What I cooked last night.

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The lemon tree and the passion play.

The lemon tree had had a good summer. It had surreptitiously reached six feet across the fence - I hadn’t realised - and into the neighbour’s yard. To support the weight - it was now fully laden - its almost horizontal leaders, like giant elbows, were resting on the palings. The fence nails were unnailing, vertically distended gaps were showing light; and gratingly clichéd aphorisms about good fences were repeating themselves. Scene one: the church. Three o’clock. I had walked the half-mile or so towards the slate-encased red brick spire, still strainingly visible above the rising skyline of new apartments. It was a warm afternoon. The silvery sky tinged with red had suggested either a medieval painting of Calvary, or a 1950s Hollywood biblical epic. I sat in the south transept as the truncated passion play was read to an half-empty church. Everything is open on Good Friday now; the congregation has diminished with the zeitgeist, if that term can be applied to rushing aroun...

The silver Jaguar.

The Mark II Jaguar, silver, red leather, flew across Moreland Road and straight through a red light. It was seven in the morning. I was driving blind into the rising sun. I saw nothing else, let alone a couple of peripheral red orbs. I should have been more attentive. I should have driven slower. I should have been dead. Plenty of crooks in swinging 1960s London used Mark II Jaguars as getaway cars, and crashed them, and ended up maimed or worse. I kept going. The maternity hospital was a faint brutalist silhouette in the distance. Last day of January, 1977. I’d stayed awake the previous night with a Haig on ice and the late movie - Vertigo - on TV, waiting for the phone to ring. It was good. I had stared at the screen without wanting to throw a brick through it, and even the ads were kind of acceptable, corny but with none of the sanctimonious rationalisations that sell everything from cans of tuna to cars these days. The television itself was a chunky four-legged mid-seventies model...

Bacchanalia.

We drove down from the artists’ colony and headed south west through the foothill-underpinned and heavily treed suburbs of Montmorency (which always reminded me, when I drove through it, of the fox-terrier in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat ), Macleod and Rosanna; and then the road flattened out and we were back in the inner-city grid heading for a warehouse in the back street of a used-to-be working class suburb, where once men hacked and sawed and planed and amber-shellacked, and made things of lasting beauty and utility that would never be placed on the street for the hard rubbish collection. And there it was: an old sawtooth-topped factory of red brick. It was such a caricature you could almost see it breathing in and out, cartoonishly, along with the let’s work soundtrack, and workers inside putting tops on jars in hundredfold unison. Now, endless decades later, the sun dropped below the building's zigzag roof making a glowing halo around its jagged perimeter. It was se...

Scenes from a wedding.

The couple emerged from the darkness of the great medieval hall and stood together on the sandstone threshold. Their faces, flushed with heat and relief, bore the jubilantly weary expressions of the just-wedded: of having accomplished a great task, as if the thirty-minute ceremony were a four-year work-in-progress, a continuum from first making eye contact in a street or a lecture room or a supermarket or a shoe shop, to signing their names - finally ! - with an ostentatious pen on parchment in front of a breathless, grinning celebrant. Of course, the great stone building was not medieval; in fact it was less than a hundred years old, parts salvaged from city buildings demolished during the Depression; windows and beams and doors and staircases, ghosts of the gilded era, rising again on a hill in the rolling acres of an artists’ colony in the far northern suburbs of Melbourne. * Cloudless early autumn Sunday. Four in the afternoon. On the forecourt in front of the great recl...

Radioactive time.

Eventually I knew that time was not on anyone’s side, let alone mine. It was not, as the human mind imagines, a kind of subterranean stream following along in parallel, a happy bubbling compliant brook. That year, time had broken out of its former muzzled existence as a sequence of languid forty-minute school periods. I slept during those lessons. I read Tolkien. I dreamed of white foam creaming on a beach. I ate coffee scrolls at the back of the classroom. Now, only months later and school finished for life, time ran my life rather than accommodating it. A Copal clock radio sat by my bed, its rectangular face shedding eerie green light and its mechanism infinitely flipping numbers, like a slow-motion poker machine. It had a wood-grain pattern trimmed with plastic chrome around the edges, like a Cortina’s dashboard. It woke me in darkness with the faltering but carefully enunciated syllables of the early morning Learning English program on 3AR. Or it wove bits of song into m...

The golden window.

I was enduring the effects of a potentially fatal accident, yet forced to stand in the capricious moral light of acknowledging that I was alive. Unlike the other three occupants of the car, I had not been wearing a seatbelt when the car crashed headlong into the pole: the seat in front had stopped me, rather than the windscreen, the road, or the telegraph pole itself. Missing lectures and deadlines, I had to make some adjustments. I converted to part-time study, and found a day job. This only increased my hours but I figured, correctly - or as a precocious eighteen-year-old - that a lowly but paying office job bore fewer mental rigours than full-time academic study. And so began - as Tennessee Williams once wrote* - ‘a short career in the telephone business’ (he was referring to his father). The telephone business - mine, not the playwright’s father’s - was in the London Stores building, a 1925 cube on the corner of Bourke and Elizabeth streets. It was one of those buildings arch...

A tale of two films.

Thanks to my own impetuosity I had to confront studying film as an academic subject. For me, this was like studying Australian politics without knowing who were the last ten prime ministers. On the first day, a February dragon, I rode a tram, one of the old solid green ones that rumbled with dignity over the points instead of reverberating like an enormous tin can, down the long Mt Alexander Road hill towards the city and got off at Latrobe. I sat alone in a crowd of new students, probably equally alone in their first-day anxiety, and we watched a film by Sydney Pollack called They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? This was followed by a lecture in a room scattered with plastic chairs and rhomboid-topped tables in the old Building 6 in Bowen Lane. These lectures, discussions really, were to become journeys into dusty locations and long-abandoned sound stages and other cinematic archaeology, where the eyes of forgotten actors told flickering stories of sadness and love and tragedy. The su...

Year of the cyclone.

In that year of the cyclone that destroyed a city, I had finished school, underperforming; not that anyone had been pushing me. One subject saved me in that final year of floods and impeachments and cyclones; and that was down to D. H. Lawrence. The Virgin and the Gypsy and Sons and Lovers were both for some reason on the English study list. In the former the daughter of a straight-laced rector has an affair with a gipsy while her repulsive grandmother drowns in a flood; the latter concerned a boy’s relationship with his mother and girlfriend in a dreary English mining village. Lawrence wrenched and wrung masterpieces from the bleak shaft-riven hills of northern England, and proved that genius or at least great artistry can emerge from the strictures of anti-intellectual provincialism. I wrote something along those lines for the exam, and after a post-examinations interlude at a relative’s house in a small town called Birregurra overlooking the Warrnambool train line, I returned...

The art of serving black pudding.

Black pudding is a culinary curiosity, an oddity even, a food item that can excite strong dislike, and one which is rarely seen at dinner parties, as it crosses too many taboos and prejudices and is obviously an acquired taste. To chance it with the dietary requirements of divers visiting diners might be considered a host or hostess’s bridge too far. After all we are talking about a product made mainly of congealed pigs’ blood. I acquired a taste for black pudding early, my mother frying rounds of it sliced off a Don horseshoe-shaped sausage. I didn’t always wait for the frying; being a teenager I could eat the stuff chilled, straight off the roll, straight out of the fridge. Delicious. I bought some recently after a long hiatus. The meal I presented to a certain party featured black pudding in a pasta dish and was an undoubted success, but I had had to resort to a certain subterfuge to enhance its acceptability. I told my dining partner that the recipe for the meal ha...

AI explained.

Thinking Machines , Irving Adler, 1961.

Scenes from a festival.

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...

Did you lock the door?

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...

Tomatoes ripening; basil in full leaf.

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...