Greetings from Western Australia! I am currently posted up at the parents for a few days where I am enjoying a stocked pantry, quality time with the family dogs and loads and loads and loads of beautifully mindless cable television. Which brings me to The Girls of the Playboy Mansion – a reality show that has been running since 2005 about Hugh Hefner and many, many young blondes. Holly, Kendra and… what was the other one’s name again? Anyway, the original girlfriends are long gone and have been replaced with a plethora of perma-tanned, bottle blonde, gold digging nymphettes.

In the latest episode, the girls have decided to have a camping party on the grounds of the mansion where they toast marshmallows over a fire made by the butler and tell scary stories / stories of sucking an 87-year-old man’s cock. So they’re just sitting around giggling and being sexy for a bit and then, in walks ‘Hef’ dressed in his uniform of silk pyjamas and captain’s hat and, on cue, the ‘bunnies’ all squeal with delight and make room for his wrinkled ass. It was, without a doubt, one of the saddest things I have seen this month.

Old age and growing old has been a bit of a theme for me lately, my 76-year-old grandfather is about to go into a home where he will be bathed by a stranger at 4.00 pm every day and will have to wear normal cotton pyjamas when he goes to bed alone at 9.00 pm every night. I can’t be sure because I don’t really want to think about it too much, but, if he were to double drop some viagra and go to bed with nine 22-year-old blondes, it would surely send him into an early grave. Or would it? Could it be that it is just what he needs?

As the world began to spin faster with the aid of technology and the internetz I watched my granddad make the decision to ask it to kindly stop spinning so that he could get off. His heart is still beating with all the vigour it once did, however, almost overnight, his shoulders began to slump forward, his speech began to slur and the only cerebral challenges he undertook was through game shows on the telly. He put his spirit into an early grave. Then we have Hef, playboy extraordinaire, who lives in a mansion filled with peacocks and debauchery. Gone are the days of whiskey sours and gentlemen’s clubs when the men were, in fact, gentle. It seems that as he has gotten older, the girls have gotten younger and dare I say it, vulgar.

One ex-girlfriend, after leaving the mansion, wrote a book called Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors where she tells us that it was basically like living in a prison. According to her, they all had to be indoors by 9.00 pm every night, were given $1000 pocket money per week which they had to collect sans clothes from his bedroom where he counted it out slowly in front of them. Apparently, the mansion is a fucking mess as well. Nothing has been updated or replaced for years and no one really talks to Hefner or spends much time with him unless it is during one of his ‘sex parties’ (ew). Sounds to me like Hef has cultivated his very own old age home where he is the only patient and the rest are all prostitutes… eurgh sorry, ‘girlfriends’.

Aging, if you’re lucky, is inevitable. The way I see it, you can be like Hef and try to hold on to a time where you think you were happiest and literally have to pay people to pretend that you are still the life and soul of a party – a party that you have long outgrown. Or, you can be like my dear old granddad and choose to feel hopeless and blinded to all the blessings that have been bestowed upon you for free while you just wait to die. Both are tragic; both are no longer balling. Alternatively, you can live in the ‘right now’ and when you do look back, it is to see how far you have come, and not because you are looking for something you think you have left behind.