What I Cooked Last Night

Due to the time pressures of a high-powered career and various domestic pressures such as wife and children, I used to try to cook a meal in the shortest possible time. I wrote about it in a post entitled the  four-minute meal , a take on the four-minute mile. Heat was a mandatory factor, otherwise you could just eat cold pizza from the fridge. The following recipe is fast and easy but doesn't approach four minutes. You'll need at least ten. Just make sure the pasta goes on first, because everything else can be done within its cooking time. OK, pasta's on. Now peel and slice an onion and a garlic clove and put them in a pan with some olive oil on low heat. Slice some mushrooms, halve an avocado, remove the stone and slice and cross-hatch it. I do it in the skin and then carefully remove it.  Now slosh some white wine into the pan and check that the onion and garlic are softening, not burning. Now put in the mushrooms, lid the pan and turn up the heat slightly to soften th...

I stood in the mid-morning silence in filtered sunlight watering potted plants. I didn’t know their names then, but they were orchids, geraniums, begonias, monsteras, lace-delicate ferns, and succulents in long hanging strands that looked like pale green jewels. The pots sat on cascading terraced boards in a west-facing outbuilding that was latticed for semi-shade.  The outbuilding was at the back of the house next door to mine. I was ten. The owner of No. 55, an old lady by the name of Mrs. Snaith, was away on her annual summer holiday. She paid me each year to keep her plants alive for four weeks. There were hundreds. I climbed the fence each morning and entered the kind of quiet I had never found anywhere else. Me, the plants, the gentle hiss of the hose, and the drip-drip-drip of the hydrated pot plants onto the cold concrete below the terracing. No. 55 was utterly, achingly empty under the clear, cloudless early summer sky, and life - mine - was pregnant with its unknown futur...

Mid-ceremony: somewhere around the offertory. St Patrick's Cathedral choir was in full voice performing something by Palestrina. The congregation was silent, some possibly dozing. Five hundred year old polyphony does that to you. The dean (or the deacon, I never know which is which), wielding an incense burner, was smoking the altar like a beekeeper calming his bees, and the chains of the incense burner were singing a soft metallic rasp. He turned and swung the burner towards where we were sitting in the transept, and the indefinable aroma (perhaps the inside of a hundred-year-old cedar drawer used to store pipe tobacco in the library of a vicar who has given up smoking) of incense drifted across to greet our noses. Palestrina's unearthly syntactical perfection was progressing along a sonic line unbroken by any harsh melodic, and I was marvelling that it was probably the most sublime sound ever created by man, beast or machine. Then the siren went off. It was a discordant, hig...

First day of summer. I gazed out the 1940s timber sash window at the front of the house, looking to the north, and realised that that framed piece of landscape is now arched by a crepe myrtle on one side and a six-foot Queen Elizabeth flowering rose on the other, and the arch meets in the middle creating a church-window vista of stained glass reality. Not by accident. That view was planned seventeen years ago . To build a garden, and hence a series of revealed vistas, you need patience. The previous night I had taken Alex to see The Velvet Queen (more accurately La Panthère des Neiges ) at Cinema Nova and explorer/hermit Munier had declared that patience is mankind's highest virtue. I gazed out the window thinking about taking patience to its ultimate end, such as blundering around the roof of the world for three months looking for an animal that might eat you in three minutes, the aroma from the kitchen crept up the hallway: meatloaf in the oven. * They have been packaging sausag...

In that west-facing big old 1960s kitchen that filled with gold from the lowering sun on summer evenings, silverbeet was the main competitor to cabbage in the battle of the boiled greens. We ate great fleur-de-lys sheaves of silverbeet, bought at the Victoria Market, and cooked in a big pot on a cream Chef stove until the white stalks had turned almost black from the leached leaf pigment. Cabbage on the other hand assumed an almost transparent appearance and had a faintly herbal aroma. It squeaked when you ate it. These over-cooked culinary relics are satirised by sophisticated modern foodies, but a hungry teenager took great satisfaction in the unadorned plainness of plenty. My mother borrowed her rustic boiling technique from her own mother who, as a teenager on the family farm near Corowa had cooked for farm workers who were not fussed with sauces, blanching or exotic accompaniments. Not that they had a choice: the cook couldn't be fussed either. Nothing was tarted up: gravy for...

After quoting Helen Hanff in the previous post I hesitate to admit that 84 Charing Cross Road comes under consideration for that author’s own solution to limited shelf space.

Some months back I was puzzled about the irrationality of throwing things out that work but retaining things that don't. I gave as an example old scissors. They never get thrown out, just tossed in a drawer. Another example might be books: people will keep a forgettable $19.95 paperback on a bookshelf for decades. Helene Hanff remarked on this in 84 Charing Cross Road (Andre Deutsch, 1971):  "I houseclean my books every spring and throw out those I'm never going to read again ... It shocks everybody. My friends ... read all the best sellers, ... get through them as fast as possible ... skip a lot ... never read anything a second time ... don't remember a word of it a year later. But they are profoundly shocked to see me drop a book in a wastebasket or give it away. The way they look at it, you buy a book, you read it, you put it on the shelf, you never read it again for the rest of your life but YOU DON'T THROW IT OUT!" I personally can't think of anythi...

I drove from Williamstown through Footscray and down into the Maribyrnong flatlands where the mud is still visible. I grew up on a ridge overlooking this valley and we would walk down steep Afton Street every time the river flooded to watch the water lapping at some park bench or even a house. Few thought it would happen again, falling victim to the common misguided belief that the world is on a continual improvement plane, and disasters (except for climate change) are all in the past. Indeed, the painted post showing the height of the 1920s and 1974 floods was some kind of local curiosity, a kind of totem pole showing ancient events, to gaze at knowing the water could never - in a million years - go up again to that neck-ricking height. Impossible, they said: the river mouth had been widened, the estuary had been dredged, weather bureaucrats had insisted rain would never again fill dams. Maribyrnong in spate, let alone the river flats flooded? Never.  You can fool yourself in...

This tuna pasta recipe uses fresh tuna rather than the usual canned variety in tomato sauce. (Nothing wrong with canned tuna - one of my all-time favourite comfort dishes is pasta with canned tuna, grated cheese and peas.) Marinate a piece of fresh tuna in lemon juice, chopped garlic, salt and pepper for a few hours. Bring back to room temperature before cooking. Cook pasta: this is best with short, chunky pasta such as fusilli or rigatoni.  Cut the tuna into fat cubes and sear in a little olive oil and white wine until just done. This should be timed to synchronise with the pasta cooking time. Trim some green beans and asparagus spears, chop into thirds and steam until both vegetables are bright green and just starting to soften.  Chop some vine-ripened tomatoes, or use semi-dried ones and gently warm them through in a little olive oil together with some halved pitted black olives and a scattering of capers.  When pasta is done, drain. Add cream and white wine to the sti...

Term break. Four times a year now; they seem to happen every few weeks. We had driven out of Melbourne mid-morning under a slate sky and a rain-blowing southerly on a cold late-winter Saturday. North, north, north: trying to outrun the weather. Around midday we pulled in for lunch on the run at a truckstop cafe on a great curving main road in a town west of Bendigo: salty, deep-fried, battered food: food you'd probably never eat standing still or sitting at a table. Food that reaches way down into the prehistoric DNA. Does salt enhance the view of mountains sliding by on the horizon or, conversely, does that incredible panorama make the food taste better? After the western roll we corrected northwards again, munching, and in the rear vision mirror grey fingers of cloud groped towards us, chasing again, like fingers of a giant. Small towns swung or swam into view and out again; Bridgewater on Loddon, Serpentine (describes the river, not the town), Durham Ox and Kerang, a 1950s relic...

The AFL's Essendon Football Club was founded in 1872. Essendon was a respectable suburb in the lower middle class sense of being seen to be respectable. Many early players were drawn from local churches. Anglicans, Baptists and Methodists gravitated to the Club. Catholic footballers, largely Irish and working class (although some were better educated and culturally richer than many of their bovine-like overlords), knew they need not apply to play at Essendon, and generally went to the neighbouring industrial suburban clubs of Foostcray, North Melbourne or Fitzroy. Reasons are lost in the mists of time, but history yields clues. In 1916 the highly-patriotic Essendon Football Club, exclusively Protestant, airily proposed along with many of the more affluent clubs that players compete as amateurs and that the League turn all gate receipts over to the Patriotic Fund. The proposal was rejected as a drain on the poorer clubs, and the four working-class largely Catholic suburban pillars ...

We sat stretch-legged and stunned in the front row of cinema ten at Pentridge, and I emerged over two hours later, mid-evening, with my mental chronology rearranged like a typhoon rearranges a village. The boys didn't even live though the Bowie era but they still enjoyed the 154 minutes of Moonage Daydream , a neon-soundtracked cakemix of glam glitter space arthouse new romantic post-disco punk-survivalist rockumentary. Talk about your life passing before your eyes: that pre-year-twelve January day in 1974 when Sorrow oiled its way out of the radio on the spirits shelf behind the bar at the Windermere hotel and snaked across the pool table while I played snooker with friends on a camping trip. The hot March of the previous year when Space Oddity 's discordant fade-out chilled the charts four years after its recording. That October Friday night another year earlier when newsreader Peter Hitchener was still on radio hosting a weekly pop show and back-announced Starman segueing ...

On that cold, bleak night I was out late at the shops: it must have been about nine o'clock. It would be a late dinner. The car radio was chattering to itself. I turned it up slightly. Behind the voice were sound effects, like a radio play. Behind the soft commentating voice that sounded very much like the late Whispering Ted Lowe but wasn't, there was a clatter of metal on stone, a military screech here and there, a distant trumpet, and a faraway purr of drums: noises off (in the theatrical sense). The radio play continued as I drove down Pascoe Vale Road into Moonee Ponds and pulled into Pratt Street. In an apartment overlooking the carpark, part of a screen could be seen in an uncurtained upstairs window of an apartment. The head of a horse was visible, until it disappeared stage-right into an obscured section of the screen. The supermarket was brightly over-fluoro-d and vast and empty, except for some shelf stackers dressed in their dirty green corporate colours, like tired...

That morning I drove to the station and caught the train to the city, getting off at shadowy Melbourne Central and riding the escalator up into Swanson Street and the light of an early spring day. By eleven - the ideal time for a quiet coffee, after the breakfast stragglers and before the lunch crowd - a glass cup holding a rich brew of chocolate brown topped with a tawny golden spindrift sat on the bar in front of me at Pellegrini's at the top of Bourke Street, where nothing changes except the clientele. Later I walked through Myer and several laneways and eventually disappeared underground into one of the city's last remaining second-hand bookshops, Melbourne Basement Books, in Flinders Street. You could spend a week there and get through only half the books. By two o'clock I was on the train again, having walked under the clocks where once piles of just-pressed newspapers would fly out like those momentous edit points in old movies. But there was a very odd thing. It ha...

The title of the novel Leafy Rivers is not some evocatively named bucolic setting as the first edition's (1967) green-leaved cover artwork might suggest. It is the central character's name: Mary Pratt Converse marries Reno Rivers, but retains the nickname her brother gave her as a child thanks to her indecisive habit of answering 'never "yes" or "no" but always "I'd just as lief." '. The novel covers not much more than one day in 1818 - but the bulk of it is in flashback; the building blocks of Leafy's life heaved into place by an author in complete command of language, atmospherics, and dialogue. Flashback: Leafy and Reno move to the Whitewater Valley after being gifted tenancy of a cabin by its landholder, Simon Yanders, who has abandoned it, having lost his wife to milk fever. Credit being short in 1818, he is later forced to foreclose on the couple causing Leafy to undertake a desperate, nightmarish and ultimately fateful two-...

1952 : 'The North Suburban Club annual picnic remained a popular event. 1952 was to be no different, with the date set for 17 February and all the usual preparations put in place; buses chartered, ten nines (nine-gallon beer barrels) ordered and admittance prices agreed upon. Eleven days before the picnic, King George VI died. A special committee meeting on Monday 11 February postponed the picnic 'owing to 17 February being declared the National Day of Mourning'. The picnic was held the following month, and the new monarch would eventually reign for more than half the length of the Club's entire existence*.' 2022 *Extract from Dum Vivimus Vivamus: A History of the Moonee Ponds Club by  Paul G. Kennedy. Clarity in Design Publishing, Melbourne, 2021.

A long time before the ugly visual numeronym '24/7' became a commercial boast, the end of each week signalled a day and a half of rest. The period of time from midday on Saturday until Monday morning was a welcome release from the endless scheduling of daily life. But there was a frantic price to be paid for the pleasure of being unhitched from the tyranny of the clock for thirty-six hours. On Saturday mornings I stood, a nine-year-old and several years either side of nine, at the back of a throng of jostling shoppers in a blue-tiled, glass-fronted butcher shop in Moonee Ponds. Amid the smell of sawdust, blood, and raw meat, the butcher signalled the start of his weekly meat auction by waving his knife through the air, as if he were cutting through the stench. Frenzied bargain-hunting shoppers pressed forward and all but fought each other for the trays of weekend-sustaining bounty: chops, scrag-ends, roasts, flaps, oxtails, heads, innards, smallgood end-of-rolls. Moonee Ponds w...

The recipe called it a 'tortilla', but no flatbread was in it. Instead, potato. That made it Spanish. In the late 1500s, the Spanish conquered the Incas, and sailed potato-laden ships victoriously back into Europe. (There was some competition from a pirate named Drake who carried the same loot into England while Raleigh did the same for Ireland.) Spanish potato and chorizo tortilla. Sice about half a kilogram of potatoes thinly and boil them for a few minutes until not quite tender. Meanwhile, whisk six eggs with a generous splash of milk and a few cranks of pepper. In a pan, fry a chopped onion, two chopped garlic cloves and one sliced chorizo sausage. Stir this continuously for around five minutes until the onion softens and the chorizo starts crisping. Then add a teaspoon of paprika, stirring it through. Line a greased baking dish with the par-boiled potato, including around the walls of the dish. Then add the onion and chorizo mixture, pour the whisked eggs over the top and...

The last thing I did that year was to read Animal Farm . There was nothing significant about it; the novel just happened to be at hand on that hot, close, steamy new year's eve. I finished it in a couple of hours, sweating on a stool propped up against a bench in the backyard art studio my father had built. The 'studio' was a neat white cube with a raked roof and windows to the north and west to catch the day and early evening sun. Inside, on a bench running the length of the room was a mess of paint tubes, brushes in old jars, palettes thick with hardened paint, bottles of thinners, oils and sealers; and paintings - finished, unfinished and barely started. The smell of a working art studio is bewitching. I sat amidst the linseedy redolence, switched on the downlight over the bench and opened the book. Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night ... . Some notes from an Emerson, Lake and Palmer track detached themselves from the radio on the shelf...

The best thing about the film documentary In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 is that very little screen time is devoted to the progressive rock band's early days. While old concert footage makes music documentaries interesting in a nostalgic sense, it often renders them unremarkable as films. In this example, director Toby Amies could have mined over fifty years of King Crimson material but chose to focus on the present. King Crimson founding member Robert Fripp is a Toscanini-like dictatorial perfectionist who is a self-confessed monster to work with. He is narrow-minded, obsessively focussed, definite, immutable, and completely his own person. He is not unlikeable: far from it, he is merely a pedantic genius. He keeps telling Amies (who is trailing after him with a microphone and camera) that all his questions are 'shite'. Bill Rieflin, percussionist and keyboard player, had been in and out of the band on Robert Fripp's say-so over several years and...

We had gone, the twelve-year-old and I, to the house down the coast on Saturday night to work on the fallen tree on Sunday. I woke late, which for me is almost mid-morning; not anywhere near midday or, God forbid, even later. I'd feel like the day had been stolen. It had rained since midnight. The yard was sodden and there would be no cutting or burning. I drove down the hill to get the Sunday paper. No traffic; nothing. Even the horizon was gone; Port Philip Bay, dirty grey with drizzle met a leaden sky somewhere you couldn't see.  The deadness sparked one of those momentary flashes of memory, lighting on those wet 1960s Sunday mornings; bringing alive that remembered frieze: knots of people outside a church after mass - ladies under hats, men in dark suits - coated and bent against the driven rain; ignoring the weather for the sake of fifteen minutes' cordiality. You couldn't just rush off. Near the church door a booth that opened only on Sundays sold the accessories ...

The eastern side of Vincent Street shivered; the shops on the western side were ablaze in the late-morning sun. It was the morning after thge coldest night this year, cloudless with brittle stars frozen in an icy universe. Of course we had chosen the night to stay in Blackwood. The caravan park was little more than a creekside campground, and Blackwood is possibly the coldest place in Victoria outside the alps. We split between an ancient caravan and a Kmart tent. We were walking north on the sunny side of Vincent Street trying to defrost. I pushed open a shop door and found myself in cavernous semi-darkness. When my eyes adjusted to what might once have been a goldrush era hotel, I saw passageways vanishing into darkness, staircases winding out of sight, and shelves stretching to the ceiling, valiantly bearing thousands of books waiting in stoic mute silence for someone to read them again. I crept up some dark-stained stairs, moved along a narrow hall and came into a small space, poss...

I once posted a story about combining pasta and potatoes in the same dish; an unusual combination but certainly not an unlikely one. Must have been a couple of years ago .... (conducts search) .... couple of years?  - time flies: it was  posted in February 2007 .  This is different; it combines pork with fennel in a pasta dish without tomato- or cream-based sauce, but simply relies on the fragrance and sheer good flavour of its core ingredients. Pasta with pork sausage, zucchini and potato. I diced a large white zucchini and fried it in olive oil, with half a diced onion and two cloves of garlic. When done, I reserved the zucchini; and in the same pan, fried the crumbled meat of four coarse de-cased pork and caramelised onion sausages with some more onion and a scattering of fennel seeds. Meanwhile, I peeled two medium potatoes and diced them into small pieces. These I boiled - they need only a few minutes or they will soften and break up. For the pasta, I used the small ...

Broken shafts of late winter sun came through the window, having penetrated the lemon tree just outside, and crawled their way across the floor, pieces of broken gold. Shards of toast were scattered on the table along with open jars of Vegemite and peanut butter, a newspaper wet from a spilt cup of tea and other detritus of the type generated by late-rising, breakfasting teenagers. Now water was running in adjacent bathrooms and, on the fridge, the radio tuned to 3MBS-FM played to a mute audience of one. 8.23 a.m.  Her voice came out of the speaker like a lark ascending, apologies to Messrs. Vaughan-Williams and Meredith. It was a live version, recorded much later than the original 1965 studio recording which was gayer, younger. This later version was shot through with a sense of sad, yearning wistfulness but without any over-sentimentality. She lived in my suburb, but when I walked past her house on the way to St Monica's church on one of those rainy early 1960s winter Sunday morn...

It is some ancient tradition or belief system. One whose roots are lost in the tortuous once-hollow ribbons of time, blocked by centuries of sclerotic irrationality intermixed, confusedly, with an occasional random truth.  Never throw away certain items.   Why would you, when they still work? The can opener still opened. Kind of. The scissors still cut. Most things, anyway. Paper, thin cardboard.  Here's the proof sitting, opened, on the table: an 800-gram can of pears; Australian, not Chinese or Mexican or Thai or wherever else they can these things. Topped by my old Swing-a-Way can opener. A little crinkly around the edges. But open nonetheless. It was a bit of a twist. Metal must be harder these days. Everything else is. Have you tried opening a shrink-wrapped pack of, I don't know, flank steak? You know, that semi-hard plastic that has a thinner seal with a gripping point that gives you a millimetre to grasp between thumb and forefinger and that is so strong that...

I once wrote on this weblog that gnocchi out of a packet tasted like compacted Deb instant mashed potato: because that's what it essentially is. However, as gnocchi has grown in popularity the manufactured item has improved. It's called market forces. The major supermarkets now carry their own house brands in the refrigerated department. These are not as good as homemade gnocchi but are a satisfactory substitute. At the supermarket, I picked up a pack of Coles pumpkin gnocchi, a pack of Brussels sprouts, and some walnuts. As I was passing the fresh cheese section one of those mark-down stickers jumped out at me. They always do: I do like a bargain. It was a wedge of Roquefort cheese marked down from $12 to $3 due to an arbitrary use-by date nearing - I thought cheese improved with age. Roquefort at the price of cheddar. Gold. Later, I cooked the halved sprouts until they were just tender and bright green, then browned them slightly in a pan with flecks of prosciutto. I threw t...

I like old-fashioned names, so in the unlikely case that another child of mine should struggle its unknowing way into the world, I would call it Clarence. We already have a Thomas.

“ ... It was hard to see how that value made sense.”  (Said Dr Michelle Deaker who, if anyone might see sense she might, being founder of one of Australia’s leading venture capital firms, OneVentures, as reported in today’s Business Australian “Start-up layoffs just the beginning for sector”.) Dr Deaker was referring to the buy-now pay-later sector comprised of start-ups with names that sound like 1960s family board games: Sezzle, SplitIt, Humm and Zip being the four mentioned in the story. The story quotes Zip as having lost an astounding 94% of its market ‘value’ in twelve months.  Of course those exact words were uttered in a past downturn: no, not the Great Depression, the 1970s recession or even the '87 stock market crash. It was the dot.com crash of a mere two decades ago. We could say people have short memories but mass hysteria has always trumped common sense. *Acronym time!

When Ronnie Di Stasio opened Cafe Di Stasio decades ago he jettisoned the twee travel-postered fake Italianity of some 'family style' restaurants and introduced a kind of low-key, high-class style based around a grown-up architectural sensibility and an interior design devoid of fads. Closed since January due to industry-wide staff shortages, the Herald Sun reports today that it is hoped to reopen soon.  Meanwhile, Di Stasio's other outlet,  Di Stasio Citta, near bureaucrat-central in Spring Street, lost most of its customers due to the work-from-home obsession that has, of course, outlasted the Covid panic. During that time, Di Stasio Citta also suffered heavy-handed 'trading restriction' compliance raids. "I'm not sure what six heavily armed police all entering as a raid can achieve," Di Stasio said at the time. "Terrorists hiding in the spaghetti al dente?"

These past few weeks from mid-May, which makes it a full month, seem to have been the most sustained stretch of poor weather I can remember. Incessant rain, low temperatures, and even a spring-like wind during the week that drove rain before it like bullets; and no sunshine beyond a few minutes' worth here and there - which had the effect of merely teasing you before disappearing again behind the dreary, cold, grey cloud-mass that is a constant canopy. Or was it an illusion? Schooldays had plenty of cold and wet weather. I remember the gurgling drainpipes and drumming rain drowning out a teacher's voice; wind-fanned rivulets of rain flooding the schoolyard; and running my fingers along the icy tops of front fences and walls, arriving at school almost frostbitten. We didn't worry then. We didn't have to think about roof leaks and flooded gardens and getting clothes dry.  But no: it wasn't an illusion. I heard on the radio that this has been the coldest start to a Mel...

The post office is one of those hybrid ones located in the local newsagency, a pleasant five minute walk from my front door on a cold winter day, with the sun slanting in from the north and clouds roaming across from the southwest. I try to pay most of the bills there because direct debit is the world of consumer finance's worst invention, as you cannot keep track of your balance. While waiting, I browse the wall of magazines; there has always been an excellent selection of titles across music, currents affairs and old cars, three vastly different subject areas in which I have an interest. I usually walk out with a Restored Cars or a Spectator or a Vintage Rock or even a Rolls-Royce and Bentley Driver . Until last week. I walked across the square and into the shop to pay a ridiculously high power bill. The entire east wall, instead of being covered in eye-catching magazine covers, was a shop-long panorama of slightly dusty white desolate emptiness. 'No-one buys them any mor...

Three days later. It was a long drive and almost one o’clock in the afternoon when I got out of the car to open the lop-sided gate, which had to be lashed to a tree to stay open, onto the campground. The car crunched down a gravel slope and the steep track curved around and the bend opened up a view of the creek down below. The three stood like figures in a Frederick McCubbin painting; indeed, the soft mist gathering along the creek bed, even at this time in the afternoon, made life resemble art. The tents were flattened and there was a random scattering of bags that always says we're going home, but not yet. Breakfast out of cans had been recent. There had been no mishaps or starvation or death by thirst, but one of the three had a large bruise right between the eyes. Walked into a tree at night, he said. Later, after packing less luggage than they had brought into the same space but it not fitting, I drove off the valley floor and up around curves and over elevations and out of t...

So you drive away and abandon them. It's hard to leave three teenagers in a remote place without phone coverage. Even though you know it's actually good for them. It's the anxiety of the connected age.  There had been no flat ground, so I had helped them use stones from the creek bed to build a kind of hollow cairn in which to place their stove, which was a top-heavy unit consisting of a trivet perched over a gas burner and cylinder. Put a pot of water on that, and the serious burns unit is your next stop if you're not careful. It looked like it was designed to be tipped over. And they would have to boil water because there was no tap water. Of course, I had done the same thing decades ago. Lerderderg Gorge at age sixteen; with pipe tobacco and frightening tales at night of Deliverance-style murderers stalking the valley and carving sleeping campers in their tents. We frightened ourselves half to death. In retrospect it was all good fun. Another time we'd camped by ...

Dennis Waterman, who died this week at 74, was the central character Terry McCann in British TV series Minder. I don't usually post about the deaths of actors, but Minder was my personal favourite television show of all, thanks to its intelligent cliché-free scripting, comic touches, sardonic overtones, gritty British cinematography and deft acting, unlike the ghastly face-pulling today's 'actors' carry on with. Minder's locale was seedy London with shady characters wearing suits as bright pastel colourful as the Jaguars, Capris, Volvos and Rovers they thrashed around the warehouse-lined streets of London. They'll be raising a glass at the Winchester Club tonight. Another one? Cheers, Dave.

And then that déjà vu feeling again when the sound of a soft rumbling like a distant earthquake that seemed to come from the sky but was low on the radio; one of those dreamlike trance tracks that run for seventeen minutes and involve a synthesiser recorded in a wheat silo with two overdubbed voice tracks mixed way down low. It is almost music and almost astral dust. The freeway out of Melbourne pointed east; an arrow on the map quivering around bypassed towns and heading for the mountains. We coasted along it easily, like a laden three-master under a stiff breeze. There were three teenagers on board and enough camping gear for three days. An hour and twenty minutes later we turned north at a town familiar to me from childhood days when I would get off the lazy ex-Melbourne train and be met on the platform by an aunt, my mother's younger brother's wife, who was a dumpy, non-nonsense farmer, and who would drive me in a gearbox-whining old Holden up this same road curving around ...

We haven't held this Easter vigil for two years, the church closed down by the health bureaucrats who fear that faith and spiritual succour is a threat to their earthly ersatz-religious diktats. The church was plunged into darkness. Candles were lit from the brazier, bathing the timber and columned interior in a faint glow like dying embers in a cave. The baritone sang the fifteen minute praeconium, an invitation to the light. The Exultet Paschal Praeconium hearkens, alive like a bloodline running a jagged line down through history, from some seventh-century French or Italian composer. A chill ran through me. The voice was accompanied by that aggressive, clashing, almost classical guitar style that punctuates rather than caresses the vocals, medieval-style. The lights came on. Two thousand years melted away. Happy Easter.

Buying retro crime and mystery can be a gamble if you don't know the author. Of course there are many sources of information and websites such as this one provide much information via reviews and are also quite frightening in the sense of revealing the sheer breadth of authors and titles one has yet to read. There is a certain irony in the fact that that website could now itself be regarded as 'retro', still carrying an early 2000s banner and scroll style. (A search for James McKimmey's The Long Ride led me to the site.)

It's been wall-to-wall The Saints records this week on 3PBS-FM and 3RRR-FM following frontman Chris Bailey's death earlier this week at 65. Tributes are all over the web and the 'greatest' accolades are not hype. The Saints' most well-known song - (I'm Stranded) - was voiced by the late Mr. Bailey, and I was honoured to list it at No. 52 in my list of one hundred favourite songs of the twentieth century. Look for more Saints programming in the next few days across the PBS and RRR schedules especially Neon Sunset at noon on RRR.

The Australian reported yesterday on the strange inability of Australia's chief medical officer to identify fifty percent of the nation's population: Australia’s top health bureaucrat has been slammed for refusing to provide a definition of the word “woman”. ... Liberal Senator Alex Antic posed the question to Health Secretary Brendan Murphy ... “Can someone please provide me with a definition of what a woman is?” he asked. ... The question was met with uncomfortable silence. ... "Department of Health? Definition of a man, definition of a woman? Anyone? Professor Murphy?” Senator Antic said. Finally the chief medical officer ventured a timid reply, like Oliver Twist asking for more porridge or a juvenile delinquent owning up to stealing a pig: “Look, I think there are a variety of definitions ... " "Look" ? That sentence prefix is shorthand for 'I know this is a pathetic answer but I'll give it anyway'. The CMO can't define a female but if w...

There are now 'international days' for literally everything. The concept of the 'International Day of' (or 'for') started in the middle of the last century as a promotional tool designed to advertise an issue instead of dealing with it, an idea that is now known as the largely useless modern invention of 'raising awareness’. I had to laugh, metaphorically (I didn't actually guffaw) when I was informed that today was International Carbonara Day. I'm not sure who issued or initiated the day (once again, I don't know the correct verb for the invention and dissemination of an 'international day') but it appeared in an email I receive occasionally from a magazine about Italian food. The article went on to prescribe the correct recipe for the apparently often badly-made dish, which is a simple combination of pasta, egg yolks, and cheese; or, more specifically, pasta, guanciale, egg yolk, grated pecorino, salt and pepper. 'There is no compro...

Yes, of course, the central character in The Stranger by Albert Camus, gets a bad rap. Meursault is sentenced to be executed. That's as bad a rap as you can get. I first read it (in French: L'Étranger ) in high school. It took me several decades to read it again, in English this time, one sweltering day on a beach under a torrid late summer sun, comme un été en Algérie. Plot: Meursault's mother dies, but the vague telegram by which he is informed leads him to be unsure of the date of her death. This fact causes Meursault's growing reputation as indifferent, dispassionate and even heartless. He is surrounded at her funeral by an assortment of ugly characters whose piety nevertheless raises them Pharisee-like above Meursault's supposed detachment: a priest who calls Meursault 'my son' even though they've never met before; an aged 'boyfriend' from the mother's nursing home who ostentatiously doffs his hat; the funeral director, 'a little ma...

The price of meat has gone through the stratosphere as has the price of everything else so it's back to austerity cooking, if it ever left. I always cook austerely, if austere means making the most of everything and paying the least for the best. The money goes on paying too much - mixed salad leaves in a plastic bag cost anything up to $50-plus in supermarkets, but at the greengrocer they are $11-$12 in bulk. You're paying for the packaging which increasingly is ending up in the environment and ultimately ingested by animals and humans (see current reporting on the subject - no hyperlink required; it's all over the news). So it's back to lamb shanks. Yes, I do realise the net kilogram price is higher because you can't eat the bone, but it still works out cheaper than eye fillet steak for example. I've done lamb shanks a thousand ways over the years but versatility is what makes them work so well. Throw them in a pot with water, salt and aromatics and you've...

It was autumn and humid, early evening. A Handel opera, Giulio Cesare, was playing on the radio on 3MBS. It had been composed in 1724, the announcer said: two years short of three centuries. Given what is going on in the world now, no one can really get their head around that. I had been looking in the back of the cupboard. I had a packet of spaghetti, and some olives and capers in the larder. What to make? I found a can of tomatoes. Listening to the countertenor, I fried some garlic and onion in a little olive oil and added the tomatoes to the pan. Then I threw in a dozen pitted black olives chopped in halves, and a handful of capers, and left it to reduce slightly. The aroma filled the house. It hit me when I went out to the back garden to get some oregano and parsley from the herb patch, an old concrete laundry tub. It hit Casper, too, the foster greyhound who might be staying and might not be staying, depending on his behaviour, who raised his nose to the north-west breeze that sou...

We came out of the ti-tree tunnel and walked onto that beach of memories, the two teenagers the age I was then, seeing with eyes I once gazed through, not yet carrying the burden of having seen too many things. It was as if I were accompanying my own past, times two. They went off with their sister and their mother on a walk along the sand to the yacht club, where a giant arc of shoreline cuts right in close the clubhouse, buttressed by a wall of stone. I did what I often do on beaches these days. I fell asleep. * It had been a torrid January day. I had spent most of it floating around on a sea as flat as a tennis court on an old tyre inner tube. Then I'd returned to the old rambling house that my parents rented each summer for a fortnight. That year I'd made it, through seniority, since a couple of siblings had left home, to the double-room bungalow that was an annex to the old house. It was all old stained timber and panelled walls and a picture window overlooking the bay and...

The steep shaded path from the road down to the beach was as it had been all those years ago, winding under a ti-tree canopy and levelling out before opening suddenly on blinding sand and sea. One difference: the path was shorter now, the relentless circular wash of the bay having eaten into the foreshore over time. They were always building groynes and piling up rocks and trucking in sand, but the cruel sea just swept them all away again. It was a humid Sunday, early afternoon. We had driven across the peninsula from the carnival side, past vineyards and through forested valleys where knots of brown ponies carrying school children can sometimes be glimpsed through the trees, like questing hobbits. Half an hour later a Westernport Bay slideshow had appeared from behind the crest of a hill. Somers sits on a lip of the peninsula midway between quiet southern seaside towns with hedges as clipped as their accents, and a naval base and deep-sea harbour at Hastings to the north. At low tide ...

Now, yet another pasta: 'capunti paesani' by Squisito turned up in Vinnie's Fresh in Sydney Road. ‘Capunti' resemble pea pods (the name does not translate directly: it refers somehow to fingers pressing the pasta, making the indentations look like peas in a pod). All these varieties are not mere novelty: the different shapes provide texture and taste variables. Perhaps radiatori (resembling automotive radiators) and ruote (wheels) take the concept a bit too far. Or maybe they're made in Turin or Modena for revheads. I cooked the capunti for little more than ten minutes although the label prescribed thirteen; apparently the type of flour used in their manufacture means they stay al dente and hold their shape longer where softer floured types tend to throw gluten and fall apart. While the pasta was cooking I fried a chorizo sausage chopped into halved discs along with a chopped red onion and a chopped sweet capsicum (the long conical one). Just before these were done ...

Time stands still on a steamy hot evening at a country cricket oval, a pale green circle in a vast sweep of brown stretching to the west horizon, a high plain almost outside the suburbs of Melbourne. A pavilion of corrugated iron and timber sash windows, 1950s, leans tired like an old man pausing on a walking frame, and a brick farm shed on the other side of the oval is shrinking into the advancing wild shrubbery. Behind a long fence, off-white shapes are stealthy: sheep in the front paddock of an adjoining farm. The scene is as timelessly bucolic as a nineteenth-century George Cole oil painting - if you ignore the unending traffic murmur to the oval's north, an arrow-straight freeway to the new gunmetal-housed suburbs beyond.  The oval had been in full sun at five o'clock, but as the game wears on a dark line hatted by the corrugated pavilion's shadow creeps across the green as the under-16 away team, batting second, slowly racks up runs, chasing 117. The eleven-year-old, ...

The world doesn't need another spaghetti bolognese recipe, so I've given it the title above. However, what passes for bolognese can sometimes do with improvement, so to go back to the source (no pun intended) occasionally could be a good idea. The concept is simple: it should be homely, robust and appetising: and that's just the aroma. If you ever walk down Little Italy (Lygon Street or even Hardware Lane) at eleven-thirty in the morning, what stops you in your tracks is that steamy, herbal aroma of a sauce in its early stages; carrots and onions and wine bewitching the air. The pasta best suited to this sauce is a flat, thin one made with eggs; last night I used pappardelle which provides greater surface area for the sauce to cling to; a kind of fork-driven conveyor belt to your mouth. I diced a few slices of pancetta and fried it in a little olive oil in a large pot before adding a diced carrot, a finely chopped stick of celery and half a chopped onion. I chased these aro...

I had been listening to strangely squeaky hold music, and now I was talking again, trying to negotiate some understanding of what had been stolen and what hadn't; if anything. Yes, I said, my car was a green 1999 model, but the plates it is currently wearing are, as you said, from a silver 2003 model. Therefore - (yes: I actually said 'therefore' in a telephone conversation with a cop) - if you check the VicRoads database (I continued, doing his job for him) you can compare the VIN (vehicle identification number) of the two cars. That will show you that the 924-suffixed plates do not align with my car. I'll make a note, he said, an answer that was both non-commital and non sequitur-ish. He hung up. Nothing happened for three months, except that I saw my car again, wearing the same plates, and I phoned the sighting through to the police again. Last week, the phone rang. This is Corey, the caller announced, from the police. We've found your car, he told me brightly. I...

The fleeting glimpse I caught of my car as it flew by was like seeing a girlfriend on a train with another man; except I was not on a train and nor was my car. It was driving west along Bell Street, having been stolen a month earlier. I noted the registration plates which had obviously been stolen from another vehicle, went home and looked them up on the VicRoads public database. Then I rang the police. Can you still see the car, they asked me. No, I said. I saw it going down Bell Street. Was I supposed to chase it? No good then, said the police. Can't do anything. That was kind of obvious, I thought, but the important thing was that telling them what plates the car was wearing would help identify it. Well, here's the registration number, I carried on, imagining the cop noting it down on a scratch pad. He put me on hold for five minutes while I listened to something that sounded like twenty people wearing crystal-soled shoes learning to dance on parquetry. Looks like it's n...

One very hot day eleven Kodachrome-memory years ago I was reading Ernest Hemingway's Islands in the Stream  while sitting in a fold-up chair on the lawn in the dappled shade of a ti-tree at the Oak Park pool. It was mid-afternoon. The boys were lightning streaks in the white-blue water. Echoed shouts could be heard from the waterslide that is no longer there. An unseen train's rumble crossed Pascoe Vale Road from the parallel track behind the high apartments on its east side. From one of these apartments, a dark figure emerged from its second floor to hang some wet clothing items on the wrought-iron balcony before disappearing again with the faint thud of a slammed door. A plane made a buzzsaw drawl as it inched across the sky. All of these things were half-noticed; a parent's instinctive mental note-taking while monitoring children around water.  In a while the boys came back into the shade for food, splashing and shaking like spaniels, a five- and a six-year-old with rave...

By throwing seeds everywhere in spring I had hoped that the north-facing garden bed that gets full blistering sun would develop a wild, cottage garden-like appearance and grow its own canopy to protect the bare soil from the heat. The strategy worked. Zinnias and marigolds were rioting alongside mini tomatoes; there were even a few swelling corn ears. However, some vines, zucchini and pumpkin, looked like going out of control and tendrils were already climbing nearby trees ... The tomatoes had to be hunted amongst all the foliage. The hidden ones seemed to be ripening first. Years ago, we used to eat these at just-picked temperature at the height of summer, cut in slices with salt and vinegar and served on lightly-toasted ciabatta touched with olive oil lightly infused with garlic. The salty acidic sweetness contrasting with the earthy garlicky bread, alternating with sips of chilled white wine with the sun almost down was a building block, if not the entire edifice, of late summer 200...

 Murder in the Wind. The Empty Trap. All These Condemned.  These and others - many others - covered the days. John D. McDonald. Trash fiction. Good trash fiction. Very good trash fiction. Not even trash, actually. He wrote The Executioners , but I read that a few years ago. Brought back the horrible face of Robert de Niro. Nobody knows The Executioners , but everyone knows Cape Fear , the movie they made of it. I can't get that bite out of my mind. John D. McDonald. Two hundred and sixty-two days of waiting. Not really waiting; just stopping. A moratorium of the kind my hippie sister never attended in 1970. A torment from nowhere, a Job imposition that Job never endured. Or maybe he did. I forget. Maybe I should read the Book of Job again.  A hell on earth, but he held up. Or did he? Seven thousand pages, thirty-seven novels, fifteen non-fiction books, innumerable Spectators , Economists , Classic and Thoroughbred Sportscars , five hundred and twenty-four newspapers. * Th...