My family are shit. I don’t think any of them even remembered it was my 18th. I invited some friends over to the flat I was staying at and we played cricket in the carpark, then drank beers for a couple of hours.

57?

Years ago I worked in an inner city market. I had made friends with a person at one of the nearby market stalls. We spoke almost every day. She was an actress working at the market between acting jobs. I had never seen anything she was in, but it didn’t matter. She was just really sweet and easy to talk to.

For unrelated reasons, my girlfriend and I broke up and I moved to the other side of the city on very short notice, to my brother’s house, and didn’t have the chance to say goodbye to my friend.

My brother and I were watching TV a couple of months later and there’s my friend from the market, introduced on a popular TV show as the new season 2 “token annoying character” (think 2000’s, trendy, weekly drama).

“That’s name of my friend. She’s my friend. We used to chat every day!” My brother scoffed and called me a liar “just because we live out in the suburbs, don’t think you city folk can make us believe any old bullshit story!”

Two weeks later she happened to go to my brothers’ workplace for car parts and he recognised her: “My brother reckons he knows you.” Friend: “What’s your brother’s name?” Brother: “SkaraBr…” Friend: “What? Where is he? Is he okay? I’ve been so worried. Do you have his number?”

Good lad, my brother, wouldn’t give out my number, even to a TV actress, but she made him call me right then and there so that she could talk to me.

Twenty years later and I still laugh about that phone call and the sound of his voice when he said “she wants to talk to you”.

Australia: The Homo Sapiens Cognitus Plummetus, or Drop-Bigfoot, larger cousin of the drop-bear (Thylarctus Plummetus). They’re rarer than the drop-bear because they’re so easy to see due to their size that they have been hunted to almost-extinction. The last remaining specimens are only found in high, rocky, mountainous areas where they can hunt from the protection of cliff overhangs and large rocks.