Outings with toddlers are so much fun.

The day the local anaesthetic didn’t work during my vasectomy procedure was my most torturous, until we recently went on a family outing during the school holidays. If you too wish to ensure a family outing provides you with as little enjoyment as possible, it will help if you do the following.

1. Your memorable family outing should be attempted while sharing the company of a partner and two sickeningly recalcitrant toddlers, preferably aged one and three. Failing this, any children under five will suffice. If you don’t have access to children take anyone who makes you want to kill either them or yourself.
2. Choose a popular tourist attraction to visit during holiday season – to ensure queues and crowds are at optimum levels – such as the Blue Mountains. This is particularly effective if you suffer from anxiety disorders that are triggered by queues and crowds.
3. Before departure, check with the Bureau of Meteorology to make sure you go on a day where persistent torrential rain is expected.
4. Travel on public transport. Unintentionally sit in a quiet carriage on a packed train for two hours and try to keep your toddlers quiet for even two minutes. Grimace as if you’re constipated when people who seem to hate your children only slightly more than you do, stare at you with utter disdain.
5. Make sure one, if not both of the toddler’s shit themselves on the train trip. Try and clean up the mess in a tiny, rancid toilet that was last cleaned in the 20th century and appears to have been recently inhabited by a junky who left behind a festering needle for the kids to play with.
6. Time the arrival at your destination to coincide with category-4 cyclonic weather.
7. Spend fifteen minutes frantically looking for your wife’s bus pass only for her to find it in her pocket.
8. Let your wife (or whoever is most geographically useless) ask for directions then follow him/her like an idiot in the rain for ten minutes until you realise the bus stop you need was only 50m from where he/she initially asked for directions.
9. Arrive at your desired tourist detination – in this case the Three Sisters – when the weather has closed in so badly that visibility is the equivalent of being confined in a prison cell with a working smoke machine. (Think very carefully about using the poor visibility to sneak off on your family to find a pub to sit in for the day).
10. Go to the cashier at Scenic World only to be told that tickets for the Skyway, Railway, Walkway and Cableway won’t be sold for two hours because there are too many visitors to cater for. Get a family member to curl up in the foetal position on the floor, suck a thumb and start crying until the cashier says, ‘Please get up, Sir, it appears there are tickets available for you immediately.’
11. Spend half an hour queuing for the Scenic Railway first (the steepest in the world). Make sure you sit at the back of the ride so that when one of your children inevitably regurgitates their breakfast, lumps of it strike many more passengers than it would if you were sitting at the ride’s front.
12. Join a 75-minute queue for the Skyway, avoiding eye contact with as many as possible of the 47 people your child’s vomit hit on the Scenic Railway. The Skyway traverses the magnificent gorge up to 270 metres above the ground. This you know only from reading the plaque as the cloud was so thick you might as well have been standing in an elevator.
13. When ready for the return trip home (just before hypothermia sets in), stand smugly at the front of the bus queue, waiting for a bus that pulls up 15 minutes late and 50 metres away from where it is meant to. Everyone should run to it, leaving you standing, not so smugly at the bus stop in the rain.
14. When the next bus arrives 25 minutes late, your children should be asleep in the pram and silent for the first time in ten hours. All going well you’ll get a bus driver who insists you collapse your pram before boarding. Explain to the driver you’d sooner set yourself on fire than wake your children.
15. When this fails get your wife to communicate to the driver that collapsing the pram won’t make any difference to the available room on the bus because prams are generally larger than tanks these days. At this point the bus driver will tell your wife that she will be blamed for any passengers who can’t fit on the bus. Your wife will then tell the driver to go fuck himself and you’ll be forced to wait in the rain for the next bus that won’t arrive until 45-minutes later.
16. Before eventually making your way to the train station for the two-hour journey home, sit your toddlers down and plead with both of them to spend the entire trip home acting as if they suffer from every condition ever recorded in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
17. On the train journey home pretend you’re going to the toilet and stand in between carriages by yourself, hoping that the burning-rubber-train-smell kills you instantly. When it doesn’t, consider getting off the train at Mt Druitt where you’ll definitely be killed instantly.
18. Catch a bus home that stops at the SCG. Here, passengers board who have been drinking and having a great time all day at the football. Feel the beginnings of a facial tic in the corner of one eye as you smile at them like a maniac.
19. Arrive home, trip over on your son’s skateboard and ask your wife if she has the phone number for Lifeline.
20. Realise that your vasectomy was performed three years later than it should have been.

Happy holidays.

How to – golf

If there’s an idiotic activity (Tupperware parties aside), men are most likely to be its majority participants. Golf is the prime example, as the single greatest substitute to personal growth man has ever created. Golf is the white flag of life.

Invented in the inhospitable climate of Scotland, it’s difficult for emotionally mature people who strive towards a meaningful existence to imagine the extent of boredom, denial and/or matrimonial disharmony required for a bloke to venture outside in arctic conditions, pick up a stick and commence hitting a rock or frozen piece of shit around a farm.

Meek, uninspired men all over the Scottish countryside are soon wandering, defeated, around sparse fields, warding off pneumonia, playing golf. A tribe for like-minded souls has purposefully been created wherein a male’s denial can prosper unabated.

A sport, and I use the term loosely, has evolved due to man’s inability to cope with that which life has presented him. People from the United Kingdom also call darts and pool sport. Australians would know these as activities played by raging alcoholics and people who experience difficulty making friends, respectively. At best a leisure activity, golf like darts and pool can be played by the morbidly obese.

Some Scottish women got suspicious. What on earth could their ‘soul mates’ be doing that takes them away from child rearing and grown up responsibilities for a similar amount of time as regular employment?

‘Hey, you can play too,’ the men say, knowing full well that after two games, most women will be bored shitless, not to mention incredulous, that a male could be involved in an activity more stupid than even she thought possible.

Strangely, some women continue to playing the torturous game. The men immediately implement their contingency plan and female golfers are forced to play separately from the men. Because, there’s nothing like a bit of sexism to rival the game’s institutionalised racism.

What it is that motivates women to persist with golf is best answered by women, but for what it’s worth, men who attend Tupperware parties do so because they are directionless embarrassments to their gender.

Contemporary golf has developed into something more than a leisure activity played by some of the planet’s most noteworthy narcissistic wankers such as Greg Norman, Tiger Woods and Robert Allenby. It is also an industry catering for all of the simple male creature’s needs.

Aside of it’s main function of providing men who have no idea of what to do with their lives with an outlet, golf caters for retail therapy, holidays and an excuse to drink. But, men love conversational relevance more than anything and they’ve found a way to get it with golf. The complexities attached to what is essentially a game where you count the number of times you hit a ball with a stick are spellbinding. By creating scoring formats like Ambrose, Stableford, Matchplay, Scramble etc. golfers have unknowingly acknowledged the tedium of their own sport, but have given men the opportunity to converse as if what they are talking about is not a very strange way to spend a few hours.

Should you ever get stuck talking to someone who has just played a round of golf, the best thing to do is immediately commit suicide. You will save yourself a lot of pain.

Don’t ever ask a golfer what time they are playing. Because when they answer 7.32am or 11.46am with a straight face, weirdly, you’ll feel like the moron in the conversation.

For the man truly disconnected from his friends and family golf can be viewed on mobile phones. As if it’s not hard enough to find the fucking ball on a golf course.

Complete silence is expected when golfers are playing their shots. This provides an insight into why no golfer has ever been a decorated war veteran.

On a golf course you can yell and scream like a lunatic while throwing stuff like you’d really like to at home or work. The beauty of doing this on a golf course is that a maximum of three emotionally immature men will witness it and that the police will never be called.

Driving ranges are the most fun part of golf. You can belt the shit out of as many balls as you like without having to walk after them and find the fucking things.

As someone who used to play golf on a regular basis, take it from me, you are much better off marrying someone you love.