Saturday morning: you wake and wonder for a millisecond which weekday it is, and in an instant you realise. The express train you are on has pulled into some unexpected rest stop. The day before I had rung a café in the hills to make a booking for five, having failed to book online. ‘We don’t take phone bookings,’ the woman who answered had said. ‘Or online for that matter,’ she had added, as if the place had achieved some kind of victory over the digital age. ‘Just turn up, and the attendant will take your name and give you a time when a table should be free.’ How would they know, I had wondered. * As far as the view goes, Melbourne ends at the hills, a purplish blue graph that looks like the season’s temperature variations written across the sky. Today the graph was clouded so you couldn’t see the highs and lows. East, east, east: we drive what is virtually a direct line across Melbourne. Bell Street, Eastern Freeway, Maroondah Highway, Boronia Road. Mountain Highway ascends to wh
Recipes and ruminations from a small house in a big city.