What I cooked last night.

Fitzroy’s Perseverance Hotel is the kind of place in which your  blacksmith great-grandfather might have drunk a few cold beers after a day hunched over the furnace in a factory down a lane somewhere off Brunswick Street. The blacksmiths are long gone, the only people hunched over furnaces in Fitzroy are the chefs in the countless hipster cafes, and the Perseverance is a music venue and bar.  Canisha will launch her new single at the Perseverance Hotel on Friday night.  Tickets are free; book here: https://tickets.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/fb450c29-c0be-452e-b727-b981bb846f43

I dreamt about the immensity of the task: the rambling house; the thousand books; the clothes-stuffed wardrobes in every room; the groaning originally temporary but now permanent spillover shelves warped with the weight of accumulation.  Much of the gathered freight had been magpied from charity shops by the obsessive collector - who wasn't really obsessed, but merely gained great satisfaction, having been a child of the 1930s Depression and therefore had economy flowing through her ancient veins, in paying next to nothing for old treasures. And yes, old junk. Anything that had a potential practical use was never to be thrown out. This habit, not rare among early-twentieth centurians, predated an entire twenty-first-century obsession with recycling, a thoroughly corrupted incarnation of that elementary, transparent six-letter word: thrift. But her thriftiness was not the hair-shirted asceticism associated with today’s displays of self-denial; indeed there was an element of brio in ...

14 October 2024 Dear Angelika I write to you with the sad news that my mother Mary passed away last month. She had been suffering several conditions and eventually succumbed in hospital. She died quite peacefully on September 25. Mum always enjoyed receiving your letters and cards. She looked forward to hearing all your news, especially about your many cycling and walking adventures in the countryside and along the rivers of your country, news about your cooking, and about your garden and the animals and birds that appeared in it from time to time. Mum’s funeral was held on October 11, and many family and friends attended, including grand- and great-grandchildren, and even a great-great-grandchild. The funeral was held in the St John Bosco’s church in Niddrie, close to her house in West Essendon. It was a sad but nostalgic occasion, because in the 1960s my mother and father had sent us to the parish school next to the church, and both of my parents helped out with parish function...

There was a steady, distant hum of traffic on High Street as I entered the funeral parlour. Set well back behind its own car park lined with trees it was a pale square of a building, rendered white walls broken up by black glass.  The consultant, neat, efficient, fiftyish, was apologetic. We were sitting at an oblong table in the client room, a kind of reduced boardroom with sympathetic quotes on the walls and a water jug on the table and no ashtrays. Death!  The consultant’s laptop had crashed and all the details of the deceased had been lost. She left me to find some ghostly IT person in an office elsewhere in the building, and I gazed out the window at a garden bed humming with flowers. Beyond that, passing vehicles on High Street were blurred wraiths, their soft filtered whine fading in the mid-afternoon air.  Fifteen minutes passed. A gold-flecked shaft of sunshine fell on the carpet and crept up the leg of the boardroom table. Then the consultant returned, sombrely ...