What I cooked last night.

‘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of the dinner ritual - and tempts his readers with the concept that it - or at least its hyper-formality, is outdated: The dinner-table and what was expected at it epitomised, as much as anything, (Mrs Ogilvie’s) attitude which was not one of anti-modernism but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 ...

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 ...