Without a hitch 👍

Today’s episode is about the outdoors and space: how we seek out the outdoors as a reset for our troubles; and how we negotiate physical space with our fellow humans, harmoniously or otherwise. Features:

• Pride, fancy boots and mangoes – when a forest walk, far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, goes awry
• Neutrinos, a haunting road trip and getting frazzled – a foray into the science (my version) of getting overwhelmed
• Murmur...

Today’s episode is the fourth in the Notes from a small house series – short tales of life in and around a small house chock full of animals, people and stuff. 

The theme is habits – the patterns we find ourselves falling into, and the patterns we notice in others, including the good, the bad, and the strange. Features:

• Choosing your preferred parent – kids reveal the truth
• Witnessing the fitness (or lack thereof) at taekwondo
• Posh...

Today’s episode is the third in the Notes from a small house series – chaotic, funny stories from a smallish house chock-full of people and animals. 

The theme is misaligned perceptions – how something perfectly reasonable to one may be anathema to another. Features:

• A smashed face, and what to do about those teeth
• Old cows, barbecues and vegetarianism
• Rabbits in the home, and everywhere, for eternity
• How to be a demotivational spea...

Today’s episode is the second part of a two-part series on language, looking at phrases we use all the time, but which on closer examination are a bit weird, misleading or funny. Features:

• Bears, hares and wondering where – notes on the hilarious linguistic laziness of Kiwi English
• Stars, lasers and taxi cabs – the glorious (and mixed) metaphors of workplace language
• An examination of idioms and phrases I never quite understood as...

Today’s episode is about language and working out what things mean – generally by saying the wrong things first, and then looking back on them to either laugh or cringe. Features:

• Blurts and faux pas – when you don’t know what the right thing to say is until you’ve already said the wrong one
• Demonstrating how irony works to your secondary school students by living ironically
• A rendezvous with a supermarket checkout machine
• A starfi...

Today’s episode is about hitchhiking, and that choice you have to make when someone pulls over to give you a ride: Should I trust this person? Listen to four tales where this was a difficult question to answer. Note: Contains R-rated language and themes. Features: 

• A paranoid fellow wielding a machete and asking where I live
• Looking for love in the wrong places, by a driver obsessed with porn and a shade removed from reality
• Incre...

Today’s episode is about work. It chronicles a series of jobs that I thought were terrible at the time, although perhaps I should have given them more of a chance. I was young, and didn’t yet have much of a work ethic. Features: 

• Riding the zeitgeist and cleaning toilets – epiphanies while working the nightshift
• Kiwifruit, Viagra and the gift of rain – trying and failing to develop a work ethic
• Animal impressions, chess addiction ...

Today’s episode is about teaching, including what it’s like to be a teacher, plus the impression we might form of our own teachers. Features:

• A story of teaching in Japan and trying to melt the ice with difficult colleagues
• The performance of teaching gone wrong, plus trying to balance pet and family life in the background
• Burning out and leaving the teaching profession, including the responses of colleagues, and the guilt
• An almos...

Today’s episode is about school and a little about hard luck – negotiating the slings and arrows of a boarding school in the nineties, and finding the humour in all of it. Features:

• Some background notes on what school is really for
• The story of a duckling, a Vauxhall Viva, and the deep irony of trying to do the right thing but making things much, much worse
• An examination of a really, really big nose, and how (strangely) it was e...