What I cooked last night.

Into the trolley, the shopper places a shrink-wrapped four-pack of empty jars. The jars have matching red and white checked metal lids, simulating the real gingham fabric circles that traditionally were cut with pinking scissors and tied with string around the necks of re-used jars containing home-made jams, pickles, chutneys and preserved fruits; and were either gifted or stored on high shelves for use in winter when fresh fruits and vegetables were scarce. Alright, nobody does that any more. But the shrink-wrapped four-pack of cheap jars with imitation lids makes it feel like you can. Kind of a nostalgic short-circuit, without the mess, or the cooking time. The shopper, pushing the trolley neatly around the end of aisle six and into seven in a perfect arc, accelerates slightly (it was close to dinner time) and stops halfway along the aisle where seventeen brands and fifty-seven sub-varieties of pasta sauce sit waiting to be turned alchemy-like into someone’s home-cooked dinner. Five ...

No. That was today at Coburg High School’s ‘Dress to the Decade’ day. From left, Thomas, Alexandra and William.

On a north-facing block that slopes down in that direction, the house takes advantage of low-slung winter sun, which slides up onto the couch in the front room, a warm slab of mid-morning gold, falling off the other end later, like a guest that came for lunch and drank too much sherry. No sun today; steel-grey sky over a pale lemon rim and a mean wind swirling. I walked out the front gate and around the corner and up the next street where  autumn’s last yellowed leaves, tossed in the air, flickered gold like the last frames of a super eight film. Home movies. Silence, flickering, peopled by the dead. Relations. They call them relatives now. Aunts, uncles, bearded, spectacled, tentative smiles, lost, dead. Mechanical movements, except when they stood still like my grandmother who thought my father’s super eight camera was a box brownie. ‘Stand still,’ she said to the younger ones, blond haired heads flying around down among the adult goal-post immovable legs. 1967. Manfred Mann. Sum...

Pride comes before a fall and hubris (literally and metaphorically in defiance of the gods, since the ‘accountancy’ firm PwC was so woke any concept of god was anathema). Yes, I’m full of Greek today. Nemesis is in the air, hovering with an upswept, knife-bearing, clothed arm. Seven years ago  I  alluded to the sanctimonious nature of modern capitalism with particular reference to this company, with a  2018  update. Sanctimonious? Try ‘corrupt'. Some select quotes from the last few days' news: PwC's acting chief executive Kristin Stubbins may now face questions as (to why) she sat on a NSW district health board during the time her firm was awarded millions of dollars in contracts to that district.  - News, The Australian Business Review, 1 June Earlier this year, Tim Ryan, chair of PwC's giant US operation ... said: "Building trust has never been more important." ...  The shocking abuse of trust at PwC's tax advisory arm has shredded the reputatio...

This one was accidental. It happens every year. (They self-seed, probably falling off one of last year’s plants and sleeping in the soil all winter before springing into life in spring.) This specimen grew in a hole about six inches square in the concrete by the fence; once the repository of an old fencepost. Last summer there was a tomato in the old trough close by; this rogue plant was probably an escaped fruit from that, rolling down the slant into the slight depression.  It grew tall. I couldn't - or didn't bother to - drive a stake into the hole but I tied a kind of restraint on the fence rail around it, like a seat belt. It outgrew that, flopping forward, wanting territory. So after I  considered ripping it out I commuted it to King’s pleasure (archaic legal term), thus anthropomorphising it, and propped its spreading vines over a plastic chair; one of those white stacking ones that cost about $10 at Bunnings. The plant was most appreciative, spreading further and envelo...