And another thing PHIL BROWN

Iam hoping no old photos of me in fancy dress surface. After Dominic Perrottet’s recent strife and Prince Harry’s similarly inappropriate behaviour one gets a little nervous. Not to worry though. I mean I have worn fancy dress but never a Nazi uniform so hopefully I’m safe.

My first foray into this field was when I dressed up as Hercules. My mother made me the costume for a Halloween party at Kowloon Junior School in Hong Kong back in the mid 1960s. I have the photo of that and I can tell you that given my weedy physique I wasn’t very convincing. There wasn’t a muscle in sight. When we were discussing costume parties recently my son reminded me that he had dressed up as a shepherd for a nativity play in preschool. He was, to quote the teacher, “the lowest of the low”. He seemed okay with that.

I remember my brother going to a party as the Hulk when he was young. He was a body builder so he looked pretty convincing and he wore green body paint.

My fancy dress efforts as a young man were a little different. I went to a party in 1974 as a hula dancer. I wore a hula skirt of my sister’s and one of her bikini tops with oranges in it. The oranges fell out soon after I arrived at the party and I ended up pretty flat chested. May I apologise to hula dancers everywhere for this awful indiscretion. I’m sorry. When I was at uni in Toowoomba I dressed up as a woman again to go to a fancy dress party. The girls in our share house did my make-up including some very bright red lipstick and I wore a dress and a little hat I had bought at a vintage store.

Should I apologise for this too? Anyway I reckoned I looked pretty hot so off we went to the party but we had to stop at a drive-in bottle shop on the way and when the bloke came over to the window of the car to take our order he did a double take.

“What’s your story?” he asked and we all just laughed. Toowoomba in the mid 1970s was pretty conservative. He wasn’t sure what he was dealing with.

Anyway he got the grog and he called me sweetie as he handed it over. Nice.