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
• Murmurations, swimming pools and etiquette – a look at the social science of personal space, including why we get so annoyed when people don’t follow the rules
• A poetic bookend from a chronic memoriser 

Support the show

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 cats with impossible standards
• The dragon chicken – on eggs and hoarding
• The ever mug – when coffee never ends

Support the show

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 speaker (or not to be)
• Kihap! like you mean it – a taekwondo tale

Support the show

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

• Reverse sibling psychology
• Photodynamic face-melting therapy
• Artificial intelligence muttering to itself in the next room
• Things kids say to imply they don’t like their dinner and certainly won’t be eating it

Support the show

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

• Inexact questions
• Kids being lawyers
• An avalanche of artwork
• A forlorn-looking dog who can’t make up his mind
• Things kids announce just as you’re rushing out the door for school at 8:59am

Support the show

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 a kid – and still don’t, really

Support the show

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 starfish and a universal theory of humour
• Quaint things your five-year-old daughter says after listening to a lot of Enid Blyton books

Support the show

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
• Incredibly inappropriate humour during a high-speed dash through Hamilton, New Zealand
• Throwing caution to the wind in Japan in the pursuit of maximum freedom, but then hopping in a car with a guy claiming “gun”

Support the show

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 and meaningful work – attempting to be an upstanding museum worker, with mixed results
• Google Doc lurkers – why are people always in that Google Doc, week after week, month after month?

Support the show

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 almost unbelievable tale of a primary school trip to the sewage treatment plant – coordinated by a teacher who truly must have drawn the short straw

Support the show