What I cooked last night.

There is an astrological concept known as the seven year cycle, probably the figment of someone’s imagination, like most irrational things are - if you’ll pardon the cynicism - in which some very odd unexplained things may happen amid a whirlwind of change and uncertainty. Last week some research was reported on (see below) in the newspapers (which for the benefit of younger readers are - or were - physical pieces of paper on which was printed ‘content’, produced by people known as ‘reporters’ or - in the case of the more self-absorbed - ‘journalists’). Newspapers still exist: online. If that statement strikes you as an impossibility you are, strictly speaking, correct: publishers continue to entitle their digital reportage a ‘newspaper’ as long it it is gathered beneath one ‘masthead’. Odd, really. Nevertheless an item appeared last week describing the research mentioned above. Some academics at a ‘university’ in some polluted regional city in the north of England (where possibly the ...

The airless tram stopped, its door peeled open, and I stepped out into the shady archway of the gothic arboresque cathedral formed by the Royal Parade elms.  Summer, late afternoon. The sun, scorching, had sailed across 135 vengeful degrees, burying its heat into every hard dark surface that its hot blind fingers could reach.  I turned from the shade into a burning laneway, passed the brutalist angled academic buildings of the university and reached the Beaurepaire swimming centre. The building, a modernist cube of monumentally optimistic design, brazenly wears a multi-coloured frieze, an Aztec-like belt of mid-century zeitgeist, as if it were still 1956. As I passed its glass-walled blueness, I sensed, if not heard, the metronomic slap-slap of immersed students ploughing endless laps, subconsciously invoking a curious para-temporality designed to speed their five-year courses to an earlier conclusion.  Outside the glass, the athletics track hosts the same time-bending ri...

I had thought they went to the moderator (me? a moderator?) via email, but in poking about the entrails of the twentieth-century online word-airport called ‘blogger’, I found them huddled together in their own little virtual waiting room, hatchlings patiently eager for take-off. I ticked them off like a steward handing out boarding passes and off they flew. Apologies for the delay.

‘Artificial’ once denoted something made by humans instead of occurring naturally; for example, artificial flowers. The meaning has changed marginally. Artificial intelligence has all the appeal of those flowers, smirking like evil aliens in their soil-free and water-free vases.  In the early days of the internet websites such as this were assailed by humans posting opportunistic comments hoping to publicise themselves or their websites or their business.  The phenomenon has returned via AI, with dozens of machine-generated comments appearing on recent posts, sixteen at a time, all seeming to advertise concrete works or internet businesses or fish-scaling devices or personal development agencies or home soothsayers.  The comments, while cleverly (somehow) segueing neatly off the content of the post, then lurched drunkenly off into pidgin English territory so typical of those early internet interruptions: ‘Fastidious blogging is your forte!’ ‘ My sister is studying this ar...

Two echoes - one from inside the house, behind me; the other more distant, a hundred metres away perhaps, behind the house among the trees. Two dogs, emitting short, sharp, expectant noises; almost as articulate as the human small talk had been, over the Christmas table slung beneath the spreading canopies of full-leafed European trees. The bark from inside the house had the harsh, brittle sound echo of the four walls from which it had emerged; the more distant one had carried its landscape with it, softened by hedging, plantings, damp earth, and muffled slightly by the tree trunks it had to bounce around to carry.  The barking had woken me out of a sunlit doze, or daze. I lay on a poolside chaise longue, one of those wicker things with cushions enveloped in magically-weatherproofed material. Easy to fall asleep on, at mid-afternoon on a warm eucalypt-fringed Christmas afternoon, as far from snow and pictures of red Santas as Pluto is from the sun. The journey from the northern sub...

Hal Porter, in his 1971 novel  The Right Thing , delves, via his character the landed matriarch Mrs Ogilvie, into the anthropology of the dinner ritual - and tempts his readers with the concept that it - or at least its hyper-formality, is outdated: The dinner-table and what was expected at it epitomised, as much as anything, (Mrs Ogilvie’s) attitude which was not one of anti-modernism but anti-retrogression - a centre-of-the-tunnel stand. Farther back in the tunnel her earlier Scottish ancestors, gathered together for their evening meal in a smoky granite hut, had more or less pigged it. Later ancestors, generation by generation, had advanced to more and more lighted parts of the tunnel, to smoother manners. Her father and mother had dined at Kildermorie under the chandeliers she had inherited, as she had inherited the idea that this last meal of the day should mean a family concurrence, an interchange of civilities: knives used for cutting into lamb chops, not for slitting t...

In 1977 I placed a round yellow and black sticker on the back window of my first car. It showed an illustration of a ferret, under which were the words: ‘Lean and nosy like a ferret’. The newspaper it advertised was Nation Review, an ‘alternative’ (whatever that means) weekly. The sticker was illustrated by Michael Leunig, who died this week. Leunig was a cartoonist for Nation Review and later moved to The Age, under legendary editor Graham Perkin, when the newspaper was judged one of the ten best in the world.  Leunig’s cartoons were whimsical but savage; gentle but scathing; soothing but undermining: everything, in fact, a woke society could many years later not bear. Hypocrisy hates a mirror. Leunig’s mirror was a fine point pen, a genius line and nothing else. The Age sacked him, obviously preferring him to stick to the annual calendars, anthologies, mugs and other middle-class decor which Leunig’s gentle illustrations so admirably suited but which may have become a millstone a...

That mountain is actually a series of small ones, an observation I might already have made in the post about Miss Marple’s Tearooms; or the one about the transcendent slope of land in that cool, shady, towering canopied garden of Eden that bears the kindergartenesque name of ‘Dandenong Ranges’.  Garden of Eden? Indeed, during the Hurdy Gurdy days of the late 1960s and early ’70s, the steep, winding roads to the villages and hamlets of the Dandenongs echoed not just to the bellbird’s transcription and the kookaburra’s machine-gun burst, but also to the staccato approach of the tangerine Volkswagen Kombis that clattered their way up the impossible slopes; transporting their orange-tinged loads of pumpkins and kaftans and hippies to the share-houses and rental bungalows - or their Camberwell-based parents’ holiday houses - for weekends or entire summer holidays of mountain-air-flavoured curried lentil feasts with a backdrop of progressive rock played on  woodgrain Kenwood stereog...

I left the room quietly - probably for the last time; its lonely sunrise mural gazing down on the room’s first utter emptiness, save for some kind of eighties carpeting, since the house was built in the sunshiny days of optimistic postwar Melbourne, when steamrollers roamed the bare streets, their sibilant screams heard from afar as they subjugated hot tar over a recalcitrant basalt plain turning it inch by inch into yet another suburb. I shut the door and moved on to the next room. This would be harder. Clearing my own once-bedroom, although long occupied by others, held a dilution of fascination for a personal past, a lost but remembered history, a shrine of memories; but mine alone, so no need of any sentimentality. The bathroom was different. My eyes stripped away the inert detritus and saw my father, silent in front of the mirrored cabinet door, spring morning light scintillating through two textured glass windows and projecting on pale blue walls and ceiling like the surface of a...

November 1973. I lay on my bed, arranging myself around the broken spring in the mattress, and waited for it to get dark. A narrow shaft of dying light fell on the wall, slid down over the bedhead like a fragment of yellow silk and blinded me. In the bedhead a cassette player was ticking away quietly as it wound off a track from Trilogy by Emerson, Lake and Palmer.  After a while the light died and the wheels in the cassette player stopped with a ‘clack’ and I fell asleep. * Much later, last week in fact, in clearing the house after my mother’s death. I was in the room again. I recognised it like a palaeontologist recognises an unearthed mastodon skeleton: everything in the right place. The door, the window, the light switch. But repainted, recurtained, recarpeted. Not very well, but can’t be possessive about a room after all that time. Above the picture rail, a wall-length mural I painted in the 1970s - a kind of imitation tapestry of scalloped colours representing a sunrise - ha...

(I hope I spelt that right.) Pasta with garlic and oil is almost a cliché of Italian cuisine. Probably the tastiest cliché ever. Some may cavil at the garlic: you have to like garlic to like this dish. Having said that, garlic is possibly the most unfairly maligned ingredient in the history of food. How would you feel if you were a root vegetable but people kept calling you ‘Herb’? Of course, if you want to call garlic a herb there’s plenty of justification for that on the internet, just as there is if you want believe a cat is a human, a tote bag is a criminal accomplice, or an apple is a timepiece. But then there's the flavour. Many may be more concerned with the aromatic after-effects of garlic than the flavour itself which is earthy and pungent and adds so much to so many dishes.  In any case, the pleasure derived from eating a large bowl of rustic-style pasta aglio e olio flecked with freshly-picked parsley (a((n))herb) outweighs any fear of what people may think about yo...

A weekend in 1972. The sedan, gold metallic and book-ended with doomed chrome, hums its new-engine tune as it sails east along Canterbury Road. Somewhere near Camberwell it passes beneath a railway viaduct bearing a garish advertising poster, and the seven-year-old sitting next to my mother in the back seat sniggers at the suggestive bath towel brand painted across its width. Beside my father in the front seat I roll my eyes at the boy’s juvenility, while slowly rotating the volume control on the car radio, so that Marc Bolan can drown the back-seat sniggers. (Slowly, because if the volume goes up too fast or too much, my father will snap the radio off with a punctuation-like punch of his left hand. It happened once before with the Rolling Stones’ 'Honky Tonk Women', although I was never sure if it was the volume or the song’s content that made my father kill the song. I never asked him and he never told me. He was the weak silent type.) The gold car draws closer to that blue g...

The scones at Miss Marple’s seem to have been baked in a kind of four-part loaf and split into four even squarish towers. According to reviews this apparently makes them contentious, like refusing to pray in a Norman square-towered church when you’ve grown up with Gothic.  The appeal of the scone is not its beauty, but its inscrutable taste: a bland, doughy buttress embraces a blitz of sweet/acid jam, the two opposing taste and texture sensations both then being subsumed beneath a cold, unctuous blanket of cream, synthesising a flavour complexity like no other.  And from such a humble food item! Miss Marple (she is almost a person at this end of the review) pairs her scones with Yorkshire Gold tea, a rich, smooth blend that is vastly superior to most caterer’s blend ‘English Breakfast’ contenders; in my opinion as good as  my personal favourite  from across the Irish Sea. * Miss Marple’s Tearoom, 382 Mt Dandenong Tourist Road, Sassafras. Website: 'When we take ...