Fat of the land.

 For most of us, summer is the time of reckoning. It’s strange how you can convince yourself that you haven’t gained weight until you put on your swimming togs for the first time every summer. They’re your own little fat gauge.

 My neighbourhood seems to be full of gut-busters. Guys and girls gamely strutting along, trying to look as though they’re enjoying the walk. You just know they’d rather be at home with a pie and sauce. It’s the price we have to pay for our lazy western lifestyle. We take the car for even the shortest of journeys these days. We use remote controls, food processors, dishwashers, electric can-openers and all other manner of electrical gizmos which save us time and energy and pile on the centimetres around our stomachs, thighs, and bums.

 Let’s face it, a lot of us drive a car to the office, drive a desk all day, then drive home and slump exhausted into a chair, moaning about what a tough day we’ve had. If both you and your partner work, you may be even so tired with sitting down all day that you phone for a nice fatty pizza because you can’t be bothered cooking. Shame on you. Order a deep-pan Supreme with extra pineapple and bacon, and I’ll be over to help you with it later.

 It’s an easy trap to fall into but take heart; it’s not your fault. We can blame the Americans. First they hit us with their fried chicken and special herbs and spices. Then it was their hamburgers and ‘have a nice day’. Then all-you-can-eat family restaurants: clean, quick and cheap, and we can’t get enough of it. They cash in on our tastebuds’ love of saturated fats and our desire to order in rather than cook. To make this even more tempting, they produce lots of great television and then advertise pizza meal-deals during our favourite shows. This is the thanks we get for winning the war for them.

 So how do we keep in shape with all this temptation? Sadly, it just means willpower. The big causes of weight gain, apart from not walking anywhere near enough, are fats, sugar and alcohol. I’ve found that if you can be tough with yourself and eat fewer biscuits and chips and cut out the grog, the weight will actually go.

 Yes, it’s easier said than done. I don’t think scientists spend enough time thinking about diets. The statistics show that an alarming number of us undertake diets ever year, nearly all reverting immediately afterwards to their old habits. What we need is something to stop the cravings, like smokers have with nicotine patches.

 Why not sugar patches, grog patches, and fat patches? We’re onto something here. It may be a while before science catches up, so experiment. Next time you have a sugar craving, tape a jellybean to your back. That way, if you’re tempted to retrieve the bean and eat it, you’ll think twice. I’m not saying it will stop your craving, but it will give you something else to think about…like will it melt, will it stain and does very cherry flavour work better than the thrill of vanilla?

 Alcohol can be avoided. You simply have to stop being sociable. People can’t insist you have a drink if you’re not there. And the words ‘Drive in’ at the local bottle shop are a suggestion, not a traffic sign. Fat can be avoided. Some avoid it too much but let’s leave Calista Flockhart out of this. Fried foods are a lot easier to avoid in the hotter months. Salad is your friend, salad dressing isn’t. And Cesar Salad isn’t really a salad – it’s just a fancy way to eat bacon and fried bread.

 Of course, the other option is to let it all hang out at the beach this year. There will always be someone there who looks worse in his or her togs than you do. Trouble is, the older you get, the fewer of them there are.

We shall fight them on the benches.

 Humankind is a bit wussy, when you think about it. We’ve put a man on the moon, and we’ve invented all sorts of machines to make our day-to-day lives a lot easier. But really, we’re scared. We’re scared of death, we’re scared of the unknown, but we’re most scared of insects and common-or-garden creepy-crawlies.

 We’re supposedly the dominant species on the planet and we spend a fair bit of our leisure time fighting little creatures no bigger than a fingernail. Take the ant. It has many characteristics we should admire. It has an incredible strength-to-size ratio, brilliant communications and a work ethic which would put most of us to shame. So do we admire them? Do we live in harmony with this remarkable little creature? Not likely. We dust them, pour scalding water on them, spray them, do anything to stop them coming into our homes.

 Then there’s the spider. Now, we do have a few poisonous spiders I admit. But for the most part, they’re just a vital part of the food chain, keeping flies and other insects in their places. Maybe it’s their ability to do something that we can’t even do with aerosols which scares us. Just knowing there’s a spider somewhere in the bedroom is enough to make me spend the night on the lounge. My screams from the bathroom usually mean there’s a huntsman trying bravely to climb the sheer walls of the bath. I try not to kill spiders (ok I don’t try too hard) but if there’s a funnel-web I usually introduce it to a close view of the Yellow Pages.

 And the humble fly. Let’s face it, Australia is run by flies. We try to deter them with screens and silly, beaded, coloured blinds in shop doorways. We make them stick to flypapers, we hit them with knock-down sprays, and we slather ourselves in insect repellent. Someone, somewhere, once hung corks off his hat to deter them. Unfortunately, this was photographed by a travel writer and now most of the world thinks we all wear them all the time. Of course, urban Aussies, happy under our clouds of pollution and car fumes, can keep flies in check. But once you get out in that fresh country air, flies rule. Have as many corks hanging off you as you like, a blowie’s still going to fly into your mouth as you eat your food.

 Don’t forget slugs and snails. They slide, they dare to eat our flowers and vegies; they must be destroyed with pellets or the kinder, more Aussie solution, in a slug pub – funny how letting them drink themselves to death on free beer seems a kind way to kill, isn’t it? Plus it’s a waste of good beer!

 Mosquitoes are a menace too. They are so small, so devious and can carry nasty viruses. So we try our best to put them off. More insect repellent on our exposed bits. And we burn those little scented coils to keep them away – of course; we only have the manufacturer’s word for this. If you weren’t bitten at least once, you wouldn’t bother to buy anymore coils, would you? You can take direct action too – the mozzie zapper. But don’t buy one yourself or you’ll have every mozzie in the street at your back door. No, buy one and give it to your neighbour. Let them have your mozzies and have to listen to that sickening “bbzzzttt” every time a moth hits the electric mesh which, let’s face it, is what moths do.

 Now there’s another one, moths. They eat our clothes so we make our clothes stink to high heaven to discourage them. Their larvae eat valuable Persian rugs – I am ever-vigilant with the camphor.

 However, we save most of our fear and loathing for the cockroach. It’s really just a beetle. Plenty of insects are dirtier, more dangerous, more invasive. Fleas are harder to get rid of and they bite you; dust mites can be a far greater health risk and there are hundreds of them feeding on your skin while you sleep each night. But we don’t seem to mind them compared with the loathsome roach. Maybe it’s the way they scuttle. Or the way they sit, antennae twitching, in your fruit bowl. It could be the old scientist’s tale that in the event of a nuclear holocaust cockroaches will become the dominant species.

 So this unfortunate-looking insect feels the full weight of humankind’s wrath. Surface sprays and baits are now improved so that one infected cockroach kills all his mates. We even bomb our own kitchens to get rid of them. It’s meant to kill all adult roaches and make the eggs infertile. Clever? No. We’ve just solved all their over-crowding problems for them in one stroke.

Chip off the old block.

 Technology is a wonderful thing if it’s used wisely. If you’ve read ‘After the beep’, you’ll know I’m a tad sceptical about whether the telephone is such a crash-hot invention, but there’s no doubting the computer – it’s great. And if you don’t believe me, ask one of the richest men in the world, Bill Gates.

 How many women out there have been persuaded that the family needs to buy a computer to do the accounts and to help the kids with their school work? And how many found out it was just an excuse for the old man and the kids to play video games every waking hour? It may be a lot quicker and cheaper playing a round of golf at home on the computer, but I somehow don’t think it’s doing such great things for your cardio-vascular system. Although anything that saves any man from wearing shorts and long socks is a plus in my book!

 It’s amazing how quickly you pick up the computer jargon about RAM, memory, speed and the like. But more amazing is how quickly your sate-of-the-art PC is outdated. It used to be possible to stay fairly current for about four years. Not any more. I’ve had this machine for about two years and already it’s possible to buy one twice as fast and with double the memory for nearly the same price. That’s an incredible increase in the rate of improvement. It’s like going from the first car, with the man walking in front waving a flag, to the latest Ferrari, in four years.

 If you’re the materialistic type, it makes keeping up with the Joneses a nightmare. Not only do you still need the new car every couple of years, you’ll have to replace the family computer every year, then every six months, every month, week, and so on. If this rate of progress continues, you’ll have that day’s computer delivered to your doorstep with the newspaper. You may think I’m exaggerating and that’s because I am.

 What I find really strange is that a computer is somehow a more acceptable décor item than a television set. Over the years, furniture companies have spent millions developing furniture to make a TV set disappear into a cocktail cabinet or bookcase. But go into many living-rooms today and the PC sits on a table or one of those awful-looking computer desks, completely out of keeping with the rest of the furniture. Nobody seems to care, least of all the pale-faced teenager staring into the screen zapping people into a million blood-spattered pieces while Star Wars-style sound effects make the six o’clock news seem as if it’s live from a war zone.

 But new computers certainly come with all the bells and whistles. And games, do they have games! What used to be a box, a screen and a keyboard now has satellite navigation, internal fax/modem, etc etc.  And your new computer can be a frightening thing, particularly with those powerful speakers. Whenever a warning window comes up, the sound that goes with it is enough to make your heart skip a beat. But soon you get so blasé and ignore anything that doesn’t say, ‘Move away from the screen, it’s about to blow!’

 The only other downside of owning a computer is that there’s no longer any excuse to send a letter with spelling mistakes, unless you forget to make sure you’ve set up the spell-check for Australian English and not American English. (For some reason Americans use a lot more zeds. Or to be precise, they use a lot more zees.) You can simply set up your word-processing program to correct your most common spelling mistakes automatically, check your spelling and grammar as you go, and the words practically write themselves. And the best bit of all is that it even counts the words, which is very handy indeed when you’ve got to fit it all onto.......

How to enjoy the perfect summer’s day.

 It’s summer here in Australia. Summer is not the time of year to be overdoing it. If you do too much, you sweat, dehydrate and are well on the way to heat exhaustion. Summer is nature’s way of telling us to slow down. Which is strange, because everything else that lives seems to speed up.

 I wonder why we don’t grow seasonally, like plants. It would make growing up so much easier. You’d buy winter clothes for your kids and they’d fit perfectly all winter long. Then, when they’re back into shorts for summer, they could grow as much as they like – no need to let down trouser legs or skirt hems. Parents would save a fortune on clothes. If your children were getting too tall, you could make them spend summer in the shade. Likewise, a short winter break up north would soon add a couple of centimetres.

 I wonder why we don’t grow more hair in winter and less in summer like most animals. Think of the savings in haircuts. I digress. I’m here with tips on how to have the perfect summer’s day. You will need:

Weather:

Cloudless blue skies, a light breeze, a touch of wood smoke from a neighbour’s BBQ, and high fire danger.

Sunblock:

The days of thinking a tan means sun protection went out with the electric typewriter and the Sex Pistols. Anyone wearing what used to be called a healthy glowing tan is likely to be an English tourist. Soon, instead of Bronzed Aussies we will be known as Alabaster Aussies.

A hat:

Very important for the follicly challenged male and the teenager with a buzz cut. It should ideally have a broad brim and SP factor of 15 or more. But try making teenagers wear their baseball caps the right way around. They’d rather squint into the sun with their hands shading their eyes. Stops them burning the backs of their necks, I suppose. The older you are, the better the hat you can wear and just not care.

A shirt:

Linen is cool, as long you’re not the one having to hand wash it (not tumble it, not spin it) and dry it flat in the shade. This is a washing instruction which makes no sense whatsoever; the only place I know which is flat and in the shade is the kitchen floor.

Shorts:

This garment was so called because the legs are short. Not any more. Now that it’s a fashion accessory, the defining thing about a modern pair of shorts is that it is anything but short. Some still allow a flash of kneecap, but most teenagers wouldn’t be seen dead in shorts which end any higher than mid shin – the kneecap is about where the baggy crotch comes to. The only place any man can still wear his short shorts without being laughed at is playing Aussie Rules or in his back yard.

Sunglasses:

Very important if you’re to avoid cataracts in later life. Wear silly little John Lennon ones at your peril. The sun gets all around the frames and you end up squinting. I prefer my sunglasses to look like a pilot’s or a federal agent’s glasses. The Australian Cancer Council’s wraparound glasses are very good if you really want your kids to giggle and do Roy Orbison impressions all summer.

A deaf ear:

Not really deaf, just selective. You do want to hear the sounds of an Aussie summer: cicadas, crickets, kookaburras, parrots, cockatoos. You don’t want to hear whingeing kids, barking dogs, lawnmowers and chainsaws. Best stick in the earphones and listen to some music.

 I’d give you some more tips, but frankly it’s a perfect day outside and this is too much like work.