What I cooked last night.

On Friday morning before the Melbourne Cup weekend, there had been furious jockeying between the creative staff to win the Cup Eve Monday off as a holiday. Creative director Jason had a kind of reverse-Solomon moment in preventing inter-staff jealousy by awarding the bonus Monday to himself (as he had in the past three years). Meanwhile, everyone had been called into the boardroom for drawing of the annual Melbourne Cup sweep, which Yasmiijn de Reverien was to draw. Jason has recently appointed her as his new personal assistant, a job title he changed to 'creative co-ordinator' to deflect any suggestion of inferiority, servitude, misogyny, sexism etc. Yasmiijn's employment was greeted with scepticism from the rest of the creative department; and raised eyebrows from management, but Jason insisted he be allowed to staff his own department without interference. Yasmiijn has flame red hair and is wearing a silky thing that looks like it was woven by butterflies. It is prob...

Warning: offensive language, sexist stereotypes, threatened violence and more. Section 18C would not survive a morning in a robust advertising agency. In a place like this, a 'trigger warning' is when you walk through the front door. The following story is true. Some names have been changed. IT IS THE FRIDAY BEFORE THE MELBOURNE CUP. ACROSS THE CITY, THOUSANDS OF EMPLOYEES GALLOP TO THE MANAGING DIRECTOR'S OFFICE (OR IN THIS CASE, THE CREATIVE DIRECTOR'S PENTHOUSE-LIKE SPACE COMPLETE WITH LEATHER SOFAS AND TWO BRETT WHITELEYS) TO ASK FOR THE MONDAY OFF, MAKING IT A FOUR-DAY WEEKEND. JASON IS THE CREATIVE DIRECTOR AT BLAKE, BROWNING, BURNS. WITH HIM IN HIS PALATIAL OFFICE ARE ART DIRECTOR ART (YES, ART. ART IS SHORT FOR ARTHUR. IF YOU ARE YOUNGER THAN FORTY YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW THIS BECAUSE THERE HAVE BEEN NO ARTHURS BORN IN THE LAST THIRTY YEARS, EXCEPT THIS PARTICULAR ART, WHO IS 26) AND JAKE, A WRITER. JASON: I'm not coming in Monday, so you guys will have to ...

A cold wind blasted up from the south and the sky was steel grey. I was walking through a patchwork of emerald green paddocks where I once walked as a child with my parents, picking mushrooms. The mushrooms still pop up occasionally but these days the fields are given over to another purpose. I walked along a fence line and saw a horse standing in the cold air in the middle of the paddock. I came closer. The horse seemed to be on a slight lean. It was old. Its eye was on me. It picked up its hooves and ambled over. I walked slowly along, outside the fence. The horse followed me a little way, and then its attention was drawn by another horse in the corner of the field. I came to a gate. On it a sign read: Fields of Omagh. Suddenly I heard a thunderclap. It sounded like 30,000 people screaming, willing a horse past a finishing post on a tight, curved racecourse track. Then silence. Another paddock. Another old horse. Another sign: Might and Power. The noise and vision this time was...

From a news report: But others called the academy’s decision misguided and questioned whether songwriting, however brilliant, rises to the level of literature. And can you believe they're still smarting from the time he picked up an electric guitar?

I was researching a long-defunct 1960s cricket team called the Northern Cricketers. The Northern Cricketers were a social side who played on Sundays at Holbrook Reserve, West Brunswick. The ground was at the westernmost point of the suburb, perched on a horseshoe bend of the Moonee Ponds Creek, so that a good stroke over cover would land in that part of Moonee Ponds immediately south of Moonee Valley Racecourse. Just a short way south of the ground is the Essendon Hockey Club and Ormond Park, home of the Moonee Valley FC, once known as the Fog, as anyone familiar with that low-lying area would know, especially on those cold autumn evenings at the start of footy season. OK, the place is dripping with sporting history. I didn't know if Holbrook Reserve still existed. So I investigated. A glance at the map showed that it looked to be almost obliterated by the Tullamarine freeway, which was built in the early 1970s. However, the ground survived, and I found it. The freeway is its...

Late morning. I was on the phone to yet another 1800 number listening to yet another 'menu'. If you want to give money, press one: you're first. To increase your monthly direct-debit donation, press two: we'll be with you in a millisecond. To hear a heart-warming story about a dog who would have died except for someone's $50 donation, press three. If you have no heart, hang up now. It was the twenty-fifth 'charity' I'd called that day. They call themselves charities, but they are collection agency call centres for non-government organisations. * She averages a dozen request-for-money letters a week. I help her collect them from the letterbox, because she can barely reach it nowadays. She is in her late eighties and elderly widows are gold for the charity sector. Hence the torrent of mail. The fronts of the envelopes have faces with big, sad eyes and short headlines which telegraph the next death sentence that could be delayed or stayed via a q...