What I cooked last night.

OK, since we're delving into history, one of memory's first tunes was that haunting mournful melody Jamaica Farewell . I found the song hypnotic although I was disturbed about the little girl being left in Kingston town, imagining her to be my age - two.

Matt Taylor was a failure, kicked out of school for wearing his hair too long and spurned by the girl he loved. He left the hick city of Brisbane in search of intelligent life on earth, and discovered the blues in Beechworth. In 1973 he recorded a six-minute twelve-second open wound of blues delivered in a voice so raw it hurts.  Albert Collins on Taylor:  "You play the blues but it's like no other blues I've ever heard in my life."

The Barry Humphries award, named after the mid-to-late century absurdist and humourist - was cancelled because they (Melbourne Comedy Festival bureaucrats or humour-vettors or whatever they call themselves) were too stupid - comprehensively stupid - to understand parody.  The humourist has died. Humphries outlasted the death of humour, if not the grim, grasping, unseeing stare of the  woke ungendered zombie class of humanoids, for whom funniness is death.

The tomatoes were late; the second month of autumn and finally green turned to red almost in synch with the autumn leaves. I bought the seedlings one sunny hopeful Saturday morning in November from that community garden behind the Uniting Church in central Coburg where they write the variety on icy-pole  sticks 1950s-style.  It was worth the wait. The still-warm tangerine tomatoes lying on the preparation board were big and fat and perfectly round, like tangerine wooden beads on a 1970s hippy’s necklace. I sliced them into thick discs along with some baby bocconcini about the same size as the tomatoes. The fresh linguine was writhing in a big pot of well-salted water to which I’d added a good dash of olive oil, which seems to help stop the strands sticking together both in the water and after draining. The oiled water also adds an unctuous texture to the cooked pasta. Meanwhile, I had gone out to back garden where the mint tries to break out of its quadrangle (one  half o...