What I cooked last night.

A newspaper item (The Australian, it should know better) reported last week that while the perpetrator of a crime had been captured, the gun he had used to threaten his victim was still ‘at large’. * Mistakes - typos, literals  - happen. I usually ignore them. Everyone makes them. Including me. But there is a change. We are seeing more of the errors that used to be called schoolboy howlers not only submitted but sailing all the way past the increasingly illiterate eyes of the sub-editor and proofreader (if there is one) and into print and digital publication.  So let’s enjoy the chase as we hunt down errors of the type usually described as (the world’s most currently overused word): ‘egregious’.

Dead quiet on a heat-heavy afternoon, around two o'clock, except for the almost imperceptible shush of movement from the trees; an almost-audible shimmer of movement, mirrors of light, from the full-leafed shrubs; and some faraway grind of a bus on a hill. Far, far away. That was a week, three days, two days, before Christmas.  I had finished school days before. The world was mine; the world being the garden, the street, the hill to the river, in another direction, another hill to a creek that wound, anyway, down to the same river. Another direction, around two corners to a small strip of shops that seemed asleep under the sun's oppression: side street; milk bar; haberdashery; newsagent; chemist; butcher; greengrocer; bakery; Four Square grocery; fish shop; another side street. The haberdashery was also an agent for the bank, a curiosity I found perfectly normal; the grey-haired cardiganed middle-aged woman who ran it seemed perfectly suited to taking one's money, putting i...

Nine hundred kilometres south, early in the evening, after a  warm, overcast Sunday I had spent at Lakeside, I was on a train heading to my home in the northern suburbs. During the afternoon, in between sporting events, I had taken a book to the sun-drenched lawn high up behind the bleachers (plastic bucket seats these days, powerfully sprung so that they won’t even support your bag of running gear without flipping up and flushing it onto the dusty concrete below). The novel was Philip Roth’s Nemesis (Jonathan Cape, 2010). The grandfather, Sam Cantor, had come alone to America in the 1880s as an immigrant child from a Jewish village in Polish Galicia. His fearlessness had been learned in the Newark streets, where his nose had been broken more than once in fights with anti-Semitic gangs. The violent aggression against Jews that was commonplace in the city during his slum boyhood did much to form his view of life and his grandson’s view in turn. He encouraged the grandson to stand up...

In a 2017 interview Tom Stoppard recalled the crowded solitude of his writer’s block: ‘  … there are so many things that ought to be written about, and could be written about, that the contents of my head appear to be mostly white noise, a buzz of all the possible things’.  While not making any comparisons with the playwright, I can empathise. Stoppard : ‘I’m a bit oversensitive about the ideal conditions that I desire or require for doing proper work. They tend towards the extreme, isolation. It’s as though I need to be the only person in the house before I can completely let go of everything around me’. * (Quotes from obituary published in The Times last week and reprinted in The Australian on 5 December.)

‘That’s nice! What is it?’ Or: ‘What’s for dinner?’ She of an earlier generation might - and did - dismiss the impertinent questions with a kindly but sarcastic culinary neologism. But the next generation - the abundant post-war offspring (whose parents feared, after two wars in a few decades, will we lose these as well ?) grew up into a cossetted mid-century middle class that wanted answers. Newly cosmopolitan, and hearing the siren call of airbound silver jets roaring across airport boundaries and up and down the streets and avenues of the suburbs and banlieues, they crossed becalmed oceans, freshly ridded of U-boats, to hunt for foreign dishes, just as their safariing grandparents had hunted game. The names of such captured dishes would be practised in front of pre-dinner party mirrors and tripped off tongues with the syllabic facility and pronunciation of a first language - bouillabaisse; onigiri; cacciatore  - and the resulting culinary exotica would be displayed - and announc...