What I cooked last night.

And here's the one that was too big to carry around town last week. Are books expensive? Unanswerable. Is a $90 book too expensive? Unanswerable, but the answer is no, anyway. You can put $90 into your tank and tear it up in an afternoon driving down the coast, but the $90 book takes you around the world and not just once and you keep it for life. I can't see a book of this scale (hardback, 480 pages) making much margin even at the price. They sell glossy magazines a tenth of the weight at a quarter the price and full of nothing. Nor are books subsidised by ads for watches and Burberry and single barrel Scotch. This is not a cook book. They just sell it out of that section because there are recipes in it. It's a two-kilogram rebuke to purists who insist that only those who hail from such parts may write about them. Christine Manfield an expert on India? She is now. Buy it for the photography. Not of food; though that is there. The teeming cities; the mysterious wate

Here's William at the same age of fifteen months. Hose off the dirt and you'd mistake one for the other. The hair is identical; Tom's was always straight.

That was yesterday. She sat in my chair and smiled. Today she wore yellow, and there was a trip to town; two bookshops, one retail store (other) and the State Library. But before all that, coffee. Brunetti is 75 metres - to the inch - from Flinders Street station if you don't count the platform, escalators and steps. I had coffee (Vienna); Tracy cappucino. The children (Thomas and Alexandra) ate a coarse-sugar dusted doughnut, Italian-style. It was fat and doughy and fresh, and then it was just some grains of sugar on a plate and more grains on their faces. Dymock's is downstairs off Collins. Dymock's recently announced expansion plans. You can see why. Their staff are knowledgeable and the book selection is as good as it gets in a chain bookstore. Dymock's is also soaking up the foot traffic from the defunct Angus & Robertson and Borders, the latter of whose staff were in turn snooty, unobtainable, uninterested or even disinterested. By contrast, Dymock'

The post directly under this one may have restored my brother's faith in simple parties . (Just last Thursday, I sat at the place he occupies; he was diagonally opposite; Alexandra was in a high-chair at the place occupied by our sister. We had lunch.) That was July 1969. What else happened that month? Nothing much. 43 years later, our mother is still feeding us. Just not so often.

Yes, he's grown . (He's not a Footscray fan, they gave out the caps at kindergarten as a kind of early recruitment drive. He remains true to the Same Olds, but the cap is handy.)

The only hand-held devices you can use at this restaurant are your knife and fork. "Only six months ago we never saw an iPad, but I've had a two-year-old in here with an iPad - it's a joke," co-owner Nabil Kurban said. "We are just letting people know that being at the dinner table for the family is the most valuable time of the day so that people can say, 'How are you, how's your day, is everything OK?' "It's a very special moment. We are just asking for one hour a day - no gadgets at the dinner table."