What I cooked last night.

Thinking Machines , Irving Adler, 1961. 

The sky was as clear as a saint’s conscience. Below its sheer impossibility, awaft on a mercury sea, yachts rolled and turned, their sails convexing and concaving like living breathing creatures. Arriving from ninety-three million miles away, blinding sunlight hit the water at 300,000 kilometres per second and shattered into a lacework of twinkling diamonds prettier than the night stars. (Forgive the figures; I am a reincarnated Rømer trying to convince that sceptic Cassini about Io.) It was idyllic. But the sky was too blue, the sea too perfect, the yachts too three-dimensional, like languorous basking sharks. It wasn’t real: it was a piece of preserved transparent thermoplastic backlit into life by 60,000 lumens (figures again) of anti-darkness; a kind of reverse firing squad in which something dead is shot against a wall to make it live again; if only momentarily. A documentary film. The boats were participants in the 1958 America’s Cup - a yacht race - but the real subject of the f...

I was scared rigid. My life’s inexorable linear projection was punctuated by moments of sheer terror, and no-one could say where this predilection to be terrified came from. In the middle of nights that never ended I drew the bedclothes up so tightly I wished I could have zipped them around my face, as I’d done once with my older brother’s tartan-lined sleeping bag at a scout camp at Rowallan in the spring of 1968; an irony given that in the company of dozens of sleeping others I felt no fear at all. By day, while a scout leader chased a fear-stricken koala up a tree to the vapid amusement of his minions (an event that revealed to me the vacuous corruption of authority), from a crackling camp radio speaker crept  This Guy’s in Love With You, Witchita Lineman, The Fool on the Hill, Macarthur Park; and my mind climbed into and around every piano intro, vocal inflection and orchestral upsweep, as if each note were an architectural manifestation, a building block, of some other univer...

It’s that time of year. Tomatoes on the vine, basil in the ground, heat in the air. The tomatoes are mainly the cherry type, and they will be prolific. As the vines themselves are over six feet tall, I had to go to that ghastly hardware place and buy stakes. Is there an alternative? Please advise. And I don’t mean ripping thin lengths of timber from a neighbour’s fence.  The stakes are not really tall enough: they lost two of their seven feet on being hit into the ground; even so they are slightly unstable under the weight of a six-foot vine and will go over completely if we have a strong-enough wind. Basil is easy but transient. It is impervious to sun even at forty Celsius, but the snails will eat it. Also, pick it before it goes to seed which this year was quickly.  Ok. Tomatoes and basil organised: now to eat.  Easiest of all, slice tomatoes over good bread brushed with olive oil, crumble some goats’ cheese over (Meredith Dairy, or Coles has its own version - which pr...

The two older teenagers and their mother flew back from the land of her parents’ birth, and late on a warm humid night I met them at the airport, and heard stories of Scotland on the way home. Being mid-winter in the northern hemisphere it had been cold and it had snowed and it was out of tourist season; therefore it had been a good time to travel. The following night we had dinner in a small Vietnamese restaurant and I heard the extended adventures illustrated occasionally by pictures on a phone. Thanks to its immediacy the cell phone has ingeniously obviated that once-common social occasion, the slide night. Overseas travellers once took rolls of film and had them developed as ‘slides’ - transparencies - to be projected against a large bare wall. This function (as well as for projections of Super 8 films) was catered for by architects who penned the cathedral-ceilinged or low-slung modern houses of the cosmopolitan 1950s. The slide night, a cultural shipwreck ironically washed up on ...

New buildings are curated now, with museum-like interpretations of their anthropomorphic value and historical influences: ‘Coburg Station presents as a civic gesture drawing abstract references to the formal language of classical architecture.’ Given the formal language of the station, the sign in front kind of lets the side down.

The magpie stood beneath a photinia shrub in the front garden, beak ajar and slightly upturned, as if it were singing in a film documentary from the silent era; but with no sound it was just a hot bird cooling itself in the shade. I turned on the sprinkler; they like to bathe in the falling drops of water. It was 42 degrees. 107 always sounded better, but you have to be of a certain age to remember Fahrenheit. Another magpie appeared, dropping down from a power line, or someone’s roof. It was probably a sibling or a some other relative of the first. The pair were most likely descendants of a deformed bird I once knew and  wrote about . * Earlier in the afternoon I had taken the youngest teenager to her first shift at a takeaway restaurant. Before picking her up later I had sat at an open-air table outside a cafe in the mall with a drink and an Alberto Moravia novel. It’s only a kilometre and a half from home but in this heat ...  * Two Women is set in the coastal mountains so...

A newspaper item (The Australian, it should know better) reported last week that while the perpetrator of a crime had been captured, the gun he had used to threaten his victim was still ‘at large’. * Mistakes - typos, literals  - happen. I usually ignore them. Everyone makes them. Including me. But there is a change. We are seeing more of the errors that used to be called schoolboy howlers not only submitted but sailing all the way past the increasingly illiterate eyes of the sub-editor and proofreader (if there is one) and into print and digital publication.  So let’s enjoy the chase as we hunt down errors of the type usually described as (the world’s most currently overused word): ‘egregious’.

Dead quiet on a heat-heavy afternoon, around two o'clock, except for the almost imperceptible shush of movement from the trees; an almost-audible shimmer of movement, mirrors of light, from the full-leafed shrubs; and some faraway grind of a bus on a hill. Far, far away. That was a week, three days, two days, before Christmas.  I had finished school days before. The world was mine; the world being the garden, the street, the hill to the river, in another direction, another hill to a creek that wound, anyway, down to the same river. Another direction, around two corners to a small strip of shops that seemed asleep under the sun's oppression: side street; milk bar; haberdashery; newsagent; chemist; butcher; greengrocer; bakery; Four Square grocery; fish shop; another side street. The haberdashery was also an agent for the bank, a curiosity I found perfectly normal; the grey-haired cardiganed middle-aged woman who ran it seemed perfectly suited to taking one's money, putting i...

Nine hundred kilometres south, early in the evening, after a  warm, overcast Sunday I had spent at Lakeside, I was on a train heading to my home in the northern suburbs. During the afternoon, in between sporting events, I had taken a book to the sun-drenched lawn high up behind the bleachers (plastic bucket seats these days, powerfully sprung so that they won’t even support your bag of running gear without flipping up and flushing it onto the dusty concrete below). The novel was Philip Roth’s Nemesis (Jonathan Cape, 2010). The grandfather, Sam Cantor, had come alone to America in the 1880s as an immigrant child from a Jewish village in Polish Galicia. His fearlessness had been learned in the Newark streets, where his nose had been broken more than once in fights with anti-Semitic gangs. The violent aggression against Jews that was commonplace in the city during his slum boyhood did much to form his view of life and his grandson’s view in turn. He encouraged the grandson to stand up...

In a 2017 interview Tom Stoppard recalled the crowded solitude of his writer’s block: ‘  … there are so many things that ought to be written about, and could be written about, that the contents of my head appear to be mostly white noise, a buzz of all the possible things’.  While not making any comparisons with the playwright, I can empathise. Stoppard : ‘I’m a bit oversensitive about the ideal conditions that I desire or require for doing proper work. They tend towards the extreme, isolation. It’s as though I need to be the only person in the house before I can completely let go of everything around me’. * (Quotes from obituary published in The Times last week and reprinted in The Australian on 5 December.)

‘That’s nice! What is it?’ Or: ‘What’s for dinner?’ She of an earlier generation might - and did - dismiss the impertinent questions with a kindly but sarcastic culinary neologism. But the next generation - the abundant post-war offspring (whose parents feared, after two wars in a few decades, will we lose these as well ?) grew up into a cossetted mid-century middle class that wanted answers. Newly cosmopolitan, and hearing the siren call of airbound silver jets roaring across airport boundaries and up and down the streets and avenues of the suburbs and banlieues, they crossed becalmed oceans, freshly ridded of U-boats, to hunt for foreign dishes, just as their safariing grandparents had hunted game. The names of such captured dishes would be practised in front of pre-dinner party mirrors and tripped off tongues with the syllabic facility and pronunciation of a first language - bouillabaisse; onigiri; cacciatore  - and the resulting culinary exotica would be displayed - and announc...

It rained all Saturday. Not unusual for the third month of spring, but rain that goes on for days is a Melbourne fixture; a festival of sopping misery and cancelled sporting fixtures in a Mediterranean climate that is supposed to follow its seasonal script. I’m exaggerating, of course. It’s not Innisfail. But it’s not tropical either. In childhood I hated enforced confinement. I was an outdoors child. Not the hunting and fishing type, I just did not want to be in the house for days on end. You can’t go outside. It’s raining. I can see that. It’s been raining since Wednesday. Don’t be sarcastic.  That’s not sarcasm, I replied, it’s observation. I went from room to room looking for another climate. I found several in books. Then back to damp reality, in the days before I learned a harsh forbidding beauty could be found in the ever-changing skies thanks to the winds from the oceans at the bottom of the world. Through the louvred panes of a window overlooking the back garden I stared ...