting there is a grand love affair, a little death, joy, sorrow, success and failure - all waiting to be brought back to life, reborn on the page. If we could flesh out our memory, then we would have a definitive tome, a master work that would justify our life, excuse our existence or just sell well. This novel idea has been around for centuries and I am here to tell you it just isn't true. Most of our lives are a waste, why make them a waste of paper too?

To be completely honest, most of us don't even have a novella inside us, much less a novel. Some might have good copy for an ad, a select few the operating manual for a Camira or an episode of Seinfeld, but the great novel will definitely elude most of us. Why is it a book? Why literature? Why can't we all have one fully realised all-dancing, all-singing musical? And why limit this thing to the arts? Perhaps some of us out there have once great moment of plumbing. One great chest of drawers. One great septic system.

We first hear this lie from the over-eager lips of the English teacher. I cannot recall a maths teacher telling us we all had a unique logarithmic progression struggling to get out, or a science teacher telling us we all possessed the formula for carbon. I was informed of this universal potential in pre-school; what novel did any of us have then? Even now the best I could manage would be a poorly illustrated pop-up book. I once tried to put my story into words but discovered it was a dull read, even for me. I can't imagine what someone else would make of it - less interesting than a shopping list and longer than the Yellow Pages.

Some people do have lives worth recording, but I'm stunned that every Australian sporting hero has found a literary voice. I know I will not be popular for saying this, but I don't care - I have never read a sporting autobiography and never will. Apart from lacing their boots or polishing the ball what can an Australian sporting hero tell us about the nature of man?* That he bites in the scrum? He stares in the shower? God was not a team player?

There is another tragic aspect for those who find the "great novel" inside themselves. Those who spend years spinning gold from the lead of your lives, those who toil over manuscripts and eat, sleep and breathe themselves. A day will come when you've examined and cross-examined your life, when you've run the spell check and word count over it, when you've dotted the i's and crossed the t's. That will be the day when you stand, mentally naked, with 300 pages of typed A4 and ask: "What d'ya think?"

You'll suffer the indignity of getting your life rejected by countless publishers.

Receiving your life back in the mail accompanied by a letter: "Sorry Sir/Madam. We find we are unable..." Alternatively your life may return one day accepted in exchange for a paltry advance. It may be transformed into a limited edition run on poor quality paper for the Christmas market. But before this can happen your life will be edited by an independent hand. A hand that finds '76 to '85 a dull period and cuts that bit out. Or, they suggest your great novel should be 160 pages shorter.

Thankfully most of us will never write a book. We can console ourselves that we are common people and that we have one thing in common: we'll all make it to print at least twice in our lives. It won't be in a fancy book: it'll be in the local newspaper. There'll be one entry for the start of our lives and one for the end.

* I have chosen the "nature of man" here, rather than "human nature", due to the dominance in Australian sport of the male.

On my return to work I decided to clean out my desk. There, stuffed in the drawers, were the collected ravings of '97. Hastily jotted notes, unfinished thoughts and diary entries for things I had forgotten to do.

In the middle of the mess I found a curious pile of hand-written papers. I went to throw them out, but the style of writing intrigued me. I had never seen anything like it before. It was almost illegible, completed in a child-like scrawl with numerous scribbles. Small drawings of severed heads filled the margin and, here and there, the ink was smudged with tears. It took me a while to realise I had written it myself. To help you understand this situation I should give you some background. During 1997 I was co-presenting a breakfast radio program; at the time I was rising for work about 5 in the morning. Due to my other commitments I wasn't arriving home until around seven or eight at night,

This may not have been a bad thing, had I been able to go to bed at that time, but there is something tragic about a grown man going to bed before children and I just couldn't do it. I was surviving on less than four hours sleep a night, which was fine under the circumstances. The problem arose when I stopped sleeping altogether: when bed was the part of the day where I lay still for a hours and stared at the ceiling. Around this time I went a little mad. Below is a transcription of the papers I found.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. What's the use of setting the alarm if you're always awake? How many times can you check a watch in a minute?

Sheep. Last night I counted them, thousands of them, jumping over fences. Well, they started jumping, but that was a bit strenuous. Pretty soon they're bumming fags, standing around the fence or hitching lifts out of my dream. After 200 I was very bored with this whole "jumping sheep" concept. At about 320 they begun o lose body parts to the abattoir. By 480 armies of handicapped ghost sheep appeared; by 660 only bloodless limbs and skinned heads were being tossed over the fence. A pile of offal collected at the base of my dream. I am looking forward to "sleep" tonight. Perhaps I will graduate to cows or even humans.

I am not complaining *. I am fully aware that there are those citizens whose burden is greater than mine. This does not however, prevent me from dwelling on the injustices I suffer in my own life, on of which I a disturbing bout of insomnia. This has given me the appearance of a derelict - a derailed human being, a lifeless Tamagotchi. I have become the social equivalent of Mir: malfunctioning, uncaring, self-destructive and heading to God knows where.

I have tried a vast number of concoctions designed to knock me out. Helpful hippies from all over the country (mainly Mullimbimby) have sent truckloads of herbal remedies: sickening pot-pourri from their bush gardens, evil alchemical recipes of a foul-tasting nature. One bag was filled with what I believe was illegal drugs. Do these people think to cure insomnia I would break the law? I need something synthetic, hard-core, something developed in the banks of Rhine, something that has millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of research put into it. I need something I can buy in a tamper-proof, airtight foil container. Something I can swallow with water. Something from the chemist.

A pharmacist was kind enough to prescribe a legal sedative that doubles as an animal tranquilliser. He claimed just one these innocent-looking capsules could knock over a rhino. I was game and took a couple. By 4am my entire body was comatose, apart from my eyes, which were wired to the ceiling. Is that the alarm? I didn't set the alarm. Why set the alarm if you're always awake?

* Of course I'm complaining.

A long time ago I stayed with a friend from school over the Easter weekend. His parents were ferret-faced university lecturers. Rallying against the commercialisation of Easter, they hatched a unique plan. They sent four children into the yard without having hidden a single egg. We entered the garden full of hope at 11 o'clock in the morning: it was six before the flyscreen door opened again. We were allowed back in the house, our bodies and clothes stained, our anguished faces streaked with tears. My friend's parents smiled and asked us what we had found. We held open our empty hands, they embraced us and said, "you don't always find what you're looking for." Then they added, "You'll never forget this Easter." And the strange thing is, I never have.

It was a lesson in life that made me obsessed with the true meaning of Easter: the egg hunt. Where no quarter is given and none taken. Where cheating by peeping out a window was mandatory. In the egg hunt there will always be winners and losers. Here was a game containing such power it was almost pagan. I would have dragged my bum along a razor wire fence if there was an egg waiting for me at the end of it. Sharing the booty was frowned upon - what you found you had to consume. You became hunter, gatherer, eater: an unholy union of base appetites.

In the pitch of the hunt, nothing was beyond the realms of reason. Even though we knew our parents would never place eggs anywhere that put us in peril, we checked every possibility. We would blindly stick our hands into stacks of ceramic pots, knowing they housed a family of redbacks. We would crawl out on the branch of the old gum knowing it was dangerously close to frayed electrical wires. We would check in the neighbour's yard, aware of his short-sightedness and love of antique guns. (He had once shot the cat with a wax bullet, mistaking it for a rabbit. If we were holding eggs in the middle of his yard, we could easily be mistaken for rabbits as well.)

When you had the prize, you could tell how much your parents loved you. In the family it was one thing: they could try to be impartial, but in the schoolyard it was another. The true test came when you described the type of egg (or eggs) you received the next day at school.

You endured an intensive study convening the nature of the chocolate: if the gift included any other kind of confectionery, the design and style of the packaging and approximate price. Standing alone on the handball courts with your pathetic paper train of caged chocolate eggs, you realised the sad truth was your parents didn't love you.

the tragedy for me is, as an adult, I have not managed to rid myself of the thirst for the hunt. this is the reason I have become unpopular at Easter gatherings. I confess I've pushed young children out of the way to get to the letter box first. I locked an astute child in a cupboard to keep him out of the running. I am the Philby, burgess and Maclean of the quest: I have pretended to be an adult, helped hide the eggs and then swapped sides and joined the kids. Last Easter I crawled along a ledge in an apartment block five storeys above the ground just to get to an egg I had placed there.

My saving grace is that I am not a hoarder. The hoarder is an evil child. Months after Easter the hoarder will still proudly display their stash. This child will walk around untouched by the Bacchanalian excesses of the chocolate frenzy. The days of pain that traditional follow Easter will not affect them.

Now let us spare a thought for the eggs we never found. The ones who never returned. they're still out there. Thirty went out and only 28 made it home. Tucked away under the blades of the Victor two-stroke, shoved down the side of the compost bin or in the back of an unused tool kit. They're out there somewhere, in every backyard across this nation - the eggs that never came back

The world is shrinking, or perhaps we have simply outgrown it. Everything arond us continues to become smaller as we grow larger, more obscene and more obese. The offenders are electrical goods, cars, computers and mobile phones: it's reached the point where my gargantuan fingers cannot press the miniscule numbers on my phone's keypad, assuming I can find it and it hasn't slipped down the back of the couch. The damn things are so diminuitive they are harder to find than the remote control.

This desire to constantly reduce contravenes the natural order of things. Obsessed with the concept that 'less is more', we are scaling down, rationalising, reducing objects once considered as perfectly acceptable size to working models. The saddest aspect of this universal shrinkage is what it's doing to the book. Little books are everywhere, in plague proportions, tumbling from the counters of shops to the call of the cash register. Last week I found myself in a bookstore...

There was a dismayed look on the face of the aged Nimbin techno-bunny behind the counter as she shook her head in disbelief, unable to understand how anyone could purchase a book called 'Clinical Signs in Physical Surgery' on a Sunday. She attempted to direct my gaze to he mass of Lilliputian publishing with more evocative and pleasing titles: Pleasant Thoughts from the I-Ching, The Little Book of Calm and Making Love Last. There they sat, pointless point-of-sale books and 'stocking fillers'. Meditations on maintaining tranquillity, sanitised collections of poetry and health giving inner-city lifestyle cookbooks with just a pinch of Eastern mysticism. Little books to saisfy the little urge to spend, or the ineffectual desire to become a better person, or a gift for that -not-so-special someone you don't think too much of, but have to give a little something.

I believe, in regards to the book, that size is important; perhaps not width, but definitely size. By far the most docile are the collections of vulgar contemporary truisms hatched by some feeble-minded,, post-mid-life crisis ex-trauma counsellor. They possess as much honesty, warmth and insight into life as a Nescafe ad. Open any page and you'll find a single line of life affirming drivel: the world is a better place with you in it, like the sunflower you follow the sun, the mandarin must be first opened to savour its fruit...It's not that I am set against the idea of little books, its just these little books. Why do they have titles that only appeal to brain-dead dolphin lovers? Why can't they be ballsy? The Little Book Of Anger, Don't Meditate - Obliterate, Runes are Crap, Great Swear Words of the Twentieth Century, Killing for Fun and Profit.

As I leave the store my 'normal' sized book feels large and cumbersome in my hand. In the digital age of micro-wonder I have the literary equivalent of an ancient analogue brick, a book that will weigh down my body as much as my mind. I couldn't escape my own paranoia, it assaulted me in nauseating waves. This hard bound tome could never fit in my pocket. Can I read this on a bus? Will these graphic depictions of catheter placement serve to uplift my spirit?

I wait for the day when the big things return. When a retro-wave of technological nostalgia will drag us back to things immense. Who wants a mini-disc when you can have an eight track cartridge? International book prizes now accept 'books' that don't exist as 'books' - internet 'books', paperless paperbacks that can be read off the screen, down loaded onto A4 and bound with a staple. Will the book as we know it be' rationalised' out of existence? Are these tiny tot tomes the first stumbling steps in that direction?

These moralising life-savers - morsels of nothing that are meant to nourish your flagging spirituality - give a little information, and in the wrong hands a little information is a dangerous thing. You will not read them in one sitting, or return to them religiously because you are so engrossed in the storyline. They're designed to be read in a moment of boredom: to be flicked through in a search for something 'relevant'. For once it would be better to turn on the TV, but unfortunately they've made the remote so small you can never find it. The only thing that defies this frightening trend are the weekend papers. These travesties of commonsense get more bloated every week.