So here goes: Parade watched some of Australian Ninja Warrior on Monday night and enjoyed it. It’s not a pretty statement, but it’s the truth.

To be fair, Parade wouldn’t have enjoyed the show half as much if he hadn’t been with his nephews, who oohed and aahed and cheered and gasped at all the right moments to add the necessary drama and excitement.

But even without all that, the show would still have been quite fun.

Watching the heavily muscled competitors clambering over logs and hanging off poles and trying to run up walls made Parade think of the obstacle courses he and his brother used to create when they were younger and the simple pleasure they derived in trying not to fall off or out of high things.

Parade and his brother tied a length of rope between two tall trees to make a home-made flying fox in one childhood backyard. In another, they dug a big pit, filled it with horse manure and strung a swinging rope above it. 

Australian Ninja Warrior looked like a bigger version of that sort of stuff – except with a live audience and prizes for the winners and without the horse manure and flying children.

GOT some spare time on Saturday morning? Maybe you can lend a hand at the Bathurst Regional Council National Tree Day event at O’Keefe Park, off Eglinton Road.

Parade has been told this site has been chosen because it is the last section along the riverbank in O’Keefe Park to be revegetated with native plants.

Over the past three years, council and volunteers have been revegetating this section of the river as part of the Restoring Regent Honeyeater Habitat in the Bathurst Region project.

Parade is told more than 4000 plants from the Casuarina Gallery Forest community have been planted.

Saturday’s National Tree Day event will start at 9am.