One day when I was a kid, I ran down a steep dune at Wilson’s Promontory that got steeper, and gravity inverted me, slamming my head through 135 degrees to hard sand. I remembered nothing until I floated home in my father's car late in the afternoon, gazing out at anamorphic scenery through the distorting glass of its 1960s curved windscreen; a psychedelic world of an unknown colour that had the taste and smell of sunshine filtered through dry desert sand. Concussion. Years later. I woke out of anaesthesia in the delirium of some drug, the one - or one of the ones - that makes you talk to anyone in your state of ecstasy, before the pain sets in and has to be worked at. A few months earlier, breathing had not returned to normal and, one x-ray later, I had found myself on the fourth floor, south, of a cream-brick hospital in Parkville. The nose had set in its broken position. No-one had noticed after the accident, in which my face had cannoned into the back of the front seat; but why...
Recipes and ruminations from a small house in a big city.