What I cooked last night.

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 ...

Saturday morning: you wake and wonder for a millisecond which weekday it is, and in an instant you realise. The express train you are on has pulled into some unexpected rest stop.  The day before I had rung a café in the hills to make a booking for five, having failed to book online. ‘We don’t take phone bookings,’ the woman who answered had said. ‘Or online for that matter,’ she had added, as if the place had achieved some kind of victory over the digital age. ‘Just turn up, and the attendant will take your name and give you a time when a table should be free.’  How would they know, I had wondered. * As far as the view goes, Melbourne ends at the hills, a purplish blue graph that looks like the season’s temperature variations written across the sky. Today the graph was clouded so you couldn’t see the highs and lows.  East, east, east: we drive what is virtually a direct line across Melbourne. Bell Street, Eastern Freeway, Maroondah Highway, Boronia Road. Mountain Highway...

Fitzroy’s Perseverance Hotel is the kind of place in which your  blacksmith great-grandfather might have drunk a few cold beers after a day hunched over the furnace in a factory down a lane somewhere off Brunswick Street. The blacksmiths are long gone, the only people hunched over furnaces in Fitzroy are the chefs in the countless hipster cafes, and the Perseverance is a music venue and bar.  Canisha will launch her new single at the Perseverance Hotel on Friday night.  Tickets are free; book here: https://tickets.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/fb450c29-c0be-452e-b727-b981bb846f43

I dreamt about the immensity of the task: the rambling house; the thousand books; the clothes-stuffed wardrobes in every room; the groaning originally temporary but now permanent spillover shelves warped with the weight of accumulation.  Much of the gathered freight had been magpied from charity shops by the obsessive collector - who wasn't really obsessed, but merely gained great satisfaction, having been a child of the 1930s Depression and therefore had economy flowing through her ancient veins, in paying next to nothing for old treasures. And yes, old junk. Anything that had a potential practical use was never to be thrown out. This habit, not rare among early-twentieth centurians, predated an entire twenty-first-century obsession with recycling, a thoroughly corrupted incarnation of that elementary, transparent six-letter word: thrift. But her thriftiness was not the hair-shirted asceticism associated with today’s displays of self-denial; indeed there was an element of brio in ...

14 October 2024 Dear Angelika I write to you with the sad news that my mother Mary passed away last month. She had been suffering several conditions and eventually succumbed in hospital. She died quite peacefully on September 25. Mum always enjoyed receiving your letters and cards. She looked forward to hearing all your news, especially about your many cycling and walking adventures in the countryside and along the rivers of your country, news about your cooking, and about your garden and the animals and birds that appeared in it from time to time. Mum’s funeral was held on October 11, and many family and friends attended, including grand- and great-grandchildren, and even a great-great-grandchild. The funeral was held in the St John Bosco’s church in Niddrie, close to her house in West Essendon. It was a sad but nostalgic occasion, because in the 1960s my mother and father had sent us to the parish school next to the church, and both of my parents helped out with parish function...

There was a steady, distant hum of traffic on High Street as I entered the funeral parlour. Set well back behind its own car park lined with trees it was a pale square of a building, rendered white walls broken up by black glass.  The consultant, neat, efficient, fiftyish, was apologetic. We were sitting at an oblong table in the client room, a kind of reduced boardroom with sympathetic quotes on the walls and a water jug on the table and no ashtrays. Death!  The consultant’s laptop had crashed and all the details of the deceased had been lost. She left me to find some ghostly IT person in an office elsewhere in the building, and I gazed out the window at a garden bed humming with flowers. Beyond that, passing vehicles on High Street were blurred wraiths, their soft filtered whine fading in the mid-afternoon air.  Fifteen minutes passed. A gold-flecked shaft of sunshine fell on the carpet and crept up the leg of the boardroom table. Then the consultant returned, sombrely ...

I was early for the visit; the traffic had seemed lighter than usual. I parked in my usual spot in the shadow of the University’s halls of residence and walked to the cafe and sat at the end bar near the pizza oven and read my current book, The Peculiar Institution by Kenneth M. Stampp, a careful and detailed study of slavery in the ante-bellum South, published in 1956; and in which the author acknowledges that ‘… American Negroes still await the full fruition of their emancipation …’. An hour later I left the café and walked rather quickly, as light rain was falling although it was not cold, through the university and across European-treed Royal Parade, elms still not in full leaf, to the hospital; and then in through the private hospital section’s entrance, along several corridors and around several corners, past radiology and a few other -ologies, and finally down a flight of steps into the main reception area. That knowledge of the labyrinthine building saved a few hundred metres o...

My mother occasionally receives letters from her German correspondent Angelika , but as she can no longer read, I read them to her.   Extracts from a letter received recently, posted here with permission:   “(Dear Mary) … Here in Dortmund spring has arrived … trees are in bloom … bees and bumblebees are humming around and the butterflies are dancing on the flowers. There are a lot of titmice and robins, even jays. But I do not like the magpies. They are a danger to all the smaller birds. There is also a pair of brown squirrels that visits my garden every day. It is quite a punctual animal; it has its breakfast in the birdhouse at 10.30 a.m. … Spring is the prettiest time of year, I think.  “At the beginning of May I plan to do a cycling tour along the Danube. We’ll do about 50km every day which means that we’ll stay in about fourteen different hotels. … We will travel to the south of Germany by train, taking our own bicycles with us. My bike is 56 years old and it ha...