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...
Recipes and ruminations from a small house in a big city.