What I cooked last night.

Walls fall; presidents and popes are shot (if not fatally, like musicians); rockets bearing civilians drop out of the sky; clothes grow pads; music becomes a visual medium (on hearing a tune a listener, confusing senses, exclaims, ‘I remember that video!’ ); Roth/Updike/Bellow carry on jousting*. Meanwhile, you had to eat. Not everything in the 1980s was of the 1980s, such as savoury mince, an example of the kind of mundane dish that became a default meal keeping the beef grinders in business like ‘spaghetti bolognese’ does today, its reddish-beige lava bubbling over cheddar-coloured pasta mountainsides in the bowl-volcanoes of a million family tables. ‘Bolognese again?’ Savoury? That redundant word is one of the cooking clichés that never disappears. What else is minced beef except savoury? What does it even mean? The word is scattered like confetti through the recipe supplements (lift-outs, the publishers called them) stapled into those mid-century women’s magazines that sold in the...

The Pink Pussycat - as cryptic a name as I could think of to drop at the next student party - was not the only source of income, little as it was, including tips. Melbourne Airport was arguably an even better conversation starter ( what, you fly planes? - people always think the obvious) but the work here was even more mundane than pouring a ‘taste’ (a charade that even then was embarrassingly outdated) of Yalumba Carte d’Or riesling or McWilliams Shiraz Cabernet into the glass of the male half of a dining couple so that, after making a method acting impression of a furrow-browed, purse-lipped judge at Mundus Vini, he would decide whether they would drink it or not. Indeed, the airport job - money is obviously tight in this anonymous early 1980s Carltonian mise en scène - involved little more than bussing Budget rental cars from their terminal drop-off point to a depot back in the endless sun-parched acres of tarmac in the backblocks of Tullamarine, where I cleared their overflowing ...

The pub - hotel - mentioned in the previous post was, of course, Poynton’s Carlton Club, on the corner of Grattan and Cardigan, opposite the Royal Women's Hospital. The Carlton Club was three short blocks from the small terrace house, whitewashed brick in the fashion of the Greeks (the owner was Con, a barman at the Continental Hotel in Lonsdale Street, to whom I paid the rent), in which we lived for five Arcadian years (an Arcadia chequered by the stop-start linear domesticities of child-raising; the eternal nightmare-producing (even now) failure to complete a degree; and the death,  late one night , of an older sibling, announced at the door by a couple of dark blue uniforms whose lines and colouration and stance and timing told me all I needed to know.  Nine minutes walk, slightly downhill; across Elgin, Faraday, and Grattan. The hotel’s Cardigan Street side had a separate door with a 1950s backlit and illustrated sign over it: Pink Pussy Cat Bistro , the cartooni...

I had a call from the auctioneer just as I was turning right for home into Sydney Road, on a pale sunny late Friday morning. I had been down to Carlton where the cafe I frequent permits writers to spend an hour or more over one coffee exuding words. Or not. He thanked me for the gift of wine and the signed copy of the book about the Moonee Ponds business whose story I had written a couple of years ago.  I had delivered the gift of wine and book to the Mt Alexander Rd agency a few days earlier. The book part of the gift was not an ego trip; the agency had pitched itself as an expert in the district, so I thought it might fill in a few colour-by-number spots in the patchwork of local history. The auctioneer told me he had already dipped into it and had recognised several names, locations, and events. The wine accompanying the book was a Henschke, a label I could not afford now; the owner of the hotel at which I worked in the late 1970s and early 1980s had always opened a bottle (well...

The day of the house auction, a couple of weeks ago, had been significant: the final day of autumn, the end of our 72-year family ownership of a west-facing, sunset-drenched oblong on the edge of the great city of the south, and the last day of warm weather. The following morning had dawned ominously cold to a ferocious blast from Antarctica. (‘Ominously’? It could have been any adverb - ‘oddly’, ‘ironically’, ‘appropriately’, ‘strangely’ - as long as it signified meaning in the context of sheer randomness. We fear the anarchy of existence, so we invent fate, investing the electrons and quarks and bosons with the ability to talk: untold billions of particles as seers and prophets, inhabiting infinity, unable to shut up.)  I think while I cook. It’s purposeless, but fun. It makes time go by: the ‘don’t watch the kettle boil’ theory. Thinking helps pasta cook faster when the sauce is already done. If I don’t think, I will keep checking it, or pulling the griller out or opening the ov...

 R.I.P. Brian Wilson.

The road out of Melbourne rose to Ballarat through smooth green saddle-back hills like giant rearing horses embedded in the landscape. Shafts of sun pierced the clouds, setting the hills off in an eerie luminosity.  We turned off halfway to Ballarat, heading for the cross-country running race. The course was in a vineyard which sat south of the freeway on a flank - several flanks - of the rising hills. Vineyard is misleading; it was of several hundred acres. The turnoff twisted left and hairpin-bent for a kilometre, and then we turned right - ‘cross-country race’ read the sign - into a small valley with vines stretching up and away into the distance. Tents had been pitched and a generator-powered inflatable arch - the finish line - had been set up and roped off. Small triangular orange flags on metal spikes marking the course curved away and disappeared tinily over a hill. Bang. They still start these things with a gun. In the colours I had worn in a race at Ballam Park nineteen ye...

We sat down at 10 o’clock - hipster breakfast time - in a 1980s cafe (you can tell by the aged clientele) in the shopping strip that runs east-west a few hundred metres from the house; the house that will, in two hours plus auctioneer spiel time, fall out of the family’s ownership for the first time in 74 years, signalled by the anti-climactic slap, like an egg cracking, of a rolled-up contract into the auctioneer’s left hand. Or his right, if he is left-handed. The shopping strip is a drawcard because it has cafes which have ascended the real estate pecking order of residential desirability to rank narrowly below ‘schools’; in some cases above. Our cafe, cornily named Strudels despite bearing no apparent affinity with Northern European cuisine, culture, staff or décor - indeed, it is run as so many of these places are by an industrious ex-subcontinental family - stands where once an aircraft engine maintenance plant dominated the block, its massive patients - Rolls-Royce Darts from Vi...