What I Cooked Last Night

Two echoes - one from inside the house, behind me; the other more distant, a hundred metres away perhaps, behind the house among the trees. Two dogs, emitting short, sharp, expectant noises; almost as articulate as the human small talk had been, over the Christmas table slung beneath the spreading canopies of full-leafed European trees. The bark from inside the house had the harsh, brittle sound echo of the four walls from which it had emerged; the more distant one had carried its landscape with it, softened by hedging, plantings, damp earth, and muffled slightly by the tree trunks it had to bounce around to carry.  The barking had woken me out of a sunlit doze, or daze. I lay on a poolside chaise longue, one of those wicker things with cushions enveloped in magically-weatherproofed material. Easy to fall asleep on, at mid-afternoon on a warm eucalypt-fringed Christmas afternoon, as far from snow and pictures of red Santas as Pluto is from the sun. The journey from the northern sub...

Hal Porter, in his 1971 novel  The Right Thing , delves, via his character the landed matriarch Mrs Ogilvie, into the anthropology of the dinner ritual - and tempts his readers with the concept that it - or at least its hyper-formality, is outdated: The dinner-table and what was expected at it epitomised, as much as anything, (Mrs Ogilvie’s) attitude which was not one of anti-modernism but anti-retrogression - a centre-of-the-tunnel stand. Farther back in the tunnel her earlier Scottish ancestors, gathered together for their evening meal in a smoky granite hut, had more or less pigged it. Later ancestors, generation by generation, had advanced to more and more lighted parts of the tunnel, to smoother manners. Her father and mother had dined at Kildermorie under the chandeliers she had inherited, as she had inherited the idea that this last meal of the day should mean a family concurrence, an interchange of civilities: knives used for cutting into lamb chops, not for slitting t...

In 1977 I placed a round yellow and black sticker on the back window of my first car. It showed an illustration of a ferret, under which were the words: ‘Lean and nosy like a ferret’. The newspaper it advertised was Nation Review, an ‘alternative’ (whatever that means) weekly. The sticker was illustrated by Michael Leunig, who died this week. Leunig was a cartoonist for Nation Review and later moved to The Age, under legendary editor Graham Perkin, when the newspaper was judged one of the ten best in the world.  Leunig’s cartoons were whimsical but savage; gentle but scathing; soothing but undermining: everything, in fact, a woke society could many years later not bear. Hypocrisy hates a mirror. Leunig’s mirror was a fine point pen, a genius line and nothing else. The Age sacked him, obviously preferring him to stick to the annual calendars, anthologies, mugs and other middle-class decor which Leunig’s gentle illustrations so admirably suited but which may have become a millstone a...

That mountain is actually a series of small ones, an observation I might already have made in the post about Miss Marple’s Tearooms; or the one about the transcendent slope of land in that cool, shady, towering canopied garden of Eden that bears the kindergartenesque name of ‘Dandenong Ranges’.  Garden of Eden? Indeed, during the Hurdy Gurdy days of the late 1960s and early ’70s, the steep, winding roads to the villages and hamlets of the Dandenongs echoed not just to the bellbird’s transcription and the kookaburra’s machine-gun burst, but also to the staccato approach of the tangerine Volkswagen Kombis that clattered their way up the impossible slopes; transporting their orange-tinged loads of pumpkins and kaftans and hippies to the share-houses and rental bungalows - or their Camberwell-based parents’ holiday houses - for weekends or entire summer holidays of mountain-air-flavoured curried lentil feasts with a backdrop of progressive rock played on  woodgrain Kenwood stereog...

I left the room quietly - probably for the last time; its lonely sunrise mural gazing down on the room’s first utter emptiness, save for some kind of eighties carpeting, since the house was built in the sunshiny days of optimistic postwar Melbourne, when steamrollers roamed the bare streets, their sibilant screams heard from afar as they subjugated hot tar over a recalcitrant basalt plain turning it inch by inch into yet another suburb. I shut the door and moved on to the next room. This would be harder. Clearing my own once-bedroom, although long occupied by others, held a dilution of fascination for a personal past, a lost but remembered history, a shrine of memories; but mine alone, so no need of any sentimentality. The bathroom was different. My eyes stripped away the inert detritus and saw my father, silent in front of the mirrored cabinet door, spring morning light scintillating through two textured glass windows and projecting on pale blue walls and ceiling like the surface of a...

November 1973. I lay on my bed, arranging myself around the broken spring in the mattress, and waited for it to get dark. A narrow shaft of dying light fell on the wall, slid down over the bedhead like a fragment of yellow silk and blinded me. In the bedhead a cassette player was ticking away quietly as it wound off a track from Trilogy by Emerson, Lake and Palmer.  After a while the light died and the wheels in the cassette player stopped with a ‘clack’ and I fell asleep. * Much later, last week in fact, in clearing the house after my mother’s death. I was in the room again. I recognised it like a palaeontologist recognises an unearthed mastodon skeleton: everything in the right place. The door, the window, the light switch. But repainted, recurtained, recarpeted. Not very well, but can’t be possessive about a room after all that time. Above the picture rail, a wall-length mural I painted in the 1970s - a kind of imitation tapestry of scalloped colours representing a sunrise - ha...

(I hope I spelt that right.) Pasta with garlic and oil is almost a cliché of Italian cuisine. Probably the tastiest cliché ever. Some may cavil at the garlic: you have to like garlic to like this dish. Having said that, garlic is possibly the most unfairly maligned ingredient in the history of food. How would you feel if you were a root vegetable but people kept calling you ‘Herb’? Of course, if you want to call garlic a herb there’s plenty of justification for that on the internet, just as there is if you want believe a cat is a human, a tote bag is a criminal accomplice, or an apple is a timepiece. But then there's the flavour. Many may be more concerned with the aromatic after-effects of garlic than the flavour itself which is earthy and pungent and adds so much to so many dishes.  In any case, the pleasure derived from eating a large bowl of rustic-style pasta aglio e olio flecked with freshly-picked parsley (a((n))herb) outweighs any fear of what people may think about yo...

A weekend in 1972. The sedan, gold metallic and book-ended with doomed chrome, hums its new-engine tune as it sails east along Canterbury Road. Somewhere near Camberwell it passes beneath a railway viaduct bearing a garish advertising poster, and the seven-year-old sitting next to my mother in the back seat sniggers at the suggestive bath towel brand painted across its width. Beside my father in the front seat I roll my eyes at the boy’s juvenility, while slowly rotating the volume control on the car radio, so that Marc Bolan can drown the back-seat sniggers. (Slowly, because if the volume goes up too fast or too much, my father will snap the radio off with a punctuation-like punch of his left hand. It happened once before with the Rolling Stones’ 'Honky Tonk Women', although I was never sure if it was the volume or the song’s content that made my father kill the song. I never asked him and he never told me. He was the weak silent type.) The gold car draws closer to that blue g...

The scones at Miss Marple’s seem to have been baked in a kind of four-part loaf and split into four even squarish towers. According to reviews this apparently makes them contentious, like refusing to pray in a Norman square-towered church when you’ve grown up with Gothic.  The appeal of the scone is not its beauty, but its inscrutable taste: a bland, doughy buttress embraces a blitz of sweet/acid jam, the two opposing taste and texture sensations both then being subsumed beneath a cold, unctuous blanket of cream, synthesising a flavour complexity like no other.  And from such a humble food item! Miss Marple (she is almost a person at this end of the review) pairs her scones with Yorkshire Gold tea, a rich, smooth blend that is vastly superior to most caterer’s blend ‘English Breakfast’ contenders; in my opinion as good as  my personal favourite  from across the Irish Sea. * Miss Marple’s Tearoom, 382 Mt Dandenong Tourist Road, Sassafras. Website: 'When we take ...

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...

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 ...

I was early for the visit; the traffic had seemed lighter than usual. I parked in my usual spot in the shadow of the University’s halls of residence and walked to the cafe and sat at the end bar near the pizza oven and read my current book, The Peculiar Institution by Kenneth M. Stampp, a careful and detailed study of slavery in the ante-bellum South, published in 1956; and in which the author acknowledges that ‘… American Negroes still await the full fruition of their emancipation …’. An hour later I left the café and walked rather quickly, as light rain was falling although it was not cold, through the university and across European-treed Royal Parade, elms still not in full leaf, to the hospital; and then in through the private hospital section’s entrance, along several corridors and around several corners, past radiology and a few other -ologies, and finally down a flight of steps into the main reception area. That knowledge of the labyrinthine building saved a few hundred metres o...

My mother occasionally receives letters from her German correspondent Angelika , but as she can no longer read, I read them to her.   Extracts from a letter received recently, posted here with permission:   “(Dear Mary) … Here in Dortmund spring has arrived … trees are in bloom … bees and bumblebees are humming around and the butterflies are dancing on the flowers. There are a lot of titmice and robins, even jays. But I do not like the magpies. They are a danger to all the smaller birds. There is also a pair of brown squirrels that visits my garden every day. It is quite a punctual animal; it has its breakfast in the birdhouse at 10.30 a.m. … Spring is the prettiest time of year, I think.  “At the beginning of May I plan to do a cycling tour along the Danube. We’ll do about 50km every day which means that we’ll stay in about fourteen different hotels. … We will travel to the south of Germany by train, taking our own bicycles with us. My bike is 56 years old and it ha...

There is a thing called spaghetti omelette - frittata di pasta - in which you use your leftover pasta, generally spaghetti, to fill an omelette. Not a bad idea for a late weekend breakfast, for example: an omelette bubbling  with cheesy spaghetti.  I didn’t have leftover spaghetti; I had leftover omelette. So I did the opposite, using the omelette as the ‘sauce’ for a pasta dish. The omelette had been six eggs, a dash of milk and plenty of salt and cracked pepper, filled with a cup of grated cheddar and half a cup of very finely chopped chilli salami. It was a big omelette and half had been left over. Having sliced the remaining omelette into small neat cubes, I cooked the linguini, drained it, and put it back in the pan with a generous dash of olive oil and cream. Then I added the egg very gently to warm through. To serve I showered the lot with plenty of chopped parsley including the stalks and more parmesan-style cheese. Pasta di frittata, I suppose. Or cubist pasta carbona...

There were cousins and second cousins and uncles and aunts and so on. Grandparents. Distant relatives who came down from the country, the farm outside Corowa, and went home again, fitting in a quick visit secondary to attending the grand final or the Boxing Day test or once-a-year shopping at Myer.  But there was an aunt who was not related. She went to school - 1940s - with my mother, and they were friends for life. She was a fawn-gabardine-coated, hatted, husky-voiced woman with a round face and tight light brown curls and red lipstick; dressed and made up as if she’d just walked out of the war years. Her three children, honorary cousins because their mother was an honorary aunt, had grown up a couple of suburbs away on a sun-filled north-south street like ours, and their simple post-war timber house like ours faced east as ours did, so that entering it was like walking into a familiar but transplanted environment. The honorary cousins had 1950s Christian names (Maree, Thomas, Ma...

The pack says polenta but it’s corneal. It’s only polenta after you’ve cooked it. And cornmeal is maize, ground to various consistencies. Corn flour is the finest of these and was sold for decades in Australia under the ‘Kream’ brand, of which tons were sold every year to thicken the watery stews of Irish and Scottish immigrants.  Complication #1: Australian cornflour is corn starch rather than the entire grain, ground, as it is in the rest of the world. So that previous sentence is not strictly true.  Complication #2: some products labelled ‘corn flour’ are made from wheaten starch. The hell with it. Let’s get on with the story. Polenta, the cooked product, is - as I think I might have mentioned somewhere - a good alternative to mashed potato. It has an affinity, a complemetariness (or possibly more correctly a supplementariness) with strongly flavoured dishes not quite equalled by the spud, even when dressed up for dinner, so to speak. Velvety, creamy polenta stands up, for ...

British music journalist David Hepworth considered 1971 the most significant in rock music, calling it ' ... the most febrile and creative time in the entire history of popular music'. Puffery, of course, but that was the publisher’s jacket copy. (By comparison, Andrew Grant Jackson’s 1973: Rock at the Crossroads  could be read both as an alternative ‘greatest year’ or as confirmation of pop music’s decline.) Either way, 1971: Never a Dull Moment  exhumed a year awash with towering names producing so much great music the charts literally couldn't accommodate it all: The Doors' LA Woman , Van Morrison's  Tupelo Honey, The Faces'  Every Picture Tells a Story ;   albums by T-Rex, Black Sabbath, The Who, George Harrison, Pink Floyd, Isaac Hayes, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Marvin Gaye, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell and more, obviously .  A teenager forging a dark and ragged pathway through life guided by such musical signposts could not help but be perplexed b...

August 19 is - was - National Potato Day. While the last thing the world needs is another National ‘Day’/‘Week’/‘Year’ of something or other, that particular recognition of the potato was at least just an industry marketing ploy: few would be aware of it apart from a muster of farmers from Colbinabbin, Terang, or the Adelaide Plains at an industry conference in some regional convention centre where they talk Russett Burbank and Sebago and Dutch Cream by day and get drunk in the evening. Conversely, the United Nations takes a much more serious approach, marking its own International Day of the Potato in May: its webpage, virtually anthropomorphising the innocent tuber, features such arrestingly appetising gerund-led (of course) headlines as ‘harvesting diversity, feeding hope’ . The UN’s ‘diversity’ invocation is not a plea for greater culinary variety - that would be far too mundane for the bureaucrats in New York, Geneva or Vienna. Leave that to the servant-class chefs. But let's ...

An end-of-winter dinner when spinach is plentiful and cheap. Olive oil and cream tame the rustic earthiness of the green leaves into a silky voluptuous pasta dish for spring. Yes, it’s still more than a week away but the sky can’t help telling the story. Sauté a medium chopped onion, a leek chopped into thin rounds, a chopped garlic clove and a red capsicum chopped into fine strips in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. In another pot, wilt a bunch of spinach, washed - but not spun, so the leaves retain some water - and chopped roughly, in some more olive oil. Turn with a wooden spoon occasionally and add plenty of salt and pepper. Remove from heat immediately the leaves have collapsed. * In the west, those winter evening skies have all but gone. The show is over: the dramatic severe blood-orange stains marked with patches of black, like Turner paint storms, are now transforming into paling blue-white spring ambitions, hanging on for longer, fingers of light grasping for summer. * Me...

She had left a hand-written note on the kitchen table. Inscribed on a paper napkin, cream, one of the more robust ones, embossed, that you could put around at a dinner party. ‘Dear family ….’ Cursive handwriting. Baroque Ks and Ms and Ts, all curlicues and loops and tails like little wedding dress trains.  ‘Going on bus to Llandysil …’ Telegram style. You never lose it. The style disappeared after the telegram’s demise; returned for the SMS and text. No-one had to relearn it, it just reappeared, with a few acronyms and affectations.  ‘ … to visit Laurie. He must be lonely.’ It was signed off with another heavily curlicued three-letter word: ‘Mum’. The curlicues probably haven’t changed much since the 1960s; maybe just a little flatter and slightly out of line. Visiting Laurie would be difficult. He has been dead 32 years and two months. He no longer resides at Llandisyl, the nursing home, which in any case fell to the wrecker’s ball, or whatever they demolish with these days, ...

 Mistakes follow me everywhere. They jump out at me like angry lions. * Centreway Steakhouse. 28 Centreway, East Keilor. Probably one of the best butchers in the north-west.

I was in the front row at a packed Nova cinema in Carlton with my younger teenage son for its ‘retrospective’ screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey . Kubrick’s 1968 film is in favour with arthouse buffs, despite original critics variously labelling the 149-minute epic as unintelligible, lacking plot, and being too long. Well, the film does encompass a timeline of four million years. How short do you want it to be? The front row was otherwise empty. Don’t people like being close? Or is a cinema screen an overpowering phenomenon for a generation attuned to watching a tiny device twelve inches from its face?  The front row has always been my choice since the legendary Doug Ling, RMIT film lecturer, enlightened me to its virtues: complete absorption in the film, no interruption to peripheral vision, near deafness, and plenty of legroom. I might add that during the more transcendental films the sweet redolence of something approximating incense also emanated from somewhere near the front o...

Seen on the back of a cake mix packet: Warning: Do Not Eat Unbaked Batter . Goodbye, innocent childhood pleasure.

The plant had outlasted summer. It didn’t sicken and grow spindly and yellow like the others, but retained its healthy greenness and even seemed to grow, although that might have been illusory. It was situated in the spot that gets the most sun; moreover, no tomato vine has been planted there in the almost twenty years we have had this house, although whether that theory (don't plant tomatoes twice in the same spot) holds water, who knows.  Every year, I rip them out automatically, harvest and let the green fruit ripen in cardboard boxes. This year I left the healthy one in the ground, and it continued to produce bunches of green-yellow orbs. And I kept harvesting them and ripening them and using them. And now it is mid-winter and I have seasonal tomatoes. Climate change, everyone says. Maybe. I don't know. Persian fetta and fresh tomatoes with fettuccine.   No apologies for this flagrantly summerish dish in the depths of winter; after all, I make stews and brisket and la...

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...

First came the aroma, a kind of steamy spiciness, like woks in an Asian market. Then a plate appeared. On it was an explosion of glistening red barbecued pork erupting out of a bread roll containing a sea of coriander, sliced cucumber, pieces of dynamite chili and shredded carrot. It was a cold early autumn day under a steel grey sky heavy with cloud. We had been driving: what they used to call a day trip. East out of the city, and an early  lunch stop; a shopping square off the main highway. Selected at random. More plates arrived. Barbecue pork banh mi. Roast pork banh mi. Pork crackling banh mi. Roast chicken banh mi. The place was a hybrid cafe bakery: laminex tables with chairs that shriek when you pushed them back, help-yourself refrigerators, those straw cylinders on the counter where you pull one and two others fall out. The front was all glass, framing the looming mountains above the shopping square.  Iced coffee Vietnamese-style: a cold tawny caffeine blast designed ...

Some years ago I put a hedge of rosemary where some old geraniums had been, in a narrow garden strip under the north-facing front window bordering the path to the front door. Now, fully grown, its pine forest-blue-green needled stems tap at the windows; and, if you brush your hand against it as you pass, leaves an aromatic earthy perfume you seem to be able to detect all day. On a more practical level, rosemary adds an immense flavour and aroma boost to meat dishes, particularly gelatinous stews from cuts such as lamb shank. I made the recipe below the other night, the coldest this year; a night when the pain of almost-molten sand underfoot goes from recent memory - just a few weeks ago on Point Leo beach - into some cerebral receptor vault: another summer dies (although it was already autumn). And they are finite. Tick, tick. * I browned salted and peppered four lamb shanks in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a pan and then transferred them to a baking dish. In the same pan, I ...

The new freeway skirting Geelong (pop. 250,000) is an arc so perfect it is almost artificial, half-circling the city like a whining Electrolux floor polisher wielded by a 1950s frocked housewife on linoleum, pink roses rampant.  New? The bypass has probably been there fifteen years, but I don’t come down this way much any more. In the early 1970s my family purchased a slightly down-at-heel ex-farmhouse in Birregurra, a small farming town in the western district. Geelong was the halfway point, and the road faltered through the city’s endless stoplights, over a railway bridge under which old diesels slept in glittering rail dust, past industries and factories and a cement works and the Ford engine plant and a greyhound track and the fourth-division soccer fields and a water park. Once past Geelong, the journey's second half had been easy, like a long gradual landing in a light aircraft on a gigantic flat green field. The house was a rambling - and possibly even slightly crumbling - t...

The neighbours left a large bag of apples they had harvested in the wicker chair on our front porch one hot day in late summer. A text message said they’d be away for a few days, and we might also collect some cherry tomatoes from their garden before they became overripe.  I opened their big gate and walked into a kind of eclectic sub-tropical Japanese-style garden in which flowering vines trailed over brick walls, freakishly tall sunflowers towered out of raised garden beds, and hundreds of cherry tomatoes sprawled; their vines winding through and around other plants rather than being lashed to their uprights like crucified lawyers. Amid this psychedelic jungle sat a red-beamed gazebo topped bizarrely but satisfyingly by a Danish maritime flag. The apple tree was somewhere behind all this eclecticism. The place seemed to have its own atmosphere, if not its own climate.  The neighbours sit out here at night under coloured lights listening to Shankar and watching parti-coloured...

The couple walking up the hill was bent into a wind; or rather, were: she slightly ahead, he struggling. We crossed the road just ahead of them. Recognition: she was the mother of my two grown-up children; he, the man who married her later. Two couples, a partner of each who were once married to each other, had converged on a corner in one of those disjointed greetings that grow out of sudden recognition. Cordial now, have been for years: children in common. They had had a child. We had had three. Total: six. This week, we baptise a great-grandchild. A generation seems to have been overlooked. How did that happen? How? Years collide, crash; like waves on Inverloch beach in 1978 when I filmed on Super 8 the innocent gold optimistic sunset like the colours on her yellow and ref caftan, while a one-year-old child staggered on the sand as she watched, sitting, the fluctuating breeze alternately flicking her long auburn hair, revealing and obscuring her pale face, and later set the thre...

Rosella was an early Melbourne cannery. The following link (that seems to be un-hyperlinkable) is a potted history of the Richmond company.  Rosella products included game soup, kidney soup and mutton broth and were far much more important than what today would be merely ‘convenience’ foods; in the pre-refrigeration era they provided reliable weatherproof sustenance. As an example, see in the link a letter of commendation from Antarctic explorer Douglas Mawson. https://blogs.slv.vic.gov.au/our-stories/collection-care/rosella-preserving-company/ Thanks to State Library of Victoria for the link.

New product: ‘Free Range Chicken Pâté: made (only) from free range Tasmanian chickens’ . I find invoking woke sensibilities before eating dead animals to be somewhat macabre, like some quasi-religious moral cleansing.

The song burst onto the charts in the golden halcyon days of early 1972; a rollingly precocious, almost insane melody with bouncy allusive single-syllable lyrics,  bringing forth in the listener nothing but sheer unadulterated joy; except for the actual adults of the time who, as always, read into the song every weird obsession they could think of. I remember the song being banned from some radio stations, as if in 1972 we were still struggling vainly against the Reformation.  The writer, Melanie Safka, who died last week at age 76, later admitted having written the song, Brand New Key, in about fifteen minutes. It was a very good fifteen minutes, producing two minutes and twenty -six seconds of pop-song perfection. RIP.

Blurb on a bottle of AirWick air freshener:   Transport yourself to the orange-lined streets of charming cities like the city of Seville, Spain. Be transformed with the zesty fragrance of sweet citrus accompanied by warm and alluring aromatic undertones. I'm glad they pointed out that Seville was in Spain.

Six feet high and rising, to be precise.  Rain and moderate heat have conspired to produce this multi-bloomed cluster of magnificent pure pink petalled flowers; just one of many on the incredible Radox Bouquet rose variety, first developed in England in 1980 by Harkness, with one of its ancestor varieties being Fruhlingsmorgen. The photo is not intentionally soft focus, it is just sheer out of focus - the cluster was swaying in the wind. * The rose taps at the window ... with flower-laden boughs (With apologies to Gustav Mahler)

In Martin Boyd's 1969 novel  The Tea-Time of Love  one of the characters, a Brigadier Cheston, describes a favourite fish recipe:      'There's a very good way of cooking haddock in cream,' (the brigadier) was saying, 'but a bit expensive nowadays. You put sliced tomatoes in a baking dish with some peppercorns and a bay leaf.  Lay the haddock fillets on that, pour cream over the lot, and give it a quarter-of-an-hour in the oven.'      Boyd's novel is set in the immediate post-war period of food shortages and the expense the brigadier refers to is not the fish but the cream: such luxuries were often not available.       I tried the recipe. Rather than haddock which is not available here I used rockling, a mild-flavoured white fish which holds its shape well and flakes away into ideal fork-friendly pieces when cooked.       Lining the base of a casserole with fresh thinly sliced truss tomatoes, I placed t...