What I cooked last night.

That same corner was a Deveson's bus stop; there was no ad-rashed glass shelter or even a fixed bench, just a 'bus stop' sign on a lamp post. If you wanted to, you could sit on the low brick wall of the white house from which an aproned housewife once had come running upon hearing a screech of brakes. Now, twelve years later, I am a teenager waiting at that same spot watching my eternal four-year-old self repeating that ride into the side of a car with the never-seen driver until the bus’s groaning whine of brakes brings me back to the present, and I pay five cents or whatever the ticket was in 1973, and the bus roars away, and I stagger down the back and the bus sways, almost tipping, around the uphill, half-left, past St Teresa's parish hall where'd I'd been a cub and then a scout during those Beach Boys years - I Can Hear Music and Do It Again echoing down the years into remembered history. Diesel fumes, drawn into the open windows, reek all the way to Esse

No. 53, on the corner two doors down from my house, was always blindingly bright in the morning sun. Its impeccable white-painted timber was bedecked all around with white pin-striped blue canvas awnings, like butchers' aprons, over the windows. The white house held its corner tenaciously, as if stopping houses further up the hill from slipping down the block and falling off into the cross-street. Its angled front door gazed imperiously over the corner giving the house an oddly satisfying diagonal symmetry. A low brick wall ran an L around the two frontages. In the house lived the son and daughter-in-law of the owner of No. 55 next door.       Three doors up, we used the hill for rides. One day my brother pushed off on his billy cart and I went after him on a tricycle slightly too big for me. If I was four, he would be eight. Thirty-five seconds of electrifying descent and he took the corner in a sharp right, back wheels sliding out to correct the angle back into a perfect straigh

You go somewhere and it is good and you think  why didn't we do this a hundred times before . I was sitting on a beach. The teenagers were sitting kind of beside me and kind of not beside me, in the distant way that teenagers do, and they were reading books that were probably more highbrow than the ones I would have read when they were toddlers digging in the sand. You could have brought them here when they were two, four, seven, whatever.  That internal voice. It never shuts up telling you what you should have done in the past. Sometimes it screams.  They could have dug in the sand and watched the ships. The beach was Port Melbourne, crowded, early evening, still hot. A cruise liner detached itself from Station Pier in complete silence like a city block on an ice floe ,  and slid down the bay, a square of gold in the setting sun. OK, we could have come here before. But didn’t we take them to plenty of other beaches? Williamstown? Altona? Blairgowrie? South Melbourne? Rye, of cours

My sister had brought home Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and Nashville Skyline among others and then one day in 1970 she came in with a new album by Arlo Guthrie, a little-known (in Australia) country folk artist.  Running Down the Road became high rotation on my personal playlist: when she wasn't playing it. My parents had already questioned my taste (or morals, probably) in playing 'Lay Lady Lay' off Nashville Skyline but 'Coming Into Los Angeles' seemed to zoom way over their docile suburban heads. They said nothing while I repeat played side two track one, a master class in guitar, and a sweeping tribute to the music and culture of the '60s - for better and worse. Later, of course, I started buying my own records but my sister's taste remained a strong influence. * Hip woman walking on the moving floor Tripping on the escalator  There’s a man in the line and she’s blowing his mind  Thinking that he’s already made her

That's blown it. Last year when London broiled in 41-celsius heat - and we had a cool summer - I joked that should this admittedly most unlikely scenario be repeated this summer we would move to London.  In other words, if Melbourne Australia could not even reach the temperature heights of foggy, rainy London then there's no further point living here. Cor blimey (as the Cockneys say): it's March 1. Summer's over. Melbourne did not reach 41 degrees. If my word is any good at all, we should be off to London on the next steamship. Not sure now that I can move five people to Blighty and leave this wide brown land behind.  While I was contemplating the consequences of promises rashly made I cooked up this insanely delicious casserole, a kind of hybrid combining a conventional beef casserole with a caramelised onion and golden onion topping.  French onion beef casserole with garlic-butter potatoes and cheesy caramelised onion . Brown a batch (1kg) of diced oyster blade steak