The best part of every episode of Gossip Girl is the show’s clever and unexpected use of irony.

For example, after a lifetime of meticulous avoidance of rumoured carcinogens, Serena develops bowel cancer and shits blood which is gross and all her friends pretend they don’t know her.

Lorikeets are horrible, horrible people and should not be trusted under any circumstances.

I saw some lorikeets once when I was a child, and then I fell off my rollerblades and chipped my four front teeth.

I also have a birth mark on my leg that looks like a pimple.

My favourite rice crackers flavour is salt & vinegar, but not as many brands are making it lately. I am not sure why.

Buckley was born in Indiana in 1962 and had eleven children to his highschool sweetheart, Regina.

Regina began to lose her sight in the early nineties and required an expensive operation to repair the damage to her eyes.

Through a commercial radio competition, Buckley won the May Day ‘Grab as Much Cash as You Can in 8 Minutes!’ contest, but he had no arms and Regina went blind.

When I was in primary school, we were visited once a year by the Life Education Australia van. This was a caravan manned by chirpy women who used a giraffe puppet (Healthy Harold) and a nude mannequin (Tammy) to educate third graders on drugs and general health. I didn’t care much for Harold, but I was fascinated by Tammy and her womanly figure, which I would never develop. Her plastic skin had been shaven away on one side, exposing her plastic internal organs. I wanted to reach out and stroke her plastic liver, then tweak her plastic nipple. I was shy though.

Healthy Harold taught us about the food pyramid and advised us to exercise regularly. He then launched into an anti-drug tirade and touched on the dangers of peer pressure as well as the legal and socio-economic factors involved with drug abuse and their long-term effects on society. I spent these lessons staring at the caravan ceiling, which was covered in tiny fake stars, and thinking about my silk worms, but the message was so strong, it seeped completely into my eight year old brain anyway. If anyone had offered me a cigarette, I would have urinated on their entire packet and rang the police immediately. If thirty of my classmates had stood in a circle and chanted “CHUG, CHUG, CHUG,” I would have tipped my bottle of beer down the nearest drain and raised my face to the sky, arms outstretched, before calling out the twelve steps and giving glory to God. I was completely staunch in my resolve: I would never drink or smoke. I would certainly never take drugs. I would be healthy. I would be happy. I would be like Harold.

Four years later, my great-grandmother died. She was ninety-seven years old, and had been in a nursing home for six months. I remembered the day she was put into the nursing home, because my father was very tense and simply told me, “She fell over.” But through eavesdropping on my mother’s phone conversations, I was able to piece together all the details: Nan had gotten out of bed during the night to get a glass of water, then she had fallen over on her way back from the kitchen, breaking her hip and smashing her head against the floor, knocking herself out. Unable to get back up after she regained consciousness, she simply remained on the floor and waited for somebody to find her. By the time my grandfather arrived in the morning to take her to church, she had ripped up half the carpet in her living room in an attempt to keep herself warm throughout the night. She had torn up her hands doing this, and managed to cut her arms on broken glass. She had also shat herself and was crying with embarrassment.

This single agonising, undignified event completely horrified me. “Why couldn’t she get back up again?” I asked my mother, interrupting her phone call.

“She’s just too old,” Mum explained, “The body starts to give up and stop working after a while.”

This distressed me deeply. The idea that I could one day find myself unable to walk or wipe my own arse was the most depressing thing I had ever contemplated. And the thought of my great-grandmother lying amongst broken glass on her kitchen floor, nursing a smashed hip and a bruised face, scratching at the carpet and defecating on her own muumuu was too awful for my pre-pubescent brain to handle. In that moment, I vowed that I would die the day after my 70th birthday. Or even sooner, if possible. I would never be found covered in my own shit and lying broken on the floor, because I simply wouldn’t live that long. I would die while I still had dignity and presence of mind. Hopefully I would still have my figure too.

And so, when my time came, I said “Yes!” to cigarettes. I said yes to alcohol and pot and pills and anything else that crossed my path. I still work out and eat properly and moisturise and sleep 8 hours every night, because I am vain, but I’m not going to make any effort to extend my life beyond the ability to control my own bladder. If being healthy means dying in a puddle of my own excrement with broken hips, then Harold can eat my arse.

Editor’s note: Any teachers or parents who are interested in having Annik speak at their children’s schools can send an expression of interest via email to education [at] annikskelton.com

“Oh god, we were so fucked up that night…do you guys remember?”

“Nope.”

“I remember Chris getting laid that night.”

“Oh look, it’s those two fat chicks who sat on my bike! I’m pretty sure Chris went home and had sex that night.”

“And this one was at New Year, right before Chris laid some girl. Fuck, we were drunk.”

“Oh and there’s the time we ordered all the red bull and vodka jugs… Hey Annik, see what Chris is doing to that pool cue?”

“Wait, there’s the chick I used to hook up with who had leukemia… I thought I could make her feel better. Like, fuck the cancer out of her or something.”

“Did it work?”

“I don’t know, I broke up with her.”

“Hey look, it’s the biker viking party!”

“Oh yeah! Chris had sex that night.”

“Anal sex.”

Me: Dad, there’s something gross on my neck. Can you take a look?

My brother: Is it your face?

Dad: It’s eczema.

Me: I’m going to my room.

My grandmother was a pretty cool lady. She made an excellent batch of honey jumbles and was the first person to nip outside whenever one of my aunts lit up a joint. Even though we shared the same name, I never spent enough time with her, but she wrote her memoirs before she died and reading them helped explain a lot about my own life.

Last year, Nanna got sick with various forms of cancer and shifted permanently into my aunt’s lounge room while she waited for the inevitable. I flew up to Brisbane to visit her and found my namesake sunken in an armchair, even thinner than usual and looking overly pale.

“How are you feeling about everything?” I asked, as I painted her nails a deep red.

“Okay, I guess,” she shrugged, “I’ve said goodbye to all my children, divvied up my stuff and had a good run. All I can do now is wait.”

“It’s a bit horrible though,” I pointed out, “Just waiting to die.”

“Nah, it happens to everyone,” Nanna replied, “Besides, I’m sick of hearing about the bloody American election.”

If you mentioned South Africa to me, in any context, and perhaps even in passing, I would smile awkwardly and change the subject. This is because South Africa cost me the following:

• approximately $6,000
• a month of sleep
• 4kg
• a pantload of bad karma

When I was twenty-one and full of goodwill and energy, I applied to go overseas and perform 6 months of volunteer work. “Sure,” I lied during my phone interview, “I love kids!” And then, “Oh yeah, small towns are awesome!” Lord only knows why I decided to get myself into this, but (similar to my decision to go to uni) I was bored and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

And so, at the crack of 2008, I flew to South Africa, where I attended a 2-day orientation program in Johannesburg. The gist of this seemed to be, “do not take drugs, do not stop at red traffic lights, do not use ATMs, do use condoms but do not have sex with your students, and if you catch malaria you shall lose a spectacular amount of weight.” Armed with this knowledge, I was then sent to the north-east coast, and driven to a leetle village which shall remain nameless.

“Here you will be a boarding house mistress,” Francois, the teacher I was to share a house with, informed me, “And you will teach cricket and swimming at the school.”

“I’m not really into sports,” I explained, lighting a cigarette.

“Just take grade one,” he said, as he climbed into his ute and drove off.

I sat on an upturned bucket on the driveway and glared at my volunteer partner, Zoe. She came from a small town in Victoria, had too many freckles, and required prompting to do absolutely anything. I hated her, but we played cards sometimes and I was interested in the fact that she had recently had breast-reduction surgery. “What did they do with the extra boob-matter?” I would ask, but because she was boring, she would just shrug. On the upside, she followed most of my instructions without question. “Fetch my washing and take it to the boarding house,” I would say, and she would disappear inside to collect the sweaty T-shirts and dirty underpants from my bedroom floor.

Our house was small, hot, and not air-conditioned. I was provided with a fan to keep the mosquitoes away at night, but scheduled power-cuts throughout the district meant that we were without electricity for roughly 2-hours, three times a day. We did not have a working television or cooking facilities, and the internet was a distant memory. We also ran out of water several times. I was dying for a pedicure.

Our “meals” were cooked for us at the boys’ boarding house. And while we were treated to the odd piece of fruit or vegebetalia, our staples were frankfurts, meat pies, fried chicken strips, and oven chips. Not having the palate nor the metabolism of a fifteen year old boy, more often than not, I drank a glass of cordial, ate a piece of bread, then left the table to sit on my bucket and smoke.

Our days were spent at the school, where we began each day helping the first, second and third graders read. These kids were either total show ponies or complete morons. I tried to shame them into learning (“You are in the third grade and you cannot even read, Monte, how will you ever bust out of this miserable village?”) but they had no respect for my volunteer authority.

Once the day’s reading had finished, I was supposed to help out with art or computer classes. I didn’t like art or computers, so I re-organised my timetable so that it appeared I was fully booked. I then walked back to the house, sat on the bucket, and smoked until lunch time.

In the afternoons, I almost always had to take PE. When I was rostered to teach soccer or cricket, I would put the students in a line and instruct them to kick or throw a ball to each other while I worked on my tan. My swimming lessons were unfortunately more involved, as I was required to be in the water at the same time as the children. There they climbed on top of me and dragged me underneath the surface. I then pushed them away and swam to the edge. They chased me around the pool, and I suppose that in some way, they did get a bit of swimming practice. As long as none of them drowned, I felt I was doing my job.

After school finished, I was either required to supervise homework at the girl’s boarding house or amuse myself in some way. I spent my spare hours playing the piano in the school’s empty hall or walking aimlessly around the village. But most of the time, I sat on the bucket and smoked.

There were, of course, some pleasant little pockets in all of this. The students were generally polite and well-behaved, appealing kids. They called me “Ma’am” and wished me good morning when they saw me around the school. When I was alone at the house, the matric boys would come over from the boarding house and we would sit together on the driveway and smoke cigarettes and look at the stars, while they put together very convincing arguments on why I should buy beer for them. I was also getting the best tan of my life.

However, a few weeks of this routine began to take its toll. I was awfully homesick, losing weight and suffering from terrible insomnia. The villagers were gossiping about me, because I was young and female, and half the boy boarders claimed to have slept with me. I was bored as fuck and Zoe was about as entertaining as a fence post. I called my airline on the sly and quietly enquired as to how long it would take to get a flight back to Sydney. “Four to six weeks,” the plane lady told me. I hung up, sat on the bucket, lit a cigarette, and decided to go home. The only problem was working out how to extract myself from my volunteer duties.

I began to weigh up my options. How could I leave and cause offence to the least amount of people? And more importantly, how could I get out ASAP?

In the end, I lied.

I called my father early one morning in February to wish him a happy birthday.

“How are you doing?” he politely inquired.
“Oh you know, I’m just- BAAAAHHHHHHH URRGGHHH!”
“Oh. Well. Um, hang in there, sweetheart.”

And so, using the tears so instantly produced by hearing my father’s voice, I walked into the kitchen and when Zoe asked what had happened, I told her that my mother had developed breast cancer and was scheduled for surgery in a week’s time.

Over the next three days, before I climbed onboard a jam-packed flight that I was able to join after being granted compassionate priority, many of the students and teachers shared their personal stories about cancer with me. The school’s art teacher, in particular, took me under her wing, as her husband had been battling various types of cancer for years and was on his last legs. Most of the students, staff and boarders approached me privately to offer their condolences, love and prayers. Francois sat with me on the bucket and smoked, then took my hand and placed it on his crotch. Zoe cried and asked me not to leave. I smiled sadly and nodded.

A week later, as I sat in my parents’ sunny backyard in Sydney, sifting through the assortment of “Get Well” cards the South African children had made for my mother, I related this story to my friend Mark. He listened quietly, took a long pull on his beer, and squinted at the sky. “You’re going straight to hell,” he told me, and I figure he’s probably right.

• Glandular fever
• Pneumonia
• Cancer of the brain
• Arthritis
• Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
• Epilepsy
• Appendicitis
• Broken ankle
• Leukemia
• HIV
• Anaemia
• Receding hairline
• SARS
• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
• Emphysema
• Alcoholism
• Insomnia
• Heart murmur

My earliest memory is of lying naked next to my brother on the burnt orange carpet of our hallway in Candowie Crescent. I sucked on black jelly beans and cried silently while my parents rubbed a foul-smelling ointment into my skin. Holding my nose, I tried to ignore the revolting cream that was applied to my entire body from the neck down, but these things are hard for a three-year-old. This entire process was repeated for four consecutive nights, and then I was allowed to bathe as normal.

Years later, I realised my parents had been treating us with sulfur. Dad brought lots of things home from work, but scabies was the best – microscopic bugs that burrow under the skin, lay eggs, and create a red rash that resembles an allergic reaction in appearance. As the eggs hatch and the mites crawl around underneath the skin surface, the infected person develops a terrible itch, scratches the shit out of hisself, and often develops a secondary infection. My father had been working as a GP in a local nursing home in 1989 when they experienced an outbreak among the old folks. They treated the residents and doctors but didn’t think about the doctors’ families, even though scabies is extremely contagious and transmitted readily through skin-to-skin contact. For the remainder of my childhood, I would have an intense fear of insects. When I found out about bed bugs, I slept in the bathtub for a week.

My second earliest memory is of my father forcing me to solemnly swear to never practise medicine. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, for years I replied, “Not a doctor.” Teachers and creche workers were fascinated by my inclination to define myself by what I was not, or would not do, rather than the opposite, but that ended up being the professional direction I would take as an adult. It’s as if I have a giant list of every career possible and am slowly crossing them off one by one after each failed attempt to make a living. (Eventually, I assume I will be left with my dream job and a string of bad references.)

Dad only worked one job, but he had a hard life. He spent years building his practice and getting patients, and then the rest of his life trying to get rid of them. Admittedly, our number was never listed in the phone book, but do all other forms of advertising go completely unnoticed? An entire generation of Australian adults simply lived without medical care until they met my father at a dinner party in the eighties. Whenever I was dragged along with my parents, I would watch the other guests’ faces light up as they chatted to Dad. “Oh! You’re a DOCTOR? That’s so interesting, because I have this pain juuust heeere…” and they would reveal the body part that grieved them. Even as a child, I was always amazed at the rudeness of these people. If you met a hairdresser at a party, would you hand them a pair of scissors and request a trim? If you met an accountant, would you ask them to do your tax before dessert? If you met a cleaner, would you ask them to pop into the kitchen and tidy things up a bit? Fuck no. But people thought nothing of pulling my father aside at tupperware parties, trivia nights and bible study groups and making him inspect their genitals. Over the years, almost every family friend, relative and member of my parents’ church has adopted my father as their GP. Dad has dirt on everyone in the Hills.

My next earliest memories are of late-night trips to nursing homes to certify bodies. Mum was out a few evenings during the week and Dad couldn’t leave me at home by myself when one of his patients died, so he took me with him. The first time, I waited patiently in the home’s common area. I sat quietly and pulled leaves off a pot plant, but within minutes I was surrounded by gnarled geriatrics with glossy eyes. They shoved pieces of fruit into my pockets and tugged at my hair. One woman proudly introduced me as her granddaughter, then smacked away the hands of anybody else who tried to touch me. They drooled and moaned and hacked and couldn’t hear a damn word I said, which was probably a good thing as I was pretty feisty for a five-year-old. After that night, I chose to wait for Dad in the same room as the corpse.

Not only North-West Sydney’s preferred medical health professional, my father was also the go-to guy for household injuries and neighbourhood emergencies. I probably set the precedent when, one night in the early nineties, I jumped out of the bathtub and ran naked through the house. Still wet, I slipped and cracked my forehead open on the cement step in our kitchen. Instructing my brother to clean the pools of blood off the floor, Dad made me lie on a beach towel in the back room and calmly stitched my face back together. Years later, getting up to pee during the night, I would see the exact same scene happening in the kitchen after one of my brother’s friends fell off his motorbike. People regularly arrived at our door with sprains, burns, grazes, cuts, dog bites, stuffed backs and split lips. Friends seemed to bring to Dad what they were embarrassed to take to the medical centre. He once dug a small bug out of a girl’s eye with a Q-tip, flushed a bead out of a boy’s nostril after he intentionally inhaled it, and sedated a friend’s son after he had tried to scrape their mashed kitten off the road outside their house. Dad was brilliant during emergencies and could treat his own children without batting an eyelid, but when it came to general illness or ailment, my brother and I always went to our mother. Mum had cool hands and stroked your hair; she made you honey tea and prepared hot packs or cold packs or steamy rooms; she rubbed Vicks on your chest and dabbed calamine lotion on your mossie bites. My father, on the other hand, only ever had one piece of medicinal advice for us: “Take two panadol and lie down for half an hour.” Nevermind the fact that I couldn’t swallow tablets until I was ten – lying down for half an hour is practically impossible when you’re a kid. No matter what symptoms we had, Dad’s advice was always the same. It was as if he couldn’t take us seriously unless we were bleeding or bruised or broken. I spent seven years complaining of headaches before Dad sent me to a specialist. Mum received even more useless advice than me – whenever she complained about an ache or pain, Dad simply said, “Aww that’s no good.” One day, Mum snapped. “Eight years of medical school and that’s what they teach you? THAT’S NO FUCKING GOOD?” After that, Mum started seeing a female GP at one of the surgeries Dad owned.

Through eavesdropping on my father’s phone conversations over the past twenty-two years, I like to think I’ve gleaned quite a bit of medical expertise. (Although I once overheard him tell a patient to “take two panadol and get a divorce.”) Dad was always stupidly giving patients his home number, and they’d ring every night the minute we sat down to dinner. I listened attentively as Dad rattled off medications, dosages, statistics and warnings. I also disgusted myself thoroughly by reading his medical journals and learning far more than a child should about the body. At school, I showed off my drug-company pens and notepads (Zoloft was way cooler than Mambo!) and surveyed the playground carefully at lunch time. Whenever a student fell or injured themselves on the monkey bars, I dashed over. “Don’t worry,” I would reassure the growing crowd of spectators, “My father is a doctor.” And they would make room for me accordingly. Then I would inspect my classmate, poke them in various places and ask if each one hurt, nod gravely, and escort them up to sick bay. There I briefed the school nurse on the incident and offered my diagnosis before she rolled her eyes and kicked me out.

The problem with my Dad is that he’s too nice. He treats all our friends and family for free, even though he would never dream of using their accounting, consulting, plumbing or basket-weaving services without paying them. Even when he does things through the books, Dad accepts “alternative forms of payment.” One of his patients, a greengrocer, gives us boxes of fruit after each appointment. An elderly Philippine lady with no medical insurance pays Dad in bizarre desserts (green things with jelly and spaghetti and mousse.) Most of the time, he just bulk bills everybody, even the “struggling” retired couples who request vaccinations before their overseas holidays and then drive away in their sports cars. Dad genuinely cares about his patients though, and he always puts their safety and wellbeing before his own. One day his most annoying patient, a recovering alcoholic, showed up to an appointment blind drunk and twirling his car keys. Rather than letting him put other road-users in danger, my father drove the patient home, stopping on the way to buy him KFC because the lush hadn’t eaten in days. After dropping him home, locking up his car and tucking him into bed, my father then walked the 6 kilometers back to the surgery. In January.

As a side project to general practitioning, my father regularly taught sexual education at a local highschool. This meant that while he usually sidestepped awkward father-daughter chats by cutting a relevant article out of the newspaper and leaving it on my desk, he thought nothing of sitting me at the kitchen table and placing a condom and a carrot in front of me. “Practice makes perfect!” he declared, while I looked up at my mother pleadingly. I was thirteen.

Despite the scabies, career limitations, dead bodies, phallic objects and constant interruptions to daily life, having a father who is a GP has its perks. I can get scripts for anything, we have enough medication in the house to kill a rhino, there’s some great gear on hand whenever I have an emergency fancy-dress occasion, and people assume I’m rich. Unfortunately, I also have an unusually high tolerance to panadol…