The online version of The Age (yes, I know, dead horse, we've covered this) was last night running with the whacky headline, "Mother's Fury at Body Bungle" to describe one of the more repulsive stories of the week, namely that an Australian soldier died in Baghdad under mysterious circumstances and the wrong body was brought home to Australia.

Mother's Fury at Body Bungle. Really. Sounds like a story about surgery gone wrong.

Still, at least this morning they've realised it's serious. "How Could This Happen?" demands the front page of The Dead Horse this morning. And just below, there's a VOTE where you can HAVE YOUR SAY.

For real news and interesting articles, check out this.

By the way, I finished two of the essays by my bed by Alistair Cooke. Look out writers' festival, here I come...

In training for the Sydney Writer's Festival, I've decided I need to finish the books I've started (those on the top of the pile next to my bed). Until then, I'm not allowed to buy or borrow new ones because I don't deserve them.

Over the years, I've become a hopeless reader. When I was a kid, I used to read every book from cover to cover, and then read every other book by that author, in order of books written. Now, I'm hopeless.

You know on your computer, if you press ALT and TAB at the same time, it flicks between one program and another? That's how my life works. There I am, working on a film and then ALT + TAB I'm also working at the Comedy Festival but ALT + TAB I'm working at the Law Foundation and ALT + TAB I'm working at Radio National. All the other windows are open and the programs are running and stuff, but I'm flicking between them all the time, so I never quite optimise my experience.

That's how I read, too. I've had Alan Bennett's new book (which is so funny and brilliant) next to my bed since I ordered it online so I'd get it before anyone in Australia could claim to have read it before me. Several ALT + TABs later and I still haven't finished it but I've read several Joanna Murray-Smith plays, two brilliant scripts by Tom Stoppard and the beginning of a book called Boyhood by Coetzee. I also started a book by Will Self but I lost it down the back of the bed somewhere and I wasn't sure I didn't resent and despise it anyway, so at least this way I don't have to find out.

I do feel so guilty about these books I don't finish. It's a form of infidelity, not unlike when you have to turn off a CD in the middle of a really intense bit where the singer is belting out a particularly complicated couple of bars of climax and you have to rush out of the house but you know you're not paying enough respect to Aretha, or Buckley, or more likely if I'm being honest, Ben Folds.

Anyway, point being, book-wise, I am turning over a new leaf. Last night, after visiting Penny's and Yianni's shows (yay for them by the way, they're selling out)... I went home.

Yes! Home. Not to the Festival Club. Not to a Kitson gig or to support one of the local heroes or to a bar to hang out with people I don't see enough of anymore. I went home, I had a bath and I finished Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard. Yay for Tom Stoppard being clever about British snobbery and writing good characters for women and being a little bit obscure and making you wish you'd studied history right the way through university.

So, I'm on my way. For a lovely take on the reading of books, check out this. Nick Hornby, writer of things like About a Boy, writes a column about what he reads versus what he plans to read every month. Depressingly, he reads more than I do and complains about not reading much and being a philistine. But all that will change now I'm sure and I will become the sort of person Nick Hornby wishes he could be. Or not. We'll see how that one pans out.

Last, ALT + TAB, a dig at The Age, which I realise is a dead horse, but COME ON. Yesterday, they (the Melbourne newspaper that sponsors the comedy festival) ran reviews of Ross Noble (who so desperately needs a good review), two people with national TV shows, and two Americans.

Good. Excellent. So people know what the things they won't be able to get into because they're SOLD OUT are going to be like. What a service to the community.

I went back to my old work today (Tough Love on Triple M) to talk on radio about the two comedy shows I'm directing. For those of you who don't know Tough Love, click here.

It was so fun to be back there, actually. Someone should write a book about radio. It is just such a funny universe. You know how sometimes you listen to the radio and you wonder what sort of people actually take time out of their days to call a radio station?

Well, turns out, all kinds of people do exactly that. Part of my job used to be putting people on air for talkback. I used to get calls from (literally) brain surgeons (that happened twice), truck drivers (that happened more than twice) and one time I got a call from a guy who kept suddenly talking about stocks and shares so his boss wouldn't get suspicious that he was calling a national radio show. When we put him to air, he quite unashamedly put us on hold. A nation waited, listening to a couple of bars of Fur Elise, desperate to hear the end of his story.

So it was good to be back, and wasn't it quite the contrast to Radio National, where (as Mick correctly surmised) there aren't quite so many bomber jackets as one tends to find at Triple M.

Check out the show I was working on at the ABC (The Deep End) here. The eight hour day story mentioned below is available here.

It was interesting working there, although I have to admit that the ABC building at Southbank in Melbourne is very confusing for someone like myself. All the floors are identical. The studios, the bathrooms, the visitors' waiting rooms... Identical.

Which is why I accidentally walked in on a full orchestra rehearsing a quite reverent movement of something by Bach for ABC Classic FM. See? Not the sort of thing you walk in on at Triple M. More likely to walk in on a sales meeting where an executive is up on a table roleplaying his favourite animal (true story).

So, radio is unpredictable (see for example Judith Lucy's show in the Melbourne Comedy Festival) but then so is any job really. One time I worked at the Arts Faculty at Melbourne University and part of my job was processing applications for Special Consideration. One person wrote on his form that he needed an extension because he was "tired on account of being part of a medical experiment".

All in a day's work.

I think maybe my life works in the exact opposite way to everyone else's. The busier I am, the further into my work, the bigger my social life becomes.

I'm working at Radio National this week with some fabulous people (including my very addictive friend Michael Williams, which I'm sure will get one of us fired), and then every night I go to one of my shows to discover a long list of people I haven't seen in years.

It's brilliant. Do come and see the shows because I'm sure I've been dying to see you.

Penny's show has been reviewed here and in the new comedy zine, The Pun, and both her houses and Yianni's are starting to fill up, so make sure you book.

And check out the new Aussie film with my friend Simon in it. Kokoda, which I haven't seen yet and which is reviewed rather bizarrely in The Age today, is definitely my first outing after the festival finishes. I'm going to try not to giggle every time he comes on screen purely by virtue of the fact that I know he doesn't usually wear army gear. Peehee. The fourth wall comes a tumbling down.

Both of the shows I'm directing in the Comedy Festival, Yianni's Head and Penny Tangey in Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp, have opened with their pre-Easter preview shows.

The Peter Cook bar was abuzz with highly strung comedians on the first night of the festival. Each of them had a story about something that went wrong. Projectors changed their minds half way through shows, CD players didn't work, audiences wandered into venues far too early to discover the punchline standing on stage, half dressed in a chicken costume and swearing at the front of house staff.

Yianni and Penny were not without drama. Yianni's show suddenly had to have a new ending, due to the fact that the slides he was supposed to respond to did not appear on the slide screen. Thankfully, this proved to be much more amusing than the original ending. We've now changed the show accordingly.

Penny's show went well, apart from the fact that about eighty percent of her audience accidentally lined up in Will Anderson's queue and didn't show up to Penny's until about a third of the way through. Distracting for Penny? Yes. Disconcerting for the audience? Hell yeah. Mind you, it's funny to think that some of Penny's crowd might have actually made it through to be seated in Will Anderson's audience and left an hour later, rather baffled as to where exactly the maths references were.

As I said to everyone I spoke to, hey, it could have been so much worse.

Here are some edited highlights from my experience in live entertainment:

1. Primary school production, Sleeping Beauty
I was in grade five, playing a character with a cockney accent (which I retrospectively realise must have been because one of the teachers realised I had watched a lot of Dickens movies). Anyway, the fairies in the Sleeping Beauty were played by boys (a joke in itself of course, enjoyed no more by anyone else than by the boys themselves). They were each given stockings, a leotard, and a wand made out of cardboard.

Every woman knows that negotiating a leotard - particularly with the stockings underneath - is quite a complex little game when one is young and one really needs to go to the toilet. I don't want to drag this out unnecessarily. Suffice to say that one of the boy fairies performed a miserable little dance on opening night with poo all over his tights and dropping off him onto the stage.

2. Primary School Production, The Wizard of Oz
I played a munchkin, whose job it was to describe in an over-dramatic and long-winded way, the circumstances wherein the house had fallen on the wicked witch. (I now realise of course that partly this was a joke in itself. As the show wore on, the descriptions became more ridiculous and verbose. Everybody knows typecasting is funny).
My other job was to accidentally knock the hat off the Mayor, played by a boy called Lucas. Lucas was the tallest boy in the world. One night, he actually had to bob down so that I could knock his hat off, because my previous eight attempts had really dragged the whole show to a standstill.

3. Secondary school production, Three Sisters.
I was playing Irina in Three Sisters and Rory was playing the doctor. Rory somehow made me senseless with giggles. Three Sisters is a play by a Russian dramatist called Chekhov. It's not cool to become hysterical with snorty giggles in a Chekhov play. Well, the director didn't think so anyway.

4. The Really Useless Theatre Company, The Max Factor.
In the middle of The Max Factor, the lights went out. I was sitting next to Lawrence Leung, in the audience, and he still has little crescent moons on his arm from when I reached over and grabbed him in order to prevent myself from screaming and running from the theatre. After what seemed like several hours, the lights came up but they were tinged with a violent red. The play suddenly had all these evil undertones. As did I.

5. Standing There Productions, People Watching.
People shouldn't go out and party the night before a show. That is all I am prepared to say on this point.

6. Tough Love, Triple M. When you're in charge of reading out the best of the year's emails sent in by listeners to a national audience and you realise - on air - that what you've brought upstairs is not the listener emails but the article you printed out about a chip that's being sold on ebay because it looks like Mary Magdalene, you have to make sure you remember to breathe.

I've just realised this list could go on forever. Why anyone would work in a nine to five job is beyond me. Imagine the glamour of stuttering your way through some made up emails on radio, or slipping on your own poo in a fairy costume on stage. What a fabulous career choice.

Here's some genuinely rather impressive news from our Sydney office (represented as it is by Standing There Captain of Industry Melanie Howlett).

Mel, production manager and now lawyer, decided some time ago that she'd like to run a marathon.

I decided, at about the same time, that I would never be late for anything again. I also decided that I was going to start a soccer team.

As you know, the Standing There Soccer team is in its third season, preparing for the finals next Saturday, and my GOD we've done well for a team that came out of nowhere.

Or, to put it another way, there is no soccer team.

I wish the central theme of this diary was not the massive chasm between my expectations and the reality of my every day existence, but at least Mel can lend us all some inspiration.

Mel finished her marathon yesterday. Not only did she arrive on time (it was at seven in the morning, which is apparently a time of day) but she beat her expected time by what's known in the running business as "a country mile".

She's a legend of the sport already, finishing with a time of 4:07:52 (which is not a time of day, and it denotes hours, not days or weeks). That's what's known in the biz as "pissing it in".

Anyway, in her absence, by way of revenge, we have held a meeting wherein it was decided that if she keeps this up, she's fired. A motion was passed that Standing There Productions be renamed Sitting There Productions and that any breach of this would be seriously debated in a restaurant, bar, or loungeroom. No running shoes allowed.

Congratulations Melanie Howlett you're a big ole champion, just quetly. But that's enough. Everybody just pipe down please.

Poetry from the pen of someone who knows about my computer skills and who doesn't know Nick from a bar of soap but who hasn't let that stop him, let me introduce our next poem in the poetry-slam.

'Twas an Internet Butler named Nick,
Went abroad on account of his dick,
Who had promised he'd find,
Women who'd blow his mind,
'Cos his accent was Aussie and thick.

But his mates at home were all dark,
Especially our friend Lorin Clarke,
Her few skills in I.T,
Could not be called mighty,
And relied on Nick's trustworthy spark.

But on the eve of this comedy fest,
Let's remember how much we've been blessed,
We'd not have this site,
Nor poems this shite,
If it weren't for Nick's generous bequest.

(Now, Nick, there is slim possibility this is libellous. I know some very good lawyers but I must say I kind of like any poet who refers to me as "dark". So many layers of meaning).

Big kudos to our new Mystery poet. See you at the Comedy Festival, you bawdy wordsmith.

Last night I had a dream that I sent a text message to a friend of mine telling him how great he was. I remember thinking, "Oh! I must tell him" and then scrolling through the phone to find his number.

These sorts of things have been happening in my subconscious more and more lately. When my grandma moved house, she told me her new phone number and I absent-mindedly wrote it down on a piece of paper. That night, in my dream, I was inundated with questions about grandma's phone number, so I recited it several times and I've never forgotten it since.

This is very pleasing to me, because I can't remember anything, least of all numbers. However, from the reliable assortment of "dream dictionaries" online, I'm told that to dream about having telephonic contact with someone you know signifies "an issue that you need to
confront with that person". More alarming, "this issue may have to do with letting go some part of yourself". I wonder which part. Sounds expensive.

Anyway, the whole reason I raise this (a dangerous move given that the two most boring conversational topics in the world are other people's pets and other people's dreams) is that I would like to remember something useful in a dream, that I can't forget later. Not that
Grandma's phone number and the fact that Simon is a great guy aren't useful facts, but frankly I could have either remembered them or looked them up without the help of my subconscious.

So, if I could please dream each of my pin numbers, in relation to what it is they allow me to access, and also what I need to get from the supermarket the day before I go so that when I get home I don't suddenly remember that I actually went out to get toilet paper and came back with
some onions, twenty dollars worth of antipasto and a bath towel.

Ok. Enough about dreams. Have I told you about my dog?

I started work on Monday at eight thirty in the morning. It's now 1am on Tuesday and I've just arrived home. I didn't have a lunch break really, and I won't be paid for most of it. The working conditions are shockingly bad, but thankfully my relationship with myself is not such that I'm subject to the new IR laws, so I'm only fooling myself. Being your own boss can be confusing.

So I was thinking, in the car on the way home, that my bed was like the ribbon at the end of a marathon that has NINE WORLD OF SPORTS written across it. The finish line, I suppose that's called. Anyway, so I'm stumbling towards the finish line and my hair smells of ciggies and I've seen a billion comedians in a week and my eyelids are drooping and I really need someone to stand by the side of the road with a water bottle that I can grab on my way past and hurl all over myself in exhausted relief... but I get nothing. And then when I get home, there's an obstacle course at the end of the marathon because I haven't cleaned my room in years because everyone knows you can't work from half eight in the morning until one the next day and have a clean room unless you work as a cleaner, and so finally I get to the finish line and collapse, like a real marathon runner except without the over-excited family and friends screeching hysterically and draping me in a flag. (Mum and Dad were busy).

So, as if to further highlight my metaphorical struggle, the thought came to me all of a sudden that Melanie Howlett, Standing There Captain of Industry, is actually running a marathon. A real marathon. An actual one. With her legs. And I guess her lungs. And the rest of her body anyway shut up the point is she's running a race that STARTS AT SEVEN IN THE MORNING ON A SUNDAY (9 April for those counting) and it goes for 42.295 kms.

Although she has told me that if she "feels liks it", she's allowed to just keep running until she's run fifty ks and she'll be able to tell her friends she ran an "ultra marathon" as opposed to a shitty old normal 42 km marathon at seven in the morning on a Sunday. In Canberra.

Anyway, so now my metaphorical marathon of a day seems somewhat less energetic. Mine was probably more of a "long distance walk". No lifting your feet completely off the ground or you'll get disqualified by a little guy in a suit.

I dunno. Shut up. It's half past one in the morning. Leave me alone.