What I cooked last night.

It rained all Saturday. Not unusual for the third month of spring, but rain that goes on for days is a Melbourne fixture; a festival of sopping misery and cancelled sporting fixtures in a Mediterranean climate that is supposed to follow its seasonal script. I’m exaggerating, of course. It’s not Innisfail. But it’s not tropical either. In childhood I hated enforced confinement. I was an outdoors child. Not the hunting and fishing type, I just did not want to be in the house for days on end. You can’t go outside. It’s raining. I can see that. It’s been raining since Wednesday. Don’t be sarcastic.  That’s not sarcasm, I replied, it’s observation. I went from room to room looking for another climate. I found several in books. Then back to damp reality, in the days before I learned a harsh forbidding beauty could be found in the ever-changing skies thanks to the winds from the oceans at the bottom of the world. Through the louvred panes of a window overlooking the back garden I stared ...

I spent that year removing seventy years’ worth of flashbacks from the house in gaffer-taped or open-top boxes, and black plastic garbage bags half-filled like under-inflated giant balloons. The flashbacks - old teapots, Leon Uris novels, a pressure cooker, an A-line dress in yellow and orange polished cotton that still had some 1950s sunshine stuck to it, a Gem razor, a wooden-handled chisel - trooped gaily to the car and got in like children going off to a summer camp; rattling and shushing and flipping and clunking on their way to the opportunity shop. Then it was done. Three fourths of a century of junk, each piece with its own little micro-climate of memories, gone. Freed from driving endless boxes of ornaments to second-hand shops (the provenance of much of the junk, it should be pointed out; my mother was an incorrigible collector and hoarder), I relished the freedom of being on foot, diverting the route of my occasional runs to pass the house while it was unoccupied but still u...