What I cooked last night.

She rang me late; it must have been 9.30 or 10 o'clock. He was coming up the drive, she said. She had heard all the familiar noises, she told me; the big side gate that was built in the late 1960s, steel and cyclone mesh, to keep children in and wandering dogs out. It groaned with its sheer weight when anyone opened it. She had heard it just like that day in 1968 when my father had to stop and get out of his cerulean blue Holden Belmont and open it before continuing up the drive; and these noises of gate dragging and car purring and soft coming-home voices had made her call me because he hadn't come into the house and his dinner was ready, and he hadn't acted out those familiar little rites that no-one notices until they are gone: coat, warm, smelling of Melbourne autumn and coffee-dense cafés, and hung on the back of the chair; Melbourne Herald, a reasonably respectable broadsheet, folded rustling onto the table like a placemat you could read, which in my father's case

Twenty years and twelve days ago I started writing recipes into an online diary. It was easier than my earlier habit of writing on bits of old paper or on the backs of used envelopes which were then filed inside cookbooks in no particular order. My new online system eliminated the need to find notebooks or paper, or pens for that matter. As a professional writer, I was always running out of these things thanks to my habit of scribbling random thoughts on any white space I could find. Since that time twenty years and twelve days ago, I have accrued (if that is an appropriate word) three more children; seen one close relative turn from straight to gay, another from gay to straight, and a third from female to male; lost several aunts and uncles signalling the closure of my father's generation; watched a frail, ailing 75-year-old very close relative on thirty pills a day into a frail, ailing 95-year-old on thirty pills a day; fostered fifty greyhounds and adopted a couple; owned ten ca

Tom and I walked down from the beach house on the hill, and along Canterbury Jetty Road towards the ocean, and then branched off where the walking path follows the shoreline. Here, the wild broken cliffs of the beach itself are obscured behind impassable dense bush and steep sand dunes, and at night you can hear the groaning ocean roar as it smashes itself against the rocks.  As usual we were talking about music as we went in single file along the overgrown path, the occasional bird flitting startled from the overhang. Fifty years ago a record hit the charts, progressive rock it was called, and it was good and it was on high rotation in that year that the genre reached its zenith. Putatively. The record was Yes’s Rick Wakeman who, solo, had released The Six Wives of Henry VIII; and once again time was standing still, I being precisely Tom’s age then as he is now. I played it over and over on cassette, taped directly off AM radio; Tom has the actual record - yes the original 1973 vinyl

All of that fourth form year I sat in the back row, left side; the quiet corner, equidistant from the exit door at back right of the room and the teacher on the platform at the front. Classrooms were large in those days; more like lecture theatres. I used to smuggle in a cassette player and regale nearby students with early 1970s progressive rock. My deskmate Robert was a Bob Dylan fan and owned Dylan's entire opus. (We had only one Dylan record in the house - my older university student sister's copy of Nashville Skyline. One day my mother - of seven children - burst into the living room where I was innocently playing the album to shriek at me that the lyrics of Lay Lady Lay were not acceptable. I was of course lost for words. It's just a song, I thought.) As well as a complete Dylan collection, Robert also owned a whippet, an Indian runner duck and a ferret; and he had a sister, Janice, who was a year older. I did not care about the duck, the dog or the ferret. During the

It was just an ordinary beef stew; nothing to write home about. I used oyster blade, the cut in which the layer of gelatinous membrane spliced between two layers of muscle, like a gold vein in quartz, melts under long slow cooking and bastes - or more accurately lubricates - the cut until the fibres break down. I sliced the meat into large cubes the size of matchboxes, dusted it in flour and salt and pepper, and sealed it in olive oil before tossing it into a casserole with a cup of chopped onions, half a cup of diced bacon, some whole button mushrooms, rounds of carrot, chopped parsley, a cup of red wine and stock to cover.  These days I do all this mechanically; that autopilot function that allows humans to think about something entirely different to what they are doing. Like having two brains. Maybe that's the secret to evolution. I was thinking along those lines and also listening to 'Into the Mystic' and 'And It Stoned Me' among other tracks, and suddenly it hi