My nearly 17-year-old Stella got invited by her childhood friend of many years to his formal in Brisbane.

Now, as her father, I know this young man so I’m okay with it.

Naturally I gave her strict instructions on what to do and what not to do, and that I wouldn’t tolerate ANY under-age drinking. I do trust her though ... how naïve can you get?

I dutifully dropped her off at the boy’s grandparents’ place in Brisbane and all seemed well ... until I picked her up the next morning, where I found out that instead of giving her a dozen roses, he had in fact turned up with a dozen Bacardi Breezers.

Needless to say, I gave him the sharp end of a very old cynical, sarcastic tongue. In my day it would have been a corsage.

Clown on a bike cuts it fine

I was driving through Pacific Paradise the other night at about six o’clock. There was traffic everywhere.

A huge line of cars was moving in front of me towards Mt Coolum and an equally busy line was coming back the other way.

All of a sudden, from the left into my lane of flowing traffic rides a man on a bicycle with no lights, no helmet, no shoes and no shirt.

Oh, I almost forgot – and no teeth. He was balancing two bags of groceries from his handle bars.

He stalled momentarily and then power peddled across the oncoming traffic and through a gap no bigger than a redneck’s eyebrow and darted off towards Mudjimba, leaving everyone in his path wondering: “Who was that banjo-playing fool?’’

Now that’s not childcare

I was travelling towards Buderim over that new green bridge with the blue lights that goes to Wises Road when the unthinkable happened.

A fully sign-written Childcare Centre bus with kids on board changed lanes abruptly in front of me without indicating.

If you are going to claim gvernment subsidies and purport to be professionals in the sensitive area of taking care of children perhaps you shouldn’t put the name of the childcare cntre on the side of your bus and drive like that.

That sinking feeling

I have been watching a building go up in Carnaby Street, Maroochydore. It is adjacent to the creek and during all the rain it got flooded miserably.

It was pumped out and they began the foundations.

To my amazement, what they do in wet sand is simply thump telegraph poles straight into the ground in clusters of, say, nine.

They then attach the base for the building to those.

I don’t know about you, but it certainly didn’t fill me with confidence.

I guess it’s an accepted building practice for three-storey office blocks on swamp land ... but I think I’d need convincing.

Come on, Iraq, give us oil

Please someone give me a white flag. I surrender – I can’t take any more.

I bought a diesel because when I bought it, it was the cheapest form of transport. Now it costs me $100 plus just to fill the tank up.

Who the hell would have thought it would come to this and what can we do about it?

Just sit here and get slapped around the head with the shiny end of a petrol pump?

I feel sorry for anyone who relies on petrol to make a living.

To my mind it’s pretty basic – we joined with America and England and liberated the people of Iraq. Surely they can just give us some cheap oil by way of thanks.

Not that we are colonial masters or anything, but isn’t it about time that the guys with the tea towels on their heads in the desert gave us just a little bit of consideration, eh?

Bring on school holidays

What is it with boys, in particular? They are the ones who tell you at 10 o’clock at night: “I’ve got a 500-word essay to hand in tomorrow morning on the internal workings of the combustion engine.”

The girls, on the other hand, make me ill with their attention to detail and nine times out of 10 they are sitting there doing their homework when I pick them up from school.

I can only assume that the boys take after me and the girls take after their mother.