What I cooked last night.

I drove to the back blocks of Thomastown to get a book on philosophy: don’t laugh. It was a VCE text for Tom and the academic book store is essentially a factory outlet on the northern basalt plain where hulking grey warehouses line the streets like monstrous black windowless mansions. The location keeps the prices down but I still walked away with $72 worth of Nietzsche. It was about midday. This being the winter solstice, the buildings on the north side of the street were in deep shadow but, on the south side, the glassed entrance to Campion was flooded with angled sun. I rang the bell. The place was empty except for an enticing aroma of cooking food. A woman came out and apologised and said she had just put her lunch in the microwave. On the contrary, I said, sorry for interrupting. She disappeared into the warehouse to fetch the book and when she came back I asked if she would take cash as my bank account had been hacked, and I was still waiting for a new card. She put the book in ...

That afternoon at Heide we wandered around the grounds that were once a farm. Inside the modernist house the limestone walls glowed pale pink, butter yellow or deep orange depending on their orientation to the low winter sun. The 1967 house, now a sparse gallery, was built when bohemians John and Sunday Reed outgrew the old farmhouse, now known as Heide Cottage, thirty yards up the hill and obscured behind rambling garden beds and some ancient spreading trees. Almost sixty years later the design brief for the building has been fulfilled: that it should ‘... have a sense of mystery and weather over time to take on the appearance of a ruin in a landscape’. Indeed, it now recalls the white walls of Eucla's abandoned telegraph station. At age ten I had visited a similar house at the edge of a forest, disappearing with the occupants’ children into the trees; and the clean-lined modernist building seen from the distance was a low white cave radiating soft yellow light in a dusky steel sk...