What I cooked last night.

I don't know if these recipes are repeated. I don't have an index or a contents page or labels or tabs or a like button or a follow-me-on-twitter thing with a bird-with-outstretched-wings logo, as if twitter lets you break free of the multitudes and soar alone in a soundless, soaring space where you hear nothing but your own wings beating the air ... Didn't someone make a record about that once?* Now the bird imagery is used to drag millions of humans down into a kind of subterranean worldwide typing pool where they issue forth messages not much longer than the grunting of cavemen, and some of their grunts make the front pages of newspapers. Nuts. But then I got dragged into it, because I had to write some tweets for clients. They couldn’t even do their own grunting! So I set up an account - "Instantly connect! Follow your friends and your favourite celebrities!" - to see how it worked. Apparently it’s not about character count (140) but message byte lengt...

At 10 o’clock the truck arrived to pick up the desk . The driver got down. He was small and old and grey. He wore a cap that was too big and it made him look like an old ferret. He introduced himself as Pat, opened the back door of the truck, pressed a button underneath, and the motorised tray whirred to the ground. Then he leapt up onto the back of the truck and came out with a trolley. “It’s heavy,” I said, referring to the desk. “Not a problem!” he grinned. He still had some teeth. Later, after getting the desk aboard, he said he’d been driving trucks up and down highway 31 for sixty years. Sixty years? Now he just did it for fun, driving his truck to Melbourne once a week from Pyalong to do volunteer pick-ups and deliveries for the op shop. He told me he had just turned eighty. An eighty-year-old who drives halfway across the state and juggles wardrobes and Danish director’s desks for fun?

The new template doesn't allow paragraphs until you select 'press enter for line breaks'. The default setting is set to 'use tag'. I've changed it on mine. I couldn't break Saturday's post into two paragraphs.

Back of the bottle: Since 1698. Finest Scots (sic) whisky. Cutty Sark picture embossed in the glass. Front of the bottle: Follow us on Twitter.

It's about the size of the Titanic. You don't so much sit at it as pilot it. It was built in the 1930s by Danish craftsmen from some Scandinavian tree or other, that was clearly sacrificed specifically for the purpose. There wouldn't have been much left of it. The warm grain of the desk glows chocolate russet coffee according to the light, especially when you give it a loving polish with Marveer. The whole thing is rounded like an early barge. The drawers to either side of your chair are enclosed behind curved lockable timber doors that are attached to the desk by full-length brass hinges. The lock inlays are also of brass, and the keys are the old-style substantial ones in stainless steel, meaning you won't lose them. Two more lockable doors in the front, to either side of the foot well, hide cavernous stowage. With the desk against a wall, these cupboards act as concealed storage, making them ideal for storing your life savings or your rare whisky. Make sure you won’t...

Well, actually, no. I don't recall it ever being that hot on Good Friday. What I do recall is the silence, something even more apparent in recent times when the city never takes a day of rest. I drove to Essendon for an early lunch at the house of a thousand tins, and while the roads were not completely empty, they seemed to be missing that kind of pressing traffic that is always on a mission, tearing off to a supermarket or some other kind of store. On crossing the valley, I usually run into a long, impatient and unyielding northwards line of traffic bound for DFO at Essendon airport. But on Friday everything was closed. I understand why they legislated for seven day trading all those years ago. But a silent suburb beats a herd of black BMWs racing to be first in the single lane entrance to the shopping mall any day. Now it’s once a year instead of one and a half days a week. Enjoy it. Shortly after three in the sultry, silent afternoon. No breeze blew through the open arched d...

Seems to have been all seafood lately, or maybe I just haven’t written about the less interesting dinners; baked beans on toast, etc. (Having said that, if you add scrambled eggs flecked with chopped prosciutto or pancetta, sliced warmed avocado, grilled mushrooms and a grilled leek sausage, you have a passable supper. Interestingly, people seem to be eating this kind of thing in the morning in cafes all over town, but I can’t; just like I could never face up to the British morning fare of kippers before midday.) Nevertheless, Easter week is a good time to be eating seafood. I went into the fish shop in Sydney Road to buy some clams to make pasta vongole, but came out with a large bag of mussels instead, due to $5.99 compared to $25.99 per kilogram. I also bought some flathead tails because they are delicious and the children are not yet eating mussels. (However, William did ask me if I picked them off the pier from which they had been diving. I replied no, but not far away; just acr...

next-gen , as in: The company is positioning itself as the next-gen platform for restaurant marketing, leveraging the appeal of video and power of social media to help restaurants drive foot traffic by allowing diners to discover and share the dishes with their friends across their social graph. Nos 2 and 3 also appear in that paragraph.