What I cooked last night.

The last thing the world needs now is another chorizo recipe. Chorizo is a cliché. Pick up any newspaper or magazine and there’s a recipe for chorizo. But there’s a reason. It’s good; the dried Spanish-style sausage is packed with chilli and garlic. It pairs well with pasta as long as all the ingredients are robust. I use rigatoni instead of the usual clichéd penne. Recipe Cook 250g rigatoni. Halfway through, place one or two chorizo sausages in the cooking water. Cook five minutes more. Drain. Combine pasta in a pot with a tablespoon of good olive oil, a drained tin of borlotti beans and half a tin of diced tomatoes. Slice chorizo, fold through pasta, place in serving bowels, add halved cherry tomatoes and a little crumbled feta. That covers most of Europe.

Wouldn't normally post a picture of a face-painted child but the quality of the artwork was outstanding in this case. He'd been to a party. Thomas turns six tomorrow. Here he is at a few days old in 2006. I can see a bit of tiger about him now, come to think of it. * I'm the king of the jungle They call me the tiger man I'm the king of the jungle They call me tiger man If you cross my path You'll take your own life in your hands (Lewis/Burns)

Late in the afternoon, we were on a beach on the southern side of the Murray River. The sky was that shocking blue you get in the inland and the day was still hot. The river was flowing north-east, which means the beach was on one of those bends that doubles back on itself, a billion-year-old fluke of nature. The water was silent and deadly. You could see the current out towards the middle; fast busy wrinkles that would have you downstream in a flash. The boys waded to a small island near the shore that was just mud with an ancient gum tree growing in it. The gum was bent and its lower limbs dragged in the flowing water and it looked like an old fisherman trying to hold a net. No wonder the aborigines saw spirits in everything; the quality of light and the depth of the shadows out here makes figures of everything. They practised going along in the softer current close to shore. I stood downstream a little and showed them how to swim towards the bank with the flow, and not against i...

Dropped down into the tea tree to the west flashed; colours sat moved along red head blue sun flashing; gold wings? gone. Thomas saw it first. Seven am on a spring morning.

It was one of those cold nights that creep up on you in early spring. I was on the train. Every passenger was wired, but they call them customers these days. "Attention all customers: the 7.40 from Frankston has been cancelled due to overhead works. Fingers tapping and flicking. Necks craned down. Eyes fixed on screens. Automatons. Earlier that day, one of my clients – a consumer goods manufacturer – had asked me for help with his Facebook page; meaning his company's Facebook page, not his own personal Facebook page. Yes! Companies have Facebook pages! The page's message board or wall or whatever the thing is called had been beset with negative comments about one of its products. Many were factually incorrect, some were abusive, and some were unpublishable in mainstream media. He wanted to design a kind of pseudo app within the page that would get complaints off the wall and into a forum so that the comments could be sorted and the genuine ones dealt with individually...