DANNY KATZ

THAT'S what I always do for you, mum, I always do the Interflora thing. I just go to a florist and point at some flowers and say, "I wanna send these to my mum in Sydney". Then somehow, supernaturally, those exact same flowers appear at your doorstep the very next morning, even the same day if I'm sending impatiens. I don't know how the florists do it, they must have some kind of flower-powered stamen-quantum Interflora-teleporter. And I can even write a message to go with your flowers in my crude, scungy scrawl and when it gets to you it's magically transformed into the fancy flourished handwriting of a 17-year-old girl with a TAFE floristry certificate.

That's what I always do for you, mum, but this year I thought, "Nahhhhh, it's too easy, too impersonal, too pricey with Mother's Day flowers always costing so much round about Mother's Day". So here's what I did for you this year, mum, here's the heroic effort your son made for you: I got all Bear Grylls and actually trekked to one of those big shopping places where even the boldest fear to venture, and I plunged inside and searched for something nice and mothery to buy you. I spent a whole hellish half-hour braving the perilous, rugged harshness of that comfortable air-filtrated humidity-controlled shopping tundra.

That's what I did for you, mum: plodded across the vast empty echoing wastelands of the David Jones food hall where no one has ever set foot before, surviving by eating things no one would ever dare eat, canned grouse and candied quince tarts. I scaled impossible escalator heights until I stood atop the sheer steely summit of a home decor store that sold stainless steel couch covers and a soup tureen the size of a bidet. I descended into the Nine Circles of Hell in the cosmetics foyer of Myer where haunted painted-faced cosmetic girls perched silently behind their make-up stands, just staring, staring, like lipstick-slashed emo-salmon. Got wooed by the wickedly sexy headless window mannequins in women's fashion stores, beckoning me to step inside, pointing the direction with their pointy mannequin nipples. Dragged my blistered bunion-bruised feet into a pyjama store that sold nothing but pyjamas and when the lady said "Can I help you?" I wanted to say "Yes, yank that pyjama cord from those hipster pyjama pants and wrap it round my neck then hang me from that silky nightie rack because I'm in a pyjama store that sells nothing but pyjamas. Do you have it in a red? Medium to large neck?"

That's what I did for you, mum. I macheted and thrashed and crawled deep into this shopping mangrove until I got to the most inhospitable, treacherous shop in all of shoppingland: a place called Lush. They sell soap and bath stuff there and you know you're getting close when your nose starts dribbling, and it's not snot, mum, it's blood. The caustic perfumes emanating from this shop can burn an extra nostril hole in your sinal membrane, and the moment I stepped inside my septum cartilage collapsed and my corneas peeled off my eyeballs like lychee skins.

Unable to breathe, see, think, I staggered up to a Lush-lady some kind of primitive bottom-feeding organism with no developed olfactic organs and I said "Please . . . soap . . . buyyyyy". Just the act of speaking allowed Lush-air to enter my mouth and my tongue snap-curled back like a party blower. She showed me soaps and gels and even bath-bombs, powerful incendiary ones, the kind you might buy from a Middle Eastern arms dealer at Bed, Bath and Baghdad. So I grabbed a heap of stuff and paid for it and sealed it in a bio-hazchem Lush bag then ran out and spent the next 10 minutes hanging round the fresh-fish stall upstairs trying to neutralise my Lush stink with sliced smoked mackerel smells.

That's what I did for you, mum, that's the kind of extreme sacrifice this son has made, and I hope you like your pressies: got you some oat soaps and honey soaps and coconut soaps, so if you smoosh them all together you can make a very nice Anzac biscuit soap.