F A Q

The first thing you should know is that I am so not the stereotypical tech-head who revels in analysing long lines of code.

My ability to use HTML and CSS – two of the three main languages used to create websites – happened by accident. I was working at a bookshop in Sydney when a colleague showed me his copy of  Head First HTML and CSS: A Learner’s Guide to Creating Standards-Based Web Pages  by Elisabeth Robson. This book was so different from other books about computers and web technology that I'd seen. It incorporated many different principles of learning – such as overlearning and using colourful and wacky images and diagrams to ensure that the ideas taught in the book stayed firmly in the reader’s mind.

The text and images are surrounded by a lot of white space – which increases the size of the book – but the payoff is that the content has a spacious vibe and it never feels crammed in. I don’t mind having to deal with a hefty book if it means that I’m going to understand the content, which is not something you can say about most web technology books, which usually fail to keep the reader’s needs uppermost in their priorities. They are, as a result, usually poorly written and largely incomprehensible to the novice.

I bought my own copy of Head First HTML and CSS and since then I’ve been fascinated by the process of creating a website from scratch. I can now understand more complex books on the subject; my next task is to teach myself Javascript, if I can find the time.

I can't begin to tell you how much I love this book. I’d always wanted to create a website for myself from scratch, largely because I can’t stand the cookie-cutter look of websites based on WordPress, Wix and similar sites. Regardless of how many options they offer, they all look so boringly generic, as if they were created from a template – which they were. I wanted to have as much control as possible over the look of my site, and although I’ve had many frustrating moments while trying to get everything working – as does every website creator – it was worth it. Head First was the first book I saw that made me think that a regular person – who didn’t guzzle six-packs of Red Bull or sport an ironic hipster moustache – might be able to learn this stuff. This is true of many of the titles in the Head First series of web technology books.

One more thing: no, I’m not getting sponsorship or any other kind of payment from O’Reilly Media, the publisher of the Head First books; I just think they are geniuses at making complex subjects much easier to understand than they otherwise would be – and I'm just an incorrigible evangelist for things that I like.

Lozenge, preposterous and kakistocracy, which means “government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state”.

The oozy sound of the “z” in lozenge hints at the soothing, buttery ingredients in these cough lollies that relieve scratchy throats.

Preposterous became a favourite of mine a few years back after I saw an old British TV series, Monarch of the Glen, which ran from 2000 to 2005. Set in the Scottish Highlands, the story centres on Archie, a young man who is trying to restore the crumbling castle on his estate. He and his father often quarrel with a neighbour called Kilwillie, a tweedy, aristocratic, perpetually harrumphing gent (played by Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey) who was frequently outraged by the behaviour of everyone around him. If someone suggested a particular course of action to Kilwillie of which he didn’t approve, he would look at them aghast and spit out the only word capable of expressing the full extent of his indignation – “Pre-POS-terous!” Note the extra stress on the second syllable.

Kakistocracy is a word of Greek origin. I love the kakos bit at the start, which comes from the Greek kakistos, meaning ‘worst’. Kakistocracy is similar to the word kleptocracy – and all kleptocracies are, by definition, kakistocracies, but it's a word that isn't used as often as it should be, given the prevalence of so many bad governments around the world.

A few years ago it occurred to me that I could name plenty of countries in Western Europe and Asia but very few in Africa. When asked to list some African countries, I could, like most people, come up with a handful. But there was no way I could have listed countries such as Malawi, Benin or Mauritania. And cities such as Lilongwe, N’Djamena or Antananarivo were way off my radar. (But I've known about Ouagadougou – the capital of Burkina Faso – since I was nine years old. I've never forgotten that name, which sounds like a phantasmagorical mash-up from the minds of Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl.)

I’ve also noticed a strange phenomenon among many people who are about to go to Africa. They’ll say, “I’m going to Africa”.

What’s so odd about that?, you ask. But do you ever hear anyone say that they’re going to Asia?

Almost never.

They’ll tell you the name of the country they’re going to, such as Indonesia or Thailand or Myanmar. Telling you that they’re going to Asia wouldn’t be all that informative, because most people are familiar with the names of many Asian countries, and we want more detail than just “Asia”.

But Africa, for most of us, seems to consist of South Africa at the bottom, maybe Kenya and Tanzania on the right-hand side in the middle, and Egypt, Libya and Morocco at the top. The rest of it, for most of us, is a vast, amorphous mass of undifferentiated nations. The expression “the Dark Continent” really is an apt descriptor for Africa, as far as many of us are concerned; we’ve never heard of many African countries, let alone know anything about them, so it’s just easier to refer to the entire continent rather than be more specific.

Obviously many African countries – such as Somalia, Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – are no-go zones for tourists, and that certainly doesn’t help to improve our knowledge of them. Knowing that a country has a reputation for bludgeoning, kidnapping and shooting visitors so that they end up coming home in a box doesn’t exactly encourage travellers to flock to it.

The fact that some African countries are off limits doesn’t make me perversely want to visit them any time soon, but it does pique my curiosity to learn more about them from afar, and plan for the day when I might be able to roam across them without a high likelihood that I'll come to harm.

I also have a desperate hankering to visit Papua New Guinea, but I still haven't fully scoped out how to avoid getting robbed, bashed and having a gun barrel poked between my ribs while there. I'll have to contact expats who know the ropes.

While I'm on the topic of PNG, sometime back I was talking to a publisher friend, telling her about my desire to visit our neighbour to the near north.

“All I want to do is experience its stunning landscapes and wildlife, maybe meet some nice people – and not come home in a box. Is that too much to ask for?”

It turned out that she knew quite a bit about PNG. Her stepfather had lived there – and he did come back to Australia in a box. He was killed during a botched robbery. I made the comment flippantly, never thinking that a random person I decided to discuss this topic with would have first-hand experience of violence in PNG.

The book that has had the biggest impact on me over the last few years is Free Will by Sam Harris, an American philosopher and neuroscientist. This book has changed my life – really. It might not have changed my outer circumstances in any noticeable way, but it has certainly changed my thinking – and my attitudes towards my fellow human beings – for the better.

Here’s a snapshot: Sam Harris argues in this book that none of us have any free will, and he presents a compelling case by providing evidence from neurological studies to support his claims. This might sound like a frightening and bleak prospect to most people, but it has made me a lot more understanding – and forgiving – of the behaviour of other people. If we really can’t do all that much to change our behaviour, and if we are just passive recipients of what our environments and our genetic endowments throw at us, then we should be more understanding of both our own foibles and fallibilities and those of others.

I’ve found it incredibly difficult, though, to try to convince anyone that I’ve discussed this book with that we have no free will. (But that could just be an indicator of my unimpressive powers of persuasion.) We are an extraordinarily diverse society – ethnically, physically, economically and politically. But the one thing that almost everyone agrees on – regardless of those differences, even though they have probably never discussed the topic with anyone before – is that we are free to choose how we behave. This is what makes this topic so fascinating; for most people, the idea that free will is virtually a defining feature of humanity seems so self-evident that it goes largely unquestioned in everyday discourse (but not in philosophical and neuroscientific circles, where it is fiercely debated). I have to overcome a huge amount of initial resistance when discussing the topic. It's as if you’re trying to tell someone that the Queen of England is really the leader of a super-race of lizards trussed up in human-like suits. The idea just seems so absurd to most people that they aren't prepared to even entertain the possibility of not having any free will. More than anything, I suspect that many of us find the prospect of not having free will very frightening; the notion that you have no agency in what you do in your life seems terrifying to most of us. But we all still feel as if we have free will (which is, however, no proof that we actually do), and it's important to act as if we have free will and go out into the world and make things and do things. If we're going to have even a faint hope of a fulfilling life, then we still need to get up in the morning and strive to achieve our goals.

Many people assume that if you deny the existence of free will, then a corollary of that belief must be a fatalistic attitude to life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Believers in a deterministic universe don't necessarily think that people are incapable of change; people are changing all the time. And not just from good circumstances to bad, but also from bad to good. Just think of the story of Gregory P Smith, who was physically and sexually abused as child and became an alcoholic tearaway in his early adult life. He was diagnosed with depression, binged on drugs and tried to kill himself. He was told as a child that he was unintelligent – his IQ was measured at 80 – but he ended up studying sociology, got a PhD and now teaches at Southern Cross University. So change is undoubtedly possible, although it can often be very difficult. And denying free will doesn't mean being passive.

I encourage you to read this short book (it's only 96 pages), where you'll find Sam Harris’s clear and easy-to-understand explanation of why coming to realise that we have no free will is not a cause for hopelessness but could actually result in our redemption.

Other favourite books include The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens, Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner, Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson, The Small Hand and The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. Any of the travel books by Paul Theroux (especially The Pillars of Hercules and the part where he writes about Corsica; he described the Mediterranean island so vividly that it made me want to teleport there while I was reading). And any book by A. A. Gill, the hilarious and caustic but now sadly deceased UK journalist and humorist.

These books might not necessarily be my all-time favourites, but they’re the ones that come off the top of my head right now.

Bill Bryson, Helen Garner, Paul Theroux, Susan Hill (her ghost stories), Isaac Bashevis Singer, Christopher Hitchens, Alain de Botton, Sam Harris, A. A. Gill.

I have one mild superpower, but it's not very useful – which is virtually a defining feature of mild superpowers. But I'm going to have to be satisfied with my modest superpower until the day when I accidentally swallow a jug of molten kryptonite or rubidium, which will transform my modest gift into a superpower worth boasting about.

Let me tell you how I discovered it. It was years ago, when I was on a train trundling towards Melbourne. I was sitting alone in a compartment when a Caucasian guy in his thirties got on the train at Strathfield. We talked on and off over the 12-hour trip, but after several hours we still hadn't introduced ourselves. An intrusive thought then entered my head: I had the overwhelming feeling that this guy's name was Richard.

You're probably thinking at this point that I'd seen his name on a luggage tag but hadn't consciously registered it. But I checked that out later and I couldn't see any signs of identifying labels.

I was utterly possessed with curiosity, so I asked him what his name was.

“Richard,” he said matter-of-factly. I felt weirdly and thrillingly vindicated. In ordinary circumstances it would just be an ordinary name. But in these extraordinary circumstances it was the name that first hinted that I might possess a mild superpower.

What was it about this guy that made him an über-Richard, the quintessence of Richard-ness (whatever that might be) to the extent that his name just radiated out of him? I have no idea.

Not everyone matches their name, though. I once worked with a woman named Daisy. She was not a typical Daisy. Daisies – or should that be Daisys? – are usually fey and etheral, pale and blonde – at least in my experience. They almost vanish into the walls. This Daisy, however, was of Greek background. She had black corkscrew curls of hair with the texture and bounce of steel coils. She was of stout build – not at all insubstantial and ethereal. And she might have been named after a flower, but she was far from a shrinking violet. She even said herself that she was the most un-Daisy Daisy that she knew.

Getting back on track with the topic of mild superpowers, this weird ability to correctly guess names doesn't happen to me all that often. That's part of what makes it so mild. It's also getting a lot more difficult now that so many people are giving their kids unusual and unique names. If you're called Arlo or Huck – or Tallulah-Does-the-Hula-in-Borroloola – then I'm probably never going to pick up on it. I seem to more easily detect popular names that are a part of the zeitgeist at the person's birth.

My most recent experience of picking up on someone's name happened a few months ago, when I was watching an episode of the ABC TV show You Can't Ask That, which was about priests. The show consists of eight people who respond to a list of questions that they read off cards that they pick up. The participants come from groups in Australian society that are often misunderstood and marginalised, such as sex workers, people of short-stature, obese people, homeless people and Muslims.

While watching the show I again got this overwhelming feeling of knowing the name of one of the participants – and in this instance the name was Chris. But I couldn't tell you which participant it was out of the eight. Viewers learn the names of the participants, but not until the end of the show. So it wasn't as if I had seen the name. Some of the participants are paired with another participant, and others appear on their own, so you're probably thinking that I might have heard one participant refer to another one by name. But the person who turned out to be called Chris – I've revealed the punchline right there, but you knew what was coming anyway – was on his own. So no-one called him Chris throughout the show.

I've long been fascinated by the feelings, connotations and thoughts that names evoke when we hear them. (The name for the study of the history and origins of names, by the way, is onomastics.) Lately I've been interested in why so many parents over the last few decades have been giving their children surnames as first names, especially among boys. Think of Taylor, Mason, Channing, Jackson, Carson, Griffin and Nash. Notice how they all end in a consonant – or, in the case of Nash, a digraph. Consonants seem to evoke masculinity, whereas vowel endings in names evoke femininity – think of names like Olivia, Sophia, Clara and Anna. Parents of boys seem to be obsessed with giving their child a “strong” name (whatever that means), and surnames are often considered to be somehow more substantial or meatier than first names. In an era of increasing gender equality, perhaps unconscious forces are prompting parents to select a name that will bolster what they perceive as a reduced sense of masculinity in boys at a time when differences that demarcate the sexes are starting to diminish.

Ever since I first grabbed a pencil in my chubby infant hand, I have thought of myself as a slow writer. (Slow with handwriting, that is. I’m a pretty fast typist, though. I’ve also been told by many people that I hold a pen “in a funny way”, although it looks perfectly normal to me.) I longed to have a hand that could speedily and legibly glide across the page, but I’ve been condemned by fate to be a pen-dragging laggard, cursed with a slow and untidy scrawl.

One day I was looking around in an old bookshop in Sydney when I saw a book titled Teach Yourself Pitman’s New Era Shorthand. I bought it without a second thought. It wasn’t just the prospect of being able to speedily record words that intrigued me; the ability to reproduce the beautiful geometric shapes of Pitman shorthand also fascinated me. This writing system is filled with elegant curves and straight lines of full, half or double length. I became fascinated with the word statistics when rendered in shorthand, which looks like a dragonfly. And the word showroom, with its languorous symmetrical curves, resembles the petals of a flower.

I diligently practised the exercises in the book and became moderately proficient at it. My speed has never really been tested, although I know that I can write shorthand faster than I can write longhand. I’m also fascinated by the possibilities of using shorthand as a secret script; it’s gratifying to be able to write something and rest easy knowing that most people, if I were to carelessly leave my shorthand lying around, wouldn’t be able to decipher it. Unless they decide to photograph the shorthand and send the image to a shorthand transcriber. But they’ll probably have to pay for this service, so that might be a deterrent.

There are many self-appointed pundits in the world of journalism who declare that shorthand is totally useless and that digital voice recorders have rendered it obsolete. But there are still millions of people around the world who take notes by hand. They could all write much more quickly, though, if they could write shorthand. I recently had dealings with a couple of lawyers, and I noticed that they were taking notes – in longhand. If they knew shorthand they could have written more comprehensively and much more quickly.

I’ve had stops and starts while learning shorthand, but the one thing that prompted me to continue after a dispiriting layoff was a fantastic website – Long Live Pitman’s Shorthand – that is dedicated to propagating the word about the value of Pitman New Era shorthand, even in this age of smartphones with digital voice recorders. It’s run by UK citizen Beryl Pratt, who started to learn shorthand in the early 1970s. Beryl is an encyclopedia on the subject, and she provides a huge range of resources on her site to help anyone who wants to maintain their shorthand skill or start learning it from scratch. Her enthusiasm for the subject is nothing short of evangelistic.

One of the problems I found while learning shorthand is the small number of interesting texts written in it. At the State Library of NSW you can find Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island written in Pitman, but beyond that there isn’t much surviving shorthand text. Instruction manuals on the subject can be pretty tedious, filled with stuff like “Dear Mr Smith, Thank you for your letter of 3 February. We are in receipt of your order of 3000 widgets, which will be delivered by Wednesday 15 March ...”.

In an attempt to fill the void, Beryl writes a blog on her website in shorthand, together with a longhand transcription underneath each entry. She has been doing this since about 2012, and it’s proved to be a great way to get practice in reading shorthand as well as writing it, and it gives students of the subject something more interesting to read than tedious business letters, which seem to be the mainstay of most of the old texts on the subject. Beryl writes about shorthand itself and how you can make it easier to learn, but she also turns her attention to other things, like excursions to London's dazzling Shard building and watching the London Olympics back in 2012. She might be writing about a technology that's 180 years old, but there are plenty of references to contemporary technology, such as when she writes about touching up errant shorthand outlines on her website with the help of a Wacom tablet. It helps you to feel that shorthand is still alive among a small band of dedicated followers around the globe, which would be a difficult state of mind to sustain if you could read only business letters written in a sober and soporific 1950s style.

Let me first ask you a question. Why are people always asked about the music they listen to, as if that provides the ultimate illuminating insight into their psyche?

For many of us, it's the comedians we like that will give you a better idea of how our minds work. I like music, but I like to laugh just as much – if not more.

My favourite comedians include Frankie Boyle (my favourite foul-mouthed Scottish vulgarian), Joan Rivers (sadly no longer able to provide laughs live, but still funny on YouTube), Akmal Saleh, Kitty Flanagan, Ricky Gervais, Paul Fenech (and his TV shows, such as Fat Pizza and Housos – or Fat Pizza vs Housos), Ronni Ancona (she is, strictly speaking, an impressionist rather than a comedian; but whatever – she's still very funny), Jo Brand and Simon Evans.

But since you did ask about music, I won't disappoint you entirely. My answer, though, will freak you out a bit.

Let me give you a bit of backstory. A few years ago I found myself working across from a graphic designer colleague who had much the same taste in music as I have. We worked in a separate room from everyone else at the magazine, so we would crank up tunes on YouTube or Spotify without disturbing anyone. We listened to music that helped us to get into a productive zone. I've always found that the right music – which is usually movie soundtracks and video-game music – has a hugely beneficial effect on my productivity and helps me to focus. I can be quite distractible, but listening to soundtracks from movie composers like Alexandre Desplat, Bernard Herrmann (who wrote the music for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and North by Northwest, among others), Rachel Portman, Hans Zimmer, Elmer Bernstein or Danny Elfman enables me to concentrate on reading and writing for long periods. It's as if I go into another zone where intrusive thoughts – which usually centre on all the tasks I have to do and which tend to distract me from the task at hand – fall away and can no longer reach me.

But when we needed a break, we'd turn off the movie soundtracks or video-game music and plug the words “creepy amusement park music” into YouTube. The melodies that came out sounded like the tinny tunes emitted from a decrepit fairground carousel, trying really hard to be cheerful but instead coming across like a malevolent, off-key dirge. We would kill ourselves laughing for a minute or two, and in our minds we would be transported to an abandoned fairground after midnight, where effigies of clowns would leer at us in the eerie moonlight, and the sinister recorded voices of sideshow spruikers would lure the ghosts of unsuspecting but long-gone merrymakers onto rides that were one-way tickets to hell.

I also like a lot of traditional Greek, Arabic and Indian music.