One of my favourite destinations when travelling internationally is the airport bookshop. Not to buy a book. I just love standing in front of the business books. They are so unintentionally funny. Especially when seen as a group side by side. In Sydney airport the other day I saw: The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, The 12 Factors of Business Success, The Martha Rules: 10 Essentials for Achieving Success as You Start, Build or Manage a Business and (and I swear I’m not making this up) Winning Without Losing: 66 Strategies for Succeeding in Business While Living a Happy and Balanced Life. Talking with my friend Chris (a CEO of one of the more successful companies in Australia) about the seemingly limitless appetite for this rubbish he suggested we write a book to cash in called Leadership with the ‘p’ crossed out and replaced with a ‘t’ instead. We would subtitle it Lessons from Visiting the Bathroom and write it entirely seriously with chapters like ‘The Importance of Being Prepared’ and ‘How To Adapt to a Crisis’ etc.

I have another international trip to look forward to soon as I’m travelling to the UK for my dear old Mum’s 80th. I called my brother the other night to start planning the joint speech we are to give. Not being a fan of long speeches I reminded him of Guy de Rochefort’s maxim that ‘No man should talk in public for a period longer than that which he can sustain the physical act of love’. Advice my father-in-law fabulously followed at his 80th dinner earlier this year when he stood up and said ‘I’m on the Viagra and prune juice diet — I don’t know whether I’m coming or going’ and then sat down again. Brilliant. But I suspect my Mum might just want a little more ‘content’ (as they call it in the advertising business these days) from my brother and I.

At the start of this week I had a meeting with the lovely people from the National Parks in my role as the founder and owner of the Sydney Skinny. It made a wonderful change. Three years ago when I was telling potential partners I wanted to set up the world’s first communal nude ocean swim in Sydney Harbour the conversations tended to be quite short. So to have a meeting where I was told they wanted to sign up as our partners for a further three years was sweet affirmation. This year a number of people travelled from the States to Australia for the first time especially to do the swim and subsequently we got significant coverage in America. My next meeting is at Destination NSW to convince them to help us publicise the event over there for the event in 2015.

Walking our dog recently I passed a huge piece of graffiti on a public wall saying in surprisingly elegant large handwriting ‘this is for my parking ticket’. I tutted internally and was pleased when two days later the council had painted over it. Last weekend a new line appeared on the same wall ‘this is for my other parking ticket’. That was also duly painted over. Then this morning on Anzac day I walked past the wall to see in the same handwriting ‘Lest we forget my parking tickets’. I’m not supporting public vandalism or in any way wanting to trivialise the true Anzac message but truth is I found it hard not to smile.

In one of life’s weird coincidences I received an email from a reader last month inviting me to dinner if I ever happened to visit his neighbourhood. Given that I live in Bronte, New South Wales and he lives in Austin, Texas it didn’t seem likely. However barely a day later I got another invitation, this time not to dinner but to present a keynote speech with Arianna Huffington at a conference American Express was holding. In Austin, Texas. I’m 50 years of age and have never once visited Austin and probably never will again so to get two invitations 24 hours apart to the town seemed a little written in the stars. I therefore booked the trip.

Whilst the speech was one of the more enjoyable corporate engagements I have done this year it was the dinner that really stuck in my mind. The reader and his wife were a delightful couple — and generous, warm hosts — however their domestic set-up was ‘non-conventional’ to say the least. Their six children all had names starting with ‘J’, were all home-birthed and, most remarkably, were all Unschooled. Not Homeschooled. Unschooled. There is a BIG difference. Google it. As a father of four kids in expensive private schools I found the evening fascinating and the financial saving Unschooling would represent to the Marsh Household Budget mouthwatering. But, call me a bluff old traditionalist, I know if my kids didn’t go to school and were left to do whatever they wanted, ‘quench their thirst for knowledge’ wouldn’t come even remotely high enough on their teenage list of priorities for my taste.