Life is short, but it certainly doesn't have to be boring and that's the approach recently published Bright author Graham Badrock has taken to his life.
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Life's Too Short To Wear Dull Shirts recounts what has been a varied and interesting life for Badrock, from travelling Australia with his "long-suffering wife" Karen to hosting a domestically hapless diplomat at their bed and breakfast.
"They say everyone has a story and I was struggling to find things to read and so I thought I'd just have a go at writing a book," he said.
"I'd never been academically inclined at school and I just thought I'd give it a go.
"Four re-writes later and out came the publishing contract."
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As the title implies, the book never takes itself too seriously, which is a bit of a way of life for Badrock.
"You can't be serious, a lot of our friends are serious and they're down, you're not that old yet ... you've got to live a little lighter," he said.
"I'm trying to hold the years at bay but life goes so quickly and this is just a way of keeping that in people's minds."
The book takes the reader along for the ride that has been Badrock's life, moving from location to location, profession to profession.
A high point in the auto-bigraphical tale comes after Badrock and his wife open up a bed and breakfast in Bright, which they ran for 19 years until they "got sick of being nice to people".
Life's Too Short For Dull Shirts gives the reader a glimpse into the life of a bed and breakfast host.
"When we decided to do the bed and breakfast all those years ago my wife vowed she wouldn't cook breakfast, so I think I worked out that I cooked close to 14,000 breakfasts and she cooked two or three," he said.
"We had a vast cross-section of the community that came and stayed with us.
"Some people would come in and steal everything, we had a Swiss ambassador from Canberra who'd never even cooked a piece of toast or put the jug on.
"He'd been in the diplomatic service for 30 years so he had staff doing it."
Throughout the book there are also stories of he and his wife's travels, including an eventful entry into Norfolk Island where they almost crashed.
"The wind was so bad that I think he (the pilot) dropped the plane the last two metres onto the tarmac, it was so hard that all the oxygen masks fell out and the overhead luggage containers came open," he said.
"When we stopped people were cheering and clapping."
And having written one book, Badrock isn't resting on his laurels.
His second book, Travels With My Wife, is due to be published later this year with the United Kingdom-based firm, Pegasus Publishers.
