What I cooked last night.

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...

I can’t - couldn’t then - criticise  Jaws,  the movie: I never saw it. (Although I doubted a shark could out-fright the feral truck in Spielberg’s first film, Duel . Anyone in the water would disagree, of course.) But I did read Jaws , the novel, during those strange empty months of winter 1975. I finished it one July afternoon sitting in Centrepoint, a lurid green downstairs bar off Bourke Street. I was waiting for a girlfriend, my fellow back-seat passenger who had escaped uninjured in a car accident a couple of months earlier. She worked in an office building a block away, and I had been in the habit of dropping into Centrepoint before meeting her after work.  The bar, being downstairs and a shade of green that glowed under artificial light, exuded a weirdly submarine atmosphere. I felt I was swimming through a sea of lime-green nylon carpet, laminex tables and vinyl chairs to get a drink, but maybe that was the book talking. Overhead, a circular drop ceiling simulated...

The first film of that year, 1975, was screened on a sultry afternoon in February in the old Radio Theatre, a 1940s relic in RMIT’s Bowen Lane. The film was Sydney Pollack's 1969 psychological drama  They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?  In that same month, on the other side of the world,  Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville  and Pollack’s  Three Days of the Condor  were being shot or were in post-production. As was  Jaws . Film students yet to be born would in some future or extant cinema critique those productions. The theatre door, heavy as that of a bank safe, had closed with a heavy wheeze when I entered out of the blinding sun and, feeling my way, found a seat I could barely see. In the dim luminescence of the uncurtained screen, a film lecturer called Doug who, apparently relishing the prospect of sharing his cinematic favourites with a new intake of students, was enthusiastically introducing the film before signalling the projectionist - “Roll it, Sid...

The race to the solstice had been easily won; the weeks had flown and been flung aside, bits of history never to happen again.  But then the hard part. The solstice was a chimera; the promise of daylight remaining a few minutes longer masked the prospect of a long cold wet miserable July and August. Inhabitants of other climes might jeer, and point to their winters of ten below, or their blinding snowstorms. But snow is romantic; a Melbourne winter is a bone-chilling wind-blown marathon, without the northern hemisphere’s Christmas - with its logfire-and-sleigh bells imagery - in the middle. (We get to endure that hokey European nonsense when it’s forty in the shade: Celsius.) A fellow runner - a Canadian - once admitted to me one bleak winter night that the chill wind that whipped frozen Antarctic air and dropped its cut-throat icicles onto Olympic Park, the Botanical Gardens and their surrounding pathways on which we were running, Lycra-tighted and gloved, was colder, more glacial...