OPINION: Let me tell you what made me an antisocial, godless, illiterate criminal: comics.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

A girls' boarding school is a home to many weird rituals, none weirder than one Guy Fawkes Day celebration when I was a kid in the junior school.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

OPINION: It's been a secret for years, but I now feel free to confess to my passionate, tempestuous and altogether fantastic affair with John Lennon.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

OPINION: I know, I know, it's wrong of me - but I have gazed at the unusual, not to say challenging, facial features of Stephen Versalko for the past week, and marvelled at how that goofy blandness wangled him $17.8 million.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

No disrespect here, but if I had a dollar for every time I was groped by some creep when I was 15 I wouldn't have to work for a living.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

OPINION: When Rufus Marsh died in jail last weekend I doubt that anyone shed tears, but I won't forget him.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

OPINION: I look forward to Christmas, I'd say, much as a condemned man looks forward to the scaffold. The difference is he only has to do it once.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

OPINION: We had intended to keep our studies secret, but now that Paul Henry finds himself in a spot of bother, I feel bound, as his fellow student, to leap to his defence.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

OPINION: We have an odd belief in this country that you can solve social problems not by changing social conditions, but by changing laws.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

OPINION: Let me sweep aside the veil on latent lesbianism in New Zealand girls' boarding schools of the past, since British author Fay Weldon has already twitched that Terylene.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

OPINION: Let this be a lesson to Rodney Hide - he should have stayed fat, and out of trouble.

OPINION: I have discovered the man I should have married. It's been a long time coming, this epiphany, and is, alas, too late.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

OPINION: There are A-list people and B-list people, and then there's the rest of the alphabet to slide down, to grade how groovy and important you're not.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

OPINION: It takes courage to be Michael Bain, if not the aggressive strutting type of a street fighter. Courage can be quiet and gentle, and rare.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

OPINION: In some places people riot over serious matters - religion, politics - but here we riot just because we can.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

OPINION: Until now I've looked solely on the gloomy side of being in jail, but a flash of information from a trial made me reconsider.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

OPINION: Coughing your lungs out with some viral update on TB isn't the best state for battling dark forces, but too bad.

OPINION: I was but a chit of a thing, a wide-eyed ingenue, when I noticed the difference between the middle class and everyone else when it came to objectionable behaviour.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

OPINION: We undermine privacy regulations when we make them look ridiculous, but sometimes authorities come swiftly to their senses, as police did this week.

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD - © Fairfax NZ News

OPINION: Rather than damning Social Welfare Minister Paula Bennett for releasing details of their incomes, we should marvel that the two solo mothers involved in last week's stoush did not expect to face scrutiny themselves.