Walls fall; presidents and popes are shot (if not fatally, like musicians); rockets bearing civilians drop out of the sky; clothes grow pads; music becomes a visual medium (on hearing a tune a listener, confusing senses, exclaims, ‘I remember that video!’ ); Roth/Updike/Bellow carry on jousting*. Meanwhile, you had to eat. Not everything in the 1980s was of the 1980s, such as savoury mince, an example of the kind of mundane dish that became a default meal keeping the beef grinders in business like ‘spaghetti bolognese’ does today, its reddish-beige lava bubbling over cheddar-coloured pasta mountainsides in the bowl-volcanoes of a million family tables. ‘Bolognese again?’ Savoury? That redundant word is one of the cooking clichés that never disappears. What else is minced beef except savoury? What does it even mean? The word is scattered like confetti through the recipe supplements (lift-outs, the publishers called them) stapled into those mid-century women’s magazines that sold in the...
The Pink Pussycat - as cryptic a name as I could think of to drop at the next student party - was not the only source of income, little as it was, including tips. Melbourne Airport was arguably an even better conversation starter ( what, you fly planes? - people always think the obvious) but the work here was even more mundane than pouring a ‘taste’ (a charade that even then was embarrassingly outdated) of Yalumba Carte d’Or riesling or McWilliams Shiraz Cabernet into the glass of the male half of a dining couple so that, after making a method acting impression of a furrow-browed, purse-lipped judge at Mundus Vini, he would decide whether they would drink it or not. Indeed, the airport job - money is obviously tight in this anonymous early 1980s Carltonian mise en scène - involved little more than bussing Budget rental cars from their terminal drop-off point to a depot back in the endless sun-parched acres of tarmac in the backblocks of Tullamarine, where I cleared their overflowing ...