What I Cooked Last Night

The property falls away to the west resulting in views of incredible sunsets on hot summer nights (and nights in winter, for that matter, when the sun has wheeled right around 45 degrees north). The plunging garden is terraced; twelve years ago I planted a plumbago hedge of four plants along 18 feet of ornamental lattice guarding a drop of ten feet to a garden bed below. The hedge was to prevent two small boys climbing on the lattice and risk falling, should the ornamental lattice give way. No longer required. The boys are teenagers now. The plumbago had done its job. Over the dozen years, it had grown to twelve feet in height and had moved out about 18 feet from the fenceline. That's what? 12' x 18' x 18' in volume? Whatever. The point is I had to clear it. Plumbago produces a magnificent green façade with stunning lilac foliage in late spring and is totally gorgeous all year round. But beauty is skin deep. That eighteen square foot of volume behind the green a...

2009 - the Kookaburra . 2007 - the Golf Course . Merry Christmas.

The British election was decided early on Friday in the former mining region of Blyth Valley on England's Northumberland coast. ... the Conservatives took a seat held by Labour since its creation in 1950. ... And then the Conservatives took Workington, another deep red seat held by Labour for 97 of the last 100 years.... And then Don Valley fell too, and on it went, the red wall crumbling brick by red brick. ... There won't be any celebrations at The Guardian ... where its election eve editorial announced ... Jeremy Corbyn deserved to win because ... he was "progressive". That a major newspaper could endorse Corbyn, a diehard socialist who campaigned on policies so deeply regressive, tells you the danger of Corbyn's ideas lingering in the soppy brains and bleeding hearts of people who have university degrees but little common sense. (The Weekend Australian , 14 December.) Spectator Lowlife columnist, the late Jeffrey Bernard, once wrote something along the line...

I'm in a room with no windows, sitting at a large table covered with old books and weathered archives, under a single burning globe. I've been here for three years . The world might have ceased to exist, except that I know it hasn't, because I go home occasionally. Hello, children. I'm hauling bits of history into the present, like dragging two grand pianos bearing donkeys behind me. Buñuel knew what he was talking about in that scene, but especially the eye-slicing bit. Un Chien Andalou, an Andalusian dog. Radio theatre. 1976. Roll it, Syd. Syd was the grey-coated elderly projectionist, and the call to action was from Doug Ling, the world's only film buff who was not an insufferable intellectual. My mind is wandering. Back to the yellowing papers. Now I'm in 1902 reading an account published in the November edition of sporting newspaper the Australian Cyclist , about an overnight trip by the North Suburban Cycling Club to Gisborne, from where its members wi...

It stood sentinel in the back garden for endless seasons. Its central pillar had the strength of a battleship's flagpole and its four radial struts could have been deck railings from the same craft. They used to build clotheslines to last. Silent for decades, it occasionally emitted a low industrial whine when a breeze might set it turning lazily, which I fixed with a squirt of oil in its main shaft's intake valve. You couldn't wind it up or down any more because its winder had seized up years ago. Eventually it developed a slight list, to the north-west, after the drought of 2010 broke. I thought the extra water had allowed movement in the subterranean concrete block in which it was set. Eventually the slight list became a noticeable slant, and by earlier this year, it was like a sinking steamship in its death throes. I dug down to the concrete block, but three inches below the surface of the earth the mast was a brown, flaky mess. Rust. At 40 degrees from perpendicu...

If the Bible is too long, read The Third Beast instead. All your answers about what is moral, what is immoral, and what is evil, in 158 short violent angry pages. Wait a minute. This gritty British crime novel is blurbed as 'the ultimate novel of bloody revenge'. Revenge Biblical? Hardly. But then, maybe. She was only a little girl, really. When she was done up in her school uniform, with her white ankle socks and all, she looked about ten years of age. The first-person unnamed narrator is the girl's uncle. He runs a breaker's yard in grimy 1970s unemployed pre-Thatcher Britain. He breaks cars and sells the bits to poverty-stricken Triumph Dolomite, Morris Minor or Ford Escort drivers. Occasionally he might get a Jag. When she was a little girl, she was always down at the scrapyard in the nice weather. There was an old Riley I kept for her, as a playhouse. She'd line all her dolls upon the back seat, you know the way little children do, sitting them up straight a...

It was a warm night. I was two blocks into my six-block return walk, Helen by my side, and the streets were empty. (Helen is a failed greyhound staying with us for a few weeks. Failed as in racing, not as in being a greyhound. At being a greyhound she is quite competent.) Nothing in the air tonight except the occasional muffled ramp of a distant tram in Sydney Road and the soft rush of a city train on the down line. This neighbourhood was built in the 1940s for artisans and tradesmen who wanted to work where they lived. House blocks combined a residence with a small factory or workshop: cup of tea in the morning and five minutes later you're planing a piece of mountain ash or cutting some leather for a car seat. There are still several small factories, a couple of old warehouses with car parts hanging from dark ceilings like carcasses in butchers' shops, a bird boarding house that used to be something else, and a couple of print factories that clatter by day and fall silent...

The TAB was deserted at 9.30 a.m. "Everyone bets on their phone," she told me when I got home. Of course. * Cup Day lunch: home-made chicken burgers in the sun at the new table in the garden, with roses as good as Flemington's (Queen Elizabeth climber planted last year is now in full bloom and six feet tall with a bullet). The burgers were very simple; nothing to it. Hardly needs a recipe: Toast burger buns very lightly. Grill or fry crumbed (breadcrumbs, garlic, herbs of choice, salt, pepper) chicken fillets until just done. Ample shredded iceberg lettuce as a bed for the chicken on bottom bun spread with mayonnaise (peri-peri or aioli). More mayonnaise flecked with finely chopped white onion under top bun. Serve. * Alexandra had chosen Vow and Declare, who lost the race with fifty metres to go after leading bravely; and then, incredibly, took off again and got his nose in front. Then, on the replay, the second horse's crazy diagonal charge across th...

A five-Test series: Kitchen Hand pits five Beatles recordings against cover versions recorded by a selection of Australian artists. Who will win the Ashes? 1. Bad Boy The Larry Williams (Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Slow Down etc) classic put to the test by the Beatles in full flight, versus the Twilights' uncanny harmonies. The Beatles : A crowd favourite, John Lennon's voice tends to a slight raspiness when he really gets going while Ringo lets fly on the hi-hat or tambourine or whatever brass it is he's belting away on. A classic rock'n roller. But can it beat the Twilights? The Twilights : Glen Shorrock doesn't rasp like John Lennon and doesn't scream but it's still a visceral vocal job. The drums thunder with that millisecond off-beat accuracy that makes any song as tight as a ... well, drum if no other comparison comes to mind. By the way, don't judge this song by its ridiculous YouTube black and white clip in which Shorrock was forced by some idiot d...

I keep seeing the expression 'comfort food'. Isn't all food 'comfort food'? No. Comfort food is food that (a) makes you feel good when you're eating it; and (b) allows you to think about something else while you are eating. Anyone who continually talks about what they are eating is not eating comfort food. Pasta carbonara is a prime example, like lamb shanks, or beef goulash, or shepherd's pie, or loaded mashed potato. I've been making carbonara for years; went through a phase of ordering pasta carbonara on hot summer Fridays for lunch inside darkened Ti Amo in the 1990s, anticipating the efforts needed on Saturdays. Carbonara-loading. Sitting up at the bar, pasta on an oval plate, heavy on the bacon, rings of buttered pasta dura to mop up the cheesy residue, astringent coffee afterwards. Unbeatable. Pasta carbonara. Bacon or just about any variety of salted, cured meat is fine. Anyone insisting on guanciale is forgetting rule (b) above. If you h...

Love Machine , an unexceptional folk rock tune recorded by by US west coast band The Roosters, didn't chart in Australia. It probably didn't even get any air play. However, a bunch of musicians in Sydney and Melbourne noticed it in 1968 and thought they could do a better job. (The Small Faces had just released Itchycoo Park , Cream had The White Room ; and The Legend of Xanadu , Pictures of Matchstick Men and Lazy Sunday Afternoon were the psychedelic soundtracks to my Grade Six life at St John Bosco's where I sat at my desk virtually levitating.) So the musicians who thought they could do a better job of Love Machine did. The result , co-produced by Geoffrey Edelsten, was a swirling symphony of psychedelia complete with synth, keyboards, feedback, phase, reverb, swell, mind-altering drugs and the kind of harmonies the Twilights took to the outer limits with their later incarnations of Axiom and the Little River Band among other projects. The song was recorded under ...

Sydney Road shoots straight out of Melbourne like an arrow and becomes the Hume Highway, an ant trail of roaring B-double trucks on four, six or eight lanes connecting the two cities. The concert was in a venue about twelve miles out of town; one of those places that does big outer-suburban weddings. It was raining when I drove through the hipster suburbs where they ask you five questions before they make your coffee. About 7 p.m. I passed the border, which used to be Bell Street and then Gaffney Street; but which is now Camp Road where a checkpoint charlie stops cool people getting out and non-hipsters getting in. It's called Campbellfield. Then Campbellfield's yellow brick veneers gave way to concrete depots, and empty manufacturing plants, and breaker's lots, and half-built orthodox churches, and signs spruiking new suburbs with names like Eden Rise. I did a U-turn just south of Craigieburn where Supreme Caravans stares across Gasoline Way to Northern Fleet Care and ...

This piece of pop perfection , also buried and forgotten under layers of post-twentieth century sonic silt, saw on-air sunshine today for the first time in decades. From the days when they used to cram the local symphony orchestra into the sound booth. As one commenter noted: "I had forgotten what a bright and happy world it was in 1969."

FM radio is full of singers who sound like they are about to cough in between notes, or who ululate as if they are gargling gravel while taking part bin a prehistoric mating ritual. I have lived through some grim fashions in music but the current crop takes some beating. There are small pockets of resistance. Someone who goes by the on-air name of Ghostrider puts out three hours of gold on Mondays featuring acts you should know but most don't. Drowned in a sea of mediocrity, these names surface and then disappear again for decades at a time. Yesterday's feature artist: Esther Phillips. Listen and weep. Or try this link . MDR has the wrong track listing.

I wasn't sure who had put the gum tree in all those years ago, or the unidentified tree next to it with the long poplar-like trembly leaves on long stringy liana-like branches that hang down and catch your neck as you try to mow under them (despite not much grass surviving down there in the semi-darkness); but he or she must have had the idea of creating some kind of 'indigenous' garden of Eden in which nymphs dance and cavort amidst the native flora; but what they ended up with was untrammelled undergrowth into which sunshine barely penetrates so that while the monster gum tree expands exponentially everything else dies. I was in the front garden. (I dealt with the back garden quite some time ago.) Garden aside, there was a new dilemma inside the house. I had, of course, done some work in the house on many occasions, removing piles of old newspapers that had built up on, beside and behind chairs and sofas. I had also removed hundreds of plastic food containers that ha...

BARRY THE BARRISTER: Now Gordon, this Folau business ... GORDON THE JUDGE: What would you expect of an uneducated Pacific Islander, Barry? BARRY: That comment is offensive. GORDON: Only when amplified in public, Barry, where the great unwashed roil around in confected outrage twenty-four hours a day. But here in this comfortable bar where intelligent adults can have a conversation without stamping their feet or throwing a tantrum worthy of a two-year-old, the question is both rhetorical and ingenuous. And therefore by definition, inoffensive. What would you expect of an uneducated Pacific Islander? – or, indeed, Barry, of an educated one? And the answer, my friend, is that you would expect exactly what we have seen. BARRY: Stop talking in riddles. GORDON: That, from a barrister! BARRY (TO THE BARMAN): Another whisky for my loquacious friend here, please, Charles. (TO GORDON) Then get to the point. GORDON: There's no point. Only a collection of random observations. Th...

Having lost his father at three and his mother at twelve, the breach of a close familial circle would always weight heavily on J. R. R. Tolkien. It is the theme of Tolkien , the movie. The young Tolkien is placed in foster care under a Catholic priest who later bans his girlfriend Edith, insisting the student go up to Oxford. There, Tolkien bonds with three fellow poets, the quartet calling themselves the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS). The scenes of their poetry meetings at the Barrow are realistic and are devoid of the slow-motion filmic tics and posh-Brit characterisations typical of the genre. War ensues. The company is burst asunder. In scenes of blood and death in the Somme, an injured, fevered Tolkien staggers through mud and gore in a fruitless search for two of the members of TCBS. Delirious, he thinks he hears the voice of one who is already dead calling desperately. As soldiers and horses are cut down and fire burns and blood pools into small dams of red, walled b...

The sun was out but a cool late-autumn breeze was just enough to put jackets on the golfers scuttling down out of the green hills and heading greenwards. I locked the cabin and pointed the car south, back alongside the river through shopless Kelso, tiny timber houses either side of the road, and past the dock at Beauty Point where the estuary is still deep enough for a 100-berth marina. A right turn just before Beaconsfield brought some low mountains into the middle distance. We wandered through high farmland and tree plantations that were partly-logged, leaving mohawks of forest on otherwise bald hills. Then the road went around a high spot and after a long curve, a mountain moved out of the way to reveal the sea down below. A town appeared, crouching on a long low hill that faced the water. Ulverstone sat in the sun doing nothing as we approached. The road went through several roundabouts full of no cars, and suddenly we were in the main street. Unusually for a coastal town, it w...

(GetUp chief lobbyist) Mr Oosting ... said the campaign in Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton's seat of Dickson had been partially successful because the swing to him was weaker than the swing to the Coalition across the rest of Queensland. The Greens' road trip to re-educate outback Queenslanders also went well: "The Stop Adani convoy in particular reminded locals about everything that's wrong with elitist politics. ... (they) decided to get in their petrol-fuelled cars and drive thousands of kilometres to a place in central Queensland to tell them they shouldn't have a job." Well done, everyone.

The road had ended in a short curve that wound into itself at the entrance to the caravan park. The only movement we had seen last night in the utter blackness on those last few kilometres had been hundreds of small hopping shadows reflected in the headlights. Some kind of marsupials jumping like abandoned soccer balls in an earth tremor. I had finished Deliverance some time after midnight on the deck of the cabin under the yellow light of a single globe. This remote place is probably the best place in the world to read the book if you exclude the actual Chattooga River. Far off, a muffled crash of distant surf carried in on the wind. I went inside. Now it was morning and the sun had jerked the black curtain back to reveal a bay washing onto a shore that curved around to a point at the western end and a lighthouse the other way. Directly in front of the cabin a pathway broke through scrub and led down to the water, probably fifty steps away. The children had stolen out of the cab...

There was once a poet who won the American National Book Award in Poetry, and then got appointed Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. After that, he was hired as poet-in-residence at the University of South Carolina. In the end he must have tired of rambling around empty halls of learning like a kept ghost, albeit a scholarly one, while stroking his beard and frowning as if trying to give birth to a sixty verse epic. So he wrote a book. He called it Deliverance . I may be exaggerating a little, but just about the entire world has seen the movie 'Deliverance'; or if they haven't, they know what it is about. But most people have never heard of James Dickey. My copy is a Pan from its tenth printing in 1976. One of the reviews on the back cover states that it ' ... achieves what it sets out to do ... ' and even the word 'brilliantly' prefixing that snippet doesn't really detract from the quote's air of faint praise. Time called it a ...

It was a late afternoon flight – the only one available – and daylight saving had ended the day before. The plane rode cloud cover all the way across Bass Strait and in just under an hour it came down out of the clouds and banked and frail dying orange light came into the plane as the sleety runway rose up and hit the wheels. We climbed out of the rear of the plane and walked a hundred metres through light warm rain to a square terminal that seemed a lot bigger once you got inside. A trained beagle led by a uniformed customs officer greeted the passengers and pushed into someone's bag and pulled out an apple. No fruit admitted. I've seen this trick several times and every time the perpetrator looks guiltier than a terrorist. For some reason it always seems to be a well-dressed upper middle-class lady who has forgotten about the no-fruit rule. Bailed up by a beagle, hands in the air in dismay. Or just well-bred embarrassment. I had wanted light so I could see where I was goi...

The punch-line is that they re-named the award after the bureaucrats themselves. Now that's funny.

"Why, Rebecca, how can you call him a name like that?" Evelyn exclaimed. Rebecca laughed, "Oh, come off it, Kansas. You can't pretend you like the son of a bitch." Evelyn thought very deeply. She had to admit to herself, and then to Rebecca, that she did not. "Look," Rebecca said, "if there's racial equality, we have the right to hate bores and loud-mouths regardless of what species they are." Evelyn was a little reluctant to admit she was right. "He is an aggressive fellow, but after all, Becky, any member of a minority is bound to be ..." "Now that's real prejudice, Evelyn. If you think you have to go around loving all Jews because of what happened in Germany, then you're as guilty as Hitler is, or was . For God's sake, respect us enough to hate us when you feel like it." "I see," Evelyn said in a small voice that held an enormous new realization. "Yes. Of course I see." But i...

This 1962 edition of Horace McCoy's No Pockets in a Shroud was clothed in the typically gritty Penguin Crime design sensibility of the time featuring a murky photograph of a newspaper in a monochrome gutter. Oh to have been a fiction cover designer in the early 1960s. But Penguin often published earlier titles. It's an old game: I start reading and try to pick the original publication date. There are usually plenty of period clues, but sometimes few. * Reporter Michael Dolan walks into his managing editor's office to be told his story has been spiked: commercially 'sensitive'. The manager of the baseball team that has deliberately thrown a series has connections. Dolan resigns, sets up his own newspaper, having a list as long as your arm of corruption ready to print: all the stories his former employer refused to run. The corrupt baseball series story is followed by revelation of the death of the husband of the woman with whom Dolan has had an ongoing affai...

On the long sweltering days of a late summer I like, if I can find the time, to switch on my internal air conditioning by reading something from another time, another place, another climate. One of my favourite things to read (we could be talking 'genres' if we were a book club, but we are not) is period fiction and I don't mean regency romances but gritty 1960s British thrillers. Eugene George was a pen-name of Paul Chevalier. (They all seemed to have pen-names - nom de plume to you, Mr Book Club Guy.) George/Chevalier wrote only a few books and is unknown to the extent that you cannot google him, but I Can See You But You Can't See Me is a masterpiece of the sinister British style. (My short review posted at Neglected Books , a godsend for readers now listed in the sidebar.) I Can See You But You Can't See Me by Eugene George Hamish Hamilton, London, 1966

Why don't people throw out ballpoint pens that no longer work? You want to shout at these people. It doesn't work! Throw it out! I was in an office recently and, of nine ballpoint pens sitting in one of those plastic pen caddies given out by print suppliers or pharmaceutical companies, six didn't work*. I've been thinking about this and I have several theories why the pens never get thrown out and end up back in the drawer. Theory 1 A ballpoint pen that has run out of ink doesn't look broken - and people only throw out things that look broken. Theory 2 They are not sure whether the pen has run out of ink. They think it might be that the paper is waxy. The pen gets the benefit of the doubt. Theory 3 My most compelling theory: people are lazy and the waste bin is too far away. Straight back in the drawer. * There's a thesis in this. Maybe a book. Where's my pen? * *I put them back. It was not my office. It wasn't my job to thro...

" ... in the next few years he is ... upset at the injustice and hypocrisy that exist in the world: a world in which some men are athletic stars, James Bonds and millionaires and he is not; he is morally appalled. In his dreams he recreates the world, righting all wrongs, eliminating suffering, redistributing wealth ... ending all wars. He becomes a reincarnation of Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ ... Evil governments topple, corrupt churches collapse, laws are revised, and Truth, written in Xeroxed tablets of stone ... presented to the world." Or on Twitter. Or Facebook. Anyone can take part. The description of the keyboard warrior and his (or her, pedants) delusions of grandeur are well described - in a 1971 novel by George Cockcroft under the pseudonym Luke Rinehart. * The Diceman Luke Rhinehart, Granada, 1971 Kitchen Hand's one-sentence summary: dated parody of psychoanalysis clothed (but often unclothed) in early 1970s post-psychedelic era preoccupations. * (T...

Newspapers are reporting a study that found music lyrics are not as happy as they used to be. I could have told you that twelve years ago .

They impelled themselves in mad arcs, rather than flew, towards the porch light: airborne armadas of brown hard-backed buzzing creatures about half an inch long. But they did not see the wall and they crashed into it. And then they fell on the floor, upside down, and could not right themselves. I put around citronella candles. But they were not deterred. Because they are not mosquitoes. They were attracted. One zeroed in on a candle like a kamikaze pilot at a navy ship, and found itself upside down in molten wax, waving clawed tentacles or legs or whatever an entomologist calls them in the air. I picked him out because I felt pity for such utter stupidity. I threw him into the darkness, away from the porch, but the wax probably solidified in the air and he will end up a fossil to be discovered by some future scientist sixty million light years from now. A beetle embalmed in wax! It was nine o'clock, a warm night with a northerly still blowing straight down from the Queensland...

They shut the Oak Park pool for a year and renovated it. The low curved cream-brick walls topped with white wrought iron detailing are gone, as are the cascading concrete steps and the multi-coloured 1960s seats, and the general retro atmosphere of the place. Now it's angular blocks and steel and seats made from recycled drinks bottles, and an entrance foyer with a revolving glass cylinder door more typical of an office block. But there are still large swathes of lawn, and some trees for shade, and the elephant is still there; but he is no longer pink and water no longer spurts from his trunk. 42 degrees tomorrow. Hemingway is already in the bag by the front door with the towels and sunscreen. Full circle. There was a time when I could read, when the boys were small and stayed in the toddler pool. Then they grew and needed supervision as they leapt into pools, and dived, and tore around the place. So the books stayed at home and I supervised. But now they are old enough to look...