What I cooked last night.

' ... the Present evaporates continually. It's the Past, distilled, bottled, ... which is eau de vie, the cognac of existence.' - Hal Porter, The Extra . University of Queensland Press, 1975. * It was too dark to read the menu, so I didn't. I gazed out at Market Lane, the narrow thoroughfare our window table-for-two looked out on. In the late-summer light of Sunday evening a cast of accidental actors were taking part in a pantomime; hi-vizzed Indian cyclists, playing oriental kings, bearing gift-meals for hungry baby-Jesus adults reclining in their strawless sky-byres; fast boys spidering into their carelessly parked crackle-exhaust sports cars, having not held the opposite door open for their vacantly-botoxed passengers; skeletal homeless pilgrims moving drug-shakily, like marionettes, towards some dead-end mattressed Mecca. Harlequins, columbines, pierrots, clowns. I took in all this cinéma vérité with a ten-second glance, and then a waitress materialised beside our t...

On occasion over the years I've marked St Patrick's Day with a half-hearted attempt at an Irish stew; nothing much more than throwing a few chops into a pot with sliced potatoes and sometimes carrots and onions. Well, essentially that's what it is: on a sleety cold day in the Emerald Isle even that would raise the appetite. This year, more of the same, albeit with a few extra ingredients. Irish Stew with Leek and Parsnip. (Yes, parsnip, one of my all-time favourites .) Brown about one kilogram, or whatever that is in pounds, of lamb in oil - I used diced lamb steaks because they were on special.  Remove lamb and add a tablespoonful of butter to the same pan and saute a chopped onion, a finely sliced leek and a grated potato.  When the onion and leek soften add three carrots, three potatoes, and two parsnips, all chopped evenly. Over the vegetables, as you turn them, sift about a quarter cup of flour. This will help thicken the stew. Add a bay leaf and about a litre (ditto) ...

It was engineered like a chamber music performance; appropriately, given Roberta Flack’s classical music background.  The production wasn’t lush. It was extremely spare - significant given popular music’s headlong rush towards over-production at the time (even though the track was recorded three years earlier).  Flack believed the production to be too slow. The engineer had created a four-minute dream set to the rhythm of a sleeping heart rate in which a lover lies content, dreaming a soliloquy of happiness: or loss? A foreground double bass opens, and a classical guitar sheds teardrops of joy - or despair - in the mid-ground, before piano - and vocal - notes emerge so tentatively you can hear the studio air around them.  The song’s string arrangement by William Fischer is extraordinary, blending violas and cello into an emotional counterpoint that could be fateful, anticipatory, ominous,  portentous, celebratory, frightening or omniscient … depending on whether the...

The long high road sloping down to the distant coast sparkled with the blinding reflections of sun on an endless snake of cars. Chrome bumpers, body strips, window and door surrounds, bonnet ornaments and petrol caps shimmered and diffracted crazily in the haze of boiling engines and midday heat. A far-off strip of blue-grey - the sea! - underscored a cornflower sky. Later, the car I was in stopped opposite the beach where a line of shops stretched to the horizon. The driver got out, disappeared into one of the shops, probably for cigarettes, came back, and gave me an icy-pole in a wrapper with a picture of a helicopter on it. * Endless summer days. We are sprawled on beach towels, which were probably tasseled and multicoloured - but who would remember that detail? - on the sand in the shade of some kind of building, a yacht club or boat launching house or a covered pier. I lick the last sweet droplets, setting in the heat, from inside the torn waxed wrapper. Next to me, my father crus...

I made the following recipe years ago and then filed it away in the archive, where it remained a vague memory, like a lost game of chess. I found it again one hot day recently when I’d bought three large coming-into-season eggplants; and I made the dish and wondered why I'd eaten ten thousand boring meals in between. In the intervening years the recipe's origin seemed to have moved south from Naples to Sicily and its flavour is Mt. Etna-sized. Rather than the more common, and tedious, mince-and-rice filling, this dish relies on the ability of the eggplant itself to deliver extraordinary flavour thanks to the ingredients it carries. Stuffed eggplant with anchovies, capers and olives. Halve and cut the flesh out of two of the eggplants, leaving four shells with about half an inch of pulp remaining. Peel the third eggplant. Cut the pulp of all three into small cubes and place it into a colander, salting generously. Leave to drain for thirty minutes, then rinse and squeeze out exc...

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...